“No.”
“I get the feeling it bothers you.”
I shook my head. “No. Why should it?”
“Good point.”
A few miles later he said, “They would have talked, Paul.”
“No question about it. Not much they could have said, though. And if they got away in Omaha, then I’m not so sure they would have talked. Especially once they found out they’d been conned. They’d have kept their mouths shut forever.”
“What are the odds on all five of them getting clear in Omaha?”
“Long odds. Not much they could tell anybody.”
“They can describe you.”
“General Windy can do it better.”
“They can describe me, too. And pick out my photo, if it comes to that. Once they’re identified the truck becomes hot. That’s the only problem, right? We’ll have it cured before anybody identifies them or figures out that Sprague had a truck. From then on the identification works in our favor. What’ll you bet that at least two of the five are in the Klan? Or some other right-wing thing? That fits the Texas story, drags one more red herring across the road.”
“True.”
“You don’t sound convinced, Paul.”
“No, you’re right,” I assured him. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It’s over four hours now, they’re all dead. Unless—”
He looked at me. “Unless what? You saw them take the pills, didn’t you?
“Oh, sure. But say one of them threw up before the pill worked. Or had diarrhea and somehow flushed the pill before zero hour. And then he’d see the other men dropping like flies and he might want to tell somebody about it. Or say one pill just took a lot longer to dissolve, and the one left alive figured things out. You remember that movie with Edmund O’Brien? D.O.A. or something, he’s been fatally poisoned at the opening but he manages to get to the cops before he goes? I saw it years ago, I—”
“Oh, Christ.”
“Probably nothing to worry about, George.”
“You son of a bitch. You’re sitting there and smiling, you son of a bitch.”
“Well, you know,” I said. “I wouldn’t want you getting over-confident, George. Got to keep you honed to a keen edge.”
He let it hang there for a while. Then he laughed, but it sounded as though he was pushing it.
We were on the road ourselves not long after the truck convoy pulled out. The few things that had to be done beforehand were worth the time they took. Sooner or later someone was going to know something was wrong, and sooner or later a team from Fort Tree would check the route and find out what had happened and where. The idea was to make all this occur later instead of sooner.
We brought the stolen Chrysler back into the intercept area. It was clean, so we didn’t mind abandoning it, but it was an attention-getter, and this way it would be out of sight until the team from Fort Tree came down. We left all our road signs in place to insure that. Accidental discovery by some citizen would cut our lead time to the bone, and the road signs would keep most citizens off that stretch of road and might coax any others into interpreting anything they saw as an accident the authorities already knew about.
The bodies were easy. We had the snow to thank for that. George had already tucked our two majors into a drift, and when I went back to check out their pockets it was hard to find them, the snow had erased all traces. I decided it wasn’t worth digging them up and left them there.
We gave the other twelve the same treatment. We hauled them far enough from the road so that they would have been tough enough to spot even without the snow, and then piled white stuff on them. We left tracks in the snow, of course, but the wind figured to wipe them out within half an hour.
There were a lot of extra guns around — handguns returned to us by Sprague’s men, the M-14s, the Thompson, a few stray rifles. They went in the back of the van — “A dividend for our compañeros,” George called them. I figured it was quicker than burying them.
The van also got all of the garbage from the army Ford, plus my own luggage. Some of it would have to be destroyed, but we could paw through it at our leisure.
We left the crippled convertible at the side of the road. It was clean, like the Chrysler. My own rental car bothered me a little. I had cleaned it out, but it would trace to John NMI Walker, who in turn would trace to Lynch. They were going to guess Lynch anyway, so it didn’t really make a hell of a difference. Still, it bothered me; I told George we should have put it on one side of the empty trucks and he told me I was building a case out of nothing.
“Slam it into the convertible,” he suggested. “Make it look good.”
“Make what look good?”
“The accident, the reason why the road is closed. Hell, I don’t care. Dig a hole and bury it. Fold it up and put it in your pocket. Take it and shove—”
I got in the Chevy and drove it a nice steady twelve miles an hour into the upset convertible. Thinking back, I suppose the main reason I did this was because it’s the sort of thing everybody secretly wants to do. I was braced for the impact, of course, and I stopped accelerating instinctively a few instants before the collision, and twelve miles an hour is not all that fast, but it was still a hell of a sensation. And it did more damage to both cars than I had expected.
When I got out of the car George told me it looked like fun.
“It was,” I admitted. “If you want to try it, the Chrysler’s just down the road. You can make it a spectacular three-car smashup.”
For a moment I thought he was going to try it. Then he said, “Oh, the hell with it, it’s a waste of time. What did we forget?”
“Sprague’s jackets.”
They went in the van. So did the wallets we had taken from the five men. If there was anything else, we didn’t have the time to stand around figuring it out. We got in the cab, and George started it up and stalled it twice figuring out where the gears were. Once he got the hang of it, though, he wasn’t bad at all.
The radio announcer said we were listening to the Twin Cities’ home of countrypolitan music. He said this right after a newscast during which he had said nothing at all concerning our operation. This didn’t mean anything one way or the other. Whatever happened, it didn’t figure to make the papers. “Three months from now there might be a paragraph in Drew Pearson’s column,” George had said, “and then someone important will tell him please to write about something else, and he’ll expose a highway construction scandal. That’s all.”
The radio played something with too many guitars. George slowed the truck, killed the radio, and said we were here. At first I thought he was crazy. Then I saw that there was a space ten yards wide between two fences and that there were no trees in the space. That was the only indication that it was a road.
“There’s two feet of snow there,” I said.
“We’ll make it. I’ll back it in.”
We kept getting stuck and he kept rocking us loose and we were in the barn sooner than I’d have guessed possible. Partly in the barn, anyway; the cab and half of the rest remained uncovered. I was going to point this out to George, but he answered ahead of time. “No neighbors anywhere near here, and we can’t be seen from the road. C’mon.”
“What now?”
“Grab a broom. We’ve got a hundred yards of tracks to cover.”
There were brooms in the bam. We each took one and waded out to the road, walking in our own tire tracks. Then we backtracked all the way, using the brooms to fill the tracks with snow. The top ten inches of snow were loose and powdery, which made it easier. A wind would have been extra help. For the time being, though, we had to live without one.
It took a lot of time. Walking backwards, filling in tire tracks with a broom. A hundred yards, after all, was a substantial distance. It was approximately the length of my island, but it was a lot easier to walk the length of my island than to trudge backwards through snow, and—