Man on a leash Page 17

  But he was going too fast. They hit a bump, and for an instant all four wheels were off the ground; he seemed to be somewhere far off, watching with clinical detachment and arriving at a decision: if they came down without exploding, he’d better cool it a little. He eased the throttle. There was a rocky ridge on the right now with a scattering of large boulders on its slopes, and just ahead the road dived into a shallow canyon between two of them. He cut his speed to thirty, and then to twenty, as he entered it. Kessler couldn’t see them now, no matter where he was. But he could still hear, he thought.

  Up ahead the slopes on each side closed in and steepened, but he saw what he was looking for before that. He slammed on the brakes. Along the base of the slope to his left, just off the road, were several large boulders, some bigger than the car, shrugged off the hillside in some seismic upheaval of the geologic past. They were in a variety of shapes, but one of them had a configuration he thought would do. He put the car into reverse, shot backward a few yards, and pulled over beside it. This side was practically vertical, with a slight outcropping approximately where he wanted it. He leaned his head out the window and looked down.

  They’d left at least an inch and a half of the threaded rod protruding beyond the washer, and the nut on this side. He’d have to attack it in reverse, however; going ahead would push the rod back against them if he managed to tear it at all, and it could cut them in two. He pulled ahead about ten feet, cut the wheels, and looked back to line it up. Paulette Carmody had raised her head now and was staring at him in a sort of benumbed wonder, unable even to guess what he might do next. He shifted into reverse and came back, hard, turning the wheel a little more to wipe the door right across the jagged and nearly vertical face of the rock.

  There was a screech of rending metal as the door handle came off, tearing away a section of the skin. But his wheels were spinning now, digging in with a whining sound of their own. His angle was too steep, and he was jammed against it. He shifted and shot ahead four or five feet and started back again.

  “Good God in heaven,” Paulette Carmody said, and shut her eyes. He tried not to think of that relay himself. They came into it with a crash and another shriek of metal, and he gunned it hard to keep going. The door buckled in toward them; they hung for a second or two, and in this fleeting hiatus in the sounds of destruction marred only by the high whining of the wheels he heard Paulette praying beside him, “—hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come—” Then they were moving again, to another keening of agonized metal, and when they lost contact with the face of the boulder the rod was some four inches in front of him, and he could see the long tear in the material lining the inside of the door. He stopped and looked out the window.

  The rod had ripped through the sheet metal for at least five inches in a widening tear that was now nearly the width of the washer, and one side of the washer was already in it. He caught the rod with both hands, palms up in a weight lifter’s hold, braced his elbows against the back of the seat, and heaved. At first nothing happened. He relaxed, came up again, and then put his whole strength into one burst of upward pressure. There was a sound like a breaking guitar string as the washer popped through and the rod bent upward. He tore it through the composition material lining the door, slipped his ring off it, and pushed the end of it from between Paulette’s shackled wrists. It wouldn’t go on out through the hole in the right-hand door, of course, because the nut and washer were still on it and jammed now beyond removal by anything short of a hacksaw, but it didn’t matter.

  Paulette Carmody’s eyes were open now, and she was looking at him in a sort of numb blending of awe and gratitude and returning hope. She started to speak; he cut her off with an abrupt, almost savage, gesture for silence, shoved the door open on her side, and waved—get the hell out, run. She looked startled, almost as if she were as much afraid of him now as of the dynamite, scrambled out of the seat, and began to run along the edge of the road.

  He shoved at his door. It was jammed. He was about to slide over and get out on her side when it suddenly gave way and fell open as much as swung open. The screws in the upper hinge had been sheared off by the pressure. He shoved it out of the way, got out, and pulled the seat forward.

  Kessler had long since figured out what he was up to, and if he were going to blow it at all, he’d do it within the next few minutes. By this time he must have serious doubts regarding that moonshine about the acid, and anyway he’d send it up to prevent their escape. No amount of money was going to save him if they got away to identify him. The sun was gone out of the canyon entirely now, and the light was poor on the floor behind the seats; he could just make out the detonating caps and their wires. They weren’t soldered, thank God; merely twisted. He pulled the first one loose, and then the other. It was disarmed.

  He sighed, and his knees felt weak for a moment in testimony to the amount of tension they’d been under for hours now, and then it was gone, and he was plowing ahead. He pulled the two detonating caps free, straightened, and threw them back up the road, indifferent as to whether they exploded or not. They didn’t. He yanked at the webbing holding down the two bundles of dynamite, tore it loose, and set the explosive out on the ground at the base of the boulder. Paulette Carmody had climbed a short distance up the slope a hundred yards away and was watching him from behind another big rock. He gestured that she could come back now.

  He tore off the straps holding the piece of electronics equipment in place and hauled it out. All the interconnecting wires, several still fast to dangling clusters of batteries like the fruit of some electronic grapevine, seemed to converge into one cable at the back of it. He caught it by the cable and swung it against the boulder, batteries and all. Parts began to detach and drop among the sticks of dynamite at his feet as Paulette came up.

