He focused and saw that the movement was at the doorway of a liquor store at the end of the block. The door completed its outward swing. The wiry man he had last seen at the Diplomat emerged, climbed into a battered station wagon. The station wagon swung in a U-turn, went north on the highway and out of town.
O’Hara honked, looked toward the restaurant. Nothing happened. He climbed out, took long strides to the door and hauled it open. Clancy was not in sight. O’Hara muttered a comment on Clancy’s ancestry and went back to the coupe. He got it rolling in the wake of the station wagon.
Angling away here and there from the highway as it ran arrow-straight across the desert were faintly-marked and little-used tracks that led to mining properties or homesteads. Given too much of a start, O’Hara knew, the wiry man could turn off on one of those and disappear again. Clancy would probably wonder why O’Hara had stranded him but he wouldn’t worry too much if he was stranded close enough to a bar.
The sun-bleached buildings of Alkali Center slid past and O’Hara hung the speedometer needle at sixty. Three miles ahead the station wagon was a crawling bug that jittered and shimmered in the heat ripples. O’Hara paced it, neither gaining nor dropping behind. Ten, fifteen miles drifted by.
The station wagon turned from the highway, began to raise a dustcloud that moved steadily across the wasteland toward the mountains. O’Hara slowed to a crawl and watched the dustcloud. He reached the twin ruts where the station wagon had turned off but he continued along the highway. If he could see the wiry man’s dusty wake, the wiry man wouldn’t miss one made by the coupe.
The cloud mounted higher ground and then stopped and disappeared at a spot that looked as though it might be from three to four miles off the highway. With the naked eye it was impossible to distinguish any habitation at that point but there must be something of the sort there. O’Hara pulled off the shoulder, stopped and checked his map. No county road was shown at that point, which indicated that the track gave access to some small mining property or homestead.
He debated the next move. There would be a township marshal or perhaps a deputy sheriff in Alkali Center. But it would take time to get back there, explain things and drive out again. Meanwhile the wiry man and his companions might be moving on. It would be smarter, O’Hara decided, to camp by the rathole and, if the rats ran, to run along with them.
A couple of centuries passed and finally the sun crept down to the jagged edge of mountains, suddenly took a dive the rest of the way. Fingers of darkness reached from the mountains and curved down onto the desert. At the far-off point where the dustcloud had dissolved, a yellow twinkle appeared.
O’Hara fiddled around with Clancy’s camera under the shine of the dashlight, setting exposure and shutter opening. Having dragged news photogs around with him for a dozen years, he had a fair working knowledge of the box. But he’d rather have had Clancy handling it. He got set with plate holders, stuffed three flashbulbs in his pockets. He was a little regretful now that he’d left Ernie’s gun in the Diplomat washroom.
But maybe it was just as well he didn’t have it because guns sometimes got a guy into gunfights. All he wanted was a picture of Mr. Rex Miller of Midland City with the three characters — if such a scene offered itself. He drove back to within a quarter mile of the side road, walked the rest of the way to the turnoff and struck out toward the twinkle of yellow light.
At eight o’clock by the green gleam of his wrist watch, he judged he was within a mile of the light, now a very defined square of orange in the blackness. O’Hara had cut that distance in half when twin lights, the night-eyes of an automobile, snapped on near the illumined window. They began to move, bore down directly on O’Hara.
He stepped off the track, crouched behind the circular bulk of a tumbleweed. A jackrabbit, startled from that cover, hopped out between the ruts, flopped his ears at the approaching lights and hopped away just in time to escape the wheels of the station wagon as it rushed
O’Hara was sure he could distinguish two figures in the car as its bulk blotted out briefly the star-dusted horizon. He swore softly; if one of the pair was Rex Miller all this heel-and-toe business across the desert would be largely wasted motion.
But at least someone was out there on the desert yet for the glowing window still hung in the night like a framed painting of fight. O’Hara plodded closer and closer until he was beginning to distinguish things in the room beyond the window.
He could see Ernie, the dark-faced man, seated at one end of a table. The other end was hidden from O’Hara until he worked himself off the road so that he could see into the room at an angle. He made a rough pleased sound in the back of his throat. Miller was at the other end of the table and he was shuffling a deck of cards. He pushed the deck out to the dark-faced man for a cut, took it back and began to deal. O’Hara could see him speak, laugh.
It was a nice sociable scene, just the thing that O’Hara would have ordered for the picture of the month.
He began to circle the building, which was flat-roofed and sprawling, a typical desert structure. He came upon a small derrick and windlass, propped over the black mouth of a mine shaft. He rounded a corner and almost bumped into the pale-green Cad. He devoted his attention to the car long enough to loosen the valve cores in two tires and leave them flattened. If he had to leave in a hurry, at least they wouldn’t be able to come after him any faster than their feet would carry them.
After that he hugged the wall of the building and worked his way slowly and silently to a point beside the lighted window.
Rex Miller’s crisp voice said: “Gin!”
Ernie swore. “Damn if you don’t have the damndest luck!”
Miller chuckled. “Science, my boy.”
There was the crisp snap of cards being shuffled. Ernie said: “Pour us some drinks, pal, while I shuffle. This lousy desert makes a guy dry.”
There was the click of glassware and O’Hara thought, this is it! He’d wanted to stall, to listen, to soak up any information they might drop in their conversation. But a picture like that was too good to lose, would be worth a thousand words he might overhear.
He slipped a bulb into the flashgun swiftly, fingered the shutter release, pivoted around to the window, holding the box chest high and at an angle to catch the whole table.
The flashbulb flared like lightning in the night.
The tableau was perfect. Rex Miller at the moment was pouring a drink in Ernie’s glass. Ernie was flipping a card to Miller. They had the relaxed smiling appearance of a couple of pals whiling away an evening at gin rummy.
The pose held for the instant it took to register on the plate and then sprang to pieces.
Miller dropped the bottle and jerked his face, wide open at the jaws, around toward the window. Ernie spun his cards away and all in the same smooth motion went for his gun, kicked the chair away from him and whirled toward O’Hara.
O’Hara flipped the hot flashbulb out of the holder at Ernie. Ducking back from the window, he saw Ernie jerking away from the arc of the flashbulb. A gun went off inside the room.
O’Hara made the corner of the building, rounded it and broke into a crouching run that took him off into the black wilderness of sage and sand. He headed for the highway, guided now and then by the swift passage of faraway sparks that were headlights.
He had put a quarter-mile between himself and the building when he saw the headlamps of the Cadillac go on. They went off again quickly. The Cad wasn’t going to roll for a while.
Chapter Four
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