Hush Money (7 page)

The only reason I don't mention the name is that I've got a sentimental interest of my own in the trade secrets.

I thanked her for the tip. She bit at a non-existent nail and looked at me anxiously again, as though she had something to add but didn't know whether she should. Apparently she decided against it. I blew her a kiss goodby from the Mustang, and we went our separate ways.

I drove back to the motel, changed my clothes and poured myself a couple of Chivas Regals from the bottle I carry along for just such gala occasions. I'm not much of a day time boozer, but I guess I needed to wash the taste of mourning out of my mouth. Then I headed over to the Coast Highway, stopped for gas, and drove south along what used to be one of the prettiest deserted stretches of coast anywhere. And still is, largely. And won't be, once the Diehl Corporation is finished with it.

I was feeling pretty loose—for one thing, I was going down the road of more than one happy memory—too loose in any case to pay much attention to what was going on around me. I was just moseying along, an even sixty-five, with a tape in the deck and singing at just the right off-key …

Which is when the bastards always jump you.

I was almost through the empty stretch and going up the first of the steep hills where the town starts. A few hills later the town ends and the coast goes wild again, then another town, and so on, clear to Baja California.

Up near the top of the hill, they'd cut the lanes down from four to two. It was a hell of a dumb idea, but there'd been some kind of roadwork going on and those orange highway cones had it marked off for you way in advance. I'd half-noticed a cream-colored van coming along like gangbusters in the outer lane, and out of reflex I opened the Mustang up a notch to give him room to tuck in behind me. Hell, no van is going to take me on a hill. But this guy had another notion and at that he must have had more than a coffee grinder underneath.

Only not enough. The driver was up too high for me to see him when he went by, but I saw the orange cones forcing him over, and I saw him swerve to cut me off. I saw curtains on his side and rear windows and I jammed on the brakes just as his ass end slammed into my left front fender north of the door.

There was an awful tearing sound like the twisted fingers of two tin forks pulled apart.

The van jumped like a goosed cat. It shimmied, danced along on two wheels and by some miracle which isn't supposed to happen, landed back on all fours and disappeared over the top of the hill, bumper stickers and all.

Whereas for me and the Mustang, we wound up in a ditch, also on all fours, our nose about two feet short of the hibiscused brick wall of another Diehl enterprise called Turquoise Estates.

6

“I don't believe in accidents,” Twink Beydon had said.

Neither do I.

The motor was still turning over, and the dull ache in my forehead would take a while to turn into a full-fledged bruise. I backed out with a crunch and a spinning of rubber that didn't do the iceplant growing in the ditch any good, and I went after him.

Laguna's a picturesque little town in a freaked-out artsy-craftsy way, narrow streets winding up over the hills and houses tucked in every whichway, a lot of them perched on stilts, but I didn't do much sightseeing. Which isn't to say I wasn't on a good half of those streets in the next twenty minutes. I glimpsed him as I came over the second hill. Way down at the bottom a traffic light had stopped him. It went green just as I caught sight of him, and he disappeared down a side street into the center of town. I made the light on the yellow, veered down the side street, a second side street, a third, a fourth, burning a couple of stop signs en route and raising havoc with the Hare Krishnas on the corners. A couple of times I thought I had him, once when I was about ten cars back at a light, but each time he did the vanishing act. I went by half a dozen vans painted every hue of the rainbow, but none cream-colored. Maybe he'd done an instant paint job or maybe, like in the bankrobber movies, he'd rolled up the ramp of a moving truck and was laughing at me as I went by.

Finally I thought I had him cornered up a No Through street. I let out a whoop, squealed rubber on a curve, went up a hill, around a corner where the macadam ended in a fence on the side of a canyon, and almost ran smack into the ass end of a J. C. Penney delivery truck.

That's where I gave up.

“And I thought we were pretty good,” I said to the Mustang.

The Mustang didn't answer.

