Slide

by Gerald A. Browne

  The inadequacy, the inequity of it was too much for Marion. “No!” she protested, unintentionally raising her voice. “Love is love.”

  That got attention from all directions.

  Marion held Judith’s head. Her mouth took Judith’s mouth with passion.

  Judith resisted momentarily, a reflex, but then she understood and contributed without shame.

  Peter Javakian went over to Brydon. “I’ve got an idea,” he said.

  “What?”

  “If we could get up to the office, from there it would be easy to go on up through the ceiling.” He meant the glass-enclosed overhanging management office at the south end of the building.

  Brydon had considered it. “The problem is getting up to the office.”

  “Let’s take a look.”

  They went to Island One. Peter shined his flashlight through the window and into the office diagonally above, fifteen feet away. He pointed out how the office was built close up to the ceiling. He explained his idea and asked if Brydon thought it would work.

  “Might.” Brydon was still feeling the failure of the scaffold. He thought that might be the reason he couldn’t believe in Peter’s idea. Maybe, at that moment, it was just impossible for him to be receptive. He gazed up at the office, appeared thoughtful and then nodded. “Why don’t you give it a try?”

  Peter was encouraged. He hurried to get at it First requirement was material to make a line. Denim was strong. Lois Stevens and Gloria Rand were wearing blue denim jeans. They cooperated, tore off the legs of their jeans. Peter ripped them into three-inch strips. He square-knotted the strips together, like the tail of a kite, twenty-five feet long.

  To the end he tied the half-gallon can of liquid floor wax that had been salvaged. It was appropriately weighty, a compact five pounds. He tied the other end of the denim line around his right wrist, so he couldn’t lose it. Holding the can of wax like a football, he stepped back and threw it up and across at the office window. It smacked hard against the glass pane, caused a cobweb pattern of cracks, but didn’t break through.

  Peter recovered the can by taking in the line hand over hand. On his third throw the glass shattered. Still, large hunks of it remained in the window frame. He continued throwing until he had broken away enough of the glass — an opening about ten feet wide by three feet high. Now he untied the can of wax, replaced it with one of the eight-foot planks. He double-bound and knotted the denim tight around the middle of the plank. Using both hands, he tried to toss the plank up through the window. The plank was unwieldy, weighed about twenty pounds, couldn’t be thrown accurately.

  Peter completely missed the window three times. On his fourth throw he hit the window frame. On his next the plank went up and in.

  What he hoped was that the plank might work like a grappling hook, catch and wedge itself against the legs of a desk, behind file cabinets — anything substantial. Then he would be able to shinny up the denim line to the office, find electric wiring and cords that could be used to safely hoist the others up.

  He pulled in the slack of the denim line, made it taut. Tried to feel whether or not the plank was caught on something. It seemed to be. He applied more tension, tugged. The board came flying out the window.

  Peter flung the board up into the office again. Same result. He kept trying for nearly an hour, until he could barely lift his arms.

  Spider also gave it a few tries.

  So did Brydon.

  It depended too much on luck, and they certainly weren’t having any.

  22

  Captain Royden Dodd looked down at his bare toes and thought, Old toes.

  The young Newport Beach police chopper pilot, Hackley, was in the dark bedroom screwing a new bulb in the lamp.

  “My hometown is famous for a light bulb,” Hackley said. “Livermore, California.”

  “Never been there.”

  “They’ve got a light bulb up there in the firehouse that’s been burning for over seventy years.”

  “Regular bulb?”

  “Hand blown, thick carbon filament, made to last. Just keeps on burning.”

  The light went on in the bedroom. Hackley came out with the bad bulb that he dropped in the wastebasket by the desk. He said: “Whenever it gets to me how lousy things are, that old Livermore bulb comes to mind.”

  “Maybe it’s not the same one, maybe it’s gotten to be such an attraction they keep replacing it on the sly.”

  “I don’t think so,” Hackley said.

  “It’s a possibility.”

  Hackley didn’t want to think so. He turned off the idea by turning on the stereo, an FM rock station. It came out thumping loud. Hackley lowered it some for Dodd’s sake.

