Chapter 8

THE CAMP IN COUGAR CANYON seemed much the same, attesting to the good housekeeping of my sidekick. I had been gone for some time, and all of those hectic days there had been no chance to communicate with Ben.

It was rather a shabby trick to play on one's business associate. But in this particular instance, I had an alibi. In fact, I had a flock of assorted alibis.

Ben's station wagon was there. And beside it was a smart little foreign job, a bright red convertible that I hadn't seen before. Evidently we had a visitor, nothing unusual at a TV camp on location.

I barged into the trader which we used as a combination bedroom and office.

"Hi, there!" someone said.

It wasn't Ben Carazzo. She had a much more melodious voice, and she didn't have red hair.

She stood in the opened door of the bedroom, dressed in a yellow housecoat and a pair of sandals.

She was a chick who evidently was built solely for a photographer or an artist.

The face was nicely chiseled, with a straight nose, sultry mouth, and a smile that turned off and on quite easily. She was about five feet five, I judged. I couldn't see her legs, but she had nicely turned ankles. The housecoat seemed to be doing a thorough job, bulging at the proper places.

"Hi, yourself," I said, surprised. "Do I know you?"

She walked closer. "No. But I'm sure that you're Ben's long-absent partner, Steve Hille."

"Guilty," I admitted.

"I'm Rita Gonzales," she said, and held out a long-fingered hand. "Are you working for Ben?"

"In a way."

"What does that mean?"

"I'd rather that Ben told you." I got hold of her hand again, didn't relinquish it this time.

"What goes on between you and Ben?" She gave me a tight smile. "What usually goes on between any man and women?"

"I don't know," I said. "I'm listening."

"It could be that I've fallen in love with Ben."

"Is that bad?"

"It isn't bad-for me."

I pulled her closer. "Let me be the first to congratulate you."

I got her into my arms before she quite realized my intention. I was very certain of that. I got my lips over hers and mashed hard.

But the kiss was decidedly one-way. She didn't respond. I did feel her breasts under the housecoat digging into my chest. They dug quite hard, so I knew she was well endowed in the dairy department.

She pulled back, grinned at me. "No, you don't!" she said. "I'm saving all of that for Ben. He's got an option on me."

"Just like that?"

"Just like that."

Evidently she meant it. And if she did, I was glad-at least for Ben. I always like to test them when the occasion offers. This was an occasion. But evidently she meant just what she said.

The housecoat had gaped a bit, showing me some very interesting cleavage. Her hands pulled it tighter.

"For Ben," I said, wishing she had pulled the coat open instead of closed.

"For Ben." Her eyes were frank, and they didn't waver a bit. "Now we know where we stand, you and I."

I was laughing and I suppose it was contagious, for she started laughing as well. She had very pretty teeth.

"Honey, if anyone is entitled to a gal who actually loves him, and will love him for keeps, it's old redheaded Ben!"

I walked closer to her now, and she didn't back off.

"If that's the way it is between you two, I'm for it all the way!"

"It's that way," she said, "a regular brush fire." I believed she meant it, and looking at her I believed she was the type of a girl who could ignite a brush fire in a man's loins.

"Now let's sit down, and you tell me all about yourself," I suggested.

But we didn't sit down.

Ben barged in at this moment and slammed the door. He's a big guy, five feet eleven and one-hundred-ninety on the hoof, stripped. He is a redhead, but he wears his hair so short in a crew cut it isn't too noticeable until he gets in the sun. He's one of the few guys who has a double-take face: calm one moment, visibly excited the next. Right now he seemed justifiably disturbed.

"Where in hell have you been?" was "his explosive greeting.

I looked at his angry eyes and decided to agitate him further. If Rita was to share his life, she should know all phases of him. "Out!" I said.

"For two-bits I'd knock out that false tooth!" He meant it, too. And in a fistic encounter he just might do it. He was terrific with his fists.

"All right, give me the bad news."

"Bad news? Nine days! Do you realize that, Steve-nine days!"

"And nights."

"Yeah. And I'll bet you had some real Arabian nights!"

