by Gores
Louise carefully followed the taut rope up the nearly vertical face, using the handholds and bolts and chocks which Runyan had left set for her. All her energies were concentrated on the climbing; no room left for anything else. Every movement of the hand, every placement of the foot, had to be thought out beforehand, then performed without hesitation and with absolute precision. Dancing had never required such precision.
Her jitters were gone, and the residual stiffness from yesterday's practice climbs had long since worked itself out of her muscles. She was loving it; even the sweat which bathed her body and stung her eyes was given a sensual quality by the edge of danger always present.
She paused to clear the chock she had just passed; the downward pressure caused by the weight of a climber's body was what wedged chocks so firmly into fissures in the rock; by pulling upward, she reversed that pressure and freed it. She clipped it, jangling, with the others on her belt, and looked up to seek out the next handhold. She was a hell of a lot better at this than she had been even an hour before.
***
They ate lunch on another ledge nearly a thousand feet further from the valley floor, Spam sandwiches washed down with tepid canteen water. From here the hotel, the camp grounds, the road, even the river and the forests far below them just weren't relevant any more.
"Like all the shit one gets himself into," said Runyan.
He so precisely voiced Louise's own thoughts, that she said, "What?" in a rather startled voice.
He swung an arm to indicate everything below. Louise nodded, then suddenly clutched his arm, galvanized by an impossibly wide flat rakish black shadow drifting far out from the cliffs.
"Golden eagle," said Runyan. It wheeled in the sunlight; a wash of pale gold flashed momentarily on the back of its neck. "He gets to live like this all the time," she mused. Runyan looked over at her. The wind, midday hot, tugged at their clothes and riffled their hair. He nodded.
"I love you," he said in a voice muffled by the last of the sandwich he was chewing.
She whirled to stare at him. "What did you say?" Runyan licked his fingers and wiped them on his trousers as he pushed himself back from the lip and stood up. "We'd better get going."
"What did you say, damn you?"
"That we have to get cracking if we don't want to spend the night slung in hammocks halfway up this mother."
"You're a real bastard, you know that, Runyan?"
"I'm glad me poor mither isn't here to hear you say that," he said in a broad Irish brogue.
They both laughed, and the moment passed. Runyan clipped one of the carabiners from his belt to a bolt driven into the rock behind the ledge. Louise looked up, craning back a bit trying to see what was above them. It looked like there was nothing above them. A vertical rock face without the slightest sign of any hand or footholds. She had learned enough in this long day to recognize that.
"I hate to mention it," she said, "but where are we supposed to go from here?"
Runyan was tying one end of the Gold Line through the carabiner. He jerked it, hung on it with his full weight. He nodded and came erect. "Sideways," he said.
Louise looked horizontally along the rock face. There were handholds, all right, but they looked pretty scary to her. She felt a sudden hollowness in the pit of her stomach.
"Sideways," she said in a flat disbelieving voice.
"After I do a little maneuver called a pendulum," he said. "It looks a lot more spectacular than it is." He tested the rope again, then began slinging it around him, getting ready to rappel down it. "What it really is, it's a hell of a lot of fun."
***
Moyers, full of a good lunch from the hotel dining room, belched almost delicately as he picked his way up the dry stream bed toward the frightening sheer rock face which one of the waiters had called the Royal Arches. He could see nothing resembling arches in the mound of granite rising ahead of him. Neither could he see anything resembling Runyan and Louise.
He began glassing the rock face with his binoculars. Suddenly Louise leaped out at him. She was alone on a rock ledge, peering carefully down.
Down?
The roving glasses found Runyan a hundred feet below, lashed to the far end of a line fastened somehow beside Louise. Runyan was leaning back away from the rock, almost out at a right angle to it. Even as Moyers picked him out, he turned to his right and began running along the face of the cliff. It was the damndest thing Moyers had ever seen, and the most unexpected. He could not have been more surprised if Runyan had spread his arms and started to fly.
