For the first time since Emli had awakened me I felt panic. Pure 102-octane adrenaline-charged, heart palpitating panic. Up to this point everything had gone smoothly, or as smoothly as disposing of the body of a murder victim can be expected to go. Now everything – my loyalty to Emli, my quickly formed plan, my effort, the corpse in the trunk, the thick sage aroma of the gentle desert wind that was neither warm nor cool, the starlit night canopy above me, the headlights of the approaching vehicle – was closing in on me. I felt a taughtness in my chest and then, uncontrollably, I started to hyperventilate. After several seconds, this passed and I bent down to pick up the pick and shovel. I stepped rapidly out from around the sagebrush and toward the embankment. Under the influence of the adrenaline I fairly bounded up the embankment, my momentum when I reached the top almost taking me straight into the side of the Buick. I propped the tools against the side of the car.
My mind raced for some plausible explanation that I could give for my presence in this unlikely spot. None came to me. I looked at the dual light beams, trying to make out what sort of vehicle they emanated from. My eyes struggled at the task but failed. I listened to the sound of the engine. At this I heartened because I realized what I heard was not the easy purr of a well-maintained, modern engine like that of a late model vehicle such as one most likely to be driven by members of the sheriff’s department, which had jurisdiction in those parts. What I heard was an engine with a non-electronic ignition system and an exhaust system that was faulty. There was either a small hole in the muffler or the exhaust pipe was loosened up near the manifold. On top of that I could hear some form of rattling attending the whole unwelcome progression and I could discern from that that the shocks or springs were worn out.
It took longer for the vehicle to reach me than I anticipated. Finally it rounded a last bend in the dirt road and came up on me. It was a pick-up truck, an International, about 35 or 40 years old. Despite the fact that its lights were hitting me full on in the face and nearly blinding me, I could still tell that it was beat to hell, with what looked to be its original paint job fading, tarnished and peeling. I could see corrosion on the front bumper. There was a horizontal crack that ran nearly the entire breadth of the windshield.
I walked over to the right side of the road and up alongside the truck on the driver’s side. I peered into the cab. At the wheel sat what appeared to be one of the original Forty-niners, a guy in his late fifties who looked for all the world like a gold prospector from the middle of the Nineteenth Century who by some trick of fate had been placed behind the wheel of a pickup truck from the middle of the Twentieth Century. He grinned at me slightly, showing several missing teeth, which added to the old miner effect.
“What are ya?” he asked. “Stuck?” I would have sworn I heard a slight hillbilly twang.
“Nah. I’m okay,” I replied.
“Ya headed up to the springs?” He did not wait for me to answer. “Ya cain’t git thru. The rangers done locked up the gate.”
He stared out of the windshield before him then.
“Oh, I see. You been doin’ some diggin’.” He had spotted the pick and shovel.
“Yeah, well, I’m burying a dead dog,” I heard myself say, winging it.
“All the way up here?” He sounded skeptical.
I winged it again. “My two kids loved that dog,” I said. “It got out of our backyard and got hit by a car tonight. My wife wanted to make sure they didn’t see it, so I drove out here.”
“Ahh,” he said, cocking his head. “Well I gotta git past ya there. If ya’ll just back up to that wide spot back there, I kin git aroun’ ya.”
He did not have to tell me twice. I went back toward my car and lifted the shovel and pick and laid them up on the top of the embankment. I got into the car, started the engine, and without turning on the headlights, put it in reverse. I twisted my neck and trunk around, throwing my right arm back to drape over the seat and watched my backward progress while I steered with my left arm. I negotiated the Buick back almost a sixteenth of a mile to the wide spot and pulled over as close to the edge as I could so that the scrub, sage and wild manzanita bushes were brushing against the car’s right side. The Forty-niner squeezed the International past me and continued on toward Hubbard Road. I waited there a good minute, watching in my rearview mirror his one unburned-out taillight as he headed out the winding road.
I took advantage of the wide spot to turn the Buick around, having to make several backward cuts to the left followed by forward cuts to the right to get lined up. I then backed up the sixteenth of a mile to where the pick and shovel were. I shut down the engine and got out of the car.
The crickets and cicadas were again in full chorus as I walked around the Buick. My intention was to return to the hole and as quickly as I could take it to the required depth, and then roll Williams down the embankment and over to it and seal him in his unlined and unmarked tomb by heaping the mound of dirt I had unearthed over him. But before I had even picked up the digging implements, I was thinking better of that. The old prospector had unnerved me. He apparently lived up here someplace, probably in a primitive cabin he had built with his own hands. That meant he probably knew this dirt road pretty well. I could not overlook the possibility that he would be able to return right to that spot and locate my handiwork with a little bit of exploration. My story about the dog had been pretty thin and might have aroused his curiosity. He might even have noted the Buick’s license plate number. Of course it was just as probable or even more so that he would forget having encountered me. As intent as I was to push on and unburden myself of the albatross hidden in my trunk at once, I knew I could not risk it.