  They were in Hackley’s apartment in Newport Beach. A three-room place counting the kitchen that was only separated from the living room by a barlike counter. The apartment was on the second floor overlooking the inevitable pool. Hackley lived alone, but from evidence such as a couple of string bikini tops and bottoms on the hook on the back of the bathroom door, excess lipstick on a crumpled tissue in a bedside ashtray, one brush but two kinds of toothpaste and a pair of foreign-made bikes hung on the entranceway wall like contemporary art, he wasn’t alone much. No reason for him to be. Twenty-two, good rugged looks, a straightforward easiness about him that was immediately likable.

  At the moment he was off duty, had on only a pair of well-bleached jeans. No one would ever have guessed he was a policeman. Too relaxed. There was a wound scar on the fleshy part of his back close to his right underarm. Like a large lopsided cleft, the skin there was pinched inward.

  Dodd noticed the scar, guessed Vietnam and decided not to ask Hackley about it.

  Hackley didn’t ask Dodd if he wanted a refill, just took the J&B over and poured into the glass Dodd had in hand.

  Dodd was as off duty as he ever was. He’d called headquarters, was told what was happening in the area, including a few things that had become almost routine since the rain: armed quarrels, a family murder, hit-and-runs. No telling what would happen next and no real way to prevent it. Dodd gave Hackley’s number, told headquarters he would be calling in.

  After his perilous slip down the slide, Dodd had had the choice of returning to headquarters or going home again. He looked and felt horrible, covered with mud. It would be too obvious to anyone at headquarters or to Helen what he’d been up to — disobeying orders. So he was glad when Hackley had suggested the apartment.

  There Dodd had gotten out of his clothes — they must have weighed thirty pounds. He shoved them, shoes and all, into a plastic bag, having a flash of guilt because of how quickly Helen’s loving care had gone to waste. He took his second shower of the day, had to dig the mud from his ears and was surprised to find that so much of it had somehow gotten packed into the crease of his buttocks.

  Hackley had also supplied a robe and a drink.

  Now Dodd appraised the robe. It was silk. He’d noticed an I. Magnin label.

  “From a lady,” Hackley said. “She ran a stop sign. Instead of her getting a ticket I got that.”

  Dodd didn’t say anything, but his disapproval was obvious.

  Hackley smiled. “My mother gave it to me.”

  That was better.

  “What size shoe you take?” Hackley asked.

  “Ten and a half.”

  Hackley brought out a pair of sneakers, a pair of jeans and a shirt.

  Dodd’s feet were slightly large for the sneakers and his middle was a couple of inches too middle-aged for the jeans. The shirt fit and he squeezed into the sneaks. Hackley solved the pants problem with a pair of blue denim overalls, the regular work kind with adjustable shoulder straps, which Dodd lengthened. Still, the overalls were short in the legs. Dodd would have to go with his bare ankles exposed. He glanced down at them. Pale and veiny, he thought.

  Hackley made two phone calls. Tucked the phone between his shoulder and cheek and talked while dressing. His first call was to break a date. He didn
’t lie, although it would have been easier to use the excuse that he was on duty. He just told the girl he couldn’t see her that night and sounded sorry enough.

  Dodd felt he was intruding, offered Hackley an out.

  Hackley wouldn’t take it, made his other call, started it with, “Hey, old buddy.…”

  Dodd didn’t hear the rest of that phone conversation because of the stereo and because Hackley took the phone by its long cord into the bedroom, not to get out of range, only to find a pair of old white moccasins among the disorder on the floor of the closet. He put them on. He was hanging up the phone when he came out. “All set,” he said.

  He provided Dodd with a lightweight hooded slicker, a sort of ski jacket. For himself, a trench coat and a regular white sailor’s hat with the brim turned down all around.

  They used Dodd’s car, gassed it full at the first Union station.

  “Can the two of us handle it?”

  Dodd thought so.

  “I mean, you don’t have a bad back or a hernia or something?”

