“I quite agree with you,” Jim Howard said.
Colonel Ortega finished his vermouth and paid the little waiter. “Then we understand each other,” he said.
“It is so.”
“Tomorrow is another day.”
“It is true.”
“Adiós, Jim,” Colonel Ortega said.
Jim Howard went back to his table and sat down opposite Hope Graham.
“Well?” she said.
“The chief is a wiser man than you know. He has given me something to think about.”
“Really?”
“Why did you refuse his offer to send two of his men with your papers into the Sierra and deliver them to your boss?”
“Because the boss wants me to deliver them in person.”
“They are that kind of papers?”
“I imagine,” she said.
They drank their coffee in silence. He stole glances at her. He wondered how much she knew about Fitz Jordan. He couldn’t believe that Fitz Jordan had asked her to make the trip unless he was desperate. She was bringing him something that he had to have and that he did not dare try to get in any other way. She must know this. She must know a great deal more than she was telling. And yet he felt she was all right. He was going to take her with him because she knew where to find Jordan. He wondered what he would be doing if he hadn’t that excuse.
She finished her coffee. “When do we start?” she asked.
“Can you be ready in ten minutes?”
“I’m ready now.”
“In those clothes?”
“I have slacks in my car. I’ll change on the way.”
“Where is your car?”
“Half a block down the street, right behind your car.”
“Give me the key.”
She got the key out of her purse and Jim called the waiter and gave it to him and asked him to take care of the señorita’s car.
“Sí, señor,” the little waiter said, pocketing the bill Jim gave him. “It will be done.”
Jim Howard walked down the street with Hope Graham, and held the door of his car for her. He got her bags and the tarp and the blanket. He had some difficulty finding room for her things in the luggage compartment. He had a lot of stuff in there—two five-gallon cans of gas and the things he’d figured he’d need if he had to camp out. It took him five minutes to rearrange it. He got in behind the wheel and started the motor.
“You don’t know what you’re in for,” he said.
“No,” she said. “But I think you’re a decent guy. And if not, I have a gun.”
The streets and the plaza were deserted; luck was with him. A gas station, its familiar American trademark looking strange with the name of the company in Spanish over it, stood beside a grocery store. But both were dark.
They rolled on through the town, toward the hotel that had been the scene of big gambling until Cárdenas stopped it. The road seemed to go straight to the hotel, looming dark and abandoned in the fog. But at the gate to the wide gardens, a track cut off to the right. A California Automobile Club sign said: SANTO TOMÁS, 30 MILES, CARMICHAEL’S RANCH, 110 MILES. Some vandal had peppered the sign with bird shot; rust, starting from the holes, was eating the sign away.
Jim swung down the hard-packed dirt road. The fog was breaking into mist. It would be clear for a moment, then a cloud would form and blow softly in front of them. Suddenly the air cleared, the stars came out, and a dew began to fall, so heavy that he had to use the windshield wiper. Water streamed down the windshield as their bodies warmed the inside of the car and condensed the moisture out of the overburdened air. But through the open window the moon was brilliant on Todos Santos Bay.
“If you’ll stop here,” Hope Graham said, “I’ll change.”
He got the bag she asked for out of the luggage compartment and went back to his place at the wheel. She stood behind the car. In two minutes she asked him to put the bag back. She had changed to a slack suit, but she still held the wide-brimmed straw hat she’d been wearing.
“I can’t pack it without ruining it,” she said. “Will it go on the shelf behind the seat?”
It did.
Jim drove on. The road turned sharply. He was going twenty miles an hour when he hit a patch of clay that had been corduroyed by the wind. They both bounced so hard their heads hit the canvas top of the roadster. In trying to control the car, he stalled it.
Before he could start again, four soldiers appeared out of the dimness, their bayonets fixed on their rifles. They stared at him impassively, brown faces under big brown hats. The moonlight picked up spots of brass and silver on their uniforms.
The corporal said in Spanish, “It is not permitted to go south, señor.”
“What?” Jim said, trying to bluff. “What did you say? I don’t speak Spanish.”
The corporal was not to be bluffed.
“You are Señor ’Ovard,” he said in Spanish. “The chief said you might pretend not to understand Spanish. But you speak excellent Spanish, señor. If you do not turn your car and go back north, I have orders to put a bullet in your gas tank.”
“I don’t get it, mister,” Jim said in English. “You want to see my papers? My name is Johnson.”
“It was foretold,” the corporal said, “that you might claim to speak no Spanish and that you carried the papers of Johnson.”
Jim waited.
“Meestair ’Ovard,” the corporal said in what he tried to make English, “you go al norte, please. Viva los Estados Unidos.”
“You win,” Jim said. “May I be permitted to congratulate you, corporal, on your tact and your devotion to duty?” He reached in his pocket as though for cigarettes and took out his wallet. He displayed a five-dollar bill casually and smiled, and found his cigarettes. Each soldier accepted a cigarette, with grave thanks.
“Señor,” the corporal said, as he motioned his soldiers back, “I am sorry. I am a patriot. Also I do not defy Chief Ortega, my colonel. You will proceed back to Ensenada?”