At the far end of the arc controlled by the length of the safety line, Runyan whirled nimbly and began running in the other direction as fast as he could, out to the other extremity of the arc in a sort of giant pendulum. At the end of this run, he stretched as far as he could, and tried to jam his hand into a crack in the rock face. He missed by scant inches.
As his momentum failed, Runyan whirled and started his run back the other way again, bounding across the face of the mountain as if he possessed seven-league boots. At the far end he returned, running faster, stretching further--and managed to jam his fingers into the crack and hold himself there against the backswing gravity. He had made it.
Moyers lowered the binoculars. Sweat was standing on the back of his neck. He didn't like the bastard, but he had to admit that had been something to see. Without the glasses, the two climbers were merely flecks of colored confetti against the grey rock and black shadow of the cliff face. He took his cassette recorder from his pocket and said, "Subject is attempting a climb on the Royal Arches. I am told this is usually an overnight effort. I will continue to observe the subject as I am able to do so."
Runyan was safely on the mountain until the next day. Which meant, Moyers thought, that he had lost all options except the one Moyers had chosen for him.
***
The westering sun pushed heavy shadows out across the valley floor over half a mile below. The wind was cooler, with a hint of evening in it, as Runyan worked his way across the forehead of a great slanting expanse of bald rock, an "aid climb" using chocks and pitons. Above him he could see the Jungle, as the foliage which rimmed the crown of the Royal Arches like a receding hairline was called. He crawled the last few feet, stood up, and yelled down at Louise.
''Off belay."
Seventy-five feet below the balding crown of rock, Louise began her traverse, following the safety line along the trail of chocks and pitons Runyan had left for her. Her movements were now quick and sure despite her fatigue; she had come a long way figuratively as well as literally during that day.
Runyan, standing in the shrubbery at the edge of the Jungle, tended her safety line without thought, kept the tension on automatically; his hands were busy but his mind was free.
He had told her he loved her. Unexpectedly: It had just popped out. He did love her. But did he trust her? What would he do tonight when they got back down? Everything that had happened to him in the past eight years--intensified since his release from San Quentin--passed one ineluctable message to his brain: Don't trust anyone. Especially someone who has already betrayed you once.
But last night ...
Hell, last night she could have heard a crackle in the brush, could have guessed you were there, and said what she knew you wanted to hear.
So what? You didn't want the fucking diamonds, even when you thought they still existed. You don't want the money from the robbery you're planning with Taps. You don't want anything in this world except your freedom. And Louise.
Would there ever be any freedom with a woman you weren't sure you could trust? Would there ever be any freedom without her?
"I love you," he said aloud. Through his mind passed a line from an old Tin Pan Alley tune: There, I said it again.
Just then he heard the labored sounds of her approach. The slack of the safety line was neatly coiled beside him; he didn't remember doing it. She appeared on the bald forehead of rock, walking herself up with the aid of the
safety line. She had a big smile on her face. Jesus, what a woman he had found! He reached out and gave her a hand up.
How could he have had any doubts?
"Congratulations," he said. "Half the experienced people I used to climb with couldn't have made Royal Arches in one day."
Louise was too exhausted to give him more than a bushed smile. They sat down side-by-side on a windfall tree at the edge of the jungle, swinging their legs and staring out over the view. Louise took the canteen and drank greedily.
She finally lowered it to say, "God was feeling good when he made these mountains."
"And when he made you."
She looked quickly over at him, caught by an intensity of emotion in his voice she had never heard before; but he was looking out over the incredible twilight vistas of the valley.
"This is what I missed in prison. Really missed."
"Then why become a thief?"
"Adventure," he said. "Excitement. Beating the system. But then it changes. All of a sudden, money isn't what you get any more. It's what you have." He looked at her, something close to pain in his eyes. "And you want it, because you've started living in a way you can support only by stealing."
"Or by compromising," said Louise, her thoughts turning inward. "Compromising until there's nothing of you left except the marrow in your bones."
Runyan nodded. "I was a thief for six years before they caught me. Always worked alone, cased my own jobs ... Then. . ."
