Duncan Delaney and the Cadillac of Doom Read Online Free PDF Page B

doors but they were jammed shut. The engine caught fire. Duncan backed away. He heard something wail.
    Oh my god, he thought, there’s a baby in there .
    Duncan saw movement in the back seat. He kicked out a window and pulled something warm and hairy out. He staggered from the burning car and collapsed in the brush beside the road as the gas tank exploded. He looked at the squirming bundle in his arms and groaned. He had risked his life for a bright orange cat.
    “One down,” he said to the cat as the Porsche burned like a bonfire among the Joshua trees, “eight more to go.”
       
    “Judging by the skids,” the Highway Patrolman told Duncan after the fire burned itself out, “she must have been going over one-twenty.”
    He gave Duncan hot coffee from a thermos and radioed for a tow truck. He measured the skid marks and filled out a report. Then he wrote Duncan a ticket for having two bald tires and a burned out brake light. Two coroners arrived and took the woman, now reduced to a stick figure in charred crepe, out of the smoldering car. Her blond hair was gone and her clothes were melted to her skin. They put her on a gurney and covered her with a white sheet. An arm broke from the corpse and fell to the ground. A coroner tossed it back on her chest beneath the sheet. Duncan threw up.
    “You okay, bud?” the man asked.
    “Just great,” Duncan replied. “Thanks for asking.”
    He picked up the cat and wandered into the desert. Not far off the highway he stumbled across the coyote. One leg was gone and there was blood across its matted fur, but it was alive enough to snap at his leg. Duncan dropped the cat and walked up to the Patrolman’s car.
    “The coyote’s out there. It’s hurt pretty bad.”
    The Patrolman considered Duncan from behind the mirrors of his glasses. “What do you expect me to do?”
    “Take care of it, I guess.”
    He followed Duncan into the desert. They stopped beside the coyote and regarded the dying animal. The Patrolman was not much older than Duncan, though he was bigger in the arms and chest, with a black crew cut and baby fat in his cheeks. He looked like a life size Ken doll in a tan uniform. He sighed and drew his pistol and shot the coyote in the head. He holstered his gun, picked up the cat and handed it to Duncan.
    “Consider it taken care of,” he said.
       
    The tow truck dropped Duncan off at a garage in Baker where he bought a retread and a spare. He bought two hamburgers and a chocolate shake at a diner and cat food at a market. He bought a map of Los Angeles and charted a course to Angela Moncini’s office. He reached Los Angeles at dusk. He exited the freeway at Sunset Boulevard when the van began to lurch and sputter. He parked in a lot in front of a mini-mart just as his engine died. He got out, opened the engine hatch, and pulled the dipstick. It burned his hand and he dropped it. He had forgotten to check the oil. He sighed and stared at the engine. But it looked as it should and no amount of staring could make it run again. A small, dark man came out of the mini-mart and tapped Duncan’s shoulder. He was five and a half feet tall, slim, with Hindu skin, a sharp nose, and a lone thin eyebrow across his forehead. He spoke perfect English with an accent that spoke of opium fields in his native Pakistan. He had been a lawyer in Islamabad until his religion made him the target of an extremist group who butchered his wife and five year old son and set fire to his house while he lay bleeding from a gut shot beside the front door he had innocently answered. Once healed, he went straight from hospital to airport to Los Angeles, and had never looked back.
    “Excuse me,” he admonished, “you cannot park here if you are not patronizing my store.”
    “My girl dumped me,” Duncan said. He was not making sense but he found it difficult to care. “My van just died, I have no place to stay, and I really need a beer. Can you understand that?”
    The small man