Chapter Four

 

 

 They were back there somewhere   though the rearview mirror showed only the passing glitter of Denver suburb street lights, like stars glowing from a bowl of water. Dan Newhaul gripped the wheel as the van followed the winding road up and out of it, circling the belly of the mountain like a lopsided belt.

 Back there riding the curve behind him with their headlights off. He tried to picture their grim faces and grey suits, wondering if they would break his legs or toss him off a cliff. He glanced forward in time to swerve away from the guard rail as the road began to tighten to it slow winding way around the mountain, narrowing a two lane county road that connected Denver with Boulder.

 Calm down, boy! Don't do their job for them.

 As the grade increased, the van protested. The weak Volkswagen engine struggling to keep up speed. It hadn't been built for mountains like these. And the thin air affected its fuel mixture, set originally for L.A.

 It coughed and grunted. The additions he and Lance had built into the thing weighing it down. Like the wood bed frame and the boxes of clothing. Sarah had stuffed suitcases and boxes beneath and around the bed despite Dan's protests.

 ``But this is all my stuff,'' she said. ``You don't expect me to leave it behind?'

 After everything had been put in place, they van looked like something out of the Great Depression despite its red, white and blue home-done paint job, and three travelers looked the part of Okies fleeing the dust bowl, not hippies headed on the road.

 ``Didn't anyone ever tell your girlfriend we needed to travel light?'' Dan asked Lance in a whisper.

 ``I tried,'' Lance said with his usual helpless expression. ``But she wouldn't listen. She says it’s all too valuable to leave behind.''

 ``She could have sold it,'' Dan said. ``The money might come in handy where we're going.'

 ``I suggested that, too,'' Lance said. ``But this is her Hollywood stuff. It would take an earthquake to break her grip on it.''

 Everything swayed with each turn, dragging at the wheel as the speedometer needle descended from 45 to 40 to 35, then 30.

 Dan coughed, too   the pain in his chest bringing back the horrors of East Coast life and the frightful medical predictions which had said: Go West or Die. They had meant Arizona or New Mexico. Not Colorado. No one came to Colorado for their health. No one gave up Wall Street for citrus groves and retirement villages either. Not at 25. Which was all Phoenix had been.

 He coughed again, down shifted as the needle dropped and the engine threatened to stall.

 "Easy baby," he mumbled, patting his pockets until he came up with a box of Vicks Cough Silencers and a pack of Sherman cigarettes. He put both on the dashboard with Lance's empty Marlboro packs, but drew out one of the long brown filter less cigarettes that had become his trade mark in L.A. He lit one of the cigarettes, the smoke relieving the tickle in his throat.

 Ahead, the dim headlights illuminated a change in the road, the hill leveling off for a moment as it prepared for the more serious incline a half mile on. Dan gunned the engine to gather speed. Every mile an hour would help on the upswing. Behind him, approaching the hair pin curve around which he'd just come, the other car's headlights flicked on.

 "Got ya!" he shouted, then coughed. He crushed the cigarette in the overflowing ashtray, though many of the other butts were Lance's Marlboros.

 No drinking, no smoking, no citified air, the doctors had said, and maybe he would live a full, if not enjoyable life. He knew very little about the disease. He hadn't wanted to know details. But fleeing New York had mean a serious change of life.

 One lost wife, career and life style.

 "Phoenix isn't as bad as it looks from here," he'd told his wife, then found himself buying a single one way ticket out of town. Two months later, he'd packed up again, heading straight for L.A.

 Wall Street?

 That was a capitalist plot, man. Street life and free love were "in" these days, smoking dope and promoting peace. Even his exterior had changed, from the suit & tie indignity to a floppy leather hat and beard. After all, one didn't have to get jeans dry cleaned twice a week. Nor did he have to worry about alimony payments in California, which didn't recognize divorce laws from other states.

 Behind him, the car lights remained on after the hairpin curve, as if the drivers saw no point in seeking secrecy after their cover have blown.

 Dan downshifted again, but the dip in the road had ended and began its steady and steep upgrade, one that went on for miles before leveling off again. Even now, the speedometer -- which had worked its way back up to near 60 miles per hour -- began to waiver as uphill effort zapped the engine's vitality. Something putted at the rear, not yet quite a backfire, but a symptom of the air-cooled engines rebellion against the thin air.