I glanced at Rita's sober face, winked. "You didn't do too badly yourself, old man!"

"You leave her out of this!"

I shook my head. "She looks like a pretty package to me."

He advanced a step. "She is not for you. Period. Understand? Don't even hold her hand. I know you!"

I walked over to him, poked a finger at his chest. "Calm down. She's already confided in me. I'm tickled pink."

He turned off the anger like someone pushing a light switch. A smile started deep in his eyes, and suddenly he was laughing.

"Okay!" he said. "But it was a shabby trick, going off on your own private Shangri-La with not even a buzz-"

"There were no telephones near, fellow!"

"Just a gal, eh?"

"Not only one-a total of three."

"Let's sit down and talk," he suggested. "You must have a lot to say."

I sat down with them. It took better than an hour, and all that time I saw the consternation building on his young face. Rita sat there, a stone Indian as far as emotion was concerned. But when I told them about Geri's death, I saw the tears limning her eyes.

"I'm in love with a million-dollar girl," I concluded.

"Is that bad?"

"Yes, it is. It frightens me. I wish she was simply Nan Goodwin, a Maricopa."

I glanced at Rita, and suddenly realized that I didn't even know why she was here.

"Brief me!" I said to Ben.

"When you met this Lopez woman in Lou Fink's Joshua Tree bar," Ben explained, "the town sprouted ears all of a sudden."

That was news. I waited:

"They started to figure out some angles. Lou Fink, for one. And his right-arm, a guy called Sammy Morello."

"What angles?"

Ben shrugged. "Look at it this way. You meet this woman here; you have some close-lipped conversation in a booth. The next day they see you out fit for the desert. Morello even followed you to the rim, saw you leave the jeep at Salt Creek and start through the Potholes with her."

"I'm ahead of you," I grinned. "They could come up with but one conclusion: we knew a new twist to the airplane crash."

Ben nodded.

"So what?"

"They've been checking on you closer than you think. They know you've returned. But they've seen nothing of the Lopez woman. That excites them even more. They think maybe you've actually found something important. She's staying at the spot while you come back for a bigger outfit."

"Let them go in and get their brains cooked."

"They might give us trouble."

"What makes you think that we're going back to hunt for the plane?"

I saw the look of incredulity on his face. "Aren't you?"

"I'm not sure-at least not at the moment."

Ben slammed his big hands down on his knees.

"That's why Rita's here!" he ejaculated.

Now it was my turn to sit and listen to Ben.

Rita had come up from a little mining town about forty miles West of the Potholes, Ben told me.

Her father had died. He was the owner of some mining property that had possibilities. She was waiting in Arroyo Seco for an attorney to sell the property.

"She's massaging a drink in one of the booth of the Joshua Tree," Ben continued, "when she hears all this talk about outfitting a group to go into the Potholes to check on you and the Lopez woman. It seems that Lou Fink is the man sparking it. He thinks you two know something big, and they intend to beat you to the jackpot."

"They can still go in and cook their brains for all I care," I persisted.

"Hold your horses!" Ben said. "Rita knows something that makes real sense. When she heard all this, it disturbed her. She's an inquisitive girl, and finally she found out about you and the Lopez woman. She knew I was your partner, so she came over here to tell me a few things."

"And you fell in love."

Ben grinned. "Yeah! Isn't that something? But that isn't the story-"

I waited, noticing the building excitement in his face.

"I'll tell it," Rita interrupted. She leaned forward, and I could see that she was tense. The housecoat gaped a bit now, but she didn't seem to notice. Ben, you lucky dog, I thought, this chick has a lot of delectable merchandise; and she's real stingy with it.

"My father's mine is in Santo Nino Canyon," Rita said. "It's a jumping-off place if you ever saw one. He always called the canyon itself Hell's Kitchen."

It was interested now. "Why that name?"

She shrugged her shoulders, and there was a delightful jiggle that I tried not to notice under Ben's possessive eyes.

