Mike watched in grim satisfaction as Ginger Merville was led away to the other car. He felt no sympathy for such creatures. Five years ago, seven years ago, you could understand and almost forgive all those people who flirted with the kind of antisocial behavior they liked to mislabel ‘revolution’; you could understand it because most of them were merely dupes, sheep going along with the popular sport of bad-mouthing Authority. (And also, of course, he had to admit, because it was an unsettled time, a difficult time, and he was as glad as anybody that it was over.) But to continue now in such actions was no longer forgivable, no longer merely a fad or a sport. Ginger Merville had played with fire too long, and he was about to get very badly burned, and Mike was happy to be the one to strike the match.
Dave Kerman, putting away the notepad in which he’d copied down what Merville had had to say, said, “Nice work, Mike.”
Mike shrugged, pleased with himself but trying not to show it. “All I did was shake the little bastard’s hand.” To the Sheriff’s Department officer, who had just come over from his own vehicle, Mike said, “Have someone pick up this car, okay?”
“Will do, sir. He was what you wanted, was he?”
“Just what the doctor ordered.”
“I still have his license and registration.”
“He won’t need them for a while. Leave them with the car.”
“Yes, sir.”
The car containing Merville drove off as Mike and Dave Kerman walked back to the Buick. It was Mike’s private car, but Dave drove, freeing Mike to get on the radio. As Dave swung around in a U-turn, heading back toward the Coast Highway, Mike called Jock Cayzer down at the beach house site, telling him, “They’re there, Jock. We got confirmation from Merville.”
“Very nice,” came the pleased voice, crackling through the static.
“And our information is, Koo Davis is still alive.”
“Praise the Lord.”
Dave Kerman laughed at the phrase, and made the right turn onto the Coast Highway. Mike said, “Keep them bottled up, Jock. We’ll be there in five minutes.”
The problem was, the area was so thoroughly public. The Coast Highway itself was four lanes wide, being not only the scenic route along the coast but also the main road to Oxnard and Santa Barbara and beyond, filled with traffic all day long; rerouting all those vehicles up through the hills would be complicated and arduous. Besides that, the entire beachfront from Malibu State Beach just west of the house to Las Tunas State Beach several miles to the east swarmed with people, who would have to be safeguarded. All of which meant that a lot of preliminary work had to be done, and there was no way to do it without attracting the attention of the people inside the house. They could only hope the kidnappers wouldn’t panic, wouldn’t kill Koo Davis or do anything else stupid once they became aware of the tightening net.
A mobile command center had been set up in two trailers in a diner parking lot on the shoreward side of the road, just east of the target house. When Dave Kerman angled the Buick around the police-line sawhorses and into this parking lot, Mike saw there were now six trailers, the other four all being connected with the media; three TV remote units and one documentary film unit. “The vultures are here,” he said.
Dave Kerman grinned. “Why not? When else are they gonna get Koo Davis on the program for free?”
At times like this, the final moments of the hunt, when the TV and newspaper people began to cluster and swarm hot-eyed for blood, Mike felt a certain disgust for the media and all its representatives. As far as he was concerned, though his own work might become messy and dirty in the heat of the struggle, both the motives and the result were clean; the media, on the other hand, was engaged in the unhealthy task of pandering to unhealthy desires. Now, striding from the car to the main trailer, he grimly ignored the two camera crews recording his progress and refused either to listen or respond to the questions of the microphone-waving reporters who trotted to his side. His earlier embarrassed pleasure at becoming in a small way a media celebrity was washed away by this repugnance. “Out of the way,” he said to a reporter who had become just a little too bold, and stepped into the trailer.
A dozen people were crowded into the long narrow cream-walled space inside the trailer, among them Jock Cayzer and Lynsey Rayne. Lynsey came forward at Mike’s entrance, looking frightened but elated, saying, “Is it true? He’s certainly alive?”
“According to Merville.” But then he quickly softened that, preferring to have her optimistic: “And he was telling the truth, no question about that. He opened up like a flower.”
Some toughness in his tone startled her, and she looked at him more closely. “What did you do to him?”
She’s still a liberal, Mike reminded himself; we get Koo Davis back by fair play only. “Believe it or not,” he said, “the only time I touched him was when I shook his hand.”
“Just so Koo’s all right,” she said. Meaning fair play was no longer an issue?
“He isn’t all right yet,” Mike told her. “We still have to get him away from those people.” And he stepped deeper into the trailer.
The furnishings were a grab-bag of bits and pieces; some folding chairs of various styles, a couple of folding- leg card tables, one sturdy wooden table and a couple of small battered gray-metal desks. At one of these sat Jock Cayzer; approaching him, Mike said, “Is our phone line in?”
“Let’s see.” Jock lifted the receiver of the phone which was the only thing on the surface of his desk, listened, and shook his head. “Not a thing.” Cradling the receiver again, he called toward the other end of the people-filled trailer, “How much longer on the phone?”
“One minute!” The person who answered was a big bearish young man with shoulder-length blond hair and shaggy blond beard. He was dressed in work pants, a yellow T-shirt and a large tool-filled workbelt around his waist, and he was kneeling on the floor at the far end of the trailer, a screwdriver in one hand and a telephone receiver in the other. “Just checking with the operator,” he called, waved the screwdriver, and went back to work.
Mike said, “I’m assuming that place has a phone and we know the number.”
“It does,” Jock assured him, “and we do.”
“Good.” Then Mike added, “According to Merville, they killed our inside girl.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Jock said. “We didn’t do her any favor.”
Lynsey had followed Mike, and now she said, with new worry, “If they’ve already killed once, they don’t have anything to lose anymore.”
“These people started killing years ago,” Mike told her, and went over to the wooden table, which was filled with an untidy Rube Goldberg assembly of electronic parts and wiring. Half of it comprised a two-way police radio, at which an operator sat, receiving occasional messages from elements at the perimeter of the siege area. The rest was the recording equipment, being fussed over by their regular technician from the Burbank office. Mike said to him, “You ready to tape phone conversations?”
“I
“They say that’ll be just a minute.”
“They always say that,” the technician said.
The radio operator said, “Sir?”
“Yes?”
“An L.A. Sheriff’s car on the beach just reported. The word’s got around, and the offshore is filling up with small boats.”
“Boats! Are they looking to get killed?”
“I guess they’re just looking, sir.”
Mike pointed to the array of radio equipment. “Can you get the Coast Guard on that thing?”
“I believe so, yes, sir.”
“Get onto them, explain the situation, and tell them we’d appreciate their cooperation clearing that area. And if they feel like sinking a couple of those stupid bastards out there, we leave them to their own initiative.”