 To the right, the trees vanished as the mountain dropped away -- the distant lights of Denver showed deep in its valley. To the left, the mountain rose, its trees thinning as chunks of stone jutted out over the road, a grinning granite face with deep grooves filled with growths of ice.

 Yellow signs had been posted here warning drivers of ice patches and falling stone. Other, larger and more insistent signs ordered drivers to slow down with elevation markers indicating just how far down a car would plunge if it skidded through the guard rail.

 He hadn't wanted to come to Colorado. No hippie, gay, Indian or black in his or her right mind did. The reputation of the state had spread to both coasts, where the street people whispered of neo-Nazi movements alive in the mountains. While Dan had seen no brown shirts breaking windows, he'd seen plenty of demented cowboys wandering the back streets and alleyways of downtown Denver, drunk enough to beat up anyone and everyone who got in their way -- including the police. Dan had run two red lights just to avoid them -- although more than a few pickup trucks had followed behind him, drunken cowboys hooting and hollering for Dan to stop.

 No, Dan had come because of Bobo -- that pudgy little bastard from East L.A., who's clever little brain pondered one get rich quick scheme after another, many of them just barely viable enough to work, all of them absolutely insane. Most street people along Hollywood Boulevard avoided Bobo for that reason, knowing the man was just clever enough to wrap them up in his plans. Unfortunately, Dan had not been so clever or lucky, or for that matter, wise enough in the ways of the street to recognize just where Bobo was coming from or to what kind of danger it would lead.

  ``It's the deal of a life time, Dan,'' Bobo had told him, whispering part of the plan over the dirty orange and yellow table of Hollywood's Hamburger Palace. His round face so apparently trustworthy that people stopped routinely on the way to the service window to ask him what was best on the menu, and he, with a wink at Dan, always told them the spare ribs, although the food section of the L.A. Free Press called it burnt flesh on a stick. ``With this deal you won't have to whore yourself around anymore. You might even get yourself a good quack to take care of your lung thing.''

 ``What kind of deal?'' Dan asked, caught between the lure of the pudgy man's soothing voice and the whispered campaign of warnings he had heard up and down the street.

 Bobo leaned over the table, his breath smelling of peppermints. ``Dope,'' he said in a soft voice. ``More dope than you can imagine and so pure you could cut the stuff a hundred times and still have people telling you how good it is.''

 ``You've got me interested,'' Dan admitted. ``But you make it sound as if all we had to go and do is pick the stuff off a branch like apples or pears.''

 ``It's almost that easy,'' Bobo said, his green eyes glinting with the excitement of his own plan. Dan had seen the look before on Wall Street traders, who had an inside line to some major breaking corporate news.

 ``You're crazy,'' Dan said with an angry wave of his hand, having heard enough about Bobo to dismiss him. Only Bobo's voice kept him hooked, a single barb already deeply imbedded beneath his skin-- too painful to leave in; too painful to remove.

 ``No, no, Dan, I'm serious,'' Bobo said, giving Dan a reassuring smile. Dan had seen that smile before on Wall Street, too, and had come to distrust it. ``We can rule this town, have a regular monopoly on the market.''

 ``I'm not stupid, Bobo,'' Dan said. ``This is Los Angeles, not Phoenix. No one group of people can control the whole market here, no matter how much dope they have. There are too many variables, too many bikers and gangsters -- and more than a few independent operators making their rent from weed.''

 ``I'm not talking pot,'' Bobo said. ``I'm talking chemicals.''

 ``What kind of chemicals? Speed? Smack? Downs?''

 ``LSD.''

 Even without Bobo's dramatic pronunciation, the letters sent a chill through Dan, and left the air around their table charged, as if both men had dropped a hit themselves and were just then on the edge of reality, waiting for the drug to kick them into the other world.

 Dan tugged at one end of his long moustache, pulling and smoothing the hair as if the tail of cat, half expecting a purr or a strike of claws. He glanced around. Suddenly the faces in the restaurant all looked hostile, not angry so much as competition, each long-haired soul locked into the very market Bobo was offering.

