Such Men Are Dangerous (18 page)

I climbed up into the truck. It wasn’t snowing and didn’t look as though it had snowed while I was asleep, but somewhere along the line we got the wind we’d hoped for. The driveway looked as though it hadn’t seen a car or truck since the last Indian uprising.

I went through everything we’d thrown in the truck. The wallets, the suitcases, everything. For the most part, I didn’t do more than establish that we had a lot of crud in the truck that deserved burning and/or burial. But I did find a baby camera in O’Gara’s luggage, plus a roll of exposed film. He’d taken one shot of my ID that I knew of, and it was possible that it hadn’t been processed yet. If that was so, then my prints never got to Washington.

As far as I knew, those prints were the only solid link between Richard John Lynch and me.

I don’t know how long George might have slept. When it got to be six in the morning I decided that anything over twelve hours amounted to criminal self-indulgence. I shook him awake. “Get up,” I said. “It’s morning, I’ve got a dozen questions for you.”

“In a while. Oh, God, I think I’ve got a barbiturate hangover. Let me eat something. I feel like hell.”

We ate ham sandwiches and drank milk. He came slowly back to life. While he was doing this I took the garbage that had to be burned outside. I set a garbage can lid on top of the snow and built a little fire in it, feeding the stuff in a little at a time. It was mostly paper. After a few minutes he joined me and contributed a handful of paper. I fed it to the fire without looking at it.

“There’s a well out in back,” he said. “For the clothes and stuff. Get rid of that uniform. I’ve got trucker clothes in back, and keep a suit for afterward. Everything else goes.”

“They’ll look in the well.”

“If they get here. The hell, let ’em. There’s nothing traceable, is there?”

There wasn’t, and it was impossible to dig in the frozen ground. We uncovered the well, threw a lot of clothing into it, and piled snow on top. Back in the barn, I started in on my questions.

“First of all, the route. Do we take the Mississippi Valley south or cut east first?”

“East. It’s longer, but I feel better about it.”

“All right. What kind of roads? Not turnpikes or main roads, obviously, but won’t we be conspicuous on back roads?”

“We would. That’s why we take the pikes.” He unfolded a Shell map of the country that just showed major highways. “Straight east through Wisconsin, pick up the Wisconsin freeway south of Milwaukee. South on that, onto the Belt around Chicago. Then there’s one stretch of turnpike through Illinois and Indiana and Ohio and on across Pennsylvania all the way to the coast. We don’t go all the way, we pick up the Penn-Can and head south. It takes us—”

“How can we do that?”

“Easy. We take turns driving and—”

“There’s a weighing station at every turnpike entrance. We have to show papers, we need all sorts of invoices and crud—”

“We’ve got them.”

I looked at him. “You do your homework, don’t you?”

“You betchum. Hang on, I’ll show you.”

He went to the back of the barn and returned with a manila envelope. He spilled it out on the ground, and he had everything but a sweepstakes ticket. There were invoices and bills of lading and chauffeurs’ licenses and membership cards in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

“See?” he said. “Turnpikes. They’re fast and easy, and we are the Thornhill Hauling Corp. That’s what it says on the registration and that’s what it’ll say on the truck once we paint her. I’ve got paint, I’ve got stencils. I’ve worked for my million, Paul. We get on that road and we stop for fuel and that’s it. We stop for diesel fuel and change drivers. Period. We roll right on through, we swing along the coast to Orlando and cut west to Tampa and we’re home. There’s even a pretty good road from Orlando to Tampa. I checked, I know. See?”

“I’m impressed.”

“Sometimes I even impress myself. What else?”

“You,” I said. “What’s your cover?”

“Me?”

“You. The last they heard of you was Monday morning when they sent you to Amarillo. You never got there and they never heard from you. You must have something. What?”

“I’m in Guatemala.”

“Huh?”

He grinned. “You heard right. I called the office from Chicago Monday and begged out of Amarillo. I told them something hot was breaking and I had to go to Miami. I called in again from Pierre when I went to collect street signs. I told them I was in Miami and had to leave the country.”