  Dodd didn’t bother to answer, young smartass.

  “How much does one of those things weigh?”

  “Don’t know exactly.”

  “What’s your guess?”

  “Three, maybe four hundred.”

  “Maybe more,” Hackley said. “We ought to find some help just in case.”

  Dodd agreed.

  First, on Harbor Boulevard they rented an open trailer from a U-Haul place that lived up to its advertised pledge: OPEN 24 HOURS RAIN OR SHINE. The man in charge didn’t help hitch up the trailer, just took the hundred deposit and watched from inside, keeping dry.

  From there Dodd and Hackley cruised some of the side streets off Grand Avenue. They pulled over at a small stucco house that had been converted into a neighborhood grocery store. Four men stood hunched with their backs close to the store front. It wasn’t really a good place to stand because the rain poured off the overhang of the roof, hit the pavement and splattered the men. They didn’t seem to mind getting soaked from the crotch down. Maybe because they were passing a paper bag with a bottle in it. They were Mexicans, migrant farm laborers, who usually lived from one day’s pay to the next. The weather was particularly rough on them.

  Hackley rolled down his window to call out, “Hey, sēnors, vengan aqui, por favor.”

  The men exchanged quizzical glances, shrugged and resumed their previous detachment.

  “¿Hablan inglés?” Hackley asked.

  No response.

  Dodd leaned across and asked them: “Want to make twenty dollars?”

  The four men rushed to the car, shoved one another roughly to be at the window. One said, “What I must do for twenty dollars? I don’t steal.”

  Another said, “I steal.”

  Dodd liked that man’s honesty, chose him. His name, he said, was Gilberto Fuentes. He got into the rear seat. One of the other men also climbed in.

  “We only need one man,” Dodd told him.

  “Two for thirty,” Gilberto said, “Good deal, señor, only fifteen each.”

  Dodd hesitated. They took that to mean he was considering.

  “Him my brother,” Giberto said. “We work together. Good stealers.”

  Dodd didn’t believe the brother routine. Evidently they didn’t expect him to, because when the car was under way the second man introduced himself as Paco Ramos. Dodd figured Gilberto’s comradely generosity wasn’t true either. The split would be twenty for Gilberto, ten for Paco, better than nothing in the rain.

  Night traffic on the Newport Freeway was moderately heavy. Everything looked slick, hazardous. Dodd thought maybe his tiredness was adding to the impression that any moment he would slip out of control. He kept to the right lane, under sixty.

  The Mexicans hadn’t asked where they were being taken or what exactly was expected of them. All they knew and cared about was a job for the money. Typically, they were saving their energy, slouched heads down, riding on the comfortable surface of sleep.

  Making conversation, Hackley asked if Dodd knew anything about bio-rhythms.

  “What’s that?”

  “We’re all supposed to have three different cycles — physical, emotional and intellectual. The way they go up and down can be plotted on a graph for every day of your life — so you know in advance what you’re in for.”

  Dodd grunted, thought how it would be knowing for sure tomorrow would be a bad day.

  “When all three cycles are way down you should feel lousy and dumb.”

  “You believe that?”

  “A girl I know does bio-rhythm charts. Did mine. Right now, I’m scheduled for a physical and emotional high and medium-low intelligence. Maybe there’s something to it, because I’m sort of horny and in a good mood and, instead, look where I am.”

  Hackley was glad Dodd laughed. He’d nearly given up on the captain’s sense of humor.

  No talk for a while. One of Dodd’s thoughts was about that silk robe he’d had on. He doubted I. Magnin had a branch store in or anyplace around Livermore.

  They were approaching the Garden Grove interchange when the red and amber flashed through the rear window.

  Dodd pulled the car over.

  A highway patrol car parked behind. Two officers in it. One got out and came to the window on Dodd’s side. He kept a cautious distance, one hand on his revolver while the window was being lowered.

  Dodd recognized the man, asked him, “What is it, the trailer?”

  In the back seat Gilberto and Paco were up on edge, wary, taking it all in.

