A Time of Predators

The trouble was that he didn’t have it worked out. Sure, he had the approach to the house all plotted out; he knew how to find out if Paula Halstead could recognize him or not; but then it all got hazy. If she did, then what? An idea of how they could make sure she wouldn’t identify him to the police had been dancing uneasily in the back of his mind ever since Monday, when he’d talked with Debbie. But he had continued to reject it in conscious thought. Paula Halstead was damned near as old as his mother, for Christ sake, no matter what she looked like.

He leaned forward to put his forearms along the back of the front seat. To hell with it. Things always worked out. “Right up here,” he said, “is another T-junction, Heavy. Take a right into Longacres Avenue Extension, and I’ll tell you where to stop.”

Longacres skirted the northern edge of the golf course. Rick kept watch on the edge of the road, suddenly exclaimed, “Turn here.” Heavy slowed, turned into a small dirt area beside the road. “Pull up under those trees and douse the lights.”

The wagon stopped on a carpet of narrow brown leaves fallen from the eucalyptus trees, facing back toward the blacktop. With the lights and motor cut, the night washed over them with the scrape of crickets, the rustle of a breeze in the trees overhead.

Rick checked his watch. “Okay. Eight o’clock. Let’s move out, you guys.”

By the weak illumination of the interior lights, Rick proudly watched the others get out. They were his outfit, like the commando-type group way back in World War II that they’d seen in the drive-in movie last week. He really dug war movies, always saw himself as the commander of whatever group was featured.

As he reached for the door to shut it, there was a whirring along the blacktop, and a small hunched dark shape hummed by. They saw a pale flash of face turned toward them, and all ducked involuntarily.

“What the... was that a kid? On a hike?” hissed Julio.

“Christ, Rick, we was standing right in the light,” quavered Heavy. He emitted a sudden explosive belch which for once did not crack up Julio. “We gotta leave. We can’t—”

“We aren’t quitting now,” snarled Rick. “Hell, it’s dark; he was by before he could see anything.”

For a moment they wavered, group discipline shattered. Champ was the one who saved it for Rick. “We coulda been up to the house by now, you guys wasn’t always arguin’ with Rick.”

That did it. In a compact group they crossed Longacres and went out across the golf course. Rick, in the lead, glanced back at the others. Here they were, because he had wanted them to be, not for any other reason. He was in command. He stopped and they gathered around, their eyes gradually adjusting to the semi-darkness of a first-quarter moon.

Rick gestured down the long alley of the fairway. “See the lights just showing through those trees? Not another place within half a mile of it. We’ll go right down the fairway, across the fourteenth green, and up the driveway to the house.”

“What if someone else is with her, Rick?” Julio’s question was not a challenge this time, but a request for tactical information.

“Then we get a signal to hold off.”

Before they could frame their questions, Rick went on. The soft, already dew-wet grass was springy under their shoes, muffling any sound of their passage. In Rick’s mind, he led a commando into enemy territory: for a moment, fleetingly, he wished they had blacked their faces. Five minutes later they crossed the green, skirted the sand trap, and then stopped at a strip of weeds, some fifteen feet wide, that separated the course from the edge of the Halsteads’ gravel driveway.

“Down!” hissed Rick suddenly.

They hit the dirt. There was the growing hum of an auto, the spreading aureole of its lights above their backs. Then it was by, with the oddly abrupt drop in decibel level that always accompanies a passing auto.

Heavy spoke in an urgent, frightened whisper. “Rick, there’s a girl, just sitting in that phone booth across the blacktop with the door open and the light out. I saw her when that car passed!”

“That’s Debbie. She’s our lookout. As long as she keeps the door open, so the light in the booth is out, we know no one is coming. If she shuts I he door like she’s making a phone call, we split.”

Julio had stiffened like a retriever finding the scent when he had heard Debbie’s name. She had been in Rick’s class, a senior when he’d been a junior, and had always been too good for Julio Escobar. She’d never worried about showing her legs to the crowd as a cheerleader, but she’d never even looked at Julio. Cheap goddamn tease.

“You should have told us that our safety would depend upon a woman.” In his excitement, Julio’s voice had taken on a Spanish singsong.

“Deb doesn’t know any of you are here,” Rick said. “Once I call her in that booth, she won’t even know I’ve been here.”