Fugitive Nights (40 page)

As soon as the screaming had started, Lynn dropped his drink and headed, not with Nelson and Breda
toward
the screams, but around the kitchen, across the lawn, straight toward the front of the house, to the only plausible escape route. He passed a clump of banana trees, then stopped in the shadow of the trees to watch who might be rushing outside to the street.

Lynn thought he was still too close to the light from the entry doors, and retreated even farther into the darkness. With his right hand on the Colt under his shirt, he backed up toward the banana trees, failing to see an elongated shadow move. It wasn't dark enough so he kept backing up.

Until a voice said: “No.”

That was all the voice said. Then Lynn felt the steel muzzle press against his neck, and a strong hand gripped his own, the hand he had under his shirt.

The fugitive kept the pressure on both places, but it was the pressure against his neck that Lynn felt. Lynn relaxed his right hand and felt the fugitive slide the Colt from his holster. The gun flashed across the sconce lights and clattered into the banana leaves.

Then Lynn was forcibly moved by the fugitive, who slid the steel muzzle down into the center of Lynn's back and propelled him forward holding onto the collar of his aloha shirt.

The fugitive never said another word, and Lynn waited for a crash, for his head to explode. He knew he'd never hear the shot. The house was a crescendo of sounds, shouts and screams. The building was swelling and heaving, ready to burst like the belly of a dead horse. When it did it would cascade out of the entry doors, a writhing swarm in full panic.
No one would hear the shot!

He waited forever, perhaps ten seconds. Then he turned slowly to look death in the face. He was alone.

An elderly couple who'd found the party far too tiring were at the door of their Lincoln when the screaming began. They'd started toward the patio along with everybody else, but changed their minds, realizing that whatever it was, it couldn't be good. They were trying to get into their car when the fugitive grabbed the valet parking girl and tossed her into the street. Then he shoved the man out of the way, and both old people, worrying more about hips than Lincolns, cried out in terror and scuttled away from the car thief.

By the time Lynn found his gun and ran out to the front street there was nothing to do but watch helplessly as the taillights disappeared. The guard in the kiosk, even if he'd
known
what had happened, wouldn't have left his little room when that Lincoln roared past.

The fugitive pounded the steering wheel in frustration when he got stopped by traffic at Highway 111. Saturday evening traffic was horrendous because of the Bob Hope tournament and the unseasonably hot weather.

He kept expecting headlights behind him. He knew he should've shot the policeman with curly hair in order to guarantee his escape. But he could not bring himself to shoot a policeman. When he found a break in the traffic flow he stomped on it, crossing the highway faster than he wished. What if he was stopped for a traffic citation? he thought. After
all
this!

His Buick was where he'd left it. He parked the Lincoln behind it, and when he got out he removed his black vest and wiped the steering wheel and anything else he might have touched. Then he realized that he had no fingerprints on file in this country. What was he doing? Just the reflex action of a policeman, he thought. No matter what he had done, he was still a policeman.

Leo Grishman was the first person at the party to grasp how to handle the horrifying event. He located his very shaken client and led him into the study, off the master bedroom suite on the lower floor. He looked in vain for Lynn, but gathered Nelson and Breda and brought them into the study too.

“Okay,
now
we know,” the lawyer said to them all. “Bino was free-lancing. Once a druggie always a druggie. I
told
you not to hire him, John!”

“I trusted him. He was like a nephew.” John Lugo was built like a block of concrete but had a flutey voice.

“Well, you shouldn't have. He was free-lancing with drug dealers.” The lawyer pointed to Breda and Nelson and said, “These people're the ones I told you about. It's apparent that one of Bino's drug-dealing associates knew something about your mother's funeral, but nothing else about him. And that's the information they used to find him. There's nothing anybody can do about it now, John. Bino burned some dealers and they made him pay for it tonight. Period.”

“What should we tell the cops?” John Lugo wanted to know.

“What
can
you tell them?”

