The Summer Soldier (25 page)

“Let’s just say I didn’t kill her and leave
it at that.”

The smile became just a shade broader, and
then after a moment she nodded and turned back to her cooking.

She wasn’t a bad cook, as it turned out. She
wouldn’t have won any prizes, but she wasn’t bad. Of course she had
never claimed to be a student of the domestic arts; it was the
bedroom that she had taken as her special arena.

She had a way, after she had reached a
certain pitch of enthusiasm, of suddenly hooking her pelvis an inch
or so to one side. Each time, the movement would be accompanied by
a little catch in her breath, as if you had suddenly somehow caused
her a twinge of pain; but of course it wasn’t pain. She would do it
perhaps three or four times, several seconds apart, before she was
finished. It was tremendously exciting. Perhaps more so because you
never could be sure if it was passion or artifice—or perhaps
because it seemed that the distinction had become blurred.

They had made love twice that night—each time
brilliantly, like two highly accomplished technicians. But Guinness
had been left with a sense of personal emptiness for which Galen’s
maxim did not seem entirely to account. It was as if the act no
longer had any fixed place in the pattern of his life, as if the
pattern itself had been violated to a degree admitting of no
reconstruction.

For none of which, of course, Doris was in
any way responsible. It wasn’t as if the two of them had suddenly
rediscovered Original Sin. And perhaps he was simply being
melodramatic and things would eventually sort themselves out. He
hoped so .

The mouth of the alleyway where he stood was
suddenly blocked off by a blue pickup truck with an enormously wide
aluminum camper in the payload. The truck seemed to hesitate for a
second or two, and then slowly it finished its turn into the
alleyway, the walls on either side of which it almost bridged.
Guinness took one sideways pace, putting himself in the precise
middle of the roadway, and the truck jerked to a stop a few yards
short of him. The door on the driver’s side popped open and the
driver got out. He had to close the door again before he could get
past the trash cans and to where he could put his foot up on the
front bumper.

He folded his arms over his knee and stood
balanced like that, looking at Guinness from under his eyebrows,
for a long time without speaking. He was a big boy, only an inch or
two taller than Guinness, but filled out. There must have been a
good two hundred fifty pounds hung on that frame, and none of it
looked the least little bit soft.

The impression of size was increased by a
darkish blond beard and long hair that stuck out perhaps as much as
three inches around the full circle of his face, making him look
uncomfortably like an enormous bobcat. His thick forearms, where
they were visible below the rolled up sleeves of his Pendleton work
shirt, were matted with the same darkish blond hair.

All in all, he was pretty impressive—the sort
of man you instinctively wonder if you can handle, should it come
to that. And he looked rather as if it might. He really didn’t
strike Guinness as the amiable type.

“You want a ride south,” the bobcat said
finally, with a faint down home twang in his voice. “You got my
three bills?”

Guinness said yes, he had the money, and the
bobcat unfolded one hand from the pile on his knee, and thrust it
out in front of him. “Then let’s have it.”

Guinness, for just a moment, contemplated how
much he would enjoy twisting the son of a bitch’s arm out of its
socket, just to teach him a decent respect for business etiquette.
Once upon a time, in a burst of enthusiasm for polishing his
professional skills, he had enrolled in a ten week crash course in
Gung Fu offered by the Anglo¬Chinese Friendship League. They had
met, for two hours in the evening every week night for ten weeks,
in the basement of a Masonic lodge hall in Marylebone, and they had
taught him how it was done. It was supposed to be easy, like
pulling the drumstick off a Christmas turkey.

Of course, in the real world you couldn’t
dismember people just because they failed to display the proper
deference. Not people you needed, at any rate, and at the moment
our friend with the whiskers was a necessary person. Later would be
time enough.

So Guinness did the sensible thing and took
out his wallet, extracted six of Ernie Tuttle’s fifty dollar bills,
and slapped them down in the outstretched hand, the fingers of
which closed over the money like filaments of a meat-eating plant
over an unwary fly. The bobcat held them in his closed fist for a
moment, as if trying to decide if they felt like enough. Apparently
they did, because when the moment was over, he pushed the fist into
the pocket of a pair of elaborately shabby jeans and pulled it out
again, empty.

