“Okay, okay.”
Flagg opened the toolbox and pretended to rummage around inside. After a moment, Lou went out and closed the door behind him. Flagg straightened and stood at the door, listening, for a full minute. Then he opened the door and peered out. Lou had disappeared among the stacks of pallets.
Flagg closed the door again and locked it. There was a window in the rear wall, and he went to it and brushed some dust from the glass and looked out. He could see across to where the fuel pumps were located. The diesel tanker that had arrived earlier was parked there, and three men were standing around it. One end of a huge black petroleum hose was hooked to a bottom outlet on the first of the tanker’s two reservoirs; the other end disappeared into a large, square metal plate set into the concrete yard.
Underground tanks, Flagg thought, and then: Well, I’ll be damned! He had just realized that with that hose hooked to the bottom outlet on the reservoir, they couldn’t possibly be filling it; they were emptying it. Strange. The tanker was one of Tru-Test’s, not a delivery vehicle from a manufacturer. Why would they be emptying fuel oil from one of their own trucks back into the underground tanks? Unless...
Unless it wasn’t fuel oil, at all. Unless it was shine.
Flagg smiled a little and then frowned. Of course, that was it. They were storing the bootleg in the underground tanks. But it made his job that much more difficult. They brought the bootleg in the tankers from the point where it was being made, and he had no idea where that was. He had hoped they had the actual still operation here at Tru-Test. That would have made things one hell of a lot simpler.
He listened to the machinery sounds coming through the wall and thought about the door marked no admittance. With the moon being stored here, and distributed from here, they were obviously bottling it here, too. He knew what he would find on the other side of that door: a long three-sided roller belt, with stainless steel machinery along it which would fill, cap, label, and stamp the bottles of “Old Pilgrim,” with a direct pipeline to the storage tanks outside. But he didn’t need to get a look inside there, now.
Patiently, Flagg allowed fifteen minutes to pass by his wristwatch and then he closed up the toolbox and unlocked the door and stepped into the warehouse. He found his way to Door 5. Lou was writing on the clipboard again. “All fixed?” he asked as Flagg approached.
“Yeah.”
“What was the trouble?”
Flagg made up something.
Lou laughed. “I’m glad I don’t have your job.”
“Sometimes I wish I didn’t either,” Flagg said sourly. “Well, hang in there.”
“You too.”
He went down the steps and put the tool kit in the rear of the panel. He drove back to the front gate, and the same guard came out of the sentry box. “That was quick.”
“Sure,” Flagg answered. “That’s our motto.”
The guard opened the gates and Flagg drove out and turned south on Hathaway Road. He parked the rented panel in the parking lot behind a supermarket in Emmetville a quarter mile away. In the rear, he changed out of the coveralls and the baseball cap, back into his fishing clothes. Then he retrieved the camper and drove back to a spot on Hathaway Road where he could watch the main gates of Tru-Test through a pair of binoculars.
Half an hour later, he saw the diesel tanker come out through the gates. It turned south and passed him. Flagg waited until it got a good distance down the road, then started the camper and swung out after it.
The tanker turned west onto a county highway just before Emmetville. The highway looped around to the north, bypassing the town, and then swung east, climbing into the mountains. Flagg followed at a discreet distance. They had gone some fifteen miles when the tanker turned off onto another county road, this one in relatively poor repair. A mile into there, it turned again, this time onto a packed earth road flanked with signs reading PRIVATE PROPERTY-TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.
Flagg passed by, looking up the private road. A couple of hundred yards along he could see two men with rifles. A third man was swinging a heavy wooden gate open to allow the tanker admittance.
Flagg followed the county road for another mile, turned around, and came back again. The tanker had disappeared, and the gate was closed. The men were still there.
He drove directly to Barney’s Oasis.
Cabin 15 had green shutters and an old, rusty-framed swing in one corner of its narrow porch. Flagg knocked on the door. After a moment it opened and Terry Kenyon looked out. She was wearing the short miniskirt and tight white blouse that composed her waitress uniform.
“Are you alone?” he asked.
She nodded, standing aside, and he went in. The interior was furnished spartanly, but it was clean and had a comfortable feminine touch. Flagg barely glanced at it. He put his hands on her shoulders. “Listen, how well do you know this area?”
She didn’t draw back from his touch. “I grew up in Emmetville,” she answered. “What is it, Flagg? Did you find out something?”
“Maybe,” he said, and told her where he had followed the tanker. “Do you know where that private road leads?”
“To an old abandoned mine. There are a lot of them around here, from the old gold rush days, I suppose.”
“Anything else in the area?”
“Just woodland.”
“What about this mine?”
“Well, for a while it was turned into a gravel pit. Some special kind used in making concrete. But even that was abandoned, about ten years ago. I remember that a lot of gravel was taken out of the base of the hill, so that the pit almost reached the main mine shaft.”
“It’s still abandoned, as far as you know?”
“I heard that somebody had bought the property and was going to reactivate the pit,” Terry said. “But if they’ve begun yet, I wouldn’t know about it.”
“Okay,” Flagg said. “Now, is there any way in there besides that private road?”
“The road itself only goes as far as the gravel pit. There’s a spur track which comes in from the other side and reaches all the way up to the mine tower. I think it goes inside the hill through an auxiliary tunnel there.”
“Foot trails?”
“None that you could follow for very long.” She paused. “Do you think that’s where the moonshine is being made?”
Flagg shrugged. “I’m not sure,” he said. “How do I find that spur you mentioned?”
“Follow the county road past the private entrance. About five miles farther along, the main railroad track crosses it. Walk back on the tracks to the second switch. Not the first, but the second.”
“Right.”
“You’re not going up there alone, are you?” Terry asked. There was concern in her voice.
Flagg grinned. “Don’t worry about me,” he said. He moved to the door. “Thanks.”
“Will I see you again, Flagg?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Take care of yourself.” He slipped out and closed the door quietly behind him.
Flagg found the spur without difficulty.
The sun was setting, and there was less than an hour of daylight left. He moved quickly along the side of the track, keeping to the brush as much as possible, stopping occasionally to listen. He wore khakis now, which blended with the surrounding terrain better than black or dark beige clothing, and a new navy blue seaman’s knit cap pulled down to conceal his prematurely salt and pepper hair. He had a long-bladed hunting knife sheathed at his waist.
He thought about the shine operation as he went. Two weeks ago, after three days of abortive low flying over every inch of the county in a chartered plane, he had been forced to admit that the still was extremely well hidden. During his prolonged study of the wild, mountainous terrain, he had uncovered no signs of activity in isolated places, no telltale columns of smoke to point to the possible location of the cooker, no signs of pollution in the streams he subsequently checked. Nothing at all.