“Sonny,” Forrest said in a kindly voice, “I been in this business a lot longer’n you, and I know what it means to be after a man, to track him for a long time, and to corner him. Then the idea of anyone but you takin’ him is enough to drive you right up into the rafters.”
“Yes,” Delaney nodded miserably. “Something like that.”
“But you see my side of it, don’t you, Captain? I got to call them. I’ll do it anyway, but I’d rather you say, ‘All right.’”
“All right. I can understand it. How do you get them?”
“Radio in my wagon. I can reach the troop. I’ll be right back.”
The Chief moved off, up the dirt road, with a remarkably light stride for a man his age and weight. Captain Delaney stood by Blank’s car, looking through the window at the coat, the shoes, the wig. They already had the shapeless, dusty look of possessions of a man long dead.
He should be feeling an exultation, he knew, at having snubbed Daniel Blank. But instead he felt a sense of dread. Reaction to the excitement of the morning, he supposed, but there seemed to be more to it than that. The dread was for the future, for what lay ahead. “Finish the job,” he told himself, “Finish the job.” He refused to imagine what the finish might be. He remembered what his Army colonel had told him: “The best soldiers have no imagination.”
He turned as Chief Forrest came driving through the sprung gate in an old, dilapidated station wagon with “Chilton Police Department” painted on the side in flaking red letters. He pulled up alongside Blank’s car. “On their way,” he called to Delaney, “About twenty minutes or so, I reckon.”
He got from behind the wheel with some difficulty, grunting and puffing, then reached back inside to haul out two more six-packs of beer. He held them out to Delaney.
“For your boys,” he said. “While they’re waiting.”
“Why, thank you, Chief. That’s kind of you. Hope it’s not leaving you short.”
Forrest’s big belly shook with laughter. “That’ll be the day,” he rumbled.
The Captain smiled, took the six-packs over to his cars. “Better get out and stretch your legs,” he advised his men. “Looks like we’ll be here awhile. The State boys are on their way. Here’s some beer, compliments of Chief Forrest of the Chilton Police Department.”
The men got out of the cars happily, headed for the beer. Delaney went back to the Chief.
“Could we take a close look at Devil’s Needle?” he asked. “Why sure.”
“I’ve got three snipers with me, and I’d like to locate a spot where they could cover the entrance to the chimney and the top of the rock. Just in case.”
“Uh-huh. This fugitive of yours armed, Captain?”
“Just the ice ax, as far as I know. As for a gun, I can’t guarantee either way. Chief, you don’t have to come with me. Just point out the way, and I’ll get there.”
“Shit,” Chief Forrest said disgustedly, “that’s the first dumb thing you’ve said, sonny.”
He started off with his light, flat-footed stride; Captain Delaney stumbled after him. They made their way down a faint dirt path winding through the skeleton trees.
Then they came to the out-crops. Captain Delaney’s soles slipped on the shiny rocks while Chief Forrest stepped confidently, never missing his footing, not looking down, but striding and moving like a gargantuan ballet dancer to the base of Devil’s Needle. When Delaney came up, breathing heavily, the Chief had opened his holster flap and was bending it back, tucking it under that sweat-stained belt.
Delaney jerked his chin toward the dogleg holster. “What do you carry, Chief?” he asked, one professional to another.
“Colt forty-four. Nine-inch barrel. It belonged to my daddy. He was a lawman, too. Replaced the pin and one of the grips, but otherwise it’s in prime condition. A nice piece.”
The Captain nodded and turned his eyes, unwilling, to Devil’s Needle. He raised his head slowly. The granite shaft poked into the sky, tapering slightly as it rose. There were mica glints that caught the late afternoon sunlight, and patches of dampness. A blotter of moss here and there. The surface was generally smooth and wind-worn, but there was a network of small cracks: a veiny stone torso.
He squinted at the top. It was strange to think of Daniel G. Blank up there. Near and far. Far.
“About eighty feet?” he guessed aloud.
“Closer to sixty-five, seventy, I reckon,” Chief Forrest rumbled.
Up and down. They were separated. Captain Delaney had never felt so keenly the madness of the world. For some reason, he thought of lovers separated by glass or a fence, or a man and woman, strangers, exchanging an eye-to-eye stare on the street, on a bus, in a restaurant, a wall of convention or fear between them, yet unbearably close in that look and never to be closer.
“Inside,” he said in a clogged voice, and stepped carefully into the opening of the vertical cleft, the chimney. He smelled the rank dampness, felt the chill of stone shadow. He tilted his head back. Far above, in the gloom, was a wedge of pale blue sky.
“A one-man climb,” Chief Forrest said, his voice unexpectedly loud in the cavern. “You wiggle your way up, using your back and feet, then your hands and knees as the rock squeezes in. He’s up there with an ice ax, ain’t no man getting up there now unless he says so. You’ve got to use both hands.”
“You’ve made the climb, Chief?”
Forrest grunted shortly. “Uh-huh. Many, many times. But that was years ago, before my belly got in the way.”
“What’s it like up there?”
“Oh, about the size of a double bedsheet. Flat, but sloping some to the south. Pitted and shiny. Some shallow rock hollows. Right nice view.”
They came outside, Delaney looked up again.
“You figure sixty-five, seventy feet?”
“About.”
“We could get a cherry-picker from the Highway Department, or I could bring up a ladder truck from the New York Fire Department. They can go up a hundred feet. But there’s no way to get a truck close enough; not down that path and across the rocks. Unless we build a road. And that would take a month.”
They were silent then.
“Helicopter?” Delaney said finally.
“Yes,” Forrest acknowledged. “They could blast him from that. Tricky in these downdrafts and cross-currents, but I reckon it could be done.”
“It could be done,” Captain Delaney agreed tonelessly. “Or we could bring in a fighter plane to blow him away with rockets and machine guns.”
Silence again.
“Don’t set right with you, does it, sonny?” the Chief asked softly.
“No, it doesn’t. To you?”
“No. I never did hanker to shoot fish in a barrel.”
“Let’s get back.”
On the way, they selected a tentative site for the snipers. It was back in a clump of firs, offering some concealment but providing a clear field of fire covering the entrance to the chimney and the top of Devil’s Needle.
The State police had not yet arrived. Delaney’s men were lounging in and out of the cars, nursing their beers. The three pale snipers stood a little apart from the others, talking quietly, hugging their rifles in canvas cases.
“Chief, I’ve got to make some phone calls. Do I go into Chilton?”
“No need. Right there.” Forrest waved his hand toward the gate-keeper’s cottage. He pointed out the telephone wire that ran on wooden poles back to the gravel road. “They keep that line open all winter. Highway crews plowing snow use it, and Park people who come in for early spring planting.”
They walked over to the weathered wooden shack, stepped up onto the porch. Delaney inspected the hasp closed with a heavy iron padlock.
“Got a key?” he asked.
“Sure,” the Chief said, pulling the massive revolver out of his holster. “Step back a mite, sonny.”
The Captain backed away hastily, and Chief Forrest negligently shot the lock away. Delaney noted he aimed at the shackle, not the body of the lock where a bullet might do nothing but jam the works. He was beginning to admire the old man. The explosion was unexpectedly loud; echoes banged back and forth; Delaney’s men rose uneasily to their feet. Two brown birds took off from the dry underbrush alongside the dirt road, went whirring off with raucous cries.