The Boy Who Invented the Bubble Gun (11 page)

Marshall gave Julian a long and quizzical look. He said, “You did? What happened?”

Julian replied, “Nothing. They were nice. There was an extra bed in a closet that came out.” He suddenly grinned in recollection. “I had to b-b-bounce over them.”

Marshall said, “They must have enjoyed that.”

“Aw, they didn’t care.”

Marshall, still studying Julian half amused, was visualizing the scene and wondering exactly what had happened and whether Julian had had any suspicion as he himself had that this was not a honeymoon pair at all but a couple of kids getting away from home for a lay. He thought probably not. It was this quality of innocence in Julian which somehow had touched him. Wise guy, smart-alec children he couldn’t bear. In this day and age most of them were. He said, “What made them suddenly decide to turn around and go back to San Diego?”

“I dunno. They didn’t say.”

“And you didn’t ask?”

Julian looked at him in astonishment. “What for?”

Marshall laughed. “Kid, if you go on minding your own business like that you’ll go far.”

C H A P T E R
8

T
he pilot of the light plane had just spotted the distant fringe of coast in the early morning light with its white band of gently breaking Pacific surf barely visible when the two searching army jets picked up his blips on their radar and soon had him in eye range, a tiny moth flying at five thousand feet.

The first jet pilot tuned his radio to the private commercial band and spoke into his microphone, “Piper Number VN 473, do you read me?” He repeated, “Piper Number VN 473, do you read me?” He received no reply but thought he saw a change in the direction and angle of flight of the light plane. He spoke again into his mike and said, “Okay, mister, it’s your hard luck if you don’t read me. Go down and land before we shoot you down. Those are orders.”

The man in the cockpit of the Piper’s cabin grimaced. There was the packet to deliver, the big pay handout, but it was also a silly way to die. He took a quick note of his position, the coastline and a stretch of flat beach vacated by the tide. He also saw something which he was convinced the pursuing jets might very well see but would not think about. Their job was simply to get him out of the air. He picked up his microphone and turned to the military frequency. He said, “I read you. Okay. Roger. Wilko. I’m going down. Don’t get nervous, boys.”

He kicked the right rudder and put his plane into a side slip and dropped like an express elevator while the two jets descended to the level he had vacated. With the ground looming he kicked the rudder again, yanked the stick back and fishtailed on to the strip of beach. The hovercraft that had been waiting in the shallows sent up a spume of spray as it darted inshore and nosed on to the beach.

The man in the Piper climbed out of his cockpit, threw one glance overhead to make sure that the jets hadn’t followed him down into shooting range, ran to the hovercraft and handed his packet to the man waiting at the open door. He received an envelope in exchange. The door slammed, the hovercraft backed off and then stirred the Pacific into a real froth as with all engines full out and propellers whirring it roared off south-bound. The hovercraft caught the jets totally by surprise and it was several minutes before they realized what had happened. The second pilot in a blaze of anger put his ship into a dive, yelling, “Why the son of a bitch!” into his microphone. He prepared his rockets for firing and at a thousand feet got the hovercraft into his crosshairs.

The first pilot chased him down and shouted into his mike, “Cool it, Johnny, for chrissakes. We’re over Mexico. You gonna declare war all by yourself?”

The scene in the office of Lieutenant King was the same as it had been before except that with the lieutenant absent Sergeant Cassidy, looking slightly grieved, was taking the brunt of West’s angry voice heard emerging from the receiver held some distance from his ear.

When the shouting had somewhat subsided the sergeant said, “I’m sorry, sir, I’m afraid not yet . . . Yeah, yeah, I know there was a bit of a mix up on the description but we’ve got it right now and it’s being broadcast every hour. I’m sorry about Mrs. West being took sick in bed but we oughta have some news any minute. See, you never know with these kids when they’re on the lam . . . No, no, sir, I didn’t mean that. Sure he ain’t on the lam. But we figure on him hitch-hiking and sooner or later the driver tunes in for the news and we’ve got him . . . Sure, sure, we’re checking on all the airports and terminals. The kid wouldn’t be going to Honolulu on a hundred and fifty bucks would he? . . . No, no, Mr. West, I ain’t tryin’ to be fresh. It’s only we got everybody workin’ on this. We’ll call you as soon as we hear anything.”