His foot came off the front bumper of the
truck, and he wiped the hand that had held Guinness’s money on the
front of his shirt. “I don’t want no trouble from you,” he said
with a kind of sullen rumble. “Money or not, you start gettin’ cute
with me and you’ll end up by the side o’ the road someplace, tryin’
to flag down a ride with both y’r arms busted.”

His head dropped slightly so that once again
he stared out from under cover of his eyebrows. Guinness was
suddenly struck by the idea that all this was probably meant to be
intimidating—he was being threatened; good heavens, what a
surprise!—and he smiled a ratty smile. These low budget goons were
all alike.

“Don’t you worry, pal. God knows, I’d never
want anyone to think I was getting cute.”

The low budget goon didn’t seem entirely
satisfied with his answer, and for a few seconds appeared to be
meditating some response. Apparently, he thought better of it,
however, and merely pointed back over his shoulder with his
thumb.

“Get in the back. I don’t want you seen on
the way through town.”

Guinness didn’t particularly want to be seen,
so he went around to the back of the truck and climbed in without
further comment.

The inside of the camper was just a shade
under six feet high, yet the light filtering in from tiny windows
on either side created rather the impression of a cathedral in
which the immense vaults are concealed in a gloom of their own
fashioning. Lengthways against either wall were cots only slightly
wider than park benches, between which ran a narrow little alley.
On the left hand cot lay an army fatigue jacket with the name
Pfeifer stenciled in black over the right breast pocket. Guinness
picked it up and read another name, this one embroidered in
two-inch-high white letters on the back. Boyd. He set it down again
and frowned. Boyd Pfeifer. Something told him most emphatically
that he and Boyd Pfeifer would be having trouble before they were
finished.

The truck lurched into motion, and Guinness
drew tight the curtains in front of the windows before lying down
on the cot opposite from the one occupied by Pfeifer’s jacket. The
truck bounced around too much to make sitting in comfort
possible—you got sick to your stomach. You got sick to your stomach
anyway; apparently, the shocks were bad. If Vlasov didn’t kill him,
he must remember to have the shocks in his own car checked.

He folded his coat into a pillow and closed
his eyes, keeping himself entertained by trying to puzzle out which
streets they were taking from the way they felt through the
mattress.

If the idiot had any sense, they would follow
Geary right out to the ocean and stick to the coast road after
that. The inland route would have been quicker, but they watched
you closer.

It wasn’t very long before he could feel them
making the long, sweeping turn around Point Lobos Avenue that
passed in front of the Cliff House and then fed into the Great
Highway.

Once in a while Guinness was able to tune out
the engine noises enough to hear the heavy pounding of the morning
high tide against Fleishacker Beach. He had come up there once in
the summer to do a little surf casting, and the beach had been
littered with small jellyfish. He wouldn’t want to go swimming in
those waters; things like that scared the hell out of him.

He tried to sleep, since there wasn’t much of
anything else to do, but it was impossible even to close your eyes
with the truck lurching over every pothole like some drunk on his
way home from a bender. Every bounce made him feel as if his
stomach had been pumped full of raw sewage. Objectively, however,
on a purely rational level, he knew that he was hungry, and several
times he attempted to calculate just how far south they were likely
to have gone before his chauffeur would decide it was time to break
for lunch; but each time the truck jolted he would lose the thread,
and finally he gave it up entirely.

Perhaps it was just as well. Breakfast had
been a skimpy business. Doris had been asleep when he got up, and
he hadn’t wanted to disturb her. He had dressed as quietly as he
could and then checked the kitchen, but apparently she didn’t even
own a toaster. So he had had to settle for the inch and a half of
orange juice there was left in a plastic pitcher in the
refrigerator. He had stood by the sink, drinking his orange juice
out of a highball glass, wondering if he would ever see Doris
again. It didn’t seem very likely.

