Free Obedience by Joseph Hansen

“I always like to keep my promises. Even though he’s probably sound asleep.”
    Dave was dead tired. He pushed open the door on the passenger side, got out, and stretched. Over the shaggy dark ridge of the hills came a glow from the boulevards of the San Fernando Valley to the north. Above, the sky was thick with stars. The air was cool and crisp. It was quiet. He shook Makoto’s hand, thanked him, walked to the rickety Valiant—it wouldn’t have done to drive it on this expedition—eased his weary self behind the wheel.
    Framed in the lighted doorway, Makoto lifted a hand in good-night, stepped inside and closed the door. Dave coaxed the rattly engine of the old car to life, and started down the narrow, parked-up shelves of street, lit by intermittent lamps shining through tree branches. Unlikely as it seemed, all these hairpin curves would finally get him out of the hills. He had to believe that. He wanted very much to be home. Makoto would have driven him, but that would have left the Valiant parked in front of Mel’s house. Shocking. Unthinkable.
    With Makoto at his side, he’d run into no trouble gaining entry to the Vietnamese clubs on Tracy Davis’s list. Old mansions, back rooms of shops, in Monterey Park, at the beach, in the heart of L.A. In five clubs in three hours tonight, he had seen as much green baize as in his whole life, had played more poker hands than in the Army, had rolled more dice, and stared half hypnotized at more roulette wheels than in all the movies of the 1930s. Makoto and he between them had dropped almost a thousand dollars. That had been vital. Baiting a trap, you should look as if you’re doing something else. With serious intent. Maybe they’d overdone it. Porcelain-skinned, dark-eyed, mustached little men in tight tuxedos had four times out of five smiled, bowed, shaken their hands, and invited then back as they’d left.
    They hadn’t overdone it. He knew this a half hour later when he creaked the Valiant up the steep grade of Horseshoe Canyon Trail, and the jittery headlights showed him a black stretch limousine parked at a tilt on the broken road edge opposite his driveway. He geared the Valiant down and climbed toward the parked car slowly, squinting ahead, trying to make out whether or not anyone was inside it. The streetlight was behind him, down where two trails met, and the branches of trees shadowed it, so he got no help from there. The Valiant’s yellow beams glanced off a dazzlingly clean windshield. Heart thudding, he drove past the limousine. If anyone was inside, he couldn’t see him.
    Thirty yards up the trail, he swung the Valiant in at Wilma Vosper’s driveway, backed it up, sat in the middle of the road, motor idling, frowning. Wilma Vosper’s raggedy little dog began to bark inside the house. He didn’t want to wake her up, and he eased the Valiant down the trail and halted it beside the drop into his bricked yard. He didn’t want to look, but he looked. And made out the boxy shape of Cecil’s van parked in its usual place, beside the long row of French windows that walled the front building. Sometimes these days when half the crew at the television station was away, he worked very late. Why couldn’t tonight have been one of those times?
    Dave took a deep breath, and jounced the old car down into the yard. He parked it beside the van, got out, closed the door. It was pitch-dark. Cecil was good at remembering to turn on the ground lights. So somebody else had switched them off. He had expected that someone else—just not so soon. He smiled sourly to himself. It damned well was time he quit. The spring in his step wasn’t all he’d lost. The spring in his brain had snapped. A simple phone call could have warned Cecil away, and he hadn’t made that call—it simply hadn’t crossed his mind. He touched his side. His gun. He’d left it at Mel’s. And simply forgotten. Wonderful. Grimly, he crunched over the uneven bricks, rounded the shingled side