16

  GROFIELD didn’t slow for the turn at all. Foot clamped on the accelerator, he spun the wheel hard, and the Pontiac came roaring and bouncing and skidding out onto the blacktop of 185 like a PT boat coming over a waterfall. An elderly Chevvy coming the other way nosed off into the ditch to avoid them, and Grofield kept spinning the wheel back and forth, keeping the Pontiac from lying over on its side the way it wanted to, until at last the car got its balance again and was willing to stay on all four wheels facing straight down the road. Then Grofield hunched grimly over the wheel, both hands gripping it high and tight, glaring through the windshield at the narrow, twisting blacktop road ahead of him, flanked tightly with jungle growth and jungle trees.

  From the back seat Roy, his voice high and trembling, cried, “Are you trying to kill us?”

  “I’m trying to keep us alive,” Grofield snapped. He took a quick look in the mirror. The turn-off was still visible back there, and the Mercedes hadn’t arrived yet. The Chevvy, out of the ditch, was moseying on again. With any luck the Mercedes would ram it and put itself out of commission.

  Fat chance.

  Grofield looked back at the road ahead, squealed through two bends, and the next time he checked the rear-view mirror the turn-off could no longer be seen. And still no Mercedes.

  “You can slow down now,” Roy said, his voice still too high.

  “The hell I can,” Grofield said.

  “I have this gun pointed at your head, Mr. Grofield.”

  “That’s nice. If you want to kill me while this car is doing seventy-five miles an hour, you just go ahead.”

  Beside him, Patricia Chelm twisted around in the seat and said to her brother, “Let him go, Roy. I think Mr. Grofield is good at this sort of thing.”

  “Thanks,” said Grofield. Coming around a curve, he found an old Plymouth meandering along in the same direction, in the middle of the road. Grofield leaned on the horn, kept his speed up, and sliced through between the Plymouth and several tree trunks. There was a slight scraping sound on the right, where he kissed the Plymouth goodbye, and then they were past and tearing down the road again.

  Still talking to her brother, Patricia Chelm said, “Why did you insist on coming this way? We want to get to San Juan, don’t we?”

  “They expect us to try to get to San Juan,” Roy said. “If we went the way they expected, they’d catch up with us in no time. And remember, we have a murderer in the car with us. Danamato can even call the police in to help him.”

  “Intersection coming up,” said Grofield.

  You could go straight, or make a right. Both roads were blacktop, similar, nothing to choose between them.

  “Go straight,” Roy said.

  Grofield went straight. Two boys sitting on their heels beside the road at the intersection watched them go by, mouths open in surprise.

  The road was twisting more and more, forcing Grofield to keep slamming on the brakes. He squealed around every curve, sometimes on the right side of the road and sometimes on the left. There was little traffic and what there was Grofield passed any which way, left or right, up or down, horn wailing, tires screaming, engine roaring.

  Patricia Chelm kept being thrown into him, which was dangerous, and finally he snapped, “Don’t you have a seat belt, for God’s sake?”

  “Why? Are you planning to have an accident?”

  It was a remark he hadn’t expected from her, and he wished he could take a look at her expression, but just now he was passing a slow-moving truck on a blind curve.

  Once by it, he did look at her, but she had no expression at all. “What I want,” he said, “is for you not to keep bouncing off my arm when I’m trying to steer. Tie yourself down.”

  “Oh. All right. I’m sorry.”

  The road was climbing. The jungle was more jungle, the little peasant shacks were fewer and fewer, the traffic was almost nonexistent now. Grofield said, “Where the hell have you got me?”

  “Away from Danamato,” said Roy.

  “Maybe. Patricia, take a look in the glove compartment for a map.”

  She did, and said, “Here’s one.”

  “Find out where we are.”

  “How? I never looked at one of these in my life.”

  “For God’s sake! Chelm, what about you?”

  “I’ll try,” he said doubtfully. “But I’ve never looked at one of them either.”

