Deadfall(2)

I glanced over at the GTE mobile telephone unit mounted under the dash. It was brand new, that unit. I had always felt that mobile telephones were an unnecessary affectation, and I had put up something of a squawk before yielding to Eberhardt’s insistence that we each outfit our cars with one. Now, after two nights on Cerritos, with the most interesting thing I’d witnessed being a schnauzer having a bowel movement, I had begun to change my mind. I had used the mobile phone twice already tonight, once to check in with Eberhardt and once to let Kerry know that she was probably going to have to sleep alone again—a fact that depressed me, if not her. Too late to call either of them again, much as I would have liked to. Besides which, the mobile phone was for business and emergency use, not for idle chitchat to alleviate the boredom of a rolling stakeout. I had gotten through thirty-odd years of stakeouts without a telephone as a steady companion; I could likewise get through the next couple of hours of this one.

Come on, Alfred Henry, I thought. Come on, you deadbeat son of a bitch.

I sighed. I shifted position again. I poured a little more coffee from the thermos I’d brought along and tried to drink it too fast and spilled half of it down my chin onto the front of my coat. I said some rude words. I sighed again. I poured more coffee and managed this time to find my mouth with the cup. I yawned. I stared out at the street. I switched on my Sony portable radio and listened to five minutes of news, local and national, none of which was worth listening to. I switched off the radio and looked at my watch again.

11:28.

Headlights appeared in the rearview mirror. I pulled my head down lower on the seat and sat still, watching and listening to the sound of the car as it approached and then glided past. It might have been a Mercedes XL; it had the shape of one. But if so it wasn’t Alfred Henry’s Mercedes XL. It drifted on past Eileen Kyner’s house and turned right on Moncada and disappeared.

11:29.

I had hung around until after two last night. Not tonight, Alfred Henry. If he and his Mercedes didn’t show by 1:00 A.M. I was going home to sleep. Alone, damn it.

I thought about Kerry again. She was nice to think about—the love of your life always is. Almost always, anyway. I wondered what she was doing right now. Probably getting ready for bed in her Diamond Heights apartment. That coppery hair of hers brushed out smooth and shiny, her face scrubbed free of makeup. Wearing that flimsy peach-colored thing, maybe, the one that ended halfway down her thighs and was sheer all around except for little wisps of lace here and there, here and there….

Terrific, I thought. As if this stakeout isn’t difficult enough. Now you’re having erotic thoughts and giving yourself an erection.

I forced myself to quit thinking about anything and stared out at the street some more. Most of the nearby houses were dark now; the only ones that showed light were the two directly opposite where I was parked—a smallish Spanish-style job with a red tile roof and a round, squat central tower that bisected it into wings, and its east-side neighbor, a bulky wood-and-brick structure that had an old-fashioned front porch. A chest-high hedge separated the two. The TV sounds—the droning voices of news commentators, now, replacing the canned laughter—were coming from one of them, but I couldn’t tell which.

Another set of headlights appeared, headed toward me this time from the other end of Cerritos. But they didn’t mark the appearance of Alfred Henry, either; they came past the Kyner house, past me without slowing, and eventually swung into a driveway back near Ocean Avenue.

I told myself I was not going to check the time again. I told myself it was pointless and counterproductive and besides, a watched pot never boils. So then, having convinced myself not to look at my watch, I proceeded to look at my watch.

11:37.

Across the street, in one of the two lighted houses, somebody fired a gun.

I sat up straight, tensing, on the seat. TV, I thought—but it hadn’t been the TV. I had heard enough guns going off in my life, too many guns going off, not to recognize the real thing even at a distance.

After a couple of seconds there was another bang, followed this time by a series of muffled noises that I couldn’t identify. I was out of the car by then, acting on impulse and instinct, running across the empty street. It was the Spanish-style house that the shots had come from; the television noise was pouring out of the bulky one next door. The lights in the Spanish house were at the back; the front part was obscured by darkness. I cut over onto an asphalt drive that paralleled the hedge, ran past a Chrysler parked there, through heavy darkness toward the rear.

I was twenty yards from the corner when I heard a door whack open around back, then the thud of running footfalls. But whoever it was didn’t come my way. I pounded around the corner, into a shrub-cluttered yard bloated with shadow. At the far end I could make out a human form pushing through a gate in a tall grape-stake fence—somebody wearing a floppy rain hat and a trench coat, the tails of the coat flapping like half-folded wings.