The Man Who Followed Women

Bert and Dolores Hitchens

Chapter 1

By the time the misty, foggy nights of that particular April had rolled around, Mr. Howery had been following women for almost a year.

In the way of most innocent amusements which become compulsions, his had begun idly, almost whimsically. Months ago he had stepped out of a movie into the dark of a night not quite summer, warm with the smell of the city and with some faraway memory-teasers blown on the wind, a hint of clipped hayfields and stubby dusty hills, God knew how far from L.A. and its traffic, and out at the edge of the glow splattered by the theater signs he had seen the young woman in the red coat, dropping the candy wrapper in the gutter, and it had occurred to him to wonder where she was going.

Like that.

He had stood by the darkened ticket booth, fishing in his jacket pocket for the cigarettes and the pack of matches, and just as he had lifted the lit match to the end of the cigarette she had glanced back at him. Not seeing him, really. The sort of look she would take if she was sizing up how late it was and how much of a pounding her feet would take getting home and whether there was anything at all interesting to see before she started out. Her glance skipped over Mr. Howery as if he wasn’t there.

From his recollection of her, she was a perfectly ordinary looking girl. Brown hair, neither long nor short, not very curly. She had crammed the last of the candy bar into her mouth, and her cheeks bulged as she chewed it. Her complexion was good. Vivid lipstick. Slim legs. Patent-leather pumps. Red coat belted in tightly at the waist.

He had thought that she was probably just going to stroll home from the show, a matter of a few blocks. But perhaps not. A curiosity had flickered in him, an interest in her and her destination and what she did and with whom she lived … mental flotsam.

Behind him, beyond the closed panes of the lobby doors, the young ticket taker in his imitation-navy uniform was brushing up the lobby carpet with a small broom and a pan on a long wire handle, and the girl who sold candy and popcorn was twitching a cotton cover into place over her counter.

He remembered these things clearly, even now. The moment held a vividness in memory, not easily explained; a hairline sharpness of detail. Something more: an import. As if it marked a division or a rechanneling of something in his life; the end of an impasse, the beginning of some kind of compromise.

On that night when he looked at, and thought about, the girl in the red coat, Mr. Howery had been forty-seven years old, five foot six in his shoes, gray-haired and getting bald on the top, dressed in a three-year-old fifteen-dollar sport jacket and a six-dollar pair of slacks ($5.95), and he was just getting used to living alone in the two-bedroom flat after his mother’s death and burial. He held a degree in accountancy, which he had never found use for. He worked as a salesman for a wholesale ceramic tile company, selling mostly to contractors of subdivision single-family dwellings. He wore arch-support shoes. He drank a little beer occasionally, at home evenings in front of the television set.

The only thing he had ever done which might have been considered aberrant behavior was stealing a pair of women’s underpants off a heaped table bearing a towering label, 88c, in a department store. They were pink knit nylon pants with white, coarse-looking lace around the edges of the legs and inside on the waistband a label: Mi-panties, and the size number, 28.

Somehow it had been the word, panties, which had rolled around in his mind long after he had wadded the silly garment and discarded it in a trash barrel in an alley, less than a block from the actual theft. This had been a couple of years past; his mother had still been alive, though sickly. He still remembered how, in the evening after he had arrived home, and they had sat at dinner, it disgusted and revolted him to see the sleeve of his mother’s robe dragging on the bread. And this sudden surge of hate had been, obscurely, a part of the pants-stealing.

But at the time he had stepped out of the movie house, had paused to light the cigarette, and had noticed the girl in the red coat at the curb, no trace of that previous eccentricity remained. His interest in the girl had none of the hotheaded prankishness of the theft; and afterward there had been no disruptive emotions such as the hatred for his mother which had plagued him after that other incident.

He had simply and rather whimsically decided to trail her wherever she went and to see what she did with the rest of the evening.

She had crossed the street and headed for the corner, where there was an open drugstore. She had gone in and bought a confession magazine and something else … gum or cigarettes … at the cash register and had come out again almost immediately. Mr. Howery had watched and waited from the corner, where he was pretending to inspect some papers in a rack.

She had passed close to him, the magazine under her arm, her purse open while she tucked into it the wallet and the other purchase; and he had caught the smell of her, perfume and a sort of dry-cleaning odor he thought must have been given off by the coat.

She went on, heels tapping, up the half-darkened block and he trailed after. She looked back once, and he had a sharp jolt of alarm, not unpleasant. She turned the next corner quickly, and by the time he had turned it too, she was up some stairs at a door. An apartment house. She was using a key to let herself into the lobby. The light had shone out on her through the glass in the door, and again he had thought what an ordinary-looking sort of girl she was. And had felt no slightest interest in trying to follow her into the building.

He had gone on, the five blocks to his own old-fashioned two-bedroom flat, where the liniment odors left by his sick mother were not entirely dissipated and where her bag of knitting still lay tucked into the corner of the couch. And there the thought of the girl had seemed to drop from his mind, taking with it some encrustation of worry or what not, like a barnacle pried from the bottom of a befouled boat.

He felt peaceful and at ease, ready for bed. What he didn’t realize at the time was, now he had a hobby.

He followed women.

The very next night he had gone for a stroll. He had walked all the way up into the heights of the park. As dark came down he was fascinated by the panorama of traffic in the pass below, the enormous layout of the railroad freight yards, the switch engines, the grunt of diesels, the thin blue mist dying against the hills far beyond; and then he had seen this woman. She had a dog with her, a big brute. But of course since Mr. Howery had no intention of accosting her, of inviting the brute’s attention, she made just as good a subject for following as had the other girl. He strolled behind her, the two of them quite alone in the woodsy height, and she got visibly nervous and stared at him frequently over her shoulder. Probably if she hadn’t had the enormous brute practically tugging her arms from their sockets by the leash, she’d have done something silly, like screaming.

After hurrying faster and faster, and getting wound up in the strap and almost tripping, and looking back at Mr. Howery as if he were some slavering fiend, she had at last come out on a road where she had parked her car, a little open foreign job, and she and the dog had jumped in and taken off.

End of trail.

Again he’d had the sensation of relaxing, of the release of some old befuddlement or annoyance; and he had turned gratefully for home.

He didn’t recall as much of the second woman’s appearance, now, as he did of the first. He thought she’d been a long-legged, fortyish, and sort of tweedy woman, the kind who wore brogans to hike around in. Short hair, wind-blown, and practically no make-up. The kind of woman who, if she married young, was all set; and if she waited, God help her.

On the third evening he had trailed a little colored girl, perhaps eighteen, probably a maid who worked by the day in the neighborhood and now was headed home. What attracted his attention was that she was singing, very quietly, and that as she walked she kept looking up at the twilight sky as if it looked beautiful to her after being cooped up all day in somebody’s kitchen. She had a knit handbag, a big one, probably had knitted it herself, and it swung against her knee as she walked, in time to the tune she sang. She waited on the corner for a downtown bus, Mr. Howery keeping carefully in the background; and after the bus came and she got in, paid her fare, and sat down by the window, she looked out directly at Mr. Howery and he had seen her teeth gleam in the smile she gave him. It was a smile full of mischief and understanding; the only one like it he’d ever received from any of the women he had followed; and it had taken a while for him to get the meaning of it.

She had understood, somehow. She had known without being told, about the empty flat, and the tucked-away knitting, and the liniment smell that always brought with it the lump of guilt and self-hatred, along with the memory of his mother’s dragging sleeve.

Well, perhaps not precisely about these things. But she had, while walking and singing and watching the twilight sky, been aware of Mr. Howery’s flitting and humble figure. And she had found in him something comic and friendly, a person working oddly at a very odd hobby. And so the smile.

Of those he had followed on the numberless nights since, most were a blurry memory. Some had misunderstood his interest and had responded with bold invitation; and others had misunderstood and had looked around for cops. The majority had been unaware of him, since he was an inconspicuous man and had managed, as time passed, to learn to go about his hobby very inconspicuously indeed.

Now it was April. The nights were misty and chill for spring, with a sea-smell clinging in them, a miasma swimming ashore with the tides at Santa Monica, and Mr. Howery walked the shadowy pavements with a nostalgic lassitude.

He would have given up his hobby at this point, but it had become a habit.

He didn’t actually need it any more. He no longer got the sense of relief, of guilt dropping away like a barnacle, of almost-but-not-quite scaring and worrying someone of the same sex as his mother and of not-quite being punished for it. He had long ago lost the nervous twinges, and hence most of his sense of caution. His curiosity about what women did with their evenings had long since been satisfied. Most of their activities were dull to the point of stupefaction, in his opinion.

He had even begun to look around for a new television set, a big one, to replace the quivery twelve-inch-screen model which now stood, neglected and dusty, under a stack of newspapers in the dining room.

Thus he came, unwary and a little bored, to the night of the sixteenth of April, when he first followed the woman who haunted freight trains.

She was quite pretty, though this was not what first attracted his attention.

At about eight o’clock that evening he decided to stroll over to the neighborhood shopping center. He intended to pick up cigarettes and a pound of coffee for breakfast and maybe a slice of ham. Perhaps also, underneath, was the half-formed thought of following some woman who looked interesting. If one did. The idea was pretty vague, and almost as routine as that of brushing his teeth before going to bed.

He never entered the great neon-lit cathedral-sized vault of the supermarket without a sense of welcoming, of vast plenty, of having come to a place where every possible want could be satisfied, of being catered to. The bustle, the prodigious display always quickened his senses. In passing he glanced at the idiot board—as he called it—just inside the entry, noting the litter of paper scraps and cards pinned to it, offering in the main the resale of mistakes. Outboard motors offered by those with no taste for the water, artists’ kits by those who had learned they could not paint, golf clubs by those too tired to golf, fur coats and dance frocks by those without a social life, and houses by those who presumably wished to be homeless—these all carried for Mr. Howery a note of bittersweet imprudence, plus a sense of self-congratulation over all the mistakes he had avoided. The juvenile scribblings offering to mow lawns or to baby-sit reminded him, too, of the fact that his mother had never permitted him to earn money as a child. Money had been withheld, to be doled out as a reward for good behavior.

Above the crowding scrappy impressions he noted now that at the desk beside the board, scratching with a pencil on a white card, stood a woman with a thumb tack between her lips.

He caught at once that she was writing a notice to be pinned up.

She was slender and fair-haired, the hair having that thick silky quality, almost like liquid, sliding and slipping with its weight as she moved her head. She was fine-featured, the shape of the face delicate and precise. He couldn’t see her eyes; they were bent upon whatever she was writing.

She wore a skimpy light blue dress, a rayon print, and a black imitation-fur jacket. No hose on her bare legs in spite of the misty weather. She had on open-toed sandals and her toenails were tinted red.

A rather ordinary-looking girl, in spite of the prettiness.

He had walked past, beyond sight of her, before curiosity suddenly tugged at him. What sort of notice was she writing for the idiot board?

Some sketchy possibilities occurred to him. She had broken her engagement and now was selling the ring. A small, cheap diamond. Or she was looking for a room to rent. She was the kind of young woman, he thought, who could pack what she owned in one suitcase. Or perhaps she had taken in some homeless female cat—she looked that kind, too—and now was offering to give away the kittens.

He had better find out. He swung around and found himself looking at a wine display. He studied the array of wine bottles until she finished the note, took it over to the board, and pinned it into place with the tack, a spot low and in the right-hand corner.

Then she went quickly past, entered a turnstile, and disappeared into one of the long, busy aisles of the market.

He walked quickly to the board and at once located the newly written notice. At first he was so surprised at what was written on it that he felt positive it could not be the one she had tacked up; but on examining that corner of the board he saw that it was the one plain square card in the middle of scraps of notebook pages and other riffraff. So that what she had wanted was not to sell a small cheap diamond nor to rent a small cheap room. She had some new expensive automobile tires to sell.

NEW TIRES. WHITE SIDEWALL. WILL FIT CADDIE OR OLDS, NEW MODELS. $125 FOR SET OF FOUR, PLUS SPARE. THESE ARE A REAL BARGAIN FOR RIGHT PARTY.

PHONE BA-XTER 7-7754

She looked so unlike the kind of woman who would have five brand-new tires, Caddie or Olds or even a Ford’s, that his interest at once perked up. He went into the market quickly, got the coffee and cigarettes, passing up the ham since none was displayed in the meat counter ready-sliced, and went outside to wait in the parking lot.

He wanted to see this Caddie or Olds which had come so well supplied with rubber.

Some more of the foggy vapor had gathered in the air, so that the lights of the big market had a misty softness, and the blue globes that hung above the ranks of parked cars were like faraway moons. The light was so poor out there, in fact, that he almost missed her.

She came out swiftly, silhouetted for only a moment against the glow within; and it took an instant for him to realize that she had turned away from the parking area and was headed for the street. Even then, hurrying to catch up by cutting across the parking lanes, he nearly lost her. She turned a corner and walked north, away from the shopping center, at a fast clip. He kept within sound of her hurrying steps, getting an occasional glimpse of her dim figure; but actually the pace was too fast to be fun. He preferred a leisurely and provocative wandering; and besides, at this rate, she must be heading directly for a nearby destination. Probably home.

Presently he sensed a change in her direction; and sure enough she had left the sidewalk and was hurrying up the driveway of a large, old house. Lights were on inside. She went around to the rear. Probably she rented a room in the place.

Where in the hell the Caddie with its extra rubber could be hidden, Mr. Howery had no idea.

Besides, he was practically breathless and his legs twitched with the exertion of hurrying. He gave her a mental good night.

Strolling away, his mind returned to thoughts of breakfast, and he wondered if it was worth while going back to the market and asking for a cut of ham. He thought, too, of the possible new television set, the current state of his clothes—growing subtly gaudier this last year—and whether he shouldn’t take the occasional beer at a bar and perhaps meet someone … not follow, but actually face and talk to … a woman.

So it was that when her steps approached him out of the dark, not rushing now but with a firm quick step, he was not aware that this was the woman from the market.

She passed him, not looking at him. There was enough light from the street lamp at the corner so that he recognized her.

Inexplicably, an emanation reached him—a feeling that was happy and excited and alive. It crossed his mind, out of nowhere, the thought that she was going to meet a man she loved.

Chapter 2

She was brisk. She had energy and youth. More, she was headed for a place where she would enjoy herself, where there was a blissful reward awaiting her. A place to be with the one she longed for. This, Mr. Howery would have sworn to.

So that when they came at last to the steel-link fence that shut in the vast dusty expanse of the railroad yards, a place that even at night gave off the smell of sun-baked oil and dirt, the indefinable smell of worn machinery and steam, he expected her to turn off on some intersecting street at any moment.

She kept on.

At a spot where there was an opening in the fence, where a great wedge of crisscrossing track entered the yards like a funnel of steel, she paused. There was a light on a standard not too far beyond. Mr. Howery saw her glance around with a touch of caution. He was well behind her, there was no place that she could get lost here on the dim-lit but open street next to the fence. Whatever she did, he was with her.

And then … and then Mr. Howery had his stunning reward for all the hours of purposeless trailing, for the nights when stupid women had rewarded his attention by drifting home to oafish companions in odiously tasteless houses, or to the laundromat, or to the confession-magazine racks, or to a neighbor’s claptrap porch and rocking chair, or to church. For this woman darted in through the fence, and across the maze of tracks, and so on into the dark of the yards.

Mr. Howery licked his lips. His pulse was simmering.

He walked forward finally to the opening in the fence. He took a good long look at the scene inside. Linked boxcars sat, apparently deserted, in the middle distance. A diesel switcher grunted and stammered somewhere out of sight, and there was the answering clang of moving cars. High in the night sky banks of lights hung, big ones, but the creeping mist cut down their brilliance. Patches of darkness lay here and there, and one of them had swallowed his quarry.

The conviction came to him that she had lost him.

Had she done so deliberately?

Had she sensed him following, had she slipped into this place—this incredible place for a woman to wander—just to lose him?

He thought not.

This had been her destination.

Excitement tingled all the way down his arms and prickled in his palms. Bafflement brought his curiosity to its highest pitch. He picked his way past the boundary marked by the opening in the fence. He was careful in stepping through the crisscrossing tracks, remembering tales of his youth about people getting a foot caught in a switch and then being run over by a train. He came to the place where the boxcars sat, huddled end to end; they made him think of something grotesquely asleep, some kind of great bug which had been immobilized. He waited there in the shadows, and listened.

He heard her walking in the distance, the faint scratch of shoe leather on hard soil. He went after her, cautious about making noise; she would be much more wary here off the street. Probably both he and she were trespassers and would be rousted out of the place if they were caught.

She must have walked a quarter of a mile, he thought, before she came to a second fence and a gate. She opened the gate; he heard the metallic sound of its latch and the faint screech of the hinges. Beyond this point, when he came cautiously to stand and look, he sensed a dropping away of the ground like the opening of a shallow gully, or some old excavation; and a little way beyond, dimly, he could make out some sort of structure. It was high, braced by the side of an embankment. An overhead ramp, or a signal bridge perhaps. He thought that tracks ran under and through it.

He touched the gate with his finger tips. It had not been relatched, and moved with a slight grating of hinges, and he slid through. The ground did drop away, unevenly. He almost turned an ankle before he got upon the firmly packed roadbed. He followed the tracks toward the overhead structure, knowing that she was ahead of him somewhere and that he might run into her and that if she made a fuss they could easily both be in trouble. She must be meeting someone. This someone could be with her now, and the results of his own appearance on the scene could be rough treatment.

He couldn’t go back, though. Curiosity burned in him like a fire.

The light was very poor. Mist floated around him. If the thing up ahead was a signal bridge, it must be out of use. No green or red glow burned in it. Mr. Howery walked touchily in the dark, alert for alarm; and then from far off he caught the approaching thunder of a train.

He stopped, standing there between the rails, and his heart began to thud. This was no yard switcher, poking back and forth with a few cars in tow. This thing coming toward him through the night was full-grown, a reverberating juggernaut; he sensed even in those first moments of listening, the rush, the weight, the hammerhead of roaring power; and he froze inside his prickling skin.

It came on. The air around him began to vibrate.

Get off the track.

He hurried. He fell on the gravelly border and felt his pants give, the right knee shredding and gravel digging into his flesh. He got up and hurried to the embankment and grabbed at weeds in the dark, trying to pull himself up. He could not have made it before the headlight swung into sight, except that now the train was noticeably slowing.

Probably it had begun to slow before he had even heard it, long before it approached the boundary of the yards.

Wig-wags danced in the distance, signals flickered; he caught these glimpses as he scrambled up the embankment, dirt rolling away under his feet. Finally he reached the buttresses of the overhead bridge. He saw now what this thing was—an overpass connecting two areas of the yards, spanning some main right of way.

He crouched in shadow as the great oscillating beam swung into line down the track. He saw the woman for an instant. There was a small shed, a tool house or a housing for some mechanical equipment, across the track, and she stood by it. Even in that momentary glimpse Mr. Howery got a distinct impression that she was waiting for this train.

So he expected it to be a passenger train, somehow; and it turned out to be a freight.

It was a long train, and it must have come a long way. Four road engines, hammering and puffing giants, rolled past, and then there was an almost interminable line of cars, boxcars, gondolas, hopper cars, tanks, and flat cars with piggyback freight. Dust and the smell of oil flew up from the roadbed, filling Mr. Howery’s throat and lungs. Meanwhile, the train continued to slow, and long before the caboose reached him it was going at a crawl. The rattle of brake rigging and the clank of wheels subsided to little more than a mutter.

The caboose rolled by—someone on the tiny rear platform, a dark figure—and Mr. Howery waited until it was safely past. Then he looked around for the woman.

She was still over there. He could see her dimly. She was alone, though he had figured out during the time the train had passed that someone must be dropping off it here to meet her. A member of the crew? It didn’t seem likely; Mr. Howery had some inkling of the strictness with which train crews were expected to stay with it. If she’d planned to meet someone on that train, the person must have been traveling through the unknowing courtesy of the railroad; in other words, a hobo.

She stood for several minutes as if still waiting. He thought that her head was turned in the direction the train had taken.

She moved, then. He thought she must be leaving and prepared himself for the ticklish job of getting back down the dirt bank. But she walked only a few feet and sat down on something … a stack of crossties? … and was now much more openly in the light. He could see her distinctly, the shine of the blond hair and even something of the pattern of the blue print dress.

She sat, swinging an ankle, and Mr. Howery sweated with tension.

He was up beside the concrete buttresses of the pedestrian bridge, but these sprang out of the smooth, hard-packed earth, the embankment with its sharp drop of perhaps thirty or forty feet. He was perched on the slope. His wounded knee throbbed and stung. He was quite uncomfortable. For God’s sake, why couldn’t she take herself off and let him go down?

It was such a crazy place for a woman.

Even his curiosity about her, though, could not overcome his feeling of discomfort. Go, he thought with an effort at mental telepathy. Go on home.

She didn’t leave, however. Time passed, instead. Mr. Howery grew cramped and twitchy, clinging to his perch; and then at last, after what seemed half the night, there came another freight train.

This one had none of the hammering power, the night-shaking vibration, of the other. Even at a distance it sounded tinny and rackety. Its pace seemed lackadaisical. She stood up from the thing on which she had been sitting and turned her face in the direction of its coming; but even from his perch Mr. Howery sensed a change in her. Something in the way she stood, looked, waited, betrayed a loss of confidence. This was the last-chance sort of thing. She didn’t actually expect anything to come of it.

Mr. Howery knew almost nothing about trains, but he would have bet that this one had been patched together off the sidings between L.A. and the Arizona line. The boxcars bumped and rattled along as if most of them were empties. There were no tank cars, no hopper cars. A few reefers—refrigerator cars—and some empty flatcars, and then the caboose.

She didn’t sit down again when it had passed. She came close to the track and stood there, almost as if meditating.

Mr. Howery was tired, torn, dusty. His knee hurt. He wished to God that the woman would go home and let him get down; and he promised himself that never … never so long as he lived … would he follow any other woman. Anywhere. Any time. And no matter how eccentric, weird, baffling, and intriguing her looks and actions might be.

So help him God!

She turned abruptly away from the tracks and went back the way she had come, losing herself in the shadows. He heard the metallic rasp of the gate, a faint trace of vanishing footsteps, and she was gone.

Within forty-five minutes Mr. Howery was at home. He inspected the ruin of his pants, threw them into the trash box. He showered, doctored the skinned knee, put on fresh pajamas, and got into bed.

He found himself unexpectedly wide-awake, and full of thought.

What in hell had she really been doing in the railroad yards?

Well, she had waited for a freight train, and after it had passed she’d hung around until there had been a second. That was all she had done.

Of course to his mind she’d had an air of expectancy about her, of being prepared for someone or something to drop or jump from that train when it reached the overpass.

Then he remembered another fact about her. She had five brand-new tires to sell. Would fit Caddie or Olds, new models.

A suspicion trickled into Mr. Howery’s mind, and he frowned into the dark, squinching up his eyes as if trying to see.

He realized the possibility but not the method. How could she have worked it? Carried the tires home one by one in her arms? Tires that big and new were heavy. She was a slim woman.

A confederate on the train. One who jumped when the tires did.

No, no. He mustn’t let his imagination run away with him.

The yards must be policed, guarded in some fashion. He had heard of bums being chased out by cinder dicks, so the cops must be there. And how would you roll, carry, or somehow finagle five big tires across all that maze of tracks, between all those huddled boxcars, without one of them seeing you? He and she had crossed that corner of the yards tonight, of course, but they’d been like flitting shadows. Unburdened, quick. And lucky.

A daring thought crossed his mind. Its very impudence and risk brought out goose-pimples on his skin and dried his mouth; and in spite of this there was something about the idea which was familiar. Like an echo. Like a reflection mirrored back from that other time when he had snatched the pair of underpants.

Call her up on the phone and say that you’ve seen the ad on the idiot board and would like to see the tires.

Then go and have a look, and find out what story she tells.

In spite of the nervous apprehension, the goose-bumps, Mr. Howery was so intrigued by the idea that he couldn’t stay in bed. He got up and fixed a pot of coffee and sat in the kitchen, drinking it, to think.

He saw the principal risk.

Once he had shown himself at her dwelling, had talked to her and had inspected the tires, she would know him. It would be much more difficult to skulk along behind her without being noticed. She’d be able to pick him out of a group. His silhouette would attract her eye, even in shadows.

Well, now, it should be possible to do something about the silhouette. Nights were misty, quite cool. If he went in the evening to look at the tires, it might not seem too out-landish if he wore an overcoat. He had that huge one, the one Uncle Sherman had left when he’d died and which his mother had packed into mothballs in a box under the bed, because she had been positive that someday, somehow, she could rework it into a rug.

Mr. Howery went in his mother’s room and knelt down—cringing over the pain in his scraped knee—and got the box out, opened it. He put the coat on over his pajamas and was startled at the change. It concealed all his rounded middle-aged softness. Uncle Sherman had been tube-shaped, and tube-shaped it made Mr. Howery, giving him vast high military shoulders and a hint of bulky legs, both quite false. The thing had a terrific stench from the moth-killer, so Mr. Howery put it on a wire hanger and fixed the hanger to the rod of the open window, where the coat could air all night and the next day.

Drinking more coffee, Mr. Howery decided that tomorrow he would pick up a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, the dime-store variety, and a secondhand hat. He had been going bareheaded since he’d noticed the increasing baldness on the top.

He had one fear, now.

He itched with nervousness over the idea that by the time he got there, she might have already sold those tires.

For this reason he didn’t wait until after work to call her. He phoned at eight-thirty the next morning. First he had to call the market, which didn’t open until nine, and get a janitor to go to the board and look up the number on the card. Then he got the house, and a man who sounded half asleep went to get Margie.

Margie. Yes, somehow it fit her.

Her voice on the phone was light, clear, and cautious. She listened to his inquiry about the tires, asked his name and his make of car and whether he was willing to give what she asked or wanted to haggle. He assured her he had no wish to haggle. Meanwhile he got the odd impression that she was listening not so much to his words as to his voice, that she wanted him to talk so that she could place something about him. His mind chilled under a trickle of warning.

She explained finally that she didn’t have the tires at home. They were stored in a friend’s garage and she wouldn’t have access to them, to show them, until the coming weekend. Saturday morning.

Mr. Howery took alarm. The morning would certainly be bright, might even be warm, so that the overcoat would seem ridiculous. She’d get an excellent look at him. All at once, mentally he backed away from the meeting. He decided that he wanted much more to see if she went back to the railroad yards than to check her tale about the tires.

He promised to call her again before Saturday, gave her a name … John Abbott, a cousin of his in Pasadena … and hung up.

He wiped the sweat off his brow.

Very queer about those tires.

She was on guard during their conversation, that was plain. In some way she had been screening him over the telephone, seeking some trace of … what? A voice like a cop’s?

He didn’t bother buying the hat, or the glasses. He tucked the coat away in its box before driving down to report to the office. That day, covering the miles of Orange Country from one newly cross-hatched acreage to another, seeing and talking to building contractors, he found his mind straying to the scene of the night before, her figure in the dark beside the tracks.

Something funny going on, he’d bet on that.

She might be some sort of dupe, a pawn. She didn’t seem quite the type to be a … what was the word? … a moll.

When the day was done, when he had gone home and fixed dinner and eaten it, read the paper, and decided definitely on seeing what she did that night, he had a moment of self-congratulation. He didn’t have to trail her all the way from her house. He could pick her up along the way somewhere. Or even in the yards.

He couldn’t explain to himself why he was so sure that she would repeat her fruitless errand of the previous night.

Perhaps because it had been fruitless.

He was across the street in shadow, therefore, when she came to the opening in the fence, the big gap where the tracks converged to enter the yards; and he was no more than a hundred yards behind her as she tripped down the dark, lonely way between those boxcars. But there Mr. Howery’s luck ran out.

He was collared by a railroad dick named Kernehan and taken off to the yard office to be interrogated. Leaving her to meet her freight trains unobserved.

Chapter 3

Michael Kernehan had been an investigator for two years. Before that he had served his time as a yards patrolman, mostly at the Brett Street Yards. He had had two run-ins with juvenile gangs, tough ones, during the time at Brett Street; and these encounters seemed to have left him with an unusual attitude of suspicion, especially toward anyone under twenty-one. The change was marked enough so that the chief special agent, Ryerson, took note; he rarely assigned Kernehan to a case which might involve juveniles.

Kernehan was just a few months short of thirty. He was a veteran of the Korean War, in which he had served as a marine sergeant. He was well over six feet tall, lean-bodied with wide sinewy shoulders and flat hips, a redhead with brown eyes which must once have been warm with innocence but now had the cold vigilance of a cat’s. He was good-looking as far as his features went; and on first sight women were always much impressed. It was on longer acquaintance that they became uneasy. Under the surface Kernehan was always on guard.

He went to New Canyon Yards late that morning, checking on a report about a dead dog.

At about eleven o’clock he was near the overpass talking to an old car-knocker named Lizt. This old man, shabby in greasy overalls and a shapeless cap, red-eyed and sniffle-nosed, perhaps from last night’s wine bout, took Kernehan to a spot near his shanty and pointed to the ground. He pointed with the long-handled hammer which was the badge of his employment and said irritably, “He’s the third one. Cluttering things up. I don’t like it a bit.”

The dog was a big tan-haired mongel. He lay stiffly, puffed with poison, and some expression around his jaws, an incompleted retch, gave a hint of agony. Kernehan looked him over and said, “The poor son of a bitch, to go like that.”

The car-knocker edged a paw around with the head of the hammer. “He’s stiffer’n a board. Take a big hole for him. I buried the other two. They was little ones. I won’t keep it up.”

“Tell me about the other two,” said Kernehan, lighting a cigarette and moving upwind from the dead animal. The mists of the night had burned away, and the place was bright with sunlight. His shadow and the old man’s were sharp on the brown earth.

“Little old white one, part poodle. Other one about this one’s color, but long-haired. They wasn’t skinny, somebody’d fed them and kept them.”

“No, I mean where you found them. And when.”

“First one last week, and the brown one two … three days ago. They was both right hereabouts.” The car-knocker indicated the fence, the overpass, the main-line tracks. “Just dropped, stark-like. The way he is. The part poodle, though, was on the tracks yonder. I’ve a notion they thought to splatter him.”

The irises of Kernehan’s flat brown eyes seemed to narrow with concentration. “You found them when you came to work?”

The old man nodded. “Somebody brings them in at night.”

“Look at the dog’s neck. He’s worn a collar. Did either of the other two have a collar and license?”

“Like him, they’d worn one.”

“Did you call the pound, see if they might have been taken out just recently by someone? Or the Animal Shelter?”

“Ain’t my job,” he sniffled, peering red-eyed at Kernehan, “I ain’t no detective.”

“Anything you noticed beside the dogs? Any signs of mischief?”

“Nope.” He brushed at his nose with the back of his free hand. “Who you expect is doing it? Kids, maybe?”

Kernehan gave him an enigmatic look. “Go to the yard office and call the city health offices. They have a truck for picking up dead animals.”

“Wish to hell I’d known it before.”

Kernehan began to prowl, using the dog as the center of a widening area. It was a spot where a lot of track terminated. There was open ground between the row of car bumpers and the fence where the main line cut through the yards. Here stood two small buildings, the car-knocker’s shanty and a tool house. The shanty was open, and Kernehan glanced in. Then he went to the tool house, used the company switch key which he carried to unlock it, and went in. It too was bare of any sign of trouble or disorder. He went out and relocked it.

He opened the gate in the fence and went through, looking for the spot where the poodle had been placed on the tracks, hoping there was still some sign of where the dog had lain and knowing there wouldn’t be. Passing trains would have taken care of it.

There was a switchman’s shanty this side of the fence, close to it, and a small heap of ties. As soon as he got over there he saw the small, distinct impressions of a woman’s shoes.

He was careful not to step on them. He found where she had stood beside the shanty, a lot of restless overlapping prints, and then some more prints alongside the ties.

Puzzled, he went farther; and almost at once he found a man’s shoe mark. A minute or so later he discovered Mr. Howery’s path up the side of the embankment. Weeds were torn and trampled, and there were gouges and slide marks in the slanted bank. Kernehan studied carefully how the land lay. Then he returned to the gate, back through the fence and down a way, to the wooden stairs leading to the overpass. He climbed these and so out upon the footbridge, leaned upon the railing. From this point the marks made by someone climbing the bank were laid out like a map. Kernehan studied them without being able to understand. A woman had stood over there by the shanty, then had paused by the heap of crossties. A man had scrambled up the side of the small cut, had trampled out a perch for himself right beside the cement reinforcements of the bridge.

Kernehan looked further, getting the general outlay. Behind the little hill, which had been cut here to provide a way for the main-line tracks, lay another part of the yards. Here was a new commissary for the diners, big freight offices, and the coach yards, an area almost as large as the freight yards to his left.

He looked around over the wooden planking, down the stairs of the other approach, without finding anything unusual.

He found the car-knocker in the vicinity of the yard offices and took him back inside. He called the City Pound and a couple of private animal refuges, getting the old man to supply descriptions of the dead dogs, but found that no dogs like these had been adopted and removed from any of the shelters recently. Kernehan decided that his original idea was the right one. The dogs were pets and someone had killed them from malice, probably. The thing which made it the railroad’s business was that they were being disposed of on company property.

He had time to go back to his office and turn in a report before lunch. The chief special agent of the Los Angeles division occupied a huge room in a large old-fashioned office building near skid row. The chief, Ryerson, was out on business, but Pete the office man was at his desk. He got interested right away in the affair of the dead dogs. “Never had anything just like that before. Sounds like something a kid might do.” Then he gave Kernehan a suddenly thoughtful look through his horn-rimmed specs, and went back to the typewriter.

Kernehan typed up the report of the morning’s work, including his observation that there had been recent trespassers, male and female, and turned it in to Pete and left.

He waited in the lobby of the building for her. To the left of the foyer was a bank, dignifiedly busy; to the right, beyond the ramp of elevator doors, was the entrance of a small quiet café. It was quite a different block from the one in which the railroad had its headquarters. Three men stood in a group near the small cigar stand, talking together. They glanced over at Kernehan when he came to a stop and stood patiently waiting, but their interest was brief. They were money men, cut to the Spring Street pattern, neatly dark-suited, with toned-down ties and shoes and the correct kind of hat; and they could see at once that Kernehan was not one of them. Perhaps none of the three placed him precisely for what he was, a cop. Kernehan was much better-looking than the average policeman.

She came quickly, before most of the others. Not more than three or four girls got out of the elevator with her. She was a slim girl in a black dress, the skirt cut full, a white collar turned back like big lapels, two heavy silver bracelets circling her right arm, matching the big silver pin at the neck of the dress. She had pale olive skin as smooth as silk. Below the eyes and across the temples there were rather flat planes, giving her somewhat of an oriental look. She came up to Kernehan and linked her arm in his. “Hello, darling. How’s cops and robbers today?”

“Slow as hell.”

“Too bad. Nobody wanted to shoot it out, or anything?”

“All the corpses were canine.”

They went through the entry of the small cafe, over to a far corner, and as they sat down at the table for two she gave Kernehan a close look and decided he’d meant it. “Really? Doggies? How many?”

“Three dead dogs in the freight yards.” He was always reluctant to talk about the job, though she seemed to find great interest in it. Kernehan took the pair of menus from behind the napkin holder and handed one to her. She opened it, looked into it; and for a moment, still watching her, Kernehan marveled at how absolutely green her eyes were. They were green as green leaves. It didn’t have a thing to do with the way he loved her, but somehow it was important. It was a thing to tuck away in memory against a day he felt was coming, when green eyes would no longer be there for him to see.

Still looking into the menu, she said, “Jimmy’s getting out this Saturday.”

“I know it.”

“I want to be there to take him home.”

There didn’t seem to be an answer to this, so Kernehan made none.

“I was hoping you’d be there too,” she said, still not looking up.

“I don’t want to be there.”

“He’s young and he made a mistake. A year is a long time, even on an honor farm. He told me all about it. He’s not defiant and all closed up inside the way you think he is.” She was looking at Kernehan now, the green eyes seeking his. “He’s humble and honest.”

“He’s making a jackass out of you. You and your dad and your mother.” Kernehan said it without emphasis or heat, but with complete conviction. “He needs you all now, he’s got to have you to make parole, to get those months off for good behavior. Wait a while and see.”

She shook her head. The dark hair tied into a pony tail swung with her vehemence. “I want you to go with me when I bring him home.”

Kernehan laid down the menu. “Why in hell do you insist on having me?”

“It’s important.” She controlled the inner agitation, reached a hand to touch one of his. “How can I talk to Mother and Dad about marrying you when you have this opinion of us?”

“Not of you. Of Jimmy. I’m not marrying your brother.”

