Cat and Mouse (15 page)

He seemed to be having the same trouble with his caller that Rubio had been having with his bar patron, a disgruntled horseplayer.

He hung up, finally, and shook his head. “Have you ever noticed that the richer people are, the slower the pay?”

“That was my experience in Los Angeles,” I agreed.

“Did you come to bet or to talk?”

“I came to ask you if you have had any contact with crapshooters since you moved here.”

“Only those who bet on the ponies. If it’s Turbo you’re thinking about, it isn’t likely he’d have the scratch to mix with my clientele.”

“He brought at least five hundred dollars with him when he came here from Santa Monica.”

Larry smiled. “The way he plays that should last him about five minutes in a big-money game.”

“I had the same thought. That might be why he burglarized a house in Omega last night.”

“It could be. Brock, the way it reads to me, that guy is waiting for you to make a dumb move. You’re protected at your house. So he has to get you out in the open. But first he wants you to know
why
he intends to kill you. He must have guessed you know by now and that will be his twisted revenge. I hope to hell you’re carrying a gun.”

“I’m not. What makes you think he knows what I have learned about him?”

He shrugged. “Like you, I go by my instincts. He’s led you a merry chase. He knows some of the people you talked to in Santa Monica, not all of them solid citizens. It is time for you to get a gun.”

“I have one.”

“Well, damn it, carry it!”

His phone rang. He picked it up, listened, and said, “Two hundred on the nose. You’re covered.”

He cradled the phone and asked, “Are you going to carry the gun?”

“I’m thinking about it.”

“Thinking is not your strong suit, Brock. Mine, either. And it sure as hell isn’t his. Carry the equalizer.”

“If you insist.”

The phone rang again. I left.

Larry was probably right. Turbo and I were heading for showdown time and he wanted me on his ground. I didn’t want him on mine, not with Ian and Mrs. Casey living there.

I took over for Corey in front when I came home so he could get come exercise. He left his gun with me.

Our new neighbors must be wondering what was going on across the street from them. It was possible Bill Crider had hurried out of town before he could get a fair price for his house once he saw the guard car in front of ours. This was ridiculous and demeaning. It was also expensive. What if I hadn’t been able to afford it?

Patience,
I told myself.

But patience, like thinking, is not my strong suit. And what did we have on Turbo that would stand up in court? As Bernie had pointed out, there were no witnesses to either murder. There was no weapon to incriminate him. What could he be charged with? Creating a public nuisance? Putting Jasper Belton on drugs, if proven, might get him a couple months in jail. But would Fernando Valdez, the garage guitarist in Santa Monica, testify against him? Not unless he could find some place to hide after the trial.

McClune phoned right before dinner to tell me he hadn’t been able to find any record on Charles Turbo. The DMV didn’t have a record of his ever having a driver’s license.

I asked him about the motorist who had seen the man resembling Turbo leave the burglarized house in Omega.

“We don’t even have his name,” he told me. “He phoned in the information. It could be another of Turbo’s tricks.”

“Or maybe the man who phoned had reason to fear him.”

“Maybe. There are too damned many maybes in this case.”

“Vogel thinks it’s possible we don’t even have a case.”

“It’s highly possible. As an officer of the law, I shouldn’t say it, but I hope the bastard resists arrest if we ever find him. I almost hope he takes the first shot—if he’s armed.”

“And misses,” I added.

“And misses. Don’t you dare ever quote me on that!”

On the tube the bad guy always takes the first shot and misses. This gives the good guy a moral excuse for killing the bad guv. In the real world both the good and the bad are subject to legal appraisal of their acts and quite often it is the intended victim who winds up on trial. That includes a number of police officers, our guardians of the law.

In the military, if you kill enemy soldiers, you don’t go on trial for it; you often get a medal. Is it possible that criminals are not our enemies?

Jan came home looking haggard. “Anything new?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” she said. “Maybe we should move to Sun City.”

“He’d follow us. I’ll make you a drink.”

