by Sue Grafton
“Well, now there’s a recommendation,” I said. “You better believe it. In this day and age? I’d insist on a blood test before the first lip lock.”
The front door opened and a couple of customers came in. “Take my word for it,” she said, as she moved away. “This guy could be it. You could be Mrs. Doctor Somebody-or-other by the end of the year.”
I paid my check, bought a newspaper from the vending machine out front, and went back to my room. All was quiet next door. I propped myself up in bed and read the Brawley News, including a long article about “palm gardens,” which I learned was the proper term for the groves of date palms strung out on both sides of the Salton Sea. The trees, exotic transplants brought in from North Africa a century ago, transpire as much as five hundred quarts of water a day and have to be pollinated by hand. The varieties of dates – the Zahid, the Barhi, the Kasib, the Deglet Noor, and the Medjool – all sounded like parts of the brain most affected by stroke.
As soon as it seemed civilized, I called the convalescent hospital and talked to Mrs. Haynes about Agnes Grey. Apparently, she’d been as docile as a lamb for the remainder of the night. Arrangements for her transport to Santa Teresa by air ambulance had been finalized and she was taking it in stride. She claimed she couldn’t even remember what had so upset her the day before.
After I hung up, I put a call through to Irene and passed the information on to her. Agnes’s outburst still felt unsettling to me, but I didn’t see what purpose my apprehension might serve.
“Oh, Mother’s just like that,” Irene said when I voiced my concern. “If she’s not raising hell, she feels she’s somehow remiss.”
“Well, I thought you should know how fearful she was. She sure raised the hair on the back of my neck.”
“She’ll be fine now. Don’t be concerned. You’ve done a wonderful job.”
“Thanks,” I said. As there didn’t seem to be any reason to remain in the area, I told her I’d be taking off shortly and would give her a call as soon as I got back to town.
I packed my duffel, gathered up my briefcase, the portable typewriter, and miscellaneous belongings, and locked everything in the car while I went up to the front office to settle my bill.
When I returned, the lovers were just emerging from the room next door. They were both in their fifties, a hundred pounds overweight, dressed in matching western-cut shirts and oversize blue jeans. They were discussing interest rates on short-term Treasury securities. The slogan painted on the Cadillac’s rear window read: just merged. I watched them cross the parking lot, arms around each other’s waists, or at least as far as they would go. While the car warmed up, I pulled my little .32 out of the briefcase where I’d tucked it the night before and transferred it to my handbag on the passenger seat.
I cut over to Westmorland, taking 86 north. I drove the first ten miles with a constant check on the rearview mirror. The day was sunny and the number of cars on the road was reassuring, though traffic began to thin some by the time I reached Salton City. I fiddled with the car radio, trying to find a station with more to offer than static or the price of soybeans, alfalfa, and sugar beets. I caught a flash of the Beatles and focused briefly on the radio while I did some fine-tuning.
It was when I glanced up again, with an automatic reference to the traffic behind me, that I spotted the red Dodge pickup bearing down on me. He couldn’t have been more than fifty yards back, probably driving eighty miles an hour to my fifty-five. I uttered a bark of surprise, jamming my foot down on the accelerator in a futile attempt to get out of his jam. The engine nearly stalled out with the unexpected surge, shuddering a hop, skip, and a jump before it leaped ahead. The front grill of the pickup appeared at my rear window, completely filling the glass. It was clear the guy meant to crawl right up my tailpipe, crushing me in the process. I jerked the steering wheel to the right, but not fast enough. The Dodge caught my rear fender with a smashing blow, spinning me in a half circle that left me facing south instead of north. I slammed on the brakes and the VW skittered along the shoulder, throwing up a spray of gravel. My handbag seemed to leap into my lap of its own accord. The engine died. I turned the key in the ignition and willed the car to start. Dimly, I registered the now empty highway. No help in sight. Where had everybody gone? Just up ahead on my left, a soft-packed dirt road followed the curve of an irrigation canal that bordered a fallow field, but there was no ranch house visible and no signs of life.
