‘So how fast will your scout vehicle be going?’
I calculated quickly. On the open highway, Dolan’s driver kept it pegged between sixty and sixty-five. He would probably be driving a little slower than that where I planned to make my try. I could take away the detour signs, but I couldn’t hide the road machinery or erase all the signs of construction.
‘About twenty rull,’ I said.
He smiled. ‘Translation, please?’
‘Say fifty earth-miles an hour.’
‘Ah-hah.’ He set to work at once with his slip-stick while I sat beside him, bright-eyed and smiling, thinking about that wonderful phrase: arc of descent.
He looked up almost at once. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘you might want to think about changing the dimensions of the vehicle, buddy.’
‘Oh? Why do you say that?’
‘Seventeen by five is pretty big for a scout vehicle.’ He laughed. ‘That’s damn near the size of a Lincoln Mark IV.’
I laughed, too. We laughed together.
After I saw the women going into the house with the sheets and towels, I flew back to Las Vegas.
I unlocked my house, went into the living room, and picked up the telephone. My hand trembled a little. For nine years I had waited and watched like a spider in the eaves or a mouse behind a baseboard. I had tried never to give Dolan the slightest clue that Elizabeth’s husband was still interested in him — the totally empty look he had given me that day as I passed his disabled Cadillac on the way back to Vegas, furious as it had made me at the time, was my just reward.
But now I would have to take a risk. I would have to take it because I could not be in two places at the same time and it was imperative that I know if Dolan was coming, and when to make the detour temporarily disappear.
I had figured out a plan coming home on the plane. I thought it would work. I would make it work.
I dialed Los Angeles directory assistance and asked for the number of Big Joe’s Cleaning Service. I got it and dialed it.
‘This is Bill at Rennie’s Catering,’ I said. ‘We got a party Saturday night at 1121 Aster Drive in Hollywood Hills. I wanted to know if one of your girls would check for Mr Dolan’s big punch-bowl in the cabinet over the stove. Could you do that for me?’
I was asked to hold on. I did, somehow, although with the passing of each endless second I became more and more sure that he had smelled a rat and was calling the phone company on one line while I held on the other.
At last — at long, long last — he came back on. He sounded upset, but that was all right. That was just how I wanted him to sound.
‘Saturday night?’
‘Yes, that’s right. But I don’t have a punch-bowl as big as they’re going to want unless I call across town, and my impression was that he already has one. I’d just like to be sure.’
‘Look, mister, my call-sheet says Mr Dolan ain’t expected in until three P.M. Sunday afternoon.
I’ll be glad to have one of my girls check out your punch-bowl, but I want to straighten this other business out first. Mr Dolan is not a man to fuck around with, if you’ll pardon my French — ‘
‘I couldn’t agree with you more,’ I said.
‘ — and if he’s going to show up a day early, I got to send some more girls out there right away.’
‘Let me double-check,’ I said. The third-grade reading textbook I use, Roads to Everywhere, was on the table beside me. I picked it up and riffled some of the pages close to the phone.
‘Oh, boy,’ I said. ‘It’s my mistake. He’s having people in Sunday night. I’m really sorry. You going to hit me?’
‘Nah. Listen, let me put you on hold — I’ll get one of the girls and have her check on the — ‘
‘No need, if it’s Sunday,’ I said. ‘My big punch-bowl’s coming back from a wedding reception in Glendale Sunday morning.’
‘Okay. Take it easy.’ Comfortable. Unsuspicious. The voice of a man who wasn’t going to think twice.
I hoped.
I hung up and sat still, working it out in my head as carefully as I could. To get to LA by three, he would be leaving Vegas about ten o’clock Sunday morning. And he would arrive in the vicinity of the detour between eleven-fifteen and eleven-thirty, when traffic was apt to be almost non-existent anyway.
I decided it was time to stop dreaming and start acting.
I looked through the want ads, made — some telephone calls, and then went out to look at five used vehicles that were within my financial reach. I settled for a battered Ford van that had rolled off the assembly line the same year Elizabeth was killed. I paid cash. I was left with only two hundred and fifty-seven dollars in my savings account, but this did not disturb me in the slightest. On my way home I stopped at a rental place the size of a discount department store and rented a portable air compressor, using my MasterCard as collateral.
Late Friday afternoon I loaded the van: picks, shovels, compressor, a hand-dolly, a toolbox, binoculars, and a borrowed Highway Department Jackhammer with an assortment of arrowhead-shaped attachments made for slicing through asphalt. A large square piece of sand-colored canvas, plus a long roll of canvas — this latter had been a special project of mine last summer —
and twenty-one thin wooden struts, each five feet long. Last but not least, a big industrial stapler.
On the edge of the desert I stopped at a shopping center and stole a pair of license plates and put them on my van.
Seventy-six miles west of Vegas, I saw the first orange sign: CONSTRUCTION AHEAD
PASS AT YOUR OWN RISK. Then, a mile or so beyond that, I saw the sign I had been waiting for since . . . well, ever since Elizabeth died, I suppose, although I hadn’t always known it.
DETOUR AHEAD 6 MILES.
Dusk was deepening toward dark as I arrived and surveyed the situation. It could have been better if I’d planned it, but not much.
The detour was a right turn between two rises. It looked like an old fence-line road which the Highway Department had smoothed and widened to temporarily accommodate the heavier traffic flow. It was marked by a flashing arrow powered by a buzzing battery in a padlocked steel box.
Just beyond the detour, as the highway rose toward the crest of that second rise, the road was blocked off by a double line of road cones. Beyond them (if one was so extraordinarily stupid as to have, first, missed the flashing arrow and, second, run over the road cones without realizing it
— I suppose some drivers were) was an orange sign almost as big as a billboard, reading ROAD
CLOSED USE DETOUR.
Yet the reason for the detour was not visible from here, and that was good. I didn’t want Dolan to have the slightest chance of smelling the trap before he fell into it.
Moving quickly — I didn’t want to be seen at this — I got out of the van and quickly stacked up some dozen of the road cones, creating a lane wide enough for the van. I dragged the ROAD
CLOSED Sign to the right, then ran back to the van, got in, and drove through the gap.
Now I could hear an approaching motor.
I grabbed the cones again, replacing them as fast as I could. Two of them spilled out of my hands and rolled down into the gully. I chased after them, panting. I tripped over a rock in the dark, fell sprawling, and got up quickly with dust on my face and blood dripping from one palm.
The car was closer now; soon it would appear over the last rise before the detour-junction and in the glow thrown by his high beams the driver would see a man in jeans and a tee-shirt trying to replace road cones while his van stood idling where no vehicle that didn’t belong to the Nevada State Highway Department was supposed to be. I got the last cone in place and ran back to the sign. I tugged too hard. It swayed and almost fell over.
As the approaching car’s headlights began to brighten on the rise to the east, I suddenly became convinced it was a Nevada State Trooper.
The sign was back where it had been — and if it wasn’t, it was close enough. I sprinted for the van, got in, and drove over the next rise. just as I cleared it, I saw headlights splash over the rise behind me.