"Then you got greedy?"
"Then I became a humanist. Mr. Nice Guy." He coughed bitter laughter out of his throat like phlegm. "Jamie Cardwell, an old Army buddy from Nam, came to me because he was into a Shylock for a lot of dough. Degenerate gambler, on partial disability from Nam, married, kid coming. .."
"And he had this perfect setup?" she prompted.
"You've heard my stories before, too," he said. "Jamie could get the combination to a wholesale jeweler's safe, he could get me into the building and back out again-"
"Moyers told me a guard saw you getting away and shot you."
"Did he tell you the guard was named Jamie Cardwell?"
Betrayal opened before her like curtains on a play.
"My God!" she breathed, stunned.
"It seems Jamie'd taken in a couple of partners he forgot to mention--the Shylock and the jeweler's son. But the doublecross was all his. He was afraid there wasn't going to be enough money to get him out of the hole." He snorted in bitter amusement. "All he had to do was ask--I'd have given him my share. I was in it for him in the first place."
Louise said hesitantly, "The man who was killed in the penthouse. Tenconi. Was he the Shylock who-"
"Yeah. Shot to death four hours after I kicked him in the balls and met the maid as I walked out. I don't know who killed him, but his partner stepped into his percentage."
"That's who you came down here to avoid," she said.
"And that's why I need Moyers on my tail--as a witness to the fact that I'm not involved if there's any more killing."
"Hey, big fella," she said, "you've got a witness right here, you know."
"The cops'll believe it better coming from him."
They were silent for long moments, staring out over the darkening valley. Louise realized his expression had become difficult to read in the gathering dusk. When she finally spoke it was almost reluctantly, as if she were afraid of shattering the mood.
"Why don't you just ... give them the diamonds? I know they cost you eight years, but you said yourself you'd have given your share to Cardwell if he'd asked. You could walk away clean. . ."
Runyan stood up. "We'd better get started. It's just a walk down the backside of the mountain, but guys keep getting killed. They miss their step in the dark and fall a thousand feet into the river. They never even get a chance to drown."
Louise stood also. Sitting even that short length of time had started to stiffen up her muscles.
"I was going to give them the diamonds," Runyan said abruptly. "But there aren't any diamonds any more. Where I hid them is a subdivision now. Cardwell's big moment eight years ago was all for nothing."
CHAPTER 24
Cardwell, hunched over his glass of draft beer in a window booth of Killeen's Blarney, cast sidelong glances out into the dripping night. The hard, clear, sharply etched days of March were gone; the lousy fog seemed to start earlier each spring. A shadow fell across his face. He looked up, apprehensive yet wanting it over. Delarty, broad and tough-looking, mist standing on the shoulders of his topcoat, slid into the booth across from him. Cardwell tried to drink his beer, coolly, but his hand shook so badly that some of the foam slopped out across the table, wetting his knuckles.
"You think I blew Tenconi away?" he demanded in a sudden shrill voice. "You think I got the seeds for a killing?"
"You thought so--once," said Delarty contemptuously. He took the glass of beer from Cardwell's wet fingers and drained it in one long gulp, belched, and set the empty glass back on the table. "You might as well of killed him, telling fucking Runyan about him."
Bleary outrage welled up like trapped stomach gas. Cardwell slid over to the edge of the booth to stand up, ruining the moment by getting poked in the groin by the corner of the table. He looked down at Delarty's indifferent face.
"Leave me out of it," he said. "Just leave me out of it."
"You were never fucking in it, Cardwell," said Delarty.
***
A pair of dimes plonged in the slot of the outdoor pay phone across Judah from Killeen's. As Cardwell came out of the bar hunched down in his belligerently working-class windbreaker, a seven-digit number was tapped out.
"Police emergency, operator six," said the flat depersonalized voice of the police dispatcher. Every few seconds the call was beeped to show it was being recorded.
"Cardwell is the name," said the caller in a near-whisper. "Cardwell. C-a-r-d-w-e-1-1. You got that?"