 ``Look,'' Dan said in a low voice. ``I can dig doing a deal in acid. But there's no way we're going to corner the market with San Fransisco so close. The Sunshine family's still in business, even if Owsley isn't, and there's plenty of freaks going up and down, bringing in their goods to sell.''

 ``Not as good as the stuff I have in mind,'' Bobo said.

 ``Not as good?'' Dan said, his voice exuding disbelief. ``Are you telling me you've got better stuff than Sunshine?''

 ``By far,'' Bobo said calmly.

 ``You're full of shit! Nobody makes better than Sunshine.''

 ``The pharmacal companies do.''

 Dan stared. It was one of those statements he couldn't believe, like someone telling him Dow Jones would hit 4000 on Monday, or that the president was about to award him the Congressional Medal of Honor, or that the Beatles were just outside, waiting to talk to him.

 ``Let me get this straight,'' Dan said. ``You're telling me you have access to pharmaceutical acid?''

 ``An inexhaustible amount.''

 ``How pure?''

 ``Straight from the factory.''

 ``This you'd better explain to me,'' Dan said, lowering his own voice so that only Bobo could possibly hear. The street had a thousand ears, many of them were cops. ``How the hell did you get access to that kind of stuff?''

 ``I don't exactly have access yet,'' Bobo admitted.

 ``I thought so,'' Dan said, staring to stand. But Bobo grabbed his hand and yanked him back down, down almost to his pudgy face.

 ``I don't have access yet,'' he repeated. ``But there's a pipeline that comes into this city from Denver, carrying that kind of stuff.''

 ``A lot of good that does us,'' Dan said. ``It's probably mob run.''

 ``No,'' Bobo said with a shake of his head. ``The people on the far side are too straight for that. They're business people, not crooks.''

 ``Business people selling dope?''

 ``It's what they do,'' Bobo said. ``Times are hard. They can't make the same kind of money selling aspirin, you know.''

 ``So who do they deal with?''

 ``A chain of freaks,'' Bobo said with a grin. ``A string of communes full of peace and love people. Each town's group takes their share then passes it on. The load's way too big for their samples to make a dent. The people on the other end don't much care who gets the dope as long as the profits keep coming in.''

 ``Yeah, that's sounds all good and wonderful,'' he said. ``But once the dope gets here, it isn't the brown rice crowd that sells it.''

 ``No,'' Bobo admitted. ``The people here are street wise enough. I'll admit that.''

 ``So how do you get around them?''

 ``We go to Denver. Talk turkey with the big wigs that send the stuff. We divert the stuff along our own pipe line and then we're in business.''

 ``Why do you need me if you have it all figured out?'' Dan asked.

 ``Because I'm just a fucked up Marine with more instinct than manners,'' Bubo said. ``You've done Wall Street. You know how to sway these guys. You can make the deal, coming from a place they understand.''

 Dan shook his head, trying to clean the cobwebs that Bobo's voice seemed to weave there. It all sounded too simple, and Dan, long ago had come to distrust simplicity, in Wall Street, in his marriage, in the overnight cure the doctors said Phoenix would provide.

 ``I'll think about it,'' he said.

 ``No time for that, Dan,'' Bobo said. ``It's now or never. I got word we either make the deal before the summer or they'll find someone else.''

 ``You mean we have competition? I thought all that would evaporate when we made the deal?''

 ``Local competition will vanish. But there's always bigger brains trying to build a national network. If we don't slip in while there's a window of opportunity, we won't get another chance.''

 ``All right,'' Dan said, wiping the sweat that had formed under the loose strands of his moustache. ``Where do I have to go?''

 ``Denver.''

 ``I might have a problem with that. I owe alimony. My ex-wife would love to catch me leaving the state.''

 ``How's she going to know?''

 ``She'll know. There's a detective or two wandering around watching the airport and bus terminals.''

 ``There are other ways out of town.''

 ``Not as quick as a bus or a plane. You said there was a time constraint.''

 ``We can stretch it. The important thing is that you get to Denver before mid-April.''

 Dan frowned, studying the plump man's face, and the eyes that didn't meet his. ``You're not telling me everything,'' he said.

 ``You don't need to know all the details, Dan,'' Bobo said.

 ``Like how dangerous it is?''

 ``Dan, would I do that to you?''

