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The firemen had established several lines to and from the bluff. Going down would be a swift ride in a sling. Coming up would be slower and considerably safer via a powered pulley. A fireman took the first, the test, ride. He waited at the bottom along with Larrabee, while two young doctors made the trip, followed by a nurse, and another. Supplies and equipment were lashed to slings and sent down.

Seven-thirty. No letup by the rain. In another half hour it would be dark.

The rescue party hurried across the parking lot toward the supermarket. On the way it passed a Rolls-Royce limousine, overturned. There was a man inside it, dead. A chauffeur with his skull bashed in from having hit the separating glass partition.

When they reached the supermarket the doctors and nurses couldn't take time to indulge their amazement. They went right to work.

“My God. Oh, my God,” was all Larrabee could say, while from above on the highway Chief Croy demanded a report. Larrabee finally described the situation.

“How many dead?”

“No way of telling exactly. Not yet.”

“About how many? Fifty?”

“More.”

Several more doctors and nurses went down. Also firemen with a pair of acetylene torches. There was no way into the market, no way to get anyone out. They would have to cut the gate. They chose a spot, set up the tanks and began burning through. The gate was of tempered cadmium steel. It would be slow going. The firemen requested an additional acetylene torch and tank that were sent down.

Meanwhile, inside the market the dead were placed off to one side. Some of the stock clerks did most of that work. Spider Leaks helped. So did Peter Javakian and Frank Brydon. First the front of the market was cleared of the dead and the glass. The dead were put into shroud bags supplied by the firemen. The kind of shiny black plastic bags with drawstrings used only for that morbid purpose. Best to get the dead from sight. The bodies took up a lot of room. They were placed side by side, but respectfully, not in any way atop or overlapping one another.

The injured were carried to the gate, as close up to it as possible, so the doctors and nurses could attend them through the grillwork. The more seriously injured received priority treatment. For some the most that could be done was take them out of pain with injections of Demerol and morphine. Inverted bottles were hung all along the gate, bottles with rubber tubes running from them, feeding plasma into veins to offset shock and loss of blood.

Now Larrabee reported: “First count, dead — one hundred twenty-two; injured — forty-one. Repeat.…”

There was the hissing of the acetylene torches, the crackling jumps of the sparks they made.

Night came.

The firetrucks directed their searchlights down onto the front of the market. A five-thousand-watt floodlight and an equally powerful spot. Other lights on the pumpers contributed five hundred watts each.

It was difficult enough for the doctors and nurses to do their work impeded by the gate, having to reach through its openings to reach wounds that often required swift and delicate attention. Now they also had to contend with shadows.

Flashlights were provided.

Some were handed to those inside the market. Brydon, Spider Leaks and Peter Javakian each got one. The flashlights were the type with a handle, powered by a seven-volt battery. They gave off strong beams but were unwieldy.

Having the flashlights was what brought the three men together. They quickly introduced themselves and went searching. It wasn't easy going, picking their way over broken glass, layers of cans, all sorts and shapes of products.

Partway up Aisle Eight Brydon's light lit upon something different. A small shoe. Peter and Spider tossed aside two shopping carts, removed debris. A boy. In his clutch was a box of breakfast cereal that featured an unbeatable hero. Brydon put his head to the boy's chest. No heartbeat. He lifted the boy tenderly, as though the boy were alive, and carried him over to the rest of the dead.

At another aisle they came upon an old woman, a thin old woman who appeared to be a Mexican. She was unconscious, a rivulet of blood from her nose. Peter and Spider got their arms beneath her, joined their arms and easily took her up and away. Brydon noticed her purse left behind, imitation patent leather. It was open. He was compelled to look into it: a handprinted unofficial identification card, creased and frayed, two dollars and some cents, twelve dollars' worth of federal food stamps.

When they saw to it that the old woman was being cared for, the three men continued searching. Up and down aisles, throughout the back rooms. Brydon and Peter got to know the market, even became familiar with its rubble.

