She had a cute little figure. Renner started to ask her her name but before he could the youth with her took her arm and walked her over to his car. Renner didn’t blame him. The punk wasn’t dumb. He knew something good when he had it.
Satisfied with the performance of the winch he climbed into the cab of the truck. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he told Manners. “If anyone should ask for me tell them to wait.”
“I’ll do that,” the old man said.
The drivers of four other cars parked in front of the lounge followed the truck across the cut-over to the northbound lanes but gradually fell behind as Renner increased his speed. The whip of the wind felt good. He turned on the revolving red light and then the siren for kicks, warning no one out of his way, doing seventy then seventy-five miles an hour.
As he drove he, totaled what tangible assets he had left, cash in the bank and negotiable bonds. If he played his cards close to his belt, with what little money the lounge and the station brought in from local trade, he could meet his payroll and bank payments for two months. After that, unless he could put over the fast one he was planning, put a quick bite on the Anders money, the bank and suppliers and jobbers would have to split up the court between them.
Leaving him with nothing.
Back in the same old squirrel cage.
He mentally checked his original calculations. Few people realized just how profitable a combination tourist court and lounge and filling station could be. Figuring full capacity in the eighteen units, at fifteen dollars a night, totaled two hundred and seventy dollars a day. There were three hundred and sixty-five days in a year, for annual total of ninety-eight thousand five hundred and fifty dollars. So that was gross. Even figuring in interest and insurance and taxes and upkeep, half of the take on the units was clear profit. Say roughly fifty thousand dollars. Doing minimum normal business, using accepted small business surveys as a premise, the lounge and the restaurant and the station should net twenty thousand more. Fifty and twenty were seventy. Seventy thousand dollars net to him. A fortune. He could cut the rate on his units in half and only do half of capacity business and still pay off the court in ten years.
On an original investment of forty thousand dollars.
True, this wasn’t a nice thing he was asking Tamara to do. Still it would only be the one time. And heaven knew she wasn’t a virgin. Not after the nights she had spent in his arms.
Renner glanced in his rear-view mirror. Four of the cars that had been parked in front of the lounge were still trailing him. The headlights of the fifth car had turned off on one of the side roads and were climbing up into the hills. Getting closer to paradise. Off for the second coming. Nothing religious about it.
He shook his head at the thought. For all the moralists preached against it, it was sex that made the world go round. You couldn’t pick up a book or a magazine that wasn’t filled with it. It inspired most advertising, everything from yachts to mayonnaise. What every ad really said was, “Lady, are you a good lay? If not, why don’t you rub Old Romanoff behind your ears?” The same was true of advertising for men. If you wanted your girl, or all girls, to fight to crawl in bed with you, all you had to do was smear your hair with this or that or use Pink Sky after-shaving lotion.
The wreck wasn’t far now. He could see the revolving red light on the roof of Prichard’s car. And judging from the cluster of car headlights around it the usual crowd of the morbidly curious had gathered.
Renner slowed the truck to a crawl and eased it across the soft divider strip. He couldn’t see the wrecked car but judging from the greasy black skid marks angling across the southbound lanes, someone had hit their brakes hard and merely succeeded in burning off a lot of rubber.
There was reason for Angel to be late. The fat Mexican had driven the bus off to a clear spot on the shoulder of the road. One of the curious onlookers was leaning against a battered fender smoking a brown paper cigarette.
Renner parked the tow truck beside the bus. “A little late tonight, aren’t you, Angel?” he asked.
The fat Mexican shrugged. “Sí.” He puffed his brown paper cigarette. “Always something. I started out five minutes early, too.”
As far as Renner could tell there were no passengers in the bus. He wanted to ask Guitierrez if he had picked up a pretty blonde girl at the Greyhound bus stop in Cove Springs but didn’t think it would be wise. If there were any questions asked later on, if either Kelcey Anders or his lawyers attempted to prove he’d been conned, it was imperative no chance remark connect him to Tamara. For his plan to be successful, as far as the inhabitants of Mission Bay were concerned, he and Tamara had to be total strangers.
Renner studied the skid marks as he got out of the truck. “It’s a bad one, eh?”
Angel flicked his cigarette and it died in a little shower of sparks. “Very bad,” he agreed. “Right off the road and over the cliff.” He added, almost smugly, “But I could have told you the guy would crack up. When he whipped around me he must have been doing ninety.”
Five or six local cars had stopped. Three times that number of men, most of them Mexican farm hands, were standing on the far shoulder of the road looking out and down. There were a few women in the crowd but Renner couldn’t see Tamara.
He walked around the back of the bus to the police car. Kelcey Anders was clinging to one of the fenders. He looked like he’d just finished being sick. When he saw Renner he said, “It’s a mess. You never saw anything like it. So help me, I’ll never drive over forty again.”
Renner wasn’t interested in how fast he drove. “Where’s Bill?”
Kelcey pointed to the edge of the shoulder. “About thirty feet down the slope. I tried to help him and got sick. He thinks the girl is still alive but he can’t get her out of the car.”
“Why not?”
“You’ll see.”
Renner walked to the edge of the cliff and looked down. A late model cream-colored Cadillac Eldorado convertible was nosed into a clump of live oak saplings about thirty feet down a forty-five degree slope. The car was right side up but the whole front of it was pushed in and the hood was crumpled back against the shattered windshield.
“You need any help down there?” he called.
Prichard sounded worried. “Am I glad to hear your voice, Kurt. I think the girl is still alive but I can’t get her out of the car and I’m afraid the whole thing will go over any minute.”
The slope was mostly hardpan mixed with patches of crumbling shale. Digging his heels in as best he could, Renner inched his way down to the car and saw why Prichard was worried. Only the smashed trunk of a six-inch tree that had been snapped off by the impact and a small out-jutting of rock that had caught on the oil pan was keeping the big car from continuing on over the cliff to the rocks and surging white water two hundred feet below. He touched one of the crumpled fenders and the wrecked car quivered like a perfectly balanced seesaw.
“See what I mean?” Prichard said.
He shone his flashlight into the car. The man was white-haired and fifty, possibly older, and very obvious dead. Then Prichard shone his light on the girl and Renner felt his stomach turn over.
How or why she had got into the car he had no way