 ``You hardly know me,'' Dan said. ``And I certainly don't know you. If I'm walking into trouble, I want to know about it.''

 ``No trouble, Dan. Just get to Denver by -- let's say April 15. Meet with the men, set the deal in motion, then come back. Meanwhile, I set up our own little network here, arrange for dealers, have them waiting for when the shipment comes in.''

 Why Dan agreed in the end, he still didn't understand. Even sitting across the table from the pudgy man, Dan sensed deceit, something like the inner eyelid of a snake opening and closing inside Bobo's eyes, keeping all the real details concealed. Obviously, Bobo needed a body to go to Denver, to talk with some men here, but the logic behind it made no sense. Bobo could talk to anyone, could shape his own deal as easily with a business man as he could a drug dealer. Yet he needed Dan -- or some other fool -- in Denver on April 15.

 Dan did find another way out of town, a slow overland route to Denver via VW bus, hitching a ride with two confused hippies who threatened to kill each other the whole way, their verbal battles growing hotter as the miles shrank, though Dan actually liked Lance. The girl, Sarah, annoyed him as much as Lilly had, with same perverted sense of values. People along the boulevard called them the millionaire hippies, admiring the freeway they spent cash. For a long while, Dan suspected them of selling drugs, though later, as he got to know them, discovered some more serious crime over which Lance constantly pined. Needless to say, the trip took longer than Dan figured on, the fighting and the van slowing them down.  Between L.A. and Phoenix, they forced him to stop three times. Then in the mountains between Phoenix and Albuquerque, the van broke down stranding them for a week. By the time Dan reached Denver, it was April 20 and the cold voice on the far end of the telephone gave him instructions where to meet.

 Newhaul knew nothing of the deception when he took the elevator up to the roof top restaurant to meet the dudes from the pharisaical company, nor even when they asked him to join them in a private room in back where they might discuss business more openly.

 ``So you're Mr. Bobo's partner,'' the grey-haired man said, sitting back in his chair, his hard eyes studying Newhaul's appearances, obviously dissatisfied with what he saw. Men in grey suits didn't like dealing with hippies or admitting too openly just where their drugs wound up. They played with the illusions that it wasn't their dope in the veins of L.A. kids or the cause of some many emergency room ODs. Yet somewhere down the line it had to cross from their hands to his, just not in their own backyard.

 ``Yes,'' Newhaul said, feeling equally uncomfortable. The seated man reminded him too much of the sharks on Wall Street who ate people three times a day and spit out bones.

 ``Then you have our million dollars?''

 ``Million what?'' Newhaul said, shifting his feet, feeling an odd panic begin to rise in him with the urge to run now and ask questions from a very safe distance.

 ``Your partner said you'd be bringing the money in.''

 ``He didn't tell me anything like that,'' Newhaul said and took a staggering step to the rear only to find two more men blocking his retreat, younger men with bulges under armpits and the glint of death in their eyes. ``I guess we should just call the whole thing off.''

 ``You miss my point, Mr. Newhaul. Your partner already accepted shipment with promises that you would pay -- and you will pay, one way or another.''

 Yet the threat had an edge of fear in it. The man studied Newhaul as if looking for some great secret. Did he suspect him of being a cop? Or perhaps someone else more in the line of high class competition?

 ``Just let me make a call or two, I can straighten this all out,'' Newhaul said and eased around the two grey men with a quick move he'd learned on the basketball courts of Hell's Kitchen as a kid. As fast as they were on the draw, they didn't catch on until he plunged through the doors to the restaurant proper where too many unfriendly eyes made it impossible to shoot.

 Down, he plunged taking the quickest elevator to the street, then ran along the narrow alleys in a rapid succession of turns, trying to lose the sharp echo of pursuing feet. He found a pay phone at the bus station and fed it quarters until he could reach L.A.

 The phone on the far end rang for a moment. An operator's voice intervened.

 ``I'm sorry the number you're trying to reach has been disconnected,'' she said. ``At the customer's request.''

 His head swam with the words, and he hung up in time to see the two men from the restaurant plowing through the bus station doors, hands pressed deep in their jackets. They saw him as he darted towards the bus bays, and shouted, through the pistols didn't appear until he had crossed into the tan haze of the garage itself, where drivers and mechanics shouted for him to stop.

