Deadfall(69)

There was nobody that I could see on the embankment, and all of the dozen or so vehicles slotted in at its edge were dark. I let the car drift off the road to the left, lightless, and coasted to a stop in the shadows cast by an express company warehouse. From there I had a good look at the parked cars. One of them was a white Trans-Am. It was directly across the embankment from the nearest of the access ramps, fifty yards or so from where I was and at an angle to my left.

I shut off the engine, rolled down the window so I could listen to the night sounds. The swishing passage of freeway traffic, a ship’s horn somewhere in China Basin or out on the Bay, a woman’s skittish laughter from one of the anchored boats—all distant and random. Otherwise the creek area, surrounded as it was by industrial outfits and the Southern Pacific yards, all almost entirely deserted on a Sunday night, seemed even more isolated and self-contained than it did during the daylight hours.

I didn’t expect much of a wait and I didn’t have one. Less than two minutes had passed when Dessault came hurrying up the near ramp and through its security gate; the nightlight there made a pale nimbus of his blond hair, letting me identify him.

He moved across the flat of the embankment, startling a couple of the geese that appeared to live there—I could hear their annoyed honking, see one of them flapping its wings—and got into his Trans-Am. I waited until I heard the deep-throated roar of the engine before I started mine again. He backed out my way, pointed west toward Sixth; and that was the direction he went, not driving fast but not driving slow either.

I let him get a hundred yards down Channel Street before I put on my headlights and pulled away from the warehouse. Following him dark would have been foolish business. If he was the kind of driver who checked his rearview mirror periodically, there was enough light in the area to let him see what was behind him; and he would be a lot more apt to pay attention to a car without its lights on than he would to just another set of headlights.

He made the turn onto Sixth and I did the same. It was deserted and much darker down along here—drayage and freight-forwarding companies and part of the SP freight yards on the east side, and on the west, fenced-in lots mounded with creosote-soaked lumber and other materials that the railroad used for repair work. Here and there nightlights cast thin yellow wedges above empty loading docks. The only other illumination came from the beams on Dessault’s car and the beams on mine.

We went about a quarter of a mile. Dessault was nearing the intersection with Sixteenth when he surprised me by making an abrupt left-hand turn; the Trans-Am disappeared between two of the warehouses. When I got to that point I found an unpaved, unmarked access road that served a drayage firm on one side and some kind of truck storage yard on the other: big diesel cabs and unhooked trailers looming up out of the darkness, both inside and outside a high chain-link fence. The Trans-Am was about seventy-five yards along, its lights picking up a low, metal Stop sign anchored where the road widened out past the warehouse and the storage yard.

I slowed, thinking, Some kind of shortcut. He knows this area, he knows a faster way to get where he’s going.

Up ahead, the Trans-Am moved on past the Stop sign and its lights splashed over rough ground that fronted a criss-cross of SP sidings; splashed over a string of oil tankers, another of boxcars, as Dessault veered to the right. I made the turn just before he passed out of sight, and when he was gone I punched the accelerator a little. I didn’t want him to get too far away.

Even though the Trans-Am was no longer visible I could see the glow of its lights against the dark sky, bouncing erratically because of the uneven ground. And then, suddenly, they stopped bouncing and the glow wasn’t there any more … as if he’d braked fast and shut off the beams. And just as suddenly I knew that was what he had done—I knew this wasn’t a shortcut at all, I knew what it was, and the knowledge put the brassy taste of fear in my mouth.

Trap, goddamn trap. And I had blundered into it like a witless amateur.

I spun the wheel hard left, sent the car into a slashing turn that made the tires squeal and spin up gravel and dirt. But it was too late by then—too damn late. The trap car was hidden over that way, in the clotted black alongside the last of the drayage company’s loading docks; it came shooting out at me, dark and formless, like some kind of phantom. Before I could complete the U-turn, it banged into my right front fender … impact, crunch of metal … and the wheel twisted out of my hands and the car slewed around and came to a shuddering stop that stalled the engine. I shoved back off the wheel and reached for the door lock with my left hand, for the flashlight under the dash with my right —the only weapon I had in there.