Behind me, the Dodge had made a U-turn and was now accelerating as it headed straight at me again. I ground at the starter, nearly singing with fear, a terrified eye glued to my rearview mirror where I could see the pickup accumulating speed. The Dodge plowed into me, this time with an impact that propelled the VW forward ten yards with an ear-splitting BAM. My forehead hit the windshield with a force that nearly knocked me out. The safety glass was splintered into a pattern of fine cracks like a coating of frost. The seat snapped in two and the sudden liberation from my seat belt slung me forward into the steering wheel. The only thing that saved me from a half-rack of cracked ribs was the purse in my lap, which acted like an air bag, cushioning the blow.
The other driver threw the pickup into reverse, then punched on the gas. The truck lurched back, then forward, ramming into me like a bumper car. I felt the VW leave the ground in a short flight that ended in the irrigation ditch, plumes of runoff water splatting out in all directions. I narrowly avoided biting my tongue in half as I bounced against the headliner and then off the dashboard. I put a hand on my mouth and checked my teeth automatically, making sure I hadn’t lost any. The car seemed to float briefly before it settled against the muddy bottom. The runoff water in the ditch was only three feet deep, but both doors had popped open and salty water flooded in.
On the shoulder of the road, my assailant got out of the pickup and moved around to the rear, a tire iron in his right hand. Maybe he thought a death by bludgeoning was more consistent with a car wreck than a bullet in the brain. He was a big man, white, wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap. Mewing in panic, I fumbled in my handbag for my gun and rolled out of the VW. I crouched, shielded by the car as I jacked a shell into the chamber. I propped the barrel of the gun on the roof and steadied the sites with both hands.
Miraculously, I saw the guy toss the tire iron in the bed of the pickup as he slid back under the steering wheel and slammed the door. The window was rolled up on the passenger side, where a sheet of paper had been affixed. Like an eye test, I made out the top line of print which read as is, with several lines of print below; the temporary sticker from a used car lot. I thought I saw a face peering out at me briefly as the engine roared to life and the truck peeled out. I felt a jolt of recognition, which I didn’t have time to process. The pain descended and I felt the blackness close in, narrowing my vision to a long, dark barrel with a glinting bull’s-eye of daylight at the far end. I took a deep breath to clear my head and looked up in time to catch one last glimpse of the pickup as it headed north toward numbers were visible.
Two cars went by on the road, heading south. The driver in the second car, a vintage Ford sedan, seemed to do a double take, catching sight of the VW, which sat in the canal partially submerged. He braked to a stop and began to back up, transmission whining in reverse. The adrenaline surging through my system crested like a wave and I began to shake. It was over. I found myself weeping audibly, from pain, from fear, from relief.
“Need some help?” The old man had angled his car onto the shoulder of the road and rolled his window down. Dimly, I realized he was probably obscuring any tire tracks left by the Dodge, but the gravel shoulder seemed too hard-packed to take a print. To hell with it. I was safe and that’s all I cared about. I shoved the gun in my bag and staggered to my feet, wading across the canal toward the road. I scrambled up the embankment, tennis shoes slipping in the mud. As I approached the sedan, the old man studied the knot on my forehead, my disheveled hair, my blood-streaked face, my blue jeans sopping wet. I wiped my
nose on my sleeve, registering the streak of blood that I’d mistaken for tears. I swayed on my feet. I could feel the goose egg protruding from the middle of my forehead like I was suddenly sprouting a horn. Pain thundered in my head, and for the first time, nausea stirred. I crossed to his car, watching his concern mount when he saw how shaky I was. “Sister, you’re a mess.”
“Is there any way you can get the highway patrol out here? Somebody just ran me off the road.”
“Well, sure. But don’t you want a lift somewhere first? You look like you could use some medical attention. I just live up the road a piece.”
“I’m fine. I just need a tow truck…”
“Young lady, you listen here. I’ll give the sheriff a call and get a tow truck out, too, but I’m not going to leave you standin’ here by the road.”
“I don’t want to leave my car.”
“That car’s not going to budge and I’m not either unless you do as I say.”