“We’re a family. We’re all part of each other. One of us is … has been—sick.”

“Oh, now,” Kernehan said in mild protest.

“Sick,” she repeated. “Temporarily not himself. This was his first offense.”

“First since he turned eighteen and could be dealt with as an adult,” Kernehan corrected.

The green eyes were turning misty, the part he hated.

“Let’s order lunch,” he said quickly, looking around for the waitress.

“Everyone makes mistakes,” she said, her lower lip trembling. “Even you. Perhaps. Someday.”

“I doubt if I’ll steal a car and wreck it.” He jerked up the menu to signal the waitress. All the time, through the heavy dread inside him, he was aware of Lora’s hand on the table and of how he could pick it up and comfort her with a few lying words. He was in a way baffled by his own unmoving stubbornness. It wasn’t as if he believed in any undying principles or had any illusions about being an officer of the law. Nor about Jimmy being any worse than the rest of the nineteen-year-old kids running loose. Jimmy just happened to have been caught.

It was just something inside him, too mean to give an inch.

“Mike, I don’t want anything to eat.”

“I do.”

Lately all of their times together were like this, starting out with a few minutes of banter, of being amused and of liking each other in the old familiar way. And then the ugly arguments about Jimmy.

Jimmy was going to split them up, and he wasn’t worth it. He wasn’t worth one tear of Lora’s, one moment’s regret.

The waitress was coming. Kernehan looked at Lora. “I can’t always have a third party along, even in thought. It spoils things. That stinking little thief—”

She was stumbling to her feet.

“No, wait. I’m sorry. Please sit down.”

She sat down again, but she seemed dazed, as if the lid had come off something right into her face.

“That’s how you think of him?”

“No. No, I didn’t mean it. He’s your brother, after all.”

In the back of Kernehan’s mind, suddenly, was the memory of one of those nights in the yards, the three kids coming at him out of the dark, converging like a trio of hunting beasts; the glitter of a knife, a bike chain swinging for his head. But he forced the memory aside.

“He’s your brother, and he didn’t hurt anyone. Only himself.”

Still she was quiet, she just sat there looking dazed.

Kernehan turned to the waitress, ordered a couple of sandwiches, tea for Lora and coffee for himself. The waitress went away, keeping a sidelong eye on them, sensing the quarrel.

“Lora, can’t we just talk about ourselves?”

“Yes. Let’s do that. Tell me about your case this morning, the dead dogs.”

She had folded her hands on her lap. She listened while he told her about the dogs being disposed of in the freight yards, but exactly how much got through to her he couldn’t have said. She wasn’t going to forget that slip he’d made, what he had called her brother. No, never.

The day when he would never see her again had jumped closer, all of a sudden.

Kernehan looked around at the quiet little café, the white tables shining in the subdued light, clean linen and sparkling glass, the little bar closed off by a bamboo wall against which artificial greenery climbed and spread. He had to hang onto the memory, the way it looked and how she had sat across from him with her hands folded. He had to take it in and cherish it, because memories were coming to a close.

When he got back to the office Ryerson had come in, and he went into the inner, glassed-off cubicle. Ryerson had a fine green carpet on his private floor, a big desk, and he was behind the desk and puffing a cigar, a big man who looked contented with his lunch. He listened to what Kernehan had to say about the dogs in the New Canyon Yards.

“The City Pound officer will make an investigation of some sort,” Kernehan added. “I’m going to report to the Humane Society, too, and I’ll find out from L.A.P.D. if anyone has reported these dogs stolen. The thing is, none of them were of any value, they were mutts from what the old man told me.”

“Somebody must have liked them,” Ryerson pointed out. “They’d been fed. You priced any dog food lately?” He swung in his chair, and the chair squeaked. “The point here, though, isn’t really the dogs at all. It’s the fact that we’ve had repeated trespassing. Someone’s come in and horsed around and got out again without being collared.”

“Yes, I see that’s the important part.”

“Check with L.A.P.D. about any dogs stolen, the way you planned, and then if there’s no lead there I want you to go down there tonight. Stay until about midnight. Then check again early tomorrow. Find out more about that dog the old man saw on the main-line tracks, if you can. If he saw him there in the morning and still undamaged, the dog couldn’t have been brought in too long before. Maybe just before daylight.”

“I thought of that.”

“It’s a crazy kind of mischief. No point to it. Kid stuff.” For a moment Ryerson hesitated; a thoughtful look crossed his face. He didn’t glance up at Kernehan, though. “See what you can do with it.” He then turned to another case Kernehan had been working on, some freight shipments broken into, partial carloads lost. The losses were growing important, but the point of theft had not been pinpointed.

When Kernehan left the inner office he went to his desk in the big outer room and picked up the phone. The complaint desk of L.A.P.D. seemed somewhat at a loss about where to investigate dog thievery; the officer finally decided he’d check both robbery and burglary, and call Kernehan back.

It didn’t take long. L.A.P.D. had no records on missing dogs of the kind Kernehan had needed.

Chapter 4

Kernehan decided to stake-out inside the tool shed. It was near the gate to the main-line tracks, which seemed to have been a passing point both for whoever was bringing in the dogs, and the male and female trespassers in the vicinity of the overpass—providing these weren’t all the same people.

The woman’s prints had been those of an adult. Somehow Kernehan couldn’t fit a grown woman into the mischievous nonsense about the dogs. The person who had climbed the cut could be a kid with big feet, though.

The misty night closed in early with the sky obscured and the sun swallowed up long before its time. The smell of fog filled the air, invading even the little building; and, touching his face in the dark, Kernehan felt the moisture sticking to his skin.

He thought about Lora for a while. She had made one brief last plea at the end of their lunch together, wanting him to go with her to pick up the kid brother Saturday, and Kernehan had turned her down. Sitting on a box in the tool shed, Kernehan was filled with a lonely disgust with himself. She was lovely, a warm and wonderful person. He loved her, he suspected much more than he’d ever love anyone else; and yet he couldn’t break down this inner wall inside himself, this stubbornness. The kid was a faker, pulling the wool over Lora’s eyes, the eyes of the mother and father. So what? Why couldn’t he lie a little and pretend to agree with Lora, pretend to believe in the rotten little crook? Why did he have to be so goddammed stiff necked about it?

Even to himself, he couldn’t explain it. The only thing that occurred to him was that this particular hypocrisy was for some reason beyond him.

He waited, and the fog-laden night ticked by, and some other thoughts occupied him. He was going to have to find another place to live, for one thing. The flat where he now lived alone was too big and too far out of town. He had rented it almost a year ago, along with a couple of friends from the service. They’d been going to U.S.C. at the time. Now both of them were back in the Marines. What Kernehan thought he needed was a small hotel room with a hot plate for making coffee.

He knew he was never going to marry Lora. Day by day, and meeting by meeting, he was driving her away from him.

He shifted on the box, easing his cramped legs. There was no activity in this part of the yards right now. Off in the distance he could hear a Diesel switcher working at the interminable job of jockeying boxcars; but the nearest sound was the drip of condensed fog off the eaves of the shed.

Then he heard footsteps.

Light, little steps. A woman’s. He eased off the box and stood up, and put a thumb in the door casing and looked out.

Fog.

His skin seemed to tighten all over his body; he had almost a sense of the flesh flattening and tensing, like a cat’s when it readies to spring. And something stirred in his mind, a black memory.

He had forgotten what the yards were like on foggy nights. When you walked a long lonely beat between cuts of cars, over miles of crisscrossed tracks, through oil-and-steam smells left forgotten on the thick air, and with young hoods waiting with broken bottles and razors taped to their finger tips and with steel caps on their toes to make kicking really mean something. Yes, he’d forgotten. Until now.

He reached for the holster on his hip and brought the gun up.

He stepped out into the fog-filled night. The woman’s steps receded, vanished; his ears couldn’t follow them; but now there were others, heavier. A flash of comprehension rushed through Kernehan; something about the man, the pussyfoot way he walked, betrayed that he was sneaking along after the woman and not wanting her to know it. Kernehan waited until he was just past the side of the tool shed and then stuck the gun in his ribs and said, “Stop right there, Mac.”

The man stopped and lifted his arms jerkily. He was no more than a solid shadow to Kernehan, the lifted arms dim in the fog. He sucked in such a hard, ragged breath, though, that Kernehan felt the trembling all the way up through the heavy gun to his hand and wrist.

“Step this way.”

Kernehan snapped on the light over the tool-shed door and inspected his catch. He was surprised. This was a respectable, middle-class sort of man; not a bum. Kernehan said, “Stand two feet from the wall, lean over, and put your finger tips on it and keep still.” Kernehan slid the gun into the holster on his hip and gave the guy a quick frisk. Nothing on him. After sizing him up Kernehan would have been surprised to find anything.

“What are you doing here in the yards?”

“C-c-cutting across to save time.”

This was such a silly excuse that Kernehan almost laughed over it. “Where were you headed? Glendale?”

“I guess I got lost.”

He was looking at Kernehan over his shoulder and Kernehan was sizing him up more closely. Around fifty, five-six or so, getting bald, the clothes not new or expensive—Kernehan had a sudden hunch the guy had put on an old outfit for this little errand. The hunch came from nowhere, but he would have bet on it. He said, “Don’t do anything funny. Move slowly. Take your hands off the wall and get out your wallet and show me your identification. Driver’s license and so on.”

The little man licked his mouth. “Oh, Lord, do we have to go through all that rigmarole? I was just walking through.”

“You’re a trespasser on company property,” Kernehan reminded. “Let’s see the I.D.”

The man sort of moved backward with a funny jerk, and Kernehan had the gun out in an instant. “You’d better take it easy.”

“What the hell do you expect me to do? Jump you?” He sized Kernehan up through the drifting foggy light. He was sore because he’d been caught and perhaps because he had lost the woman who had preceded him, and Kernehan’s scaring him with the gun made him even madder. “Here, take a look. Here are some of my salesman’s cards, I sell tile for a wholesale outfit, and here’s the sheet provided by the bonding company. I have a perfectly good job, and I’m not here to steal tires or anything.”

Kernehan examined the identification while he thought about that last remark. The little guy probably didn’t even know what he’d said, didn’t have any idea of the implications. When they got excited they said the first thing that came to mind.

“I guess we’d better go over to the yard office,” Kernehan told him. “I’d like to talk to you.”

The other man stood flat-footed, facing him. “I haven’t done a goddam thing.”

“You coming with or without handcuffs?” Kernehan asked.

“How do I know you’re even a police officer?”

“I’ll show you my I.D. in the office.”

He would have liked to bolt. Kernehan knew it. The gun kept him from trying it. He would have liked to belt Kernehan one, too. But then there was a little matter of eight inches or so difference in their height, and some forty-odd pounds. Plus the fact that the little man was made of middle-aged mush and Kernehan was young and hard.

They went across tracks to the yard offices, and Kernehan thought about this pigeon as they walked and got more and more interested in him.

He had a job selling tile, all right; but jobs had been used before to cover up. He could be selling tile in the mornings and doing something else in the afternoons and evenings. Like peddling hot merchandise.

The name was Howery, Leonard Howery, and the address wasn’t too far away, over in the direction of the park, a pretty good neighborhood, some big old homes and some of them cut up into flats and apartments. Kernehan had been thinking of the district in regard to his own need for a new home.

That business of following the woman brought a quirk to Kernehan’s lips. If he hadn’t made the slip, mentioning the tires, Kernehan might have figured that the guy had simply come in to see where the woman was going. He could be a boy friend or husband, and she could be slipping around on him, and him suspicious. Or she could be a dame he’d picked up in a bar and made a rendezvous to meet in an empty boxcar. Hell, it-had been done before. The only thing was, Howery wasn’t quite the type to take his lady friends to such surroundings. And what in hell had she been doing, walking so far ahead, if they were that intimately acquainted?

Lots of possibilities.

Yeah, little man, Kernehan thought, you and I are really going to have a chat.

I only wish I could have snagged the gal, too, so we could really have a party.

Since New Canyon Yards was a relatively recent expansion and had only been in operation a little more than a year, the yard offices were big and modern. There was a separate office for the use of the railroad police, an outer interrogation room and an inner office, a telephone hookup to all the outlying phones in the yards, modern furniture and good desks. Kernehan got a patrolman in from the yards to stay with Howery while he went into the inner room and called the night sergeant, Burns. He finally located Burns in the Brett Street Yards. The night sergeant was not expected to hold down the office at night, but to get out and circulate.

Burns agreed to come at once. He thought he could make it in under fifteen minutes.

Kernehan took the patrolman out into the corridor and told him to look for the woman in the vicinity of the overpass. He went back to Howery. Howery was more nervous now, the anger subsiding under the bright lights and perhaps too under the realization that he actually was involved with a branch of the law. He had no doubt of it after Kernehan showed him his I.D. and badge.

When Kernehan got a sheet of paper from the desk, and took a pen from his pocket, and again asked Howery for his full name and address, Howery almost shouted, “Oh, for Lord’s sake, do we have to—”

“Yeah. We have to.” He wrote it down as Howery grudgingly gave it again, Howery adding that he couldn’t see why Kernehan couldn’t remember what was in the wallet. Ignoring this, Kernehan went on asking questions. Howery said he wasn’t married, he lived alone. He had never been in New Canyon Yards before tonight—nor in any other yards, nor had he had any truck with a railroad except a trip to San Francisco long ago when he and his mother had gone to a cousin’s funeral.

No, he most certainly didn’t have any company property at home, nor did he have stolen merchandise of any kind there.

“Will you give us permission to look?” Kernehan asked.

“I most certainly will if it will put an end to this nonsense.”

Kernehan nodded impassively and began to look in the desk drawer for a search release. When he found one he put it aside, awaiting Burns’s arrival. “You say you live alone? Don’t you have a dog?”

“A dog?” Howery said it as if Kernehan had asked if he kept a dinosaur.

“Dog. D-o-g.” Kernehan waited and watched.

“Of course I don’t have a dog. What would I want with it?”

“You have something against dogs? Don’t you like them? They mess the lawn? They bark and keep you awake nights?” Kernehan offered.

“My mother always said they smelled up a house. What’s this line leading to, anyway? I don’t know of a dog in my neighborhood except a Chihuahua kept by an old lady next door, and as far as I can see the thing is a deaf-mute; it never lets out a peep. What’re you trying to get me to say?”

“Just routine questions, Mr. Howery.” Kernehan had been listening with an inner ear; Howery’s puzzled annoyance, his impatience had sounded genuine. “How did you happen to come in here tonight? Really, I mean. Don’t you want to tell me about it now?”

Howery blurted, “I know it sounds like hell but as a matter of fact I was following a woman. Goddam it, is that such a crime?”

“Who is she?”

“I don’t know.” He folded his hands suddenly, clenching them as if they held a secret; and Kernehan decided that he knew the woman and wasn’t going to tell.

“She’s been giving you a bad time?” he hazarded.

“What the devil do you mean by that?”

“Stepping out on you? She must be acquainted with some rough types if their idea of where to meet is out by the tracks in the dark.”

Howery squinted at him. “I don’t know the woman, I don’t know who she’s meeting. If anybody. I’d say she was just a girl who has a yen to watch freight trains.”

Kernehan gave him an odd, thoughtful look that caused some color to come up under the film of perspiration on Howery’s face. Burns came in about that time. He checked what Kernehan had put down, then asked Howery sharply what he was doing in the yards.

“Following a woman. Following a woman. How many times do I have to tell you?” Howery shouted.

“Where did you meet her?” Burns demanded. He was cool; his voice remained heavy and unruffled.

“I didn’t. I just followed her, and she turned into the yards, and I thought, my God, she might be raped in there. I didn’t come in to steal a goddam thing or to wreck one of your trains, or any such kind of thing. I was just following this woman.”

“He has agreed to sign a release for search of the house he lives in,” Kernehan said, pushing the release forward.

Howery signed it, Kernehan and Burns putting down their names as witnesses. They took Burns’s car over to Howery’s apartment; it was one of the new cruisers, equipped with radio-phone. During the ride Howery grew increasingly quiet and sullen.

The two-bedroom flat looked to Kernehan as if someone had filled it up with knickknacks and dust catchers and had then decided to hell with it all. There were a lot of signs of a woman’s touch, but they were faded and filmed by neglect. There were a couple of religious pictures on the walls. When Burns mentioned them, Howery said that they had belonged to his late mother; he just hadn’t taken them down as yet.

“She must have been a nice lady,” Burns commented, and Kernehan thought that the look Howery gave in answer was full of hate.

He and Burns, though, found no company property, nor any signs of the stolen and missing shipments of the sort that had lately become such a mounting problem in their office.

In the shared garage at the rear of the lot Howery’s car sat alongside two others. Howery explained that he did a lot of driving in his job, that on weekends and during the evenings he had had to get out to walk for the sake of exercise.

“You’d better watch where you walk from now on,” Kernehan remarked.

“I intend to.”

Howery knew that they were going to let him go with a warning; the knowledge shone in his defiant eyes.

At the yard offices Kernehan checked with the patrolman he’d sent to look for the woman. The patrolman hadn’t found anyone near the footbridge overpass, nor the gate.

Ducked out, Kernehan decided. Heard the patrolman coming, or saw an incautious light, and ran. Those footsteps he’d heard, just before he’d caught Howery, had been real.

He and Burns discussed Howery’s actions, and his explanations.

“He could be doing what he said, sneaking along after the woman, but I’m surprised he’d admit it,” Burns commented.

“There’s more to it than that. I’m sure of it,” Kernehan said. He stood frowning and quiet, trying to organize his impressions of Howery. It hadn’t simply been the slip, Howery saying he hadn’t come into the yard to steal tires. “There’s something he hasn’t told us. Maybe something about the woman. I think he knows her.”

“Check with L.A. robbery detail and see if they’ve got anything on him.”

Kernehan nodded slowly. “And I’ll see him again. He won’t expect that.”

Burns, looking at him in the bright light, thought what a good-looking bastard he was; and then for an instant he glimpsed beyond the handsome façade, saw something more: an iron resolve, a fixedness beyond ordinary interest in the job. The movement of insight was somehow chilling. It set Burns wondering.

Kernehan said, “I’ll figure out a way to run into him again that will give him a shock.”

“I’ll bet you will,” Burns agreed.

Chapter 5

At a quarter of nine the next morning the outer office was busy—several investigators were checking schedules and writing up reports on the previous day’s work, and Pete was rattling out a batch of official letters on the typewriter. In the inner sanctum, beyond the glassed-in barrier, Kernehan sat with Ryerson. They were talking about the freight losses.

Ryerson’s air was as grim as the dead cigar in his jaws. “I’ve had a real blast from Whittaker in Freight Claims. These losses are really starting to add up. We’re going to have to break this thing, or we’ll be looking for new employment. And without recommendations, yet.”

Kernehan said, “What about our man in Vermillion?”

“He hasn’t been able to find any seals cut and stuck back the way we get them here. Looks as if it’s between here and the river.”

“Plenty of territory.” Kernehan looked at the big railroad map on the wall behind the chief’s desk. Vermillion was at the Arizona border, on the Colorado, a sun-baked town of about five thousand, built mostly of adobe bricks and corrugated iron, a railroad division point with sprawling freight yards, repair yards, division offices, and a big passenger and freight depot. Kernehan had been over there a couple of times, but not within the past year. “We ought to be able to narrow it down better than that.”

“A clue of sorts has turned up. One car with some leather goods missing—expensive stuff, handbags and such—had a seal on it which turned out to have been issued to the Colton office. I called Colton this morning. Richie remembered it, remembered testing the car seal and finding it cut and stuck back. He replaced it with one of his own. This same car had been checked at Vermillion because of the kind of shipment. Nothing wrong, there.”

“It’s going on between Colton and Vermillion, then.”

“There’s something else. As I mentioned, the kind of shipment. It’s either tires or cigarettes, once in a while soft goods like leather and fabric, or plastics. They’ve never tried for anything like television sets, for instance, though you’d think the resale possibilities would have tempted them, the kind of setup they seem to have working for them.”

“They ever tackle something they decide they don’t want? Break a seal and take a look and then leave it alone?”

Ryerson shook his head angrily. “Never. They know exactly what they’re going for.”

Kernehan was silent; he didn’t have to speak out, what both of them were thinking. Somebody was tipping off the thieves, and there was an inside angle somewhere.

“I want you to go to Colton and look around.”

“And take a run over to Vermillion?”

Ryerson thought about it, chewing the cigar. “No. I’ve got another idea for Vermillion. Send you down there under cover. You know the place, but it’s been a while since you were there—”

“A year.”

“You ought to be able to manage it. Now, while you’re in Colton, there’s another thing, just came in.” Ryerson yanked a written report out of a stack on the desk. “Dead man in a hopper car, showed up in a load of gravel for Union Concrete. Colton P.D. or sheriff’s office is on it by now, of course; you can check first with them. The stiff is a former employee of ours. Canned six months or so; try to find out what he was doing back there. Find out where the car was loaded. Oh well, you know what to do.” He skipped the sheet across the desk to Kernehan.

Kernehan stood up. He glanced at the sheet briefly. The corpse was identified as a male white American, twenty-eight years old, six foot two and weighing a hundred and fifty-five pounds—this information, Kernehan judged, having been taken from the dead man’s work record. Name, Hart Jennings; former employment, switchman in the Vermillion and Colton yards. Cause of death was given as brain hemorrhage, due to injuries to the head. Cause unknown.

“Who identified this stiff?”

“Somebody on the switcher at the cement works. You can check that item in Colton. They think it could have been an accident, him riding the hopper and falling asleep, waking up when they started to fill it, trying to get out and falling back somehow.”

“Could be.” Privately, Kernehan thought it sounded cockeyed. It sounded as if somebody wanted to put in an accident report to save himself the trouble of working on a murder. Kernehan put the folded sheet in his pocket. “By the way, I picked up a trespasser on that stake-out last night. Name of Howery. Claims he was following a woman. I heard a woman’s footsteps, but we didn’t find her. It was foggy.”

“He’s been bringing in those goddam dead dogs?” Ryerson asked hopefully.

“I doubt it. One thing sticks with me, though. He said he hadn’t come into the yards to steal tires, or anything—using his words.”

Ryerson seemed to chew on it along with the dead cigar. “You went to his place?”

Kernehan went into details of his visit to Howery’s flat, with the night sergeant. “On the surface he seems a respectable salesman—except for this business of having followed a woman he says he doesn’t know. I’m going to check with the employer, of course. But I have a hunch his days go the way he says … he peddles tile to contractors in the big subdivisions.”

Ryerson speculated, “Maybe the dame gave him the eye in a bar. Maybe she had a friend waiting somewhere, it was a come-on for a mugging.”

Kernehan was looking out into the big light well that opened up the middle of the huge old-fashioned building. A girl with shiny black hair and a red blouse was over there in another office; she was trying to change a typewriter ribbon. Something had gone wrong. Loops and snarls of ribbon hung from her hands, and she was staring in perplexity at the machine. “It could be, but I don’t go for it. Howery knows something he didn’t tell us. Maybe, who the woman is and what she was doing there. I’m going to make sure he doesn’t forget us. It might take a little time, but I think he’ll talk. Eventually.”

Ryerson studied Kernehan attentively. He seemed to be summing up the big frame, the handsome appearance, the dedicated intelligence; and the look in his eyes betrayed a conflict; he ought to like this efficient and willing cop of his. He ought to, and somehow he couldn’t. Perhaps it was too much like cultivating an affection for a machine.

Kernehan went downstairs, and in the building lobby he stepped into a phone booth and dialed Lora’s office.

She answered formally, expecting a business call; and then when she knew who it was, her tone grew cold and quiet. “How are you, Mike?”

“Okay. I’m sorry about the date last night, it was a stakeout in the freight yards, and I couldn’t get out of it.”

“Probably you enjoyed it,” she said quietly.

“Let’s don’t—” He broke off. “Look, they’re sending me out of town, I won’t be back till late.”

“I hadn’t planned to see you tonight, Mike.”

“I wanted to have lunch again.”

“Nor that, either.”

He was suddenly stung, and his face felt hot. “Are you sore about something?”

“Yes, I am angry. I wanted you to go with me to pick up Jimmy on Saturday. I wanted Jimmy to know that the man I’ve chosen to marry has faith in him, believes that he is a human being worth a little time and trouble.”

“I told you yesterday—”

“And of course you never change your mind.” Her tone was still quiet, but there was a growing raggedness in the way she breathed. “You’re like one of those big fast trains; you’re on a one-way track and you can’t and won’t get off. Right to the end. That’s you, Mike.”

He knew he was asking for it. “The end of what?”

“The end of us.”

The phone was quiet. His palm was wet, holding the receiver; and the booth seemed airless and shut in. “Don’t say it, Lora.”

“Good-by, Mike.” She hung up.

He went out and headed for the elevators, the basement garage where he could check out a company car. He noticed the bright light from the street as he stood waiting. The night’s fog had burned away and the sun was out, sharp and hot for April, a touch of desert dryness in the air, even here in the cool empty marble-walled lobby. He had a sudden sense of the uniqueness of the day, the passing hours of sunlight; it was the twenty-first of April, and it would last just so long and wouldn’t come again. Night would shut down, bringing another fog. The dropping of time, minute by minute, would touch midnight, and then it would be done.

He took a down elevator to the big basement garage, checked out a company car, drove up into the crowded street. He worked his way through traffic toward the freeway ramp. As fast as L.A. got a freeway open, it became jammed to the point of obsolescence. Kernehan was a watchful and skilful driver. He jockeyed his way into the lanes for the Santa Ana freeway from the downtown slot. The thin remainder of fog was being tainted into smog; he was suddenly glad to be getting out of town.

All at once, as if the image of time had revolved in his mind, he was thinking of the past, remembering the night he had first met Lora.

Six months? Nearer seven. Shortly after the university had opened in the fall and his roommates had given a party, a spaghetti-and-dago-red party, and he had found himself somehow quietly alone in the middle of a lot of college chatter. Who wanted cop talk? He had stood around with a drink in his hand, had had one brush with a blonde who had just discovered Proust and wanted to show off, and had begun to think of ducking out to a movie, when Lora had walked up. A dark-haired girl with a pony tail and leaf-green eyes that made him do a double-take, gawking. A small shell of silence had seemed to be folded around her, too, a shell like his own. He had answered her questions and asked a few of his own. She was a secretary. She was here because she knew a girl who’d been invited, a girl student.

She had looked at the buzzing clique and asked, wonderingly, “Are we missing something?”

“What have you read lately?” he demanded, trying to fix her in a pattern.

“I like travel books.” She had looked straight at him. “Because I never go anywhere. Oh, I crossed the border to Tijuana once. Do you know anything about existentialism?”

He had frowned into his wine. “I’m not sure. I think it has something to do with the fact that we’re all here on a very temporary basis. But I’d figured that out quite a while back. And I’m sure the idea wasn’t original, then.”

“Probably you’re oversimplifying.”

“I’m sure I must be.” And why, in that moment, in that first meeting, had there been this same fleeting taste of failure and loss, of time flying, of an inability to grasp and identify just what he wanted? The green eyes had been steady and appraising. Somewhere in them a smile, too. “Would you care to go to a movie?”

She’d said, “I would love to.”

So they had left the party and gone out into the autumn night, walked to a movie house and then decided not to go in, had gone over instead to Exposition Park and walked around near the museum and through the rose garden, the night air heavy with the scent of bloom and the sound of the city seeming far away.

She had told him some more about herself. She was twenty-two. She could have gone to the university if she had wanted to; her parents had hoped she would be a schoolteacher. She lived at home. Her dad was a bookkeeper for an oil company, and her mother worked part-time as a nurse. She had a brother named Jimmy, and he was in a little trouble over a car. It was later, several dates later, that Kernehan had found out that Jimmy had stolen a car, wrecked it, and was in jail for it.

She had let him take her home after the walk in the park, and she had kissed him good night at her door, a warm and affectionate embrace that had surprised him. He had presumed a bit, on the strength of it, their next date, and had got his face slapped.

At some time between the kiss and the slap his feeling about this girl had centered and sharpened; the green eyes and the pony tail had taken on the endearing qualities of the familiarly dreamed-about. Also, now that he was sure of his limits, he wanted a repetition of the kiss. In short, Kernehan had fallen in love.

He was still in love. Only now there was this thing about her brother and his own stony inability to care.

He forced the memories from his mind, concentrated on getting out of L.A. alive in the freeway traffic.

Under the noon sun, in the outskirts of Colton, he got out of the car and stretched briefly but gratefully. The place had the usual look of a cement works. Little stubby hills of gravel, a corrugated-iron elevator, tracks, some hopper cars both empty and filled, a rank of cement mixers minus their trucks, and over all a whitish coating of dust as if the place had been caught in a blizzard of dirty snow. Kernehan spotted a small office beside the towering elevator, walked over, and looked in through the door. He saw a couple of desks and some chairs and a phone. One of the chairs had a man in it. He was reading a comic book and picking his teeth. The remains of lunch, and a Thermos bottle, were on the desk in front of him.

“Yes, sir,” he said around the toothpick. “What’ll it be?”

“Are you the manager here?”

“Everybody’s gone to lunch. Can I help you?”

“My name’s Kernehan.” Kernehan took out his leather folder with its badge pinned inside and the I.D. “Railroad police. I came about the dead man in your hopper car.”

The man put down the comic book. “Pleased to meet you.” He offered a hand across the desk. “I’m Farley. Assistant manager. Or head flunky. I’ve told all I know to the Colton police. Wasn’t much. Just that we found the dead man when we emptied gravel yesterday. He was in the bottom of the car, mashed pretty bad, might have fallen back when they started to load and then got smothered and crushed with the gravel on him.”

Kernehan sat down and put his hat on the desk. “Did you figure this out for yourself?”

Farley looked a little blank. “Well, we all talked it over. You know, when the cops got here, and we were sizing up how it could have happened.”

“Where had the gravel come from?”

“Sidewinder, it’s out in the desert, about forty miles. I don’t think there’s even a station there, just a spur and some loading equipment. The gravel outfit’s up in a canyon.”

“Yes, I know the place. Isolated.” Kernehan took out cigarettes, offered the pack to Farley, lit both their smokes. “Suppose the man had been killed around here somewhere. After all, he had worked for us here in Colton Yards. Is there any way he could have been buried down in the gravel after the car had been loaded?”

Farley smoked a minute or so, staring quietly out into the sunlight. “I don’t honestly see how. You wouldn’t be able to dig anything like a hole for him, he’d have to be right on top. You know what I mean? Gravel slides if you try to fool around in it. If you wanted him on the bottom you’d have to take most of the load out, put the man in, put the gravel back. Quite a job, without equipment.”

“Are you sure the body was on the bottom of the car when it came in here?”

“He was stuck to the bottom,” Farley said without looking squeamish. “Squashed and dried there. That’s how we found him.”

“What was the position of the body? I mean, huddled down perhaps, as if he knew what was coming?”

“No. Straightened out, face up. Cops said the back of his head had been crushed. As if he might almost have made it out of the hopper car, then been brushed back from the rim.”

“I’ll have to check the autopsy report,” Kernehan said, thinking aloud.

“Last time we found anything funny, it was a mutt,” Farley offered. “A dead dog.” He smiled a little under Kernehan’s stare of fixed interest. “He wasn’t buried, though. He’d just been tossed in.”

“When was this?”

“Oh, a month or so ago.”

Kernehan’s principal feeling was the vaguely chilling one of being haunted.

Chapter 6

Haunted by dead dogs …

Kernehan shook off the feeling and asked to be taken to the spot where the body had been discovered. Farley took him up to the unloading ramp. It was empty under the sun, all around them acres of cement dust threw the light back at them, and Kernehan suddenly felt hot and dirty. He also thought that the cement dust would rise and choke them under the slightest wind.

“Nothing to see, really,” Farley said. “The car’s gone. Nothing in it anyway but him and the gravel.”

“How was he dressed?”

“Old army pants, looked like, and a blue shirt, maybe one he’d worn working for the railroad, and it hadn’t even been ironed. The collar was wrinkled and … oh, it looked as if he’d washed it out himself in some puddle. But then there was the watch he wore. I noticed that. My brother has one like it, and I know how much they cost. Plenty.”

Kernehan felt a tickling in his nose, as if the dust were rising invisibly. “Any wallet? I.D.? Anything with a home address in it?”

“I don’t think so. I think his pockets were bare.”

He was right, as Kernehan found out at police headquarters.

Kernehan talked to a detective. The police were working on the case, and they were no longer calling it an accident. The autopsy had shown that Hart Jennings had been dead when the gravel had poured in on him, and the crushed skull had not been the result of a fall backward into the hopper car. Hart Jennings had been beaten to death with something flat, metallic, and rusted, about the size of a tire iron.

The doctor refused to try to pinpoint the time of death, except to estimate it as more than twenty-four hours from time of autopsy, and less than sixty. The dead man had eaten a meal of chili, beans, and tortillas shortly before death, but there was as yet no way of knowing the time or the place and so no anchor. Kernehan looked over the clothes, and the shoes, and they were as shabby as Farley had said. The stained clothing had a fine dust, or silt, in it that drifted into Kernehan’s palms, and he remembered the white dust all around the cement works.

The watch crystal had been broken, the hands stopped at twelve minutes past two. Again as Farley had said, it was a very expensive watch.

The police had talked to a woman who ran the boarding-house where Hart Jennings had lived while he had worked for the railroad in Colton. This interview had not been written up as yet; the detective told it directly to Kernehan. The woman at the boarding-house had described Jennings as an easygoing young fellow, free with his money, a little wild when he was drinking—which wasn’t too often. She had no idea where he had lived, or worked, in the months since he had left her house.

The police had found no record of a family, a wife, or surviving relatives, if any. They hadn’t had time to check with other railroad employees who might have known Jennings. The detective thought Kernehan might help them out there, and Kernehan said he would; he was going to the yards on another matter, anyway.

Homicide was not the usual chore of railroad bulls. They were company men; but in this case a former employee had turned up dead on railroad property. And though Ryerson hadn’t said so, keeping a hand in was taken for granted.

Kernehan left police headquarters and drove out to Colton Yards. In the yard office he interviewed the trainmaster, a veteran of about forty years with the railroad, a stooped little man with steel-framed spectacles looped over clamshell ears. The trainmaster remembered Jennings. He hadn’t the kind remarks of the boarding-house keeper.

“I got to feeling uneasy about him, a long time before we got rid of him. We had a whisky shipment broken into, three or four cases missing. He laid off on a drunk then, and I always thought he got one of those cases. It wasn’t like he’d plan the job, do the breaking in—but if somebody else was already at it, he’d join them. Like that.”

“What was he canned for?”

“Didn’t show up for the job too many times.”

Kernehan made a mental note to check Jennings’s record in Personnel when he got back to L.A.

“Any particular friends of his I could talk to now?”

“Not any more. He ran around a lot with a man named Pethro. Around his age, a dark squatty kind of man. He’s gone, too. Left when Jennings did.”

“Do you happen to know anything about Jennings’s family?”

“Nope, not a thing.”

“Do you know where Jennings worked and lived since he left the railroad?”

Behind the “steel-rimmed lenses the old man’s eyes blinked and studied. “Seems I heard somebody say they’d seen him in Vermillion, in a beer joint. Maybe a month, six weeks ago. I guess he didn’t go too far away. My impression, he’d lived around here for quite a spell, was used to the country, and meant to stay.”

“Grew up here?”

The other man scratched a graying lock back off his brow. “I couldn’t say.”

There seemed no other avenue to explore in regard to the dead man, at least for the present. Something more might be gained from the records in Personnel. It was possible, in Kernehan’s opinion, that Jennings had been living the life of a vagrant since being let out by the railroad. Many casual workers did so at intervals. They were a pretty carefree lot.

Kernehan turned to the matter of the missing freight shipments. The trainmaster had already heard from Ryerson about the discovery of the cut seal on the carload of leather goods. He said, “Richie’s out in the yards now, checking cars—TVs and radios, tires, cigarettes, and whisky—anything easy to steal and sell.”

“So far in this particular line of thefts, we haven’t missed any TVs or whisky,” Kernehan explained. “Tire losses have been rough, that’s their main item. Quite a lot of cigarettes. Some plastic and leather goods. Nothing breakable.” He found himself thinking about the last word; it had slipped out almost unconsciously. But it was true. What had been stolen had not been fragile goods. “I think I’ll ask Ryerson to send you another patrolman, and you can put him to work with Richie.”

“I don’t believe the night patrolman has found any seals cut and stuck back,” the trainmaster said, “but of course he has the whole yard to patrol, and mostly he just flashes a light on a seal and if it looks okay he goes on.”

“I’ll leave instructions with Richie, have the night patrolman check way bills and take a close look at anything like tires or cigarettes.”

“Good idea.”