“Nothing. I don't
know
anything,” John Lugo said. “Except that Bino was free-lancing. I got nothing to do with drugs, and never have. This is what happens, you get involved with drugs. Crap like
this!
”

The door opened and Lynn Cutter walked in. He looked different somehow, but Nelson couldn't decide why. He remained somber and silent when Leo Grishman said to John Lugo, “This is the police officer that almost got the guy at the mortuary.”

Leo Grishman turned to Lynn, and said, “Do you have
any
idea who the guy was or how to find him?”

“Not a clue,” Lynn said gravely. “He had to've been a drug smuggler who came to pay a debt.”

“Then why do you wanna stick around and muddy up the water?” Leo Grishman said. “There's no need to talk about your part in the mortuary business. Let's leave Mrs. Lugo's funeral
out
of all this, why don't we? What good would it do? Let the dead bury the dead, as they say.”

Lynn turned to Breda and Nelson and said, “Let's go to The Furnace Room. I never did get that Scotch.”

“Anything I can
ever
do for you!” John Lugo said to them as they were leaving.

They found themselves among a crush of people scrambling down the steep street after the shuttles were overrun. Three Palm Springs police units were trying to get through, but the road was jammed with pedestrians.

Nelson said to Breda, “Do you think that tan Palm Springs uniform'll look good on me?”

Lynn said to both of them: “Why? Why didn't he shoot me? Why didn't he cut
my
throat?”

The fugitive set the cruise control at fifty-five miles per hour during the drive out Highway 10. Thirty minutes later he was back on Highway 111, but at a very different part of the valley highway. He was heading southeast, past the Salton Sea, past the place where he'd slept in a stolen car hidden by a stand of tamarisk trees. It seemed like a month ago. He thought about those poor
campesinos
who'd taken the stolen car, those poor little boys. He found a good place to stop and bury the gun, the knife, the bag. It wasn't the first time that the desert had concealed bloody deeds. After that was done and he was back on the road, he finally stopped trembling.

He didn't want to think about it anymore until he got home. Then he could talk it over with his wife, his comrades, his priest. Instead he thought about what was in the trunk of the car, where the blood-stained bag had been. There was a Ninja Turtle Party Van in there for his youngest. The van had wheels like little pizzas. His baby wanted one desperately. They still called him a baby, but he was five years old. And there was a small computer for his daughter. It had cost $400, but all that dirty money needed a clean use. And there was a wristwatch for his older son, a Japanese watch, stainless steel, with a diving bezel.

Finally, there was a green leather jacket and matching skirt he'd found in the Palm Springs department store where he'd bought his waiter's clothes. It was double breasted with gold buttons, and the skirt was very slim. He'd measured the size against a salesgirl who was short and slender like his wife, whose favorite color was green. It had cost $500, but he didn't care. She'd never get a present like that again, not in her lifetime.

His comrades wouldn't be getting back much of the money that they'd taken from drug smugglers and U.S. insurance companies, but that was all right. He was sure that the family of Javier Rosas would say it was all right.

When they'd finally hiked to the Smoke Tree parking lot Lynn said, “My knees're begging for a drink.”

“I don't need a drink,” Breda said, heading toward her Z.

Nelson thought it was a good time to saunter to his Wrangler and give Lynn and Breda some space to say whatever it was they had to say to each other. The little cop plugged in a cassette and listened to country blues, and watched to see if their silhouettes got closer or stayed apart.

“I thought we could just … celebrate the end of our partnership,” Lynn said to Breda as she stood by her car, keys in hand.

“I've enjoyed it, most of the time,” she said.

“Ain't you ever gonna forget about that night?”

“It's forgotten.”

“We work pretty well together, don't we? I mean, we solved your case and almost got the bald guy. I'm a pretty decent detective, right?”

“Yes you are,” she said.

“I was thinking, after I get my pension maybe I could help you out once in a while when your work gets backed up.

“I don't think so, Lynn.”

“You said you need somebody!”

“I do.”

