He was halfway through his club sandwich and French fries when the sallow, smart-ass lab technician sat down in the other half of the booth, facing him. “Do you mind some company?” the man said.
Hoval winced. He did mind, but he shrugged.
“I didn't know a man like you took advantage of thinly disguised bribes like restaurant discounts,” the technician said, opening the menu which the waitress brought him.
“I didn't when I first started,” Hoval said surprised to find that he actually wanted to talk to this man. “But everyone else does . . . And there's not much else you can take advantage of-if you want to keep being a good cop.”
“Ah you're just like all the rest of us,” the technician said, dismissing Hoval with a brisk wave of the hand.
“Poor.”
The other man's pale face crinkled in a grin, and he even allowed himself a soft laugh. “How's the club sandwich?”
“Fine,” Hoval said, around a mouthful of it.
The technician ordered one, without French fries, and a coffee. When the girl had gone, he said, “What about the Pulham investigation?
“I'm not on it full time now,” Hoval said.
“Oh?”
“Not much I can do,” Hoval explained. “If the killer was going to California in an Automover, he's way out of my territory. The FBI is checking on the names they got from Automover's central records. They've narrowed it down to a few dozen. Looks like maybe a couple of weeks until they find our guy.”
The technician frowned, picked up the salt shaker and turned it around and around in his bony hands. “A couple of weeks could be too late. When a fruitcake starts to go, he goes fast.”
“You still on that kick?” Hoval asked, putting down his sandwich.
“I think we're dealing with a psychotic. And if we are, he'll add a few more murders to his record in the next week or two. Maybe even kill himself.”
“This isn't any nut,” Hoval insisted. “It's one of your political cases. He won't kill anyone else-not until he gets a chance to set up another cop.”
“You're wrong about him,” the technician said.
Hoval shook his head, took a long drink of his lemon blend. “You bleeding-heart liberals astound me. Can't stop looking for simple answers.”
The waitress brought the pale man's coffee. When she went away, he said, “I haven't noticed any blood on my shirt in the vicinity of my heart. And I am not a political liberal. And I think your answer is more simplistic than mine.”
“The country's going to hell in a handbasket, and you're blaming it all on psychotics and fruitcakes.”
“Well,” the technician said, finally putting down the salt shaker, “I almost hope you're right. Because if this guy is a nut, and if he is loose another week or two . . .”
FRIDAY
Eighteen
By two o'clock Friday morning, sixteen hours after they had left Denver, Alex felt as if he belonged in a hospital ward for terminally ill patients. His legs were cramped and heavy. His buttocks pinched and burned as if they were jammed full of needles, and his back ached all the way from the base of his spine to the back of his skull. And these were only the first in a long list of complaints: he was sweat-damp, rumpled, and unclean from having missed last night's shower; his eyes were bloodshot, grainy, and sore; the crisp black stubble of his one-day beard itched badly; his mouth was fuzzy and dry and tasted like sour milk; his arms ached dully from holding the damned steering wheel for hour after hour, mile after mile . . .
“You awake?” he asked Colin. In the darkness, with the gentle country music coming out of the radio, the boy should have been asleep.
“I'm here,” Colin said.
“Should try to catch a few winks.”
“I'm afraid the car is going to break down,” Colin said. “I can't sleep for worrying about it.”
“The car's okay,” Doyle said. “The body got dented in a little, but that's all. The only reason it begins to shake when we go past eighty-five is that the wheel starts brushing against the indented metal.”
“I'll still worry,” Colin said.
“We'll stop at the next likely place and freshen up,” Doyle said. “We both need it. And the car's low on gas.”
Late Thursday afternoon they had headed southwest across Utah on a series of back roads, then picked up the secondary two-lane Route 21, which carried them northwest again. The swift desert sunset came, faded rapidly from a fiery orange-red to solemn purple and then a deep and velvety black. And still they drove, crossing into Nevada and switching over to Route 50, which they intended to follow from one end of the Silver State clear to the other.
Shortly after ten o'clock they stopped to get gasoline and to call Courtney from a pay phone. They pretended that they were at their motel, because Alex could not see any good reason to worry her now. Though they had been through a harrowing ordeal, it was probably all finished now. They had lost their stalker. There was no need to alarm her unnecessarily. They could give her the full story when they finally got into San Francisco.
From ten-thirty Thursday night until two o'clock Friday morning, they passed through what had once been the heart of the romantic Old West. The forbidding sand plains lay dark and empty to the left and right. Hard, barren mountains thrust up without warning and fell sharply away, out of place even if they had spent millennia here. Cactus loomed at both sides of the road, and rabbits occasionally fled across the pavement in the yellow glare of their headlights. If the trip had gone differently, if there had been no madman on their tail for the last two thousand miles, perhaps Nevada would have been a pleasure, a chance to indulge in nostalgia and a few of Colin's games. But now it was a bore, just something to be passed through before they could get to San Francisco.
At two-thirty they stopped at a combination service station and all-night diner. While the Thunderbird was topped off with gas and oil, Colin used the bathroom, freshened up for the next long leg of the marathon drive. In the diner, they ordered hamburgers and French fries. And while those were sizzling, Alex went into the men's room to shave and wash his face.