"The canyon had a solid wall of unusual cliffs," she went on. "My father esplained it as a glacial up heaval, some terrific upset in the bowels of the earth ages ago. These cliffs are different from any I've ever seen-shafts towering up like a solid wall."

Suddenly I was thinking of the dust storm, the unusual alkali I had noticed in the air when Jane and I sought the line shack for cover.

Rita's next words really jolted me.

"I think my father tacked the Hell's Kitchen name to the canyon because of the storms-the terrific dust storms-that seem to have their birth there."

I got a cigarette going, passed the pack. I needed one.

"These dust storms are terrible," Rita continued, "especially in the summer months. People moved out of the town. But my father remained there, for he was interested in the terrain. He kept studying the cliffs, their erosion-"

"Did he ever call them chalk cliffs?" I interrupted.

She nodded. "Yes. How did you know?"

There it was again.

Chalk cliffs!

The terrific dust storms, the erosion of the strange cliffs-They had to be the answer.

"Who knows about this strange canyon, Rita?"

She looked up with a tight grin. "No one but we three."

"Do you think that Lou Fink and his crowd might know?"

She shook her head. "How could they?"

I stood up, suddenly too nervous and agitated to stay seated.

"Ben, we're going in. The four of us!"

"The four of us?"

"We three-and Nan."

"Okay," Ben said. "That figures."

"Get the outfit ready. I'll be back by morning, and we'll head in."

I was at the door when he stopped me. His voice sounded like a fog horn.

"Where do you think you're going now?"

It would take too long to explain. So I merely shouted, "Out!"

I waited at the tiny strip that Arroyo Seco calls its airport. It wasn't anything but a strip of sand. Someone had bulldozed off the mesquite, and that was about all. It wasn't large enough to accommodate anything but light planes.

The plane coming in now was a four-place job, a trim little tri-pacer. It taxied up the strip like a sleek greyhound, the prop died. A single bareheaded man crawled out, locked the cabin door, then walked briskly toward the jeep.

I crawled out, extended my hand.

"Mr. McNaughton?"

"John McNaughton," he said. "And you're Steve Hillle, the man who phoned me."

I nodded. "Crawl in and well go into town."

He got into the jeep. But when my hand dipped to tarn on the ignition switch, his fingers were on my arm, detaining me.

"Hille, your phone call was puzzling."

I grinned at him, met his gaze. "I suppose it was."

He was well-preserved for his fifty-odd years. He had a rugged face, one of those chipped-from-granite profiles and a short-trimmed mustache. His eyes were steely, yet friendly. He looked exactly what he was-an executive, a man who knew his way around. There also was something else in his face that at the moment was unreadable.

"I'm waiting," he said. "You don't look like the kind of man who'd pull another man's leg."

"Thanks!" I said simply. I turned to face him. "I don't exactly know how to tell you, Mr. McNaughton."

"Tell me what?"

"Hold tight!" I warned. I pointed to the Northwest, where the desert stretched away. "If you came in from the coast, you flew over that."

"I did," he said. "Some of the roughest terrain in the nation."

I nodded. "I've been out there the past nine days. It's called the Pothole Country. I served as a guide for a woman named Geri Lopez. Seventeen years ago, she helped kidnap your baby daughter."

He never moved. But his eyes changed, hardened. I had the feeling that he was in a sudden state of shock.

"The woman died in the canyon," I said. "I buried her there."

"Hillle, he said, "just what kind of a crazy yarn are you trying to sell me?" I searched his eyes. His gaze never wavered, neither did mine. "Mr. McNaughton," I said, "I presume you checked on me before you flew down here."

"Yes, I did."

"I can't afford to tell you a crazy yarn."

"I wouldn't think so."

I related, briefly as I could, how I had acted as guide for Geri Lopez. I didn't condone what she had done, but I did try to explain her atonement.

"Now there are three deaths," I said. "There'll be an investigation, of course.-But before we bring in the law, I wanted to contact you."

He seemed older, suddenly. I knew that he must be living again that terrible moment when the baby was snatched.

"Mrs. McNaughton is a frail woman," he explained. "She never quite recovered."