Jim saw that the privates were too far away to hear. “Ten dollars?”
“Ten dollars buys for you two bullets in the gas tank, señor.”
Jim gave up. He started the car and turned it around under the bright beady gaze of the soldiers and headed slowly back toward town. Once around the curve, he was in sight of the sea. The breakers were oily and long in the moonlight. If he knew weather, it was going to be a clear hot day tomorrow.
He turned abruptly into the hotel grounds. There might be a trail through. He found an old service road that went south. But he hadn’t gone far when he came to a high woven-wire fence. He got out to look at it in the light of the head lamps. It was an American fence, on heavy pipe posts set in concrete, and no doubt guaranteed for twenty years. He got back into the car and considered charging the fence in the hope of knocking it down.
“What are you going to do now, Meestair ’Ovard?” Hope Graham asked.
“I am thinking,” he said.
“Why don’t you think up your real name?”
“What difference does it make to you?”
“It would be so nice to know what to call you.”
“Call me Jim.”
“Okay, Jim. If you will let me drive, I think I can find a way out of this. I told you I had been to Ensenada before.”
Jim got out of the car and walked around it. She slid over behind the wheel and he took her place. She backed the car around and started toward the hotel. At the corner of the building she cut across what had been a lawn, dropped into first gear as she went through a neglected flower bed. She swung again at the next corner of the building, and there was Todos Santos Bay, shining in the moonlight, with the long oily seas rolling in all the way from Japan. They bounced over a terrace and struck the hard sand of the beach. She swung the car south, turned
off the headlights and drove close to the water. Every fourth or fifth wave came higher than the rest, the creamy crest of it running in on the beach, until the wheels of the car were inches deep in sea water. But the speedometer said twenty miles an hour. They were making time.
“The bay curves in,” she said. “We ought to find the road south two or three miles below where those soldiers stopped us.”
Jim had scarcely slept for two nights. He couldn’t hold his eyes open any longer. He shut them for a moment and was awakened by the violent skidding of the car and the sound of something brushing against it.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
Hope Graham turned the headlights on. The car stood in a patch of tule, higher than the top.
“The brakes are wet,” she said. “I couldn’t stop.”
“Can you back out?”
She tried, feeding the gas slowly, letting the clutch in delicately. On the third try, the rear wheels caught. She made it back to the hard sand of the beach. Jim got his flashlight from the dash compartment and walked ahead.
The ground where the tules grew was wet. Clouds of mosquitoes descended on him. He pushed on until he saw open water ten yards wide with more tule on the other side.
He went back to the car. “It’s no soap. There’s a creek ahead. Maybe when the tide goes out we can cross it.”
“I’ll turn around and go back,” she said. “We might find a place where we can get up the bank.”
Jim walked along the upper edge of the beach, looking with his flash for some way to higher ground. But the bank was too steep.
“We’ll have to wait for daylight,” he said. “We might as well get some sleep.”
He got the tarps and blankets and spread them beside the car. Then he drew the short-barreled, heavy-caliber belly gun he carried in a holster inside the waistband of his trousers. It was the kind of revolver he preferred to any automatic pistol. The front sight had been rounded and the hammer spur ground off, so neither would catch on the holster in the act of drawing quickly. The front of the trigger guard had been cut away, so it could not interfere with the trigger finger. He cocked the gun now by pulling on the trigger until the hammer rose high enough to be caught by his thumb. He lowered the hammer gently and swung the cylinder out, in order to make sure that every chamber was loaded. He looked up to see that Hope Graham was watching him.
“Tough guy,” she said, and made it sound ironical.
“It’s just something you do before you go to bed and again when you wake up in the morning,” he said.
He put the gun down near the top of his blanket and took off his jacket and folded it for a pillow and put it on top of the gun.
Hope Graham opened the envelope purse she carried and took out a flat automatic pistol. She pulled the slide back far enough to make sure there was a cartridge in the chamber. Then she put the pistol down on her blanket and took off her jacket and folded it for a pillow and put it on top of the gun.
Jim had to smile at this performance, so close an imitation of his own.
“Good night, Meestair ’Ovard,” she said, when she had rolled up in her blanket.
“Good night,” he said.
He wished, lying there and listening to the hiss of the waves running up the beach, that he knew what she was taking to Fitz Jordan and whether she was his accomplice as well as his private secretary. He felt sure she had never heard anything about Jim Howard from Fitz. But she couldn’t be so innocent as she pretended to be….
He was waked up by a pull on his blanket, and for a second he thought he was in a sleeping car and the porter was routing him out. He sat up quickly and saw the girl. He gave himself a minute to come fully awake. She had built a little fire of driftwood. It was still night. The moon, pale now, was way out over the ocean. The girl had got the folding wire grid and the two-quart aluminum pail from his camp stuff. He smelled coffee.
“It’s time to get up,” she said. “It’s near daylight.”
“Where did you get water for coffee?”
