“Well, I’m not going to take you. I don’t like driving in this any more than you do. And I told you — I’m expecting someone.”
He twisted his head away again. She could hear him mumbling to himself. Abruptly he turned back.
“All right — we’ll do it the hard way.”
He’d jammed his hands in the pockets of his coat. She’d thought it was because he was still cold. But now the left one came out holding a pistol.
Ben had used the emergency phone in a pull-off to call the cops, and now, a quick fifteen minutes later, a patrol car pulled in. Ben slid out of the Probe and walked over to it and opened the right-hand door. Frank Bauer, the deputy who patrolled this end of the county, sat behind the wheel. He was a friend of Sue Corwin’s and maybe wanted to be more than that, and he didn’t look too happy to see him.
“What’re you doing up here?”
“I swung by to visit a friend,” Ben said.
He didn’t ask what friend — he’d already figured that out — and the look in his eyes said he didn’t like it.
“Get in, Marciano, and we’ll go look at this mysterious car of yours.”
“It’s got a bullet hole in the windshield. I thought you ought to know, Frank.”
“You’re pretty good at finding things with bullet holes in them,” he said sarcastically.
“Hey, I caught one myself once.”
They swung out of the parking lot. Bauer took it pretty fast — maybe just to put Ben in his place. But he could drive all right. He looked like he could mush through just about anything.
He shot a glance at Ben. “What do you figure about this car?”
“Not a lot. Just that the guy in the passenger seat didn’t much like being there and took the first opportunity to get out. And, oh yeah, that the guy with the pistol was in the backseat.”
“What makes you think that?”
“The placement of the bullet hole in the windshield. That’s just a hunch, though. I’m a private investigator, not a ballistics expert.”
“So what happened to the guy that got out — if you know so much?”
Ben shrugged. “He’s off in the woods somewhere. Probably an icicle by now. You sure keep the heat cranked up in this car.”
“I like my creature comforts. And if that’s a cigarette you’re reaching for, we got a policy against smoking in patrol cars.”
They came up on the ditched Toyota, and Bauer brought the car to a halt. Ditched in more ways than one, Ben thought as he saw it again.
They got out and looked at it. Bauer opened the driver’s-side door and peered at a sticker on the windshield. “It’s a rental,” he said.
“I already figured that.”
“That means we’ll be able to trace back and see who rented it.”
“If they used their right names.”
Ben walked around to the other side of the car. Bauer glanced at him once, then leaned back inside. And that was when Ben bent his knees and retrieved something from under the right front fender. He’d spotted it from the road. By the time Bauer looked up again it was already under his coat where the snow it had collected began to melt into his shirt.
“Nothing much I can do here,” Bauer said, “except call a wrecker and get this thing hauled into town.”
“What about the guy who ran off into the woods?”
“What about him?”
“That shot through the windshield might not have been the only one fired.”
“What do you think? That he’s out there wounded?”
“I don’t have any idea, Frank.”
Bauer got out his flashlight and swung the beam into the woods. Nothing but black tree trunks and white snow. The footprints weren’t even visible anymore — which meant that a body probably wouldn’t be either.
Bauer shook his head. “I’ll need help, and where am I going to get it on a night like this? Come on. I’ll take you back to your car.”
As soon as Ben was inside the Probe, he lit a cigarette. He waited until the patrol car was gone, then he reached inside his coat and got the thing he’d found beside the car.
It was an eight-by-ten glossy — enlarged from the fuzzy look of it — and it had a heel print on the back of it where somebody’d stepped on it as they’d made a hasty exit from the Toyota. It showed a computer screen, and it looked, from the angle, as if it had been shot from above and behind. The contents of computer screens are notoriously difficult to photograph in normal light, but some sort of masking filter had been used and you could read every word and number. In the left-hand corner of the screen was a company logo that read Aerosmith. Directly below it were the first dozen lines of a computer program. It wasn’t written in anything simple either, but in some sort of compressed scientific language.
Ben thought about the angle of the shot. You’d get an angle like that from a camera mounted near the top of an office wall — say, behind the grille of a ventilation duct. Then he noticed the fuzzy black bar that ran horizontally across the bottom part of the picture. No wonder the photograph was so grainy — it hadn’t been taken directly off the computer; it was a shot of a television screen.
All at once Ben noticed how cold it was getting in the car. He also remembered that he had a rather important engagement and realized that excuses about wintry roads would only take him so far.
He got the engine started and switched on the headlights, and as he did so a car armored with snow passed by. It was a four-door, and his lights briefly flooded the driver’s seat. What the hell, he thought. That was Sue at the wheel.
For about five seconds he didn’t react. Then he shoved the gear lever into first and slewed out of the parking area.
It took him awhile to catch up on the slippery road, but when he did he saw she wasn’t alone. There was a man in the passenger seat beside her. He glanced over his shoulder as the headlights of Ben’s Probe came up from behind.
Something was screwy here — something other than Sue being out on the road when she should’ve been home waiting for him. But he didn’t know what it was until the man stared back at the Probe again. And then he only half knew it because even though a bell of recognition rang in his head, no name and no connection accompanied it.
He decided to juice things along a bit. He pulled up on the bumper of the sedan and flashed his brights on.
The guy stared back at him. Ben could see the shocked look in his eyes — as if it weren’t headlights hitting him in the face but blows from a fist.
He jerked his head toward the front of the car again and hunched his shoulders. The bastard’s terrified, Ben realized. Then he saw how tense Sue was at the wheel and figured out that the guy wasn’t a welcome companion.
The man stared back again. He couldn’t seem to resist doing it. Sue glanced sidewise at him, her hands tight on the wheel.
Holy crap, Ben thought. That’s Gary Karlin. And wheels turned and tumblers fell into place and all at once he knew what this was about — the car in the ditch, the bullet hole in the windshield, and Karlin tense as a wound-up spring in the car ahead.
Karlin tore his gaze away and stared through the windshield. But he couldn’t keep it up, and in less than ten seconds his eyes were locked on the Probe again.
Up ahead a vehicle with a flashing yellow light on the roof was approaching. It was the wrecker Frank Bauer had called.
Another sidewise glance from Sue. Her hands tensed on the wheel. Even at this distance Ben could see what she was going to do. He eased off the gas — and just in time, too.
Sue slammed on the brakes full force. The sedan spun on its axis and came to a stop with its headlights beaming into the woods. Ben just managed to get the Probe stopped before it slammed into the side of it. Sue flung herself out the left-hand door and ran toward the wrecker. Karlin made a grab at her and missed. Then he tumbled out the door on his own side. There was a steep bank on the right and he couldn’t scramble away into the woods. And the driver of the wrecker had just now applied his brakes and was sliding to a stop on the left. Karlin had a pistol in his hand. He tried to run between the wrecker and the Probe. Ben pushed the door handle down, timed it as Karlin came around the front fender, and then drove the door into his chest. Karlin’s feet went out from under him, and Ben had to reach down and grab him by the collar and drag him out of the way of the rear wheels of the wrecker.