Kernehan left the office, went out into the yards. He found Richie tramping a dusty track between two cuts of boxcars. Richie, the Colton investigator, was a short man with heavy shoulders, a thick neck, and a way of holding his head forward as if he were listening for something suspicious. Kernehan knew him for an experienced and conscientious cop. Richie came up, looking into Kernehan’s face, puffing his lips out in a silent whistle. “Just on time. I just found one. Come take a look.”

He turned and led the way back to a car near the end of the cut, and rolled back the door. Inside next the opening was an empty space where some large corrugated cases were missing. Kernehan looked in; the labels on the cases beyond the vacant space were those of a well-known brand of cigarettes. He mentally filled in what was missing, the number of cases gone, and his face grew grim.

Richie said, “It’s just like the carload of leather goods, the seal cut and then the wire stuck back in the ball—you wouldn’t know the car had been hit unless you yanked the seal.”

“What about the door on the other side?”

“It’s okay. Hasn’t been touched. This is a Southern Railroad seal, put on in North Carolina. We’re going to have to check the way bill and find out how much is gone, and then we’d better call Dyart in Vermillion and see if he checked this car when it went through there.”

Kernehan went to the yard office to check the way bill, and came back. He and Richie climbed into the car and did some counting. Ten cases of cigarettes were gone, to the tune of around a thousand dollars.

“Good day’s work,” Richie growled. He was looking for some indication the car might have been hit here in the yards, footprints outside or signs left in here, but there was nothing.

“Where in the hell are they taking it all?” Kernehan wondered, looking out at the expanse of tracks, dusty earth, cuts of motionless cars, the offices in the distance under the bright sunlight. “They’re going to need a goddam warehouse if this keeps on.”

Richie shook his head.

Kernehan took a small dog-eared notebook from a pocket, made jottings to be put into his report: the name of the consignee in L.A., origin of shipment, the car number, the seal number, the estimated amount of shipment missing. It was going to bring Freight Claims down on them like a ton of bricks. He could hear Ryerson’s sulphurous cries from here.

Richie replaced the cut seal with a new one from his own supply, and Kernehan added this second seal number to the list in his book. He then returned to the yard office, leaving Richie to continue checking cars, and telephoned their operator in Vermillion.

Dyart seemed to be having lunch; he sounded as if he were chewing a sandwich. Kernehan asked him to examine his seal book, find out if the carload of cigarettes had been checked in Vermillion.

It had. Dyart had done it himself. He and the night patrolman had been especially careful during the past couple of weeks. They’d checked any and all shipments even remotely movable, from tires and cigarettes up to appliances including washing machines; and they’d found no seals cut and stuck back the way this particular bunch of jokers was doing it.

The car from which now about a thousand dollars’ worth of cigarettes was missing had been checked in Vermillion and had been intact.

From Vermillion it had moved across the Colorado River into California, and out across the miles of desert, and so to Colton.

Kernehan thought of the sidings where it must have stopped, and winced at the size of the job involved.

The thing about being a railroad bull—Kernehan had thought of it before—was that you didn’t have to stop at city limits, or at county lines, if your work took you beyond them. You had all the way to the next division point, you could spread your wings, as it were. Only in something like this, thinking of those desert wastes between here and the Colorado, Kernehan wished his job were smaller.

Then something else intruded, tentative, ghost-like; and Kernehan took a long second look at it. This man Jennings, the former employee of the railroad, had died out there, too. Somewhere on the desert. His death didn’t follow the pattern of so many accidents to bums, getting themselves maimed and killed jumping off or getting on trains, fighting with other hobos and left dying in boxcars. He had been murdered and put hastily into a hopper car; and the hopper must almost immediately have been loaded at Sidewinder Junction—out there in the middle of nowhere, a spur track from the main line up to the gravel pits, nothing but miles of sand and scrawny bitter sage and cactus all around.

Kernehan thought, now wouldn’t it be something if—

The easy way. He grinned at his own ready imagination.

Oh, sure, he’ll turn out to be—

Why not? Thieves fall out.

Hard to believe, though. For Kernehan many things that he wanted to believe brought their own doubts with them, a built-in jeer and mockery.

Just as he couldn’t believe that Lora’s brother had reformed, that he was a good kid now, repentant, wouldn’t swipe a car if it was a new Cad on a dark lot with the keys hanging in the switch. Oh yeah?

Might not hurt, though, he decided, to do a bit of checking seals on those sidings near Sidewinder. Sidewinder would give a good starting point, and God knew they needed one. He thought about it, deciding to ask Ryerson to give him a partner; not that the job would be so hard, but that the long miles of driving, walking, and waiting needed someone to talk to.

He wondered if Farrel would be free. Farrel had had a narrow squeak a couple of years ago; he’d been drinking too much and too obviously, and Ryerson had been about to can him. Then Farrel had been one of two investigators who had pulled Lobo Tunnel wreck off the griddle after all these years; and Ryerson decided to look the other way. Farrel still drank a little, in violation of Rule G, but he seemed to have it under control. He was full of experience, tolerance, and caution, and in Kernehan’s opinion would be a good man to have along in case something around Sidewinder proved to have juice in it.

Kernehan had a hunch that this thing might need the plodding and unhurried approach that Farrel would bring to it.

After drinking a Coke from the office machine to settle the dryness in his throat, Kernehan went back to the yards and helped Richie test seals. They didn’t find any more cut seals, or other signs of thievery. Kernehan knocked off about three-thirty to return to L.A.

He drove into the basement garage and checked out the company car. He went upstairs and headed for Personnel. A girl brought him Jennings’s folder from the record room; and then, remembering Jennings’s friend, he asked for Pethro’s folder, too.

Reading about these two, Kernehan spotted at once the source of their friendship. Both of them had gone through school in the town of Bishop, California. Both had apparently moved to Colton at about the same time, since they’d been employed for a year together by a trucking outfit named Eagle Transfer and Moving. Pethro was listed as a driver for the company. Jennings had put down his job as mechanic.

Jennings had had no family. His mother was dead, his father had whereabouts unknown, the landlady in Colton was given under the space for next-of-kin to be notified in case of accident or illness.

Pethro, though, had possessed a wife. Kernehan made note of the Colton address given as his home.

Kernehan began to check through their physical descriptions, contrasting as he went. They must have made an oddly assorted pair. Jennings had been tall and slender, six foot two in height, and weighing one hundred and fifty-five. Pethro was five-six and weighed more than the taller man, one hundred and seventy. Fat, Kernehan thought. But the trainmaster hadn’t used that word. He’d said Pethro was dark and squatty. Well, perhaps the hundred and seventy was all muscle. Pretty big muscle, Kernehan commented to himself.

Jennings’s hair had been light brown, his eyes blue. No marks or scars or tattoos. Age, twenty-eight at the time of hiring. Kernehan wished suddenly that he had a picture of him.

He rechecked the employment record. Jennings had put in a spell of army service, apparently between the time he left home in Bishop and before coming to Colton.

Pethro, too, had served a hitch. Pethro’s eyes were given as brown, hair black; and he had a star-shaped tattoo on his left wrist. He, too, had been twenty-eight at the time the railroad had hired him.

Kernehan thought about the two of them, one short and dark, the other tall and slim and nearly blond; two men whose bodies were in contrast but who had found something to draw them together.

Be interesting to know where Pethro was now.

He went back to his own office, where Pete was rattling away on a typewriter and where, in his inner sanctum, Ryerson wore an expression as if he’d already had news of the thousand-dollar loss that day. Kernehan put in a call for Vermillion, got Dyart on the line again, asked him to check around town and see if Pethro had been seen there.

He called Richie in Colton and asked him to run out to the address given by Pethro on Colton, see if he could find him home, if not, to talk to his wife. “Ask him about his friendship with Jennings, the guy they found dead in the hopper car. Find out how long since he’s seen his old pal—or how long since his wife saw him.”

These wheels having been set in motion to clear up the background of Jennings’s death, Kernehan braced himself and went in to report to the chief.

The interview was bleak. Ryerson seemed to divide his attention between what Kernehan was saying and some rumblings in the distance audible to himself: the thunder to be expected from Freight Claims, perhaps. But when Kernehan told him he’d chosen Sidewinder as the first stake-out point, Ryerson got interested.

“What’s your reason?”

“It’s the place where Jennings must have been murdered and stuck in the hopper car. Out next to nowhere. It’s somewhere to start, it’s between Colton and the Colorado.”

Ryerson frowned. “What’s the connection between Jennings and the other?” Ryerson lit a new cigar as if, pessimistically, he must cheer himself against some absurdity.

Kernehan found himself making up something from thin air. “When you get a stretch of line that lonesome, that deserted, and a couple of things happen, things that on the surface don’t even seem to belong together—like this seal cutting and Jennings’s murder—then I don’t think you’re too far out if you just start with the idea there might be some connection even if you can’t see it.” Rambling, he decided, but he was pleased with it nevertheless. He tried to see whether Ryerson was pleased, and couldn’t make out his expression through the smoke.

“Pretty long chance,” Ryerson grunted.

“I’d like to have Farrel along if that’s possible.”

Ryerson thought it over, possibly thinking about whatever Farrel was on now. “Yes, I guess you can take him.”

They settled the details. He and Farrel would go down to Sidewinder tomorrow, take a look around the country by daylight, then leave, then go back at night and stake-out on a couple of sidings.

He reported then what he’d found out about Jennings—not much beyond the fact that the death hadn’t been an accident—and with these official discussions out of the way Kernehan left the inner sanctum and began to think about the evening ahead. No use calling Lora and being rebuffed. She hadn’t changed in the length of an afternoon; and he wouldn’t. Better to turn his attention to something else.

For the hell of it … to Mr. Howery, the little man who followed women.

Chapter 7

In his kitchen Mr. Howery opened a can of beer and stood by the rear door to drink it, looking out through the pane at the twilight now closing down. It was going to be foggy again, perhaps not so foggy as the night before, but still pretty misty.

Thinking of last night’s misadventure, being caught by that abominable policeman and being subjected to the indignity of search and of having his house searched, Mr. Howery almost choked with anger and a sense of injustice. How unfair it had been! Why hadn’t that railroad cop caught the woman? She was obviously an old hand at trespassing, involved in some shady business connected with freight trains … God knows what. She had a full set of expensive tires to sell, without apparently owning a car to go with them.

And why in hell hadn’t he told them that?

He couldn’t understand, himself, why he hadn’t betrayed her, given them her phone number. Was it the memory of the way she had stood at the counter in the market, writing on the card for the idiot board? A small slim girl with somehow a cheated and cheapened look about her, as if life had denied her the ease and good times her prettiness deserved? Was it the fact that she hadn’t worn hose on a chilly evening? Was it the skimpy bargain-basement dress?

My God, Mr. Howery thought, I must be a fool. Feeling sorry for her. And she led me into a trap.

He drank some more of the beer. Outside in the back yard the Chinese elm was dripping with moisture and the hedge at the back, not more than thirty feet from the door, was dim in the flowing mist. Of course she wouldn’t be going out tonight.

Why not?

He frowned over the instinctive conclusion, hunch, or whatever. Wouldn’t that cop have instructed the yard patrolman to look for her while he questioned the prisoner? Sure he would. She must have taken alarm and skipped out, or they’d have brought her in, confronted him with her, while he was still being questioned.

It figured then that she’d be too scared to go back.

She’d stay at home like a mouse in its hole.

But suppose … suppose the yard patrolman just hadn’t looked in the right place? Suppose he hadn’t scared her but simply had missed her?

Mr. Howery looked at the misty yard, gradually growing dark, and realized that for some reason he was as interested and as full of anticipation as he had been almost a year ago, on the night when he had followed his first woman. He felt brash and eager. He had recaptured a mischievous appetite, wholly renewed; and he felt renewed right along with it! Standing by the door, he wanted to kick up his heels! He licked his lips, eyes shining, tasting not the froth of beer but the flavor of adventure.

I’m not a fool, he mused. I’m completely crazy!

If I did go out, follow her—

They’ll be waiting for me in that dark freight yard. For her, too.

And then out of nowhere, the thought: I ought to warn her.

He shook his head in disbelief over his own wild impulse, and then the memory of his previous plan flickered through his thoughts, the idea of going to see her about the tires she wanted to sell, questioning her, togged out in Uncle Sherman’s overcoat and horn-rimmed glasses and a hat. I could drive down to skid row even now and buy a secondhand hat; those places never close. I could find a dime store open and get the glasses. I could call her on the phone and tell her I know something about her friend who didn’t arrive, and set a place to meet. I’d have to play it carefully from then on. Mr. Howery’s skin prickled with goose-flesh, and his pulse thudded.

He hung Uncle Sherman’s overcoat to air by the foggy bedroom window. He put on a jacket, went to the garage for the car, drove downtown, and bought the hat. Far from new, a gray felt with a notice tacked inside that it had been sterilized according to law. It smelt like iodine. On the way home again he bought heavy horn-rims with windowpane lenses at a variety store.

In the living room he sat down by the phone. His palms were damp; he rubbed them on his pants before picking up the receiver.

He glanced around the room. Last night, sitting here under the gaze of the two railroad cops, he’d have been willing to swear—if anyone had asked him—that he would never, but never, fool around with stray and strange women again. It just showed you how long good intentions lasted.

He picked up the receiver and dialed.

No man’s voice this time, no intermediary, no going to call her, no time of waiting. She must have been sitting right by the phone. For a moment, hearing her voice in his ear, Mr. Howery was speechless.

He remembered then that he had talked to her recently before. She might recognize his voice. He lowered it to a whispery monotone. “You’ve been … waiting for someone?”

“Yes.” No hesitation.

“And he hasn’t shown up?”

“No.” She didn’t ask who was calling, Mr. Howery noted.

“I might have news for you.”

“Where can we meet?”

The abrupt taking-for-granted tone, the intuitive accord with his own plan, the willingness again stumped him. He wondered uneasily if there was a real person supposed to be playing his part, someone she already knew and expected. He worried his lower lip, trying to think of something to say.

“Do you know where I live?” she asked.

“Yes. That is, I think so.” He almost forgot to disguise his voice.

She mentioned the street address. “How about nine-thirty, on the sidewalk in front of the house?”

A nerve twitched in his cheek. “No. The … the corner. The corner just south of the house.”

“I’ll see you.” Without another word she hung up.

He put the phone in its cradle and sat looking at it, as if some further explanation might be forthcoming from the instrument. Then he tried to collect his thoughts. Some things had been made obvious, at least. She had been expecting someone to meet her in that freight yard, and he hadn’t shown up. He had been supposed to ride in on that train, the first one, the big one.

The fact that she had been waiting by the phone and her matter-of-fact response—low-voiced, too, somehow almost secretive—implied that she had been anticipating some word about her missing friend.

More than friend, though. He remembered his impression that first night, that she was uplifted and overjoyed and going to meet someone whom she loved. She was a shabby almost nondescript girl, her only assets a pretty face and a lovely head of hair; but she had given off an emanation of rapture. No other way to put it. He could be wrong, of course. He didn’t think he was.

Now she was anxious for news. She was willing to go out into the dark street and meet a stranger to get it.

Mr. Howery wondered, for a bleak wistful moment, how it would be to have someone love you, like that.

He went into the bedroom, switched on the lights, took down the coat from the window, shut down the pane. The room was quite cool. The coat didn’t give off too much mothproofing smell, since it had aired some the night previous and again tonight. He put it on, noting again how it changed his shape. He took the glasses out of the paper sack, topped his face with the gray felt hat.

Amazing.

He seemed at once rather military and aloof. The glasses wiped the mildness from his face, giving it a scholarly remoteness. He looked—yes, definitely!—he looked important. He leaned toward the mirror, engrossed, thinking, “I ought to go out like this once in a while, just stroll around. No one would recognize me.” He licked his lips, wondering if he dared chance the freight yards ever again, in case she led him there.

The doorbell rang.

He plucked the glasses from his eyes, jerked the hat from his head, in an almost instantaneous reaction of fright. He put the glasses into the crown of the hat, put it inside the closet on the floor, and shucked the coat quickly and hung it up. He was sweating.

He went into the living room, crossed it to the front door. He opened it a crack. The railroad cop, the one named Kernehan, stood there watchfully. A big, good-looking bastard, Mr. Howery thought with a flare of anger; the kind of jerk who didn’t have to do anything to seem impressive except just to look natural.

“What the devil do you want now?” Mr. Howery demanded.

The tone surprised Kernehan. The little twerp was actually belligerent.

Kernehan came in, in spite of Howery’s obvious reluctance. He looked around quickly, checking without even thinking about it to see if anything had been changed or moved. He noted, as on the night previous, the cretonne bag in the corner of the couch with some knitted stuff protruding from between its handles; and wondered again why Howery didn’t put away this reminder of his mother.

“I thought you were quite finished with me.” Howery was standing in the middle of the rug; his face was flushed, and his eyes glittered.

He was mad. Madder even than last night. In fact, last night, up until the end, he’d been pretty careful though feisty. This was a genuine fury, and Kernehan, from long experience plus the instincts of a cop, wondered what he had interrupted by ringing the doorbell.

“I thought you might help us, Mr. Howery,” Kernehan said disarmingly. “We’ve accepted your story, you were more or less lured into the yards by the actions of this woman.” He watched to see if Howery believed that he believed it. “I just wondered—” He looked around and picked out a chair and sat down in it. Howery retreated to a seat on the couch. “You must see our problem, keeping trespassers out of the freight yards. Inside are carloads of valuable merchandise, waiting shipment or delivery.”

“I told you I hadn’t stolen anything,” Mr. Howery protested.

“Yes. We believed you. You aren’t in jail. What I want from you is a good description of the woman. There might be more to her than just mischief, just hanging around where she doesn’t belong.”

“Like what?”

“Theft.”

“How could she get out of there with anything as big as a tire?” the other flung out. “It’s ridiculous. She’s a slim woman. How could she—” Some of the glitter went out of his eyes, he swallowed twice, and then kept still.

Kernehan’s expression hadn’t changed in the least. “Of course she’d have help. I didn’t mean to say she went in, broke into shipments, carried out heavy merchandise. Answering your guess, one tire wouldn’t be too much of a hassle if she had plenty of time and no one to interfere. But one tire wouldn’t be worth it.”

“I … I guess not.” He was staring into the bag of knitting beside him. He was also obviously frightened by the break he had made in anger and haste, and wondering how to repair it.

And Kernehan was wondering: what in hell are we talking about stolen tires for, when the big grab is taking place between Colton and the Colorado River? It’s nuts. He said, “I was thinking that she might be a spotter.”

Howery glanced at him obliquely. “You mean, she’d examine shipments, pick out the ones to be raided?”

“Yes, something of the sort.”

They were way off the subject, way off dangerous ground now, and Kernehan knew it. This wasn’t what the woman had been doing. Howery’s relieved tone told him so.

Kernehan asked, “Where do you think she was headed?”

“I don’t have the least idea,” Howery said, so quickly that Kernehan spotted the lie.

“She had already passed some cars she should have found interesting.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah, you know—there are manifest cards tacked outside, giving the destination and the type of merchandise and so on.” A lie, so far as giving a hint of the stuff inside. Howery seemed to swallow it, a clue to his inexperience. “So perhaps it wasn’t freight she was interested in. Perhaps it was a person. A man.”

“I wouldn’t know. We went over all that last night,” Howery said in a mean tone. “I told you then, I say it again now, I don’t know what she was after. I followed her in because I was flabbergasted at where she was headed. Dark, deserted. Freight yards, you know the reputation they’ve got, bums hiding out. Anything can happen. A young good-looking girl has no business in there.”

“Young and good-looking? Come to think, you didn’t supply much of a description.”

He waited. He watched Howery concocting the lies.

“Well … black hair, cut real short,” Howery said.

Blond, Kernehan said to himself. Something about her hair struck Howery’s fancy, caused him to mention it first. Probably it’s long and blond and beautiful.

“Sure had class. Clothes must have cost a mint.”

Shabby. Kernehan’s interest quickened.

“Good legs. Expensive hose.”

He met Kernehan’s glance without blinking. The little bastard had nerve, Kernehan thought.

Kernehan said, “Not at all the type to be hanging out in the freight yards.”

“That’s what I mean. I hated to see a girl like that go in there. I just had to follow.”

“What would you have done if you had caught up with her?”

Howery’s momentary loss flickered in his eyes.

Hadn’t meant to catch up, Kernehan decided, remembering then the furtiveness of Howery’s footsteps following hers in the night. He’d been keeping his distance; he hadn’t wanted her to hear. What the hell had he been after?

“I wish you could supply a name, an address,” Kernehan urged.

“I wish I could.”

Again the lie was obvious, and Kernehan was suddenly weary of it. He stood up. “Tell you what. If you happen to see this woman again”—he took out one of his cards, put it down on a table—“give me a ring.”

“Shall I … shall I tail her?”

The manner was eager, the mean belligerence suddenly swallowed up in anticipation. Hell, this was what Howery wanted, Kernehan thought incredulously; he’s asking my permission to follow this woman into the yards again. It was fantastic. It didn’t make sense, but it was too real to ignore.

“That might be a good idea,” Kernehan said, testing, watching the glow of interest come into Howery’s face.

Howery’s manner, showing him to the door, was almost bubbling.

Once outside in the foggy dark, Kernehan went down the block until he was sure that if Howery was watching, he could no longer see him. Then he cut back and stood across the street behind some parked cars. He didn’t have long to wait. Someone came out of Howery’s door.

Kernehan felt like shaking his head to clear it. This was a figure he didn’t recognize. About Howery’s height, but nothing else like—something military in the pose and gait. The figure walked away into the flowing mist, and Kernehan went after it. Howery’d had someone hidden in there during their interview.

He recalled his sense of having interrupted something when Howery had come to the door.

The steps ahead were muffled by the fog. Kernehan went silently, walking on grass verges where he could. Street lamps swam in cloudy halos; all around the trees dripped, and the traffic, blocks away on a main boulevard, was only a distant hiss interrupted by cottony grunts.

Kernehan felt the damp on his hands and face, smelled the wool of his coat drinking it up. He was aware of his senses tuned to a fine edge.

All at once something began to register. A memory.

The steps he could hear through the fog were familiar. He’d heard them before. He listened, trying to choke back his own heartbeat, holding his breath.

The footsteps were Howery’s. He’d bet on it!

Kernehan concentrated, doubting; and then began to grin. “What do you know?” he whispered to himself. The little twerp had a disguise.

He trailed Howery to an intersection in a quiet neighborhood. A girl waited under a street lamp, indistinct; she had a black scarf over her head and she stood crouched-like, as if chilled and shivering. Howery seemed at first about to approach her, and then hung back. He stood in the half-light, between the intersection and Kernehan, and seemed to study her with nervous indecision.

When he finally turned back, not having gone close to her at all, Kernehan faded up a walk to the shadow of a house.

And when, fifteen minutes or so later, the girl had had enough, Kernehan followed her to her home in the middle of the block.

Chapter 8

Kernehan was still mulling it over when he checked in at the office next morning. Howery was an oddball, you couldn’t get away from that. A real way-out-willie. He’d togged himself out in the weird disguise—a good one, come to think of it—and then he hadn’t displayed himself, hadn’t seemed to need it, as far as Kernehan could see.

The thing that interested Kernehan most was whether the girl waiting on the corner was the one Howery had trailed into the freight yards.

Could be. Could also not be. Howery obviously had something fouled up with him as far as women were concerned. He was playing some funny kind of game. Kernehan wondered uneasily if Howery could actually be a sex fiend.

He’d have to think of some way to check on whoever lived at the house where the girl had turned in, find out if she lived there with her family, or whoever. He had the house address written in his notebook.

Farrel was already in the office, waiting for him. A big man, gone quite gray, a tired face and a pair of eyes that told Kernehan he didn’t like him much. It bothered Kernehan. Farrel was one man whose respect and approval he would have valued. Farrel stared at him from the chair next his desk, his gaze summing up the handsome physique and the casually well-fitted clothes. Farrel’s shirt collar was crumpled and his tie frayed at the knot. He’d probably been drunk last night, had a hang-over. Kernehan sat down.

“What do you know about Jennings?”

Farrel said, “I just called the local P.D. for any news. They’ve decided Jennings might have been alive, briefly, under that load of gravel. Something to do with the final report on amount of blood, juices, and sticking qualities.” Farrel’s tone was unperturbed. “Still, the evidence he was killed by blows hadn’t changed. Which seems to put it right at Sidewinder. He wouldn’t have lived for any kind of a trip there.”

Kernehan was surprised at Farrel’s grasp of the situation; something he should have expected. Farrel was one of the best.

He said, “There may not be any kind of tie-in at all with these thefts of tires and so on.”

“But you hope so.” Farrel’s gaze seemed to warm. Not much, but a little. “If there is, this is a break. A real one.”

“We can use it.”

Kernehan turned to the phone, put in a call to Richie in Colton. Richie reported that he had gone out to Pethro’s address, asking the wife about Pethro’s friendship with the dead man. The wife appeared to be drinking and didn’t seem to know much about her husband’s affairs.

“She didn’t even seem to know Jennings was dead,” Richie added. “I asked how long they’d been friends, and she said must have been for years, they’d done a hitch in the Army together and before that had lived in some town up north, gone to school there.”

“Bishop.”

“I asked when her husband would be home so I could talk to him, and she said they’d separated. No kids. She volunteered the fact that she’s looking for a waitress job. Asked if I knew of one.”

“She wasn’t sore or anything?”

“No. Wined up, I think, from the smell. Not a bad looking dame. Twenty-five or so.”

“See if she’s got a picture of Pethro she’ll let you have.”

“I go out there again, she’s going to think I’m trying to make her.”

“Don’t fight it, man,” Kernehan advised. “It’s bigger than both of you.”

“Go to hell.”

Kernehan then put in a call for Vermillion, and while he waited for Dyart to come on the line he sketched for Farrel the relationship between the dead Jennings and Pethro. “Pethro’s disappeared. He quit the job about the time Jennings did. Somebody saw Jennings in a beer joint in Vermillion a month or so ago. I want to find out, if I can, if Pethro was with him.”

But Dyart, when he answered, had little to offer. He had no picture of Jennings, the town was always full of transients, nobody remembered the man. One slim lead—a lot of railroad men, working or out of work, stayed at a rooming house near the yards. Dyart was going to see the landlady that morning. Even if Jennings hadn’t stayed there during the time he switched in the Vermillion Yards, somebody there should know him, might remember if he’d been around as recently as a month before.

When Kernehan hung up, he told Farrel what Dyart was trying to do.

Farrel gazed at him tiredly. “These two characters, old friends—what’s to prevent their falling out and one killing the other? If it happened that way, what’ve you got now? Pethro in Seattle or somewhere. No connection to the thefts whatever.”

“That’s right. If it happened that way. If.”

“As far as these thefts go”—Farrel scratched one gray temple with a thumbnail—“it’s an inside deal. Any way you look at it. They pick and choose.” Kernehan realized that Ryerson had been talking to Farrel. “They know what to hit. It means they somehow get a look at the teletype consist of the incoming trains.”

The teletype consist of a train, coming in ahead of the train itself, permitted much more efficient protection. Each car was spotted by number from the engine, and the railroad police could see at once which cars, judged by what was in them, would need extra protection while in the yards. At the same time, the consist in the wrong hands would wreak havoc.

Kernehan realized that he’d been avoiding the idea. “It’s not being done in Vermillion; the cars leave there with the seals intact.”

“They’re seeing the consist in Vermillion,” Farrel said doggedly. “It just has to be that way.”

“I hate to think of a stoolie in the office, working with an outfit like that.”

“It takes all kinds.”

They got up to go. Farrel preceded Kernehan out of the office, and Kernehan saw that the back of his coat collar was greasy. He really didn’t take much care of his clothes. Kernehan wondered why Ryerson didn’t do or say something to Farrel. Maybe he figured that with what Farrel had done for the railroad over the years, he deserved some leeway not granted the others.

They checked out a company car in the basement garage. Kernehan drove. Farrel settled back and shut his eyes. Recuperating, Kernehan thought to himself without disparagement. He had great respect for Farrel’s ability, drunk or sober. They headed out the freeway. New sections were being opened all the time, and Kernehan rarely found himself driving the same pavement each time he went out.

The country changed. The highway rose through the foothills of the Santa Ana canyon, on through fertile farms, more hills, and then into the desert. All at once they had passed the last of the cultivated land and were looking at the dry reaches of sandy waste, dotted by Joshua trees, cactus, and paloverde.

Sidewinder wasn’t even a wide place in the road. Far off the highway, its principal function out here in the middle of nowhere was to provide rail facilities for ranches in this part of the county, ranches which shipped in feed and farm machinery and sent out cattle. There was a long team track with a big unloading shed, plus an office, and, to the south of these, corrals and a loading chute for cattle. A spur track headed off northeast toward an outcropping of small stony hills. The gravel pits must be up that way, Kernehan decided. To the east, where the land sloped to a hazy valley, lay the long passing track in which they were most interested, a siding almost a mile long.

Kernehan parked next the office, and he and Farrel got out to look around.

It was close to noon, and the sun was almost directly overhead. Under the brilliant desert sun it all looked weathered and deserted, like a set for a western movie. Farrel went up the steps to the platform and peered in through the glass pane in the office door. “They could dust the place.”

Kernehan already knew that it was a non-agency station. On the rare occasions when a man was needed in the office, a yard clerk was sent out from Vermillion. Under ordinary conditions the conductors took care of any paper work.

There were tire marks around the loading shed, but they looked old, filmed with blown dust.

While Farrel and Kernehan were on the platform, they heard a train in the distance. While they watched, a local freight pulled into the passing track and sat waiting; and in a few minutes one of the big through freights came pounding up out of the distant valley and passed with a thunder of Diesels.

Kernehan watched it roll past with a professional curiosity, wondering if any cars in it had been hit by the thieves.

When the through freight had gone, the local pulled out of the siding and gradually picked up speed. It rolled past with a smell of stirred dust and oiled gears, the rattle of brake rigging, the engineer nodding to them from his cab.

Kernehan was thinking, it hadn’t taken long. Less than five minutes. Even at night under cover of dark, with the right car spotted, it would take fast work to hit it sitting in the passing track. Even if there was an unexpected delay the thieves couldn’t plan on, the other train late, there didn’t seem scope for the sort of organized thievery they had here…. He frowned over it, knowing the idea didn’t fit what they already knew. But what did?

The cars weren’t being hit in the Vermillion Yards. Nor, he’d bet on it, in Colton under Richie’s nose. There was no way he’d ever heard of to hit a car in motion.

He turned, found Farrel frowning as if he too were thinking along these lines.

Kernehan said, “Well, let’s take a run up to the gravel works.”

Farrel stood waiting, looking after the vanishing freight.

“You getting an idea?” Kernehan asked.

Farrel glanced at him, as if asking him to mind his own business. “I guess not.” Kernehan wondered what he’d really been thinking about.

There was a dim road which crossed several spurs and sidings and then headed for the rocky hills. It wasn’t a very good road. There were a lot of rocks, and here and there last winter’s rains had filled the ruts with debris.

The road climbed, dipped among the hills. They came to an amphitheater where a vast bowl was being gouged in the ground by giant excavating machines. A good-sized operation—there was a hopper at least fifty feet in height, with conveyor buckets leading down into the pit. A dozen or so hopper cars sat waiting to be filled.

They found a short, swarthy man in a white cotton shirt and brown denim pants. He seemed to be running things. Kernehan and Farrel flashed their I.D.’s and asked about the dead Jennings.

“Them other cops, sheriff’s men, were up here. I don’t know from nothing.” The short man waved his hands. He had short-cropped gray hair, and he smelled dusty, as if some of the gravel dust might be clinging to him. “This hopper car they found the dead guy in, I guess it got filled at night. Brought up here from Sidewinder and filled in the dark. Otherwise looks like somebody should have noticed him.”

“You work here around the clock?”

“Not all the time. Sometimes we get an order to fill, some big contractor, we rush it.”

“The gravel must have been poured in on him shortly after he was hurt,” Kernehan pointed out.

“Yeah, they explained that. It doesn’t take long to run a string of hoppers up from the siding in Sidewinder. We could have run him in here and filled, and him been gone within an hour. I guess it happened that way.”

“You ever know the guy?”

The swarthy man shook his head. “Nope. Jennings, wasn’t it? Young guy? Our men are all old hands. I asked around, none of them ever heard of Jennings.”

Kernehan had been looking around at the barren, scraped, and denuded bowl among the hills. “Where do your men live?”

“Toprock, most of them. It’s north of here, a better road than the one you came in on. Know the place?”

Kernehan knew it, a small sun-baked desert town, not on the railroad but straddling one of the highways east. If the men who worked here lived in Toprock, there was little likelihood any of them had known Jennings, whose late years seemed to have centered in Colton and Vermillion.

He and Farrel went back to the car and drove down the way they had come, to the junction, crossed the spurs and sidings, and headed west. They had a late lunch in Colton and then saw Richie in the yards.

Kernehan made up his mind all at once. There was the afternoon to kill, before it got dark and he and Farrel could go back to Sidewinder and stake-out. “Give me the address of Pethro’s wife,” he said to Richie. “I’m going out there and talk to her.”

Richie looked sly. “Ask her for the picture of her husband while you’re there. I haven’t been back for it yet.”

“Coward.”

“Oh, I’ve been busy,” Richie defended himself. “We’re working like beavers, trying to find another car with the seal cut the way it was with that load of cigarettes. I had another idea too. I asked the local P.D. to check any unused warehouses, store buildings, and so on. I talked to Dyart in Vermillion, and he’s going to do the same thing over there. By God, if they’re hitting it this big they’ve got to have a place to keep it.”

Farrel glanced at Kernehan as if wondering why he hadn’t already taken care of this obvious item, and Kernehan controlled his irritation; he should have thought of this angle at once. But then another hunch intruded. The outfit they were trying to find had figured a foolproof and so far unguessable way to hit the freights between here and Vermillion. If they were that good, why would they do the stupid and obvious thing and rent a place for storage that the cops would spot?

He said, though, “Sure, give it a whirl,” without expressing his doubts to Richie.

Farrel had someone else he wanted to see—he didn’t say who—and so Kernehan went out to Pethro’s address alone. It was on the outskirts of Colton, a street that petered out against some bean fields in the distance, small, old, white frame houses and a lot of pepper trees, the kind of street where kids ran around bare-footed and wiped their noses on the backs of their hands. Down at the corner was a little grocery, a sign over the door, advertising wine; and Kernehan remembered what Richie had said about the woman, about smelling wine on her, and just on a hunch he stopped the car and went in and bought a bottle of dry sherry.

She came to the door when he knocked. The porch was shadowy under the pepper trees, and through the rusted screen Kernehan couldn’t see her so well, but he got an instant impression of a rather good-looking woman who was pretty drunk.

When he explained who he was and flashed the I.D., she opened the screen and asked him in. Kernehan couldn’t remember whether Richie had said that she’d had him inside, or whether they’d talked through the screen. She spotted the sacked bottle in Kernehan’s arm; she gave him a smile.

“What am I supposed to do for that?”

“Damned if I know,” Kernehan admitted. “What do you feel like doing?”

“I’ve been deserted.” She turned to face him in the middle of the room. “My husband left me. I feel like doing whatever I damn please.”

Kernehan put the sherry on a table, took a quick look around. It wasn’t much of a place, the furniture was shabby, the rug faded, and in the corners the floor was very dusty. “You talked to one of our investigators yesterday, a man named Richie.”

Without replying she went to the kitchen for a couple of glasses, came back, burst the wine-bottle seal with her nail, poured them each a drink. “Here’s how!” She drank. “You know, neither you nor him fool me a bit. I know exactly what you want.”

Kernehan felt a little uncomfortable. He wasn’t supposed to drink on the job, or, in fact, much at all; there was always Rule G breathing down your neck. An investigator was supposed to be on call twenty-four hours a day, sober, ready to go. He tentatively sipped at the wine. “Do you?”

“You think my husband killed his friend. You want me to tell you where he is now, and whether he and Jennings had a fight.” She stood there with the half-filled glass in her hand, looking at him. She had rather striking eyes, tawny colored with darker flecks, and fine fair skin now quite flushed from drinking. Her hair was cut short, something Kernehan knew, from Lora, that had come from Italy, shaggy half-curled locks that cupped her forehead and cheeks. It was brown hair, quite lustrous. When she was not drinking, when she had on makeup and a neat white uniform, she must make a hell of a good-looking waitress, Kernehan thought.

“What are you staring at?”

Easy to make, right now. Mad at Pethro. Scared, probably, about finances. Owed for the rent, maybe for groceries and wine. Pretty drunk.

“Can I sit down?” Kernehan asked.

“With me? On the couch?” She went wavy-legged to the davenport over under the windows.