I took a bottle of beer out to Corey first. When I brought our drinks, Jan had her shoes off and was half dozing on the couch.

“Would you like to take a nap first?” I asked.

“No. I need the calories. I’ve already lost six pounds.”

She was asleep fifteen minutes later. I went out to sit with Corey.

He said, “I can’t believe he’s ever going to show here, not while the house is guarded.”

“He has to show somewhere and there are a lot of people out hunting him.”

“So the cops catch him and the judge sets him free or sentences him to a couple of years. What do we do then, start this all over again?”

I said nothing.

“One thing I’ve decided,” he said. “If he ever shows here I’m not going to aim for his knee.”

“If he spots you and runs don’t shoot at his back. Because then
you’ll
wind up in court. Do you want another beer?”

He shook his head. “My stomach’s riled enough already.”

Harley phoned after dinner and I told him all I had learned since he left town.

“I’ve thought about coming back there a couple of times,” he said. “But finally decided not to.”

I told him that Jan had suggested we move to his town.

“In that case I’d stay here. My wife and I have agreed that if we move back to California it won’t be San Valdesto. Maybe San Diego. I was based there for four years and a lot of my Marine buddies are retired there.”

“It’s a good town to live in. I’ll let you know if we have any luck here.”

“I wish you had said
when
instead of
if.
”

“When,” I said.

I took my transistor radio with me (and my gun) and went out to sit with Corey. We didn’t talk much; we were talked out. We listened to a local radio station that featured the blended sounds of the big-band era and watched the cars go by on the road.

At nine-thirty I suggested he go to bed and get some extra sleep; I would stay out here until the guard came.

He shook his head. “I’m not sleeping well. This is just as restful.”

“Maybe you need a respite, Corey. I could hire a guard for this shift and you could take some time off.”

“No. I’ll sweat it out with you. This isn’t any duller than being staked out all night in my aunt’s store in Los Angeles. I see you’ve decided to carry your gun.”

“I have. In case you take the first shot—and miss.”

“What a macabre thought! That’s not funny, Brock.”

“It wasn’t meant to be. Let us remember that Turbo is not a kid robbing a music store.”

The eleven-o’clock news on the tube from Los Angeles informed Jan and me that a total of two hundred prosecution charges had now been dropped as not evidential in the year-old trial of the child-molestation case against the nursery school.

The afflicted parents had held a mass protest meeting. They had voiced some possibly libelous remarks to the media reporters about the abusive defense tactics in the case, several of their words being bleeped out as probably pornographic. The most law-abiding citizen can turn into a vindictive vigilante when
his
or
her
child is involved.

The next juicy item concerned a pro-life group that had rioted in front of an abortion clinic.

“That’s enough,” Jan said.

She turned off the set and we went to bed.

A
SLIGHT TREMOR JUST AFTER
dawn awakened us. I turned on the bedside radio. A few minutes later we learned it had been a 3.7 quake, its epicenter about fifteen miles off the Ventura coast. Our big one was yet to come. Every Eden has its snake.

Jan said, “Next week, Armageddon. I can’t sleep. I’m going down and make a cup of tea.”

“I’m going with you.”

We were about halfway through our tea in the kitchen when Mrs. Casey came in to make breakfast for Corey.

I suggested, “Why don’t you two take a vacation? Hawaii should be fun. Or maybe Carmel?”

Mrs. Casey shook her head. Jan said, “We’re not the ones he’s threatening, Brock.”

“Anybody close to me is in danger. The man is not sane!”

“We know that,” Mrs. Casey said. “Look what he did to Corey. He could have killed him! But we belong here and we’ll stay here.”

There had been another quake in Mexico City, the morning paper informed me, 5.5 on the Richter Scale. A hurricane was heading for the Florida coast. Maybe Jan’s awakening jest had some substance; we could be zeroing in on Armageddon.

It was a gloomy day, a cold damp breeze drifting in from the ocean. I was at a dead end now. What could I do but wait?

I didn’t wait long. Half an hour later the desk clerk at the Travis Hotel phoned. He said, “Your friend Sarge asked me to call you. He’s in trouble.”

