Renner glanced in his rear-view mirror. Four of the cars that had been parked in front of the lounge were still trailing him. The headlights of the fifth car had turned off on one of the side roads and were climbing up into the hills. Getting closer to paradise. Off for the second coming. Nothing religious about it.
He shook his head at the thought. For all the moralists preached against it, it was sex that made the world go round. You couldn’t pick up a book or a magazine that wasn’t filled with it. It inspired most advertising, everything from yachts to mayonnaise. What every ad really said was, “Lady, are you a good lay? If not, why don’t you rub Old Romanoff behind your ears?” The same was true of advertising for men. If you wanted your girl, or all girls, to fight to crawl in bed with you, all you had to do was smear your hair with this or that or use Pink Sky after-shaving lotion.
The wreck wasn’t far now. He could see the revolving red light on the roof of Prichard’s car. And judging from the cluster of car headlights around it the usual crowd of the morbidly curious had gathered.
Renner slowed the truck to a crawl and eased it across the soft divider strip. He couldn’t see the wrecked car but judging from the greasy black skid marks angling across the southbound lanes, someone had hit their brakes hard and merely succeeded in burning off a lot of rubber.
There was reason for Angel to be late. The fat Mexican had driven the bus off to a clear spot on the shoulder of the road. One of the curious onlookers was leaning against a battered fender smoking a brown paper cigarette.
Renner parked the tow truck beside the bus. “A little late tonight, aren’t you, Angel?” he asked.
The fat Mexican shrugged. “Sí.” He puffed his brown paper cigarette. “Always something. I started out five minutes early, too.”
As far as Renner could tell there were no passengers in the bus. He wanted to ask Guitierrez if he had picked up a pretty blonde girl at the Greyhound bus stop in Cove Springs but didn’t think it would be wise. If there were any questions asked later on, if either Kelcey Anders or his lawyers attempted to prove he’d been conned, it was imperative no chance remark connect him to Tamara. For his plan to be successful, as far as the inhabitants of Mission Bay were concerned, he and Tamara had to be total strangers.
Renner studied the skid marks as he got out of the truck. “It’s a bad one, eh?”
Angel flicked his cigarette and it died in a little shower of sparks. “Very bad,” he agreed. “Right off the road and over the cliff.” He added, almost smugly, “But I could have told you the guy would crack up. When he whipped around me he must have been doing ninety.”
Five or six local cars had stopped. Three times that number of men, most of them Mexican farm hands, were standing on the far shoulder of the road looking out and down. There were a few women in the crowd but Renner couldn’t see Tamara.
He walked around the back of the bus to the police car. Kelcey Anders was clinging to one of the fenders. He looked like he’d just finished being sick. When he saw Renner he said, “It’s a mess. You never saw anything like it. So help me, I’ll never drive over forty again.”
Renner wasn’t interested in how fast he drove. “Where’s Bill?”
Kelcey pointed to the edge of the shoulder. “About thirty feet down the slope. I tried to help him and got sick. He thinks the girl is still alive but he can’t get her out of the car.”
“Why not?”
“You’ll see.”
Renner walked to the edge of the cliff and looked down. A late model cream-colored Cadillac Eldorado convertible was nosed into a clump of live oak saplings about thirty feet down a forty-five degree slope. The car was right side up but the whole front of it was pushed in and the hood was crumpled back against the shattered windshield.
“You need any help down there?” he called.
Prichard sounded worried. “Am I glad to hear your voice, Kurt. I think the girl is still alive but I can’t get her out of the car and I’m afraid the whole thing will go over any minute.”
The slope was mostly hardpan mixed with patches of crumbling shale. Digging his heels in as best he could, Renner inched his way down to the car and saw why Prichard was worried. Only the smashed trunk of a six-inch tree that had been snapped off by the impact and a small out-jutting of rock that had caught on the oil pan was keeping the big car from continuing on over the cliff to the rocks and surging white water two hundred feet below. He touched one of the crumpled fenders and the wrecked car quivered like a perfectly balanced seesaw.
“See what I mean?” Prichard said.
He shone his flashlight into the car. The man was white-haired and fifty, possibly older, and very obvious dead. Then Prichard shone his light on the girl and Renner felt his stomach turn over.
How or why she had got into the car he had no way of knowing. But the girl caught in the balanced car was Tamara. She hadn’t changed in the two days since he’d seen her, since he’d given her her instructions. She was still young and blonde and pretty, not pretty like a doll but striking in a slightly foreign sort of way. By some freak of dynamics the force of the impact had thrown her back instead of forward. She was lying with one arm dangling over the back of the seat, her left knee drawn up almost to her chin, her other foot on the floor boards. Her skirt was wadded around her middle leaving her completely exposed. In the yellow gleam of the flashlight her blood-smeared white thighs looked like they were carved of white marble.
“Know her?” Sheriff Prichard asked.
It was an effort for Renner to lie. “No. I never saw her before.”
“Me either,” Prichard said. “She’s probably a hitchhiker the old guy picked up.”
“What makes you think that?” Renner asked him.
Prichard told him. “That cheap skirt and sweater she’s wearing. They don’t belong in a Cadillac.” He added, “Besides, there’s a cheap hat box—you know, the kind that dancers and chorus girls carry—over there in the bushes. It was probably thrown out of the car when they went over.”
Renner studied Tamara’s face. Her eyes were closed but she seemed to be breathing regularly. He asked, “Why can’t we just lift her out?”
Prichard shook his head. “I tried that. You have to climb up on the car to get at her. And when you do it upsets the balance. I thought for a moment the whole thing was going to go, me with it.”
It wasn’t a matter of choice. It was something he had to do. Renner climbed the slope again, calling back over his shoulder as he climbed. “I’ll back the truck as close as I can to the edge. Then I’ll come down with the hook and cable and we’ll take a strain on the car before we try to get her out of there.”
Kelcey was still standing beside the police car. He walked along with Renner as he pushed his way through the growing crowd to the truck. “You saw her?”
“I saw her,” Renner said curtly.
Kelcey proved he was feeling better. “She’s a little honey, isn’t she? Boy, would I like to get my hands on her. You know how I mean.”
It was all Renner could do to keep from hitting him. With Tamara in danger, possibly dying, all Kelcey could thing of was enjoying her.
Angel was still leaning against the fender of the bus. As Renner climbed into the cab of the truck the fat Mexican pushed himself erect and asked if there was something he could do.
“Yes,” Renner said. “Tell all the paisanos with cars to park them so their headlights shine over the cliff. Then you can handle the winch while I go down and try to hook on a cable.”
Guitierrez spoke in spanish as he passed on the instructions.
Then, with Angel guiding