The Damsel by Stark Richard & Weinman Sarah

Author:Stark, Richard & Weinman, Sarah [Stark, Richard & Weinman, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Crime, Mystery, thriller, Suspense
ISBN: 9780226770369
Amazon: 0226770362
Goodreads: 12947959
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 1967-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

11

“I’LL BE BACK as quick as I can,” Grofield said.

“Good.”

He shut the car door, making the interior light go off, and now they were in darkness. He stood up, putting one hand on the car to keep himself oriented, and waited for his eyes to accustom themselves to the night, but they didn’t seem to want to do it. The sliver of moon was even thinner tonight, and there was no artificial light anywhere in the world.

The time was three-thirty in the morning, and the Datsun was on the dirt beside the road just a little way north of the shack where Grofield had seen the Pontiac. They hadn’t seen another car since they left Taxco. They might as well have been standing on a rock in the asteroid belt.

After a while Grofield could begin vaguely to make out the difference between the flat, straight roadway and the less-black, less-even countryside. He moved away from the car, out onto the blacktop, and walked slowly along, keeping to the silence of the blacktop and off the soft crunching of the roadside dirt.

He was weighted down with equipment. The Beretta was in one hip pocket, and a small bottle of gasoline was in the other. A foldaway knife was in his left-side trouser pocket, a torn-off strip of T-shirt and some matches were in the right side, and he carried another sock-and-soap blackjack in his left hand. He was, he hoped, ready for whatever came up.

Ahead of him there was a faint flicker of light. He moved toward it, cautiously, hoping some late-night driver wouldn’t pick this moment to go tearing by, all noise and wind and bright headlights. But the blackness remained silent and empty, and Grofield moved slowly through it toward the flickering light.

It came from the roofless shack. Grofield approached, cautious and silent, as in his head he heard background music, movie music; and he was an Apache creeping up on the wagon train, slow and silent with the deadly stealth of the red man, that lore of the forest that . . .

They had a table in there, with a candle on it. They had folding chairs, and three of them were sitting around playing cards, Honner and two others. The fourth guy was nowhere to be seen.

Grofield worked his way around the shack to the Pontiac, and was almost to it when he heard the voices. He stopped, startled, and listened.

There were two guys in the Pontiac, talking together idly, the way people do when they’re bored and waiting and they’ve run out of all the good anecdotes. That made five, one more than this afternoon.

No, six. The sixth one came walking along, a flashlight beam ahead of him, emerging suddenly out of the darkness. Grofield crouched behind the Pontiac, waiting and listening.

The newcomer, with the flashlight, said, “Okay, time’s up. You get out there for a while.”

“You ask me, they ain’t coming this way.”

“That’s okay. It’s your turn to get out by the road.”

“Marty, come along with me, keep me company.

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