“What does have something to do with it?”
“Love,” I said.
“And need,” Dr. Hilliard said. “I too believe love. But you forget need only at great peril.”
“Frost,” I said.
Dr. Hilliard raised her eyebrows.
“‘Only where love and need are one,”’ I said.
“And the next line?” she said.
“‘And the work is play for mortal stakes,”’ I said.
She nodded. “Do you have eighty dollars, Mr. Spenser?”
“Yes.”
“That is what I charge an hour. If you pay me for this hour, I can make a defensible argument that you are a patient and that patient-doctor transactions are privileged.”
I gave her four twenties. She gave me a receipt. “I guess that means you’re not going to call the cops,” I said.
“It does,” she said.
“Anything else I can know?”
“Russell Costigan sounds like a man,” she said, “unhampered by morality or law.”
“Me too,” I said.
CHAPTER 16
WE BOUGHT A ROAD ATLAS IN A Waldenbooks on Market Street, and then we went to a flossy sporting goods store near the corner of O’Farrell and outfitted for our assault on the lodge.
To drive north from San Francisco you had your choice of the Golden Gate Bridge and the coast road, 101. Or the Oakland Bay Bridge and connection to Interstate 5. For people on the run toll bridges were bad places. Traffic slowed, and cops could stand there and look at you when you paid your toll. It was a favorite stakeout for cops.
“They’ll stop every car with a black guy and a white guy in it,” Hawk said.
“We’ll go around,” I said.
And we did. With me driving and Hawk reading the road atlas we went south on secondary roads all the way to Palo Alto and swung around the tip of the bay and headed north along the east side of it. We never went on a big throughway until we finally went on to Interstate 5 north of Sacramento, in a town called Arbuckle.
From Arbuckle it took us seventeen hours to get to Route 12 in Washington State, south of Centralia, and another two hours to get ourselves up into the Cascades near Crystal Mountain, northeast of Mount Rainier. Near Chinook Pass, where Route 410 makes a kind of Y fork, we found a store and snack bar. A sign out front said BREAKFAST SERVED ALL DAY. In front of the store was a gravel parking lot. It had been fenced by embedding truck tires halfway into the ground so that the lot was outlined with black half-moon shapes. An oil drum had been converted to a trash barrel and placed near the front door. As far as I could tell it hadn’t ever been emptied. Styrofoam cups, sandwich wrappers, beer bottles, cigarette packages, straws, chicken bones, and a lot of stuff that was no longer recognizable spilled out of it and littered around it in a spread of maybe eight feet. The store itself was one story and looked as if it had once been a bungalow, the kind they put up in a couple of days right after the Second World War so that the returning GI’s could get going on the baby boom. It had brick red asphalt shingles for both siding and roof. A front porch had been scabbed onto the front, running the entire length of the store, and it had a rustic look that may have been intentional, or may have been bad carpentry. A pair of antlers hung over the two steps that led onto the porch, and the glassy-eyed head of an elk stared down at us from over the door.
Inside the store was a lunch counter and six stools, along the left wall. The rest of the store had shelves and tables that sold canned goods and frypans and fishing gear and toilet paper and insect repellent and souvenir mugs shaped like Smokey the Bear.
Behind the counter was a fat guy with thin arms and a patch over his right eye. On both forearms were tattoos. The one on the left said For God and Country. The one on the right said Valerie and had a wreath around it. The fat guy wore a T-shirt and a blue cap that said CAT on it. He was reading a paperback book by Barbara Cartland. We sat at the counter. No one else was in the store.
“You guys want to eat,” he said.
“Breakfast,” I said. “Two eggs, sunny side, ham, home fries, whole wheat toast, coffee.”
“Got no whole wheat. Got white.”
“No dark?” Hawk said.
The counterman looked at him sideways. “No,” he said. “Just white.”
“I’ll have white toast,” I said.
“Me too,” Hawk said. “Same order as his. ‘Cept over easy on the eggs.”
The counterman drew us two cups of coffee and put them before us. He still didn’t look directly at Hawk. Then he turned to the grill and got going on the breakfast.
“We’re looking for Russell Costigan’s place,” I said.
“Know where that is?”
“Yeah.”