“This is fine.” He sat down on a chair, still holding the glass.

The pepper trees in the yard made ferny shadows on the blind above her head. She finished the wine. “But it’s not true,” she said all at once, as if there had been no interruption. “That pair wouldn’t fight. Not each other. Sure, they’ve been in plenty of scrapes. But they were like brothers. Even, I guess, from the time they were kids. Do you know where I think my husband is now?” She put the glass on the floor, looked suddenly at the one in Kernehan’s fist. “Hey, aren’t you drinking?”

“I brought the wine for you,” Kernehan said, thinking how graceful her hands were. It would be easy to let things slide, take love where you found it, forget Lora and her brother. Well, it might not be too easy at first, he corrected, but time should improve the way he felt.

“I’ll tell you where my husband is.”

Kernehan waited; he shifted his eyes off her and looked at the fern-patterned blind above her head.

“He’s hunting for the one who killed Jennings.”

Kernehan nodded. It was somehow what he had expected her to say.

Chapter 9

She picked the glass up off the floor, went to the table, refilled it with a fresh drink. She was going to be awfully drunk pretty quick, Kernehan thought, if she didn’t slow down. She sat down on the couch. “And another thing,” she said. “Why’re you and Mr. Richie so interested in Jennings getting killed? I’ve known railroad bulls before. They didn’t go in for homicide. It was always … oh, somebody breaking a switch light or swiping tools out of the yards.”

“Jennings had worked for the railroad,” Kernehan offered. “He was found dead in one of our hopper cars.”

“Still … it ought to be up to the local police department, shouldn’t it?”

Kernehan decided that she really had known a railroad cop. Pretty well. Enough to get the hang of the limits of their job. “We’re just giving the local police a hand, looking around where they might not find time to. Where do you think your husband will be, hunting Jennings’s murderer?”

“How would I know?”

“When he left you, where did he go?”

“Vermillion. That’s where Jennings was hanging out.”

Kernehan recalled that Dyart, in Vermillion, hadn’t been able to find any trace of the dead man there. “Do you know where Jennings was working?”

“He wasn’t. He was just bumming around. He and my husband—” She cut it off. She gave Kernehan a hazy, contemptuous, twisted smile. “My God, I’m spilling my guts to a goddam cop. Shows what drink will do.”

“I’m not trying to pump you,” Kernehan said indifferently. “I don’t think Pethro would have told you anything about his business, anyway.”

“His business? His business?” She laughed. “You make him sound like he was somebody. Believe me, he’s nothing. All he ever wanted was an easy job with a little gravy on the side. Like the transfer outfit.”

The ferny shadows moved on the blind, and outside in the street some kids were hollering.

“He always had an angle, and it was always little and lousy. Cheap. When he was working for the transfer outfit, he used to take something out of the load and hide it, pretend to lose it, something he figured the family would miss and get worried about, some little old fancy table or part of a bedroom set, like the bench to a vanity. He’d hide it and then three or four days later he’d show up with it, driving his own car, and he’d make the suckers believe he’d had a hell of a time running it down. Had run it down on his own time. He almost always wangled a tip. Once he got ten dollars.” She shook her head slowly. “You’d have thought he’d made a fortune.”

“What about Jennings?”

“Just like my husband. My God, I told you they were like brothers. Just like that.” She held up two fingers plastered tight.

Smalltime chiselers, Kernehan thought. He sipped a little of the wine, slowly, so she wouldn’t figure he was letting her drink alone.

“Furthermore,” she said, her tone slurring, “I don’t want to find my husband, I don’t want him to come home. I’m having too good a time as it is. I’m going to get a job and move out of here. I ought to go back to L.A. Or Hollywood.” The glass tipped as she lowered it from her lips, some of the wine dribbling out upon the yellow skirt of her housecoat. “I can get a good job, and to hell with Mr. Pethro.”

Her legs were round and firm, the ankles slender. Kernehan found himself looking at the edge of the yellow skirt, and she must have noticed, for she moved one knee a little, and he saw the rolled top of her stocking and the creamy curve of her thigh. But he was thinking, too, remembering what the trainmaster had said about Jennings, that Jennings wasn’t up to being much of a crook, wasn’t a mover or an organizer, but liked to share in the pickings. Like the stolen whisky.

“That drink’s lasting you a long time, Mr. Railroad Bull.”

“I have to be careful.”

“Sure. I know. Rule G. I told you I’ve known railroad cops before.”

“How’d you get along with him?”

Her eyes seemed shadowed all at once. “We were engaged to be married, and then we had a fight and I never saw him again.” Kernehan found suddenly that he didn’t want to pursue this line any further.

“I found out later he quit his job—this was in L.A.—and went back east and married some girl he had known when they were kids. It just shows you. It shows what happens if you fall for a cop.”

“Yes, I guess it does.”

“Then I met Pethro and he was kind of dark and good-looking, and I let him take me out and first thing I knew, I’d married him.”

“You don’t have any children.” Richie had already mentioned it. “Thank God for small favors.”

“If your husband shows up, will you tell him we’d like to talk to him about Jennings? We don’t suspect him. Make that plain. Jennings died in an accident. We’d just like to know what he was doing on the train.”

Her mouth dropped. “An accident?”

“Did Richie give you the impression it was murder? I’m sorry,” Kernehan said, standing up. He put the wine on the table. It might not work, she might already know somehow that Jennings had been beaten to death. He didn’t think Richie would have spilled it, though.

She got her feet under her, stood up, came to the table. Her expression seemed genuinely bewildered. “I guess I just took it for granted. They’d worked around trains, they knew the ropes, both of them. It didn’t seem as if Jennings would have been killed in an accident.”

“I should have made it clear at the beginning.” He moved over to the door. “You see now why the railroad has to help out in the investigation. We have to make sure what happened wasn’t our fault.”

She accepted it, nodding. Kernehan couldn’t be sure, but he thought her surprise was real; she had thought that Jennings had been murdered, had assumed it all along; and then Kernehan decided that she knew something she hadn’t told him and that whatever it was, was the reason she was so sure Jennings had been killed deliberately.

If he waited she might get drunk enough to tell him about it, but the probability was that she wouldn’t. There was an inner guard; he’d sensed it when she had suddenly chided herself for spilling to a cop.

Even a secret kept had implications. There was something to hide.

She stood at the screen and watched him leave the porch. He looked back at her from the grassy yard and could see her dimly. “Good-by, Mrs. Pethro. And thanks for your time.”

“Good-by.”

He knew what she was doing now. She was trying desperately to think back through everything they’d said, trying to remember if she had given anything away. Letting him know how sure she was that Jennings had been murdered had been a bad break; she’d be biting her tongue over it. Kernehan thought, hell, the wine had been a good investment, after all.

Driving away, he remembered that he had intended to ask for a picture of Pethro. But he decided against going back to ask for it. There might be need of an excuse to go back another day.

Farrel drove down past some warehouses and truck depots, a couple of wrecking yards, a display of used plumbing and rusty pipe, until he found the place he wanted, a shack at the rear of an area of weedy pavement where once had been a used-car lot. He parked the car he’d borrowed from Richie, got out, looked around, and then crossed the broken pavement to the back of the lot and knocked at the door.

There were some grunts, a yawn, the creak of bedsprings. Then the lock rattled and the door opened a couple of inches. A bloodshot eye looked him over. “Yeah?”

“What’s the matter, Mac? You forget me?”

Mac blinked. “Oh hell. I’m not awake yet.” He pulled the door open and Farrel went in. It was dark inside, the blinds drawn. The man who had let him in went over and raised the blind on one of the windows. He had on shorts and socks, nothing more; he was in his fifties, about Farrel’s age, gray and quite paunchy. On either side of his nose the flesh was marked by a network of tiny veins; he had the look of a heavy drinker, but Farrel noted that he seemed sober enough now.

Mac sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed his hands over his hair. “Sit down.” Farrel pulled a broken-backed chair away from a kitchen table. “How you doin’?”

“Can’t kick too much.” Farrel noted that since his last visit, at least six months before, nothing had changed except that there was a new patchwork quilt on the bed. He pointed to it. “Where did you get that?”

“My widow lady made it for me. Did I have her when you were here? Guess I didn’t.” He scratched his chest and covered another yawn.

“Widow lady? Now, that’s something. You’d better watch yourself, you’ll be getting married next.”

Mac quit yawning and scratching to give an indignant snort. “Now, wait a minute.”

“She’ll have you taking the pledge. And giving up smoking.”

Mac winced as if over a painful nudge. He got up from the bed and went to a table against the far wall, poured water in a cup, took a pill from a medicine bottle. “She’s a swell old gal and all that, but what do I want with a wife, me a broken-down watchman with a bum ticker. As for the booze, I had to cut it out on my own. Or kick off. And so what the hell did you come for, except to pry into my love life?” He grinned wickedly.

Farrel slapped his hat on his knee, looked closely at the big shabby man drinking down his pill. “Well, we’ve got a little problem.”

Mac shook his head. “Nobody’s shooting anything through the junk yards around here. I’d know if they were. And they’re not. The last thing we had that was hot was that brass you was looking for. If they knew I’d tipped you off, I’d be in real bad shape. They’d beat the hell out of me.”

“I don’t think this stuff is going through a junk yard,” Farrel said. “New tires, some cigarettes. But they’re keeping it somewhere. They’ve got at least one truck. Have to have.” He was frowning.

“You think, here in Colton?”

“We don’t know that, either. It’s disappearing out of the cars between here and Vermillion. In fact, if I didn’t know better, I’d say it was being snatched off while it was moving.”

Mac came back to the bed, sat down, and belched. He put a hand over his stomach and blinked his eyes. “I haven’t heard a word.”

“Anybody come around with new tires, cheap?”

Mac shook his head.

Farrel got out a pack of cigarettes, offered it to Mac, one pulled up, and Mac grunted, “That went out along with the booze, dammit.” Farrel lit a cigarette and sat smoking for a couple of minutes, just trying to think. Mac said, “It’s pretty big, huh?”

“Yeah, it’s beginning to hurt. It’s not just a one-shot, it keeps on, and there’s system to it. Brains in it. Good planning.”

Mac turned around and put his feet up on the widow’s patchwork quilt, stretched out with his hands behind his head. “Reminds me. Once up north, around Bakersfield—this was before I went to work with you—we had a lot of pipe going out. Hell, they were highjacking whole loads of it. Oil casing … once they got it in the ground, how would you find it again?”

Farrel nodded. Ten years ago Mac had been in the office and Ryerson had laid it on the line—quit drinking or quit the job. And he’d quit the job. He had drifted down to watching. He’d been hurt in a drunk-driving accident and that hadn’t stopped him, but now it was stop dinking or die, and suddenly he’d been able to quit.

“There was somebody inside, of course,” Mac went on. “That’s where we should have started.” He gave Farrel a glance from under his eyelids.

“Sure, there’s somebody inside in this. In the Vermillion office.” He remembered Kernehan’s unwilling stare, not wanting to hear it. “Somebody’s tipping off the train consist, spotting cars for them. No other way it can be done.”

“Get a man in there, then.”

“You’ve got to work it two ways at once,” Farrel pointed out, “getting the thieves and the man inside at the same time. You grab the one in the office, the others run out. The best way to find the thieves is to find where they’re taking the stuff. This big, they’ve got a warehouse somewhere.”

“Could be right here. I don’t know, though. Everything’s been pretty quiet lately. Some of the characters I used to notice have cleared out.”

“Like who, for instance?”

Mac shrugged against the pillow. “Oh, it’s just … just several ones I figured for small-timers aren’t here any more.”

“Ever hear of one named Jennings?”

“Him?” Mac showed signs of interest. “He got killed, I heard.”

“Who’d you hear it from?”

“A couple of truckers, down at the beer joint. They knew him, they’d drove with him, some outfit here in town.”

“How about one named Pethro?”

“Yeah, I’ve seen him here and there.”

“You know where he is now?”

“No. But his wife’s in town.”

“See if you can find out where he is.”

Mac sat up uneasily. “Dammit, you act like I’m still a cinder dick. I got no call to run around asking about Pethro. I’m like to get my head knocked off.”

“Make out like you heard about a job for him.” Farrel stood up, went to the door, turned around. “If you’ve quit drinking, what were you doing in the beer joint?”

“Buying a beer for the widow, what else?” Mac said indignantly. “By God, you better not start on me.”

“Keep your shirt on.”

Farrel said good-by and went out. He crossed the broken paving, looked around again. A kid of eighteen or nineteen in the wrecking yard next door was poking around under the hood of a stripped Buick, and he gave Farrel a long sizing-up look that said he smelled cop.

Farrel strolled over to the steel-link fence and said, “You ever hear of a guy named Watkins? Used to live there.” He jerked a thumb back toward Mac’s place. “Wore glasses. Used a cane to get around.”

“Never heard of him,” the kid said sharply.

“How long has the old guy been there?”

“I don’t know. I’m new here myself.”

“I asked him about Watkins, and he claims Watkins never lived there.”

The kid smirked as Farrel turned away, pleased because the cop was put out. It might be enough to cover Mac. Might not. The kid may have noticed how long Farrel had been inside, and wondered why he had stayed if Mac hadn’t been talking.

Farrel drove a couple of blocks and saw the beer joint. It would have to be within walking distance for Mac; Mac had lost his driver’s license when he’d had his accident. Farrel parked and went in and had a couple of beers. The place was almost empty.

He felt better with the beers under his belt. He chewed a stick of gum on the way back to the yards.

Mr. Howery looked into the frozen-food compartment of his refrigerator. He made a distasteful mouth and shut it again. He went to the cupboard and examined the canned goods. Peas. Always peas. How many cans of canned peas had he eaten since his mother had died?

He thought suddenly of her roast beef, crusted without and tender and pink inside, the baked potatoes, Waldorf salad, apple pie. His expression grew pinched. It was the first time that he had really missed her.

Best to go out somewhere. A cafeteria.

He went to the bedroom for his jacket and hat, and saw Uncle Sherman’s coat in the closet. It reminded him of his cowardly reluctance of the night before. He hadn’t been able, after all, to go right up to her and start acting a part, pretending to know something about the person she’d been intending to meet in the freight yards.

Funny. He’d followed women for a year. This was the first one he had felt involved with, had wanted to know, had been curious about beyond the mere act of tagging along to see what would happen.

He remembered his first sight of her. She had been standing at the counter writing the notice for the idiot board, and he had noticed her hair, the heavy silky quality of it, and the way it had slid and slipped as she moved her head.

The memory, even now, had some strange impact.

It occurred to Mr. Howery, with a great shock of surprise, that he might have fallen in love.

He found himself at the dresser mirror, looking at his own face as if to catch some change in it, some remarkable altering of the features. He peered and squinted. His lips were chapped from being out in the fog, and a few whiskers of the peeping beard showed silver in the light; and that was all.

The change was inward, though; and it was real. He had to hear her voice again, he had to find some means of getting to know her.

Call up, then. Call up and pretend to be interested in those tires.

He hurried to the phone, found the number, dialed, and waited. It rang five times, and the instant before the receiver went up, Mr. Howery knew that Margie herself wouldn’t be on the line.

The man’s voice said, “Hello.”

“Is Margie there?”

“No, she ain’t.”

“When will she be in?”

“I don’t guess she will. She moved.”

Some broken exclamation indicative of disaster must have escaped Howery’s lips, for after a moment of cautious waiting the other said, “Hey, you ain’t that guy she’s been expecting, are you?”

“Y … yes. Yes!”

“Well …” There was again hesitation, as if some warning had been passed on. “I got an address. In Colton. You know where Colton is, I guess?”

“Yes, I know!” Mr. Howery’s palms were hot and moist.

“Here it is … Tamarind Street, six hundred and eighty-six. She said you’d know the place when you heard it.”

“I would? … I mean, yes, I see what she means … Tamarind.” He tried to grasp, commit it to memory, and control his surprise all at once. “And thanks so much.”

“Welcome. Hope you find her okay. She sure was anxious.”

There was a click. The conversation was finished.

Chapter 10

They spent the late afternoon working in the yards with Richie, not finding any cars that had been hit. Along about dinnertime Farrel excused himself and disappeared. Gone for another beer, Kernehan thought, then corrected himself. Farrel had gone for a pint to see him through the night’s stake-out.

Kernehan ate in a diner, a sloppy meal topped off by a leathery wedge of pie. The coffee wasn’t too bad; he had two cups of it. It was the kind of meal he’d found everywhere, and he was beginning to wonder how the human stomach endured.

Farrel showed up, smelling of cloves. They got into the car and took off eastward into the desert. The distances were purple, the long sandy valleys swept with smoky light. You could smell the sage, Kernehan noted. The tires hummed and the miles of highway dropped behind them.

“There’s another passing track two miles this side,” Farrel said all at once. “I’ll take it, and you can have Sidewinder.”

Kernehan, driving, frowned at the road ahead. “I thought we’d stick together. There’s more than one in this business, and they’re in it for a pretty nice take. It might not be a good idea to meet them alone.”

“All we can do to start with is to find out what’s going on. You jump anybody this soon, you’ve spoiled it. Listen and watch. You got any idea how many sidings we got between here and the Colorado? You figured the nights we can stakeout without a nibble?”

“You’d better keep out of sight, then.”

“I’ll take the car,” Farrel said stubbornly. “I got to have me a place to sit. You’ll have the shed at Sidewinder. This other passing track, there’s nothing.”

Kernehan didn’t want to argue with Farrel, but he said, “They’ll spot the car as sure as hell.”

“No, there’s a kind of ditch, or draw there, as I remember. Piled up with brush. Some kind of old road, goes off into the hills. I’ll put the car down out of sight and wait in it till I hear a train pull into the passing track. Then I can get out and have a look around.”

Kernehan disliked the sound of it, but there was no use getting Farrel sore. Farrel had made up his mind. Probably he hadn’t wanted this job and mostly hadn’t wanted Kernehan for his sidekick; he was a hard-bitten old cop, and Kernehan didn’t fit his ideas of what an investigator should look like. It was an attitude that Kernehan was completely familiar with, one that he’d had plenty of chances to correct as a marine sergeant.

“Suit yourself,” Kernehan said shortly. “Why not?”

By the time they reached the vacant sheds and corrals at Sidewinder, the sky to the east had darkened enough to show a few pale stars, and the scrubby hills to the north and northeast held black crevasses. Kernehan got out, and Farrel moved over behind the wheel. Kernehan looked in at him. “Take care of yourself.”

Farrel grunted in derision.

Kernehan went up the steps to the platform and stood there to watch Farrel turn the car and drive away. The empty distances held a vacuum-like stillness that settled around him as soon as the sound of the car had gone. He explored the place for something to sit down on. He found a wooden crate, one side caved in, propped against the inner wall of the long shed, and settled to wait.

Kernehan hated stake-outs, hated the waiting and the boredom and the sense of useless waste when they proved profitless, as most of them did. It wasn’t too bad in town, though; you could break off for coffee or at least have something to listen to, if only distant traffic. This place had a world’s-end sort of feeling to it. Miles of nothing but creeping dusk and silence, the pattern of tracks, main lines, and sidings, laid out in shadowy steel, the smell of sun-baked wood and manured dust of the corrals, and an up-the-neck sort of prickle about what Farrel was doing. He lit a cigarette and smoked it, and watched the night settle in.

His ear caught a faint vibration, and then from miles away he caught the swinging twinkle of a headlight in the east.

He got up, went to the other end of the covered platform and dropped to the earth, went around back and stood there while the vibration grew greater. It was a big one, coming fast. He walked the length of the loading shed at the rear and had a look; it was a passenger streamliner, roaring up the shallow grade. He waited where he could see it pass, and in the lighted windows he saw people in brief flashes, bright against the dark. A sudden gush of loneliness welled in him, and he thought of Lora. Lora was somehow like those people in the train; she moved in warmth and light. And he was shut away from her.

He shook it off and went around front and back up the steps to the crate where he could sit down. By now Farrel must be at the other passing track, in the car. With his pint. With his scorn for good-looking cinder dicks who kept their clothes neat because what you learned in the Marine Corps hung on, for a while at least; and the Marines were notoriously neat dressers. Farrel knew that, but he’d ignore it, just as he chose to ignore what Kernehan had said about sticking together on this particular job.

In the hollow box of the shed Kernehan caught another approaching vibration, this one from the west. It rolled by without slackening. Kernehan hadn’t moved this time; a train headed east wouldn’t be what he wanted. He shut his eyes for a moment, opened them to find the dark suddenly thicker. All the far valleys had vanished into night; there were lots of stars overhead, a faint dry wind was rising. He shivered, then got up and walked back and forth on the platform, the planks echoing under his heels.

The switch lights out by the passing track only seemed to accentuate the dark and the silence.

Finally his ear caught the approach of another westbound train; he stopped walking, lit a new cigarette, waited with a sense of tension. The headlight came up the rise, slowing visibly, and he saw that the train was headed for the passing track.

He could make out the figure of the man who dropped off the engine to throw the switch. The train swung into the siding, moving slowly. The head brakeman jumped off the engine with his lanterns, went quickly to the main track to guard against eastbound trains, until the rear of the freight had cleared the main line. The twinkling lanterns, the big headlight, were like ghostly stars and moon.

He knew that when the caboose had cleared the main track the rear brakeman riding in it would throw the switch again. Then the train would wait.

He put out the cigarette, stood close to the wall of the small office, listened.

There was no sound except that of the Diesel.

Kernehan thought, if anybody’d been on the cars, the time to jump would have been on the long upgrade below the passing track, when the train had slowed to a crawl.

If. If they’d been on the train, hitting a car, where and how had they managed to whisk off the tires or cigarettes or whatever?

Farrel should have stayed here, and we should be checking cars at this point, looking for cut seals. Kernehan had a sudden bitter hunch that the night was wasted. They wouldn’t see anything worth seeing until they pinpointed the area in which it was happening.

He was folded on the crate, cold, half-asleep, when Farrel rolled up in the car. Farrel honked, and Kernehan stretched his stiffened body and stood up, went down the steps. Farrel said, “Say, I’ve got another idea, what we’d better do.” Then he proceeded to tell Kernehan what Kernehan had just figured out, about checking seals here and now. Kernehan was disgusted. Farrel said, “Let’s check the next freight and then pull out.”

It was way past midnight. Kernehan decided that Farrel had killed his bottle, that’s why he was willing to call it a night. Or perhaps he was being unjust to the old boy.

Kernehan crawled into the car and spent the next half hour or so fighting off the desire to sleep. A westbound freight pulled into the passing track at about one-fifteen. They took flashlights from the dash compartment, some extra seals just in case. Farrel cut around to the south side of the train, Kernehan staying on the north side next to the main line. The head brakeman spotted Kernehan, and he had to flash his I.D. under the lantern before getting to work. Then he went down the line, pulling on seals. The fifth car, he yanked and the seal came loose in his hand.

He made a note of the seal number, the number of the car. Then he took out a new seal, ran the wire through the hasp and fastened it. He turned the flashlight here and there, noting some fresh marks on the side of the car by the door.

They weren’t deep, though they were quite obvious in the light of the flash. More in the nature of smudges, rubbed abrasions on the wood, Kernehan thought. He went on to the next car, and the next—on down the line, and found nothing. He met Farrel at the end of the train. Farrel hadn’t found any cut seals. He was talking to the brakeman at the end of the caboose.

Kernehan said, “I want to get to Colton ahead of this train.”

Farrel gave him a quick look by light of the brakeman’s lantern. “Found something?”

“Come on, I’ll show you.”

Farrel stopped by the car where Kernehan had found the seal cut, looked at the smudges by flashlight, and grunted as if something had been proved according to his suspicions. About that time they heard the eastbound passenger streamliner coming, and headed across tracks to where the car was parked.

In Colton they parked by the yard offices and got out. Kernehan thought it was the grisliest hour possible, not quite dawn, cold, the air tainted by the smell of fog drifting in from the coast. They went across the street to a diner, had coffee, came back. By now the freight they’d checked at Sidewinder was pulling in. They were in luck in one respect—about a third of the train was due to be set out, cars for local consignees, and the car they were interested in was among these.

When they had it open, Farrel turned his light inside and whistled through his teeth. Tires were packed in, the inter-lock method, and there seemed a room-sized space here by the door where the shipment had been raided. Kernehan licked his lips. “Brother.”

Farrel said, “They made money tonight.” Instead of showing further interest in the load, though, he climbed up the ladder to the top of the car, and Kernehan could see him up there in the dark, shining the light here and there, finally squatting at the catwalk about the middle of the car, above the door. Kernehan climbed up after him. Farrel was kneeling on the roof. “Look at this.” In the light of the flash Kernehan saw some fresh scars on the wood at the edge of the catwalk. Something had been pressed or clamped here, it seemed, and had marked the plank and splintered it a little. “It’s the one way they could be doing it,” Farrel said. “They’re not angels or birds, they can’t be flying alongside and opening the door. They’re hanging from up top by a rope ladder.”

“Then they damned well must be acrobats,” Kernehan growled.

“Just nervy. Nervy, and interested in the dough, which is getting real good by now. The amount of tires they got out tonight would run, I’d say, over a thousand. A thousand bucks every other night or so will buy some pretty high living.”

They climbed down again, and Kernehan shut and resealed the door, making a record of the new seal number. “We’ve got one thing out of the way,” he said to Farrel. “But we still don’t know where the stuff is going. They’re able to handle quite a lot. What in hell do they do with all those tires in the desert between the River and Sidewinder?”

Farrel had his light on the smudge marks by the door. “I don’t believe the stuff’s coming this way at all. It’s being taken back to Vermillion, maybe way over in Arizona somewhere.”

Kernehan didn’t ask why Farrel thought this; he remembered Farrel’s errand of the afternoon and decided it might have something to do with Farrel’s opinion.

“After it’s thrown out, it has to be picked up.”

“Oh, sure, they’ve got a truck waiting,” Farrel told him.

“And a warehouse.”

“Shelter of some kind,” Farrel agreed.

“It’s not just a shack in the sagebrush. An old ranch house, or anything like that. There’d be too much activity out in the open, the desert rats would get wind of it, it would get back to town,” Kernehan said. “Another thing, this stuff moves. If it didn’t they’d be in trouble. But somehow, right after they get it, it goes out of sight damned fast. By God, you’d almost think they must be dropping it down a—”

“A what?”

“An abandoned mine, maybe?” Kernehan was trying to pin down the flash of insight which had come briefly, then faded.

“Something big that belongs to the landscape,” Farrel said slowly.

“I guess that’s what I was thinking of.”

They waited, drinking coffee in the diner until early daylight, then went back to the car and examined the faint marks again. The freshness of the scars on the catwalk was even more obvious, the smudges next the door plainer than ever. “Well, we got this much out of it,” Kernehan said wearily. The desire for sleep itched behind his eyes. “We know what they’re doing on the cars.”

“And they can’t see through the roof, so somebody’s tipping them off. Somebody who gets a look at the train consist in the Vermillion office.”

Kernehan nodded, no longer trying to avoid the obvious.

They drove back to Los Angeles, Kernehan at the wheel and Farrel dozing. There was no use heading for home in the short time they had; they ate breakfast and then went up early to the office. Ryerson had already come in. He was at his desk in his glassed-in sanctuary, erect and bull-necked in his big chair; he was holding papers in his fists, fumigating them with cigar smoke. He glanced up as Farrel and Kernehan came in.

Farrel sank into a chair as if he were made of lead. Kernehan noticed how the beard had come out on Farrel overnight, and how much of it was silver. The lines around his eyes were deep-bitten, as if the flesh was wax scored by a tool. But under the tiredness Kernehan sensed the patient and unflagging attention. Anything left out of his report to Ryerson would be spotted at once. There was much more to Farrel than the aging body. He had the spirit of a bloodhound.

Kernehan told Ryerson all about the stake-out at Sidewinder, the car that they’d found that had been hit, the conclusions drawn by their examination of it in the yards at Colton. Ryerson was thinking this over when Kernehan added, “I can’t find any connection as yet between the killing—the dead man, Jennings—and what’s going on between Sidewinder and the River. But I’d like to spend a little more time on this stiff. He worked for the railroad, and then he dropped from sight. Along with an old pal of his. I’d like to find the missing man, Pethro.”

“Where do you think he is?”

“Possibly around Vermillion. I talked to Pethro’s wife in Colton. She took for granted that Jennings had been murdered. Of course she might have heard something before I got there, but I doubt it, and I don’t think Richie would have told her. I think Jennings and Pethro were in on something crooked and she knew it, she expected them to have trouble of some kind.”

Ryerson said, “Think you can go to Vermillion without being identified?”

“I think so.”

“I mentioned it before, your going down there under cover. I think you might as well go tomorrow. Of course everything may be under control, everything they steal may go straight to a fence, some outfit we’d never dreamed of, couldn’t touch. But sometimes one of these jokers needs a little cash. Or gets itchy fingers. Or just naturally believes in free enterprise. You might let it be known you’re buying tires for a discount house, you need them cheap. Hit the junk yards, wholesale dealers—there won’t be many in a town that size—and anybody else you think might pass the word.”

Kernehan noticed that Farrel was looking at Ryerson with a skeptical, almost disgusted air.

Ryerson may have noticed it, for he added, “Dyart’s been around, of course, but everyone in the town knows who he is.”

“I’ll ask for Pethro while I’m at it,” Kernehan said.

The skeptical look was now turned on him.

“If I don’t get a bite on the tires, of course.”

Ryerson said to Farrel, “I’m putting you on the office end of this thing. I want you to get the records from Personnel and learn whatever you can about the men in the Vermillion office. Then go down there and talk to Dyart. Start prying, see who’s spending money.”

“If he’s fool enough to throw money around in Vermillion, they wouldn’t have picked him.” Farrel stood up. He was stooped inside the wrinkled suit, which looked exactly as if he’d slept in it—in bed. “This cookie’s salting it away. But he’d need a reason, and maybe I can spot that.”

Ryerson’s mouth twitched, and he shuffled the papers and chewed the cigar.

Farrel was looking into the air well, now bright with dust motes and sun. “I wonder who’s making book over there?”

Ryerson was a notorious horse-player. His glance up at Farrel was flat with sarcasm.

“It’s the one way I can think of to get rid of money without showing a damned thing in return,” Farrel said thoughtfully, a faint smile twisting his lips. “It’s just possible he’s playing the nags.”

Chapter 11

Kernehan sat down in his living room to take off his shoes. He looked at the phone on its table, thinking of Lora. He could call her on the job, make a date to see her on her afternoon break, perhaps repair the coldness between them. But the tiredness left by the night without sleep seemed to have increased a bitter perspective. He and Lora were so far apart in all things, not just an attitude toward her brother. She had no idea of what his job was like, for one thing. She thought of any kind of law-enforcement work as an opportunity for the reclamation of unfortunates. She had no conception of the kind of viciousness to be expected from clever and daring men who weren’t afraid to hang from a car catwalk on a rope ladder to rob railroad shipments.

Kernehan went into the bathroom and shed the rest of his clothes and showered, then put on a robe and lay down on the bed. He felt gritty and strung-up more than sleepy, though when his head hit the pillow he felt as if the heavy skull might press through all the way to the springs. When he shut his eyes he seemed to glimpse the panorama of the job to be done, the incredible distances between Sidewinder and the River, the hours of nothing to be spent on stake-outs and the walking-on-eggs performance required in Vermillion.

He thought of Farrel. Farrel would be home now, too, and having some stiff jolts of unwatered bourbon before dropping off to sleep. Farrel wouldn’t be nonplussed by the job ahead. He was like an old mule who bows to the yoke and sees only the routine landscape—and still, Farrel knew something he hadn’t told them. He thought Ryerson was wasting time with the junk-yard routine in Vermillion. Probably Farrel had some inside tip or other, knew that no stray tires or cigarettes were floating around for sale.

One thing was sure, Farrel had touched a tender spot, gibing at Ryerson about the horses.

Kernehan found a great wave of sleep welling up, drowning the sharpness of his thoughts. He had a sudden poignant vision of Lora, the way he had seen her several weeks before, waiting for him on a corner downtown. Brown suit, white blouse, a typical office girl until she had turned to look at him with leaf-green eyes, when there had seemed a sudden light in her face and all resemblance to other people or to anyone in the passing crowd had dropped away.

That’s what love did, the crazy trick it played—it made the one you loved seem so unique and irreplaceable. You treasured her, and then the sense of loss was like a heavy thud under the heart.

Kernehan found himself sitting up on the side of the bed, rubbing the red hair back off his forehead and swearing to himself.

He lay down again after a few moments, forced the memory of Lora away by thinking of other things.

Some tag ends flickered in his mind. He remembered the shape of the enormous hopper at the gravel pit, the baked dust covering everything, the smell of it hovering in the air … even in the dead Jennings’s clothes, he recalled, and then something in his subconscious objected. The fine silty sand which he had noticed on his hands after handling the dead man’s clothes had not been gravel dust. Something else. Something lighter, finer, almost silky. He’d place it someday.

He dropped off to sleep.

When he awoke and rolled over and looked at the clock, it was after three. He got up off the bed and went to the kitchen and made a pot of coffee, fried two eggs, heated some leftover biscuits in the oven. He sat down in the breakfast nook.

He was still tired, there was still the grainy feeling when he blinked his eyes; but he had no more desire to sleep.

He looked around the kitchen and was aware, as he was every once in a while, of its size and vacant air. The place was too big for a bachelor alone. Too empty and echoing. He should either make efforts to find a couple of new roommates or look for a smaller place. He buttered a biscuit and bit into it, his eyes growing thoughtful—he was thinking now of Howery, all alone in a flat as big as this one and seemingly as snug as a cricket, left solitary there by the death of his mother.

A little guy with something haywire, a little man who followed women.

He remembered the foggy nighttime scene, the girl waiting under the street light, obviously expecting to meet someone, and Howery flitting around in the shadows, trying to get up nerve enough to approach her.

Something really funny about that, Howery’s striking timidity and the girl’s patience.

It would make everything very interesting if the girl were the one Howery had followed into the freight yards.

Kernehan drank a third cup of coffee, thinking it over. Then he dressed, went down to the garage and got the car out again, drove to the neighborhood where Howery lived and finally located the house where the girl had entered.

The man who came in answer to the bell was a long bean pole with a leathery face, scant sandy hair, an oversized Adam’s apple, and he walked with a cane. There was something faded about him, as if he had to live on the memory of long years of sun and wind here in this tacky old house. “Yessir,” he said, “what can I do for you?” and Kernehan broke out the I.D. and explained that he was a cop with a few questions to ask.

The parlor was full of old-fashioned furniture. There was a white paper fan in the fireplace. The lamp had a garnet-colored glass shade. Under the south windows the wallpaper was stained by rain which had leaked in around the molding. Two brown cats lay near the hearth, flattened in sleep; they twitched their tails when Kernehan got close and sat down.

The man who had let him in introduced himself; his name was Howard Roff. Kernehan had been sizing up the place and something about the used, impersonal air of the parlor led him to say, “You take in roomers?”

“Yessir. We run a boardinghouse. Got an ad in the paper right now. That’s who I thought you was—somebody coming to ask about a room.”

“You have a tenant here, a young woman …” Kernehan went on to describe what he could of the girl under the street lamp, regretting that he hadn’t seen the color of her hair.

But the other man began to nod, even at this brief description. “That’s Margie, the one who just moved out. Left two nights ago. No warning or notice, just came in and said she was heading out.”

Kernehan realized that the girl had gone on the same night he’d seen her, waiting perhaps for Howery. “Did she say why she was leaving?”

“Nope, and I didn’t ask.” The man sitting opposite with the cane between his knees had begun to show a touch of apprehension. “Where I come from, we don’t pry into other folks’ business. What’s this all about, anyway?”

“Just a routine inquiry. Do you know where she went?”

There was a definite hesitation, a considering. The Adam’s apple worked up and down. Kernehan got the impression that some question was being weighed, or that some instruction left by the girl was being reviewed. “Nope, I guess I don’t.”

“What’s her full name? Margie …”

“DeWitt.”

“Had she been here long?”

“About a year.”

“What about relatives, friends, and so forth?” He saw the stubborn resistance growing in the pale eyes. This wasn’t a man you could push. “Any visitors?”

“I don’t know a danged thing about her family or friends. Or whether she had any. I guess she had a boy friend somewhere—she had somebody she was worried about lately. And that’s the plumb total information I’ve got.”

“Where did she work?”

“Worked in a downtown café. Bonnie Brae, I think it was.”

Kernehan sat thinking, looking around at the crowded and old-fashioned parlor. Some cattails dyed blue and sprinkled with gilt paint stood up in a big vase in the corner by the hearth. Kernehan hadn’t seen anything like them for years. Under his surface attention to the room, other ideas floated; he had a hunch that there was much more to the girl’s sudden move than the landlord had let on.