I hesitated. The VW was totaled. The entire back end appeared foreshortened, the right rear fender crushed. The car had been suffering from countless dings and dents anyway, the beige paint oxidized to a chalky hue, highlighted with rust. I’d had the car nearly fifteen years. With a pang of regret, I turned back to the sedan, hobbling around to the passenger side. I felt like I was leaving a much-loved pet behind. I’d apparently banged my left leg from the knee right up my thigh and it was already stiffening up. When I finally dared to pull my jeans down, I was going to find a bruise the size and color of an eggplant. The old man leaned across and opened the door for me.
“I’m Carl LaRue,” he said.
“Kinsey Millhone,” I replied. I slid in, slouching down on the base of my spine so I could rest my head against the seat. Once I closed my eyes, the nausea subsided somewhat.
The sedan eased out into the highway again, heading south about a quarter of a mile before we made a left turn onto a secondary road. I sincerely hoped this was not part of some elaborate ruse, the old man in cahoots with the guy in the pickup truck. I flashed on the as is sticker in the window, the glimpse I’d had of someone peering out at me. Gingerly, I sat up, remembering where I’d seen the face. It was at the rest stop where I’d eaten lunch on the way down to the desert. There’d been a kid there, a boy maybe five, playing with a Matchbox toy. His father had been napping with a magazine laid across his face… a white guy, with big arms, in a T-shirt with the sleeves ripped out. Once I made the connection, I knew I’d actually seen them twice. The same man had crossed the darkened motel parking lot with the kid perched up on his shoulders as they headed for the Coke machine. I felt a chill ripple through me at the recollection of how he’d tickled the kid. What sang in my memory was the peal of impish laughter, which seemed now as dainty and evil as a demon’s. What kind of hit man would bring his kid along?
Chapter 8
*
While Mr. Larue put a call through to the county sheriff’s department, I found myself folding up like a jackknife on the lumpy couch in his living room, overwhelmed by sleepiness. My head was pounding. My neck was stiff from whiplash, my rib cage bruised. I felt cold and little, as I had just after the accident in which my parents were killed. In a singsong voice, inexplicably, my brain began feeding back to me the text I’d read in the morning paper. “Palms grow to 70 feet and can produce 300 pounds of dates. A mature palm will grow 15 to 18 bunches of dates. Each cluster, when the fruit has reached the size of a pea, must be protected with brown paper covers to ward off birds and rain…” What I couldn’t remember anymore was where I was or why I hurt so bad.
Carl was shaking me persistently. He’d apparently placed a call to the hospital emergency room and had been told to bring me in. His wife, whose name kept slipping away, had soaked a washcloth in ice water so she could dab the dirt and crusted blood off my face. My feet had been elevated and I’d been wrapped in a down comforter. At their urging, I roused myself and shuffled out to the car again, still wrapped in the puffy quilt like a bipedal worm.
By the time we reached the emergency room, I had come out of my stupor sufficiently to identify myself and make the correct answers to “How many fingers am I holding up?” and similar neurological pop quizzes I took while lying flat on my back. The ceiling was beige, the cabinets royal blue. Portable X-ray equipment was wheeled in. They X-rayed my neck first, two views, to make sure it wasn’t broken, and then did a skull series, which apparently showed no fractures.
I was allowed to sit up then while a young doctor peered at me eye to eye, our breaths intermingling with a curious intimacy as he checked my corneal reflexes, pupil size, and reaction to light. He might have been thirty, brown curly hair receding from a forehead creased with fine horizontal lines. Under his white jacket, he wore a buff-colored dress shirt and a tie with brown dots. His aftershave lotion smelled of newly cut grass, though his electric mower had missed a couple of hairs just under his chin. I wondered if he realized I was noting his vital signs while he was noting mine. My blood pressure was 110 over 60, my temperature, pulse, and respirations normal. I know because I peeked every time he jotted anything down. In a box at the bottom of the page, he scrawled the words “postconcussional syndrome.” I was happy to realize the accident hadn’t impaired my ability to read upside down. Various forms of first aid were administered and most of them hurt, including a tetanus shot that nearly made me pass out.
