The Way Some People Die by Ross MacDonald Page A

point in the far west Pacific, after its division had left for bloodier pastures.
    “What is this, a ghost town?” I asked him.
    “It almost looks like one, doesn’t it? Actually it’s the opposite of a ghost town, a town waiting to be born. It’s a fairly new development, you see. I got in at the beginning, and it’s growing by leaps and bounds.” But he didn’t sound too happy about his real estate investment.
    He took a series of turns on tires that screeched and skittered in the gravel. I kept my sense of direction straight by watching the high escarpment that blotted out the horizon to the southeast. On the far edge of the skeleton town he slowed to a crawl.
    “That’s my house up ahead.”
    There was only one house ahead, a white frame shoebox with projecting eaves, lengthened by the garage appended to the rear. As we passed it I saw light in the front windows, leaking faintly around the edges of closed Venetian blinds.
    “I thought we were going to stop and pay a visit.” The Buick had kept on rolling, on to the next intersection and beyond. He finally brought it to a stop at the side of the road.
    “I’ve been thinking,” he said uneasily. “Tarantine knows me, and he doesn’t know you. Wouldn’t it be more strategic if you went in alone? I’ll stand by, of course. I’ll keep the car here with the motor running.” His voice, trying to be charming, was pretty dreary.
    If Dalling had a normal amount of physical courage, hemust have used it up on me when he first came into the Lariat. I pitied him a little. “Whatever you say, Dalling.”
    The pity, or the contempt that went with it, must have showed: “After all,” and the deep manly overtones had departed, “you’ve been hired to find Galley Lawrence, haven’t you? I’m doing what I can to help you, man. And if Joseph Tarantine knows I’ve given him away, you know what will happen to me.”
    He made sense, in a way. If I had had an equal amount of sense of a similar kind, I might have stayed in the car and gone to work on Dalling. Two would get you twenty there was a soft spot in his story to go with the soft spot in his spine. The one thing real and certain was his fear. It hung around him like a damp contagion. It was Dalling’s fear, or my reaction against it, that made me foolhardy. That and the whisky I had drunk in line of business. Without its fading glow in my insides I might have reacted in a different way. I might even have saved a life or two if I’d gone to work on Dalling.
    But I contented myself with a smiling threat: “Don’t stand me up or you won’t be pretty any more.
Or
popular.”
    The invisible hooks worked on his mouth. “Don’t worry.” He switched off his headlights. “I really appreciate this, your attitude, I mean—” He gave it up and settled down for a wait.
    There were more stars over Oasis than I’d seen since I left that island in the Pacific. The unbuilt street was still and peaceful as the desert was supposed to be. But I felt a hot prickling at the nape of my neck as I approached the stucco house. I transferred my gun from shoulder holster to pocket, and leaned my moral weight on it.
    I circled the house at a distance. There was no fence,and the house stood by itself on the bare ground. The doors were closed, including the garage doors at the back, and all the windows were blinded. A bronze-painted Packard roadster shone dimly in the starlight at the rear of the gravel driveway. I passed it close enough to make sure there was no one in it, and circled around to the front of the house again.
    The lights were still on behind the two front windows. The blinds fitted too well to let me see past them. Holding the gun in my pocket with the safety off, I mounted the low concrete porch and knocked on the screen door. My knocking wasn’t loud, but it sounded loud to me.
    Quick footsteps crossed the room on the other side of the door. The porch light flashed on over my head. Somebody pulled aside the