The pale-eyed man knew something of the girl’s destination, and he was keeping it to himself.

Exploring, Kernehan said, “I guess she took everything with her. There wouldn’t be anything left in her room. Anything to give a hint where she might have gone.”

“Room’s as slick as a whistle,” Roff said promptly. The Adam’s apple bobbed, and the gnarled hands moved nervously over the head of the cane.

Kernehan took it in. “Well, what did she leave?”

“Left some tires. Said I could sell them, keep the money for the rent that was due.”

“How many tires?”

“Five.”

The air of uncertainty, of hesitation was obvious; Kernehan said quietly, “Would you mind if I saw them?”

“You might. They’re mine now, I guess.”

The remark, Kernehan thought, implied that if the tires had still belonged to the girl Roff would have kept still about them. Now that they were his, he could show them to the cop if he wanted to. The old man was being exceptionally careful, perhaps because of some experience with a former tenant. Or because, as he’d said, his early years had been spent where people had minded their own affairs.

Roff led the way outdoors, off the porch and back along the driveway to the rear. The back yard was big and well tended, neatly cut lawn and several beds of roses just coming into bloom. At the back, next the alley, was a fairly new addition, two stories of white clapboard, a stair going up to a balcony where two doors opened. Below, a long unwindowed wall which must be garages. Roff pointed. “She lived up there on the left. My wife cleaned the place, you wouldn’t find anything in it.” He went to a door at the end of the lower level and opened it, displaying a crowded storeroom.

Kernehan saw a big automatic washing machine, laundry trays, a power mower, loops of garden hose hung on a rack.

Roff turned left. “In here.” Kernehan came in, and propped against the wall in a cleared spot were the five tires. Brand-new, but without wrappings. He went over and inspected them closely.

“She drove a car?”

“Nossir, didn’t have one.”

“Where did she get these?”

“She didn’t say and I didn’t ask. She stored them here a while back. Wanted to sell them, I guess. Didn’t get them sold before she had to go.”

The tires matched those of a former theft in make and type, Kernehan noted; though many more than five had disappeared at that time. He squatted, rubbed a thumb along the serial numbers on one tire, made note of it on a page of his dog-eared little book, then did the same with the other four. He stood up. “These tires may have been stolen. Would you object to having them impounded by the police as possible evidence?”

The old man shifted his weight on the cane, licked his dry mouth with a nervous air. “Nossir, guess that’d be the thing to do.”

“May I use your phone to call Burglary Detail?”

“Yessir.”

Roff led the way back into the parlor, showed Kernehan a wall phone in a hallway. Kernehan called L.A.P.D., got Burglary, located a sergeant there that he knew who agreed to come right out. Then he called Pete at the office and gave him the serial numbers off the tires, just in case they could be traced as part of the missing shipment.

Roff had been hovering in the hall doorway. “Just one thing I got to explain. If them tires are stolen, Margie didn’t do it. She wasn’t a thief.”

“You said something about a boy friend. Maybe he gave them to her.”

Roff nodded. “I kind of figured it that way. She came in one evening late and asked if she could put something in the storeroom. I said, sure. We try to get along with the tenants, do little favors if we can. I was kind of curious, though. I went out in the kitchen, to get a glass of water and sort of look around, and I heard a car in the alley. Sounded kind of loud, I figured it for a truck. Not a big one. A pickup, maybe.”

“How long ago did this happen?”

“Oh … couple of weeks, more or less.”

“She didn’t explain about the tires, where they’d come from, anything?”

“All she said was—this was the next morning—they was tires she was keeping for a friend. It wasn’t till just lately that she said anything about selling them. You know what I think?” Roff scratched a temple where the thinning hair was short and wiry. “I think the guy walked out on her there for a while.”

“He came back? She left with him? Is that what you think?”

“Nope. Somebody called up here after she’d gone. Might of been him. I don’t know.”

Again Kernehan was aware of Roff’s uneasy caution, as if the old man were trying to conform to some standard of behavior, or was checking everything he said against some instructions left by Margie DeWitt. Probably the latter, Kernehan thought. Roff was convinced of the girl’s honesty and seemed to feel protective toward her.

When the sergeant from Burglary Detail arrived, he and Kernehan made out a receipt for the tires, gave it to Roff, who seemed more relieved now than anything else to have them taken away. Kernehan drove downtown, following the L.A.P.D. car, and signed the tires in at the Property Room. Then he went to a public phone booth and looked up the Bonnie Brae cafe offices—there were six or eight of these scattered between the downtown area and Hollywood, all of them decorated with a Scotch motif, the signs outside all showing a big bagpiper in kilts. The personnel office gave him little information, though—simply Margie DeWitt’s home address, that of Roff’s boardinghouse, and the date she’d left their employment, three days before. He did find out which Bonnie Brae she’d worked at, on Sixth Street just past Figueroa. He drove out there.

The big bagpiper hung over the doorway, blinking with neon, and a subdued Scottish tune played off a record somewhere, no squealing of bagpipes involved, Kernehan noted. He went inside. There was a lot of dark wood paneling, tartan wallpaper, and a great gray mural of what would pass for a moor. The hostess came forward, a skinny girl in a black silk dress, purple lipstick, hair pulled back into a chignon—fashionable, Kernehan realized, contrasting her suddenly and without intending to, with Lora’s genuine approachableness. He flashed the I.D., and she widened her eyes over it and moved back a trifle as if he might carry some contamination. “I’d like some information, whatever you can give, about a girl who worked here, Margie DeWitt.”

“Margie? She isn’t here any more. Has she done something?”

“Just a routine inquiry.”

The hostess looked around as if searching for a place to get Kernehan out of sight. Under a rug, perhaps. “We might sit down, and I’ll try to remember what you want. I guess you know where she lived?”

“Yes, I’ve talked to her landlord. She’s moved.”

She led him to a rear booth, and had him sit opposite, had a waitress bring them coffee. Kernehan realized that she was trying to make him look like a casual customer, concealing the odium of cophood.

“We’re very careful, I mean Personnel is very careful, to hire the very best girls, the very highest type girls, who apply,” said the hostess, trying to sip the coffee without marring the purple lips. “We would all be very much shocked if Margie turned out to be in some kind of … ah … trouble.” She looked around to see if the other customers were staring at them.

“We check out dozens of people a day, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re in any trouble,” Kernehan assured her. “We would like to talk to Miss DeWitt if we could locate her.”

“And she isn’t at home?”

“She gave up her room at the boardinghouse.”

The purple lips were parted a little. “Suddenly?”

“She didn’t leave a forwarding address, is all.”

“I didn’t get very well acquainted with Margie. None of us did,” she said cautiously. “She did her work well, she was prompt and neat. She didn’t always … ah … dress quite as meticulously as she might. Of course the uniform took care of that, while she was on the job; I’m talking about her street clothes.”

“I see.”

“The only thing I ever learned about Margie”—she paused as if considering whether to part with this—“I learned by overhearing a talk she had with another girl. This other girl came in as a replacement, a temporary replacement for one of our regular waitresses, and she didn’t last. She wasn’t suitable at all for permanent employment. But Margie kind of took to her, was friendly with her. They were … alike, somehow. Both kind of—No, the word isn’t shabby. Just not … not quite up to snuff. They were both like that, and then I heard Margie talking to her, and it turned out they were both from some small town, a place near the mountains in central California. Bishop.”

How nicely it fitted, Kernehan told himself, refusing to believe it. And still, if those tires came out of the cars that had been hit between Sidewinder and the River, there had to be a connection between the girl and some of the gang. It could be Bishop; she could have known Jennings or Pethro.

It was fantastic. While he took in its fantasticness and his own unbelievable cleverness, Kernehan studied the hostess’s purple lips. In spite of her care the lipstick had run, had formed little spider-lines above and below her mouth. There were even traces on her teeth.

“Does that help, that little scrap?”

“It may help a lot.” He thanked her for the coffee and went out.

Chapter 12

He phoned Pete at the office, and Pete promised to get in touch at once with the police in Bishop and find out what he could about Margie DeWitt, whether there was any connection up there between her and Jennings and Pethro, and if any of the three had a record with the Bishop police. Kernehan also asked Pete to call Dyart in Vermillion and see if Dyart had any suggestions about where he should start tomorrow, any junk yards or used-auto supply dealers who seemed to be on the shady side.

Kernehan told Pete he would call back later and check.

“I thought you’d be home asleep,” Pete said. “Wait a minute. You know, about those dead dogs in New Canyon Yards? They’ve got another one, and I’ve heard from L.A.P.D., somebody you talked to there. A woman in Altadena has reported her poodle stolen. Wasn’t one of the dead mutts a poodle?”

Kernehan had almost forgotten about the dead dogs, the indignant old car-knocker who had buried two of them, all of this which had led him into the original stake-out and latching onto Howery. “I’ll call L.A.P.D. and see what they’ve got. Thanks, Pete.”

But brief investigation revealed that the woman in Altadena had missed her dog only early this morning, when she had let him out to go to the bathroom—as she had put it, according to the L.A.P.D. man—and he hadn’t come back to his breakfast.

“The poodle we found was dead last week. Thanks anyway. Let me know if you get anything more.” Kernehan left the phone booth, got back in his car in the parking lot of the Bonnie Brae, and headed for New Canyon Yards. The car-knocker, Lizt, was sitting in his shanty taking a break, drinking coffee from a vacuum bottle and eating a doughnut. He finished the doughnut and coffee quickly, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, wiped the back of his hand on the thigh of the overalls, slapped his cap on his head, and took Kernehan off over toward the gate to the main-line tracks.

“I ain’t going to clean it up. I buried them others, I called the pound to come get the last one. This one’ll take a broom, and then a bucket and mop.”

They went in through the gate. The remains of the dismembered dog were ground into, and strewn on, about twenty feet of track. The head lay intact, tossed into a greasy patch of grass; it had been a big black and white dog with long ears. Part hound, Kernehan thought.

Lizt sniffled, rubbed a finger under his nose. “I’ll bet it was What they was trying to do all the time. That first one, that white poodle, I found him before the train hit him. The other two, they brought them in and didn’t get all the way, and something scared them off.”

It was exactly what Kernehan had been thinking.

“You think it might be some of them juveniles?” Lizt asked.

“Probably.”

“What for they want a train to run over a dead dog?”

“Damned if I know.” What did any of them want? What did a kid like Lora’s brother want, stealing a car and wrecking it, knowing he’d be caught and that his father and mother and sister would all be involved in the theft, the punishment, and the shame that went with it? What made them the way they were, without conscience or restraint, without pity, or understanding? “Anyway, they’ve got what they wanted. A mess. Maybe they won’t come back.”

“I almost feel like waiting here myself all night,” Lizt said. “Get my big hammer and just wait.”

“Well, it’s not your job to clean it up, anyway,” Kernehan told him. “I’ll call the Division Engineer’s office, they’ll send a section hand to do it.”

“Flies already gathering,” Lizt complained. “They better make it snappy.”

Kernehan went over the ground carefully but found nothing to give a clue to the culprit or culprits. But more than one had been in on it, he made a private bet to himself. Two or three, having their kicks. Then he walked on down the tracks to the shanty and the overpass, remembering how he had first found traces there of a man and woman, the man having climbed the bank on the other side of the tracks, the woman having waited near the shanty and the stack of ties.

He could still see traces of what he now figured was Howery’s progress up the side of the cut, the weeds dislodged and the earth gouged by sliding footmarks. The girl—he was convinced it had been Margie DeWitt—had waited here for some time, a damned funny place for a woman. Her footprints were gone now, blown away on the dust, but he remembered the number of them and the impression he had received of a long, impatient vigil.

With Howery across, up there under the abutments of the overpass, she had stood here in the foggy night. Suddenly Kernehan had a hunch as to what must have happened. Howery had hidden from her, up there in his perch. But something must have scared him, set him climbing at a frantic rate; and Kernehan thought, it must have been a train coming.

A train had been approaching, maybe the one the girl had been waiting for, and Howery had figured she would see him in the glow of its headlight.

He had clawed his way up to the deep dark under the overpass, had sheltered there while the train went by. He had spent enough time up there to tramp out a little shelf for himself; Kernehan thought, Howery must have been a kind of prisoner, waiting until she had left before he could come down again. Watching and listening. The train had gone by, but Howery had stayed—which meant that the girl had stayed. There was only one logical reason she’d be loitering here in the dark near the overpass. She had been waiting for someone to drop off a train to meet her.

With a little more evidence at hand now, Kernehan would have been justified in putting out an all-points bulletin for her. If Howery would only admit that she had been the woman he had followed into the yards, if they could prove that the tires she had left at Roff’s had been stolen from a railroad shipment—at this point Kernehan was mentally kicking himself for not going right in after her at her home, two nights ago. She might have been co-operative—if she was really as honest as her landlord thought.

He used a phone in the yard offices to report the mess on the tracks to the Division Engineer, and then called Pete. Pete had not been able to run down the tire serial numbers yet, but he had talked to Dyart in Vermillion, and Dyart had said that as far as he knew every junk yard and used-car supply dealer in Vermillion was clean as angels.

Kernehan drove home and packed for the trip to Vermillion. He might be over there several days. He had a choice of driving over there tonight or of waiting until early morning. It was a four- to five-hour drive, depending on traffic.

He looked at the clock. It was past five-thirty. Lora should be home by now. Without any preplanning he walked over to the phone, lifted the receiver, and dialed her number at home. Her dad answered. “Yeah, Mike, she’s here. I’ll get her.” The tone was warm and friendly, so Kernehan judged that Lora hadn’t told her folks anything about their disagreement over her brother.

“Hello, Mike.”

“Hello. How have you been?”

“Fine. And you?”

“Okay. Have you had dinner yet?”

“Dad and Mother and I were going out to eat. A cafeteria, I guess. Mom’s been down with a virus most of the week, and I’m too beat to cook. Or maybe we’re just lazy.” There was a drawn-out moment of silence. “Do you want to come along?”

Kernehan was tempted; he thought, I ought to take her up on it. I like her mother and dad, I ought to go along and play up to them and make out like I’m bucking for a spot in the family. I could pretend that I’d been planning to go along when they went to get Jimmy out of stir, only this thing in Vermillion has come up, so I can’t. I could make quite a production out of it. I might even pull the wool over Lora’s eyes.

Only, I can’t.

He said, “No, I won’t be able to join you. I’m driving over to Vermillion. I’ll be there a day or so, I just wanted you to know I’ll be out of town.”

“It came up nicely, didn’t it?”

“I wasn’t going with you to meet your brother, anyway. Do you know what I think, Lora? I think the kid will come home and lay low, he’ll be real quiet and well behaved for a couple of weeks—maybe even a month. And then the roof’s going to fall in. You might prepare your folks for it.”

There was a moment of silence, and then she hung up.

Something seemed to jump blindingly through Kernehan’s body, and then a heavy, knotted, convulsed feeling came, so grinding that he was almost forced to bend over, gripping himself across the waist. He got the phone in its stand and got himself into a chair. He tried to force the hot breathless knot to go away by sucking in a deep gulp of air and holding it.

This was bad. Mostly it was bad because he hadn’t known how much he cared for Lora, how he really felt deep inside—as if she were an irreplaceable item in his life, something he couldn’t live without. No, not live without and not be crippled obscurely, a maiming so terrible he didn’t seem to have the stamina to face it. He gripped the chair arms and felt the sweat come out on his face in a thin film. My God, he thought. My God, I really must love her, and it’s the way all the corny songs have it; it’s like cutting off an arm to lose her.

And why the hell did I have to talk to her like that?

He wiped the sweat from around his mouth with the back of his hand. Why did I say what I did? Why can’t I leave the kid out of our conversations? Why do I always have to stomp my foot in her face about Jimmy?

Some of the hot knot subsided, and his hands, gripping the chair arms, quit shaking so badly. Kernehan looked around at the flat, the big empty vacant-sounding place where once there had been a party, a dago-red and spaghetti party, where he had met a girl with green eyes; and all at once the very furniture and the way the walls were painted made him want to be sick. He went to the phone again. He called the agent who had rented the place to him and his friends, and told the woman who answered that she could put the place up again for rent, that he was leaving.

Then he dialed the telephone company and asked that the phone be disconnected. Two more calls took care of gas and lights. Water meter was on the landlord. All he had to do now was to pack. He drove to a market and got some cartons, came back, and stuck books, knickknacks, the bathroom stuff, and the few groceries he wanted to keep, all together helter-skelter. He packed a couple of suitcases; extra clothes he put into a carton. The neighbors downstairs had been friendly; he went down and asked if he could leave some cartons in their garage until the next week, and they said fine, he was welcome.

He hit the outbound freeway with a strange sense of freedom, of release.

He would never have to go back to the flat again, never have to remember the long-ago night of the party, of the days that had come and gone since then, the departure of his friends, his efforts at housekeeping, and most of all those moments of terrible self-revelation today.

The sun went down as he drove, and the landscape clouded with twilight. He drove through Santa Ana Canyon, the wild rocky hills still green from the spring rains, and from far away drifted the scent of orange blossoms from some grove in bloom. A scent like a memory, fading and dropping back. Getting lost. No matter how tough the next few weeks would be, he told himself, in the end the memories would fade and be lost, and he would be well again.

It just took time.

He had a job to do, and he had better keep his mind on it.

His thoughts returned to the most puzzling item of all, the question of where the stolen stuff was being taken, once it was off the train. He had an idea Farrel had sounded out some contacts, hadn’t come up with anything, and was as puzzled as he was.

All of a sudden a hunch hit him about the part Ryerson had planned for him. Asking around Vermillion, trying to find hot tires for sale, was going to get them nothing; it just wasn’t the way the thing could be broken. The thieves weren’t that careless.

They were pretty damned cute. Too cute to have any tie-in with Colton or with Vermillion. No contacts with town. Somewhere out in the desert, out in the wasteland of sage and sand, the stuff was being moved and stored. And that was the place to start.

He thought it over, and he drove on through the darkening night.

When he got close to the river, he ran into a broad area of irrigated fields. He could smell the irrigation water, the rank odor of vegetation. Finally, in the outskirts of Vermillion, he turned in at the first motel with a vacancy sign showing. After paying his bill and parking his car he carried both suitcases into the cabin, opened them on the bed.

The fact that he had cleared out of the flat, packed stuff he wouldn’t otherwise have brought along, had provided him with the kind of clothes he needed. There were faded dungarees and a couple of old khaki shirts, a worn leather jacket, Army-surplus boots which had scuffed around the closet for a couple of years, it seemed.

He put these clothes aside, repacked the suitcases with more care, realizing how he had punched the stuff in any old way at the flat.

In the morning when he got up he rubbed a hand over a satisfactory stubble of beard. He washed up without shaving, put on a khaki shirt and dungarees, the battered boots. He slipped the holster over his belt at the back, put the Colt detective .38 special in it, put on the jacket, and inspected his backside in the mirror. The leather jacket wasn’t long enough to completely cover the gun. He took off the belt, removed the holster, and stuck it and the gun into one of the suitcases.

He ate breakfast at a small cafe a few doors from the motel.

None of the big markets were open yet, but he drove around and found a small Mexican grocery where the proprietor was just putting up the awning. Here he bought crackers and cheese, canned lunch meat, potato chips, and five bottles of bottled water. He gassed up at a service station and had them check the tires and the radiator; and here he also picked up a good map of the county.

He parked off the driveway and studied the map. All of the area around Vermillion, on either side of the Colorado, was marked by meandering irrigation canals and small settlements. A few miles out, however, roads became few and place names far between. It was empty country.

The map showed a few dirt roads from the highway westward, mostly to mining properties. A few were marked to ghost towns. He traced the faint, cross-hatched line of the railroad west. Some of the unimproved roads were shown as crossing it, dying into blank space in the desert northward. He noted the names of a couple of towns: Sheep’s Mound and Tarwater. Under each, in parenthesis, was the word ruins. He had seen a ghost town or two in the past, and could visualize what these must look like, sun-scorched old boards and rusting wagon wheels, a tumble left by the wind and weather, with silence so thick it had a sound of its own, a hollow mouth humming.

Ghost towns. Well, the whole case had a flavor of ghostly flittings; he might as well start with one or the other. Give the idea two or three days, and if nothing panned out he could go to Vermillion again and try Ryerson’s routine. Arbitrarily, he picked out Tarwater.

Fifteen miles out of Vermillion, the dirt track to Tarwater took off—almost invisibly; Kernehan sped past and had to go back. There was no sign. The sun was bright by now. There was none of the lingering fog or damp that this April had had in the city. The earth lay bare and brown, the only sign of greenery a line of stunted smoke trees in a distant wash. Kernehan was driving due north from the highway. The dirt track was in fairly good shape, except where it crossed eroded patches left by the flash floods. At these spots Kernehan turned out of the track, hunting the smoothest spots he could, saving his axles. The clink of bottles from the box on the rear seat was comforting. This was no country to be in without water.

About eight miles north of the highway the dirt track rounded a stony spur of hills to cross a broad barren valley. Kernehan had never seen anything so desolate, and now that he was no longer in sight of the highway with its occasional car, he was hit by a feeling of complete aloneness.

Brilliant, barren, harsh—it looked like country where anything could happen.

Chapter 13

At the other end of the shallow valley the road passed through a flat-bottomed, gradually rising wash whose sides were almost vertical, where mica sparkled diamond-like against the red clay. At the top of the wash the road seemed impassable, the sandy earth having splashed away leaving the naked stones. Kernehan stopped the car and got out to plot a way around it. On the other side of the ridge the road dropped down between two eroded gray ranges of hills, and in the far distance lay a broad flat sink, white with sand.

Where in hell, Kernehan thought, was Tarwater?

Even ruins should be visible from up here on the ridge, and he could see nothing. Perhaps the town had been built of adobe, the sheltering roofs had been carried away by vandals, and now the adobe walls were melted and gone. And he had brought himself here on the wildest of wild-goose chases.

Then in a sandy dip to one side of the rocky patch he saw the print of a tire. Here just under the ridge, it had been sheltered from the fine-blown dust that would otherwise quickly have filled it. To Kernehan it looked pretty fresh.

He mapped out the way it led, off close to some low prickly growth, rejoining the road farther down. He got back into his car, drove in low gear the way the tire-track had seemed to lead. Half-way down the grade between the gray banks the road swung sharply to the right. He looked down past a series of rocky ledges, to a sudden spot of green. There was actually a tree growing down there; then he saw other things. Old walls and weathered wooden false-fronts. A main street rutted by time, tumbleweeds growing in the ruts. Off beside the lone tree, a couple of canvas tents, big ones, that looked new. A parked truck under the shade of the tree. Some hasty fences, inside them restless specks of red and white that must be chickens.

Well, he’d found the town. And there was someone living in it.

The road curved back and headed for the long lane between the hills, and Kernehan lost sight of the town. But at the bottom of the grade the road forked. A sign that he couldn’t read, all letters weathered away, pointed arrow-like in the direction of the far sandy sink. A road to nowhere, Kernehan thought. To the right at the top of a rock cairn was a new sign, painted on the back of a tomato crate. Tarwater Store Now Open.

Kernehan swung the car right.

A quarter mile farther on there was another sign. Water For Sale.

A good commodity to be in possession of, Kernehan thought, in the middle of this country. He wondered if the water was brought in by truck, or if there could be a spring. The living tree, a leafy tower at least thirty feet in height, indicated the probability of the latter.

He drove up the middle of the street between the ruined and rotting buildings. From the distance the place had looked like a western town, the kind of thing you saw all the time in the movies or on TV; but close at hand the damage took away any semblance of life. No one had lived here for a long time. Through the cockeyed-leaning doorways he saw sunshine on weedy floors.

On a fallen porch was a third sign. Fresh Eggs.

Kernehan shook his head in disbelief. What a crazy place to start a business!

Someone had heard him coming. A man came out of one of the tents and stood shading his eyes against the brightness beyond his hatbrim, a lanky man as thin as a wire in sun-faded overalls, brown shirt, farmer’s straw sombrero, and bandana neckerchief. The tent flap moved again behind him; someone else was still inside, looking out. Kernehan sized up the two tents and the truck and the chickens hurriedly as he parked and got out. It all looked neat and shipshape, even temporary as it was. The truck wasn’t new, but the stakes had fresh paint on them and the windshield gleamed free of dust. The chickens seemed lively enough. The hens were singing; it sounded strange off here in this silent wilderness.

Kernehan stretched himself briefly, relieving his shoulders after the grind of driving. Then he walked over to the waiting man.

Getting close, Kernehan saw how old he was. He was a weathered scarecrow of far more than sixty. Hands and arms were marked by the knotted veins of old age, under the tan. Below his jutting chin the tendons made a double groove into the neck of the shirt. He spoke in a half-deaf treble. “Yes, sir. What can we do for you, sir?”

Kernehan paused and looked around. “I saw your signs.”

“Need water?”

“I brought some with me. Not knowing there was any available out here.”

“Oh? Well, we set up store here, we got groceries and homemade bread and fresh eggs. Meat’s all in cans, o’ course. Want to have a look?” As if taking Kernehan’s wish for granted, he headed for the other tent, lifted a flap and tied it back, and Kernehan found himself looking into a neat array of shelves, canned goods, a counter made of boards set up on a couple of sawhorses.

The old man was business-like. He went promptly behind the counter and waited, his air implying that if Kernehan had come to Tarwater it must be to visit the Tarwater store and therefore to buy something. Kernehan entered the tent. The canvas floor had been swept clean, the broom stood in the corner. There was the smell of the fresh wood drying. “How on earth did you happen to come here?” Kernehan asked bluntly.

“Wanted to get out of town. Bought the land off a mining company. They went broke. I knowed about the spring here for years, went through here years ago before it silted up. All I had to do was dig and cement’er up. Then my grandson and me bought the truck and the chickens and the tents. At first we was just going to raise chickens, only then we decided to sell groceries too since we had to haul our own.”

“And how is trade?” Kernehan asked, watching closely.

“Ain’t much to speak of. But I figger, what if we even sell a few dollars’ worth a month, we’re still ahead on our own grub, getting it wholesale. The boy likes to eat.”

Kernehan, in the doorway of the tent, looked back. A kid in his late teens had come out into the open. He had a shock of black hair, a long strong-looking torso, sturdy legs in denim jeans. He was bare above the waist and deeply tanned.

There’s more to this than the yarn the old man’s telling, Kernehan thought disgustedly. “Give me some canned tomatoes,” he said, remembering that this was standard desert provender against both hunger and thirst. “Some corned beef, canned potatoes—I don’t suppose you board people for a few days,” he added suddenly.

“Never tried it. Don’t know why not, if you can stand our cooking. What did you say your name was?” The old man’s stare was direct and almost challenging.

“Mike Kernehan.”

“I’m Milo Bucklen. Yonder’s my grandson, Randy Bucklen. What kind of business would be keeping you out here?”

Kernehan looked back steadily into the unwinking washed-out eyes. “I’ve got a week’s vacation coming. I just wanted to do some prospecting.”

The old man began to stack canned tomatoes and potatoes on the counter; Kernehan noted that he shook his head several times. “No use you tryin’ to board here with Randy and me—you’ll be wanting to sleep and eat out wherever it is you’re working. I’ve tried prospecting in my day, it wasn’t something you come home at night from like other work. I’ll make you a load of grub.”

“I’m just a rockhound,” Kernehan corrected. “I haven’t lost anything in that forty miles of broken country I saw from the ridge, I’ll be in at night.”

The old man hesitated, and Kernehan thought that he was trying to think of another excuse to get him going. If anything was going on, anything remotely connected with that business of robbing the railroad, they wouldn’t want a stranger camped here. At the same time, he thought dryly to himself, what an excellent supply depot this would make for the thieves, what a fine way to get food, water, and other necessities under cover of the old man’s strange business venture.

The old man’s vein-knotted hands hovered over the canned goods on the counter. “I don’t know … I kind of hate to take your money, get you to stay here. I never heard of much of anything in gem stones, this part of the country. No agate … jasper … opals—they’re further west, up around Daggett, that country.”

“Rockhounds are pretty thick there. I’m looking for new fields.”

After another moment Bucklen shrugged, began returning the cans to the shelves. “Well, sir, it’s your money. What’d you reckon would be a right price for a day’s vittles? Five dollars sound too high?” He seemed to wait hopefully, and Kernehan wondered if by some strange chance he could be honest, be what he seemed, and actually need the money.

“It’s okay.”

“I make fresh bread most every day. Boy eats it by the loaf. We got lots of eggs, can fry up a chicken at night if you’d like that.”

“Sounds fine.”

“You going to start with lunch?”

“Might as well,” Kernehan said. “It’s nearly lunchtime now.”

The old man led the way back out of the tent, lowered the flap, and tied the string. “Then where you headin’?”

“Maybe out in the direction of that big sink I saw coming down.”

“Nothing out there,” Bucklen told him. “Used to be borax works down there, but it wasn’t good quality, they gave it up. It’s just an old salt-lake bed, what it is. If I was you and wanted something in the line of rocks—don’t think you’ll get anything like agate or jasper, but you might run across a few geodes—I’d run up a few of them saddleback canyons down yonder.”

“I’ll give it a try.”

At the tree the old man paused. Beyond, in the shade, Kernehan saw a cement rim above a round boundary of desert rock, evidently the well Bucklen had cleaned out. “One thing I better mention now while I think of it. Nights, we get a powerful passel of coyotes down here.”

“I’ll bet you do.” Kernehan wondered why he hadn’t pretended to be hunting. It would give an excuse for the gun, of sorts. A rifle would have been better; but he had had no inkling of what he would find in Tarwater; and so now, no need to regret. “How do you keep them out of the chickens?”

Bucklen coughed and spat. “Been lucky so far. Chicken house ain’t much, we built it out of old boards we salvaged from the town yonder, and you see what that is. We got to bring in new sound lumber, build a good one. Till then Randy sleeps out there, takes his cot and blankets, sets up right by the chicken-house door. One night … it was moonlight … he wakes up and there’s a big buck coyote looking him over from less’n a yard off.”

“What did Randy do?”

“Chucked a shoe at him. Must of got him pretty hard, we heard him howlin’ all the way up the ridge.” Bucklen jerked his head toward the rocky heights above the town.

“Randy must have a pretty good aim.”

Something closed up tight behind the old man’s face, almost a warning, Kernehan thought, as if comment about the boy’s personal qualities were somehow out of bounds.

“Maybe he’s got a future in baseball.”

Bucklen had half turned away. Now he looked back briefly. “Where you aiming to sleep, Mr. Kernehan?”

Kernehan had given this some thought. “Well—I hadn’t expected to find a place where I could put up as good as this. I suppose I could go back to town, pick up some blankets, and come back and sleep in my car.”

“No need for a trip to town. We got blankets. Give you a cot if we had one. Don’t have.”

“I’ll be fine in the car,” Kernehan said.

“I won’t charge for use of the blankets,” Bucklen decided. “We’ll just say the five dollars covers that, too.”

“Thanks.”

Bucklen went past the other tent to a crude outdoor fireplace made of rock, and began to build a cook fire for lunch. He shaved a board to kindling, worked with a few torn scraps of newspaper, got a blaze going. He wasn’t slow in his motions. He was wiry and adept.

Kernehan thought to himself that the place wasn’t at all bad for the old man’s purpose—which seemed to be to get away from it all. There was not only apparently plenty of water, the wood supply should do nicely for quite a long while.

Kernehan called over to him, “Guess I’ll look the town over.”

Bucklen lifted his head from the small, carefully built blaze. “Just watch your step. It ain’t too early for snakes, and they’ll be shedding. Makes’em mean.”

“Have you seen any around?”

“Not yet. Ain’t really been here long enough. Warm weather coming, they’ll show themselves.” He blew on the faltering flame. “Might be they’ve stowed themselves under those old buildings. So keep an eye peeled.”

There was little to see in the broken-down town, and Kernehan failed to run into any snakes. He found a small patch of desert lupine under the toe of the ridge, a splash of lavender bloom all alone in the midst of sun-scorched rock. A couple of lizards scuttled away. From somewhere a door hinge creaked now and then, faintly, as some semidetached bit of an old house stirred under the wind.

He came back up the middle of the street, feeling the silence around him, the hinge squeaking and the noise of his boots on the earth only echoing the hollow quiet. Then he saw the boy, Randy, squatting in the shade of a lopsided porch. He had picked a splinter off one of the timbers and was chewing it and waiting. Kernehan decided the boy had been waiting for him. “Hi,” he said to Randy. “It’s hot.”

“Yes, it is. Going to get hotter.”

“The summer will be something. You and your grandad going to stay here through the year?”

“Guess so.” Randy took the splinter from between his teeth and made marks with it on the earth beside the rotted porch floor.

“Where do you attend school out here?” Kernehan wondered.

“I don’t.”

“Graduated from high?”

“No, sir. Just a junior this year, if …” His voice died.

There were state laws on the subject, but Kernehan didn’t see how they could be enforced under the present conditions of isolation.

“Do you like it out here?”

Randy gave him a look—at first Kernehan had the idea Randy was looking to see if he was crazy. Then he decided that the look meant it was none of his business, and again he had the impression of overstepping, of trespass into forbidden territory. He turned so that Randy couldn’t see his face, afraid that it would betray his conviction, the sudden hunch; there was something funny going on. The air of concealment was too obvious.

The old man might really need the five bucks a day, or he might have decided that Kernehan could stay so that he could keep an eye on him. He and the kid. The kid was keeping a sort of surveillance right now, come to think of it.

“I should think you’d get lonesome for other young people,” Kernehan offered, looking at the expression on the boy’s face.

“Wouldn’t matter if I did.” Randy rose lazily to his feet. He drew a deep breath as if bored. He was going to make a husky man, Kernehan thought. The shoulders were already broad and deep, the arms well muscled, the hands sturdy. A good-looking boy. Too bad he had to have this sort of start, mixed up in something.

“How about hunting?” Kernehan asked.

“I’m not allowed to have a gun.”

“Your grandad’s rule?”

Randy nodded briefly. He wore tennis sneakers on his feet. He used one foot to blot out carefully the aimless scratches he’d made in the dirt, as if even a little something to do was better than nothing.

They went back together to the camp. There were tin plates and cups set out on the plank table under the tree, and presently Bucklen put the food on—frying-pan biscuits and creamed chipped beef made with canned milk, canned tomatoes, slabs of brick cheese, and coffee. It was surprisingly tasty, Kernehan discovered. The old man was no slouch as a cook.

The kid ate an enormous meal. Bored, Kernehan thought.

When Kernehan headed for his car after lunch, Randy hurried after him. “Can I go?”

Kernehan looked at Bucklen, who was still sitting at the table after lighting a pipe. “If you want him along,” Bucklen said, as if indifferently.

Was it part of the pattern, keeping an eye on what he was doing? Or was the kid really eager to get away for a little while?

“Just one thing,” Bucklen added. “Iff’n you take a notion to go to town, bring Randy back here first. He don’t go to town. Not ever.”

Kernehan got into the car, the kid getting in opposite.

Kernehan was thinking of the other pattern, the other bunch whose members never seemed to get to town, either.

Chapter 14

Farrel had awakened a little after five o’clock that morning, feeling chilled and apprehensive, the aftermath of a disturbing dream.

In the dream he had been standing just inside the open door of his home, the house he had owned years ago, and coming up the front walk in the sunlight outdoors had been his wife and child. In spite of the bright light, the clarity of the surroundings, the two figures had had something insubstantial about them. They were more like shimmering illusions than real people, and no amount of squinting and focusing made them any more believable. In the dream Farrel had made a tremendous effort, willing them to be alive, willing them to take on flesh and bone; and when he woke his heart was pounding and his face wet with sweat.

Twenty years ago his wife had walked out, taking their child, and Farrel had never heard from her again.

He got up and went into the bathroom and splashed water on his face at the basin. He dried himself, feeling the quiet of the house around him. Soon Mrs. Bellows would be in the kitchen downstairs, preparing breakfast for the boarders, rattling pots and crockery. Farrel thought about the day ahead and decided not to wait; he’d warm up last night’s coffee and get out before she stirred.

He went into his room and looked over the clothes in the closet. He selected the least wrinkled of several shirts hanging on hooks. Pants needed pressing; he looked at the baggy knees in disgust. The jacket had a button gone, a raveled spot near the cuff. It was time to buy some clothes for himself, a chore Farrel put off as long as possible.

Dressed at last, he went to the dresser and tightened his tie. Then he bent and pulled open the bottom drawer, and from a nest of old papers and magazines and pocket-sized books he took a bottle of whisky. There was a good-sized snort left in it. Farrel tilted the bottle against his teeth.

