Undercurrent

look like a kind of Oriental hound. 'If Dancer doesn't turn up by morning, and with the right answers, you can call those book dealers of yours and get them to work,' he said to me. 'There's a place in Monterey, I think, that handles used paperback books and we'll try them too. Other than that, there's nothing we can do about the book. No goddamn thing at all.'

None of us seemed to feel much like talking after that, and a brooding, waiting silence formed thickly in there. I sat and stared at nothing and wanted a cigarette and kept on resisting the urge. A sunburst clock on one wall ticked away the minutes loudly and monotonously, and I saw that we were now two hours into a new day-into a new month, too, for that matter, since Sunday had been the last day of April. Monday. Blue Monday-or black Monday, take your choice. Some choice.

More time passed, and nothing happened. Three A.M. Four A.M. Quartermain sat tipped back in his chair, his eyes closed, and Favor began to snore gently in the armchair beside mine. The warm room and the inactivity and the lack of sleep and the physical enervation began to exact their toll on me as well; you can resist for only so long. I was down in that vague, heavy, slow-motion world between sleep and wakefulness, drifting toward oblivion, when Quartermain's telephone bell went off.

I came up out of my chair convulsively, pawing at my eyes and looking blankly around, my heart plunging in my chest and my head banging malignantly. When the misty remnants of sleep dissolved, I saw Quartermain swiveling around to drag up the phone receiver and Favor sitting forward in his chair, smoothing his mustache in an unconscious gesture that made him look more than ever like a silent-movie comedian. I sat down again and dry- washed my face, listening, but Quartermain said 'Yeah' and 'Christ!' and 'Right away' and that was all.

I looked up at him as he replaced the handset. His mouth was pinched tight at the corners and his nostrils were flared and his eyes were hot, bright chunks of blue, like dry ice smoldering.

Favor said, 'What is it, Ned?'

'That was the State Highway Patrol. They've just located Winestock's Studebaker.'

'Where?'

'Spanish Bay, just south of Pacific Grove.'

'What about Winestock?'

'He's in it,' Quartermain said. 'Shot twice in the chest and stone-cold dead.'

Fifteen

Dawn had begun to streak the eastern sky by the time we got out to Spanish Bay, on the northwestern shore of the Monterey Peninsula. In the cold gray light the panoramic landscape of cypress and windswept, bone-white sand dunes had a hushed and primitive look, like a tiny portion of nature that had long ago been suspended in time. The sea beyond provided the only motion; it was a rippling gray-green, the combers high and capped with garlands of white froth as they crested and rolled downward in long, graceful sweeps to the beach.

Just after we began to skirt the boundary of the Asilomar Beach State Park, the small cluster of cars appeared among all that quiet beauty like a giant's thoughtlessly discarded litter. They were drawn close together near a low fan of cypress, two-thirds of the way along an unpaved lane that led toward the symmetrically spaced dunes and the splendor of the Pacific. Favor cut off the siren we had used to make time from Cypress Bay and took us down the lane. As we approached the cluster, I could distinguish five vehicles: a State Highway Patrol unit, an unmarked sedan, a Pacific Grove Police Department tow truck, a county ambulance, and Brad Winestock's faded- blue Studebaker. Both doors on the driver's side of the Studebaker were standing open, and several men were grouped in a tight knot nearby, talking among themselves and watching our arrival.

Favor pulled up behind the sedan, and the three of us got out into a wind that was chill and yet tinged with the spring warmth that would come with the rising sun. Four of the seven men on the scene were official: a local patrol investigator named Daviault, two patrol officers in uniform, and an assistant county coroner. The other three were a pair of ambulance attendants and the driver of the wrecker, who would tow Winestock's car into Pacific Grove or Monterey for the crime-lab technicians. Quartermain introduced me briefly to Daviault, and he accepted my presence without question.

He led us to the Studebaker, and we looked inside. Winestock was in the back, sprawled across the seat face up; his eyes were protuberant, with much of the whites showing-as if the impact of the bullets or the intensity of his dying had been enough to half pop them from their sockets. There was coagulated blood on the front of his windbreaker, and some on the seat beneath him-but altogether, very little. That, and the fact that both wounds were visibly centered on the upper part of his chest, said that he had died swiftly.

I turned away, dry-mouthed, and Quartermain asked the two uniformed patrolmen, 'Were you the ones who found him?'

'Yes, sir,' one of them said. 'We were cruising Sunset Drive and we spotted the car down here; at first we thought it might be kids parked for the night, and we came down to chase them off. When we got close enough, we saw that it was the Studebaker on our pickup sheet. We found him inside there, just the way you see him.'

'How long ago was that?'

'A little more than an hour.'

'Did you check the hood then for engine heat?'

'Yes, sir. It was cold.'

'Do you patrol this area regularly?'

'Once or twice a night.'

'Had you been along here earlier?'

'No, sir. This was our first swing through.'

Quartermain said to Daviault, 'What about the gun?'

'No sign of it.'

'Anything in the car?'

'Nothing unusual. Same for the trunk.'

'Outside it?'

'No,' Daviault said. 'The road surface won't sustain tire impressions, as you can see.'

'No leads at all then.'

'Nothing we've been able to turn up so far.'

Quartermain looked at the assistant coroner. 'Can you make a preliminary guess as to how long he's been dead?'

'A rough guess, if that's what you want.'

'I'll take it for now.'

'From the temperature and condition of the body, I'd say no more than six hours, no less than three.'

'Do you think he was killed in the car or somewhere else?'

'Difficult to tell. There are no exit wounds, so he's still carrying the two bullets inside him; no powder burns, so he was apparently shot at a distance. That might be significant, considering the close confines of the car. Then again, there's a little blood on the seat and he didn't bleed much after he was shot; death was likely instantaneous, or very close to it.'

I moved away from the group and stood looking out to sea; I had heard all there was to hear for now, even though they were still talking it through. Some distance offshore, on a group of tiny rock islands, the dark shapes of cormorants and loons moved and fluttered and sat in sentinel-like motionlessness-and nearby a sleek black or brown sea lion came up out of the water like an iridescent phantom. The peach color of dawn had spread and modulated into soft gold, consuming the gray, and it would not be long before sunrise. It was going to be another fine spring day.

But the climate, as they say, was one of violence.

And pain, I thought. And grief. First Judith Paige-the rape of innocence. And now Beverly Winestock-the bitter fruits of too much family loyalty, and another kick in the groin for a woman who seemed to have been kicked too many times already. How many more were going to suffer? Yeah, how many more? Because it wasn't over yet, and two men were dead already, and Dancer was still missing, and murder and violence invariably beget murder and violence. The tremors beneath the surface of it all had gathered strength now, had become more volatile, had