You can do it, darling – I know you can. Softly cajoling.
But it was not really her voice that persuaded me to go on. What really turned the trick was an image of Dolan lying asleep in his penthouse while I stood here in this hole beside a stinking, rumbling bucket-loader, covered with dirt, my hands in flaps and ruins. Dolan sleeping in silk pajama bottoms with one of his blondes asleep beside him, wearing only the top.
Downstairs, in the glassed-in executive section of the parking garage, the Cadillac, already loaded with luggage, would be gassed and ready to go.
“All right, then,” I said. I climbed slowly back into the bucket-loader’s seat and revved the engine.
I kept on until nine o’clock and then I quit – there were other things to do, and I was running out of time. My angled hole was forty feet long. It would have to be enough.
I drove the bucket-loader back to its original spot and parked it. I would need it again, and that would mean siphoning more gas, but there was no time for that now. I wanted more Empirin, but there weren’t many left in the bottle and I would need them all later today… and tomorrow. Oh, yes, tomorrow – Monday, the glorious Fourth.
Instead of Empirin I took a fifteen-minute rest. I could ill-afford the time, but I forced myself to take it just the same. I lay on my back in the van, my muscles jumping and twitching, imagining Dolan.
He would be packing a few last-minute items in a Travel-All now – some papers to look over, a toilet kit, maybe a paperback book or a deck of cards. Suppose he flies this time? a malicious voice deep inside me whispered, and I couldn’t help it – a moan escaped me. He had never flown to LA before – always it had been the Cadillac. I had an idea he didn’t like to fly. Sometimes he did, though – he had flown all the way to London once – and the thought lingered, itching and throbbing like a scaly patch of skin.
It was nine-thirty when I took out the roll of canvas and the big industrial stapler and the wooden struts. The day was overcast and a little cooler – God sometimes grants a favor. Up until then I’d forgotten my bald head in consideration of larger agonies, but now, when I touched it with my fingers, I drew them away with a little hiss of pain. I looked at it in the outside passenger mirror and saw that it was a deep, angry red – almost a plum color.
Back in Vegas Dolan would be making last-minute phone calls. His driver would be bringing the Cadillac around front. There were only about seventy five miles between me and it, and soon the Cadillac would start to close that distance at sixty miles an hour. I had no time to stand around bemoaning my sunburned pate.
I love your sunburned pate, dear, Elizabeth said beside me.
“Thank you, Beth,” I said, and began taking the struts over to the hole.
The work was now light compared to the digging I’d done earlier, and the almost unbearable agony in my back subsided to a steady dull throb.
But what about later? that insinuating voice asked. What about that, hmmmm?
Later would have to take care of itself, that was all. It was beginning to look as if the trap was going to be ready, and that was the important thing.
The struts spanned the hole with just enough extra length to allow me to seat them tightly in the sides of the asphalt which formed the top layer of my excavation. This was a job that would have been tougher at night, when the asphalt was hard, but now, at mid-morning, the stuff was sludgy-pliable, and it was like sticking pencils in wads of cooling taffy.
When I had all the struts in, the hole had taken on the look of my original chalk diagram, minus the line down the middle. I positioned the heavy roll of canvas next to the shallow end of the hole and removed the hanks of rope that had tied it shut.