Hush Money by Peter Israel Page B

to be his, though.
    I waited in the quiet and the dark, ten, fifteen minutes. I sat up and stared out at the lights of the good life, California style. A half-dozen houses, a half-dozen flickering TV screens. Then I eased the Mustang out of her slot, headlights off, and cruised around looking for another exit.
    Only there wasn’t any. I always thought they built those tract walls to keep people out, but it must be the other way round. I drove down one deadend after another and always there was that outer wall staring me down, a gray mass silhouetted against the sky. A hell of a place for the guilty and claustrophobic.
    Finally I eased past the one entrance. I spotted the Firebird parked on the other side of the road, lights off, nose pointed back toward the freeway. He must have known, like I did, that in the other direction there was nothing between us and Palm Springs.
    I went back into the tract, like I’d forgotten my rubbers or something, and parked in the same open slot past the curve. This time, if he’d spotted me, he didn’t even bother to follow.
    The TV sets were still on, winking at me out of the night like square blue eyes.
    If Mustangs were tanks, I could have blasted down a piece of wall and made a run for it in the open country. I could have tried it on foot too, but it was a hell of a long walk to nowhere.
    I could only come up with one other solution, so I took it.

8
    According to the pink card, it belonged to one John R. Roland of 22 Acacia Drive. It was a nice inconspicuous Dodge Polara, the latest vintage, and when I drove it past my friend out by the entrance, brights on and the radio crooning a sweet tune, he didn’t so much as pop an eyeball. I had no idea who he was, but I supposed there were worse places to spend a night, and there was a Jack-in-the-Box between him and the freeway where he could have a hamburger before closing.
    I drove back onto the freeway, got off a few exits later, stopped for a pair of poached eggs and home fries with some corned beef hash tucked underneath, and drove off again. It couldn’t have been much later than ten. I counted on my host not being home, but if he was, well maybe I could help him out with his long division.
    When you think of where college kids live these days, you imagine some old condemned house with the paint peeling off the walls, leaking faucets and stopped-up heads, ten to a room and the pot smoke so thick you’ve got to wear a gas mask, right? Right. Well maybe up at Berkeley, but down my way there’s just a bunch of commuter campuses where a few of the kids live in the dorms and the rest are left to fend for themselves. So where do they fend? So anywhere and everywhere. Your next-door neighbors could be college kids, depending on your salary and their old man’s bank accounts. Particularly if you live in a place like Blue Pacific Villas.
    Blue Pacific Villas was more like permanent mobile homes, with a touch of motel thrown in. The units were built out of wood so green you could almost smell the sap. There must have been a hundred of them, one-storied, in concentric circles with narrow patches in between where the iceplant ran wild, and two inner circles of garages grouped around a swimming pool the size of your dining-room table, and a clubhouse where the old folks could play cribbage and shuffleboard while they waited to die. A transient kind of place, in sum, for people who couldn’t make the Diehl Ranch grade, oldies mostly, also servicemen and their wives and brats, a stray student, maybe the local mailman. The backmost units looked out on an Alpha Beta shopping center, the front ones on the Market Basket, take your choice and mighty convenient.
    At that it wasn’t a bad cover for a kid who had enough going on the side to make him in no hurry for his degree.
    A few pairs of eyes stared yellowly at me as I drove in, but they were too close together to be human. The units were mostly dark except for the