I was afraid to spring it on him, but I had to tell him some way. Perhaps a blunt statement was the best.

"I've found your daughter," I said softly, perhaps too softly. "She's alive, very beautiful. In fact, I intend to marry her, in spite of her sudden millions."

He sat there, staring at me. If there was any blood left in his face, it didn't show. Suddenly his hand was on my arm, and he had a grip of steel.

"Hille, what are you saying? What is this-blackmail? My daughter is dead. She must be dead. We spent thousands and thousands. There wasn't a single clue."

I told him about the old Indian couple, the wife having since died, the man with the missing thumb; how the kidnappers had left the baby with them as a last resort, then started through the Potholes.

"Rawlings, the husband, died there; she buried him in the canyon. She went to Europe, took the name of Geri Lopez. But she couldn't live it down, so she came back to hunt for the old Indian."

I hesitated, looking at his face. It was stern and unmoving.

"In the meantime I'd met Nan. That's her name-Nan Goodwin. She assumes that she is Maricopa." I told him further about the Collins brothers, how the old Indian whom she called grandfather had killed Zack with the ceremonial spear.

He sat there, unbelieving. I could see his hesitancy. Seventeen years he had called her dead. And now a complete stranger was telling him that he was wrong.

"I don't believe one word of it!" he growled.

"Will you meet her?"

"Yes," he said. The hardness was still in his eyes. "Yes, I'll meet her. And within seconds I'll make positive identification of this girl, to prove to you that are wrong."

He lowered his head and cupped his hands above his face. I knew that he was trying to get a grip on his emotion.

"God, I hope I'm wrong and you're right!" he sobbed. "But it can't be!"

I started the jeep and we headed into Arroyo Seco, then out on the Salt Creed road. I parked the jeep on the rim and pointed down at the gorge.

"Feel like walking?"

We started down. The pool in the creek was nearly gone now, a victim of the summer drought. But I could easily visualize Nan bathing there in all of her nude glory. We headed down the canyon trail, unspeaking, then started the climb to the tableland where Toyee Goodwin had his small herd.

There was the chaparral stick corral, the small dwelling. I shuddered, thinking of Zack Collins. But that was all over now.

Nan came out of the house and ran toward us, into my arms. I held her tight for just a moment, kissed her. I could still see the red welt on her throat where Zack's knife had pressed.

I pushed her back at last, turned her to face McNaughton.

"Nan, this is the man I believe is your father."

She stood there unspeaking, eyes on his face in a swift evaluation. McNaughton seemed a graven image, but I knew he was marveling at her beauty-at the tanned face, the starry eyes, the quick, friendly smile.

Finally he stepped forward, and grasped her hand. But he didn't try to embrace her. I think he was trying very hard to conceal his emotion.

"Hello, Nan!" he said simply.

Then he did a very unusual thing. He put his hands upon her shoulders, gently. He slowly turned her about so she faced away from both of us.

"I must know something," he said, his voice tight. "There is only one way."

Nan stood there, wondering what it was all about.

"Will you please pull your blouse off your shoulders, dear?" he asked.

Nan half turned, saw his serious face, hesitated. It was a strange request, but evidently there was some reason for it.

We stood there. Slowly her fingers worked at her blouse She shrugged it off her shoulders.

I was looking at that perfect golden back, wondering what it all was about.

McNaughton stepped closer, his fingertips were tracing a pattern between her shoulder blades. And suddenly I saw a tiny brown spot in the shape of a cat's claw, a birthmark. It was there for all to see.

His arms enfolded the startled girl, he pulled her into his embrace. Nan was valiantly trying to pull up her blouse to hide her nakedness. He didn't seem to realize anything but one fact: with his own eyes he had seen positive identification.

"Honey," he said, "I can't talk-just yet. Let me hold you-"

I turned away, lighting a cigarette I" didn't need.

I hadn't known about the birthmark.

Later we sat and talked. We talked long. There were so many things to say. Old Toyee Goodwin sat with us, the bandage still about his hoary head.

And at last we took McNaughton to Arroyo Seco, so he could fly back to the city.