In the vicinity of the shelves that had held gourmet foods, Brydon found one and then another jar of Romanoff caviar. He recognized the unusual-shaped containers immediately. Two-ounce size. As a souvenir, provisional one at that, he put the caviar in his pocket. What he was really looking for, wanted more than anything, had come there for in the first place, was a beer.

Peter Javakian uncovered a six-can pack of a local brew. It was so local it didn't even have snap-off, easy-opening tops.

“Anybody got an opener?”

Spider borrowed one from a stock clerk. Each time the opener punched a triangular hole in the top of the can the agitated beer spewed out fast and high, so nearly half of it was lost.

Brydon, Peter and Spider sat on the bottom shelf of Island Number One. The beer tasted fine. From there they could see the firemen cutting the gate. The blue hot beams of the torches.

“How much more they got to go?” Peter asked.

“Somebody said they're half done,” Brydon told him.

Peter asked Spider: “You from around here?”

“Most of the time. You?”

“Hollister,” Peter said — then to Brydon: “How about you?”

“I live down the beach.” Right away Brydon thought, that word, “live.” Wasn't there anything that didn't remind him? He gulped the rest of the beer, opened another, and, with his mind elsewhere, got squirted in the face.

He lowered his head, shook it slowly and laughed aloud at himself.

The supermarket manager, Phil Kemp, was up on the ramp, which had come unbolted from the wall, was wobbly, giving. Kemp hoped to Christ it held long enough for him. He had waited until the firemen were close to through the gate before he came up to the safe. Kemp was disturbed anyway — with the cash registers. When the electricity shorted, for some reason the cash drawer of every register sprung open and couldn't be shut. Before Kemp could get around to them someone had taken the money from four of the registers. He thought he knew who. He had noticed, or at least he was almost sure he had noticed that Negro box boy, the one who had been a convict, close by one of the registers that had been rifled. Sure as he was or not, Kemp believed that boy was the sort low enough to take advantage of such a moment.

Kemp opened the safe.

He had two large canvas money bags with “Brinks” stenciled on them.

The safe was a double safe. Kemp opened the inner one. He didn't bother with the rolls of coins, took only the paper money that was bound by sturdy rubber bands into five-thousand-dollar units. He put equal amounts, by estimate, into each of the bags, belted and buckled the bags closed. Double-checked them, used some heavy twine to hitch the bags together in such a way that he had a halterlike arrangement. He put on the money halter, and finally felt secure enough about it.

As he went down the metal spiral stairs that swayed precariously, Kemp decided that from then on he would stay close to the gate, close to where the opening was being cut. He would tell the firemen who he was and why he should be first out.

13

Captain Royden Dodd was in Car Thirty-one with the front seat pushed back as far as it would go. Even then, when he slumped down, his legs were too long for comfort, pressed up on the hard underedge of the instrument panel. It wasn't the car as much as it was the way Dodd was built. He was more than half legs, Gary Cooper style.

He tried to relax his head, to let the top of the seat take all the weight of it from his neck and shoulders. But his neck especially hung on tight.

It had been one more long day — worse than routine, which was usually bad enough — and it wasn't over yet.

First thing that morning they had found two more sun lovers at the State Beach in Balboa. A fellow and his girl, both about eighteen, parked head out to sea in a blue Olds-mobile Starfire with a pair of surfboards racked on it. His and hers.

The car's muffler was stuffed with their bathing suits and the end of it was tightly taped over.

The couple were in the act of love, arms wrapped around, tight together in rigor mortis.

There had been twelve almost identical cases since Friday last week. Eight of them had been in Highway Patrol Zone Six, which covered the entire southern section from Los Angeles to the border.

Dodd took two deep breaths, used his second finger and thumb to squeeze the bridge of his nose, as though that slight pressure might help ease the pressure. It was something he usually did when he was discouraged.

He closed his eyes.

Instead of relief, that brought a busy blackness. Among his thoughts: Helen, his wife. She had broken her wrist ten days ago, had fallen on a sidewalk while shopping in Costa Mesa. Sidewalk slippery when wet. Costa Mesa's fault. An attorney neighbor had advised Dodd to sue. Dodd examined the shoes his wife had had on the day of the accident. Slick leather soles. Besides, an area captain could, but shouldn't, sue a city in his area. And his backyard roses. They were goners. Roots soaked soft, rotting, stalks and stems unable, for some reason, to stop guzzling it up. All their leaves turned pale yellow.

