The Wanderer

One of the biggest of the latter lay squarely across the road, indenting it deeply. A lichen-free area just above showed the spot from which it had been dislodged, presumably by one of the quakes.

“Wow, I’ll say we’ve found the roadblock, Doc,” Wojtowicz called from behind. “She’s a bitch!”

Drawn up sideways just in front of the boulder was a top-down, four-passenger Corvette. Lipstick-red, freshly washed by the rain, it added a saucy touch to the sombre landscape. But there was no one in sight, and Doc’s cheery “Hello there!” was answered only by echoes.

Ida came hurrying up behind Doc, saying: “Mr. Brecht, Ray Hanks isn’t going to be able to take any more traveling today. We’ve propped his shoulders up a bit — it eases him, he says — but he’s in continual pain and has a two-degree fever.”

Doc rounded the red hood, then all of a sudden stopped dead and reared up and back as if invisible grapples had lifted him eight inches by the shoulders. He turned on those behind him a face that looked greener than the sunlight and swept out an arm, saying, “Stay where you are. Don’t anybody come any closer.” He whipped off his raincoat and drew it across something lying just beyond the car.

With a thin, wavery moan Ida quietly collapsed on the asphaltoid.

Then Doc turned to them again, leaning on the car for support and brushing a trembling hand across his forehead, and said in jerky rushes, with difficulty, as if he were fighting down an impulse to retch: “It’s a young woman. She didn’t die naturally. She’d been stripped and tortured. Remember, way back, the Black Dahlia case? It’s like that.”

Margo was half doubled over with nausea herself. She had just glimpsed, before the pale raincoat covered it, the bloodless mask of a face with cheeks slashed so that the mouth seemed to stretch from ear to ear.

Rama Joan, pressing Ann’s head to her waist, but her body on tiptoe as she peered ahead, called: “There are two sedans on the other side of the rock. I don’t see anyone in them.”

The Little Man moved forward behind her.

“Where’s your gun, Doddsy?” Doc demanded of him.

“Why, I can’t handle it with this hand,” the other retorted. “It’s all I can do to jot notes in my journal. I left it in the truck.”

“I got mine, Doc,” Wojtowicz called. He stumbled as he hurried forward through the press, but caught himself by driving the gun’s butt against the asphaltoid. As he recovered balance he was holding it for a moment by the muzzle, like a pilgrim’s staff.

At the same moment a voice from close by called out very sharply the trite words: “Don’t move. We’ve got you all covered. Don’t move a finger, anybody, or you’ll be shot.”

A man had stepped out from behind a boulder just above the road, and two more men from another just below it. These two leveled rifles at Wojtowicz, the other slowly wagged back and forth, only an inch or so either way, the muzzles of two revolvers. The head of each of the men was entirely covered with a bright red silk mask with large eyeholes. The man above the road had a jauntily collegiate black felt hat pulled down over the top of his, and he was slim and nattily dressed, but for all that he gave the impression of wiry, jigging age rather than of real youth.

Now he came stepping down, rather quickly and very sure-footedly. His eyes twitched as ceaselessly across the knot of travelers as did the muzzles of his two revolvers.

“That was a happy guess about the Black Dahlia,” he said rapidly but very clearly, enunciating every word with a finicky precision. “She was the masterpiece of my youth. This time everything will go much more pleasantly — and a chance of survival for each of you — if the man with the gun will just let go of it now.” Wojtowicz’s hand unclasped, and the gun teetered oddly for a second before starting to fall. “And if all the men will separate themselves from the women, moving back and a little downhill, so—”

Rock chips spattered from a point on the road-blocking boulder five feet to the side of the black-hatted, red-masked man. Almost simultaneously there was a zing-spat-zing, and immediately the crack of a rifle behind them. Ray Hanks had managed to get off a shot from his cot in the truck.

Wojtowicz snatched up his fallen gun and shot from the hip at the two masked men with rifles. Almost at once they both fired, and Wojtowicz fell.

By that time Margo had the gray pistol out of her jacket and was pointing it at Black Hat and squeezing the trigger. He slammed flat back against the boulder with a crunch, his hands thrown out like a man crucified, and his revolvers shot out of his hands to either side. The boulder rocked, just a fraction.

Someone was screaming fiercely, exultantly.