And to take two caffeine tablets.
He had bought a package of them earlier in the night, at the service station where they had stopped just before leaving Utah. Colin had been in the car at the time and had not witnessed the purchase. Alex did not want the boy to know about the tablets. Colin was already too tense for his own good. It would not be good for him to find out that Doyle, despite all his assurances, was getting sleepy at the wheel.
He looked at his reflection in the cracked mirror above the dirty washbasin, grimaced. “You look terrible.”
The reflection remained mute.
They by-passed the exit to Reno and stayed on Route 50 until they found a motel just east of Carson City. It was a shabby place, decaying at the edges. But neither of them had the energy to look any farther. The dashboard clock read eight-thirty—more than twenty-two hours since they had left Denver.
In their room, Colin went straight for his bed and flopped down. “Wake me in six months,” he said.
Alex went into the bath and closed the door. He used his electric razor to touch up the shave he had taken six hours before, brushed his teeth, took a hot shower. When he came back into the main room, Colin was asleep; the boy had not even bothered to undress. Doyle put on clean clothes, then woke him.
“What's the matter?” the boy asked, nearly leaping off the bed when Doyle touched his shoulder.
“You can't sleep yet.”
“Why not?” Colin rubbed at his face.
“I'm going out. I won't leave you alone, so I guess you'll have to come with me.”
“Out? Where?”
Alex hesitated a moment. “To . . . To buy a gun.”
Now Colin was wide awake. He stood up and straightened his Phantom of the Opera shirt. “Do you really think we need a gun? Do you think that man in the Automover-”
“He probably won't show up again.”
&nb
sp; “Then—”
“I only said he probably won't. But I just don't know any more . . . I've thought about it all night, all the way across Nevada, and I can't be sure of anything.” He wiped at his own face, pulling off his weariness. “And then when I'm pretty sure that we've lost him—well, I think about some of the people we've run into. That service station attendant near Harrisburg. The woman at the Lazy Time Motel. I think about Captain Ackridge . . . I don't know. It's not that I think those people are dangerous. It's just that they represent something that's happening . . . Well, it seems to me we ought to have a gun, more to keep it in the house in San Francisco than to protect us for the last few hours of this trip.”
“Then why not buy it in San Francisco?”
“I think I'll sleep better if we get it now,” Alex said.
“But I thought you were a pacifist.”
“I am.”
Colin shook his head. “A pacifist who carries a gun?”
“Stranger things happen every day,” Doyle said.
A few minutes past eleven o'clock, an hour and a half after they had gone out, Doyle and the boy returned to the motel room. Alex closed the door, shutting out the insufferable desert heat. He twisted the dead lock and put the guard chain in place. He tried the knob, but it would not turn.
Colin took the small, heavy pasteboard box to the bed and sat down with it. He lifted the lid and looked inside at the .32-caliber pistol and the box of ammunition. He had stayed in the car when Doyle went to buy it, and he had not been allowed to open the box on the short ride back. This was his first look at the weapon. He made a sour face. “You said the man in the sporting goods store called it a lady's gun.”
“That's right,” Doyle said, sitting down on the edge of his bed and taking off his boots. He knew he was not going to be able to stay awake more than another minute or two.
“Why did he say that?”
“Compared to a .45, it has less punch, less kick, and makes a great deal less noise. It's the kind of pistol a woman usually buys.”
“Did you have any trouble buying it, since you're from out of state and all?”
Doyle stretched out on the bed. “No. In fact, it was too damned easy.”
Nineteen
Friday afternoon, George Leland drove across the Nevada badlands toward Reno, his eyes brimming with pain even though the sunglasses he wore cut out half the glare from the white-white sand. He did not make good time. He was unable to keep his mind on his driving.
Since that especially severe headache he had suffered early Thursday morning when he had gone after Alex Doyle with a garden ax, Leland had found his thoughts wandering freely, almost beyond his control. He was not able to concentrate on anything for more than five minutes at a stretch. His mind jumped from subject to subject like a motion picture full of quick-cuts.
Time and again he snapped back from a daydream, surprised to find himself behind the wheel of the van. He had driven miles and miles while his mind was elsewhere . . . Apparently some fraction of his attention was on the road ahead and the traffic around him; but it was a very small fraction. If he had been on a heavily used freeway instead of out here in the flat, open wastelands, he would have killed himself, would have demolished the van during one of those daydreams.
Courtney was always there with him, in and out of the dreams. Now, as he came back again to the sand-flanked highway and the reality of the Chevrolet grumbling crankily beneath him, she was perched only a couple of feet away, her long legs drawn up on the seat beneath her.
“I almost had them yesterday,” Leland said contritely. “But these damn worn tires . . . “
“That's okay, George,” she said, close yet faraway.
“No, Courtney. I should have nailed them. And . . . Last night, when I checked the motel in Salt Lake, they were not there.” He was puzzled by that. “In that book of his, it said they'd stay at the Highlands Motel in Salt Lake City. What happened to them?”
