John went on smoking. “Well?” I said. “What do you think?”
“Danny, you’ve told me a lot of things about what Los Angeles-I mean ‘Great Los Angeles’-is going to be like. I’ll let you know when I see you just how accurate you’ve been.”
“It’s accurate. Subject to minor slips of memory.”
“Mmm . . . you certainly make it sound logical. But in the meantime I think you are the most agreeable lunatic I’ve ever met. Not that it handicaps you as an engineer. . . or as a friend. I like you, boy. I’m going to buy you a new strait jacket for Christmas.”
“Have it your own way.”
“I have to have it this way. The alternative is that I myself am stark staring mad. . . and that would make quite a problem for Jenny.” He glanced at the clock. “We’d better wake her. She’d scalp me if I let you leave without saying good-by to her.”
“I wouldn’t think of it.”
They drove me to Denver International Port and Jenny kissed me good-by at the gate. I caught the eleven o’clock shuttle for Los Angeles.
CHAPTER 11
The following evening, 3 December, 1970, I had a cabdriver drop me a block from Miles’s house comfortably early, as I did not know exactly what time I had arrived there the first time. It was already dark as I approached his house, but I saw only his car at the curb, so I backed off a hundred yards to a spot where I could watch that stretch of curb and waited.
Two cigarettes later I saw another car pull up there, stop, and its lights go out. I waited a couple of minutes longer, then hurried toward it. It was my own car.
I did not have a key but that was no hurdle; I was always getting ears-deep in an engineering problem and forgetting my keys; I had long ago formed the habit of keeping a spare ditched in the trunk. I got it now and climbed into the ear. I had parked on a slight grade heading downhill, so, without turning on lights or starting the engine, I let it drift to the corner and turned there, then switched on the engine but not the lights, and parked again in the alley back of Miles’s house and on which his garage faced.
The garage was locked. I peered through dirty glass and saw a shape with a sheet over it. By its contours I knew it was my old friend Flexible Frank.
Garage doors are not built to resist a man armed with a tire iron and determination-not in southern California in 1970. It took seconds. Carving Frank into pieces I could carry and stuff into my car took much longer. But first I checked to see that the notes and drawings were where I suspected they were-they were indeed, so I hauled them out and dumped them on the floor of the car, then tackled Frank himself. Nobody knew as well as I did how he was put together, and it speeded up things enormously that I did not care how much damage I did; nevertheless, I was as busy as a one-man band for nearly an hour.
I had just stowed the last piece, the wheel-chair chassis, in the car trunk and had lowered the turtleback down on it as far as it would go when I heard Pete start to wail. Swearing to myself at the time it had taken to tear Frank apart I hurried around the garage and into their back yard. Then the commotion started.
I had promised myself that I would relish every second of Pete’s triumph. But I couldn’t see it. The back door was open and light was streaming out the screen door, but while I could hear sounds of running, crashes, Pete’s blood-chilling war cry, and screams from Belle, they never accommodated me by coming into my theater of vision. So I crept up to the screen door, hoping to catch a glimpse of the carnage.
The damned thing was hooked! It was the only thing that had failed to follow the schedule. So I frantically dug into my pocket, broke a nail getting my knife open-and jabbed through and unhooked it just in time to jump out of the way as Pete hit the screen like a stunt motorcyclist hitting a fence.