Man on a leash - By Charles Williams Page 0,73
a rock-strewn demolition course, gullied, grown up with cactus, blocked by boulders, with no road at all. A jeep could make it, or anything with high clearance and four-wheel drive, but could this thing? He grinned again as he swung the wheel over and gunned it off the jeep track. There wouldn’t be much of it left, but then there wouldn’t be much left anyway.
He plowed through prickly pear, smashed the windshield on a limb of a dead tree, got stuck in loose gravel but made another run at it and got through, and tore two fenders off as he caromed off boulders, and then a hundred yards short of his objective there was a crunch underneath from a rock too high to clear. He looked back and saw a black line of oil. He’d punctured the pan, and the motor was going to freeze up any minute. He looked down and to his left. This would do.
The narrow canyon was below him, some three hundred feet down a fifty-degree slope. Kessler was still in the flat a mile away, approaching the entrance at seventy miles an hour. Still far back, the other plumes of dust were rising in pursuit, but gaining little if at all. He turned, stopped the car on the brink, and held it with the brake while he unfastened the belt. Kessler went out of sight at the upper end; then he was skidding around the turn into the narrow, half-mile straightaway below him. He released the brake, held the wheel while the car picked up momentum, headed it straight down, and jumped.
* * *
Romstead replaced the phone and picked up his drink. Mayo stood looking moodily out the window at the East Bay lights in the gathering dusk. He went over to her.
“That was Brubaker,” he said. “I asked him to call and reverse the charges. They found him this afternoon. Out at the old Van Sickle place.”
“Found whom?” she asked.
“You remember. Top Kick—that is, Delevan—said the old man killed one of them—”
“And the only reason you didn’t kill two more is that the police got there in time to stop you. The strain is improving.”
“Damn it, Mayo—”
“In another two or three generations I see a sort of super-Romstead, capable of wiping out whole communities.”
“Look, if you have to fight me, at least be fair about it and stick to the facts. I wasn’t trying to kill them. I was trying to get them out of the wreck before it burned. There was gasoline all over it—”
“And the dams don’t even seem to matter,” she went on, as if she hadn’t even heard him. “They’re only the receptacles, like the glass jars in Brave New World. Plant the seed anywhere, in a gently raised and civilized young Andalusian girl from Havana descended from five generations of university professors, and it germinates like dragon’s teeth and comes clawing its way out of the womb one hundred percent Romstead, impervious to all other genes, to any distaff-inherited tendencies toward civilization at all—”
He sighed. He’d been through these things before; the only thing to do was heave to and ride it out. Keep your ass down, or as the bureaucrats put it nowadays, maintain a low profile.
“Mrs. Carmody said that while you were throwing that dynamite around like confetti and tearing the car apart with your bare hands, even she was afraid of you, and you were on her side.”
The police had most of the facts now. Tex actually was from Texas, a fringe-area rodeo performer named Billy Heard who’d done federal time for narcotics smuggling along the border below El Paso. It was in prison that he met Kessler. The two of them, plus the girl named Debra and the man whose body Brubaker had found this afternoon, had planned the kidnapping of his father.
Jeri Bonner’s only part in it was to find out where his money was and how much there was of it. She’d agreed to it, but reluctantly, because a fifty-dollar habit had already driven her to shoplifting and occasional prostitution and now, finally, to desperation, but she didn’t know they planned to kill him, too. He, for his part, didn’t know she was on heroin, and they were sleeping together when he was in San Francisco. Romstead had never had much faith in Mrs. Carmody’s dictum that his father wouldn’t have anything to do with a girl that young. The old stud would take a hack at any girl who was willing and