In the kitchen he heated coffee, poured it into a cup, drank it standing by the nook. The kitchen smelled of cooking, a clean yeasty smell, and of the battery of soaps and cleansers with which Mrs. Bellows attacked every cranny.

He rinsed the cup, left it in the sink under the tap, went out to the parking space in the rear, and got into his car. The car was eight years old; it started sluggishly. He listened to the motor, thought about the long desert miles to Vermillion. Well, he’d put in an extra quart of oil; that should do it.

He picked up a pint at the first liquor store he saw open; stowed it in the dash compartment. When he reached Colton, he stopped in a diner for another cup of coffee and then, since Richie would be on duty by now, he headed for the freight yards. Richie was there, but he had nothing new on the robberies, nor on Jennings’s murder.

Farrel headed the car for the highway east out of town, and then changed his mind and swung back. He drove out past the warehouses and truck depots as he had done before, past the used plumbing and stands of pipe, to the lot with the broken pavement and the faded used-car signs and the shack at the rear.

It took a lot of knocking before Mac stirred, before the bed creaked as he got out of it. He came to the door wrapped up in an old bathrobe. His eyes were watery and his face covered by a gray stubble, and under the network of broken veins his flesh looked pasty. “Hello, Farrel.” He left the door open and waddled back to the bed. “I’ve been sick with the flu. You better not get too close to me, you’ll catch it.”

“Need a pill?” Farrel asked, sitting down and glancing at the array of bottles on the table.

“Full of’em,” Mac complained. He stretched out on the patchwork quilt, reaching down to wrap the bathrobe across his shins. “Mostly it’s just resting that gets you over it. My widow lady’s been bringing me soup and stuff. What brought you back so soon?”

“Well, we’ve figured out how it’s being done,” Farrel said.

“They’re using rope ladders, hanging down the side off the catwalk and hitting the cars while they’re moving.”

“No kidding? I’ll be damned!” Propped on an elbow, Mac shook his head unbelievingly. Then he thought it over for a minute. “Pretty cute. It means they know just what cars to hit. They know exactly what’s inside. What’d I tell you?”

“Oh, sure, it has to be. I’m on my way to the Vermillion office now to try to get a line on the stoolie. He’ll be expecting me, of course.” Farrel had spent the previous afternoon going through the records in Personnel. A few scraps of what he had learned flickered in memory: one man, a clerk who had almost twenty-five years with the company, was in a mess financially, had been buying a new car and a houseful of new furniture on time, and had at the same time at his wife’s insistence gone co-signer on a note for his brother-in-law. The brother-in-law had skipped out with the loan money, and now the clerk, whose name was Grofsky, was in over his neck and growing visibly more shaken every day—according to the grapevine. One of the young clerks in the Vermillion office had been warned on making book on the races, was a notorious gambler. Another had a two-year-old baby with a heart defect, had been financing trips for his wife and baby to eastern specialists.

Mac said, “You don’t know where the stuff’s going, yet.”

“No, we haven’t figured that out.”

Mac stretched out on his back and looked at the cracked plasterboard ceiling. “Jeezez, I feel lousy…. They’ve got a spot picked where they throw down. A truck waiting. If you knew where it was you’d have them cold turkey.”

“If we knew. And if they used the same spot every time.”

“Big hunk of territory out there. Damned empty, too. Anything like they got ought to be pretty conspicuous. Why don’t you run over the country with a helicopter?”

“There are helicopters out. The sheriff’s office has one for desert rescue, and the marine base the other side of Vermillion sends them out in flocks in all directions. If there was a new warehouse, we’d know it. We’d know it without helicopters.”

“Yeah, sure,” Mac agreed. “Oh, I guess I didn’t tell you. This guy Jennings, the one got killed in the gravel hopper, he was trying to peddle some tires a while back. I was chewing the fat with the kid in the lot next door, and I mentioned his name, and the kid remembered him.”

“How come they didn’t buy?”

“Jennings must of got scared off somehow. He made the deal, but he didn’t come back with the tires. This was several weeks ago, a long time before he got bumped.”

“New tires?”

“He said so.”

“Kernehan’s got a hunch Jennings was with them,” Farrel said, thinking aloud. He remembered Ryerson’s surmise, that one of the gang might try something along the line of individual enterprise.

“Then Kernehan’s got a good head on his shoulders,” Mac commented. “Jennings might have needed a little cash and made off with some of the hot stock.”

Farrel nodded, but now he was remembering how the kid in the lot next door had made him for a cop, and the conversation that had passed between them. “You brought up Jennings’s name?”

“Sure. Just casual-like. And the kid remembered.”

“I wouldn’t do any more talking to him. I don’t like his looks.”

Mac grunted, “Aah, he’s just a snot-nosed squirt. I asked him what kind of car Jennings was driving, how’d he get out here, and how he happened to pick that lot over there, and the kid said he hadn’t seen the car, all he did was overhear Jennings talking to the boss.”

“I don’t like it,” Farrel said abruptly. “Leave him alone.”

“Don’t believe it, then,” Mac said with a touch of grouchiness.

“I think he was giving you a line,” Farrel added. “And I’ll bet he’s told his boss about your curiosity.”

“I might be sick,” Mac promised, “but if anybody comes pussy-footing around this shack, I’ll fix’em so they won’t forget.”

Farrel lit a cigarette and sat smoking and thinking. He didn’t quite know how to figure what the kid had told Mac. It could be a lie, something made up on the spur of the moment to lead Mac on and have him asking other questions. Or it could have some truth in it. The funny thing was, if it was true, it fitted in with all of Kernehan’s suspicions. Kernehan might be a pretty-boy cop and a pain in the neck, all togged out and with something eating him he wasn’t talking about, but there was nothing wrong with the inside of his head. He was smart.

Farrel said, “I wish you’d keep your ears open. Find out if any of the hot stuff has been coming his way. But don’t talk to that kid again. Leave him alone.”

“I’m telling you,” Mac growled, “they fiddle around with me and they’ll wish they didn’t.”

When he left, Farrel closed Mac’s warped door and paused on the broken paving, covering his looking around by lighting a new cigarette, and sure enough over in the next lot by the wire fence was the kid. He was sitting on the earth, pulling a wheel off a wreck, and Farrel thought that though his back was turned, there was somehow about him a look of listening.

Farrel walked out to the curb and got into his car, moving deliberately, and sat for some moments behind the wheel as if thinking things over. He saw the kid take a couple of looks over his shoulder at him. He thought, I ought to go back and tell Mac to keep his eyes open. But then, it wouldn’t do any good. Mac knew the score and should be able to look after himself. He’d been a railroad cop, and these last few years—Farrel suspected—he hadn’t been above garnering a shady buck if it looked safe to do it.

Farrel drove away, headed east out of town, and the desert miles began to roll away under the tires, the sandy stretches of nothing fading into tawny distances, crumpled hills coyote-colored, brushed by the empty wind.

He noted the big, abrupt change as he drove near Vermillion, the sudden greenery and the smell of irrigation water and weedy canals.

At the freight yards he looked up Dyart, and Dyart took him into the office and they pretended to go over some reports, nothing to do with the recent thefts, while Farrel could get a look at the three men he thought most promising.

Grofsky, the old-timer who was in such a financial bind, was a tubby type with sandy hair and reddish skin. He was on the phone at his desk during most of the time Farrel was in the office. While he made calls and listened and talked, he constantly twiddled his knuckles on the desk and gnawed his lips, giving every indication that he was as disorganized and apprehensive as the grapevine had it. With all that extra movement, Farrel couldn’t understand why Grofsky wasn’t thinner.

Dyart pointed out the young clerk who gambled, a tall dark-haired man in his twenties, quite good-looking. He was working at filing some reports and seemed, in contrast to Grofsky, utterly relaxed. His name was Mark Kodear. Farrel looked him over, and then looked at the other one Dyart indicated, the clerk who had a baby with a defective heart; and then Farrel’s eyes swiveled back to the younger man. “Kodear …”

Dyart said, “Seen him before?”

“I don’t know. I thought so for a minute.”

“He worked in the L.A. offices for a while, couple of years ago. In Commissary, I think.”

“Guess that’s where I might have seen him.” Farrel looked away, out the window, his gaze thoughtful. They were on the second floor of the rambling Vermillion offices, and below were the freight yards.

A teletype machine had begun to clatter in a corner of the office. After a while Kodear left the file cabinets, went over, read through what had come in, detached the message with its five carbons. He discarded the carbon paper, put the original copy on a spindle on a desk by the machine. He headed out the door with the four carbons. Farrel knew where they’d be going—the yardmaster, the agent, and other officials. The original copy on the spindle lay there for all to see. Farrel went over as if on his way to the water cooler. It was a train consist, all right. He paused to look it over, noting that it had been sent from the division point in New Mexico and that among other things there were two carloads of tires.

He and Dyart went outside. “Suppose you pass the word that I’m from the Car Distributor’s Office in San Francisco, I’ve come down here to try to round up some cars for Imperial Valley produce.”

“If Kodear knows you, he’ll know better and he’ll tell the others.”

“I don’t think he made me,” Farrel said slowly. “In fact, somehow it wasn’t exactly him I recognized … I’ve seen someone who looks a lot like him, and I can’t remember who.”

Dyart nodded. “All right, I’ll tell everyone you’re from the Car Distributor’s Office.”

“It will give me a chance to scout around, not just inside but everywhere.” A big freight swung into view down the track in the bright sunlight, and Farrel remembered the consist on the spindle upstairs. “I noticed a couple of carloads of tires coming in tonight on their way to L.A. I want to be here when you check them.”

They arranged to meet at eight o’clock, and Farrel got back in his car and drove off. He had made note, in Los Angeles, of the home addresses of the three clerks he was most interested in. He inquired at a service station, got directions for all three.

Kodear lived in an old home which had been turned into bachelor apartments. Long ago, when there had been river traffic on the Colorado, Vermillion had been a river port. There had even been an army post here, with cavalry ready to protect the settlers, and those traveling through, from the Apaches. Kodear’s neighborhood seemed to belong to this older area of the town. The street led down to the wide muddy Colorado, the old homes sitting back under immense shade trees. There were picket fences, most of them needing paint, and some of them needing pickets. Lawns were scraggly. At Kodear’s address the gate was missing, and the walk which led up to the wide shadowy porch had cracks in it, grass growing in the cracks. Three signs were tacked, one above the other, on a porch pillar. The bottom one said: Apartment For Rent. The middle one: Garage For Rent. The topmost: Sleeping Rooms. Farrel parked the car and went up to the porch and punched the button beside the door.

The inner door was open, and through the screen he could see a red hall runner, dim-papered walls, and a big staircase to the upper floor. The smell was warm and muggy, the odor of an old house lived in for a long time, the smell of people. He heard tripping footsteps. A blond girl came to the screen, leaned close to look out at him. “Yes, sir?”

“About the sleeping room …”

She widened the opening, turning. She let him come in and inspected him sharply, Farrel thought on the instructions of someone older, looking for obvious disqualifications like shabby clothes and a dirty neck and perhaps the bloatedness of the heavy drinker. “It’s an upstairs room, front. A nice big room. Mamma put in a new mattress, and there’s all new curtains. She doesn’t mind smoking, if you don’t do it in bed, but she’d rather the tenants didn’t drink.”

“How much is she asking?”

“Fifteen a week.”

“Would she rent it by the night?”

She glanced at him uncertainly. “Gee, I really don’t know. I guess so, though. How long would you want it?”

“Three or four nights.”

She was slender and pretty. About eighteen. The blond hair had a tight natural wave, and she wore it cut short, in little ringlets. “I’d have to ask her. Meanwhile I could show it to you, if you’d like.”

She went up the stairs with a light quick step, and Farrel followed more slowly. The place looked very clean. Farrel regretted that the girl’s mother didn’t want drinkers, because he would have liked to sleep here, where it was quiet and well kept, like Mrs. Bellows’s place at home.

When he had inspected the room and expressed his satisfaction with it, he mentioned to the girl that he was a railroad man. “I don’t suppose you have any other railroad people here?”

“Oh, yes.” Her eyes lit up, quite blue and sparkly. “Mr. Kodear. He’s over there.” She indicated the door opposite, the other front room. “He’s been here ages.”

Crazy about him, Farrel thought, and remembered Kodear’s dark good looks and his lazy air of amiable humor.

She was looking at Farrel more closely. “Do you know him?”

“No, I don’t. You see, I’m here from San Francisco, the offices up there.”

“Oh, I see.” He obviously lost glamor, not knowing her friend.

“When could I call, find out if your mother will rent by the night?”

“She ought to be back here inside an hour.”

Farrel went back downstairs, thanked the girl for her trouble, went back to the car. He knew which room Kodear occupied, knew that a lovely eighteen-year-old was infatuated with him, knew that to judge by the house Kodear wasn’t living beyond his normal standard as a clerk.

He headed for Grofsky’s.

Grofsky’s place was on the outskirts of town where some new houses had been built on rising ground, perhaps to catch the breezes in summer, and obviously to give a new view of the Colorado. They were nice houses, low and ranchy, some of Mexican burned brick and some of native stone. The cars in the carports were long and glittering. The big front yards were landscaped with various kinds of ice plant and desert creepers, something to withstand the frightful summer heat.

At Grofsky’s address a patio opened at the side and under a big umbrella he could glimpse a woman in a lounge chair, stretched out and reading a magazine. She seemed perfectly at ease, in contrast to the fidgety creature in the office.

Farrel decided that Grofsky was either at the edge of ruin, or had a private gold mine.

Perhaps a private gold mine full of tires.

Chapter 15

Mr. Howery parked at the curb at about five-fifteen, went up the walk and unlocked the front door of his flat, let himself in. He made a tour of the apartment, pausing beside the new television set which had been delivered the previous evening. Then he sat down listlessly by a front window. He tried to think of the evening ahead, watching the new TV and having a couple of beers, but his enthusiasm failed to rouse.

All at once he noticed his mother’s knitting, in its bag in the corner of the couch, and as if suddenly rather indignant over it he got up and took it to a closet, stuffing it into a high shelf. Then he sat down again, and the moping expression gradually returned.

The job seemed to be taking a lot out of him. He thought, of course he was getting older, driving around all day talking to contractors and their building-supply agents was tough on a man his age. But still, there was more to it somehow than that. There was a loss of zest, of a taste for living, that he couldn’t understand.

He knew he was trying to fool himself. The loss of interest and excitement was due to one thing—losing that girl named Margie. As long as he’d had her to think about, to plan a meeting with, he’d been fine.

It couldn’t be love, of course.

He swallowed nervously at the idea. He couldn’t ever remember being in love. Getting interested in another woman had seemed, vaguely, an affront to his strong-willed mother.

Mother had been first, and of course his primary loyalty had been to her.

These memories caused such a feeling of discomfort, almost alarm, that Mr. Howery went into the kitchen, opened a cold can of beer and came back to the corner where the new TV had been installed, and clicked on the switch. He sat down and stared resolutely at the screen.

When the thing got itself in focus he watched for several minutes before realizing that this was a rerun out of a western series, something about a sheriff who wouldn’t use a gun but instead always trapped the baddies by twirling a horsewhip. He had seen it at least two years before on the old small-screen set, and making it bigger hadn’t improved it. He went over and twitched the knob to other stations, but it was too early for the really good programs. He got cartoons, the weather, a pompous news analyst, a rock-and-roll jamboree at which he stared for a while in near disbelief. Then he switched it off.

He returned to the window. The spring afternoon outside had a certain softness, not yet that of twilight, but a quiet hint of fading that foretold the end of day. Mr. Howery stepped out on the porch and glanced around for the evening paper. A touch of breeze fanned his face, and he realized that he was sweating.

He saw the car sitting at the curb. He’d better put it in the garage. He went back inside for the keys, which he’d laid on a table. Then, before picking them up, he went over to the bedroom door and stood there, then crossed to the closet. He found himself reaching for Uncle Sherman’s overcoat, the faded hat.

Funny the way they changed him. He could go anywhere—he was turning before the mirror, looking at the transformed military figure—he could even go to Colton, for instance, and no one would know him.

He went back to the living room, stood lost in thought in the middle of the rug. The address on Tamarind Street blazed in his mind.

The silence of the old-fashioned flat seemed to have a soundless titter behind it, the laughter of an imp driving him on to mischief. At the same time there was a momentous feeling, as if the whole face of the future might be changed by his decision.

He took off the coat and folded it. Put it on a chair, the hat on it; then sat down to think some more. But with a sudden air of energy he got up, took the folded coat and the hat, his keys, and went out to the car.

As he drove eastward the twilight darkened. Well and good, Howery thought. He could drive around Colton without being seen too well, and as for the house where the girl had gone—perhaps the shades would be up.

He ran into a few fog patches the other side of Santa Ana Canyon, worried for a time that he might have trouble getting home again. He remembered the dense fog of the last two weeks … nothing he wanted to sample on a freeway full of traffic. By the time he reached Colton, though, the night was clear. He asked directions at a corner store, finally found Tamarind Street. It was on the outskirts of town. He passed a little grocery with a painted tin sign over the door, advertising wine. The block looked kind of shabby, what he could see of it under the single street light. Beyond, he could see no more houses; he sensed open fields out there, perhaps acres being plowed for spring planting. Howery parked his car just beyond the little grocery, got out, shrugged his way into the coat and put on his hat.

There were no sidewalks, just grass verges at the edge of the paving. He walked on the grass and examined the houses as he passed them. All of them had lights on, and few shades had been pulled. It seemed to be the kind of neighborhood where people didn’t have much to hide.

He went down one side of the block to the end. This was the even-numbered side, he realized finally, when he caught sight of a house number. At the end of the block, though it was dark, he could see the broad fields dimly, could smell the plowed earth. Lights twinkled far away; he saw that they were moving, knew that it must be a line of cars on a highway. He turned around, crossing in the shadows, his hands thrust into the pockets of the overcoat. He passed two or three houses, one of them dark. At the fourth he looked in through the unshaded window, and his jaw dropped.

She was in there. He could see her almost as distinctly as he had that first time in the supermarket. She was standing beside a straight chair, and on the chair was a suitcase with the lid up. She seemed to be inspecting, or repacking, the contents.

There was another woman in there with her; Howery gave her a brief glance. Then with pounding heart he turned in at the walk—crooked, uneven underfoot—and passed beneath a big pepper tree and mounted the steps to the porch. He was close to the window now. The lights inside made it bright as a stage setting. The girl by the suitcase was bent forward, and her hair had swung against her throat and chin the way he remembered, heavy and silky, moving with an almost liquid weight. He had not known until this moment how vividly her image had impressed him. He recognized with a startling clarity every feature of face and build, and even her movements were familiar, as if he had known her for years.

He couldn’t find a doorbell. He knocked.

The girl jerked erect, threw a glance toward the door. Then she looked at the other woman, as if expecting some kind of instructions.

The other woman grabbed her by the arm and hustled her away, through a door to a rear room. She closed the door, then walked toward the front of the house. Howery got a good look at her. She was young and attractive, about the same age as Margie. A nice figure, inside a cotton print dress. Brown hair cut short, feathered around her face. She came to the front window and yanked down the blind, practically at the end of Howery’s nose. Her expression was one of anger and frustration, as if she regretted not having remembered the window before this.

Shut out into the dimness of the porch, Mr. Howery half hoped she intended to ignore his knocking. His heart was pounding faster than ever, and the unthinking impulse which had brought him to the door hadn’t had an accompanying increase in courage. Mr. Howery even backed away a couple of steps. Then the light came on above the door, pinning him in a bright circle. At this moment he remembered the glasses, which had so transformed his face—he’d forgotten them. He yanked at the hat brim, licked his lips, felt his heart lurch alarmingly.

“Who is it?” she said through the closed door.

“I … I came to see Margie.” The words came out weirdly, almost a squeak. His vocal cords were tight as fiddle strings.

“What’s your name?”

“I’m just a … just a friend.”

“You have a name?”

“Mr…. uh … Howery.” Mad, mad, his thoughts echoed; you’ve given her your real name. Must be insane.

“What do you want to see her about?”

“I …” Panicky ideas seemed to rattle around inside his head like pebbles dancing in a whirlpool. “Tell her it’s about the things she tried to sell in Los Angeles before she left.”

“Things?”

“The notice she wrote for the … the bargain board in the market.”

There were no further questions. Mr. Howery sensed that she had gone to talk to Margie, though she had moved away without a sound. He waited. He had begun to sweat again, and when the overcoat collar grew damp the moth-repellent smell came out quite distinctly.

He turned his back on the light, in case she should return and open the door suddenly.

After some minutes he began to feel uneasy. The house was too quiet. By now, this other girl had had time to ask Margie if she would see him, and come back with Margie’s answer.

He moved to the edge of the porch, then down a step. The step creaked. Howery started nervously at the unexpected noise. He went down into the yard and waited there, listening for some sound from inside the house. It was utterly quiet. The two women must be in some rear room, hiding there, waiting for him to go away.

Margie wasn’t going to talk to him.

He felt a sudden sense of rebuff. Here he had come, quite innocently wanting to help her, to advise her—since she seemed to be in some sort of strange trouble involving freight trains—and she had simply refused to answer the door.

He was torn between two desires, a common-sense hunch that he had better go away and forget all of this, and another perverse wish to press on to the end, even perhaps to force the girl to listen to him and give him her confidence. Her remembered image swam against the dark, a young and lovely and somehow defeated girl, a girl to whom life hadn’t given ease and luxuries and pretty clothes.

With a renewed pumping of his pulse, he swung around the corner of the house to the dark yard at the rear.

He stumbled against something, some wooden pot or tub which was movelessly heavy, filled with dirt and a potted shrub of some kind—as he tried to catch himself his hands flailed amid stickery branches. He got his balance, paused to listen. There was still not a sound.

In the house next door were lights and radio music. When his eyes had adjusted somewhat, the reflected glow allowed him to make out the immediate area. He saw the back porch, closed in, a rickety set of steps.

He went to the rear door and lifted his hand to knock. It was quite dark here; there was a latticework and vines the other side of the porch. Just as he started to knock he was aware of danger and tried to draw back. Something whistled toward his head, and there was a smashing noise. Mr. Howery went to his knees, doubled up inside the heavy overcoat. He felt a tremendous gush of cool liquid down the inside of the coat collar, and smelled a stench of wine.

His hat fell off, and he fumbled for it.

The second blow was much more solid. Not a bottle. More like a chunk of wood. Mr. Howery toppled over and rolled down the rickety steps to the grass. He lay there, breathing a smell of leaf dust and earth. He was not entirely unconscious. He knew when the two women rolled him over and went through his pockets, unbuttoning the overcoat to get at them.

They whispered together.

“Did you ever see him before?”

“No, never!”

“He must be one of them.”

“I don’t know. He doesn’t look like anyone Hart ever described to me. I’d remember. He’s not … not husky enough.”

Mr. Howery tried to open his eyes and stare her down for the insult. Here he was, her friend. And she was belittling him.

“Maybe he’s the one who handles the business end. Sells the stuff,” the other woman whispered. Her breath carried the same stench, the winey odor, that seeped from his clothes.

“Look for his wallet.”

They got his wallet, finally, by unabashedly manhandling his backside. “Can’t read it here,” said the winey one.

“Here. I’ve got a match in my purse.”

There was the flicker of match fire, and he could see the two of them, Margie with her bright hair and pretty face, the other one more sulky and sultry. They went through his wallet while he made protesting grunts that somehow didn’t get past his lips. A numbness was spreading through him; his fingers tingled, his toes and the soles of his feet prickled as with a million needles; and then all four extremities went dead. Even semi-conscious as he was, Mr. Howery was struck by the terrifying realization that the blow might have injured his brain and caused a paralysis.

He tried to sit up. The women had lit several matches while they examined the wallet. Abruptly the last match was blown out, the wallet was flung in his face, and he heard them running. He tried to call after them, he managed a kind of croak. Then a terrible pain, accompanied by expanding red lights behind his eyes, caused him to retch and reel over.

When he regained consciousness, he crawled on elbows and knees to the back steps. He pushed at the door, but it remained firm. He slid down the steps and began to crawl again. He inched his way past the wooden tub with the growing bush, on into the front yard. Everything seemed bathed and aglow with a strange gray light. There was dew on the grass. It was a while before Mr. Howery realized that the gray light was the beginning of a new day.

He was on hands and knees, still crawling though he had fallen often on his face, when there was suddenly a horrific scream from one of the houses. An old woman in a red housecoat and two little girls in pajamas ran out and encircled him, the old woman screeching something about bad boys and robbers. In the gray light she and two pig-tailed children had the unreality of demons. Mr. Howery collapsed and lay flat.

Presently there were more people, and then there was a siren, and the cops.

“Hell, he’s drunk,” said one cop as he bent over Howery. “Smell him.”

“Look at the back of his head,” said the other voice. “Wait, don’t move him. Hell, there’s glass in his hair. Somebody conked him.”

Mr. Howery listened dreamily while the argument went on above. One cop believed him to be a common drunk and wanted to throw him into something—a tank. The other kept saying, in a more intelligent voice, that Howery’s head showed signs of a blow.

Finally one of the pigtails came running with something—the crowd made a way for her. From the conversation that then went on, Mr. Howery gathered that the little girl had found his hat and his wallet and a blood puddle. The cops went away to look.

“You poor man.”

By means of a sidewise glance Mr. Howery made out the old lady who had first discovered him. She had curlers in her gray hair, and on her chin was a brownish mark with a couple of dark hairs growing out of it. Her eyebrows grew straight out, like a line of porcupine quills. The eyes weren’t any color at all. As long as he lived, Mr. Howery thought, he would remember that face against the panorama of gray sky and pepper-tree tops.

Then his vision closed, like a lens clouding, and everything grew faraway. He was almost out when the ambulance came. One of the cops got into the ambulance with him and the intern and tried to question him on the way to the hospital, until the intern put a stop to it.

The bed had an antiseptic starchiness, and the doctor’s hands had rough cool palms and hard bony fingers. He poked at Mr. Howery’s skull with the bony tips, then clipped hair off the back of his head (now how will that look? Mr. Howery thought dismally). There was a fierce stinging in the wound, and Mr. Howery jumped.

“You’re all right, you’re fine,” said the doctor, bending close behind horn-rimmed glasses. “Guess we’ll have you sleep a while. Had a bad knock and some rest will do you good. Any idea who bopped you?”

“Margie.”

“Margie, huh? She a friend of yours?”

Somebody jabbed a hypodermic, and Mr. Howery yelped.

“Margie Who?” muttered the doctor.

“I’m never going to follow another woman again,” said Mr. Howery, lapsing into slumber.

Chapter 16

Kernehan spent a restless night trying to make himself comfortable in the back seat of his car. It was a horrible way to have to sleep, he thought; he made a promise to himself to go to town in the morning to buy a cot. Finally, however, he stretched out by sticking his feet through the open car door and dropped off into slumber; he was awakened once by the yapping of a coyote on the ridge but went back to sleep at once.

The sun came up bright and warm in the clear desert sky. Kernehan awoke, unwound himself from the blankets and crawled out. He saw Bucklen over by the outdoor fireplace tending a griddle, a pancake turner in his hand. There was a smell of bacon frying. Randy was washing himself in a basin on a bench by the sleeping tent. He picked up a towel to dry himself, caught sight of Kernehan. He grinned, his teeth looking very white in his tanned face. “Hi!”

Kernehan waved back, then stretched himself to get the kinks out. The kid showed a liking for Kernehan, though Kernehan couldn’t help but wonder if it was an act. He and Randy had spent the previous afternoon hiking around in the hills nearby, presumably looking for gem stones. Kernehan had, in fact, been looking for hidden roads. His efforts to draw Randy into conversation about the old man’s reasons for coming to Tarwater didn’t produce much, either; Randy seemed to accept the situation philosophically, though Kernehan sensed his inner restlessness and boredom.

In the evening after dinner Randy and his grandfather had played checkers by the light of a gasoline lantern.

Kernehan had walked away from camp, off through Main Street to a clear spot where he could see for miles off in the dark, hoping to catch some glimmer of light out there. He stood there to smoke a cigarette, aware of the vastness of the night, the black skies overhead, and the brilliant stars. He had waited for almost a half hour. The unaccustomed hiking and climbing had tired him. He had gone back to the car, wrapped himself in the borrowed blankets, and tried to sleep.

He wondered if Randy would ask to go with him again today, and then an idea occurred to him, a way to test the kid, and he decided that if Randy asked he would agree.

He washed up and sat down at the outdoor table, and Bucklen served breakfast for the three of them. Kernehan found himself with an unexpected appetite. No doubt about it, the open air made you ravenous. Breakfast over, Kernehan offered to help wash up; Bucklen shook his head.

“I got all day,” the old man said. “Need something to keep me busy.”

“Maybe you’ll have some customers today,” Kernehan said, nodding toward the store tent.

“I might,” Bucklen agreed.

“When was the last—before I came?”

“Week ago. Two prospectors. Fellers in a jeep. Didn’t buy much, they just kind of looked around. They figured I was here for something besides raising hens. Uranium, they thought They kind of snuck around with Geiger counters when they thought I wasn’t looking.” A wry smile touched Bucklen’s lips.

“Think they found anything?”

“Any uranium ain’t been found yet is so far up in the hills they’ll need flying machines to get to it,” Bucklen declared.

“I guess that’s right.” Kernehan had gone to his car, folded the borrowed blankets, took them to Bucklen’s tent. Then he had checked the water bottles and made other obvious preparations to take off, watching to see if Randy intended to come along. The kid was helping his grandad and kept glancing in Kernehan’s direction.

Finally, Kernehan got in behind the wheel and gunned the motor. Randy left the camp site and came over, not too close, looking at Kernehan in the dazzle of morning light. “Where you heading today?”

“Further than we went yesterday,” Kernehan said. “Out to that salt lake, maybe beyond.”

“That dry lake’s almost five miles across,” Randy said.

“Well—like your grandad said, I’ve got all day.”

Randy seemed to hesitate over something he wanted to say. Kernehan wondered if the kid disliked the role he was supposed to play, the role of spy; and then dismissed it. The kid wasn’t that subtle. Most likely he simply wanted to come along and thought that perhaps Kernehan didn’t want him.

“How about it?” Kernehan asked. “Coming along?”

“Sure.” There was a sudden wide grin; it looked genuine. “I’ll tell Grandad.” He ran to Bucklen, and they held a brief conversation. The old man seemed to make some weak protest which the kid argued down. Then he came hurrying back to the car. “I can show you the road. You have to know where to turn, in this country. Some places, it’s all washed out and even the ruts are gone.”

“Good deal.”

Kernehan drove to the fork where the side road turned to Tarwater. To his right the main track led down between the two ranges of deeply eroded gray hills; the salt flats glittered in the sun. “Maybe you can help drive part of the way,” Kernehan suggested.

“Oh, I don’t drive,” Randy said hastily. He didn’t glance at Kernehan; he was looking at the road.

“Don’t you drive the truck?”

“No.”

Kernehan said, “Do you mean that you don’t know how to drive, or that you’re not allowed to?”

“My grandad doesn’t let me.”

“He’s kind of strict. A lot of kids of your age have their own cars.”

Randy shrugged, still not turning to meet Kernehan’s eyes. “Yes, I guess so.”

Covering up, Kernehan thought. It was obvious that the kid was hiding something, that the something involved old man Bucklen, who held a whip hand over him.

Kernehan abruptly changed the subject. “Isn’t there a railroad out here somewhere? Should be, if I remember the map. Cuts across from Vermillion on the river. Headed for L.A.”

“I can show you the tracks,” Randy agreed, something relieved about his tone. He was glad Kernehan had gotten off the subject of why he didn’t drive. “You have to cross that salt lake, though.”

“I was going to cross it anyway.”

Now Randy gave him a curious stare. “Why do you want to see the railroad?”

“Hell, I don’t know.”

“There isn’t a depot or a station, or anything like that.”

“I don’t see why there would be, country as empty as this.”

Randy said, “Jack rabbits don’t buy train tickets.”

They were almost at the foot of the first row of eroded hills. Kernehan could see how deeply gullied and serrated they were. The soft clay had been worn into knife-edged promontories, terraces, and pinnacles. The hard strata between stuck out like frosting oozing from layers of a cake. Under the stark morning light it had a bright unreality like a landscape from another planet.

Dry, too, Kernehan thought, aware of the desert’s ever-present threat. A world where you could die of thirst without any trouble at all. “How far to the next water hole?” he wondered to Randy.

“There’s an old mine about fifteen miles the other side of the dry lake. But Grandad says the water’s bad, it’s full of alkali. He says that when the mine was running, years ago, they could use it to wash ore. But they had to haul their drinking water.”

“He seems to know a whole lot about this part of the country.”

“He was born here,” Randy said, not without a touch of pride. “He lived in Vermillion when it was still a fort. He saw the last of the river steamers.”

Kernehan was thinking: if the birds he and Farrel were looking for had wanted somebody to run store for them, to contact them across the trackless miles, they couldn’t have found a better man than Bucklen.

“You were born here, too?”

“No, I wasn’t,” Randy said promptly. There was an abrupt silence.

“What about your folks, your mother and father?”

“My dad died with a heart attack when I was five years old,” Randy said, something in his tone careful and guarded. “My mom is sick. She’s in the county hospital. She’s got T.B.”

“Tough luck,” Kernehan said, and meant it “How long have you been with your grandad?”

“Two years.”

“Did you go to school in Vermillion before you moved out here?”

“No.” Randy shifted as if the line of talk made him uneasy. “Look, you’re coming to the salt flats, you’d better watch where you drive. You can get stuck out here real easy.”

“I guess you know the way better than I do,” Kernehan said, “and so how about you driving for a while?”

He sensed the temptation that seized the kid. Randy looked at the wheel with visible eagerness. The hands spread on the knees of the denim jeans opened and shut twice. Then his expression closed. Without looking at Kernehan he said, “Ah, Grandad wouldn’t like it.”

“He isn’t here, he doesn’t have to know.”

The voice turned stubborn. “I’d better not.”

Old man Bucklen had trained the kid to obey, even when he wasn’t with him. Kernehan decided that the stakes must be pretty big, the instructions pretty emphatic.

Kernehan picked his way along a road that was simply two packed ruts in a wilderness of glittering white salt-and-sand. The wind whipped up a little dust, and it had a clinging and silty quality that made Kernehan want to wash out his mouth and spit. And then, again, ghost-like came the memory of the fine dust in Jennings’s clothes, the tag end he always stumbled over, as if someone had tried to tell him something and he had missed it.

The dust seeped into the car, though they had rolled up the windows. “Look at it,” Kernehan muttered. “Like a fog.”

“Washed down here, I guess, when it was still a lake,” Randy offered.

It took almost an hour of careful driving, some of it in low gear, to get across the sandy sink. Kernehan could feel the fine dust in his nose and throat, seeped down under his collar, even—it seemed—inside his socks.

When the road rose from the salt sink into a fringe of rocky hills, Kernehan pulled up and set the brake. “Let’s have a drink of water and take a look around.”

“Here?” Randy gazed out as if seeking something Kernehan might have seen.

“Why not?” Kernehan reached back for a water jug, offered it to Randy. Randy drank—warily, somehow.

Kernehan got out of the car and walked over to a ridge of bare rock and kicked some of the loose rock with his boots. Randy came after him, stood watching. “I thought you wanted to find the railroad tracks.”

“We’ve got plenty of time.” Kernehan saw tire tracks in the dust, tried to judge how fresh they were. They looked pretty fresh. He pointed them out to Randy. “How would these get here? I haven’t heard a car go by your grandad’s place since I’ve been there.”

“I don’t know. Somebody might have come as far as this salt sink from the river, then turned back.”

“This road goes all the way to the river?”

“Grandad says it does.”

“But not to Vermillion?”

“No, north of there, an old river-boat landing.”

Kernehan was watching him. The kid seemed puzzled over his interest in all this, nothing more—on the surface. “Have you ever been over there?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“I guess there are more roads out here than I thought there’d be.”

Randy nodded. “Most of them aren’t even on the map. Of course, if there’s a washout, a flash flood, they have to make a new road anyhow. Sometimes it’s easier just to take a whole new route.”

Kernehan was studying the make-up of the country this side of the sink. The hills were lower and rounder and less eroded, with big stony outcroppings. There were fewer soft claybanks, a lot more shale and granite. Probably a geologist would know all about it.

“How long since your grandad’s been over this way?”

“Quite a while.” Randy was following Kernehan around, as if Kernehan might find something of interest and he should be on hand. “Last time, it was when a guy came through from this direction in a jeep, said they were going to rebuild Waybole’s Mine and open it up. Grandad drove over there to see.” Randy pointed northeast.

“You went along?”

“Sure. We didn’t find a thing. Waybole’s hasn’t been worked for thirty years, according to Grandad. It’s all fallen in, the machinery’s rusted. I wanted to go in the tunnel, but he wouldn’t let me, he said the timbers might be rotten.”

