Free Fugitive Nights by Joseph Wambaugh Page A

Plimsoll announced that Lynn had the staying power of a cherry popsicle.
    Lynn had forced himself not to have more than half a dozen drinks the night before, but hadn’t gotten to bed early enough. Still, he’d set the alarm and managed to arrive at the home of Clive Devon in Las Palmas at 6:30 A.M.
    The desert sky was breathtaking at that hour. Cloud shadow made the Indio Hills shimmer in dappled silver light. All of the pastels in the desert landscape had deepened. The sky was dove gray, with burgundy smears behind pink cotton cumulus, as he sat in his car and drank coffee from a thermos.
    At 7:00 A.M. Clive Devon drove out of his driveway in a black Range Rover. He was wearing a floppy hat, a knit shirt, chinos and hiking boots, dressed very much like Lynn except for the hat. He meandered slowly through the narrow streets of Las Palmas, traditional home of Palm Springs’ old money. It wasn’t an ideal place to hang a tail on somebody. The streets twisted too much, and there were too many huge homes with whitewashed adobe walls and ten-foot oleander hedges for privacy. There was no place to hide on streets like that, and there were no cars to get behind at such an early hour. Mostly there were just gardeners coming to work in pickup trucks, with mowers and gardening tools stacked in the truck beds. Clive Devon turned on Via Lola because it flowed into Palm Canyon Drive, and you could go either way on that main artery.
    Fortunately, Lynn Cutter’s old Nash Rambler looked like it could belong to a Mexican gardener, or to a black maid from north Palm Springs. Lynn had gotten a good buy on the car from a used-car dealer in Cat City whom he’d once stopped for drunk driving on Christmas Eve. Instead of booking the guy he’d driven him home, mostly because the lawyer for Lynn’s second wife had opened Lynn’s veins and he figured it might be prudent to make pals with a guy that dealt with rent-a-wrecks and second-hand wheels, the kind of cars he could afford. And at least the Rambler had a new engine and retreads.
    They drove past Gene Autry Trail and the Desert Princess Country Club, finally heading to the south end on Highway 10. Lynn began to wonder if this guy was one of those eccentrics who drove several hundred miles on a whim, maybe to see the Phoenix Suns play the L.A. Lakers? Lynn figured he had enough gas money in his pocket to get back if Clive Devon didn’t travel more than sixty minutes from home. He was glad when the Range Rover turned off the freeway, heading back to Highway 111, passing by the little airport that had made a lot of cops breathe hard the night before, during the long and fruitless search for a fugitive.
    Obviously Clive Devon wasn’t a man who worried about somebody following him. Lynn soon realized that he could bumper-lock the Range Rover and never be noticed. The sixty-three-year-old man was moseying toward the Salton Sea, a thirty-five-mile lake near the foot of the Chocolate Mountains. What the guy intended to do by the north shore of the desert lake, where only a few hundred people lived in mobile homes, Lynn Cutter couldn’t imagine.
    The Salton Sea was a mistake of man and perhaps of nature. Just after the turn of the century, some railroad builders made a horrible error with the Colorado River, and a levee burst, allowing millions of cubic feet of water per day to rage into a huge salt marsh left over from an ancient inland sea. The new Salton Sea submerged everything under water fifty percent saltier than the ocean. It was said that pumice rock could float in this saltiest of water, 235 feet below sea level.
    Many of the migrant workers, particularly Asian boat people, liked to fish the salt water for local corvina, using illegal gill nets. The cops figured that anybody hungry enough to eat the mutant fish from that selenium-loaded water—polluted by sewage and agricultural waste—should be welcome to it.
    Lynn Cutter was astonished