  “Oh, the hell with it!” Grofield stamped his foot onto the brake. The Pontiac slewed, slewed back, and shuddered to a stop. “Give me the map,” he said, yanking it out of Patricia Chelm’s hands. Then he saw the gun lying on the seat between them. That last braking had knocked Roy Chelm for a loop, punching him into the back of the front seat, popping the gun out of his hand so it fell on the front seat between his sister and Grofield, neither of whom had seen it till now.

  They both saw it at the same second, but Grofield moved faster. Patricia Chelm’s nails dug into the back of his hand, and then he had the gun. “Well,” he said and smiled at the gun. “Well, well, well.”

  Patricia Chelm watched him white-faced. “What are you going to do?”

  From the back seat, Roy Chelm, pressing a handkerchief to a bloody nose, whispered, “You bastard.”

  “Everybody agrees on that,” Grofield told him. “But I tell you what. You two manage not to get underfoot, I’ll keep you with me as far as San Juan. You helped me back there at the Danamato house, so I owe you that. And since you let me get away, I don’t think Danamato would treat you very nice if he caught up with you again.”

  “You’ll take us along?” Patricia Chelm was almost whispering.

  “Why not?” Grofield tucked the gun away under his left hip, where neither of them would be able to get at it, and opened the road map, saying, “Let’s see where we are.”

  When he saw, he wasn’t happy about it. Imagine the main road east from San Juan as a horizontal line, with a large letter U suspended from the middle of it. The left side of this letter U is route 185, the road Grofield had taken in from the highway when on his way to meet Belle Danamato in the first place. Farther down the U, route 185 branches off to the right, the intersection they’d already passed. After that, the road is numbered 186, and route 186 continues to the bottom of the U, makes the turn down there, and starts up the other side. And the other side of the U goes right through Sierra De Luquillo, the Luquillo Forest, which is a combination jungle and mountain range. Before getting back to that main highway, route 185 twists and turns through some of the wildest and least accessible country this side of a Tarzan movie. And the nicest part of it is, there aren’t any other roads. That is, there are lots of side roads, all numbered nine hundred something, but they’re all dead ends. The turnoff for 185, the one they’d already gone past, connected not much farther on with a main highway at Juncos, but 186 was a gauntlet with no way out except at the other end.

  Grofield showed it to them, where they were and where they’d been and where they had to go.

  Roy Chelm said, “Can’t we go back to that turn-off?”

  “How long do you think it’ll take Danamato to get on our trail? All he has to do is ask a couple questions along the way. He’s probably past that turn-off himself already.”

  Patricia Chelm said, “But what if he sends some of his men to the other end of this road? What if they’re ahead of us, and he’s behind us?”

  “That’s tough on us,” Grofield said. He folded up the map and gave it back to her.

  “What are we going to do?” she said.

  “Bull through,” he told her. “One way or the other. Hold on now.” And he hit the accelerator again.

  17

  THEY ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere.

  Grofield had checked the gauge when he’d first gotten into the car, and it had read half a tank. It still read half a tank, but the engine coughed twice on an upgrade, cut out near the peak, started again briefly as they crested, and quit for good as they started down the other side.

  Grofield shifted into neutral and let gravity take over.

  “What is it?” the girl asked. “Why’s the engine stopped?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “It acts like we’re out of gas, but the gauge shows half a tank.”

  “Could it be something else?”

  “I don’t know what.”

  From the back seat Roy Chelm said, “Pat, remember George talking about having to get something fixed on this car?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “Over a week ago. Was it the gas gauge he said?”

  “I don’t remember it,” she said. “I never listen to George anyway.”

  “You should have this time,” Grofield told her.

  They were well into the mountains now, dark green masses looming up on all sides, the road a narrow, twisting ribbon of black working its corkscrew way through the steep-sided tropical rain forest, called El Yunque, after its best-known mountain peak. Huge tree ferns hung over the road like a tumbledown green roof in the lower parts, keeping them in permanent shadow. Flamboyant trees crowded the blacktop on both sides, their roots coiled above the ground like gray snakes. On both sides the trees and vines and shrubs were all snarled together like an art-nouveau poster done in shades of green and black. Though it was noon and the sun was high in the sky, there was a moist coolness in the air, particularly in the lower parts of the road, a feeling like mildew, and here and there they’d passed narrow, tiny, furious waterfalls rushing down slick, glittering boulders.

