Ross Thomas: The Fourth Durango

“Here?”

“Right here. Don’t even stir until you get four guards I’ll pick myself.” Loom again started for the door and again turned back. “Who’s meeting you in the parking lot?”

“Kelly Vines.”

Loom recognized the name. “That high-priced lawyer of yours that got himself disbarred?”

“And consequently, my former lawyer.”

Curiosity made Loom almost forget his hurry. “Why’d he get disbarred anyway?”

Adair looked at the schoolroom clock, disliking its contrived nostalgia and suspecting it of quartz innards.

“Turpitude,” he said to the clock and looked back at Loom with a faint smile. “But fiscal, not moral, although I suspect, like most of us, he’s quite capable of either.”

Kelly Vines reached the city limits of Lompoc at 2:27P.M.on that last Friday in Juneand drove the four-year-old Mercedes 450 SEL sedan west on Ocean Avenue until he found a full-service UNOCAL gas station where he could pay twenty cents a gallon extra to have the tank filled, the windshield washed and the oil and tires checked.

As the attendant busied himself with the tires, Vines noticed that across the street Lompoc police were blocking off an intersection with black and white sawhorse barricades. When the attendant said his oil and tires were okay and that he owed $13.27 for the gas, Vines handed him a twenty, indicated the police and asked, “What’s all the excitement?”

The attendant turned, looked, turned back and began handing Vines his change. “Flower Festival parade,” the attendant said. “Happens every year and it’s about all the excitement we can stand.”

The colors struck Vines as he turned north on Floradale Avenue, which led to the penitentiary. Quarter acres of gold and red, pink and blue, purple and orange blazed at him from both sides of the two-lane blacktop. He slowed the Mercedes to fifteen miles per hour and stared at the commercial plots of lobelia, nasturtium, sweet peas, marigolds and verbena.

In his former life Kelly Vines had been an inexpert but enthusiastic weekend gardener. He now noticed flowers he couldn’t identify and wished there were time to ask someone what they were. But there was no time and Vines suspected that if he lingered, sniffing at fields of flowers, it would only drag him down Might-Have-Been Lane, an emotional dead end he had no wish to explore. He pressed down on the accelerator. The Mercedes quickly reached sixty miles per hour and sped Vines toward a speculative future that went by the name of Jack Adair.

Vines drove slowly along the pine-shaded drive that led into the penitentiary grounds, counting the four speed bumps that lay between Floradale Avenue and the visitors’ parking lot. He drove past the parking lot on the left and the family visiting center on the right, past the gymnasium and the penitentiary administration building, which resembled a college dormitory. He turned right into a long U-shaped drive, drove by some low-lying junipers, a flagpole and on up to the three-story space-age guard tower and the double row of high steel chain-link fences that were topped with concertinas of razor wire.

To Vines, the prison seemed to lurk behind the two high fences with their razor-wire toppings. The main building had been built of pale yellow stone with wings that pointed toward the gate like false “This Way Out” signposts. Assuming the Federal government had wanted the place to look as forbidding and threatening as possible, Vines judged it a brilliant success since he could think of nothing more threatening or forbidding than an enormous steel and stone box the state could drop its felons into, lock them up and keep them there for years on end, sometimes even forever.

The Mercedes crept around the curve at the top of the U-shaped drive until a guard in the tower glared down at Vines, who speeded up slightly and headed back to the visitors’ parking lot. It was not quite a third full and Vines parked six spaces away from the nearest car.

When his watch said it was 2:59 P.M., he got out of the Mercedes, opened its trunk and removed the black cane. He closed the trunk lid, moved to the car’s left front fender and, once more leaning on the cane with both hands, waited for Jack Adair.

Six of them came out of the family visiting center that was across the drive from the parking lot. In the lead was a man with silver hair and a barrel build. Behind him came a middle-aged guard, armed with a Springfield ’03 at port arms, who quartered the parking lot, missing nothing.

Kelly Vines stood very still, not moving anything except his eyes. He thought the guard with the ’03 looked like a retired marine who had put in twenty years, maybe even thirty. Right behind the guard came Jack Adair, much, much thinner than when Vines last had seen him fifteen months ago. Adair now walked with a new spring to his step that was nearly a bounce and for a moment Vines almost missed the ex-fat man’s gliding quick-step that had been virtually a trademark.

Flanking Adair were two young guards in their mid-twenties, one of them a mouth-breather, both of them armed with shotguns. Back at trail was a gloomy-looking guard of about Vines’s age who had a hunter’s look and an M-16 that he handled with the easy familiarity of someone who has been around guns since he was six.

The man with the thin silvery hair didn’t speak until he was less than thirty feet away. “Mr. Vines?”

Vines nodded, stopped leaning on the black cane and hooked it over his left arm.

“Darwin Loom. Associate warden.”

“Why the firepower, Warden?”

“Disturbing rumors and a…mishap. An inmate died.”

“Killed?”

“Yes.”

Although still looking at the associate warden, Vines spoke to Adair. “Somebody you knew, Jack?”

“Blessing Nelson.”

“I’m sorry,” Vines said, looking now at Adair. “What rumors?”

“There seems to be a price on my head.”

“A price on your head,” Vines said, almost savoring the phrase. “How much?”

“Twenty thousand, I’m told.”

“You should be flattered,” Vines said. “Ready to go?”

“More than ready.”

Adair started for the Mercedes but the associate warden turned quickly to block his way. “Not just yet,” Loom said, taking out a small notebook and the old Waterman pen. Over his shoulder he said, “You can help us with this, Mr. Vines.”

With the black cane still hooked over his left forearm, Vines walked quickly over to Adair and stood beside him. He unhooked the cane, again leaned on it with both hands and examined Loom with polite interest.

“Help you with what?”

“With where the judge can be reached,” Loom said. “Look. Because of his-well, his informal business arrangement with Blessing Nelson, both the sheriff and the FBI’ll probably want to talk to him-or to his lawyer at least.”

“I’m no longer his lawyer.”

“I know. But you could give me some idea of where we could get in touch with you or him if-”

Vines interrupted. “I don’t know where we’ll be.” He smiled a crooked boyish grin, full of charm, that Jack Adair knew to be a disguise. “Until earlier this month I lived in La Jolla,” Vines said. “But I now have no fixed address and, consequently, no phone.”

Loom frowned, as if Vines’s lack of a fixed address made him automatically suspect. “What about your wife or a close relative? Maybe your lawyer or accountant? Just anybody you keep in touch with.”

Vines shook his head regretfully. “My finances are such that I don’t need an accountant. And even if I needed a lawyer, I couldn’t afford one. My wife is in a private psychiatric hospital and divorced from reality, if not from me. My parents are dead. I have no children or other close relatives.”