Not long ago, in a horrifying newspaper story, a man whose wife was in the throes of a heart attack on the seat beside him had done just that, finally and desperately driving on the wrong side of a divided highway, and nobody had paid any attention at all. Amanda forced that out of her mind, got back into the car, and, with difficulty, clanked and ground out of the driveway and onto the road.
Chapter 9
The rendezvous with Patch was set for an extensive and usually crowded parking lot which had been chosen because it was a midway point and not the natural habitat of any of the people concerned. Nor was it, by the same token, routine police territory.
The restaurant to which the lot belonged had once been a hacienda. Curved fireplaces in its interconnecting dining rooms, warmly white-walled, burned pinon wood from October to May. A guitar player occasionally prowled through. A reasonably wretched dinner could be had for ten dollars and a good one for fourteen, and such was the atmosphere that most diners, queried by one of the New York-bred owners as to the satisfactoriness of their meal, replied cravenly that the lukewarm, oversauced, and undernourished cannelloni was fine; delicious, really.
The prices served a double purpose in convincing relatives, out-of-town guests, and business connections that they were being treated handsomely and at the same time excluding any unwanted element. This was not a place for beer-chased whiskey or arguments which were settled with knives, and the two bartenders had never been called upon to do anything but produce drinks.
Sweet had driven as though he carried high explosives, in spite of his half brother’s altered appearance, but it was still only three minutes after the appointed hour when he swung the pickup into the parking lot and cruised slowly through in apparent search of a convenient space. A light blue 1975 Camaro, Patch had said, but although the yellow arc light tended to distort colors it was clearly not there.
Patch, a careful, uncommunicative man with pressing reasons of his own for departing the state tonight, would have allowed for it but it was still a delaying factor. Sweet pulled up into the shadow of a giant spruce, said, “He’ll be along any minute,” to himself as well as to Claude, and took bills from his wallet and handed them across. “You’ve got Eddie Garcia’s address. This ought to keep you until . . .”
He was forced to let that drop. Claude, taking the money without acknowledgment and folding it awkwardly into the front pocket of his jeans, was a capable enough auto mechanic—but not with a badly infected right hand. The way he held the hand away from him suggested fear and loathing as well as a guard against any jarring contact. He had always been something of a hypochondriac, and now he was crouched like an animal in shock.
A group of people emerged from the restaurant, the women giving little shrieks at the sight of the snow and proceeding to pick their way on tiptoe. Another three minutes had passed, and Sweet was suddenly and furiously sure of what had happened. Patch, never enthusiastic about this plan, had come early, waited until the hands on his watch stood in exact position, sped away. Still—
“Be right back,” said Sweet abruptly, and got out of the truck into the falling snow. He looked quite at home here, with his confident carriage and air of brisk purpose; he might have been a patron going back to retrieve his wife’s gloves.
Along with a few brilliant ojos and a long display case of Indian jewelry, the lobby contained a telephone booth. Sweet dropped in two of the dimes taken from the girl’s purse—with all her change confiscated she could do him no harm at the crossroads booth if and when she escaped from the bedroom—and dialed.
Patch’s number rang vainly. Either his wife had gone to stay with friends or relatives during his absence or Patch, anticipating his unencumbered getaway and Sweet’s reaction to it, had instructed her not to answer.
Sweet slammed the receiver onto its rest, contrived a civil smile for the white-haired woman who glanced at him from behind the display case, and walked out into the snow again, his mind roaming and ranging. Like most manipulators, he had a nimble and fertile brain, a natural talent for turning events to his own use —but only when the initial scheme was his to begin with. This dangerous mess, far removed from his familiar world of casual thievery and double-dealing and intermittent involvement with drugs, had been thrust upon him with no warning whatever.
Fleetingly and for the first time, he saw his protective attitude toward Claude over the years for the near-fear it actually was. The effort not to look further at this had a steadying effect, and by the time he reached the truck he had said to himself that the current situation contained two men, a girl, and a child too young to give any kind of testimony.
Wasn’t there, if he moved fast, a workable equation here?
“I’ll find it, thank you,” said Lucy Pettit haughtily of the apartment key for which she had been rummaging unsuccessfully. She snatched her bag away from Justin’s offered hand and, before he could stop her, upended it over her snowy doorstep.
A considerable number of objects plopped into the furry white, the smaller and harder ones disappearing at once. Justin bent and ruffled through the snow, Lucy meanwhile