The metallic drumming of rain on the car roof, not soothing, a lethal reminder by now. No more wind, though.

Dodd opened his eyes, adjusted them to the refracting drops on the window. God, he was tired. Couldn't recall when he'd been more so. Tired all the way in to his bones and down to his wet toes. Old bones, he thought, and tensed his legs and shoulders simultaneously, trying to squeeze the cramps out, the tiredness. Hell, he wasn't even sixty yet, had nine and some to go before sixty.

Executive Lieutenant Porter was rapping on the window. Dodd didn't sit up, just lowered the window.

Porter leaned in. “The latest count is a hundred thirty-one,” he said.

Dodd gazed past Porter, at nothing. Only numbers so far, he thought, no names. “How long before they can start bringing the others up?”

“Croy says an hour, maybe less.”

“Madsen leave?”

“No.”

“I told him to go home.”

Porter shrugged. “Eager.”

“For what?”

“Motorcycle assignment.”

“Remind me.”

“A couple of the television guys had a pretty good go at each other.”

“When?”

“Just now, over who was going to get to interview the first survivors brought up. One got an eye. They're trying to cover it with makeup.”

“Crazy bastards.”

“Everybody's edgy.”

The radio had been on. Highway Patrol Center in Santa Ana and the units in the field transmitting back and forth. Sibilant volleys peppered with static, words so clipped they were practically indecipherable by the ordinary ear. Out of habit, whenever he was in the field, Dodd half-heard them, enough for him to picture what was going on throughout his area.

Now the voice coming over said, “Code eleven-seventy-nine.…”

That got Dodd's entire attention. Code eleven-seventy-nine was an accident with injuries requiring an ambulance. There had been some bad ones lately.

Dodd called in to ask how bad. He started the car and the light rack on top. Until he returned, Executive Lieutenant Porter would be in charge. Dodd hit the siren briefly to make some of the television crowd jump aside.

When he reached the freeway, he went full out along the shoulder, passed thousands of cars standing absolutely still in the rain, belligerent. Finally, a red glow was in the atmosphere ahead and then there were the emergency flares on the pavement. Dodd pulled up and got out. One of his senior officers came over to meet him. Five units were on the scene, two patrol cars and three motorcycles. All lanes of the freeway, southbound and northbound, were closed.

No one knew exactly what had happened except those who had been in it and most of those were dead.

A Jaguar, going too fast for the law and the weather, had spun into a Cougar, sending the Cougar out of control, so a Mustang couldn't stop from slamming into it from behind. Swerving to avoid, a Hornet hit the curb of the median, flew up and clipped the top of the dividing fence, came down across the oncoming lanes where it was smashed broadside by a Pinto and then head on by a Skyhawk, followed by a Colt and another Mustang.

It sounded like a mad menagerie. Eight of them were totaled, six were afire.

Blame?

The rain?

Who?

The young man in the Jaguar that was now smouldering on its side with him pinned in and burned to a black crisp?

Captain Dodd kneeled to a girl who had been a passenger in the Hornet. She lay face up on the wet roadbed, partially covered by a highway patrolman's bright yellow raincoat. She kept biting her lower lip. Dodd recognized death in her eyes. The girl was not aware that her right arm had been torn off. Dodd wanted to say something — not something consoling; he wanted to tell her good-bye. But he didn't and she stopped biting her lip.

How many faces had he seen go slack, set and be gone like that, young and old? He hated it. Certainly it had always been unpleasant to witness but he had come to really hate it. There had been so much of it in his life, on his job. Fuck the so-called blessed relief. Fuck death, fuck it,
fuck
it, his senses were satiated with it, rubbed the wrong way raw by it.

He pulled the raincoat up over the girl's face. He thought he should have said good-bye. He stood and, like a ministering priest, went to someone else who lay nearby, dying.