"I've got to go back and tell her, in my own way," he said. "I've got to break it to her very gently. It was a shock to me, and she can't take shocks any more."

"We're leaving shortly for the Potholes," I said, "in a last search for the lost plane. Then we'll spend our honeymoon with you."

It was hard for him to leave, even in his joy.

He'd had a hopeless dream for seventeen years, now it had come true.

We sat there in the jeep and waited. At last his plane was a tiny speck. Then it was gone.

We headed for the desert. Dusk was softening the hard land now, that magic moment when it is neither day nor night. Nan was unusually quiet, a very understandable mood. It couldn't be easy to find out suddenly that you've changed race, to the tune of millions.

I pulled up at our trysting spot at the rim at last, turned off the ignition. There was a certain nostalgia about this land that grew upon one. You hated it, still it beckoned.

I pulled Nan into my arms, kissed her.

"You never did show me that birthmark on your back."

"I didn't think you were much interested in my back," she whispered.

"I'm interested in every inch of that glorious body of yours."

At the moment I was thinking of Zack Collins and his sadistic hands. I kissed her throat, where the knife had pressed. Even now, after it was all over, the fear came back.

I started unbuttoning her blouse. Her hands came up in quick protest. "What are you doing?"

"Checking."

"Steve-"

The scar was still there, still livid, where his fingers had raked down.

"I scrubbed and scrubbed," she said. "Somehow I couldn't rid my body of his stench."

I bent my head and kissed her on the throat. I let my lips follow the scar. And at last her hands were holding my face tight against her breasts.

"Honey, I love you so much," I whispered.

She never answered, just caressed my face.

When I had first loved her she was a Maricopa Indian, winner of a beauty contest. But now she was part Irish, part Gypsy. It made no difference. She had been a virtual pauper, now she had a ihint. Nor did this make a difference. I was kissing the same lovely body. The same provocative breasts were there, bared to me in all their loveliness. She was young and vibrandy alive, and we were for each other.

We crawled out of the jeep at last, and spread the blanket. And on the sand, still warm from the blazing sun, we rolled into each other's arms.

This was for real. The sex was there, as it should be. But this was for real. The fear was there, too, as I thought of the knife. That was all as it should be, for I loved her.

The kiss built into an inferno now. Under my hands were two breasts, full and soft and warm, yet tautening now as the fire drove through her loins.

"Steve, will it always be like this?" she whispered.

"Always."

"I'm really Cinderella!"

"Cinderella and my Golden Gypsy."

"Steve, what was she like, Geri Lopez?"

I didn't have an answer. "I think she was a fine person, who made a horrible mistake that could never be corrected."

"And Zeke killed her!"

I never answered, but I was thinking a brand-new thought. Perhaps it was better this way, harsh as it sounds. If she had lived, with the case reopened due to Nan's discovery, she would have faced a charge for a crime that carries the stiffest of penalties.

Nan's lips were on mine, teasing. Then she drew back.

"I'm going to induce them to live here-somewhere on the desert."

"You mean your parents?"

"Yes," she said. "I'd never leave Tohee, and he won't leave the mesa."

"You can commute by plane, can't you, Steve?"

I nodded. That could all be worked out later. As of the moment the problem demanding immediate attention was of a wholly different nature. I got my lips back on hers. After a moment she forgot about the new problems facing us, and concentrated on building a kiss.

The law of propinquity helped, and soon the kiss was past the point of no return. Her heart was hammering crazily, her breasts were taut and demanding. And then she whispered that word that is the greatest thrill that a lover can hear:

"Now, Steve-"

We were together, with a violence that told our need. Her lips arched to meet me, and her tongue was stabbing at mine. The fire built into an inferno, suddenly the ecstasy was past human endurance. It was quiveringly over and we lay still, breathing hard, in that sudden relaxation that only two lovers can ever share.

Out on the desert a coyote howled. It sounded different tonight. Then I found myself thinking: maybe it isn't a coyote at all, but a timber wolf. No doubt I killed its mate.

But my mate was tight in my arms, and it was starting all over again.