  He threw up the lid of the trunk, hauled out that transmitter or receiver or whatever it was in there, swung it once against the boulder, and let it fall. It landed on another stick of dynamite. Paulette winced but made no move; she seemed to be in a trance. The left-hand door was still sagging open on one hinge. He caught it, swung it down, using it as its own fulcrum, and the bottom hinge tore out. He tossed it aside.

  “Can we go back now?” Paulette asked, almost timidly.

  “No. Go way up the hill there and hide. Don’t show yourself to anybody until you see a car with police markings.”

  He threw up the lid of the steel box and lifted out one of the suitcases. “Just in case this thing burns,” he said as he heaved it out of sight on the other side of the boulder.

  It landed with a thud, and Pauline winced. “But—the acid?”

  He grabbed out the other bag and tossed it. “There is no acid. It was only a bluff, to keep him from blowing it until we could get out.” He waved. “Hide. Take cover.”

  “Wh-what are you going to do?”

  He’d already lunged into the seat and was fastening the belt. He grinned, and she seemed almost to recoil. “I want Kessler,” he said. “And I’ve got one more dirty trick, if it works.”

  He hit the ignition switch. Wheels spun, caught, the car lurched back on the road, the rod still sticking out on the right, and began to gather speed. She looked after it, her lips just moving as she whispered. “Berserk ... berserk ...” She turned then and began to climb up the slope.

  The canyon turned left just ahead. He made it on screeching tires. There was a clatter on his right as the rod struck something and bent back along the side of the car. The canyon ran straight ahead for nearly half a mile between steep walls with scarcely room for two cars to pass. He was doing seventy now. This was the place to do it, right here, if he still had time. Kessler would be hot on their trail, God only knew how far behind.

  The road ran out of the canyon, climbing into rougher hills. There was a jeep track going up over a ridge to his left. He swung onto it, skidding, and went bounding up, rocks clattering against the underside of the car. At the top he could see most of the immense valley to the sou
th of him and the three hills still somewhat west of south. And a plume of dust. He grinned again, the same wolfish grin that had startled Paulette Carmody. There he was.

  The car was traveling eastward at high speed from the general area of the three hills, headed for the road they’d come up. The rifleman, whichever one he was, would be afoot. Kessler was going to pick him up, and they’d turn north in pursuit of their $2,000,000 and their unarmed victims.

  Then he saw something else. Far to the south, miles beyond the other car, were more streamers of dust. Several cars, at least, and they seemed to be going flat out, headed north. He sighed in relief. Carroll had made it back to the highway.

  Kessler had turned north now, along the road they’d come up. When the car came abreast the low ridge where the rifleman had been, he could see it slow and stop for an instant, though it was too far to see the man himself. Then it came on, doing seventy at least, still miles ahead of the cars to the south.

  He looked left along the ridge and the canyon below it. It would be a quarter mile at least till he’d be above the narrowest part of it, a rock-strewn demolition course, gullied, grown up with cactus, blocked by boulders, with no road at all. A jeep could make it, or anything with high clearance and four-wheel drive, but could this thing? He grinned again as he swung the wheel over and gunned it off the jeep track. There wouldn’t be much of it left, but then there wouldn’t be much left anyway.

  He plowed through prickly pear, smashed the windshield on a limb of a dead tree, got stuck in loose gravel but made another run at it and got through, and tore two fenders off as he caromed off boulders, and then a hundred yards short of his objective there was a crunch underneath from a rock too high to clear. He looked back and saw a black line of oil. He’d punctured the pan, and the motor was going to freeze up any minute. He looked down and to his left. This would do.

  The narrow canyon was below him, some three hundred feet down a fifty-degree slope. Kessler was still in the flat a mile away, approaching the entrance at seventy miles an hour. Still far back, the other plumes of dust were rising in pursuit, but gaining little if at all. He turned, stopped the car on the brink, and held it with the brake while he unfastened the belt. Kessler went out of sight at the upper end; then he was skidding around the turn into the narrow, half-mile straightaway below him. He released the brake, held the wheel while the car picked up momentum, headed it straight down, and jumped.

  * * *

  Romstead replaced the phone and picked up his drink. Mayo stood looking moodily out the window at the East Bay lights in the gathering dusk. He went over to her.

  “That was Brubaker,” he said. “I asked him to call and reverse the charges. They found him this afternoon. Out at the old Van Sickle place.”

  “Found whom?” she asked.

  “You remember. Top Kick—that is, Delevan—said the old man killed one of them—”

  “And the only reason you didn’t kill two more is that the police got there in time to stop you. The strain is improving.”

  “Damn it, Mayo—”

  “In another two or three generations I see a sort of super-Romstead, capable of wiping out whole communities.”

