Hush Money by Peter Israel Page A

Mustang eyed me balefully. My mind was working overtime with variations on a theme: the theme being that young Karie Beydon had had something her uncles wanted, and probably my employer too though I still wasn’t sure about that, and that whatever it was it had fallen into the wrong hands. Andy Ford’s? The perfect setup for a shakedown, sold to the highest bidder … with yours truly as the unsuspecting broker? But the variations were endless. For instance: did Robin Fletcher, Karie’s roommate, know about it? Or enough about it to warn me off? There was something I didn’t yet believe in called the Society of the Fairest Lord, and Robin Fletcher, strange as it sounded, was queer for Jesus. But Robin Fletcher had thought I was working for Twink, while my friend on the surfboard had given me a message for more than one. The Diehls? Who meanwhile were negotiating with the Eastern money about something, or at least talking like they were? In other words: around and around and around, and through it all the unanswered question of whether Karie Beydon had come out of that window feet or head first.
    It was too much for a stud with only a B.A. in Accounting, particularly since at the same time a corner of my mind had registered something else.
    Never once but twice, didn’t I say so?
    And there they came, a pair of shining headlights following me out of the lot even before I’d made the quarter mile of eucalyptus-lined road back to the freeway. Except that it was no van this time, instead a black Pontiac Firebird with some three hundred or so horses galloping along under the hood.
    I’ve boasted enough about what the Mustang could do. It’s kind of embarrassing even now to admit that by the time I hit the freeway on-ramp, I knew she didn’t have it. Maybe our little trip into the ditch had shaken up the jet propulsion, but I couldn’t lose our friend in the Firebird. Which was precisely what I needed to do, because where I was going next I didn’t want company.
    Finally I gave it up, and settled her down in the third lane, making like I was headed back for the motel, a logical enough idea. He stayed on our ass all the way, a comfortable dozen or so car lengths back but closing the gap whenever it looked like somebody else might cut between. I waited till I saw the sign for the exit before the motel, then held my breath and gunned her all she had.
    We shot across two lanes. We just missed the ass end of a Greyhound bus in the second and beat a two-sectioned Arco Supreme gas truck in the first. We rocked onto the shoulder, and off, and made the exit by a short hair.
    It was a good idea and so was the execution. In the movies he and the gas truck would have lit up the skies for miles around with living-color flames. But the only break in the black night sky as I turned off the bottom of the ramp was a pair of headlights up at the top.
    Lucky son of a bitch.
    I found myself on a strange road in tractland, still on the Diehl Ranch, with the Firebird for company. It was unnerving as hell. I did the best thing I could under the circumstances. I took my first right, whatever it was, my first left, another right and a left, a zig and a zag for good measure, around a curve onto still another street of houses, and squealed the Mustang into the first open space I saw on the lefthand side. I jammed the brakes, cut the ignition, the lights, and hunkered down out of sight in the front seat.
    I heard a motor go by once, then back the other way. Somebody’s brights played across the windshield above my head. It had to be his. I figured once he’d lost sight of me in a place like that, he was screwed. A Mustang’s no Ferrari after all, and he couldn’t exactly stop and check out every one he passed to see who had the lucky dented fender tucked into the curb. Because by that time yours truly could have been halfway to Tijuana and laughing like a love-starved hyena.
    The laugh turned out