“Sure! Come on up!”
“What for? You come down!”
Beaghler didn’t have a response for that one. Parker told him, “You want help carrying the body.”
“Help me carry the body!”
“What for? Leave the bastard where he is!”
“Damn,” Parker said. “Beaghler, start down the hill. But move slow.”
Beaghler obediently started to move. Parker said softly after him, “And I mean slow.”
Beaghler nodded. His whole manner was serious and slow, and his sense of balance didn’t seem very good. He inched his way down the slope.
Parker slid backwards a few feet down the opposite slope, then got to his feet and ran to his left, staying below the brow of the hill, out of sight of both Beaghler and Uhl. A gully over to the left—but how far? And would he be able to find it from this side?
He would; the ridge-line was swaybacked at one point, as though God’s hand had one day given it an idle karate chop. Parker moved upward through fairly large stones, his feet making little avalanches in his wake, and then he could see the gully snaking down the far slope. Off to his right he caught a glimpse of Beaghler, halfway down to the flat. Uhl wasn’t in his line of sight from here.
He hurried down the gully, half running and half sliding. It twisted and turned, but tended mostly to the right. Twice he caught glimpses of the house out on the flat, and once he saw Uhl, waiting with his hands on his hips about fifteen feet this side of the house, watching Beaghler.
The gully got broader and shallower near the bottom, reminiscent of the streambed they’d been following coming out here. Parker crouched as he hurried down, but now he could see Uhl clearly, ahead and to the right, with the house behind him. And Beaghler, almost to the bottom of the hill.
Movement must have caught Uhl’s eye. He had a gun in his hand, and all at once he was firing toward Parker. Three quick shots, and then he turned and raced for the house.
Beaghler had flung himself to the ground, and was lying there face down with both forearms over his head. Parker dropped to his right, half lying and half sitting against the side of the gully. He braced his arm against a boulder and fired twice at Uhl. The second shot, Uhl flipped forward, dug his left shoulder into the ground, rolled completely over, got to his feet still running, and ran off to the right on an angle away from the house for half a dozen strides before realizing he was going the wrong way. Parker was just squeezing off another shot at him when he veered back in the right direction, so that one missed.
There was no telling where the one bullet had hit, or how much longer Uhl could keep moving. Parker got to his feet again and ran down the rest of the gully and out across the flat toward the house.
Uhl reached the building, but didn’t go inside. Instead, he ran around the house toward the car. Parker ran across the flat, heading for the other corner of the house, which was nearest him.
The Ford engine roared. Parker reached the house, ran along the side and out to the front, and saw the Ford just starting to move, making a hard U-turn to come around toward the dirt road leading away from here.
Parker braced himself against the corner porch support. The Ford’s rear wheels were spinning in the dirt, Uhl apparently having the accelerator on the floor. The car was rocking, making its tight U, picking up speed. Parker fired two shots into the driver, and knew they’d both hit home.
The car was still moving, still accelerating, still on its tight curve; and now the horn was blowing. Uhl’s foot was on the accelerator, his chest was on the horn ring. The car was coming around in its circle, shooting up double spouts of dust in its wake, moving faster every second.
Parker ducked away to the left and the Ford smashed into the corner of the porch where he’d been standing. The roof support, old and dry, snapped like a pencil, and that whole end of the porch roof came down, crashing onto the car’s hood.
The horn was still blaring, the wheels were still spinning and gouging up dust storms, and now the engine could be heard laboring higher and higher, straining up toward the top of its scale with Uhl’s foot still pressed on the accelerator. Uhl was a dark slumped figure inside the car, unmoving, past worrying about.
Beaghler. Parker turned away from the straining Ford and hurried back down the side of the house toward the hill again. He could see Beaghler sitting on the ground back there, a few feet up the slope.
There wasn’t any more need to run. Parker strode away from the house and across the flat. Behind him, the horn brayed and the engine screamed.
He was halfway to Beaghler when the explosion came. It wasn’t very big, a flat crump sound that vibrated the ground slightly and faded at once in the surrounding emptiness. Parker looked over his shoulder and saw a line of greasy black smoke writing itself upward into the air.
Beaghler hadn’t moved. When Parker got to him, Beaghler grinned slightly, shakily, and said, “Well, you got him.”
“Yes.”
“I’m no trouble to you,” Beaghler said. “You don’t have to do anything about me.”
“That’s the mistake I made with Uhl,” Parker said.
Eight
Parker drove the ATV southward through scrubland, looking for a way over or around the ridge separating him from the house. The thick brush-stroke of black smoke drawn upward into the sky was his guide to where he wanted to be, but for the first twenty minutes he couldn’t find a way to get there. Then the hill flattened somewhat, in an area where the trees grew thicker, and Parker worked his way through the trees as though through a labyrinth, occasionally having to back out of a spot where the trunks were too close together. He couldn’t see the smoke from in here, but he maintained his direction fairly well, and when he emerged at last to where the trees were once more sparse, the smoke was up to his left and he was on the correct side of the ridge.
Driving was easier over here, on the flats, but it still took a quarter of an hour to cover the distance back to the house. When he got there, he saw that the house too had caught fire, and both house and car were now little more than black skeletons, both still smoldering. He made a wide sweep around the spot, picked up the dirt road, and headed east.
Something over an hour later he came to a blacktop road which was also mainly east-west. He followed it east until he came to a town that called itself Tracy. At a pay phone in a gas station there, while the ATV’s tank was being filled, he made a long-distance call to Mackey. There was no answer from his room, so Parker told the desk clerk, “Send somebody out to the pool for him. He’ll be out there.”
It took a couple minutes, but abruptly there was a click and Mackey’s open voice: “Yeah? Hello?”
“Hello, it’s me.”
“What? Oh, yeah.” He sounded very cheerful. “How’d things go?”
“Good. What about things there?”
Mackey’s big grin could be heard in his voice. “It’s on,” he said.
Part 3
One
Stan Devers was walking. It was about eleven at night, traffic on the highway was light, and as he strode along the shoulder the crunching of gravel beneath his feet gave him a kind of company.
Lights up ahead—something useful? Yes. A motel. Devers smiled, but didn’t hurry, didn’t alter his pace. He had all the time in the world, unfortunately.
It took nearly ten minutes to get to the motel, a sprawled-out complex of buildings with a swimming pool, a restaurant, and a separate bar. Devers angled across the blacktop to the office and went inside.
There was a girl clerk on duty at the desk. Devers walked over to her, smiling his most easygoing smile. He was twenty-eight, tall, muscular in a beachboy way. with blond hair and a pleasant square-jawed face. He’d had a string of bad luck recently, but he still looked presentable in his sport jacket and slacks, and he only took it as his due when the girl returned his smile with warmth and some obvious interest.