Well, hell. Even if he did survive to the end
of the week, there wouldn’t be much point to picking up again with
Doris. Not for either of them. Aside from an occasional spot of
heavy breathing, they really didn’t have much to offer each other;
it was strictly a terminal relationship, and they both knew it. He
would never be able to love her, not in any sense that could be
said to mean anything.

Had he loved Louise? At all? Doris’s mocking
question came back to him, picking at his brain the way no doubt
she had meant it to. Had he? Yes, he thought perhaps he had.
Perhaps more than he had been perfectly aware of while she was
alive. Perhaps even more than Kathleen, at least if love had
anything to do with serenity. But probably the fine shadings of
distinction he was attempting to draw were only functions of
differences within himself. Probably he was a more loving person
when he didn’t spend a part of his time murdering people he didn’t
even know. God knows how he might have felt about Kathleen if his
hands had been a little cleaner.

But he had loved Louise. Not that the
affection of one Ray Guinness was much worth having, all things
considered, but he had loved Louise. He would remember some
trifle—the way she would sit talking to him while he had his lunch,
with her sleeves rolled up above her elbows and her hair coming
down in little wisps over her brow—and he would ache with the sense
of what he had lost. He had loved her well enough.

Well, that sort of thing was all over with
now, at least for the time being. Perhaps sometime again he might
be up to it, but not now. Perhaps sometime.

He hoped not, though. God, he hoped not. His
being in love was just too damned profligate of other people’s
lives.

He drew the pads of his thumb and middle
finger over his eyelids and tried to think about something
else.

It was about ten o’clock when they pulled
into a Chevron station somewhere just north of Santa Cruz. At least
so he gathered from a billboard on the other side of the highway:
“Jet Rt 20 &: Hw 1, Santa Cruz, 10 min, Jim Stackman, Datsun.”
Guinness climbed out of the back of the truck and visited the men’s
room.

When he had finished, he bought a grape soda
from a machine by the side of the building and stood drinking it as
he watched Pfeifer pay off the attendant with one of his fifty
dollar bills. The attendant was the cautious type, turning the bill
over two or three times and examining it carefully before he went
into the office to make change.

Guinness shook his head ruefully. It was dumb
to go around flashing a bill of that size; it made people remember
you. Well, there was no point in worrying about it now.

Behind them, at the bottom of a slope covered
with long yellowing grass, the Pacific Ocean twinkled in the harsh
sunlight like a handful of colored sugar. He turned to look at it,
sliding the by now empty bottle into one of the slots of a wooden
case that was leaning up against the side of the machine. At that
distance you could see the soft, feathery curls of the waves
tumbling over one another, but you couldn’t hear them. Guinness
shaded his eyes with a hand and searched the water for swimmers,
but there didn’t seem to be anyone out yet. Perhaps they waited
until the water was warmer; perhaps they swam somewhere else. It
couldn’t have looked any stranger to him if he had come there from
one of the dead moons of Uranus.

For days now he had experienced this odd
sense of being an alien among the familiar, of having suddenly
discovered that he and the rest of the human race belonged to
different species, even to different worlds. A gas station by the
Pacific, the lobby of a hotel, the line of people waiting to board
a Greyhound bus into San Francisco. He knew how they all worked,
knew the decorums governing behavior, but knew them the way one
knows the answer to a riddle. Eventually it would be the wrong
answer, or the wrong riddle, and they would find him out. It seemed
he was a fugitive from more than just the police.

The attendant brought Pfeifer back his change
and counted it out into his hand. Guinness walked back to the
truck, slowing as he observed how friend Boyd had taken up a
position by the camper door. His fingers were resting tentatively
on the handle, and as he watched his passenger’s approach his eyes
narrowed into puckered, speculative little slits.

“I don’t want you gettin’ out like that
again,” he growled. “You stay the hell in the truck.”

Guinness tried not to let anything register
in his face, tried not to let this being threatened and ordered
about all the time reach him. After all, what did he really care?
It was probably the poor bastard’s only mode of conversation.