HE TOOK A WRONG TURN on his way back out of Bark Rise, and nearly got the Delahaye’s wheels stuck in the ruts of a loggers’ clearing.
Peaks clawed into view above the treeline as he re-found a road and drove on. He glimpsed narrow ravines and cols of snow, then the landscape opened out. From here, the mountains fell away and the land opened north into high desert. He’d managed to find some kind of pass.
The wind whipped hard and cold. He got out, took a breath, had a smoke. The thought came to him that he could have left Daniel Lamotte somewhere back around that lodge. Buried in the ground, hanging from a tree, or burnt in another bonfire. The thing of it was, he felt sure that he’d have found the guy if he was there. Which, as thoughts go, hardly helped. For it meant that he was following a trail that had been laid down.
The high desert glowered beneath thunderhead clouds. Lightning flickered. Shadow chased shadow. Hard-driven sand abraded his face. He got back in the Delahaye, consulted April Lamotte’s foldout map.
He stopped again at the gas station—with the wall-eyed man and dog—back on the Pasadena road, and used the payphone inside the dark little store. He again tried the number for Nero Securities. Once more, there was no answer. Then he got the operator to put him through to the phone booth on Blixden Avenue. It rang for about half a minute. Then came a clattering pick-up.
“Yeah?”
“That you, Roger?”
“Who else, my friend, do you expect it to be but I?” He was doing a cruddy English-baddie accent.
“Anything happening there?”
“Like what?”
“Haven’t seen anyone around have you? Perhaps some tallish, thin guy—probably driving a black Mercury sedan with some kind of badge on the side, wearing aviator glasses and dressed in uniform. Police, or the utilities—”
“Uti… .?”
“I mean gas, power, water. Possibly a security firm. You understand?”
“Yeah. But the only guy in uniform we sees around here apart from those cops you got sniffing everywhere last night is Schmidt the postie. And Schmidt’s plain mad.”
“Okay. But if you do see anyone else, just keep out of their way, will you Roger? You, and your mates. I’m serious. And can you tell my friend up in the apartments the same thing? She’ll probably be in either room 4A or her own room next door.”
“You mean the kike piece of ass?”
“Wish you’d stop talking like that. Her name’s Barbara Eshel. And you can also tell her that I’m going to the Metropolitan Hospital?”
“The funny farm?” Roger laughed. “Sounds, my friend, like you’re heading for the exact right place.”