It was the sheer cosiness of the atmosphere aboard Bus 396 which at least temporarily spared Julian from the searching efforts of Sergeant Cassidy, for the sergeant had done his duty and notified all rail and bus terminals as well as police, state troopers and sheriffs’ offices in the vicinity. Luck and the bus driver’s preoccupation with the curious melting away of his passengers also helped Julian evade capture, for when the dispatcher in Oklahoma had routinely warned him to keep his eye out for a child travelling alone, the driver was still mulling over the mystery of his defecting passengers, and a further fact was that, except for a glimpse during the boarding at San Diego, he had never seen Julian actually travelling alone. The driver was not an intellectual giant and tooling one of those monsters across the continent called for the most intense concentration. The fact that one of the kids on his bus had been with three different parties failed to register. He had always appeared under the care of somebody.

And none of the passengers seemed interested in the news broadcasts.

It was shortly after two o’clock, the bus rolling at seventy miles an hour, a half an hour beyond Lordsburg bound for El Paso, that Julian’s incognito was to become violently destroyed.

There had been a short halt at Lordsburg for the passengers to buy luncheon and Marshall had treated handsomely. They had changed seats again with Marshall by the window. Julian had a hamburger roll in one hand, a bottle of Coke in the other and on his lap a paper plate containing a sticky cream puff and a Mars bar.

Marshall was munching a ham and cheese on rye and washing it down with a can of beer. His paper plate had apple pie and a slab of cheese on it. Elsewhere all over the bus luncheon parties were going on with the exception of the chess players who, now with only a few pieces remaining, were pursuing one another over the squares with increasing ferocity.

Julian finished his hamburger and got his nose into the cream puff. He said, “Say, this is great. Thanks a lot. I was all out of tuna-fish. Can I pay you for what you spent?”

Marshall said, “No, that’s all right, this one’s on me,” and as Julian got deeper into his cream puff and acquired a fetching white moustache, Marshall regarded him once more with a mixture of curiosity and in spite of his desire for non-involvement, with a strange growing affection. He said, “Look here, Julian, this crazy caper of yours. What about when you get to Washington? How much money have you got?”

“Thirty-five dollars. My grandmother gave me a hundred and fifty for my b-b-birthday.”

Marshall snorted, “Thirty-five bucks! You know how far that will go?”

Julian shook his head and Marshall continued, “Look, I’ve got my last five hundred on me but in a town like Washington it might just as well be your fifty. If I don’t connect with a job when I get there I’ll be flat.” He grinned suddenly at Julian and said, “I guess you and me are in the same boat. Me and my kid brother. Both on our asses. Isn’t that something?” And then as Julian regarded him worshipfully, became serious and said, “Kidding aside, what do you do when the fifty is gone?”

Julian thought that this was a stupid question and the tone of voice in which he replied indicated that. He said, “Sell my Bubble Gun. The colonel said it would work. I’ll have my patent.”

In a sudden burst of exasperation Marshall cried, “Work, work, work! For chrissakes, kid, wake up. Don’t you see you can’t just go barging . . .”

Here Marshall cut off without finishing his speech of admonition about the futility of Julian’s quest, for suddenly looking up towards the front of the bus his eyes had caught a glimpse of something that was not as it should be and that subliminal sense of danger not yet eroded by more than a year of civilian life again was there to warn him. He said, “Now, what the hell is going on up there?”

Sam Wilks was a psychopathic killer, a piece of white trash turned thief and murderer. By almost incredible luck he had avoided the police dragnet at San Diego where he had been expected to try to get across the border at Tijuana. After robbing and killing a gas station attendant at Carlsbad between Los Angeles and San Diego, he had abandoned his stolen getaway car and vanished. There had apparently been no witnesses to the crime and there had been no accurate description of him available but everything pointed to his crossing over into Mexico. Nobody had either expected or looked for him on an east-bound bus.

