Double

How far had I come from the house? I wondered. How long had I been out here? Hours, it must be. My tongue clogged my mouth, my eyes were dry and sandpapery. How much longer could I last? I didn’t even know which direction to take to get to civilization.

Direction. I could figure direction from the sun — the damned sun. It beat down on me in pulsing waves. I glanced up, shading my eyes, and noted its position.

The unpaved road to Les Club — whatever its name was — ran southwest. Southwest. But that didn’t matter now. I needed shelter. And water.

Once again I scanned the horizon, my eyes burning. There had to be something...

And then I saw a gray-green haze. Clouds of smoke some distance away. Smoke? I strained my eyes. The clouds swam into focus.

Trees. Smoke trees, named for the illusion I’d just witnessed. And other trees — tamarisks, and what could be desert willows. Trees that grew near water holes...

They seemed an infinity away, across an endless stretch of rocky sand. How far? I wondered. Half a mile? More? It didn’t matter. Those trees meant shade — water.

I began moving again.

I went more slowly this time, to conserve my flagging strength. My breath wheezed in my throat, and wherever there was a little shade, I stopped and rested. Still my heart felt as if it would explode. My skin felt as if it might begin to bubble. I stumbled a number of times, fell twice. But I kept going, gasping and clutching my side, and thinking of water. The trees loomed larger, and then I reached them and plunged into them, down a rocky incline, to the bottom where the water would be.

I fell flat, the shade of the trees coming between me and the wicked sun rays. I lay there for a moment, then pulled myself up and crawled on all fours to the water hole. Leaned forward, toward the precious water.

Only it wasn’t there.

At another time of the year it would be. But not in August. Not in the hottest month of the year.

My throat constricted and a whine came from my lips. I crouched there, staring into the sun-cracked bottom of the water hole. My sight blurred and visions started to dance before me.

Sugarman hanging on the cross... Elaine’s broken body... Others, out of the past: bodies with strangled faces... bloodied heads... stab wounds... bullet holes...

I would join them — all of them, this legion of the dead.

Then the visions were gone. I lowered my head to the ground. And lost consciousness.

40: “Wolf”

It was bloody damned hot in the desert. It hadn’t been so bad in the San Diego area, after that liquid humidity of the Mexican coast, but out here the temperature must have been up over a hundred. Heat shimmered off the highway, glared off the metal surfaces of other cars, made the stark countryside look sere and fiery, and blew inside the rental heap like the breath of Old Nick himself. The car had air conditioning but it had conked out coming down the steep Banner Grade. Which figured. If I hadn’t insisted on the cheapest rental the National agency had, this sort of thing wouldn’t have happened. And I wouldn’t be roasting and dripping like a chicken under a broiler.

The turn for Borrego Springs, off Highway 78, was called Yaqui Pass Road. It climbed, steep and winding, up a sagebrush-strewn hill, and from where it crested you had a pretty awesome view of empty desert spread out to the southwest. A short while later, I had my first look at Borrego Springs. The town was scattered over the floor of a brown, beige, and dull green valley, with massive, barren mountains ringing it in the distance. This entire area was part of the Anza — Borrego Desert Region — several hundred miles of state park that stretched almost to the Salton Sea on the east, almost to the Mexican border on the south.

I was here because I didn’t want to believe McCone had gone to see Woodall yesterday, that he’d done something to her. And because I had nowhere else to look for her. Nowhere else to go period, except back to San Diego to see Tom Knowles. Which was what Knowles wanted me to do. I’d finally got in touch with him, by phone from the service station near Woodall’s house, and told him what I suspected. But I was in no mood for sitting around doing nothing while he made up his mind whether or not to put out an APB on Woodall and on McCone. When he’d told me to come in and talk to him in person I had pretended that there was something wrong with the line and hung up on him.

Down in the valley I passed La Casa del Zorro, the resort hotel where June Paxton had seen Elaine Picard and Rich Woodall having dinner, but I couldn’t see much of it because it was hidden inside a grove of densely grown palms and tamarisk trees. The town, some distance beyond, wasn’t much to look at: plain desert-style buildings, most of them designed to cater to tourists and to the horde of motorcycle riders and dune-buggy drivers who clogged a central green called Christmas Circle. I looped around the circle, drove past the Road Runner Realty Company, and stopped at a Union 76 station.