I got out and lit up a Murad to calm my nerves. I admired the view, which was composed half of the rocky coast, cut into coves and inlets by the sea, and half of a good-sized accordion pleat in my left front fender. I'd been hearing an unhealthy scrunching noise on the corners, which turned out to be a piece of bent fender rubbing against the tire. This I managed to straighten out with my bare hands, which goes to show how thick they're rolling the metal in Detroit these days. I also rearranged the bumper a little. The headlights still looked crosseyed, but they and the rest of the damage could wait for the insurance company.

I drove slowly back to the Coast Highway and south again over the rollercoaster hills. The area had been built up a lot since I'd last been that way, but what hasn't, and if you didn't look too close it made you think of Monterey and points north. In any case the Pacific was never far from view, and whenever that's true in California you can't go very wrong.

The hills started to decline. A few miles further down the coast would go flat again, but I wasn't going that far. I turned off onto a narrow dirt road which seemed to go nowhere and did, past a paint-peeled No Trespassing sign belonging to a beach club long since defunct. None of this had changed, nor had the circle of dirt where the road ended and the jagged rocks began, still some seventy yards' climb down to the beach. A developer's paradise, and how the Diehl Corporation and its competitors had passed it up I've no idea.

There were maybe a dozen cars parked in the circle, but I saw only one of them. It was a cream-colored van with black curtains across the windows, California license plate ZNV 218, and a right ass end which looked like the Jolly Green Giant had tried to take a bite out of it.

A surfer was standing on the other side of it in a black wet suit, looking busy over his board. But the suit was dry, and there wasn't another soul in sight.

I got out and walked up behind him.

“Is this your heap?” I said.

“Nope.”

“Whose is it, do you know?”

“Nope.”

“You know, it isn't very nice to go around side-swiping people in broad daylight, particularly in a piece of shit like this.”

“Like I don't know what you're talking about, Brother, this is … Hey, man! What the hell?”

I'd grabbed his rubber shoulder and pulled. The rest of him came up with it. He jerked loose, looking indignant, and fingered the rubber like it was 100 percent worsted.

“I don't like people calling me Brother, Brother, who aren't my brothers. I also don't like people running me off the road. Somebody's likely to get hurt.”

He'd driven it all right. I'd have bet my last buck on it, and he looked like he knew I'd win. He glanced uncertainly toward the water, then at me, then at his feet.

“Are you Ford?” I said.

He fit the description more or less, him and a thousand other self-styled easy riders: the sun-bleached hair down to their shoulders, the tanned skin, the slouch, the blue I-don't-give-a-shit eyes.

“Me? No, like I'm Chrysler, man, I'm …”

I slapped him just once, open-handed, hard enough to bring a wince of tears out of his ducts but not enough to leave any marks on his pretty cheek.

“Hey …!” he started.

“I'm looking for Ford,” I said. “Andy Ford. Is he down there?”

“He might be,” he said, holding his cheek. “Who wants to know?”

“I'm a friend of Robin Fletcher's.”

“Oh Robin, yeah, how's old Robin?” he began, but then he backed off, saying, “O.K., yeah he's down there, Brother, all you got to do is ask.”

“Is that his van?”

“It might be, yeah, I dunno.”

I had a yen to make a pretzel out of his rubber suit with him in it, another to take a look inside the black curtains, but I squelched both and started down the rocks to the beach.

After the buildup I've given it, it's a shame to admit it was a bad day at the cove, but so it was. The sun was glinting off the water, making all those sparkles the hopheads like to stare at, and there was a fair breeze chopping up the surface, but maybe the rollers had gone up to Santa Monica for the day. Some ten or twelve surfers were waiting it out near the breaker line like black ducks on a pond. I knew the feeling. It doesn't take as much patience as you'd think. Sometimes you could almost fall asleep out there, rocking along in the sun with your legs going slowly numb from the cold.

There were some numbers stretched out on towels on the sand who seemed to belong to the action. They weren't a bad harem at that. Robin Fletcher, I thought, wouldn't have had much going for her in that company. I asked the pick of them to point out Ford to me, and she did, and I sat down next to her to watch his form.