“I think we should keep you overnight,” he said. “It doesn’t look like you sustained any major damage, but your head took quite a bump. I’d be happier if we could keep an eye on you for the next twelve hours, at any rate. Anybody you want notified?”
“Not really,” I murmured. I was too battered to protest and too scared to face the outside world anyway. He moved out to the nurses’ station, which I could see through an interior window shuttered for privacy by partially closed rustred Venetian blinds. In the corridor, a sheriff’s deputy had appeared. I could see horizontal slats of him chatting with the young female clerk who pointed over her shoulder to the room where I sat. The other cubicles in the emergency room were empty, the area quiet. The deputy conferred with the doctor, who evidently decided I was fit enough to answer questions about how my car came to be sitting in an irrigation ditch.
The deputy’s name was Richie Windsor, one of those baby-faced cops with an uptilted nose and plump cheeks reddened by sunburn. He had to be a rookie, barely twenty-one, the minimum age for a sheriff’s deputy. His eyes were hazel, his hair light brown and cut in a flattop. He hadn’t been at it long enough to adopt the noncommittal, paranoid expression that most cops assume. I described the incident methodically, sparing no details, while he took notes, interjecting occasional enthusiastic comments in a borrowed Mexican accent. “Whoa!” he would say, or “Get real, kemosabe!” He seemed nearly envious that someone had tried to kill me.
When I finished my recital, he said he’d have the dispatcher broadcast a “be on the lookout” in case the Dodge was still somewhere in the area. We both knew the chances of intercepting the man were slim. If the guy was smart, he’d abandon the vehicle at the first opportunity. As the deputy turned to leave, I found myself snagging impulsively at his uniform sleeve.
“One thing,” I said. “The doctor wants me here overnight. Is there any way we can keep my admission under wraps? This is the only hospital in the area. All the guy has to do is call Patient Information and he’ll know exactly where I am.”
“Good point, amigo. Let me see what I can do,” he said. He tucked his pen away.
Within minutes, the admissions office had sent a young female clerk over with a wheelchair, a clipboard full of forms to be completed, and a patient identification strip in a cloudy plastic band, which she affixed to my wrist with a device that looked like a hole punch.
Carl LaRue and his wife had been sitting patiently in the corridor all this time. They were finally ushered in to see me while last-minute arrangements were being made for a bed. The deputy had apparently cautioned the old couple
about the situation.
“Your whereabouts is safe with us,” Carl said. “We won’t say a word.”
His wife patted my hand. “We don’t want you to worry now. You just get some rest.”
“I appreciate everything you’ve done,” I said. “Really. I can’t thank you enough. I’d probably be dead if you hadn’t come along.”
Carl shifted uncomfortably. “Well, now. I don’t know about that. I’m happy to be of help. We got kids of our own and we’d want somebody helping them under similar circumstances.”
His wife tucked her arm in his. “We best get a move on. They’ll want to put you to bed.”
As soon as they departed, I was whisked up to the second floor by freight elevator to a private room, probably on the contagious-disease ward where no visitors were allowed. It was only three in the afternoon and the day looked like it’d be a long one. I didn’t get zip for painkillers because of the head injury, and I wasn’t allowed to sleep lest I slip into some coma from which I might never wake. My vital signs were checked every hour. The meal carts were long gone, but a kindly nurse’s aide found me a cup of muscular cherry Jell-O and a packet of saltines. I pictured the ward clerk filling out a charge slip for twenty-six dollars. I could probably hold my hospital bill down to seven or eight hundred bucks, but only if I didn’t need a Band-Aid or a safety pin. I had insurance, of course, but it offended me to be charged the equivalent of the down payment on a car.
My eye lighted on the telephone. There was a telephone book in the bottom of the nightstand. I looked up the area code for Carson City, Nevada (702 all locations, in case you really want to know), dialed Information, and got the listing for Decker/Dietz Investigations, which I dialed in turn. The phone rang five times. I half-expected a service to pick up or a machine to kick in, but someone picked up abruptly on the sixth ring, sounding brusque and out of sorts. “Yes?”