Authors: Thomas Perry
31
Chinese Gordon watched the black Cadillac make the left turn into the road that led to the aerial tramway. He said to Margaret, “How many is that?”
“Four, if you count the one that came in right after Grijalvas.”
“I’m counting it. There were five men in it, mean, ugly men.”
“You couldn’t tell if they were mean and ugly.”
“No, but they were right on time, and what are five men in suits doing driving to the aerial tramway together at midnight? A basketball team on a wholesome junket?”
“How about a law firm?”
“I’d say they’re blocking off the road behind old Jorge. I guess that’s that. Another trap.” He turned the key and started the van.
“At least we had a good dinner.”
“Sure. Jorge has—had, I mean—good taste in restaurants. I loved it.”
“I was watching you, and you didn’t put a pound of pepper on everything the way you usually do.”
Chinese Gordon smiled. “Yeah. I hate all that pepper.”
Margaret stared at him as he put the van in gear and pulled out onto the highway. He drove toward Palm Springs, humming the drinking song from
The Student Prince
.
“Chinese?”
“Hmm?”
“Look, I don’t think this is any of my business, but I love you very much, and someday I hope to marry you if I ever can find one shred of evidence that you’re not criminally insane. Then this would be my business, because I’d like to cook for you.”
“Feel free to plumb the depths.”
“Well, I thought the reason you used all that pepper was that you’d gotten used to it somewhere you’d been where the food was awful—like Viet Nam or Thailand or maybe Africa. I never said anything about it because I thought it might make you sad or even mad.”
“Hell, no. The food in some of those places is terrific. The secret history of the world is that the French concentrated on placing chefs in all of the major cities, and the British concentrated on taking over those places so they could get something decent to eat. If you spend time in England you begin to wonder if all animals are made up entirely of innards.”
“Don’t change the subject. Why do you use all that pepper?”
Chinese Gordon pulled the van into the parking lot of the Palm Canyon Motel. “This place look good to you?”
“Fine. Why the pepper?”
“I’m not in a good mood. I just lost a chance at several million dollars.”
“Me too. Why the pepper?”
“If you must know, and apparently you must, I put the pepper on because of Doctor Henry Metzger.”
“He likes pepper?”
“He hates it. If I don’t put pepper on things, then as soon as I turn my back, he eats whatever is on my plate.”
“What about the dog?”
“He doesn’t even wait until I turn my back.”
G
RIJALVAS GLANCED AT THE FACE
of his watch, the numbers glowing green in the darkness. “By now Morrison is dead and the others are on their way down the far side of the mountain. It’s time to deal with the ambush he will have set up down here.”
Grijalvas and his two men spent a few seconds wiping the smooth surfaces inside the car with handkerchiefs. Joachim left the motor running and the headlights on. The bulb had been removed from the dome light in the ceiling, so when they opened the doors beside the edge of the parking lot they were still in near darkness.
The agent on the hillside whispered into his radio again. “They’re out of the car now. It looks like they’re walking into the bushes, but the car’s still running and the lights are on.”
The voice from the radio said, “Don’t do anything. Our highly skilled team of medical analysts agree that they’re taking a piss. They think they’re about to start a long drive.” Then there was the sound of laughter in the background.
“But one of them’s carrying a briefcase or something—”
“Wait a minute. They’re calling from the top.” There was a pause while the agent strained his eyes looking through his infrared night binoculars to see the men who had left the car.
The voice came back over the radio, much louder. “Move in. Take them now. Do you hear me?”
The agent turned to give the signal, but the voice on the radio continued, “All units, move in now.” He looked down at the Continental. Six cars were converging on it from different parts of the parking lot. On the sloping hillsides surrounding the area bright spotlights switched on and shot long beams across the basin, some sweeping slowly along the thick brush near the car, others jumping spasmodically to the road and then to the bare hills, then to the parking lot. The agent said, “We’ll have them in a minute. What’s up?”
“The car’s a decoy. The trace on it brought back confirmation that it’s stolen. They’ve probably got another one parked someplace.”
“Did you get Morrison and Morton off the top?”