  Dodd disliked the delay but it was his fault. He’d known, of course, trailers weren’t allowed on the freeway, had wanted to save time. He flashed his identification and badge at the patrolman who didn’t look at it until after he thought he recognized Dodd. He shined his flashlight head on to make sure.

  “I didn’t know it was you, Captain,” he said.

  “That’s all right.”

  “I should have known the car. Anything I can do for you?”

  Dodd told him he could get in out of the rain. When they were under way again, Dodd thought he should have told the man not to mention seeing him. What the hell, he probably wouldn’t anyway, Dodd decided.

  A quarter mile past the interchange was the Chapman Street turnoff. Dodd took it and headed east for two miles through El Modeno, where he picked up Route S25. After two and a half miles, that minor winding road ended, ran into another that wasn’t paved. Dodd swung north for a short way, came to a flat, open area, pulled to the side and stopped.

  Since the encounter with the patrolman on the freeway, Gilberto and Paco had been either apprehensively silent or whispering in Spanish. They had seen Dodd’s badge, knew now they had admitted to stealing to a policeman of some sort. They kept excitedly advising one another to remain calm.

  Hackley thought they might jump out and run for it, so he told them they had been recruited for an official job. Then the only thing that worried Gilberto and Paco was whether or not they would be paid in cash as soon as whatever had to be done was done. Hackley showed them some money to keep them in line.

  The range of the car’s headlights was cut down by the rain. Out there beyond the reach of the lights was the Lower Peters Canyon Reservoir, a triangular-shaped body of water with only about a mile of shore line.

  Dodd had been at that spot a month before, before the rain, when he and Helen had taken an out-of-the-way pleasure drive. He had noticed then that the State Water Resources Department was putting in a new pipeline to serve the recent housing developments north of Tustin Boulevard. However, not a sign now of any such work. That was strange. If anything, all the days of rain should have halted the project.

  Dodd clicked the headlights to bright. He steered the car around slowly. Through the silvery diffusion of falling drops the lights hit on something. Yellow. A heavy-duty ditch digger, what was called a payloader because of its combination digging-conveying system. Off to the left of that, a sh
ort distance beyond, was something blue, a shade between turquoise and robin’s egg. It was a section of polyethylene pipe — plastic. Thirty-six inches in diameter, three-quarters of an inch thick. A number of ten-foot sections of it were strung out in a line ready to be put underground.

  Hackley, Gilberto and Paco got out of the car. Dodd turned it around, backed the trailer near as possible to the pipe. He could feel the tires spinning some. Soaked, raw earth, it would be easy to get stuck.

  Dodd cut the motor and got out.

  Gilberto and Paco were standing there trying to get used to the idea that what they were to help steal officially way out there on this awful night was a worthless piece of pipe.

  Dodd tried to heft it. It wouldn’t budge.

  Hackley told him, “Here comes your hernia.”

  The section of pipe weighed nearly eight hundred pounds. Good thing they’d hired both Gilberto and Paco.

  Still, it was no easy task, wouldn’t have been even on dry ground with solid footing. The mud was like grease. Twice they slipped completely, causing them to drop the section of pipe. They barely got out from under it in time. Finally, they had it up on the bed of the trailer. Dodd and Hackley tied it in place.

  Dodd started the car, put it in gear and very gradually increased his foot pressure on the gas pedal. The car’s rear wheels spun, whined and threw mud up. Hackley, Gilberto and Paco couldn’t get footing enought to push. The wheels were digging their own hole. The car would soon be sunk to its chassis, useless.

  “Hold it!” Hackley shouted.

  He went over to the state-owned ditch digger, ripped off the tarpaulin used to cover its cabin. He spread the tarpaulin on the ground under the car, gathered and shoved the edge of it down between the rear tires and the mud.

  They’d have only one try.

  Dodd put the car in neutral, stomped the gas pedal all the way and threw the shift into low.

  The wheels spun, grabbed the canvas, snapped the canvas, shot it and mud up behind. Just enough traction. The car and trailer lurched forward, fishtailed and continued on to the slick but better packed road.