Jeopardy Is My Job. Marlowe Stephen

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      The burro-trail was wider than I had expected, ten feet across, but unpaved and seamed with the twisting, dry beds of streams that already had run out of water by late spring. Along with the mournful gypsy music they reminded me that Spain was a harsh, hard land where only the very rich among men, or the dishonest, and only the carrion-eaters among animals, ate well.

      I began to wonder how I would tell the cave of Fuentes from the others dotting the hillside when I heard a car behind me. I got off the road and crouched against the flank of the hill, waiting. The car roared closer, the sound of its engine as incongruous on that burro-trail as a Spanish accent at a meeting of the D.A.R. Then I saw it, a low-slung sports job pursued up the steep trail by its own cloud of dust. There had been a sports car just like it, a sleek Lancia that would clip you for eight or ten thousand bucks, parked outside the second bodega in Fuengirola. The top was down then and it was down now. In the moonlight as it sped by I saw Stu Huntington behind the wheel and blind Fernando beside him. I decided for no reason at all that they would lead me where the Fuentes brothers lived. Then I was choking in their dust, and then I started walking again.

      It wasn’t far, but they had two-hundred horsepower and I had shank’s mare. By the time I reached the car, it was parked and empty. But the engine was still ticking under the long hood, like an expensive watch.

      The burro-trail ended there. Ahead loomed a rocky slope that even a mountain goat would have shunned. At the end of the trail gaped a small cave entrance, and ten yards below it a much larger one. A burro brayed nearby, its startlingly loud hee-haw resounding in the mountains.

      Big cave or small? Chester Drum, spelunker, scowled, and rubbed his nose, and scratched his head, and listened to the unseen burro bray again, and said, “Don’t give me the horse-laugh, brother,”—and heard a motor grind, cough and kick over with a roar. Not the Lancia; it was bigger, and the sound came from inside the large cave.

      I poked my nose in there. I took three steps and heard the rattling idle of the truck’s engine smooth to a loud purr as an expert hand adjusted the choke. I took three more steps and headlights sprang blindingly on in front of me. The easy idle became a roar. The truck began to move. Fear slid down my spine like a pellet of ice when I thought the truck might be wide enough to fill the width of the cave. Then I bared my teeth in something like a smile. By hugging the left wall of the cave, I’d have room to spare. It was just as well: who’d hire a long, flat private detective?

      The truck rumbled by. I breathed its fumes and saw a high cab and a six-wheeled truck-bed, canvas-covered. I watched its taillights recede. If the driver hadn’t seen me in his headlights, I decided, he’d be too nearsighted to tool a big rig down the mountain trail. Which meant he had seen me, and that meant whatever he was doing here was not the sort of thing to make him stand on his brakes and leap out of the truck with a tire iron in his hand by way of greeting an unexpected snooper.

      That was what I thought. But then I heard a sound behind me, as of a shoe dislodging loose rock, and I had time to pivot halfway around before the roof of the cave slammed down like a punch-press, fragmenting the night and my incorrect deduction.

      chapter four

      Sterling Moss would have envied me.

      They had installed night-lights at the speedway in Indianapolis, and all the lights had coalesced to look like a big fat full moon, and there I was sitting in the bucket-seat of my Lancia so far ahead of the pack that another car wasn’t even in sight. Not only that, but look ma, no hands.

      Maybe I wasn’t driving though. It was a two-man racer, and a big figure sat hunched over the wheel to my left. That put me in what they call in the trade the suicide seat. The wind of our slipstream rushed by. We were really zooming along. Suicide seat? Ha-ha, that was a good one. My partner was hunched over the wheel as if his life depended on it, and his hands were glued at ten and four o’clock. He was a driver who knew his business. He wouldn’t wrap us around a tree.

      But he might wrap us around a rambling, spreading, thick- and twisted-limbed cactus as big as a house. Now, who had said the prickly-pear was as big as a house? Didn’t remember, didn’t know what that damn thing was doing here, but: “Swing around it, you sap,” I said, and my voice sounded like a laryngitic cat mewling in an echo chamber. “You’ll pile us up.”

      The cactus got bigger, as cacti will if you are approaching them at something like forty miles an hour. I nudged my partner with an elbow. His right hand slid off the steering wheel and hung limply between us.

      “Hey!” I said, and leaned over to turn the wheel hard left myself. My driver’s other hand left the wheel and he slipped sideways toward me. We missed the cactus and went bucketing along. My head began to ache suddenly as I came out of my racing-car dream of glory. The driver was leaning against me, a dead weight. I tugged at his hair to get a look at his face. His hair was short-cropped and sticky—sticky with blood. His face was Stu Huntington’s except for a large dent high up on the right side where his temple had been. He looked as if he had been kicked in the head by a horse. Like most people who have been kicked in the head by a horse, he was dead.

      Then I snapped out of it. I was sitting in a car, Stu Huntington’s Lancia, with a dead man, Stu Huntington, behind the wheel. We were not supposed to get very far. It was a miracle we had got this far. The road was more than a dirt track, but no superhighway. The grade was steep now, ten degrees going down. No shoulder bordered the left side of the unpaved road. It skirted the edge of a cliff and it was a long way down, almost vertical, to the Torremolinos-Fuengirola highway. Beyond that, the sea. Where, after going off the road and smashing flat on the highway, we were supposed to wind up.

      I leaned over the dead man and gripped the wheel. My hands were shaking. His head fell in my lap. His leg was in the way. I couldn’t find the brake pedal.

      Our headlights swept the cliff edge. I yanked the wheel hard. We swerved and skidded, tires whining, rocks clattering under the fenders. I tromped my foot in the direction of the brake-pedal. Same no luck: his leg was still in the way. I had no room to maneuver. He held down a bucket-seat and I held down a bucket-seat, we were a big corpse and a big man, and that was that. It wouldn’t help to cut the ignition. Rolling free we’d probably pick up speed even faster than in high gear. If I could reach the brake, or even the clutch-pedal to brake us down through the lower gears. . . .

      I couldn’t reach that either. Try getting around a dead man in the front seat of a little sports car some time.

      The Lancia had a floor shift. It was low and to the right, in fourth gear. I got a grip on it. Then I had to turn the wheel to avoid the cliff edge again, and the dead man leaned against me harder. I caught a glimpse of the speedometer. It was pushing fifty—far too fast for this road, even with a racing driver behind the wheel. We had no kind of a driver at all. I grabbed the stick again and pushed hard toward the dashboard. The stick vibrated in my hand and there was a whining, grinding, scraping sound. It would be hell on the gear box, but I could worry about that later—if there was a later.

      As the lower gear took hold, I felt the Lancia lurch. The speedometer needle jiggled down to forty and hovered there. I worked the gearbox down to second the same way. The Lancia bucked as if it had hit a wall, but that cut our speed to thirty and then to twenty-five. Those four-speed racers are geared to lose speed downhill in second. Maybe we’d make it. Far ahead and below us I thought I could see the white ribbon of the highway bathed in moonlight. The dirt road was fairly straight the rest of the way, though steep, but in second gear on the highway with nobody’s foot on the gas we’d quickly come to a stop.

      And СКАЧАТЬ