“No. Four guys who looked like Mexicans walked in and killed them before the evacuation team could move in. We haven’t figured out why yet. We thought they’d wait for Morrison to come down the tramway.”
“Maybe they looked in the suitcases.”
“Not a chance. They were still carrying them down the mountain when they bumped into the evacuation team.”
“So at least that much came off. Thank God for dumb luck.”
“What luck? There are only two trails down, and we had people on both of them.”
The agent heard the roar of an automatic weapon below him, and he jumped up to see one of his men standing beside the Continental, spraying the bushes with an Uzi submachine gun, a bright tongue of orange flame and sparks sputtering from the muzzle. He shouted into the radio, “Somebody tell that shithead down there to stop firing, if you can hear me. He’s going to blow all our heads off.”
A man got out of a nearby car and ran up to the man with the Uzi, who had paused to insert a fresh magazine. They walked back to the car together.
The agent said into the radio, “Oh, no, cowboy. Don’t get too comfortable in that car. It’s time for a sweep. Everybody hear that? I want five cars, bright headlights, at intervals of five hundred feet. The rest of you on foot. Keep to the high ground, and don’t let them get out of this valley. Now get going.”
Along the ridges on both sides of the road he could see spotlights moving now, methodically sweeping from side to side, crossing one another, but always inching up the road away from the aerial tramway station toward the main highway. The first of the cars moved up the road slowly, with men in the back seat aiming spotlights out both side windows.
Moments later the second car moved off, its headlights falling just short of the first car’s taillights. It would be impossible for anything larger than a gila monster to escape, the agent thought.
G
RIJALVAS AND HIS TWO COMPANIONS
scrambled through the bushes above the aerial tramway station. They would stay on the rocky ridges all the way up the road until they managed to find the car that was waiting for them, and then come in on both sides of it. The ambushers would never expect to be attacked. They’d be waiting for the Lincoln Continental to appear on the road with the money in it. But the Continental had been abandoned, and the money was on its way down a mountain trail miles from here. It would be safely in the back of the pickup truck in another half hour, guarded by some of Grijalvas’s best men. Morrison was dead, and in a few minutes the ambushers would be dead. Grijalvas had no doubt there would be ambushers. He had chosen this place because it invited Morrison to arrange a trap. It was the best way to ensure that Morrison would bring the money; Morrison wouldn’t want to take the chance that the blackmailers would sense the trap and escape to reveal whatever it was they knew about him.
Grijalvas led his companions up the hillside a few yards and studied the shapes of the dark ridges to see which would make the best trail. There was no reason to make this an evening of bruised shins and twisted ankles.
Suddenly the narrow valley was bathed in light. Floodlights blinked on and long cones of blinding brightness pierced the air, moving about erratically. The nearest was no more than a hundred feet from where Grijalvas stood. He tapped Joachim’s arm and scrambled over the ridge to the slope beyond. The three moved quickly, putting as much distance between them and the road as they could. After they had gone a half mile, Grijalvas heard the rattle of an automatic weapon in the distance.
He said, “It’s all wrong. There are too many of them. They’re too organized.”
His companions said nothing, only followed him over the broken ground, Joachim carrying the briefcase containing the three Ingraham automatic rifles, and Jesus carrying the extra ammunition clips.
A few hundred yards farther and Grijalvas swung to the left in a path parallel to the road. There could be no question of attacking the men waiting to block the road—there could be twenty of them, all heavily armed. It was all wrong. Even a man like Morrison couldn’t arrange this. He must have called the FBI. There was an army around that tram station. Grijalvas broke into a run, and the two men followed. They seemed to have no trouble staying within a pace of him even with the heavy metal they carried. Grijalvas’s lungs ached after three hundred yards and his breath came in gasps, but Joachim and Jesus seemed to run easily and tirelessly. Finally Grijalvas tripped on a jagged rock and fell to his knees. The two ran on for twenty feet, then stopped to wait while he staggered to catch up.