“Suppose they kept a record of the call?”

“No way to trace. They could have traced it at the time, but I know standard procedure and they wouldn’t. I called into a line that just records messages for playback later.”

“How does Guatemala fit in?”

“I go there when this is over. I have something to do there, as a matter of fact. It’ll take two days, but I can make it look as though it took that many weeks. Then I come back from Guatemala, and I say I’ve been to Guatemala, and by God I have. I’ll even have a souvenir for my secretary. Don’t teach Grandma to suck eggs, Paul.”

We wiped the truck down and spray-painted the parts of the box with Sprague’s markings on them. He had a battery-operated compressor to simplify things, and his paint was a close enough match for the van’s body color so that we didn’t have to do the whole thing. While the body dried we changed the color of the cab from red to green. Then we laid stencils on the sides of the box and labeled it
Thornhill.
We altered the state markings and added weight information to fit the papers we carried. Finally, we took off the South Dakota plates and substituted Illinois ones. The old plates went in the cab to be dumped in the first deep water we crossed. The stencils were cardboard. We burned them. The paints and brushes and the compressor were the sort of a thing a man might keep in a barn, so they stayed there.

We took the food along with us in the cab. He wanted to take along the Scotch and the beer, but I wouldn’t let him. I pointed out that it was against the law. We left them in the barn, and left the can opener so that whoever found the beer wouldn’t have to tear the tops off with his teeth. The sleeping bags we rolled up and left. George told me I ought to take the propane stove along, that it would come in handy on the island. I said I preferred fires in the open. He wanted to know what I did when it rained. I said I waited for it to stop, which it always did sooner or later, and I also said I didn’t want to talk about the island.

We were on our way by early afternoon.

The trip was boring. It was the kind of trip that was supposed to be boring, and the only way it would have been exciting was if something had gone wrong. Nothing did, which was the general idea, but after a few hundred miles I found myself almost wishing for a crisis.

We started out with the radio going. Halfway through Wisconsin neither of us could stand it anymore. The news casts were worst of all, because of course we listened to them intently, and of course there was nothing about us on them. The absence of publicity worked to our advantage, but it also worked on our nerves.

So I got edgy and kept changing stations, hoping to find one that would cease to irritate me, until George caught my mood and switched the thing off altogether. That left us alone with each other, which was worse, but I never even considered turning the damn thing on again, and I think if George had done so I would have shot him.

We tried talking, but that didn’t work either, and by the time we hit the Illinois line the motif had been established. Silence, that was the word for the day.

George drove as far as the Wisconsin pike. We picked it up a little ways south and west of Milwaukee. It occurred to me that Sharon lived in Milwaukee and that I wasn’t supposed to think about her. This might have been harder, but fortunately I took the wheel at that point and was able to think instead about driving. I had never driven anything that size before, and at first there was a lot of thinking involved.

There was also some tension, for a while, at turnpike entrances. But by the time we left Illinois and entered Indiana with George driving again—I couldn’t worry much about our cover slipping. The papers were in order, the weight was right, the truck was clean, and there was just no reason on earth for anyone to suspect otherwise.

We didn’t even have to worry about a speeding ticket, because the speed limit was seventy and everybody was doing eighty and our truck couldn’t make more than sixty-seven with a tail wind. It got so that it didn’t much matter which of us was driving. When I drove I had my hands on the wheel and my foot on the gas pedal and my eyes on the road. When George drove I had both feet on the floor, my hands in my lap, and my eyes either closed or on the road, looking at the same view that was there in front of me ever since Chicago.

There was nothing to do but think, and most of the thoughts that came to mind concerned subjects I had already determined not to think about. I didn’t want to review the past or muse about the future, and that left only the present, and the present was me and George and the truck. My mind couldn’t do very much with the truck, so that left me and George.

I did a lot of thinking about both of us.

This went on for a long time. Sometimes it was day and sometimes it was night. Sometimes it snowed, but there was never much snow, and toward the end there was no snow on the ground, either.

