He put a short piece of pipe in his pocket and left the lights burning and walked out of the house.
– 15 –
THE PLACE WAS thirty miles out of town. Ross’s odometer showed twenty-nine and a half when Cutter said, “This’ll do. Pull over.”
He slid it over against the wooded embankment and switched off. The two FBI cars parked in tandem behind them. Cutter stepped out and spread the topographical map across the trunk of the car and played his flashlight on it. The eight FBI agents walked forward and crowded around.
Cutter said, “Ross and I and four of you will walk it from here—sound travels in these hills, he’ll hear the cars coming. You four give us forty minutes, then drive in. This car and your first cruiser you drive him into the farm. The second cruiser waits down at the foot of his driveway with two men in it.” He put his finger on the map. “The Scudder farm. Pay attention to these contour lines—that driveway’s damned steep.”
Greiff said, “Any chance he’d have it booby-trapped?”
“No. He’s not a killer. There may be telltales.”
“He’s not a killer—what is he then?”
“We want him. That’s all you need to know.”
Greiff wasn’t used to being talked to that way; it showed on his middle-aged face. He was the District Director out of Atlanta and he had the habit of command.
A car came down the road, an old one jouncing on its springs. It slowed to a crawl and the three men inside it gave Cutter’s party a xenophobic scrutiny. One of the FBI men slid his hand under his jacket. The, old car moved on. Greiff said, “They’ll figure us for revenuers—never mind.”
Ross was looking at the map again. He saw how the farm tilted, how the driveway corkscrewed up from the road. If it was like the other places they’d passed it would be crowded pretty close by the forest.
Cutter said, “He’s expecting us. All right, he won’t be in the house. He’ll be out in the woods watching.” Cutter’s finger moved along the lines of the map. “We won’t walk all the way to the yard. We’ll cut off the driveway and fan out through the trees. Three of us—I’ll take you two—move left. Ross and these two move right. Everybody keeps his flare pistol charged and ready. We’ll work our way through the woods and bracket the place. For God’s sake don’t go crashing around—keep your eye on where you’re walking and don’t blunder into any dead trees. Now if you spot him fire a flare. If you don’t just settle down and wait.”
Cutter turned to Greiff. “It’ll take us about forty minutes to get positioned. Give us that long and then start up. The last car waits at the foot of the driveway on the main road. The other two go right up the driveway like you’ve got business there. Don’t crawl but don’t rush it. Keep your lights on bright. Drive right up into the yard and turn the cars around so you can pull out fast if you’ve got to. Then get out the bullhorn and challenge the house. Don’t go charging it, just give him a shout—talk to him about tear gas, show your shotguns.”
“Then what?”
“He’ll have some diversion set up. A fire bomb in the barn or something. Don’t stick your necks out and don’t fall for it. Just yell at him. He’ll make a move. It won’t be from the house. One of us in the trees ought to be in earshot when he does—we’ll light him up like Times Square with flares. Then we box him and throw down on him. Got it? All right—come on, let’s walk.”
There was a good chance he’d be long gone. He’d had more than a half hour since Greiff had tested the phone. But Cutter had insisted he’d be there waiting for them. “He didn’t set this up with all that care just to leave us with a cold trail. You’ve got to understand this is a game to him. He wants to see our faces.”
“I wish I was as sure of that as you are. Those chapters I read didn’t look like kiddy time to me.”
“They’re not. They had to be the genuine article, hot enough to scorch a lot of big people. Otherwise we wouldn’t be playing his game.”
They’d nailed him on the phone call to Ives actually but the Southworth Bond paper had brought them close and they’d have made him on that alone; the phone call had just speeded it up. He’d bought two hundred sheets of it in Chatsworth and then he’d bought a ream in Birmingham. Chatsworth was less than a hundred miles from here. But the phone call to Ives in New York had been placed from Adairsville and there were only nine phones in town, one in a pay booth between the gas station and the country store. The storekeeper knew Mr. Hannaway, recognized the composite Identikit portrait and said Mr. Hannaway had bought a big stock of groceries three days ago. The kid at the gas station described Mr. Hannaway’s Pontiac and remembered filling it and the five-gallon jerrycan in the trunk. The kingpin in town was a back-porch country lawyer who owned the lumberyard and auto repair yard, and probably a distillery and half a dozen county politicians, and sidelined in real estate; he’d rented the Scudder farm to Mr. Hannaway and had received a second month’s rent in advance just six days ago. Ross had been pleased with their detective work until Cutter told him Kendig had planned it that way.
They walked up the driveway slowly, spread out. Ross’s ankle snagged something and he heard a distant tinkle—a cowbell, he thought; he listened for it again but it didn’t repeat. They moved ever more slowly, keeping close to the trees on either side of the rutted drive. Lamplight winked vaguely through the trees. The moon was hazed with a thin cloud cover but there was light enough to see where you were going. The flare pistol in his hand was slippery with his sweat; he shifted it to his left hand and wiped his palm on his trousers.
Cutter stopped them and made hand motions. Ross took his two men into the forest and led the way with great caution, well back below the perimeter of the yard; only now and then could he catch a wink of the lamps. The footing was soft and quiet—a half-rotted carpet of needles. He touched one of the FBI men in the chest and pointed; the FBI man nodded and moved uphill and Ross waited until the man blended into the darkness. Then he took his remaining companion on with him, crossed another seventy-five yards and left the man posted in the trees and continued alone. He keened the night with eyes and ears, breathing silently with his mouth open; he shifted the flare pistol again to his left hand, dried his right hand and brought out his .38 revolver.
He crossed into a stand of younger growth; there had been a fire here at some time, there were no big trees. Younger growth had sprouted and some of the saplings were ten or twelve feet high, no more. But they were close together and he had to move by inches to avoid sound. Above and to the left he could see the lamps of the house more clearly. Every two or three steps he stopped bolt still to scan the shadows. There was a racket of insects, and he heard water running somewhere—a creek or a river.
He came to an opening that swathed irregularly from left to right. It began above him in a tangle of dead brush and it disappeared below him into heavier forest growth. He knelt and saw that some of the saplings had been sawed off close to the ground. Man-made then. For what purpose?
It was a puzzle he couldn’t solve without more evidence and in any case it probably didn’t matter. He studied it in both directions and then stepped across into the trees beyond and moved on, angling closer toward the house now. Cutter would be some-where not far to his right, having come around the opposite way. This would be about right. He settled down to wait.
He was down on one knee sweeping the yard with his eyes when he heard or felt something but he didn’t have time to move; a hand clutched his mouth and jaw, something rigid jabbed his spine and in his panic he heard a whisper:
“Freeze.”
The man was behind him, it was probably a gun in his back and no amount of hand-to-hand instruction at the academy could prepare a man to counter that. Ross didn’t stir; he hardly even breathed.