“Is it my personality? I mean, am I
that
hard to take?”

“Actually, you're funny and smart. You're even kinda nice to be with, sometimes.”

“So why do I get the feeling this is goodbye? Why can't we go have a drink and talk it over?”

“I don't
need
a drink.”

“So have a diet Coke!”

“Why don't you have one for me,” Breda said. “And one for yourself. It's none of my business but a guy like you doesn't have to end up in The Furnace Room. Or like Jack Graves.”

Breda unlocked the Z, but before she could get in, Lynn said, “Is that it? Are we finished? As a team, I mean?”

Breda nodded and opened the car door. But she impulsively turned and said, “I never did tell you: You got pretty nice buns.”

Then she tried to grin, jumped into the Z, fired it up and drove into the night.

Nelson sat for a long time, watching Lynn's motionless silhouette. It looked so lonely under the velvet desert sky.

When the fugitive was twenty minutes from Calexico he looked at his watch and realized that his wife and eldest son might still be awake. After all, it was Saturday night and they had good TV programs to watch. He got unbearably excited. Suddenly, his throat swelled and tears started spilling.

He controlled himself when he approached the frontier, until he was waved across the international border. But when he arrived at his little street in Mexicali he began to sob and couldn't stop.

He pulled over until he was once again in control. He managed it by thinking of what the baby would say tomorrow when he saw his Ninja Turtles.

EPILOGUE

J
ack Graves was pleased to have helped Lynn and Breda with the Clive Devon affair. It felt good to do a job of investigation once again; even if it hadn't been real police work it had the taste of investigation. He'd hoped that it might make him want more of it, but it hadn't.

He wasn't feeling well at all. He was having trouble with a fluttering heart and migraines. The only time he felt all right lately was when he went hiking out on the desert, like Clive Devon. And he'd suffered another accident, this one involving a nasty burn. He'd put his arm in the gas flame when he reached across the range top to fry bacon. By the time he'd thrust his arm under water, it was blistered and throbbing. The pain was excruciating. The coyotes came that night, but still he couldn't sleep with so much pain.

Jack Graves had decided to go hiking the very next morning. He wore a sweater because the hot spell had broken, and he wore his floppy hat, but he didn't bother smearing sunscreen on his face. And he didn't bother with a lunch, or even a canteen of water.

Jack Graves decided on a particular hike he hadn't made since the drought began five years earlier. He knew it would be a shame to see Upper Palm Canyon Falls when there was so little water, but for some reason he had to see it again. There simply was no more beautiful place for him. It was the kind of place that made him wish he could stay there for the rest of his life.

He parked his car by the Indian trading post. There were quite a few other cars there but nobody was going to hike up to the falls. He told the Indian woman in the trading post where he was going and she cautioned him to be careful.

When he got to the base of the trickling falls he tried to see it, not as bleak as it was, but as it used to be before the drought. He saw white water that wasn't there, splashing down between serpentine chutes carved by the ages through gray crystalline granite. The fan palms were clumped together, tall, leaning toward the water as though for a drink, when there wasn't much for them.

It was nearly a perpendicular climb to the top, and though it was early morning, Jack Graves began sweating freely and wondered why he hadn't brought his canteen. He knew there was something wrong with that.

When he got near to the top of the falls, he looked straight up and saw a solitary falcon, like a tiny kite in the towering desert sky. He tilted his head back to watch that falcon floating on the brooding wind while shredded clouds shattered the light on glittering granite below.

Then, a hush. Silence. The wind … sighed.

Almost one year to the day that Lynn Cutter had blown out his one good knee chasing after the Mayor of Palm Springs during his historic meeting with President Bush and Prime Minister Kaifu, Lynn's first pension check arrived. Moreover, he'd been able to arrange the temporary house-sitting job at Tamarisk Country Club. The owner of the house had decided to spend the spring in Hawaii, now that Maui had such terrific golf courses. It seemed that Lynn's luck might be making a turn for the better.