Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 811 & 812, March/April 2009

“I dunno,” I repeated. “He seemed straight when he pulled onto the highway back at Devlin station. Could be the heat’s getting to him.”

Again the Dodge wobbled off track, almost head-oning a Greyhound.

“That guy’s going to kill somebody, Kevin!”

“That looks like a safe-money bet; himself, if nobody else.”

The question was, what could I do about it? I had the ’57 tricked out with just about every street-worthy speed part you could name, along with a few gimmicks that had to do with my day job as an L.A. County deputy sheriff. Unfortunately that gow-gear didn’t run to roof flashers and a siren.

Then, abruptly, the problem was taken out of my hands. The Dodge’s driver slumped behind the wheel and the pickup started its final fatal drift to the right. I was flashing my brake lights at the traffic behind us even before he tipped off the edge of the road.

It wasn’t too bad of a wreck as wrecks go. At that point, it was only about a three-foot drop from the shoulder of 66 to the desert floor and, thanks to that earth-mover convoy, we’d only been doing about thirty.

I reached the overturned pickup while it was still engulfed in the dust cloud of its roll-over. I kicked in the driver’s-side window and hunkered down beside the cab. Reaching inside, I yanked the keys out of the ignition. Gas was cascading out of the truck’s filler pipe and a spark just then would have been raunchy.

“He’s still alive, Kevin.” Ignoring the dirt, the gasoline, and the broken glass, Lisette was stretched out on her stomach on the far side of the truck, checking on the driver through the busted passenger window.

The Princess only looks decorative. When things go off the high side, my girl is good people to have around.

The driver lay crumpled on the cab roof, a thin, elderly man in a rusty black going-to-town suit. He had the leathery tan of a life-long desert dweller and, under other circumstances, he looked like he might have been a tough old bird. Now, though, he was blue-lipped and limp and when I touched the side of his neck for his carotid pulse, his skin was chill and clammy. I couldn’t smell alcohol on him and there didn’t seem to be a bottle loose in the truck.

“Is he hurt bad?” A tentative voice asked from the outside world.

“You ever hear of anyone hurt good?” I backed out of the crumpled cab and stood up.

Traffic had come to a stop on the highway with long rows of cars pulled over on the shoulders and the usual crowd of gawkers standing around waiting for somebody else to do something constructive.

And the only somebody available was Kevin Pulaski of L.A. County’s finest.

I pointed at a big, late-model Buick Roadmaster station wagon. “Who owns that car?”

“Uh, I do,” a man in a garish Hawaiian shirt and straw golf hat looked startled.

“Okay. Get your tailgate open and your backseat folded down. We’re going to need you to get this guy out of here.”

That’s how you work it in an emergency. Don’t ask ’em. Tell ’em!

Lisette bobbed up on the far side of the truck, smeared with mud and gas. “Is it a good idea to try and move him?”

“We don’t have a choice, Princess.” I looked around at the cholla-studded wastes surrounding us. “It’ll hit a hundred and twenty degrees on these flats and it’ll take at least an hour for a doc and an ambulance to get out from Barstow. This old guy’ll fry if we leave him like this. I figure our best bet is to get him back to Devlin station.”

It seemed to make sense, to me anyway. I only hoped I was calling it right. I lifted my voice again. “We’re going to need a plank or something to use as a stretcher and some blankets...”

Back when the Southern Pacific first ran its rails across the Mojave, they built a string of jerkwaters along the right-of-way to service the old steam locomotives. Named alphabetically from west to east, there was never much to these stations, just a siding and a water tower with all the water coming in by tank car and a few sun-strange section men.

The coming of the diesel made these jerkwaters obsolete, at least for the railroad. But by then, Route 66 paralleled the tracks and some of the stations, like Amboy, Essex, and Goff, got a reprieve from extinction, servicing tourists instead of 4-6-4 Baldwins.

Devlin was average for the breed, a gaunt two-story combination store-gas station-lunchstand-residence and a short row of auto-court cabins. The buildings were whitewashed to bounce off a little of the sun and were all set within a perimeter of rabbit brush, hulked cars, and rusting mining machinery. Tin signs advertised DuPont dynamite and Bull Durham and a yard-tall Nehi promotional thermometer told you what you already knew.