  “Look, if you have to fight me, at least be fair about it and stick to the facts. I wasn’t trying to kill them. I was trying to get them out of the wreck before it burned. There was gasoline all over it—”

  “And the dams don’t even seem to matter,” she went on, as if she hadn’t even heard him. “They’re only the receptacles, like the glass jars in Brave New World. Plant the seed anywhere, in a gently raised and civilized young Andalusian girl from Havana descended from five generations of university professors, and it germinates like dragon’s teeth and comes clawing its way out of the womb one hundred percent Romstead, impervious to all other genes, to any distaff-inherited tendencies toward civilization at all—”

  He sighed. He’d been through these things before; the only thing to do was heave to and ride it out. Keep your ass down, or as the bureaucrats put it nowadays, maintain a low profile.

  “Mrs. Carmody said that while you were throwing that dynamite around like confetti and tearing the car apart with your bare hands, even she was afraid of you, and you were on her side.”

  The police had most of the facts now. Tex actually was from Texas, a fringe-area rodeo performer named Billy Heard who’d done federal time for narcotics smuggling along the border below El Paso. It was in prison that he met Kessler. The two of them, plus the girl named Debra and the man whose body Brubaker had found this afternoon, had planned the kidnapping of his father.

  Jeri Bonner’s only part in it was to find out where his money was and how much there was of it. She’d agreed to it, but reluctantly, because a fifty-dollar habit had already driven her to shoplifting and occasional prostitution and now, finally, to desperation, but she didn’t know they planned to kill him, too. He, for his part, didn’t know she was on heroin, and they were sleeping together when he was in San Francisco. Romstead had never had much faith in Mrs. Carmody’s dictum that his father wouldn’t have anything to do with a girl that young. The old stud would take a hack at any girl who was willing and that pretty, provided she was of legal age. He was good to her, and she liked him, so presumably she hadn’t bungled when she brought back only the first page of the three-page stock listing. She’d just hoped the others would never find out.

  Then, when she learned they’d killed him, she began to go to pieces. She ran for Coleville. Kessler by this time had found out too that she’d double-crossed them in the matter of the stocks. This, plus the fact they were now afraid she’d crack up completely and spill the whole thing to the police, had got her killed. Heard had done it, and he was the rifle expert who’d killed Lew Bonner after Bonner received Debra’s letter addressed to Jeri and started an investigation of his own. It was Delevan—Top Kick—who’d been following Bonner around San Francisco that day.

  Delevan had joined them by now in the planned big score, the kidnapping of Mrs. Carmody and himself, which was the reason their intelligence operations had improved to such an extent. He was a private investigator, and a good one until he began to itch for the bigger money. He replaced the one his father had killed, a man on whom the police didn’t have much of a line as yet except that his name was Croft.

  There’d been no telephone out at the Van Sickle place, of course, and they couldn’t very well take him to a motel to make that first call to the bank, so they’d simply brought him back home. In their pickup camper, at night so they wouldn’t be seen entering or leaving the place. They’d put the camper in the garage, forced him to make the phone call the next day, and stayed there until late at night again to leave. It was during this time that his father had killed Croft.

  He was in his own bedroom, gagged, his wrists and ankles bound with tape. They’d been a little slipshod and careless about it, at least until he taught them better, so he was able to break the inadequate bindings on his wrists. But before he could free his ankles, Croft came in to check him. Apparently his father had heard him coming and had replaced his hands behind his back. Croft, however, had leaned over him to see for sure, which was the last mistake he ever made in a life presumably full of them. He never uttered a sound, but the final death tattoo of his feet kicked over a chair that brought the others. They took him back and buried him in a remote corner of the Van Sickle ranch.

  They hadn’t caught the girl yet, the oversexed chick in the next room, and nobody, so far, had copped out on what had happened to Debra. Romstead wasn’t sure, nor were the police, why Debra had hidden a deck of junk in the old man’s car out at the Van Sickle place, but it seemed likely that Heard, whose girl she was, was taking the stuff away from her when he caught her with it. He only smuggled the stuff; he detested the people who were stupid enough to use it.

  Carroll Brooks was all right, recovering nicely in a San Diego hospital from a gunshot wound through the thigh. And the police so far had run down two hundred and fifteen
thousand of the two hundred and fifty thousand dollars stashed in several safe-deposit boxes in San Francisco. They were hopeful of finding more.

  “She was watching you—Mrs. Carmody, I mean—and hoping the police would get there in time herself. Standing there on the wreckage of one car with the second car balanced on top of it and teetering and ready to fall on you any second, beating what was left of the windshield out with a rock to get at the two men inside and kill them—”

  She was running down now, he thought fondly, beginning to sputter and go further into left field after new indictments. She knew as well as he did, from the police reports, that Kessler and Heard were unconscious in there, and pretty soon she’d have to start looking for a way out of accusing him of wanting to kill two helpless and unconscious men who might already be bleeding to death anyway. So she’d demand to know if he’d intended to kill Kessler if he’d been on his feet and armed.

  And he’d lie to her, as he had so much already, and tell her that of course he hadn’t. If he didn’t lie, he’d lose her, and he didn’t think he could face that. He needed her. She seemed to be the only human being he’d ever really needed in his life.