sorcerer’s bag of twentiethcentury science.
Now, sprawled comfortably in his motel bed, Anson Sharp enjoyed the
sleep of the amoral, which is far deeper and more restful than the sleep
of the just, the righteous, and the innocent.
Sleep eluded Jerry Peake for a while. He had not been to bed in
twenty-four hours, had chased up and down mountains, had achieved two or
three shattering insights, and had been exhausted when they got back to
Palm Springs a short while ago, too exhausted to eat any of the Kentucky
Fried Chicken that Nelson Gosser supplied. He was still exhausted, but
he could not sleep.
For one thing, Gosser had brought a message from Sharp to the effect
that Peake was to catch two hours of shut-eye and be ready for action by
seven-thirty this evening, which gave him half an hour to shower and
dress after he woke. Two hours! He needed ten. It hardly seemed worth
lying down if he had to get up again so soon.
Besides, he was no nearer to finding a way out of the nasty moral
dilemma that had plagued him all day, serve as an accomplice to murder
at Sharp’s demand and thereby further his career at the cost of his
soul, or pull a gun on Sharp if that became necessary, thus ruining his
career but saving his soul. The latter course seemed an obvious choice,
except that if he pulled a gun on Sharp he might be shot and killed.
Sharp was cleverer and quicker than Peake, and Peake knew it.
He had hoped that his failure to shoot at Shadway would have put him in
such disfavor with the deputy director that he would be booted off the
case, dropped with disgust, which would not have been good for his
career but would sure have solved this dilemma. But Sharp’s talons were
deep in Jerry Peake now, and Peake reluctantly acknowledged that there
would be no easy way out.
What most bothered him was the certainty that a smarter man than he
would already have found a way to use this situation to his great
advantage. Having never known his mother, having been unloved by his
sullen widowed father, having been unpopular in school because he was
shy and introverted, Jerry Peake had long dreamed of remaking himself
from a loser into a winner, from a nobody into a legend, and now his
chance had come to start the climb, but he did not know what to do with
the opportunity.
He tossed. He turned.
He planned and schemed and plotted against and for his own success, but
his plans and schemes plots repeatedly fell apart under the weight of
their own poor conception and naivete’. He wanted so badly to be George
Smiley or Sherlock Holmes or James Bond, but what hefrit like was
Sylvester the Cat witlessly plotting to capture and eat the infinitely
clever Tweetie Bird.
His sleep was filled with nightmares of falling off ladders and off
roofs and out of trees while pursuing a macabre canary that had Anson
Sharp’s face.
Ben had wasted time ditching the stolen Chevette at Silverwooci Lake and
finding another car to steal. It would he suicidal to keep the Chevette
when Sharp had both its description and license number. He finally
located a new black Merkur parked at the head of a long footpath that
led down to the lake, out of sight of its fisherman owner. The doors
were locked, but the windows were open a crack for ventilation. He had
found a wire coat hanger in the trunk of the Chevelleal0ng with an
incredible collection of erjunka he had brought it along for just this
sort of emergency. He’d used it to reach through the open top of the
window and pop the door latch, then had hot-wired the Merkur and headed
for Interstate is.
He did not reach Barstow until four forty-five He laad already arrived
at the unnerving conclusion that he would never be able to catch up to
Rachael on the road.
Because of Sharp, he had lost too much time. When the lowering sky
released a few fat drops of rain, he realized that a storm would slow