“With the police?”

“Not this time. With your Chicano friends. They cornered him in the Alamo Café last night. They didn’t rough him up much, but he’s scared, man! He’s locked up in his room with a bottle.”

“Okay. I’ll come down. But first I’ll make a visit to the Brotherhood. I’ll straighten them out on that.”

“I wish you would. And while you’re there, put in a word for us black guys, too. Explain to Ricardo and his hotheaded friends that we are not
gringos.
They put Davis Washington into the hospital.”

“I know. But, besides being black, Davis is a pimp and a drug dealer.”

“That,” he said, “I didn’t know. Luck.”

Brother against brother, sister against sister, people of all countries, colors, and religions fighting each other, hating each other, killing each other, when we all belonged to the same human family. Maybe Armageddon was overdue.

The headquarters of the Brotherhood was a small weathered stucco building, a converted store. The door opened directly into the meeting room, a square room furnished with about fifty folding chairs. The small office of Ricardo Cortez, head honcho, was partitioned off in one corner.

His door was open. He was sitting behind a chipped blue-enameled steel desk. He is an enormous man with a full gray-streaked black beard and bushy bone-white eyebrows.

He smiled at me. “You’re angry about something, aren’t you?”

“Yes. About what happened to one of my informants last night. I understand some of your soldiers roughed him up.”

He shook his head. “Not quite. They questioned him. I am sure he has no bruises to support his claim. You know, of course, that he is also a police informant.”

I nodded. “And that puts him on the right side of the law. Do I have to remind you, Ricardo, that when I saved you from a spell in jail I also worked within the law?”

He smiled again. “I’m sure you did, because you say so. Did you work within the law in Los Angeles, too?”

He had me there. I said, “When I could afford to.”

He leaned back in his chair. “Brock, it is because of what you did for me and several of my people that we are now trying to repay our debt to you. We have no personal interest in this Turbo creature. He is not a local man and none of our concern. As for the police, how much have they helped you? How much have
they
learned?”

“Not as much as I did on my own,” I admitted.

“Nor as much as we have learned,” he added.

“Something I should know?”

“Nothing you will learn from us. We don’t plan to involve you. We don’t want our best gringo friend to go to jail. You can tell your informant we will not bother him again. He was told that last night but he was probably too drunk to understand.”

“I guess he still is. I’ll have the desk clerk explain it to him when he sobers up.”

“Do that. And one more thing you should consider. If the police finally catch this man and he goes to jail, how long will he stay there? And when he gets out, won’t he have even more reason to hate you?”

“I suppose. Yes. But still—”

“I’ve said enough. Too much. I think it would be best for both of us if we forgot we ever had this conversation.”

I said nothing.

He said, “We live in separate worlds,
amigo.
”

“Yes,” I agreed. “I’ll stop in and tell the clerk to give the word to Sarge.”

Which I did and then went home.

The sun had come out. Corey was in the shade at the side of the house. He said, “You sure left in a hurry. What happened?”

“One of my stoolies was in trouble.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all!”

He looked at me suspiciously. “Am I too young to know?”

“Of course not!”

I stretched out on the grass beside his chair, bone weary from tension and frustration. All those miles, all those questions had added up to nothing. I had learned the man’s name and his motive. I had learned everything about him except where he was hiding and when he planned to make his move. I might never learn where he was hiding. All I could do was hope I was ready when he made his move.

Patience…

I was dozing when Corey said, “It’s time for lunch, Brock.”

Mrs. Casey had set the card table for three in the shadow of the garage. It was a quiet meal.

Mrs. Casey had gone into the house and I was sitting with Corey when we saw and heard an ancient battered Volkswagen screeching around the bend below the house. It was out of sight for a few seconds before it topped the crest. When it reappeared we could see there were two long-haired young people of indeterminate sex in the front seat.

The right front window was open. Something came flying out of it as they sped past. It landed on our lawn. My first thought was
a bomb,
but it wasn’t. It was a dead sea gull.