The Wanderer

Clarence Dodd and Harry McHeath voluntarily joined in the reconnoiter, speeding it up. The latter made his way to the downslope precipice edge and reported that it fell away sheer for five hundred feet to a rocky knob and a steep, rock-studded, brush-grown slope.

Neither of Black Hat’s revolvers turned up — either they’d carried over the cliff or been lost in the pitted and creviced rocks.

The two sedans beyond the boulder still had their ignition keys, which Doc pocketed. Doddsy jotted down the names on the steering-column registration papers, using his flashlight to eke out the fading green daylight, and he speculated as to whether one of them was that of the Black Dahlia sadist. Presumably Black Hat and his acolytes had come in the sedans, the lone girl, from the other direction in the red Corvette — a purely chance meeting at the roadblock — and then, probably before the rains, while flames were still roaring to the east, making , an appropriately hellish backdrop…it didn’t do to think about it.

Meanwhile, Ross Hunter and the Hixons corded up the murdered girl’s body in Doc’s borrowed raincoat and the smallest of the truck’s tarpaulins. The olive-drab bundle was lugged a hundred feet up the rock slope and eased into a coffin-size cave young McHeath had spotted. Pinned to the tarpaulin was a brief account in Doddsy’s waterproof ink of the circumstances of her death and, with a question mark, the woman’s name and address, found on the Corvette’s registration papers. The Ramrod spoke a brief, unfamiliar service, signing himself with a cross that ended in a finger-traced Isis-loop in front of his forehead.

Then everyone began to feel a bit better, though as horror and excitement died it also became obvious that everyone was tired half to death and this must be their bivouac. Preparations were made for sleep, most of them bedding down in the school bus, the two injured men certainly, since it was already chilly, and would get a lot chillier before dawn. Hixon was bothered about more boulders on the slope above rolling down in case of a quake, but Doc pointed out that they’d stayed in place through a couple of dillies, and that anyway the Wanderer’s gravity had probably triggered off during the first few hours after its emergence most of the quakes it was going to.

Doc decided two persons would sit guard through the night, well blanket-wrapped in a low-ramparted natural scoop in the rocks two-thirds of the way up the slope and almost directly above the boulder block. They would be armed with one of the rifles and Margo’s gray pistol. Doddsy and McHeath would take it to midnight, Ross Hunter and Margo, twelve to two-thirty, himself and Rama Joan, two-thirty to dawn. Hixon would have the other rifle and nap in the driver’s seat in the bus. The women on guard duty would sleep in the truck cab with Ann. Wanda commented on the coeducational sentry arrangements, and Doc snapped out a peppery answer.

The primus stove was fired with charcoal. Water was heated on it for the powdered coffee. They made supper of that and the milk and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from the bus.

Margo thought she wouldn’t be able to stomach such sweet, gooey child’s fodder, but found herself ravenous after the first bite and disposed of three, along with a pint of cafe au lait. She felt lightheadedly drunk, her mind from time to time happily jumping with visions of the red-hooded sadists being swept by her pistol to their deaths, and she said what she felt to everyone she met.

Catching the Ramrod behind the bus, she asked him point-blank: “Mr. Fulby, is it true you’re married to both Ida and Wanda?”

He, quite unoffended, nodded his narrow, grizzled head and replied: **Yes indeed, in our eyes they are both my wives, and I their breadwinner. It’s been an enriching relationship, on the whole. I originally married Wanda for the body’s glory — she was a Baby Wampas star — and Ida for the spirit’s exaltation. Of course, things are a bit different now…”

The scowly old bus driver heard most of that speech and turned away with a snort.

“Jealous, Pop?” Margo asked him with a friendly sort of maliciousness.

Tigerishka finished feeding Miaow for a third time and glanced at Paul. Then, with what he surmised was a deliberately human and mocking shrug of those lovely violet-barred green shoulders that had more play and stretch in them than any tennis star’s or Hindu dancer’s, she returned to the Food Panel, then swam over to him with a small kit in one paw and two narrow tubes trailing behind her. She hovered by him, eying him up and down, as if momentarily uncertain whether to force-feed him down the throat, or through a vein, or perhaps rectally.