Cardwell was walking out Judah toward his house several blocks away on the parallel street, Kirkham.
"Cardwell," repeated the dispatcher's phone-filtered voice. "Yes, I have that. What's the ..."
"Ask Runyan about it," the man whispered. "R-u-n-y-a-n. Just out of the joint for a week or so. Ask him about Tenconi, too. T-e-n-c-o-n-i. The maid saw him leaving."
He hung up before the dispatcher could ask any more questions. The door squealed when he left the booth.
***
Runyan and Louise walked side by side through the almost warm valley evening, past other strollers. Though it was only a little after seven, she could barely keep her eyes open.
"More lies," she said abruptly.
"Yours or mine?"
She kept her eyes straight ahead and said in a rush of words, "I didn't come back on my own. He asked me to and I said I would and then I-"
"I know. I heard your phone calls. In Tiburon. Here, last night-"
Louise felt a bursting rush of emotion as the long-suppressed lump of guilt was hurled through the last barrier in her mind like a stone through a window pane. She wanted to laugh, cry, sing, dance, get drunk, kick a slipper full of champagne off an archbishop's head.
"I'm glad Cardwell didn't kill you either time," she said. "I'm getting rather fond of you."
"It's a strange feeling to realize that the guy whose guts you've hated for eight years is just a shell-scared, shaky, a real boozer, a real loser ... If there's anything worse than being a con, I guess it's being Jamie Cardwell."
***
Cardwell trudged stolidly up the terrazzo front steps to his inset front door and started to find the lock with his key, his hand not as rock-steady as it might have been. Betty'd have plenty to say about that, but what was a guy supposed to do? At least he'd told off that bastard Delarty. Delarty, Runyan, all of them--they'd learn that if you tried to play pussy with Jamie Cardwell, you were gonna get ...
The silenced muzzle of a .38 revolver was pressed against his left temple. He could smell the Hoppe's No. 9 that had been used
to clean it. He didn't even raise his hands, just rolled doleful eyes toward the dull glint of streetlight off the unseen killer's weapon. His whole life didn't pass before his eyes; he felt only an overwhelming sadness.
"Aw hell," he said in a tired voice, "I just knew I was never going to get out of this al-"
The gun jerked and puffed as it had through the peephole in Tenconi's penthouse door, driving Cardwell's head sideways against the door frame like a grotesque fist. He slid down the painted wood, leaving a wet wavering snail-track of blood and brain behind.
***
Runyan had taken a small plastic pill bottle from his pocket; he kept tossing it into the air and catching it again as they strolled. They were almost back to Camp Four. Louise gave an involuntary jaw-creaking yawn.
"What are you going to do about them, Runyan? They expect their cut and you don't have anything to give them."
"I'm going to duck out on Moyers and steal some stolen bearer bonds off another thief down in Los Angeles."
"So all this rock climbing wasn't just fun and games," she said almost accusingly. "It was brushing up on old skills."
He nuzzled her neck. "I like you 'cause you're smart and you smell good."
Louise drew away from him, a frosty glint in her eye. "And when did you plan to pull this little caper?"
"Tonight."
"Tonight?" She said in ominous tones, "What was supposed to happen to me while you were off having all your fun?"
Runyan flipped the plastic pill bottle in her direction. She caught it adroitly, then stopped in the middle of the road to read the label aloud in the dim light.
"Restoril, fifteen milligrams. Take two caps before bedtime." She looked at him and exclaimed, "Sleeping pills!"
She hurled the bottle at him. He caught it and, with the same movement, tossed it into the roadside ditch.
He started walking again. Louise ran after him. She bumped him hard with her hip, then put an arm around his waist and rested her head on his shoulder.
"Kid," she said, "I like your moves."
Runyan started to laugh.
***
Louise was at the top of a mountain in a medieval walled city. The sun was very bright; in every direction there were jagged mountains to and from which people were flying with the aid of equipment on their backs that looked like scuba gear. The people had come, she knew, for that gear which let them fly.