They walked in silence for a time, then Grijalvas managed a trot. After five minutes Grijalvas’s wind gave out again and they walked until they came to a low rise and could see the cars passing on the highway into Palm Springs. Far to the left Grijalvas could see the yellow glow of the sodium lamps at the aerial tramway station and the brighter white beams that swept the land around it.
It was important not to let himself get too confident now that they were out of the immediate vicinity of Morrison’s trap. In a short time they would begin searching the highway in cars, and that would bring other problems. He was glad he’d heard the firing of automatic weapons near the station. The police wouldn’t fire aimlessly into the underbrush because three men who might not even be armed had gone into it. They’d shout something through a bullhorn and then fire, so it wasn’t the police. He hoped they had some way of learning that Morrison was dead and the money was gone. If they weren’t police they would have no reason to keep searching this area. Instead they’d make a futile attempt to catch up with Juan and the others, because they had the money.
He walked toward Palm Springs, keeping as far from the highway as possible without losing his bearings. Joachim and Jesus followed without speaking. It took an hour before they crossed the first road on the edge of the town. From here on it would be difficult. There would be lights now and soon sidewalks, and buildings that would block their movement but wouldn’t give them a place to hide.
He stopped on the shoulder of the road beside a high chain link fence. “Let me think about this for a second.”
Joachim said, “We could steal a car.”
“Maybe,” Grijalvas agreed, “but by the time we get far enough into town to find one that’s parked, we’d be risking a lot for nothing. The car Figueroa left for us is what we need.” He stared at the fence. “This looks like a golf course.” He shielded his eyes from the glare of the streetlamp and peered through the fence into the darkness. He could see a thick stand of trees and a gentle rise in the ground beyond that looked as though it couldn’t be natural. He set the toe of his shoe in the fence and lifted himself up. From there he could see that the top of the mound was flat. “It is a golf course. Come on.”
Joachim pulled himself up and stared at the mound. “Are you sure? I don’t see a flag.”
“Maybe they take them in at night.”
They climbed the fence, the two younger men pushing Grijalvas over with difficulty. At the top he caught the tail of his coat and managed to disentangle it only by tearing the bottom seam. When they were on the ground beyond, they walked among the trees and skirted the open fairway. The quiet of the night air was broken only by the distant swish of cars passing on the main highway. Sometimes they could see the headlights, tiny and dim at first, then growing brighter as the car approached, then gone again, leaving only the red taillights diminishing in the darkness.
They went through another stand of trees and then past sand traps and across a wooden bridge over a narrow pond of still, greasy water. Finally they stood on a green, and at the end of the long, straight fairway they could see the lights of the clubhouse. Grijalvas said, “I guess we’d better get the guns out now. That’s where the gate will be, and it looks as though they must have a restaurant or something open. Keep the guns under your coats and let me talk if anybody stops us.”
Joachim opened the case and handed two of the short, heavy weapons to the others. He wiped off the case with his handkerchief and ran with it back to the pond. When he returned, the three walked up the edge of the fairway toward the building. As they approached they could see people through the large, lighted windows, sitting at tables. As Grijalvas watched, a man at one of the tables stood up, holding a stemmed glass high, and spoke for a few seconds, then sat down again. To my friend Mr. Gordon, Grijalvas thought. The man to whom I owe my five million dollars.
They turned left at the tee below the clubhouse and walked up the path to the parking lot. A young man in a tight red jacket rushed up and said, “Can I bring your car up for you, sir?”
“No, thank you,” said Grijalvas. “It’s parked down the road.” As he walked on he surveyed the parking lot. All of these cars—fifty or more—would have their keys in the ignition or under the sun visor on the driver’s side. It was something to keep in mind, but his own car wasn’t far off now, and it wouldn’t be a good idea to let his tired feet make the decision for him. They moved down the driveway to the street.
There was a sidewalk now, and after five minutes they passed another pedestrian, an elderly man in a tight red jogging suit who was walking a small, fluffy white dog that stopped to sniff each tree, each fence post, then scurried on to the next with nervous excitement. When they overtook him the dog yapped twice and the man jerked the leash, turning the little dog around to face him. “Cut it out, Nancy.”