I mounted the embankment and stepped over the side. I went back down to the patch of sage brush next to the hole and retrieved my jacket. I turned around and headed straight back up to the road, this time having to struggle somewhat to reclimb out of the arroyo. I felt a slight chill in my sweat-drenched garments. I opened the trunk and placed the shovel and pick on top of the rug, making the closing of the lid difficult. I walked around the car, opened the door and tossed the jacket over onto the passenger side seat. I peeled off the gloves and threw them over onto the jacket. I got back into the car behind the wheel, fired her up, turned on the headlamps and with care headed back out toward Hubbard Road. I glanced down at the digital display on the dashboard. It was 4:12 a.m. Four minutes later I was back on Hubbard Road. Several minutes later I came up behind the old timer in the antique International pickup with one functioning taillight. I swung around him and looked over at him in profile whistling a tune as I went by. I looked back at him in the rearview, silently cursing and lamenting the inopportune timing of the crossing of our existences. Not even a minute later I turned back onto Escondito Canyon Road. I did not look back again after that. A few cars heading east passed me in the opposing lane and when I came up on Highway 14 a few minutes later, there was hardly any traffic on it at all. I went west, catching myself doing ten miles an hour above the speed limit and only a few minutes after I slowed back to 70, Highway 14 transitioned to the Golden State Freeway. On the Golden State there was considerably more traffic moving north and south than there had been when I had come up an-hour-and-a-half earlier. It was still heavily dark and at that hour the cars and trucks’ headlamps were blurry and streaky to my fatigued eyes. I entered the freeway south and eased into the traffic flow, topping my speed out at 68 miles per hour. I stayed in the number three lane for the most of the 27 mile drive back to San Fernando, occasionally weaving around a slower vehicle and letting anyone traveling faster than I was weave around me.
A collage of thought was running through my mind. I tried not to dwell on how I had just failed to execute on the mission out into the Mojave. I had wasted now more than two hours on an absurd traipse out into the desert and the corpus delecti was still very much in my possession – a ticking time bomb that could explode to absolutely ruin my life at any moment. I would just have to suspend for a while dealing with the thorny issue of disposing of the literal body of evidence and put my effort and energy into tying together several other loose ends that would need attention in a timely manner if our tracks – Emli’s and mine – were to be adequately covered.
An elaborate play had begun, I figured. The first act had taken place with me fully off stage, in Williams’ living room at about 9:00 or 9:30 or thereabouts. I had come in for Act Two, which had not been entirely completed. Ultimately, the audience being entertained by all of this was going to be the homicide division of LAPD. Whether Emli and I would get to leave the theater when the time came and go home with all of the other spectators depended on the outcomes of acts three, four and five. That was assuming Act Two came off as I wanted it scripted. My ideal for Act Two was something of a magic act – one in which Greg Williams, or what was left of him, would just disappear. Take a permanent powder. Vanish. Drop off the face of the earth. And no one would know why. It would be important that there be no conceivable connection in this disappearance to Emli, who, after all, was just two months ago Williams’ main squeeze. Los Angeles is a big city but all the same it occurred to me that it would not hurt to put as much distance as possible between Williams and Emli in a way that was documented and on the record so there would be no chance that she would be connected to the disappearance. That was one loose end.
Another was the timetable on the discovery of his disappearance. At some point the authorities would inevitably learn that Williams was no longer living the good life in San Fernando. That might be sooner or that might be later. The later the better, I figured. With the trail cold and growing colder it would be tough for even the most skillful investigator to piece together what had occurred. The sooner the detectives got to work, the greater the likelihood they would chance upon something indicative.
I was vaguely working out a game plan for dealing with the first loose end, by creating a paper trail that would place Williams in a faraway place he had never actually been and from where he would ostensibly have disappeared. As far as the second loose end – the timing of the realization of his disappearance – there was only so much we could do. In a month or so, either rent or a mortgage bill along with utility payments, credit card bills and the like would come due. Sometime after that, when delinquencies were registered, inquiries would be made. Well prior to that, he would be a no-show at work. His mailbox would be crammed full. Newspapers would litter his front yard. Maybe as early as within a few hours, someone – his employer if he worked for someone or his business partner if he had a business partner or one of his customers if he had customers – would note him missing. Depending on how reliable he had been in the past and how indispensable he was in his day-to-day function, a search for him might be underway as early as this afternoon. There was not much that could be done to affect all of this, except to make damn sure that everything otherwise seemed as normal as could be.
The sky, except for a few stars, was still dark as pitch when I exited Interstate 5 onto Van Nuys Boulevard. It could be seen, though, that the town was gradually waking up. Lights could be seen in the windows of scattered residences and in doughnut shops and a few restaurants. Traffic was sparse, but thicker than it had been more than two hours before. I turned off Van Nuys Boulevard onto the side street Emli had directed me down three hours earlier. I continued as before, made the proper turns and pulled up in front of the Williams residence.