“From the creek. The tide’s running out, so it isn’t salty. And it’s been boiled. You needn’t worry.”
She went over to the fire and took the pail off. He thought, as he watched her, that she was one of the few girls he’d ever known who could afford to wear slacks. And that head of blonde curls was as perfect as ever. She didn’t have to do much about it. Perhaps she had run her hands through it when she woke up.
She came back with a tin cup of coffee in each hand. She gave him one and sat down cross-legged on her blanket with the other. For five minutes they sat silent, sipping hot coffee.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “Last night at dinner you were Mr. Johnson, of the United States Secret Service, a man Colonel Ortega could not refuse permission to go south. An hour later you became Meestair ’Ovard and a person Colonel Ortega’s soldiers had orders to send back to Ensenada.”
“I’ve been thinking too,” Jim said. “Last night at dinner you came up to my table and asked me to pretend that we were old friends. You were private secretary to a respectable Los Angeles businessman. You were taking mysteriously important papers to him in the remote Sierra of Baja for which you had a secret map. What are you this morning?”
“So you didn’t believe me.”
“I did last night. I’d had a couple of drinks and the dinner was good and you were a hell of a pretty girl. Now that I see you in this light, without your make-up, wearing clothes you’ve slept in, with your hair uncombed, I have more sales resistance.”
“You should see yourself,” she said. “At least I’ve washed my face. You need a shave. You look like a tramp.”
She put down her coffee cup and reached for her purse. He smiled to himself when she took out a mirror and a lipstick and a comb.
“You know what you can do if you don’t like the idea of spending another couple of days with me,” he said.
“You know what I told you last night was true,” she said. “You know I wouldn’t be here if I had any choice.”
“Neither would I,” he said.
He picked up his gun and checked it as he had the night before, and put it back in its holster. He got a canvas bucket out of the car and walked up the beach to the creek. It was light enough now so he didn’t need the flash. When he got back to the car, Hope Graham had folded up the blankets and put the two tin cups in the little aluminum pail. She kicked the grid off the fire so it would cool.
“It’s light enough to start,” she said. “Let’s go.”
He didn’t say anything. Instead, he rummaged in the luggage compartment for his suitcase. He found it and took out a small rectangular box of leather.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Getting ready to shave,” he said.
“Don’t be a fool. We haven’t time. Ortega will be sending his soldiers after us.”
“I cannot go unshaven after what you have said.”
“Oh,” she said, “forget it.”
“I am not accustomed to being high-hatted by the girls I camp out with,” he said.
He put a small mirror on the running board of the car and sat on his heels in front of it and shaved while she watched him. When he had washed the lather off his face, he combed his hair and tied his necktie carefully.
“Now,” he said, “I’ll have a look for the best way to get out of here.”
He climbed the bank. But as far as he could see, it was too steep for a car to climb. He went back to the tules. It was only a little after dawn, but the morning mist had given way to the hot bright sun of the desert. Sweat ran down his face. He took off his tie and unbuttoned the collar of his shirt. As he reached to part the reeds, a pair of long-legged birds flew up. He stood for a moment staring up at them. They wheeled overhead, their blue bodies catching the sun, their long legs straight out behind them.
He waded into the tules. The mosquitoes sang around his head and the deer flies struck happily at the back of his neck. He walked on in, testing the ground. The reeds closed over him. From some place above him the birds cried angrily. He went on, his heels leaving little puddles. He thought the ground was fairly solid. He could make it by pushing the tules down and using them as a mat. But there was no way of crossing the stream. He went to work on the tules along the bank. In a few minutes his shirt was wet with sweat. Hope Graham joined him, working as fast and hard as he did.
“We’ve got a chance,” he said after an hour.
He put the car in low, went into the tules and turned left along the course he had laid out. The motor labored, the wheels spun, but the car went ahead. They came to a little marsh where the stream had once been wide and had silted itself in. The car bumped over it a little faster. But at the uphill edge he had to stop. The smooth reedy delta of the stream was behind them. Ahead were rocks and bare gravel and uprooted trees, litter of a winter flood.
Jim got out and walked ahead to pick a path for the car. He used the broken branch of a tree to pry up rocks and fill two or three of the worst holes. He cut his hand enough so he had to wrap his handkerchief around it to stop the bleeding. He made a path for twenty yards and went back to the car.
He drove in, made the twenty yards and kept on. The limbs of fallen trees scraped the sides of the car, threatened to take the top off. But he went on, making quick decisions as to whether he’d straddle a rock or put it under a wheel, and presently they were in a brush country of greasewood and sage that the car broke off with ease. He shifted into second and was making ten miles an hour when they saw the single wire of the telephone line and knew that they had reached the road south. It was eight o’clock and he guessed that they were six or seven miles south of Ensenada.
The two ruts in the brush turned abruptly into a new highway, two cars wide, with iron pegs carrying bits of red cloth to mark the sides. He guessed this was the road the rubio and his friends had been working on.
They hit the town of Santo Tomás toward eleven o’clock. Here the road branched. One trail struck back toward the sea, the other turned inland.
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 143