Росс Макдональд - Find a Victim

“Who’s running it now?”

“Nobody. That’s the crime of it. There’s plenty of money in town, but no action. We could give them action.”

“Wouldn’t the local law object?”

“Leave them to me.” He was carried away by psychopathic ambition. “Only I can’t operate out of a cell. You take me back there and throw me in the clink, you’re tossing away the hottest chance you ever had.”

“A chance for what? To get conned like Kerrigan?”

That silenced him, but not for long. “Okay. So I made a patsy out of Kerrigan. He was taking off with my girl. She wanted something with more class, she said. So I should finance their honeymoon. Not me. But this is different. This is no con.”

“I hear you telling me.”

“Listen.” He pawed at my chest “I know something nobody else knows. We can parlay it into something big, you and me together. I like you, see.”

“Uh-huh. What’s your special information?”

“Are we in business?”

“I have to know what I’m buying first. Why did the sheriff let you break out of the county last night?”

“I didn’t say he let me out of the county.”

“What road did you take?”

“You tell me. You know everything.”

“The pass road, the one that goes up through the foothills.”

His eyes were bright little knife-slits in the blue bulbs of his eyelids. “You’re smart. We could get along. I like smart cookies.”

“Have you got something on the sheriff, Bozey?”

“Maybe I have.”

“Something that Kerrigan told you?”

“He didn’t tell me nothing. I reasoned it out for myself.”

“About Anne Meyer?”

“You catch on fast. They found the body, eh?”

“Not yet. Where is it, Bozey?”

“Wait a minute, not so fast. Are you and me making a deal?”

“If you want one. These are my terms: show me where the body is and I’ll do my best to get you a break. You’re on your way to the pillbox now, whether you know it or not. The D. A.’s got you tabbed for murder–”

“I didn’t kill nobody.”

“That won’t help you. With your record, you’re a natural to take the rap for Aquista and Kerrigan.”

“Christ, I didn’t even know that Kerrigan got it until Jo told me. I never got within half a mile of – what’s his name, Tony Aquista?”

“Tell it to the D. A. He’ll tell you different, and he can make it stick. They’ll gas you for those murders if somebody doesn’t step in and prevent it. Co-operate with me and I’ll do my best to clear you. You’re going to be in for a long stretch, but I won’t let them gas you if I can help it.”

He looked around anxiously at the black spiked horizon. His pipe-dream of power and money had blown away and left him naked, dwarfed by the giant world. Away off on the other side of the ridge a banshee wail of tires ended in a long, reverberating crash and an explosion, muffled by the distance. It was the sound the silence had been waiting for.

“What was that?”

“Your friends from Albuquerque. I hope.”

He looked at me sharply, his broken nostrils snuffling in surprise. “You play kind of rough.”

“When I have to.”

“Why would you give me a break? Nobody ever gave me a break. How do I know you will?”

“You won’t know it until it happens. It’s a chance you have to take. Not much of a chance, after the ones you’ve been taking. It’s in your own interest to help me find the body. I think whoever killed her killed the others, too.”

“You may be right at that.”

“Who was it, Bozey?”

“If I knew I’d tell you, wouldn’t I? I’ll show you where she is, though. Kerrigan left her in her car, down in a little canyon near Double Mountain.”

I marched him up the slanting street. Jo was alone in the front seat of my car.

“What do you know?” Bozey said. “Family reunion.”

The girl didn’t look at him. An aura of sullen anger enveloped her.

“Where’s your grandfather, Jo?”

“Gone up the hill. We heard a crash a while back Grandpa thought maybe the blue truck went off the road.”

“I heard it, too.”

I opened the left-hand door and urged Bozey into the seat between Jo and me. She pulled away from him.

“Do I have to ride with this? After the lousy trick he pulled on me and Don?”

“Don’t be like that,” he said. “He could have passed it south of the border – a guy with Kerrigan’s front.”

“I don’t want to hear it. You’re a rotten swindler. I hope they lock you up and throw away the key.”

I turned up the grade. MacGowan was at the top, leaning on his rifle and breathing hard. Far down on the other side, in the deep trough of the canyon, there was a swirl of red and yellow fire.

He limped toward the car. “Looks like the end of them. They didn’t see the two-seater in time, I guess.”

Jo growled: “Good riddance of bad rubbish.”

“You shouldn’t say things like that, Josie. It don’t show proper respect for human life.”

“I’m human, too, aren’t I? They never showed proper respect for my human life.”

MacGowan climbed into the back, and we rolled down the long, unwinding road. The sports car was lying with its wheels in the air like a smashed mechanical beetle. Black skidmarks led to the deep-gouged edge of the road where the truck had gone over.

A thousand feet below, it was still burning brightly. Among the faint far odors of burning oil and alcohol I could smell Okinawa again.

The sky turned lime-white all along its edges, then flared in jukebox colors. The sun appeared in my rear-view mirror like a sudden bright coin ejected from a machine. The chameleon desert mocked the sky, and the joshua trees leaned crazily into the rushing dawn.

I thought if this place had a god he was lonely and barbaric, tormented by colored memories, bored by the giant inhuman drama of starset and sunrise and sunset. I glanced at Bozey’s sleeping face, swollen and discolored now like the face of a drowning victim hauled up out of black depths after many weeks. His head was on Jo’s shoulder. She was awake and looking down at him.

I shoved the car’s long shadow due west across the flatland, so tired that I had to exert a steady pressure of will to hold the gas pedal down. In sight of Tehachapi Pass, I shook Bozey awake and listened to his mumbled directions. The side road turned off to the left a few miles farther on. It led down into a hidden canyon, dwindling to a cattle-track.

The floor of the canyon was still in shadow. Four ragged buzzards wheeled above it. They soared away from the sound of my engine into the blue upper brilliance. Where the bed of a dry stream wound among the scrub oaks at the foot of the slope, a black convertible stood.

“There she is,” Bozey said.

I left him under MacGowan’s gun and crossed the gravel to the abandoned car. The front of it was empty, the rear trunk locked. A bobcat had left the marks of his pads on the dusty turtleback.

I went back to my car for a pinchbar. From deep in the grotesque mask of his face, Bozey’s eyes followed me questioning.

MacGowan put the question into words: “Isn’t she in there?”

“I’m going to break open the trunk.”

I broke it open, and she was in there, lying with her knees pulled up like a child in an iron womb. There was a badge of blood on the front of her sun-dress. The heel of one of her sensible brown shoes was missing.

I leaned over to look at her face. Tears gathered behind my eyes and almost blinded me. Not that she mattered to me. I’d never seen Anne Meyer except in a snapshot, laughing into the sun.

It was anger I felt, against the helplessness of the dead and my own helplessness. Overhead, the buzzards turned in wobbly circles like tipsy undertakers. The sun’s insane red eye looked over the canyon’s edge.