She must not have known, for she did not answer.
Leland wiped his left hand on his trousers while he held the wheel in his right, repeated the gesture and drove with the left. “I looked in all the motels near the Highlands. They weren't staying in any of them. I've lost them. Somehow, they got away from me.”
“You'll pick them up again,” she said. He had hoped that she would be sympathetic and would encourage him. Lovely Courtney. You could always depend on Courtney.
“Maybe I will,” he said, squinting out at the rolling hills of sand and the distant blue-and-rose mountains. “But how? And where?” He hoped she had the answer to that.
She did. “In San Francisco, of course.”
“San Francisco?”
“You have my address there,” Courtney said. “And that's where they're going. Isn't it? “
“Yes,” he said. “It sure is.”
“There you are.”
“But . . . Maybe I can catch them in Reno tonight.”
The lovely, soft-voiced, ethereal girl said, “They'll change motels again. You won't find them.”
He nodded. It was true.
For a while, then, he went away from her. He was not in Nevada now, but in Philadelphia. Three months ago. He had gone downtown to see a film which had been entertaining and which . . . Well, the girl in it had looked so much like Courtney that he had been unable to sleep that night. He saw the film the next night too, and he learned from the lobby posters that the actress who fascinated him was Carol Lynley. But he soon forgot that. He went back to the film night after night, and she became the real Courtney. She was perfect. Long yellow-white hair, elfin features, those eyes that seemed to pierce him . . . Gradually, the sixth and seventh and eighth and ninth times he saw the movie, he began to experience a regeneration of sexual desire—which was odd, because the film was family fare. Finally, though, he had gone bar-hopping and had picked up a girl. He had made it with her . . . But she looked nothing like Courtney. Afterward, when he was spent, lying atop her, he looked into her face and saw that she was not Courtney, and he was angry. He felt that he had been tricked. She had cheated him. And so he started hitting her, slamming his hard fists into her face, over and over until—
He blinked at the blue sky, white sand, gray-black road. “Well,” he said to the girl on the seat beside him, “I guess I will skip Reno. They won't stay in the right motel, anyway. I'll just go right on in to Frisco.”
The golden girl smiled.
“Right on in to Frisco,” Leland said. “They won't expect me there. They won't be ready for anything. I can take care of them real easy. And then we can be together. Can't we? “
“Yes,” she said, just as he wanted her to say.
“We'd be happy again, wouldn't we?”
“Yes.”
“You'd let me touch you again.”
“Yes, George.”
“Let me sleep with you again.”
“Yes.”
“Live with me?”
“Yes.”
“And people would stop being nasty to me.”
“Yes.”
“You don't have to worry about me hurting you, Courtney,” he said. “When you first left me, I wanted to hurt you. I wanted to kill you. But not any more. We're going to be together again, and I wouldn't hurt you for the world.”
Twenty
Courtney answered the telephone on the first ring, and she was even more exuberant than usual. “I've been waiting for your call,” she said. “I've got some good news.”
Alex was ready for a piece of good news, especially if it was delivered in that warm, throaty voice of hers. “What is it?”
“I got the job, Alex!”
“At the magazine?”
“Yes!” She laughed into the phone, and he could almost see her standing there with her golden head thrown back and her taut throat exposed. “Isn't it wonderful?”
Her happiness almost made up for everything that had gone wrong in the last few days. “You're absolutely sure it's what you want
ed?”
“It's better than what I wanted.”
“So . . . You and Colin will be old San Franciscans in short order—and I'll have to take a month off just to catch up with you.”
“You know what the pay is?”
“Ten dollars a week?” he asked.
“Be serious.”
“Fifteen?”
“Eighty-five hundred a year. To start.”
He whistled. “Not bad for your first really professional job. But look, you aren't the only one with good news.”
“Oh?”
Doyle looked at Colin, who was squeezed into the telephone booth with him, and he tried not to sound like a liar when he told the lie: “We got into Reno a few minutes ago.” In fact, they had never gone to Reno at all, but to Carson City. And they had arrived early this morning, not minutes ago. They had slept all afternoon, right through the supper hour, and had awakened at half past eight, little more than an hour ago. “Neither one of us is sleepy.” This was true enough, though he did not want to have to explain why neither one of them was sleepy, since they were not supposed to have been dozing in a motel all day. “It's about two hundred and fifty miles to San Francisco, so . . . ”
“You're coming home tonight?” she asked.
“We thought we might as well “Look, if you're sleepy—sleep.”
“We aren't sleepy.”
“One day doesn't matter,” she said. “Don't get in a big rush to finish the trip. If you fall asleep at the wheel—”
“You'll lose a new Thunderbird but gain valuable insurance money,” he finished for her.
“That isn't funny.”
“No, I guess it isn't. I'm sorry.” He was irritable, he knew, only because he did not like to lie to her. He felt cheap and somehow dirty, even though he was only lying to save her unnecessary worry.
“You're sure you feel up to it?”
“Yes, Courtney.”
“Then I'll keep the bed warm.”
“That I might not feel up to.”