He was good too. It's changed some since my day—they go in for the short boards now, which are trickier—but you can still spot the good ones. Sometimes you even know from the way they sit their boards. The others were paddling in and out, looking for a ride, and sooner or later each of them took his chance, wiping out in the quick break or just running out of wave, but he sat it out, waiting, an immobile blot of black bobbing against the horizon. Until, like it always does when you wait long enough, even on bad days, the right one came along. You could feel it coming. You saw the suck away from the beach, the long swell rolling in toward a crest, and then he was up quickly and riding by himself, shooting ahead of the froth like an arrow sprung from a bow, knees bending with it and body back like a sail, hands low and ready, feet shifting once, then looping and crisscrossing as a second wave hit him from the side to catch the new crest, and in finally, home free, to step off in the curdling foam as easy as a passenger climbing off a bus.

The last free ride in America, you could say, but the playmates were flat on their backs and there was no one to cheer but me.

Only I wasn't in an applauding mood.

He walked toward me carrying his board under his arm, and I got up. He had on an armless body shirt and the pants had been lopped off at the knees. His build was a swimmer's more than a surfer's, meaning he was long in the chest, in the arms too, but the rest of him was about as you'd figure.

His pals straggled in behind him, and they leaned their boards against the rocks like shields. Even some of the snatch got up on their elbows.

“I want to talk to you about Karen Beydon,” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “O.K.”

“I've never been much for talking to a crowd,” I said, looking around at his private platoon. “Suppose we take a little walk along the beach.”

They didn't seem to like it very much, but it was all right with him and we headed off toward the other end of the cove.

“Is that the way you always treat your guests?” I asked him.

He acted like he didn't know what I was talking about.

“That's your van up there, isn't it?”

Yeah, he said, it was.

“Well, your van took a piece out of me coming down here, damn near ran me into the ocean.”

He shrugged. It didn't seem to interest him one way or the other. It was probably Chris, he said. I gathered Chris was the sentinel up in the parking circle.

“But you knew I was coming, didn't you?”

Yeah, he'd known.

“Our mutual friend, Robin Fletcher?”

Yeah, that was right.

“A nice girl, Sister Robin,” I said.

He didn't answer. I remarked that the motor in his van sure didn't seem like the kind they sent out of the factories, but he didn't answer that either other than to say that he'd bought it like that from a guy. In fact he didn't answer anything more than was necessary until we got onto Karen, or rather onto him and Karen. I had the impression he had other things on his mind, but probably it was that subjects that didn't have to do with him personally didn't hold his attention.

We walked down to where the cove ended in a scraggle of rocks, and there were long brown necklaces of kelp bashing into the rocks and drifting out again. I sat on a boulder and he sort of hunkered, doodling in the sand with a stick while he talked. Because once he got started he talked, and he talked.

I won't try to put it all down. In the first place he was dead serious about it, which I couldn't be. And in the second, you've already read it in a dozen novels, seen it in a dozen drive-ins. All you have to do is put on a used Simon & Garfunkel record and you'll get the picture.

It was the old on-the-road story, re-enacted for the 88,000th time in living color. The Great American Myth to some, the Great American Disillusion to more, but that doesn't keep thousands of kids from dreaming the dream and trying to live it. All you have to do is get out on the highway anywhere in the West to see it: kids with packs on their backs and thumbs in the air, kids carrying signs, kids riding Yamahas, kids in vans and old heaps which you'd swear couldn't make it to the next town, and sometimes don't. It's like an itch in the pants, an army on the move, and no matter that there's no place to go, in the summer they're thicker than the trees up at Big Sur, all of them coming back from someplace and headed someplace else.

Karen and Ford had done it in a certain style. It was his van and her money, and they slept in motels more than in the van. They made it as far east as St. Louis, Missouri, and as far north as Wyoming, where an old lady took a shine to them and they stayed a week in her motel somewhere near Cheyenne. And they turned her on, he said, and they fucked in the snow on a bed of pine needles one day when Karen was flying on acid. In between they amused themselves ripping off supermarkets, and once in Nebraska they'd knocked over a gas station.