Sometimes I dozed off, but not often, and I never dropped into anything more than a light dream state. George was eating pills again and, as far as I knew, never even closed his eyes.

And then, after close to eighteen hundred miles of driving and roughly thirty hours of endless tedium, George made a phone call.

It was eight at night, Thursday. We were in Georgia, we had been in Georgia for hours. The current road was a stretch of the Interstate Highway System with the services off the road. George took one of the exits and drove to a service station. The gauge showed almost half a tank, so I asked why.

“I want to call ahead.”

“Fine.”

“Want to tag along?”

“Why? You’re a big boy, you know how to make a phone call. The dime goes in the little slot in the middle. The big one’s for quarters.”

“Suit yourself.”

He was gone about ten minutes. By the time he came out I had paid for the gas and moved the truck clear of the pumps. He got into the cab next to me. I looked at him, and he had an odd expression on his face. I tried to remember the last time I’d seen it.

“I called them,” he said.

“And?”

“They were surprised. They hadn’t heard a word, they didn’t think we took it off. They can take deliver at 3:30 tomorrow afternoon in Tampa.”

“What’s that, three hundred miles? No problem.”

He said, “They made a point of telling me to bring it straight in tonight. They know a warehouse where we can put the truck, and they’ll give us beds for the night.”

“Sounds good.”

“You think so?”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.” He sat silent, opened his mouth to say something, then clammed up again.

“What?”

“Something in his voice. We talked in Spanish and it’s harder to read a voice in a foreign language. Know what I mean?”

I decided to let him do it himself.

“I’ll tell you,” he said when I didn’t. “They might be thinking about a cross.”

“So we’ll go to Tampa and stay somewhere else.”

“I thought of that. I don’t know.” His eyes caught mine, then dropped. He waited a beat, then straightened up with decision. “No,” he said. “No, what it comes down to is I don’t like Tampa. They want delivery at 3:30; that’s when we show up at the pier. Tampa, the whole city is so full of so many people, I don’t want to spend an extra minute in it. Where are we now? Is there a city around?”

I checked the map. “Waycross. Brunswick. Hmmm.”

“Something substantial. Are we anywhere near Savannah?”

“Oh, so we are. It’s closer than either of the others, actually. I missed it.”

“Well, that’s good. At least it sounds good to me. What do you think?”

“About what?”

“About spending the night in Savannah and hitting Tampa tomorrow. What did you think we were talking about?”

“Oh,” I said. I took a breath. “I’m sorry, I think my mind is coming apart at the seams. I guess it sounds good. At this point you could tell me to go to Washington and I would do it. Where do you want to stay? I know Savannah, but I mean
where in
Savannah—”

He put a hand on my arm. “Easy,” he said and started chuckling. “I knew I was in bad shape, but you’re even more of a case. Let me drive. We could both do with ten hours in a real bed. Don’t you worry, I’ll find us something.”

I wasn’t worried.

What he found us was a tourist court that catered to long-haul truckers. There were three rigs already parked there, so we could forget about being conspicuous. He got us two cabins about twenty yards apart. We locked up the truck, and he went to his cabin and I went to mine.

I turned on the light, closed the door, locked it. I took off my trucker’s clothes and hung them on a peg. I unstrapped my shoulder harness, took the gun out, and put the harness itself on the cabin’s only chair.

I took a quick look through the window. George had already turned out his light.

The bed was a double. I took it down and put both pillows under the covers. I stepped back and decided they looked too white, so I wrapped the top one in the bedspread. I left the light on for ten minutes, then turned it off.

I carried the Magnum and stood behind the door in the darkness.

He waited an hour and twenty minutes. I stood there in my underwear while the gun got heavier and heavier. I didn’t move or make a sound. When the waiting got hard I thought how hard it was for him, and then I knew I could wait all night if I had to.

But I didn’t have to.

I didn’t hear him approach. He was damned good. The first sound I heard was a tentative scratching at the door, like a cat wanting to come in. Then my name repeated twice. Loud enough so I would hear it if I was awake, soft enough so that it would never wake me.