Ross Macdonald - Lew Archer 01 - The Moving Target(aka Harper)(1949) by Ross MacDonald Page B

who was sitting rather forlornly with the gun in his lap.
“Hold your fire when I tell you to.”
                 “It
was too late when you told me. I aimed over the driver’s head, anyway, to force
him out of the cab.”
                 “He
tried to run me down. He wouldn’t have got away if you could be trusted with
firearms.”
                 “I’m
sorry,” he said contritely. “I guess I was trigger happy.” He handed me the
gun, butt foremost.
                 “Forget
it.” I turned left toward the city. “Did you get a good look at the truck?”
                 “I
think it was Army surplus, the kind they used for carrying personnel. Painted
black, wasn’t it?”
                 “Blue.
What about the driver?”
                 “I
couldn’t make him out very well. He was wearing a peaked cap, that’s all I
could see.”
                 “You
didn’t see his front plate?”
                 “I
don’t think there was any.”
                 “That’s
too bad,” I said. “It’s barely possible Sampson was in that truck. Or has been.”
                 “Really? Do you think we should go to the police?”
                 “I
think we should. But first I’ll have to talk to Mrs. Sampson. Did you phone
her?”
                 “I
couldn’t get her. She was out with sleeping pills when I called her back. She
can’t sleep without them.”
                 “I’ll
see her in the morning, then.”
                 “Are
you going to fly up with us?”
                 “I’ll
drive up. There’s something I want to do first.’
                 “What’s
that?”
                 “A
little private business,” I said flatly.
                 He
was silent after that. I didn’t want to talk. It was getting on toward dawn.
The murky red cloud over the city was turning pale at the edges. The late-night
traffic of cabs and private cars had dwindled to almost nothing, and the
early-morning trucks were beginning to roll. I watched for a blue Army surplus
truck with a closed van and didn’t see one.
                 I
dropped Taggert at the Valerio and went home. A quart
of milk was waiting on my doorstep. I took it in for company. The electric
clock in the kitchen said twenty after four. I found a box of frozen oysters in
the freezing compartment of the refrigerator and made an oyster stew. My wife
had never liked oysters. Now I could sit at my kitchen table any hour of the
day or night and eat oysters to my heart’s content, building up my virility.
                 I
undressed and got into bed without looking at the empty twin bed on the other
side of the room. In a way it was a relief not to have to explain to anyone
what I had been doing all day.

  12
                 It
was ten in the morning before I got downtown. Peter Colton was at the flat-topped
desk in his office. He had been my colonel in Intelligence. When I opened the
ground-glass door he glanced up sharply from a pile of police reports, then lowered his eyes immediately to show that I wasn’t
welcome. He was a senior investigator in the D. A .‘s office, a heavy middle-aged man with cropped fair hair and a violent nose like
the prow of a speedboat inverted. His office was a plaster cubicle with a
single steel-framed window. I made myself uncomfortable on a hard-backed chair
against the wall.
                 After
a while he pointed his nose at me. “What happened to that which, for want of a
better term, I choose to call your face?”
                 “I
got into an argument.”
                 “And
you want me to arrest the neighborhood bully.” His smile dragged down the
corners of his mouth. “You’ll have to fight your own battles, my little man,
unless of course there’s something in it for