  This was a rain forest, and despite the high sun there was still a feeling of imminent rain. Eastward, thick black clouds like black pillows clumped around the mountaintops. It rained in this area nearly every day, and sometimes several times a day, sudden downpours that drenched quickly and moved on within minutes. To the east there was an experimental area, a controlled jungle operated by the United States Department of Agriculture. The main road through it, the road the tourists took, was three or four miles to the east, past the biggest mountains, El Yunque and El Toro and Monte Britton. Over there were activities and other people, a restaurant, places for the tourists to stop and take pictures. Over here on this road there was nothing. Not even a way to get over there.

  Not even if there was gas in the car.

  They hadn’t seen another vehicle for a quarter of an hour, and they didn’t see any now as they twisted and turned down the tortuous downgrade, Grofield letting the car roll as fast as he dared, hoping to get as much more mileage out of it as he could, hoping to get at least part way up the next hill before they’d have to get out and walk.

  They rolled downhill in near silence, except for the shush of the wind of their passage, and all around them in the jungle they could hear the clicking and calling and crying of the jungle creatures, bugs and birds and beasts. It was like sailing in a glider, except when Grofield had to press down on the brake pedal and spin the wheel for them to squeal around another sharp curve.

  There was the bottom, in darkness sufficient to cause Grofield to switch on the headlights. Massive trees, ripe with flat leaves and covered with vines, loomed up all around them. The road curved to the right, crossed a tiny bridge over a quick-flowing, minuscule stream, curved to the left, hit bottom, and curved upward and to the right.

  Grofield took the curves with as little braking as possible, wanting speed, as much speed as he could get. The Pontiac nosed into the first up curve, seemed to sail along at the same pace for a few seconds, and then began to sag. The road straightened, then curved to the left again, getting steeper all the time. The car slowed more and more quickly, the speedometer needle dropping below thirty, below twenty, down toward ten.

  There was a narrow break in the foliage on the left, a dirt road going in. Grofield spun the wheel hard; the Pontiac turned sluggishly, jounced off the road onto the dirt.

  Patricia Chelm: “What are you doing?”

  Roy Chelm: “Stop it!”

  It wasn’t really a road, just a little turn-around space poked into the jungle. Grofield kept the wheel tightly turned, pushed the Pontiac to the end of the cleared part, pushed deeper into vines and shrubs and bushes, and the car finally came to a stop about three lengths from the road.

  Grofield switched off the ignition and the lights. A late-evening darkness settled on them.

  Patricia Chelm said, “How are we going to get out of here?”

  “We may have to walk,” Grofield told her, “if no car shows up. We’ll try hitchhiking first. If we’re very, very lucky somebody will come along with an extra can of gas that they’re willing to sell us.”

  Roy Chelm said, “Then why drive the car into the jungle?”

  “Because you know who else might come along? Our friend Danamato. I’d rather he didn’t notice the car, because if he noticed the car he just might notice us.”

  “Oh,” said Patricia.

  “You two stay here,” Grofield said. “I’ll go stand at the road and wait for somebody to flag down.”

  He pushed open the car door and got out. It was chilly out here, cold and damp. He stuck his head back in the car window and said to Roy Chelm, “Get me a jacket out of my bag.”

  Chelm gave him one, and he put it on and walked back to the edge of the road. There was an old stone marker there, with nothing legible on it. Grofield sat on that, surrounded by dark-green cluttering jungle, trees a mile high, an empty road curving away within feet in both directions.

  “It’s Alice in Wonderland,” he told himself. “I must be the White Knight.”

  He shook his head in disgust, and watched no traffic go by.