Kernehan thought this over. The old man’s rushing off to inspect Waybole’s Mine could mean that the rumor had alarmed him with its promise of strangers in the vicinity. Or something about Waybole’s itself could be important. “How far is it?”

“It’s kind of on the way to the railroad tracks,” Randy offered.

The kid hadn’t been warned, then, to keep people away. Kernehan and the boy got back in the car. The road wound upward through the granite outcroppings, forked on the other side of a low ridge. Randy showed Kernehan where to turn.

Waybole’s Mine seemed to be just what Randy had said it was. The buildings had collapsed into a much worse state of ruin than the town of Tarwater. The ore-crushing machinery was a tangle of old gears and rusted cables. The sun shone on the ruin with impartial brightness. All around them the hills gleamed copper-colored. Kernehan walked about, Randy following. “What did they mine here?”

“Silver. It played out.”

“Is this the mine with the alkali spring?”

“Oh no,” Randy said. “That’s a lot further. It’s past that spur of the mountains over there.” He pointed out a tawny, far-off ridge that swam against the sky like a mirage.

“How would you get there, if you wanted to?”

“You wouldn’t want to,” Randy assured him. “I’ve heard Grandad warn people about the road and the bad water. Something happens to your car in country like that, you’re dead.”

“You’re dead anywhere out here,” Kernehan said, looking at the land.

“Oh no, not if you stay on the main roads.”

The kid talked as if they had been traveling a highway, Kernehan thought wryly.

Kernehan strolled over to the yawning black opening in the side of the hill and stepped inside. Instantly he felt the coolness and smelled the earth-odor from the darkness beyond. He looked at the framing at the entrance; there were dusty patches on the timbers, a hint of rot or of termites. He came back out. “Well, let’s go.”

They drove off, northeastward. Randy seemed quieter now, and Kernehan wondered if the kid was puzzled over the change in his own spurious interest, from rock hunting to exploring old mines and hunting for a railroad.

They passed through miles of country that seemed to duplicate itself, one rocky ridge and one shallow desert valley after another—and then, in the distance, from a slight rise Kernehan caught sight of twin rails gleaming in the sun.

Randy pointed. “There it is.” He glanced at Kernehan. “There isn’t anything here but the tracks.”

“I can see that.” The rails cut westward across the barren desert, the only changes a couple of fills and a culvert to protect the tracks against damage by flash floods. The road didn’t cross the tracks, but turned east some hundred yards this side. Kernehan drove up to the turn, parked the car, got out. Again Randy followed; Kernehan noted there were no questions now, but a quiet kind of observation. He didn’t like it.

He climbed to the top of the slight grade. What he had hoped to see were tire tracks, some marks on the earth, anything to indicate this might have been the scene of a robbery from the cars; but there was nothing. In the silence he could hear the desert insects singing, a subdued buzzing.

“Are you going to wait for a train?” Randy asked suddenly, as if this might expain Kernehan’s interest.

“Guess not.” Kernehan went back down the embankment, digging in his heels. The earth was hard-baked by the sun. There were a few scrubby desert bushes, dwarf mesquite and ocotillo. Kernehan stood by the car and looked eastward. “How far to the Colorado from here?”

“I haven’t been much further than here,” Randy said, still looking at him curiously. “I guess it’s twenty miles or so.”

“How’s the road?”

“Washed out in spots.”

“Does the road run near the railroad all the way?”

“I don’t think so. The road goes to the old river station,” Randy reminded. “The train goes to Vermillion.”

“They must cross somewhere out there,” Kernehan said, thinking aloud.

“I guess they do.”

There was a funny silence, and Kernehan wondered what the kid was thinking.

Chapter 17

Kernehan would have liked to continue eastward, but there were several objections he could think of. He wasn’t sure of the kid, one way or another—crooked or otherwise. Then, he had to make a trip to town for a cot to sleep on, and to call L.A. and see if Pete had had any luck with the numbers on those tires.

He turned, without explaining to Randy, and drove back the way they’d come. They passed a spot where someone had made camp by the road; there was a clutter of a half dozen or so rusting tin cans, and suddenly Kernehan remembered the rest of his plan. He braked to a stop. He grinned at Randy. “How about some target practice? Just for the hell of it?”

“Some what?” Randy stared as if doubting what Kernehan had said.

“Shooting. Bang, bang.” Kernehan opened the dash compartment and took out the police revolver. Randy’s eyes widened, and he sucked in a breath, seemed to draw himself flatter against the back of the seat.

Kernehan waggled the gun under his nose. “How about it? Think you can bounce a can around? Are you a good shot?”

Randy seemed to control his sudden fright. “I can’t. I’m not allowed—”

“Oh, now, stow it! What’s the harm in a few pot shots out here next to nowhere?” Kernehan jumped from the car and ran out and lined up some of the cans, propping them on some granite outcroppings, slipped off the safety, and let off a couple of shots. The still air vibrated with the echo, and two cans sprang into the air as if alive. He looked back. Randy was still in the car; there was that eagerness again, like hunger denied, as when Kernehan had offered him the wheel of the car. But there was something else, too: a haunted guilt. My God, Kernehan thought, the old man really has him bugged.

He walked to the open window on Randy’s side. “What’s with you, kid?”

“Nothing, sir. Nothing at all,” Randy said formally.

“Don’t like to shoot?” Randy’s eyes wavered; Kernehan added, “Most kids would jump at the chance.”

“I guess so, sir.”

Randy kept looking at the gun in Kernehan’s fist. Kernehan said, “You can come out here and watch me, then.”

“I’ll just wait in the car. If you don’t mind.”

“You think I’d tell your grandad?”

“I know you wouldn’t.”

“Well …”

Randy seemed to bite back on something he had to say, and then he blurted, “It’s just that he trusts me.”

Kernehan went back to popping cans and thought that over. He didn’t believe that Randy refused to shoot because of any respect for the old man’s wishes. Kernehan thought to himself, hell, I know kids. I know how they think, how they feel. They get away with everything they can. So it isn’t that the old man trusts him, it’s that Randy knows something around here is so big and so dangerous that he can’t risk breaking one little rule.

Satisfied, Kernehan got back into the car. They plowed through the salty waste to the other side, climbed the hilly grade toward Tarwater. “I’m going on into town,” Kernehan said, unable to resist one final test. “Want to come along?”

“I can’t. I’d like to, though.” Randy’s tone seemed almost wistful. If you didn’t know better, Kernehan thought, you’d believe that it was just the old man’s picayune rules that kept him in line.

“I’ll even buy you an ice cream soda.”

Randy licked his lips. “Let me ask Grandad.”

When they got to camp, Bucklen wasn’t in sight. Randy apparently figured his grandad would be lying down for a noonday nap; he headed for the sleeping tent. He stayed in there a couple of minutes. When he came out, his manner had changed and Kernehan realized that the old man must have forbidden the trip. Randy looked at Kernehan and shook his head. Then he turned in the direction of the chicken yard, as if Bucklen had reminded him of some chore to be done.

Kernehan turned the car, headed back through the empty, rutted street between the old buildings, climbed the ridge, and began to look for the highway in the distance. He had forgotten how far it was, had forgotten the long empty valley and the look of desolation. He wondered as he drove how often the old man took the truck into town, and what Randy did with himself while his grandad was gone.

The kid was under tight control, too scared to break free.

In Vermillion, Kernehan found a secondhand store and bought a used Army cot for a couple of dollars. He ate at a lunch stand. He phoned L.A., and though Pete wasn’t in the office because it was Saturday, he had left word for Kernehan that the numbers on the tires had checked out, that they were part of a stolen shipment.

Kernehan called the Vermillion office, hoping to catch Farrel there. He finally got hold of the day patrolman, who gave him Dyart’s home phone number. But Dyart didn’t know where Farrel was. “I’ve got something for you, though. Richie called from Colton. There’s a character over there in the hospital, somebody named Howery, who wants to see you.”

“Who?”

“Howery. That’s all I know. Richie didn’t explain.”

It was almost four when Kernehan entered the hospital room. He saw Howery in a bed beside the window; Howery wore a lot of dressings on his head, and he looked remarkably sick, gray-skinned and shrunken. He said, as soon as he saw Kernehan: “I want to make a complete confession. I made them move me to this private room, so that we could talk. I’ve got a lot to tell you.” He started right off then, almost before Kernehan could sit down in the chair by the bed, a rambling preamble about his mother dying and how he had begun—just out of loneliness, or something—to follow women on the street. He stressed, more than once, that he had never molested anybody.

Kernehan listened and believed, in spite of a feeling that the stuff was too fantastic to be true.

“Then one night I saw this girl in the market. She was very pretty. There was something kind of … hard to express it … sort of beaten down about her. As if she hadn’t had a very easy life. I felt sorry for her, very sorry, even in those first moments. She wrote a notice for the idiot board … bargain board, I guess I should say. You know, where people can advertise rooms for rent, used fur coats, cars—of course they don’t let you try to sell anything they carry in the market. Or I don’t imagine—”

“She wanted to sell some tires,” Kernehan put in grimly, remembering his visit to her home.

“How did you know?”

Kernehan shrugged. “We made some inquiries.”

“Maybe you know”—Howery’s gaze grew worried—“maybe you already know all of this.”

“No, we don’t know much,” Kernehan assured him. “Go right on talking.”

Howery continued, telling Kernehan all about his following the girl to her home, then on to the freight yards. “You can think me a liar, but I did follow her into those freight yards with a wish to protect her. She was young and lovely, and that was no place for her.”

“I’m not arguing with you over your motives,” Kernehan said. In spite of Howery’s queer habits Kernehan could not help feeling sorry for the sick and miserable man. “What did she do in the freight yards?”

“Someone must have told her exactly what to do, where to go. She headed straight across tracks in the dark to a gate in a steel fence, then on to wait beside a kind of overpass. There were mainline tracks there, I thought, and through trains that didn’t seem headed for the yards. She stood there a long time as if she had expected somebody.”

Kernehan kept his face blank, but he was convinced—she had been waiting for Jennings.

Howery patted sweat off his face with a handkerchief. “No one met her. Finally she left. I’m sure she hadn’t seen me.

“You were hidden up under the overpass,” Kernehan reminded. “The next night you came back, and that’s when I caught you.”

Howery flushed, two spots of color coming into his gray cheeks. “I was still curious, still afraid she might get into trouble.”

“She was already in trouble,” Kernehan pointed out, “trying to peddle stolen tires.”

“Well … I didn’t know that they were stolen.” Howery plucked at the hem of the sheet. “And perhaps she didn’t know it either. She looked kind of innocent. As pretty as she is—if she’d been a bad girl—she needn’t have gone shabby.”

“You have a point there,” Kernehan admitted.

“I guess you’re wondering why I really called you here, how I happened to be in Colton Hospital, and what happened to my head. Well, I called her home, and the landlord thought I must be the one she’d been waiting for, and he gave me her Colton address.”

More than he gave me, Kernehan thought.

“I realized that she had run away and that she must be frightened. So I followed her. She’s staying with another woman. They wouldn’t answer the front door, and when I went to the back yard—it was dark, this was last night—they tackled me with a club of some kind.”

In spite of Howery’s injured appearance, his obvious sorrow, Kernehan had a hard time to keep from smiling. The thought of the two women falling on the pudgy, inoffensive little man had its ridiculous side.

“I understand that the police are keeping a watch on the house now, waiting to ask questions,” Howery concluded, “and that the women haven’t come back. From snatches of their talk while I lay half conscious in the yard, I think they’re afraid of someone. They thought I was a messenger from some bunch of crooks. The other woman, the one with wine on her breath, suggested I was a ‘business agent’ for the others—whatever that means.”

“This was out on Tamarind Street?”

Howery blinked. “Yes. Did I tell you that?”

“Did the girl named Margie mention anyone named Jennings?”

“She said … something about someone named Hart.”

“That’s Jennings. He was murdered.”

Howery licked his pale lips. “Murdered. So he won’t ever show up.”

“No, he’ll never show up.”

“I thought—the reason I called you, told you the truth—I thought you might find Margie and try to help her.”

“I’ll watch out for the club she carries,” Kernehan promised.

“Oh no, Margie hit me with a bottle of wine,” Howery corrected. “It was this other woman who used the club.”

Kernehan couldn’t see much choice, but Howery was so worried and anxious and protective about the girl that he didn’t say so. He sat observing Howery for a minute or so. “Hadn’t it ever occurred to you,” he said, “that you would eventually get into serious trouble by trailing women and spying on them?”

Again the red spots sprang into Howery’s pale cheeks. He fussed with the covers, brushed at his thinning hair, reached for a glass of water on the bedside stand and sipped at it. “Yes, I knew it. I’m not an idiot. But it was something I couldn’t seem to help. Like having a case of measles.”

“If I were you,” Kernehan advised, “I’d give it up.”

“I mean to.” Howery hesitated, as if thinking it over. “You know, since I’ve become interested in Margie—you’ll think I’m an old fool—but since then I haven’t really had the urge to follow anyone else.”

Kernehan nodded without commenting. “Well, suppose you give me a good description of her.”

“And you’ll find her?”

“If we can.”

“I don’t suppose you can tell me all about this thing she’s mixed up in?”

“Not now. And she may not be mixed up in it, I mean criminally. I think Jennings was.”

“He was a bad man, and he fooled her and she trusted him,” Howery mused, in the tone of outlining a romantic tale. “Now he’s dead, and she will need a friend.”

“Just watch yourself in the clinches.” Kernehan took down Margie DeWitt’s description. When he left the hospital he called Richie, told Richie the details, and advised sending out an all-points bulletin for the missing girl and her friend, Mrs. Pethro.

In the outskirts of Colton he passed a large specialty ice cream store, and on a sudden memory stopped and swung back. They had dry ice available, and airtight packing. He had them put up three quarts, various flavors. Then he swung out on the highway east. A dusky look began to hang around the edges of the horizon; the shadow of the car slanted far ahead along the pavement, then died out as the sun went down.

When he reached Bucklen’s camp it was dark. There was a fire under the outdoor cooking stove, the old man and Randy were sitting at the table as if expecting him. Kernehan saw that they had waited dinner. When he got out of the car, they welcomed him almost as one of the family.

Dinner over, Kernehan broke out the ice cream. The kid couldn’t keep down his surprise and pleasure—plus an appetite that allowed him to finish off half or more of every one of the quart containers. Kernehan and Bucklen mopped up what was left.

All the suspicion Randy had shown earlier, the guardedness with which he had answered Kernehan’s questions and suggestions, had vanished. The kid seemed to have become his friend.

Guard down, Kernehan told himself, figuring how he could use the kid in his plans for the next day. He needed Randy as a guide. Somehow he had to crack his sense of obedience to Bucklen.

Farrel was tired. He lay on his bed in the motel and stared through half-shut lids at the ceiling. He had been out all day, keeping track of his three men; and what he had learned he figured he could use to stuff a gnat. He had parked on a piece of rising ground where he could see Grofsky’s ranchy layout, and he had seen Grofsky come out and start early on the yard. His reddish skin seemed to grow redder under the sun, or from nervous tension. He ran around fiddling with the shrubs and creepers with the same air of frantic disorganization he’d shown in the office. He moved several plants—one of them twice. They promptly wilted, and even Farrel without any recent experience with gardening, had a strong suspicion that Grofsky had killed them.

When he seemed to have done as much damage as necessary to the yard, he had started on the car, washing it and applying polish, renewing the white sidewalls on the tires and bringing out a vacuum cleaner on a long cord to tidy up the interior. Just watching him had made Farrel feel exhausted, so that at noontime he’d gone into the downtown section and had a few quick ones. Then, somewhat revived, he had gone to check on Kodear. That had been easy—Kodear and the eighteen-year-old were playing ping-pong on a table on the wide old porch.

I don’t know why in hell I’m spending daylight on them, Farrel thought. They have to be good boys while people are watching. He decided to go to the motel and rest until night, then see what Kodear and Grofsky were doing with the Saturday evening. He had mentally crossed off the name of the clerk who had the baby with the bad heart; Dyart had found out that a heart association was footing a lot of the bills. He’d driven by the home on his way to Grofsky’s, and it looked like you would expect, the yard neglected and a rattletrap Chevvie about eight years old in the driveway. Nothing out of line—Farrel had made up his mind then, somehow of the three he liked Kodear the best. Grofsky showed every sign of finding himself in a blind with no way out, not the air of a successful thief. Kodear gambled and had a way with the girls, and most important had been the only one in the office who had shown a quick interest in the train consist.

Farrel lifted himself on an elbow, renewed the level in the water glass, drank, lay down again. The room was warm and close, smelled as if dust had been stirred up and the doors and windows kept shut. He thought about getting up, opening a window for some air, then let it go. He’d have to watch himself; he was woozy already.

He was near retirement, and Ryerson was showing a remarkable forbearance about the booze, but something had better happen in this thing. He and Kernehan had better pull it off. Kernehan was out there prowling around in the desert, and then Farrel found himself hoping that Kernehan wouldn’t get into trouble and be hurt or killed. He hadn’t known until that moment that he had begun to like Kernehan. He’d always thought of him as a good-looking pansy type—no, not quite that, either, just too interested in his appearance and his clothes. But Kernehan wasn’t really like that at all. He was smart and tough, the looks were an accident he’d probably had a hell of a time living down.

Farrel remembered the gossip, then. Kernehan had had a couple of run-ins with juveniles, and he was mean in that particular direction, and Ryerson didn’t give him jobs where juveniles were apt to be involved.

Well, there wasn’t much chance of Kernehan running into troublesome kids out on the desert.

Chapter 18

When Farrel awoke the room was dark. The pillow smelled of sweat. The stuffy air had left him dry-mouthed and heavy-headed. He reached for the bedside light, lifted himself, drank from the glass, then got up and went into the bathroom and splashed water on his face, combed his hair. Beard was showing, and he debated over it, knowing that in the end he would have to shave. A shave and a fresh shirt always made people think you weren’t drinking, at least at a distance. He looked into a suitcase he had left propped open on a chair. One clean shirt, thanks to Mrs. Bellows, who occasionally in frustration sneaked out the collection on his closet floor, and laundered the lot.

Shaved and showered and dressed, he checked the gun, slipped it into the holster on his hip. He took the bottle, almost empty, with him to the car.

He drove out first to Grofsky’s, having decided that Grofsky was the sort whose Saturday evening—if any—would start quicker and end sooner than Kodear’s. The lights were on in the Grofsky living room, and Grofsky and his wife were in there, plain to be seen through the unshaded window, having a fight. She was standing in a fighting-hen stance, head stuck out, yelling words Farrel couldn’t hear. Grofsky was walking up and down between the furniture, brushing at his sandy hair and waving his arms and apparently about ready to choke her. Farrel parked boldly, right across the street. He could even hear faint echoes of the yammering. He wondered if they were fighting over the brother-in-law who had negotiated the loan and then skipped out.

It ended suddenly, and without any violence. Grofsky came over to stand directly in front of his wife; he put his hands on his hips in a gesture that was somehow ridiculous and womanish. He stamped a foot. Mrs. Grofsky threw up her hands to cover her mouth. Farrel thought that she had burst into laughter.

Then she ran out of the room, and Grofsky went tiredly to a chair and sat down. He seemed like a thoroughly defeated and unhappy man.

After a while he lifted one foot, then the other, and took off his shoes. He rubbed his socked feet, winced, put his legs up on the hassock and stretched back and shut his eyes. He obviously wasn’t going anywhere.

Farrel drove back, parked near the big old-fashioned house where Kodear had his room. The lights were on upstairs, the room the girl had indicated, and now and then a shadow passed on the blind as if Kodear was moving about, getting ready to go out. When the light went out, there was a short delay, and then he came down the front steps and the young girl was with him. They went out to a car parked by the curb, probably Kodear’s. It was a low-slung little foreign job. Kodear drove fast, and Farrel had a hard time keeping him in view; and then in the end he and the girl simply parked downtown and entered a show.

Farrel checked the time when the show let out, and then went to a bar.

He sat, drinking bourbon and listening to the chatter, and then began to think about the case, speculating as to his and Kernehan’s chances with it. Kernehan was out there where he might actually run into something; Farrel figured he didn’t have quite the percentage working for him. Their boy in the office—Grofsky or Kodear or whoever—could be playing it so cute he’d never be pinned down. There would have to be a moment of carelessness, and so far in this thing there hadn’t been any. The murder of Jennings might fit in, too, and still not lead into the core of it.

Say that Jennings had been trying to peddle some of the hot tires, just as Mac’s hoody friend next door had suggested. Jennings wouldn’t have risked it unless he had been planning to skip. It implied that he was dissatisfied with the setup, or had someone pressuring him to get out, or was scared. He’d been scared, then, with cause. An outfit that killed to prevent one of its men from leaving was savagely dedicated and streamlined. Someone up top had made the rules and saw to it they weren’t broken.

Farrel thought, I should have spent some time on Jennings, checked back through what Kernehan had done, talked to the Colton P.D., and looked at the place where they found the body. There might have been something, a tag end, that hadn’t meant anything to Kernehan.

Farrel beckoned to the bartender. “You ever have a customer in here named Jennings?”

The bartender, a bald man with pale eyes, shook his head. “Gee, Chief, I don’t keep track of names. He a friend of yours? You can describe him?”

Farrel pushed his empty glass over. “How about a character named Pethro?”

The bartender lifted the glass, then hesitated. “Pethro. Wait a minute. Is he a kind of a dark guy, not too tall? Heavy around the middle?”

Farrel wasn’t familiar with Pethro’s description, but he nodded.

The bartender said, “The reason I remember him, I like to go fishing, see? And he was talking about a catfish he’d caught, over on the canal. It was a lie. No catfish ever got that big.”

“When was this?”

“Oh”—the bartender shrugged—“couple of weeks now, at least.”

“Did he say anything about where he was living?”

“Not that I remember.” The bartender set to work down behind the counter, refilling Farrel’s glass.

“Anyone come in with him?”

“Yeah. But I don’t remember anything about the other guy. I remember him calling this dark one Pethro, and then I noticed him because he was bragging about the catfish, and I remembered he’d been in before, but not often. And not lately.”

“Did they stay long? Get to feeling good?”

“They didn’t stay long, and come to think of it that other one was nervous, he kept wanting to leave. It was this dark one who wanted to hang around and brag about his fish.”

Farrel started on the new drink with something more to think about. Fishing—yes, that’s what you might expect them to do with their days. Close to the river, kept away from town, plenty of idle hours.

He beckoned the bartender over again. “He didn’t say he caught the fish in the river?”

“Nuh uh. The canal. You know, Toro Canal, it’s about ten miles west. Drains all the irrigation water back into the river. It’s full of catfish. But not that big.”

“I’ll have to have a look.”

“Take your fishing gear.”

Farrel had a third drink and then decided a walk in the night air was indicated. He walked around. The town was small, the stores somewhat countrified, in Farrel’s opinion. Plenty of bars. It figured, the town being a big railroad center, division point for his own road, lots of men working here, a lot of them transients. He strolled by the show. It was getting late, almost time for Kodear and the girl to come out. Farrel had a final bourbon and water and went to wait in his car.

Kodear came out right on the dot, the girl clinging to his arm. They went into a sweet shop next to the show for a Coke or something. Farrel could see them in there. The place was brightly lit. They sat at a table, and Kodear fooled around with a paper napkin while they waited; he folded it into rabbit’s ears and then clenched his hand and attached the paper ears and gave a remarkable impersonation of a bunny. The girl was enraptured. Kodear seemed to be amusing himself, not having quite as much fun as she was; a little bored, perhaps. She must be almost ten years younger than he, Farrel thought, and perhaps Kodear really liked them a little more sophisticated.

When they had drunk the concoctions the waitress brought, they went out to Kodear’s little foreign car, and Farrel followed them back to the house. They went in, and after a minute or so the lights came on in Kodear’s upstairs bedroom. He could be going to bed, Farrel thought—but then, the little car hadn’t been put away. It still sat at the curb, in front of the gate.

Kodear was inside for fifteen minutes. The lights remained on in his bedroom, but he came out again. He got into his car, coasted down the street for a little way before putting on the lights and switching on the motor. He had ditched the youngster.

Farrel let him get several blocks away, going toward the river, before he started his own motor. He circled a block, came back into the street, picked up Kodear’s low-slung job in the distance. At the river’s edge Kodear turned north. He drove for several miles, passed the last fringes of the town, then turned into a road that dropped down directly to the river’s edge.

Now, Farrel thought, we’re getting somewhere.

There was another car parked by the river and Kodear pulled in next to it and doused his lights. Farrel instantly switched off his own lights, coasted to a stop on the shoulder of the road. There was a rippling reflection off the water, and by it he saw Kodear get out of his car and enter the other.

Farrel waited, and an unexpectedly long time passed.

He had thought that this might be a quick rendezvous, a pay-off or a passing of information. In such case he would have expected Kodear to make short work of it, and leave.

In the dark, Farrel began to wear a cynical expression. He had a hunch that this was a different kind of rendezvous; Kodear wasn’t dark and good-looking and lazily amiable for nothing. He was the kind who attracted women as sugar draws flies.

Finally, in a move dictated by disgust at his own optimistic hopes, Farrel got out of the car and wandered down by the river, walking silently, and finally got close enough to hear the murmuring voices—Kodear’s and a woman’s. He thought about getting the flashlight from the car and tormenting them with a few flicks of light—they’d think it was the cops, or maybe the husband. Farrel had made a bet to himself that she had one. But instead, he went back the way he had come, got into his car, let it ride down the slope a little before putting on the lights and starting the motor. Then he headed for town, the motel, and bed.

Results so far: nothing.

Tomorrow was Sunday. Lying in the dark, Farrel made further bets with himself. Grofsky would go to church with his wife. They’d be all dressed up, walking arm in arm, smiling at the neighbors, who had heard last night’s fight and others, and weren’t fooled. Grofsky would put a dollar in the collection plate. And he would pray. He would pray hard to a vague and jittery idea of God for help against the burden of debt and expense. And beside him, Farrel thought, Mrs. Grofsky would be sizing up the other women’s hats.

Kodear would sleep late, rouse like a lazy cat, and prowl downstairs where both the girl and her mother would fuss over him and feed him. And Kodear, joking back at them, would wear a mysteriously satisfied smile.

One thing—Farrel’s eyes popped open at the thought—those tires on the train consist were being worked on right now, if the word had been passed.

And if it had been … where and how?

Kernehan opened his eyes. The sun was coming up. The sky above him was streaked with gold, there was an almost unbelievable clarity and brilliance to the air, the drip of water from the rim of the well had the plink of a plucked fiddle string. He stretched on the cot, drawing in the smell of morning. He heard Bucklen begin to stir around in his tent.

This could be the day, he thought.

Living and sleeping out like this made you feel so wonderful, you grew overly optimistic, he corrected. This could also not be the day, it could be a day like yesterday, plodding and rewardless. He wondered then momentarily how Farrel was getting along in Vermillion.

He rolled over. Beyond the end of his car he could see Bucklen’s layout, the two tents and the outdoor table and benches, the stone cooking pit and the mortared rim of the well, and the truck. He took a second look at the truck; he would have sworn it hadn’t moved an inch during the past two days. If Bucklen had gone anywhere in his absence, he had parked again with microscopic exactness. And brushed out his tracks.

Suppose … just suppose … that Bucklen was what he appeared to be, an eccentric old coot who chose to live out here and raise chickens for reasons which had nothing to do with anything crooked. It would mean that Kernehan had ignored a possible ally.

He heard the squeak of a hinge, a door banging open—Randy letting out the hens. Almost at once there was a lot of cackling and singing, as the birds started the day’s scratching. Then Randy must have thrown out some grain. There was a terrific squawking and fluttering of wings.

Randy came, carrying his bedding. He waved at Kernehan, who was sitting up. He looked like a kid who didn’t have a care in the world, Kernehan thought. Kernehan pulled on his pants and went over to the bench to wash. Randy was waiting. “Where’re we going today, Mr. Kernehan?”

Old man Bucklen came out of the tent and gave Kernehan a quick, sharp glance. He knew there was something fishy about the setup, Kernehan figured, and hadn’t quite put his finger on it. He must know by now that Kernehan was no rockhound, not even the most miserable amateur. A dedicated rockhound would have moved on after the first fruitless afternoon.

Kernehan said, “Oh, we’ll find something. Maybe up around that alkali water hole.”

“That’s a long way,” Bucklen put in. “Wouldn’t hardly pay you, I never saw anything there like what you’re looking for.” The way he said it made Kernehan prick up his ears.

“You know, to be truthful, I’m not much of a rockhound,” Kernehan said, telling Bucklen what he obviously already knew. “I just wanted to get out of town and see something new, some part of the country that wasn’t crowded and buzzing with traffic.”

Bucklen accepted this thoughtfully. “This is about the only part left. Lots of the desert’s getting built up, regular towns. Stop and go signals. Motorcycle cops…. Take Vermillion. Used to be quiet and sleepy. Had the railroad yards, of course. But hardly anybody drove through. Now it’s like the middle of L.A.”

“Not quite.”

“Well, it’s getting like the middle of L.A. used to be when I drove through it.”

Bucklen seemed quiet and reserved while he fixed breakfast, as if he had something to think over. When Randy again mentioned going with Kernehan, Bucklen looked up from his plate.

“Might be best if you stayed home.”

Randy seemed surprised, then downcast. But he didn’t put up an argument.

“He’s a help,” Kernehan said. “I don’t know my way around out there.”

“I don’t want him making a nuisance of himself,” Bucklen answered. He sounded as if he might mean it, but Kernehan was wary. This wasn’t according to the way he had figured things; Randy was supposed to be along to keep an eye on him. “Besides, there’s chores here.”

Kernehan couldn’t imagine what needed to be done in this carefree, camping-out existence, but he didn’t argue. “If I don’t show up by suppertime, send out a St. Bernard with a water jug.”

A faint smile touched Bucklen’s lips, and he nodded. When breakfast was done, he packed Kernehan a couple of sandwiches, reminding him that he’d missed a meal at noontime yesterday and that the five dollars was supposed to cover all three. Kernehan checked the water jugs in the rear of the car, looked into the radiator, and kicked the tires.

“Are you going to try to find the alkali well?” Randy wondered, standing around with a kind of repressed wistfulness.

“I don’t know. I might.”

Bucklen was watching them. Kernehan had a hunch that if the kid had asked again, his grandad would have let him go.

Kernehan drove through Tarwater’s lizard-inhabited ruins to the main road, turned north, and took the winding bumpy track down between the gray hills. The flat salt sink glittered with white fire under the sun. It was all getting to look familiar, Kernehan noticed; it had lost the harshness, the repellent sense of danger and isolation. Now it seemed just peaceful, and lonely.

He crossed the flat sink, the five miles seeming more like ten in the blazing light and the sandy road, and the impression of peace persisted until, along the railroad, he found what he had so long been hunting.

The first thing he noticed was a clump of broken dwarf mesquite. It had been crushed as if by a blow from a giant fist. Then he saw ocotillo and even a young barrel cactus, similarly smashed. He climbed the slight bank; nothing had been hit on the other side of the tracks. He remembered that the car he and Farrel had examined had had one door, one seal opened.

He looked for car or truck tracks and was a long time finding them. Finally he remembered his idea that morning about Bucklen, that he could have moved the truck, brushed out the marks; and Kernehan began to look for brush marks. He found them, finally. They led away toward a faint track in the brush. Not a road, just a trail where the scant vegetation had been broken by the passing of a vehicle. Here and there the tires had broken the dry crust of earth, left a faint imprint. Kernehan squatted to look. They were big tires. It was a good-sized truck.

Last night a shipment had been hit, something had been thrown out here, put into a truck, and taken away.

Taken, as Farrel had surmised, back toward the Arizona line and the Colorado River.

Chapter 19

Kernehan guided his car into the faint, crushed track across the rolling desert. For a while the going wasn’t too bad, though some of the crushed growth whipped and ground under his axles. Then there were more and more rocky out-croppings, the tire marks finally mounting to a wide stony ridge. Kernehan braked to a stop. There was no way he could follow without gutting the underside of his car. He realized then that the truck must be high off the ground, modified especially for desert travel or perhaps a converted army vehicle.

He got out of the car and hiked to the top of the ridge. The shallow valley below was impassable for an ordinary car; flash floods had washed away the sand and left a wilderness of rock. Kernehan even found it hard to pick his way through on foot, and he had a sudden dry-mouthed moment of thinking what it would be like to lie out here with a broken leg.

The air was hot, clean, the sun brilliant. He opened his shirt collar. He climbed the next ridge, a little higher than the first. Ahead lay a desert waste, a duplicate of the country behind him, with scrawny mesquite and cactus. Nothing moved in it, it lay open and sun-baked. He could see the faint track again, though, heading due east. And then, from far away he caught a watery glimmer—the Colorado.

It was so far that he couldn’t even be sure; it was more of a hunch than anything else. Fifteen or twenty miles, at least.

He pushed his hat back on his sweating forehead, chewed his lip. There was no way he could go on. It was too far to walk. His car couldn’t make it.

He hiked back the way he had come, turned the car, followed the track back through the brush. It was much better marked now, since his lower-slung car had plowed through, pulling and crushing the growth. At the road he swung east, remembering what Randy had said, that there was an old river steamer station at its end.

The road crossed the railroad tracks perhaps ten miles or so from where he’d last seen them. Kernehan got out here and looked around, but there was nothing suspicious. The road had been built up to cross the embankment, gravel spread on it to keep it from washing away, a crossing sign stuck in the earth, looking curiously unreal and out of place. He found the river station a half hour or so later. There were the melting remains of three old adobe structures, a couple of falling-down corrals, four rusting wheel rims which had collapsed into the ruins of a wagon, and out in the water the crooked piling of an old pier. Just what he would have expected, Kernehan thought. No footprints anywhere but his own, the dust of years blown over everything, the only sound the lapping and curling of the river water in the piling.

To the south, toward Vermillion, a track led out of town. It was too weed-grown to have been used recently. Off in the sunlit distance a couple of buzzards wheeled, keeping a lonesome vigil for something to die.

No one had been through here in months. So where was the truck?

And where was the stuff the truck had carried?

He felt an impatient anger. It seemed that they were allowed to find the truth bit by bit, and each bit useless and leading nowhere, their progress blocked at the next step.

He went out to the rim of the riverbank and studied the flowing muddy water, trying to rouse an idea, what to do next. There were mossy weeds growing at the edge. He saw a dark-colored water bird, a mud hen probably, darting here and there amid the weeds. The river, Kernehan thought suddenly, watching the darting bird. It has to be the river. There isn’t any other way. And he wondered why the idea had been so slow in coming.

As Farrel had said some time past, their quarry weren’t angels, weren’t flying through the air, stealing and transporting stuff on the wing.

Kernehan thought impatiently, I’ve got to rent a boat. He was in a hurry to get to Vermillion now, and attempted the track running south from the river station, but within half a mile the road vanished under a flooded and fallen bank, and he had to turn back again. There was nothing to do now but to drive all the way around the miles of open country, the salt sink, Tarwater, to the main highway.

He was in a hurry, but he was hot and thirsty too. He took a bottle of water from the car, slaked his thirst. It was past noon, the morning was gone. It would be three, at least, before he could reach the highway.

He drove as fast as possible, taking chances, and in the middle of the salt sink he made a mistake. The road fanned into a cross-hatch of tracks across a soft spot, and he forgot which were the safe ones and found his wheels bogged down and spinning. Then he had to work, gathering such scanty weeds as he could find, pebbles, anything to give traction, finally yanking out the rug in the rear of the car, before he could get going again. The sun beat down, and he had to drink again. He had begun to have a high appreciation for his own foresight in bringing those jugs.

When he got to the turnoff to Tarwater, in spite of his hurry he took time to drive to Bucklen’s camp. He saw at once that the truck was gone. When he pulled to a stop, Randy came out of the sleeping tent.

Randy hurried to the car, a hint of relief in the way he looked at Kernehan. He leaned in at the open window, saw the brown paper sack on the seat. “Hey, you didn’t eat your lunch!”

“Too busy,” Kernehan said briefly. “Where’s your grandad?”

“Gone to town.”

“What for?”

“Chicken feed and mail, if there’s any mail. Usually isn’t.”

“How long has he been gone?”

“I don’t know.” The friendly, relieved air was changing to one of puzzlement. “About noon, maybe.”

“Has anyone else been here?”

“You mean, to the store?”

“I mean, anybody. Anyone at all.”

“Nobody’s been here,” Randy said, lifting his elbows from the rim of the window and stepping away. “Is something the matter?”