Hunched in the front seat of the upper level of Bus 396, his hat pulled down over his eyes, a map of the district in front of him, Wilks was full of himself and the Godlike feeling of knowing he was master of life and death. He had got away with it and he would still vanish into the badlands of Mexico until the heat was off. He carried two articles on his person which practically guaranteed this. One was a .45 automatic pistol, the other a hand grenade of a new army mark, a recently introduced model with the explosive force of a three-inch shell. The stability of this latter horror, from which Wilks always kept the pin half pulled, was no more reliable than the man holding it. He belonged to that new breed of self-justified terrorists spawned in the seventies and like all of them was prepared to risk everything including himself, with the cunning to let the dice roll on the gamble of trying something never before attempted.

His map showed him that they were approaching the small town of Deming, about an hour or so from El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. The authorities would not be looking for him coming from that direction and even if they were no one was going to stop him. He folded up the map, having committed to memory the spot where a secondary road branched off, put it away in his pocket, pushed back his hat to mop his brow for only the briefest moment of nerves which he shed by thinking that he would probably kill that good-looking son of a bitch who had been interfering with him and enjoy doing it. His right hand closed around the warm steel butt of the .45. His left hand curled against the fragmentation squares of the grenade in his pocket. He turned around once for a last look at the disposition of the passengers, where they were and what they were doing, another glimpse of the bus driver and the road ahead and then made his move.

Julian said, “What? Going on up where?”

Marshall said, “I dunno. Sit still.” But he thought he did know for having half risen out of his seat so that he could look over the heads of the other passengers he saw the character in the dirty clothes and ten-gallon hat get up, go forward and lean over the shoulder of the bus driver. He was holding something in his right hand, a second object in his left and Marshall had no difficulty recognizing either of them.

Between his teeth Marshall muttered, “The son of a bitch,” and without a weapon felt completely naked and helpless and at the same time very angry. He watched the bus driver momentarily take his eyes from the road and stare up at the man Wilks with utter incredulity and then with a shaking hand pick up the microphone connecting him with headquarters.

The main dispatcher’s office of the company in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, was a vast, air-conditioned soundproof chamber filled with receiving and sending apparatus and men and girls serving them as the messages came pouring in from every corner of the country. At the end of the room there was a huge map of the United States with all the bus routes, and the messages were relayed to boys there who stuck pins and flags into the routes so that an overseer at a glimpse would know practically where every one of his vehicles might be within fifty miles at any given time. At the other end of the room the chief dispatcher sat at a high desk like a judge’s bench with earphones and a plug-in switchboard which could connect him with any of the incoming or outgoing circuits. The room was filled with the quiet hum of the voices of the dispatchers speaking
sotto voce,
livened by occasional interference crackle where somebody was encountering weather.

At one of the receiving desks the instrument gave a long bleep and then came the muffled mechanical tone of a voice adulterated by electronics, “Three nine six, three nine six. Do you read me? Three nine six.”

The dispatcher put on his headset with a yawn, but then suddenly looking up at the big electric clock on the wall, wondered what the hell 396 was calling him for at that hour. He adjusted a dial for better reception and said, “Three nine six. I read you, Mike. What’s cooking?” and then his eyes popped as a voice clearly said, “We’re ten miles west of Deming. I’ve got a guy with a gun on me.”

“You got what?”

The bus driver’s voice said, “He’s going to take us down from Deming to the border. He wants to cross at Juarez Oeste. And half a million bucks. He says he wants half a million bucks. He’s got a bomb. He says he’ll blow us all up.”

To the dispatcher it could be nothing more than a gag or maybe Mike had got loaded somewhere, but if he was that kind of a goddamned fool the chief dispatcher ought to know about it. He pressed a button at his desk and a red light glowed on the panel by the chief dispatcher’s rostrum. The chief threw a switch and donned earphones and microphone.

The dispatcher spoke a curt message to his superior, “Three nine six claims he’s been hijacked,” and then to the bus said, “Aw, listen, you’re kiddin’, ain’t you? You trying to say you got a hijacker on board? C’mon, Mike, what is this? Cut out the clowning. Nobody hijacks a bus.”