  18

  GROFIELD opened the driver’s door and slid in. “Take over for a while, Chelm,” he said. “I’m cold and wet.”

  Chelm looked panicky. “Me? I don’t know what to do.”

  “If you see a car,” Grofield told him, “wave at it. Frantically. Try to look helpless and not like a madman or a murderer or a thief. Apparently that was my trouble—I don’t look innocent enough.”

  Patricia Chelm said, “You mean that truck?”

  He did. In the fifteen minutes he’d been out there—he stood most of that time, since the stone marker tended to make his butt cold—only one vehicle had passed, that a rickety old truck with a well-mustached, pop-eyed driver at the wheel and a lot of rusty automobile parts in the back. Grofield had waved at him to stop, and the truck had veered all over the road in the driver’s frantic attempts to get around him and away from there. So much for the local Good Samaritans.

  “Take fifteen minutes,” Grofield told Chelm. “Then I’ll take a turn again.”

  “Very well,” Chelm said doubtfully. He got out on his sister’s side of the car and Grofield watched him shamble round-shouldered out to the road and stand on the verge there, as dejected as a character in a Beckett play.

  Grofield shook his head and said to Patricia Chelm, “You two amaze me. I don’t remember the last time I’ve seen two people so totally incapable of taking care of yourselves.”

  “We take care of ourselves,” she said indignantly. “This is a special situation. Nobody would be expected to . . . You haven’t done so well yourself, if it comes to that.”

  “I suppose not,” Grofield said. He stretched his feet out between the pedals and put his head back on the top of the seat. Closing his eyes, he said, “I’m tired. It’s been a busy day, and I didn’t get my eight hours last night.”

  They were both silent a minute and he was starting to doze off when she said, “Did you really kill Belle Danamato? You can tell me the truth.”

  Not moving, not bothering to open his eyes, he said, “The truth is no, I did not kill Belle Danamato.”

  “I believe you,” she said. “I’m not sure why, but I do.”

  Grofield turned his head, opened one eye, and looked at her. “What about you?”

  She didn’t understand him. “Me?”

  “Did you kill her?”

  Her face got very cold and very angry. “Are you going to start that business again? The frigid virgin hiding inside her brother’s pants?”

  “That’s a nice image,” Grofield said. “Keep it in the act.”

  “I’m not acting!”

  “But did you kill Belle Danamato, that’s the question.”

  When she turned away and glared out the windshield in lieu of answering him, he closed his eye again, made his head more comfortable on the seat, and said, “Back there at the house, naturally part of what I was doing was trying to dazzle Danamato. But I was also interested in getting myself unframed by figuring out who really did do it. It had to be one of us bunnies upstairs, and so far as I can see, a motive of one kind or another can be made out on just about every one of us.”

  “Not me,” she said thinly. “I may not have approved of Belle Danamato, but that doesn’t mean I—”

  “Ha hah!” He opened the eye again and grinned at her.

  She met his gaze rigidly for a moment, then suddenly chuckled and looked away and said, “Oh, what the hell.”

  He raised his head, opened his other eye and said, “I beg your pardon?”

  “I may not be quite as much the plaster saint as Roy thinks,” she said, not looking at him. “Or as much as he wants.” She looked back again, meeting his eye, her own expression more open now, more intent. “For God’s sake, you saw Belle Danamato. Can you imagine her being engaged to a man she wasn’t sleeping with?”

  “No.”

  “Well, she thought it was the berries, believe me. Roy has that effect on people. He makes them want to be better than they are, makes them want to look good in his eyes.”

  “I hadn’t noticed him affecting me that way,” Grofield told her.

  “It might be just with women,” she said. “I’ve seen it happen time and time again. Roy is good, I mean morally good, whether he’s physically weak or cowardly or not. That’s another matter. He’s morally good, he’s much better than I am, but he makes me want to be good.” She smiled crookedly, looking out the rear window in her brother’s direction. “I’m the one around him most of the time,” she said, “so naturally I’m the one who gets the fullest treatment. But . . .”