Blowback(44)

He was wearing a sports jacket today, no tie, and he looked cool and rested. He could hardly have missed noticing the way I looked, but he had the grace not to say anything about it. Instead he motioned me to a chair and said, “I've got that list of names and addresses for you.”

“Right.”

The chair was one of those lumpy pseudo-Victorians, made for people with better posture than I had; I sat on it gingerly and watched Kayabalian open a briefcase that was sitting on a writing desk, take out two sheets of paper. He brought them to me and stood there while I glanced over them. Most of the addresses were in San Jose, but there were two in San Francisco and one in Fresno. Under each one he had written out a paragraph of information on the individual: occupation, connection with Terzian, relevant personal data.

I asked him a couple of questions, made a note or two of my own, and said finally that I guessed I had everything I would need for the time being.

He asked, “Would you like an advance against your fee and expenses?”

“That's not necessary,” I said. Under other circumstances I would have taken his check, but even though I kept telling myself I would follow through for him no matter what Dr. White had to tell me, I could not make myself forget the frightening possibility of things like hospitals and further tests and maybe even an urgent need for surgery. “We can take care of a retainer after I get to work.”

He nodded. “Do you know yet how you stand with your time?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “I'll let you know later today or early tomorrow, if that's all right.”

“Yes. You can reach me at my office, or at home after seven.”

He gave me another business card, this one with his telephone number written on the back. We said a few more things to each other, and then he got his briefcase and a small overnight bag-he was ready to check out-and we went downstairs together and shook hands and said good-by in the lobby.

Outside, the Hangtown Stagecoach had gone off with its first load of kids, but the fiddlers were still working on the veranda and there was still a crowd in front of the General Store. A guy in buckskins and an Indian headdress was circulating there, selling balloons and souvenirs-a red-haired guy with freckles. Nobody seemed to think it odd, or if they did, none of them cared.

And people wondered why native Amerinds were so angry these days…

I got my car and fought the main street traffic until the county road intersection; I was the only one who turned off. The temperature had picked up another few degrees, but there were clouds massing above the peaks to the east, restless and soiled-looking, and the sky in that direction had a kind of dull silvery sheen, like an old dime. If the high-altitude winds blew those clouds down here, it would rain later in the day. I wished it would rain right now-break the heat and clear the dryness out of the air and settle that damned red dust.

When I came around one of the turns two miles from the camp, driving mechanically, half my mind on the road and half of it brooding about the abortive telephone call, a deer bounded out of the undergrowth thirty yards in front of me and darted across the road. I said something in alarm and jammed my foot down on the brake; the car slewed to the left and for an instant I thought it was going off into the trees. But when I pulled the wheel around and eased up on the brake pedal, the rear tires held traction and the thing settled on a point and came to a sharp stop. The deer had vanished into the woods on the other side.

I sat there for a minute and thought that that would have been all I needed, an accident with the car. Once I started moving again, I drove more slowly, watched the road ahead more carefully-and I was more aware of my surroundings than I might have been otherwise.

Ahead on the light, around another turn, was the bare hillside and the abandoned pocket mine partway up. High to the left of the mine were a few trees, and below the trees was the crumbling outbuilding, its roof sagging a little to the left. The hillside directly behind the building was bare, rocky I hit the brakes again, not quite so hard this time, and the car bucked to a halt in another swirl of dust. I shoved the shift lever into park and got out and stared up toward the mine. Then I opened my wallet, took out the folded triangle from Bascomb's sketchpad. Not much of the roof in the sketch showed, but it might have been canted to the left like the one up there. The trees and the rocky hillside looked about right too.

A few hundred feet farther along, at the side of the road, there was a short slope and then a flattish limestone shelf. A man could sit up on that shelf, and he'd have a good clear view of the mine entrance and the rotting building; it was the kind of thing, the kind of angle of perception, that might appeal to an artist like Bascomb. I had seen it from this angle myself half a dozen times since Sunday, and that would explain why that small part of the sketch had seemed familiar last night-something you saw without really thinking about, an image tucked away at the back of your mind.