 He saw the spark before he heard the pop. A small round hole appeared in the driver's window of a parked bus. He rolled in front of the big red and silver vehicle and jumped up on the other side, emerging out onto the dark street again. He remembered little of the rest of the flight, though heard only one set of footsteps pursuing him for a while. He understood later when the car engine sounded what had transpired, at which point he discovered the van.

 He worried little about Lilly or the cops when he drove away, turning up one way streets in their wrong direction, twisting down narrow allies at reckless speeds. Someone, miraculously, he gained time and space, yet couldn't shake them, and when he started out of the city, they saw him, roaring up from out of the maze of downtown like a shark with the taste of blood.

 Now those same headlights closed in on him, the shape of the car almost visible against the back drop of city lights. A sports car of sorts. Low to the ground and fast. A two-seater. It eased up to the wooden bumper of the van, slow and steady. It was Dan's hands that shook, the van swaying ever so slightly from side to side.

 "Steady, boy," he mumbled.

 The car made its move when the road straightened-- the curving ascent from Denver had become a single steady rise lasting miles. Dan shifted and pressed his foot on the gas. The van sputtered but moved no faster.

 "Don't stall, damn it!"

 The car pulled beside him, riding the opposite lane. A dark colored Mercedes with the shape of two heads inside. Something flashed. The glass of the vent window cracked as a small round hole appeared.

 Dan slammed on the brakes!

 While the tires didn't squeal or burn, the van twisted around, its painted body sideways to both lanes. The engine sputtered out. The Mercedes stopped, too, a few hundred feet farther up hill, and struggled to make a three-point turn on the narrow road. Dan turned the key; the engine grunted but didn't start.

 "Come on, baby," he said. Footsteps sounded on the gravel coming towards him. In front of the van, Denver spread out like a jeweled blanket, car lights moving along its webwork of streets. Life still throbbed there; the cops still patrolled the streets.

 "Start, damn it!" he yelled and hit the dashboard with his fist. The engine whined once, then started weakly. He slammed the gear shift into first.

 The men on the road gave a start-- a surprised growl immediately followed by spurts and flashes. Two more cracks appeared in the glass, inches from Dan's head. But he turned the van downhill. At first, they ran after the van, their figures visible in the driver side mirror.

 Dan slammed the gear shift into 2nd, then 3rd. The van picked up speed. The weight which had held it back coming up, now propelled it downward into the abyss. He kept it close to the belly of the mountain, protruding pine branches scraping the roof and side. But he dared not move out into the center of the road where the coming sharp curves could drive him over the other side. A chunk of jutting stone scraped the van. The speedometer read sixty and still climbed. He shifted into neutral to keep the engine from slowing him down. This fast, the gears acted like a brake, and he needed all the speed he could get. Denver's lights smeared on the left. He had to get back into the maze of streets where his tail lights didn't attract bullets.

 He wanted to explain   to tell them it was Bobo who'd taken their money, and if they had approached him more respectably, he might even have helped in the hunt. But something had frightened them, driving them into a desire to clean house. Bobo's time would come.

As would the others along the route to L.A. But they wanted Dan first.

 The headlights reappeared in the driver's side mirror, coming up fast despite Dan's head long plunge. The other car kept close the mountain as well-- and there was just a chance Dan might make the city limits. If the van could handle the hair-pin turns. It would be hairy. Dan had no intention of slowing down.

 The first of very sharp curves came. The steering wheel nearly jerked out of his hand. He fought it, keeping it solidly right as stone and branches whacked the passenger side. Behind him, the Mercedes made its move, creeping up to his rear bumper. The headlights vanished, then reappeared on the left side as the road straightened again. It pulled up slowly, the bumper first, then the hood, windshield, and finally a face in the open window.

 Spark! Splat. Tinkling glass.

 The curve came. Dan slammed on the brakes, turning the wheel towards the Mercedes, not the mountain, the wood front bumper striking the car's side.

 The Mercedes hit the guard rail and plunged right through.

 By the time Dan stopped the van, the car had hit the ground below and burst into flames. Dan stood for a long time, too shaken to light a cigarette. Too shaken to think about the cold, his disease or the thin air.

 He thought only of Bobo.

 

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