The Wheel is Fixed by James M. Fox

Author:James M. Fox [Fox, James M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: crime, murder, mystery, suspense
Publisher: Dell
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten: WRONG QUESTION

THE incorporated city of Formosa, California appeared on my motoring-map of Los Angeles county as a tiny speck just off the Harbor Parkway, strategically located within a dollar taxi ride from both the dockyards of San Pedro and the oil refineries of Wilmington. The name means beautiful, in Italian. I knew that much, and nothing else, about the place. It didn’t take me long to learn a little more.

They had a banner sign up with a spotlight on it where the highway entered town. The sign said Jesus Saves, summarily, as if that were all there was to it. They must have needed the reminder; all they had to offer was a mile of clapboard frame and ancient yellow brick, dumped squarely in the middle of an endless stretch of flat and barren fields. On Main Street the used-car lots and the shabby real-estate operators were crowding each other to death; at Main and First, four corners featured a flyblown little drugstore, an establishment selling Rabbits on Ice, the redwood shack of an expert in Palmistry, and a brisk new stucco box labeled Happy Valley Mortuary. This seemed to be the only intersection with a traffic light, presumably intended to protect the drunks when they came staggering out of the poolroom next to the drugstore.

The City Hall was something else again, a tall modern sandstone structure set apart from the common herd in a tile-paved square of its own, complete with trees, two hundred feet of lawn, a huge steel flagpole, and the only six street lamps in town. They caught a glitter of chrome and polished brass for me from two big, beautiful, streamlined engines proudly on display behind the open doors of the Fire Department wing. Across the square a nice, clean, prosperous little glass-brick edifice proclaimed itself the home of the Formosa Enquirer.

I kept on going at the legal rate of twenty-five past all this impressive array of civic progress. The sixteen hundred block on South Main turned out to be at the very edge of open country. It was occupied on the east side by a couple of Quonset huts casually deposited on the verge of a stretch of dark pastureland and casually marked Formosa Airport. On the west side rose a large, solid-looking, windowless white concrete building, brilliantly floodlighted and sporting a roof sign in flashing red-and-green neon that announced Club Gaucho. Behind it, less than half a mile away, the ocean muttered sullenly against the cliffs.

The night was still a pup, but business seemed to be pretty good; the big cement parking-lot was jammed to capacity, and cars were stacked along the shoulders of the road for several hundred yards. Most of them needed a wash job and a turn in the body-repair shop. I rolled the Ford to the end of the line and wandered back; the brightly trimmed canvas marquee split like a Y toward separate entrances. Five aces spread into a neon fan were featured over the revolving

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.