The heat, the long struggle to free the car in the middle of the dry lake, the sense of being always too late in this thing, too stupid and ineffectual, tugged at Kernehan’s temper. “What the hell are you and the old man really doing out here?” Kernehan said tightly, and was rewarded by a definite look of fright from the kid. “This thing of raising chickens thirty miles from town, in the middle of the desert, and running a store where you don’t have a customer through in a month of Sundays … it’s nuts,” he insisted. “So why not just come out and say what you’re doing here? Give with the truth? For once?”

Randy turned away and headed for the tent, and Kernehan jumped from the car and went after him. Randy flung around. “You keep away from me.”

Kernehan stood with sweat running down his face, his fists clenched. “It’s pretty big, isn’t it? Too big for you to blab about.”

“It’s not so doggone much,” Randy said, “and I don’t have to talk to you about it. We didn’t ask you to come here, we weren’t the ones who offered about furnishing meals, or anything. We …” Randy’s voice was shaking, his face white even in the heat. “I even liked you,” he blurted out, then ran into the tent.

Kernehan yanked up the tent flap and went in. Randy had sat down on a cot, his face turned away. There were two army cots, the bedding folded in a heap on one, the one Randy must have moved out by the chicken house last night to guard against coyotes. Kernehan saw a stack of apple boxes in the corner, shaped up into shelves, with clothes piled in them. No TV of course, not even a battery radio. A single chair. In that moment Kernehan took in something that had heretofore escaped him. He said quietly to Randy, “How much did it all cost … two tents, the truck, the gear, chickens—”

Randy didn’t look up. He said, “Grandad had a thousand dollars saved. He’s got about two hundred left. He put four hundred and fifty into the truck, painted it with me helping. He spent about two hundred for the tents and the groceries, the rest for chickens and feed. He took some eggs into town today to trade on more feed. If we can make a go of the chicken business, we’ll stay.”

“And if you don’t stay?”

“I’ll go back to jail.”

Kernehan sat down on the other cot. “What’s it all about?”

“I stole a car. There was a gun in the glove compartment, just like in yours. I wrecked the car, and when the cops came I got excited and I … I used the gun to try to get away. I didn’t shoot, I just … showed it. They put me in a reform school and I didn’t get along so well, and I was headed for the … for something tougher. It didn’t seem as if anybody gave a hoot. My mother was in the hospital, and the county was paying my board with some people. Well, I guess that really didn’t have much to do with it.”

“Maybe not. Other kids have lived through it without getting into trouble,” Kernehan said. “What happened next?”

“My grandad was in a rest home in Vermillion. He’s got a bum heart.” Randy’s hands were clenched between his knees, the wrists bulging with strain. “When he heard about me, he got up out of bed and took all his money, and went to see the judge in L.A. Just to give me a break. He promised that we’d get out where I’d have … different surroundings.”

Through the lifted flap Kernehan could see the deserted, falling-in town and the high ridge and the empty sky. The hens were singing against the desert quiet. Kernehan said, “Well, I was wrong about you two.”

There was a space of silence. Kernehan knew he had to be on his way. All at once Randy said, “There was one time I was really scared. When I first figured you for a cop.”

Kernehan was startled. “When was that?”

“When you tried to get me to fire the gun. I figured you’d been sent out here to test me, to see if I was doing what I’d promised.”

Kernehan shook his head. “They won’t notice you until you get into trouble again, if you do. Do you still think I’m a cop?”

“Yeah. I guess it must have something to do with the railroad, though. That’s what you seem to be interested in.”

The kid was more observing than he’d given credit for, Kernehan admitted to himself. There wasn’t time now to think out all the angles to this thing, but one thing stood out like a light—the tough resolution of the old man determined to salvage his grandson.

Kernehan stood up. “I’m with the railroad, and I’m a cop. You can tell your grandad when he gets back. I’m going into town, and I don’t know whether I’ll see you again.” He put a hand on Randy’s shoulder. “So I’ll say this now. You’re doing fine. You’ve got a damned good chance to leave it all behind and forget it.”

“I sure can’t let him down,” Randy said.

“That’s right.”

Randy followed him out to the car. “If everybody … if every kid who got into trouble had somebody like him—”

He looked away into the empty sunlight as if suddenly embarrassed.

Kernehan had paused with his hand on the switch. He sat that way, quite still, for several moments. “Come back by, if you have time,” Randy invited. “Yes, I’ll do that.”

In Vermillion, Kernehan called the yard office, but since it was Sunday, Richie wasn’t on duty and the relief patrolman didn’t know how to get hold of Farrel.

Kernehan drove on down to the river, made inquiries about renting a boat. He learned that north of town was a fishing camp where outboards could be had by the hour. He drove out there, parked, walked down through a lot of clutter—boats being painted and caulked, stacks of lumber, supply sheds—to a row of cabins and a float. He rented an outboard, bought an extra can of gas. The owner offered fishing gear, and Kernehan took it as a cover for his real errand. Then he listened to a word of advice about currents and sand bars, and took off.

It was cooler out on the water. He passed several other fishing parties, some stationary with lines in the water and others headed up or down river looking for a better spot. Soon he was out of sight of the camp, and then of the other boaters. He was headed directly upstream at maximum speed.

All signs of cultivation dropped away. The riverbanks had wild, weedy growth, the hills rising starkly behind, tiger-striped with gullies and crevasses. The only sound was that of the motor.

He came after a long time to the old deserted river station. It was strange, looking at it again from out here; the adobe ruins and the falling corrals, the stubby piling, seemed so much more insignificant, almost lost against the long reach of the river and the tawny bareness beyond. He drew past, rounded a long curve in the river, and found himself looking at a new kind of country.

The hills grew steeper, they closed in upon the riverbanks. There was no growth, just a footing of fallen rock. Great striations of red sandstone jigged and jagged across the face of the cliffs. At the river level here and there the water had washed away soft layers, and Kernehan saw the black mouths of caves.

It seemed that there would be no landing place for miles here. He crept on, the cliffs growing higher, the muddy flood pushing hard against the laboring propeller. Then on his left, the west bank, he saw a break in the precipice. Some long-past upheaval had split the bank all the way down to the water, the crumbling walls had shed clay to pave the floor. It was a narrow, straight-sided canyon. He pulled in for a closer look, and saw all the marks on the muddy bank, tire prints and the prints of shoes, the long streaks where a boat had been beached.

He circled, idling the motor enough to keep headway. Inside the narrow canyon were several caves. He remembered how he and Farrel had speculated, and Farrel’s words: something big that belongs to the landscape. Well, it was big. And it belonged. It had been here longer than anything, including the old river station and any of the mine tunnels.

It was time to go back to town and report, come back with official reinforcements. Notify the FBI—they were always in on cases of theft involving interstate shipments. Get hold of Farrel, find out what progress he’d made, pinning down the gang’s connection in the office.

Kernehan drew in a little closer, trying to get a look into the caves. If he could make out just one box, one crate … he let the boat creep against the muddy bank, swinging against the current. He listened and waited. The muttering of the outboard echoed back from the tunnel-like opening, but that was all. He edged on, to a spot where the bank hadn’t been chewed up; he cut the motor, stepped out, grabbed the bow and pulled. He had a bad moment. The current surprised him, almost tearing the boat out of his hands. He felt the sudden wrench all the way up his arms and across his back. Then he had most of the keel out of the water, sliding up on the damp clay. He tipped the motor on its hinge, heaved the boat all the way out, stepped free. His boots were soaked, covered with mud. The sun was far in the west, so that there was shadow here under the cliff. There was a breath of cold from the narrow canyon. He had a sudden hunch, which he perversely ignored, that he was doing something that was a mistake.

He went a dozen feet and then stopped. He had reached for his hip, and then had remembered the gun—in the dash compartment of his car.

He shook his head over it, feeling the color come into his face at his own stupidity. Knowing what an old hand like Farrel would have said about it. Knowing that Ryerson would have canned him on the spot.

Farrel didn’t like him anyway. It was probably exactly what Farrel would have expected him to do.

He hesitated. But he was here, and this was what he had come to see. He shrugged inside the jacket, went on up into the mouth of the canyon. The slight wind that drew down through the slot had the smell of dust in it, and something more. The gas-and-oil smell of a place where a car is kept. He went twenty feet farther, and there, tucked under an overhanging ledge, was the truck. It was high off the ground on big wheels; it was rusty and dilapidated, if he had seen it anywhere on the desert he would have figured it for an abandoned wreck. He went past it, walking warily, and now he could see into one of the biggest caves.

He thought, a modern version of Aladdin’s.

There was a rattling, scratching kind of sound, and he turned. A man had been under the truck with a tool in his hand. He was crawling out. The wrench in his fist looked as big as a baseball bat.

He was very dark. Black hair grew low on his forehead. His waist was thick inside denim coveralls. His left hand hung free, and suddenly Kernehan saw the star-shaped tattoo on the wrist, and knew him.

This was Pethro.

Chapter 20

In that moment of astonished confrontation Kernehan was suddenly aware of and grateful for the clothes he wore, the faded dungarees and the old khaki shirt, the scuffed boots and leather jacket. The man facing him with the wrench in his hand stood solidly as if blocking him from the river, but in Pethro’s expression there was only annoyance; and Kernehan had a hunch that this same sort of thing might have happened before.

“What the hell do you want?” Pethro growled. He had a low, husky voice, in it a dragging hesitation that was almost a speech defect.

Kernehan glanced around, shrugged. “My damned outboard motor’s acting up, I pulled into the bank, and then thought I’d just see what was back here.”

“This is private property, no trespassers allowed,” Pethro said, in a tone of repeating something in which he had been instructed. “I’d advise you to move along, bud.”

Kernehan knew better than not to show interest in the truck. He walked forward a couple of steps. “That thing looks pretty beat up to me. Think you can get it running again?”

Pethro’s eyes didn’t change, didn’t warm up a bit. “I’m working on it.” He moved closer to the fender as if to let Kernehan get past.

“You herd cattle with it?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“This is a long way from anywhere.”

“It sure is, and it’s private property.”

Kernehan waved an arm. “Okay, okay. I can take a hint.” He went by, looking at the river ahead but wary for any movement from Pethro. Then he saw something that gave him a jolt. A big wide-keeled boat with double outboards had swung by the slit of view, obviously slowing for a stop. “Hey,” he said to Pethro, “there’s a boat, a big one!”

The pop-popping of the double outboards must have reached Pethro at about that moment. There was a flash of sour anger in his face, and he said, “Well, that does it. You’re going to be sorry, bud.”

“What have I done?”

“You’ll be sorry,” Pethro repeated, the dragging impediment in his speech almost tying his tongue. “You just stay put until we hear from the Big Man.”

“The Big Man? Who’s he?”

He had his answer in about five seconds. Apparently the sight of the strange boat on the bank brought them in a hurry—two men in dungarees and cotton T shirts, barefooted. The big one in the lead must be about six-foot-seven, Kernehan judged. Tall as he was, and wide as he was, he seemed to fill the narrow canyon almost from wall to wall. He had blond hair, almost taffy-colored; it looked as if he’d cut it himself. He had a lot of freckles on his face, a lot of yellow hair on his arms, and fists like a pair of hams.

Unnecessarily, Pethro muttered, “That’s the Big Man.”

“You’re right.”

The second, trailing behind, was about the size and build of Kernehan himself. At one time in his life he had broken his nose. He had the blackest sun tan Kernehan had ever seen.

The Big Man stopped in his tracks and regarded Kernehan and Pethro in silence. Pethro laid the wrench carefully on the truck’s hood. “He had motor trouble,” he said to the Big Man, “and he thought maybe I could help him.”

The Big Man thought it over and then smiled, or at least showed a double row of outsize white teeth. “He thought you could help. And how the hell did he know you were in here?”

“I went down for a smoke,” Pethro said. “He saw me and pulled in.”

Kernehan saw Pethro’s maneuver, to keep the Big Man from knowing that a stray stranger had been allowed to come so far unchallenged, and he judged that Pethro’s job had been that of guard rather than of repairing the truck. “I just came up here for the wrench, see if I could do anything with his motor,” Pethro added.

“And brought him along to carry it?”

The eyes were ugly, close-set in the broad freckled face, the color of two steel pellets. Kernehan said, “I guess I kind of barged in on him. I sure didn’t aim to cause any trouble. It’s private property. He explained that.”

The pale eyes turned to Kernehan. “You. Who are you? What’s your name?”

“Kernehan.”

“What’re you doing here?”

Kernehan looked as puzzled as possible. “I was fishing, or rather I was looking for a place to fish.”

“Where you from?”

“L.A.”

“You came all the way over here to fish?”

“No, I really came over to look for gem stones. You know, just rockhounding around a little.” The word was a snap. “Where?”

Kernehan nodded westward. “Out there. Crossed a big salt sink and looked around a couple of old mines. Didn’t find anything worth taking.”

“Where’d you stay?”

He had the ugliest mouth Kernehan thought he’d ever seen, the upper lip long and held stiff while he spoke, so that he seemed to be talking through a mask. “I stayed at a camp, bought grub from an old man and a kid. They keep a kind of store, and chickens.” He noted the flashing glance the second man turned on Pethro. They knew what he was talking about. “But now I thought I’d fish a couple of days and then head for home.”

“You got any I.D. on you?”

The I.D. he might have produced would have ended things pretty quickly. Kernehan shook his head. “Hell, I left everything in my car in town.”

The Big Man looked at his second-in-command, and a sort of silent conference took place. Pethro was left out of it, and Kernehan judged his subordinate position by this. Pethro’s expression was sulky and apprehensive, and he kept wiping his palms against the legs of his coveralls, a nervous motion.

The Big Man spoke to Kernehan. “We’ve got a big operation here, a big strike, I’m not saying what it is but you can guess. Something everybody comes looking for in the desert and damned few of them find.”

Kernehan showed a lot of interest. “Uranium?”

“I’m not saying,” the Big Man repeated. Even lying, he was impressive, Kernehan thought. The strangely immobile mouth had the look of letting out a secret. “It’s just that we can’t afford to take chances on strangers. We can’t afford to have our land run over and grabbed up by a lot of knot-headed amateurs.”

“My God, I’m not interested in your uranium, I’m just a rockhound. Really,” Kernehan protested, trying to look innocent.

“If you’re what you say you are, you’re all right. Only, we’ll have to check.”

If they checked the car at the boat landing, they’d find all the junk he had packed in L.A., private papers among the rest, and somewhere in it the fact that he was a cop, plus the gun in the glove compartment. He braced himself to give them an argument, and at the same time tried to figure his chances of getting away if he charged the Big Man and second-helper—not good, he admitted—but then it turned out that the Big Man had another idea entirely.

“You say you stayed with the old man at the spring, and that he knows you.”

“That’s right.”

“That’s all we need, then.”

Kernehan tried to analyze that one, tried to pin down the tone—did the Big Man mean that Bucklen was a kind of lookout for them and that if he said Kernehan was okay, they’d take his word? He remembered that he had told Randy that he was a railroad cop and given permission to the kid to tell the old man. So if Bucklen was in with them, as he had thought all along, his goose was cooked as of this minute.

“I’m going to take the truck,” the Big Man said, “and I’ll be back inside a couple of hours or so, and if things check out you can be on your way, mister.”

“Okay by me,” Kernehan said, trying to sound indifferent.

“Billy here”—the Big Man was looking at the guy with the broken nose—“and Pethro will keep you company. Play a little poker if you want. Or listen to the radio. Pethro’ll show it to you. Only just stay put and don’t make like you’re running for the river.”

They herded him into a cave where there were some broken-backed chairs, some apple crates serving for tables, and a big transistor portable radio. From inside he heard the truck start, a deep-throated powerful roar. He heard the gears take hold, smooth as silk, and then the air held a whiff of gasoline, there was a crunch of broken rock, and the truck and the Big Man were gone.

Pethro sat near the entrance to the cave. He lit a cigarette with slow care. He seemed more lethargic than anything, not apprehensive about what the Big Man was going to find out, nor interested in Kernehan. Kernehan sized him up as a pretty dull character, and remembered the good-looking wife in Colton and wondered what she had seen in him. The other man, the one the Big Man had called Billy, was fiddling with the radio, but Kernehan sensed that his attention was on himself, that he was waiting for some sign of panic or rebellion.

Kernehan said, “I don’t see how you’ve kept your strike a secret. In every case I know of, there’s been a mob move in.”

“That’s what we don’t want,” Billy told him. “We just don’t crave to put up with a bunch of Joe Blows who don’t know from nothing.”

“Have you filed on it yet?”

“That’s our business.”

“Excuse me for asking,” Kernehan said, as if in hasty apology.

Pethro suddenly spoke up. “I been working on them brake drums. I should of told him.”

“You sure should,” Billy agreed, giving Pethro a sharp look. “Is he going to have trouble?”

“Probably not.”

“I hope not,” Kernehan put in. “I don’t want to spend the night here.”

Neither of them answered. Billy got a program of bop music and listened to it for a couple of minutes, then switched channels and got symphony music, then switched again and got a hell-fire preacher. He stayed at the radio, patiently turning the dial, and Pethro smoked, blank-eyed. No one had shown a gun, but Kernehan had no doubt several were handy.

“We’re just going to have to wait,” Pethro said at last, as if the truth of the situation had finally dawned on him.

“We sure are,” Billy agreed.

Less than fifty feet from where they sat was another cave, in it such a stack of stuff as Kernehan had never seen outside a warehouse. He tried to act as casual as possible. The thing not to do—definitely not to do—was to ask what might happen if the Big Man came back and said his story had holes in it.

The Grofskys didn’t go to church, but Kodear did, reversing what Farrel had figured for-their Sunday routines. Kodear and the eighteen-year-old and a woman who must be her mother, the three of them all gussied up, headed for church at a quarter of nine; Farrel arrived almost too late to see it. They walked, chattering, a couple of blocks, entered for nine o’clock Mass, Farrel slipping in behind them. He wanted to see Mr. Kodear being devout. The way Kodear looked around, and his apparent unfamiliarity with the ceremony, gave Farrel the impression that the two women had brought him, trying to improve him, no doubt. Farrel was reminded of Mrs. Bellows’s similar attempts on his behalf. She had once rented the next room to his to a ministerial student, with what Farrel figured were underhanded motives.

Farrel slipped out again and headed for the Grofskys’. Mr. Grofsky might be attacking the yard again, murdering shrubs by moving them—but no, all the blinds were closed and the place had the look of sleeping. Farrel parked and waited. He tried to figure what he had learned about the two men. It was all such insignificant personal stuff, he decided. Kodear had a young kid sweet on him, and the kid and her mother had dragged him to church, not knowing about the riverside rendezvous the night before. Farrel thought, I should have crunched a few twigs down there by the river, given them something to think about. Mr. Grofsky, in contrast to Kodear’s easy manner, seemed a man driven by demons, at outs with his wife, a nail biter who should be taking tranquilisers by the bucket. But so far there was nothing to indicate which of the men—if either—was involved in the freight thefts.

It was past ten when the blinds were finally opened. Farrel was a half block away, parked near the intersection, watching the house through the rear-view mirror. He saw Grofsky come out on the porch and pick up the Sunday paper. Grofsky was wearing a bathrobe over his pants. He put the paper under his arm and walked out into the yard to inspect the shrubs he had moved yesterday. Then he went inside again. Farrel, having placed him at home, drove downtown and ate breakfast in a cafe.

At one o’clock a car pulled up in front of the Grofsky house. There were a couple of women in it; they didn’t get out, but honked, and in response Mrs. Grofsky came tripping through the door and down the walk, and the glimpse Farrel had of her in the mirror sent him swiveling around to look firsthand. The impression, even at this distance, was of a high-style getup, a silk suit and a small but rich-looking fur, a spring hat aglow with ribbons and flowers. She came around the car to get in at the rear door, and Farrel caught a gleam of diamonds from her gloved wrist, a diamond watch, no doubt. Even as little as he knew of women’s clothes was enough to tell him that this meant money.

She glanced at her wrist, where the diamonds had twinkled, said something to the women in the car, and got in. The car pulled away, passing Farrel, who bent down as if to reach for something on the floor. A whiff of perfume as ripe as flowers drifted in through the window above, as the other car went by. Farrel sat up again slowly.

About thirty minutes after his wife’s departure, Grofsky came out of his house, got into the car, and backed it from the garage. In contrast to her, he wore old clothes, faded pants and a broken hat, an old shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He did something in the garage before he backed the car, lifted the trunk, Farrel thought, though he didn’t get a good look at the maneuver. When he was more than a block away, Farrel started his own car and followed cautiously. Grofsky drove north from town, to a wildly cluttered bank where boats were built, repaired, and rented. He took fishing gear from his trunk compartment and walked down to a float. Farrel didn’t dare follow him out on the water, nor did there seem much need, until he saw where Grofsky was headed—for another boat. This was a big one, with double outboards, much wider in the beam than the ordinary fishing boats that were coming and going. Farrel squinted at it and decided that something about it made him think of a barge, a cargo vessel. There were two men in it, dangling poles over the side.

Grofsky’s sidling maneuver, approaching the other boat, was so obvious to Farrel’s experienced eye that it was like a kid sneaking up on an apple tree. He did nervous things with the fishing line, pretending to cast, guiding the boat here and there, then cutting the motor and letting her drift. In the car, Farrel grunted in skepticism. It was too bald to believe.

When the two boats were practically touching, Grofsky seemed suddenly oblivious of the others. He fussed with the bait and his hook, his back to the other boat. The bow swung in to touch the other’s stern, and in that instant one of the other men dropped a small package into Grofsky’s boat.

“The payola,” Farrel muttered, still not believing he’d seen it. He shook his head. How stupid could you get?

The big boat drew away after a little while, drifting downstream. They’d be watching, he knew, waiting to see that Grofsky made it ashore and away free. Farrel kept to his car. Pretty soon Grofsky wound in his lines, started his motor again, and headed for shore. The big boat was almost out of sight, just hanging at the rim of a curve of bank where trees overhung the water.

Grofsky paid for the boat and started picking his way up through the clutter. Still Farrel didn’t move. The big boat was slipping past the trees; as Grofsky reached the road, it disappeared. Farrel opened his car door.

This must have been a moment that Grofsky had half expected all along, Farrel thought. When Farrel met him beside his own car and flashed the I.D., a sort of whoosh went out of him, like air from a pricked balloon. All he said was, “Well … my God. My God.”

He started to twitch badly. He hung onto the fishing rod, but the small paper-wrapped parcel fell to the ground, and Farrel picked it up.

“She made me do it,” Grofsky whimpered. Then he leaned on the car and started to cry.

The paper had broken, and Farrel could see the color of the money inside.

“… so many things she had to have,” Grofsky sobbed.

“Yes, sir. Let’s get going. My car,” Farrel said.

Chapter 21

When he heard the roar of the truck motor echoing off the canyon walls, heard the tires spit gravel when the brakes slammed on, Kernehan knew what the answer was going to be. He looked around quickly, sizing up what he could do. It was almost dark by now. The man named Billy was outlined against the light, standing in the cave opening. Pethro had flung himself down on a sleeping bag an hour or so before, had now lifted on an elbow, looking sleepy and ill tempered. Kernehan got his feet under him, tensed his legs.

The Big Man came in half crouched, pushing Billy aside and swinging to face Kernehan. “You. Come here.”

“What’s up?” Kernehan said. He stood, tugged at his belt, tried to look as puzzled as possible.

“To start with,” the Big Man said, turning back to Billy, “who in hell meddled with the truck?”

“Pethro was fixing the brakes, he said.”

“He damned well almost got my neck broke.” The Big Man looked again at Kernehan. “They never heard of you out there.”

Kernehan shrugged. “I can’t help what they told you, I was there most of the week, the kid and I went rockhounding together. The old man sold me water and meals.”

“He never heard of you,” the Big Man repeated, moving into the cave. There was a long smear of grease down the side of his jaw and neck, where he must have wiped the sweat away after repairing the brakes.

The Big Man was working himself up to something, Kernehan knew. He was the kind who whips himself into the necessary rage, then acts. Kernehan didn’t move away; to do so would have been fatal, like trying to run from a tiger. He stood as easily as possible, hands hanging free, looked mean, animal-like.

“Get the damned lantern lit,” he yelled at Pethro. Pethro seemed startled. He got to his feet by bracing an arm against the cave wall. He started a yawn, then cut it off. He went to a big gasoline light sitting on a box, worked with it, struck a match. The cave filled suddenly with an unearthly blue glow. The light took away some of the shadowy danger from the Big Man, but showed more of his face; and Kernehan found himself studying the immobile mouth, a lipless gash in the ugly profile. The Big Man, satisfied with the light, turned again to Kernehan. “Now. You. You’re going to tell me—” All at once the moment must have arrived, for he rushed Kernehan like a bull.

Kernehan put up an arm as if to ward him off and then at the last instant simply stepped aside. The Big Man crashed over the box Kernehan had been sitting on, his knees splintering it. He fell prone, chin foremost, and Pethro yelled in alarm.

The one named Billy yanked an object from his pocket. There was a snick of metal, and eight inches of blade steel shone in the light. Pethro yelled again, this time in protest. “You said there wouldn’t never be any rough stuff! You promised!”

The Big Man pushed himself to his knees, wiped his nose on his hand, said to Billy, “Come on, give me a hand here.”

“You promised!” Pethro cried again. He was just behind the light, the blue glow lit him like some strange fire.

“Shut up,” said Billy, circling Kernehan.

Without turning his head, Kernehan jerked words in Pethro’s direction. “They’ve already killed your friend Jennings. If you didn’t know it. Think this’ll worry them?”

The moment of silence that followed was like that which comes after a gunshot. Pethro was rigid. The Big Man and Billy didn’t look at Pethro. On the floor the Big Man was rubbing his jaw; Billy still held the knife, still looked at Kernehan—but still, Kernehan sensed a new direction to their vigilance.

Pethro said stumblingly: “They run him off. He wanted to get out, anyhow. They might of blacked an eye. They admitted they might of done that much.”

“They murdered him deader than hell,” Kernehan said. “Don’t you read the papers? They killed him at Sidewinder, stuck him in a hopper car, got him covered with a load of gravel.”

“No,” Pethro said, something panicky in his tone. “He was going to his girl, they were going north again.”

“Margie DeWitt? She knows now that he’s dead. She went to see your wife.”

“How come you … you know—” Pethro’s voice died out. Then he said harshly, “Hell, you must be a goddam cop.”

“Yeah,” said Billy, white teeth showing against the deep tan.

“So I’m a cop,” Kernehan admitted. “You like them better?”

“They didn’t kill him.”

“What’ll you bet?” Kernehan jeered, saw Pethro’s eyes flicker.

The Big Man had crouched; now he plunged against Kernehan’s knees from behind. As Kernehan started to fall, he turned; he swept down a chopping blow to the back of the Big Man’s neck. The Big Man let out a noise like Yuuuk, fell, his head dropping sidewise like a severed pumpkin.

Billy came running, low and fast, the hand holding the knife outstretched like a hunting snake. Kernehan let him get within cutting distance, then swept the arm aside, used it as a lever to raise Billy off his feet, screaming. The knife clattered unheard as Kernehan sent Billy’s body whirling against the wall of the cave. Another scream split the air, reverberating in the closed space, and Pethro bent trembling toward the lamp. Perhaps he didn’t like what he was seeing, or perhaps the dark was a cover he wanted. He had a hand on the lamp when a voice spoke from outside. “You just keep away, buster.” Old man Bucklen and Randy came in, Bucklen carrying a shotgun.

Bucklen inspected the fallen Big Man, the crawling and scrabbling Billy. “Looks like we got here a little late. You didn’t hardly need us,” he said regretfully.

Randy said, “We had to wait, follow his lights. He’d have seen us if we stuck to his tail.”

“I’m damned glad to see you,” Kernehan said, brushing the red hair back out of his eyes. He thought, God, I’m tired, feeling the trembling that fanned downward from the taut muscles in his shoulders.

“You broke both of Billy’s legs,” came Pethro’s voice.

“I never could stand a creep with a knife,” said Kernehan.

Old man Bucklen was looking all round. “This what you been looking for all along?”

“There are other caves,” Kernehan explained, “all stuffed with the tires and cigarettes and other stuff they robbed off the railroad. But this is what we had to find, yes, sir.”

“I couldn’t have done better myself.” It was Farrel, coming in with a gun in his hand. Everybody’s got a gun, Kernehan thought, except me. I’m too stupid to bring one. All I had with me was what I learned in the Marines, plus what those tough hoods taught me in the freight yards. That’s all I had. How to fight dirty. How to live through it.

Farrel looked him over. “Not a goddam scratch, as I live and breathe. What did you use on them? A bazooka?”

Kernehan glanced at the Big Man. “I’m afraid he’s got a broken neck. I hit him pretty hard, I didn’t have time to pull the punch. The other one’s got broken legs from hitting the wall over there, but he should live. Since you’re here, I guess you rounded up the one in the office and he squawked.”

“I almost feel sorry for him.” Farrel put the gun away and slapped his coat into place over it. “Grofsky. He was in a money bind, his wife wanting nice things and him trying to oblige. His wife ran the messenger-service end of it—he’d call her at noontime and she’d relay the message when these birds called in. She took care of the profits, too. Spent them on her back, mostly, I guess.” Farrel was looking at old man Bucklen and the kid. “Who’re these folks? Friends of yours from out yonder?”

“I’ve been boarding at their place.”

He introduced them to Farrel. They left Randy and Bucklen to watch Pethro, then went on a tour of inspection of the caves.

“Of course they’ve moved a lot of it, Freight Claims will have a hell of a time running it down,” Farrel said. “But still, this ought to make somebody happy. I doubt if Ryerson knows how, so maybe it’s just us.”

“It makes me feel damned good.”

All at once Farrel had turned and stuck out his hand. Kernehan didn’t know what to make of it for a minute; he had figured Farrel still didn’t like him much. Then he shook Farrel’s hand and said, “We ought to have a drink on it.”

“You think we won’t?”

They were going to have to have professional help to move the Big Man and Billy. Old man Bucklen rode shotgun on Pethro, went to the boat with Farrel. Kernehan and Randy stayed to wait.

Randy told Kernehan what had happened at camp that afternoon.

“I’d just got through telling Grandad about you being a railroad cop, when this truck pulls in and this big guy gets out. He tried to pretend he was just driving around, but then he wanted to know all about us, how long we’d been there and who’d been around lately, and then if we knew a rockhound, and he described you. Grandad sized him up for what he was and said we hadn’t seen anybody. When he pulled out, Grandad said there was something funny going on and you must be in trouble. So we took off after him. Our truck isn’t as high off the ground, we had to be careful on the rocky places, but we made out okay. Grandad knows a better way back, through the old river station.”

Probably the old man knew a thousand tracks visible only to himself and the other old-timers, Kernehan thought.

“Grandad said we had to watch our step, we couldn’t let that man know we were trailing him. Grandad let me drive.”

“He let you drive?”

“Sure. He had to hold the shotgun,” Randy explained. “Coming over here, you know what? He said I’d better learn to shoot, there wasn’t any harm knocking off a coyote or bagging some quail for dinner.”

“He’s right.”

“I think he’s kind of … well, beginning to think I can be trusted.” In the blue brilliant light, Randy’s eyes were shining. “And maybe he’s—he’s beginning to like me.”

“He always has, Randy. That you can depend on.”

They had made Billy as comfortable as possible without moving him; but now the man began to groan again, and they went to see what they could do.

It was almost two hours before a sheriff’s launch came, bringing a doctor and a couple of stretchers. The doctor gave Billy some morphine to deaden his pain. The Big Man they simply wrapped and loaded; he was already growing cold, and the strange unmoving mouth had taken on the grim half-smile of death.

It was time for Kernehan to say good-by to Randy and Mr. Bucklen. He went with them out to their truck, parked up the canyon, and there they stood for a little while, the night cool and dark above them, and talked about the prospects for the chicken business. Kernehan promised to come to see them within the next few weeks. He intended to help Randy learn to shoot.

When Bucklen and Randy had gone, Kernehan turned back to the canyon. Nothing to do now but operation mopup, trying to run down the stuff already sold and moved out, get it back for the railroad. Probably most of it had gone into Arizona at that, and the job would be done by the investigators of the Arizona division.

Time to go home again.

Well, there was a job waiting for him there, come to think of it.

On Monday noon Lora was waiting on a busy downtown corner. Kernehan caught a glimpse of her through the crowd; it was like having a match touched to some tinder of his soul. He wanted to run, to rush her into his arms, to touch the solidness of her and make sure she was still alive and warm and that nothing had happened to chop a finish to her love for him. But instead he came up, walking in the ordinary way, trying to read the expression in the green eyes.

“Lora.”

“Hello, Mike.”

Neither of them said anything more until they were in a booth in the rear of the cafe. “How did your job go?” she asked over the menu. “Okay.”

“All cleaned up and tidy?”

“No, not entirely. We lost two women somewhere, they’re hiding out in a strange motel is my guess. They’re scared, they were mixed up with some bad characters.”

“And what about the bad characters?”

“They’ve been taken care of.”

“And the dead dogs in the freight yards?”

“We found the answer to that one, too. One of our patrolmen collared a nice middle-aged lady. It seems she likes cats, has about a dozen at home, and the dogs were annoying them. She thought that a little runover with a train would cover up what she was doing with strychnine.”

Lora shook her head. “It sounds so fantastic.”

“Yes, it is.”

Lora had put down the menu. “Was there … danger? Could you have been hurt bad, Mike?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged off the memory of the Big Man charging, the one called Billy sneaking toward him with the knife. “I’m here in one piece. I’ve even learned a little something.”

“Is that why you wanted to see me?”

“Yes, that’s it.” He wanted to tell her about Randy and old man Bucklen, about the kid who had gone wrong and who hadn’t had a prayer until the old man had made a new way of life for the two of them. But that could come later; right now it would be better to say what he felt as simply as possible. “I was wrong about your brother, Lora—wrong in everything I said or did. If you still want me as part of the family, I’ll try to do my share of the job. I’ll try to give whatever is needed. If you want me.”

“Mike!”

She was leaning across the table, oblivious of the other diners. The green eyes were big as stars. Her palms were cool on either side of his face, and then she kissed him.

A middle-aged lady in a flowered hat said to her companion: “That’s an unusually good-looking young couple, but wouldn’t you think they’d restrain themselves a bit in public?”

“Yes, wouldn’t you?” The second woman had gray hair and a seamed face, and her blue eyes were wistful.

Mr. Howery got stiffly from his car at the curb, shut the door, went up the walk to the front porch. He felt weak and tottery. Strange, that just a couple of days in the hospital left you so queasy. It was either the invalid diet, all those slippery puddings and so on, or it was the sense of aseptic isolation. In either case, you were left feeling as if you’d had major surgery.

He went into the shadowy living room and sat down at once on the couch. Even such a short absence had given the place an unfamiliar look. It was dusty, too, and the drawn blinds shutting out the sunlight of late afternoon made it seem secretive. He got up and opened the blinds, then sat down again. He wondered if there was any beer in the refrigerator. His head ached, where those women had beaten him.

Aspirin, then a beer, he decided.

He took a glass from the kitchen cupboard, rummaged on the shelf for the aspirin. It struck him suddenly that in spite of the dust and neglect, the kitchen was the same as when his mother had been here: the toaster still kept to its certain niche, the measuring cups hung over the range, the hook with the hand-knitted potholders and the rag rug on the floor were just as she had arranged them.

Her memory seemed suddenly more vivid than at any time since her death, and for a moment he felt sicker than ever, and afraid.

Then he found the aspirin, downed three of them, turned to the refrigerator for the beer.

His mother was gone; he had lost her. This business of following women … what had that all been about? He poured the beer, his spirits lifting a little.

“I’ve really been awfully silly,” he said aloud into the silence of his mother’s kitchen.

He went to the back door and stood there looking out at the yard. Spring was in full bloom. It might be nice to do a bit of digging out there; perhaps the landlord would let him put in some iris, some of the new pinks, and so forth.

“I’ll never follow women again,” Mr. Howery told the prospective iris patch; and then some echo answered in his mind: Well, not at least before tonight.

Hollow footsteps seemed to trip through his mind, and he hurried after.

About the Author

Dolores Hitchens (1907–1973) was a highly prolific mystery author who wrote under multiple pseudonyms and in a range of styles. A large number of her books were published under the moniker D. B. Olsen, and a few under the pseudonyms Noel Burke and Dolan Birkley, but she is perhaps best remembered today for her later novel, Fool’s Gold, published under her own name, which was adapted into the film Bande á part directed by Jean-Luc Godard.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1961 by Bert and Dolores Hitchens

Cover design by Ian Koviak

ISBN: 978-1-5040-6702-7

This edition published in 2021 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc

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BERT AND DOLORES HITCHENS

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