“Faster, Robby,” Shay said.
We left her with Krimbow and went over to Garver’s house. I cut the lights before we came over the last rise. The night was bright enough so that I could see the turnoff to Garver’s place. The willows made the shadows heavy. I cut the motor.
A voice at the window said, “Nice and easy, now. Press the palms of your hands against the car roof.”
The pencil beam shot through the window. The faint rebound of it picked up the trooper’s brass and the gun-muzzle glint.
“Oh, Mr. Pritchard!” the trooper said, recognizing Shay.
“Where’s Burns?”
“Right here, Shay,” the big trooper captain said softly. “Nothing yet. We’ve got a net all around the place. The old man’s been in bed for hours.”
Shay got out on his side. He latched the car door softly. “The tip is good, Ed. The only danger is that when it went wrong on the Endor City end, they might have had a chance to call their man off.”
“Jim Garver pays his taxes. He gets protection.”
“Have you planted a man in the house?”
“Haven’t wanted to take that chance.”
Shay was silent. He said, “I’ve been in there. I know the floor plan. Mind if I work my way close?”
“Better leave it to us, Shay.”
An awakened bird made small throaty sounds and subsided. Off in the swamps the peepers shrilled endlessly. Over on the main highway truck motors thrummed. The gray in the east began to be touched with rose. The car, invisible moments before, emerged from the blackness.
I glanced at Shay. He had an odd expression on his face. He had a listening look.
“I’m going to the house,” Shay said.
“You gave us the tip, Shay,” Burns said with a hint of anger, “but this is my show. When I call it off, which will be soon, you can go take a look.”
“Garver has lived alone,” Shay said. “He has farmer’s habits. The way the house sets, we can see the kitchen windows from here. There’s no light on yet. Why?”
“Maybe he was tired.”
“And maybe,” Shay said, “he’s dead tired.”
“A mouse couldn’t have crept in there since we started covering the place,” Burns said impatiently.
“And suppose the mouse was already holed up in there before you circled the place? Or had killed him and gone?”
“I had a trooper phone him and hang up when he answered. The light went on, so he was okay then.”
“He should be up by now,” Shay insisted.
“Okay, okay,” Burns said wearily. “We’ll both go take a look.”
Nobody stopped me, so I followed along.
The house was as tight as a drum. We circled it. When Burns shined his light into the bedroom window through the screen and began to curse softly and slowly, I looked in.
His bare, gnarled feet hung motionless, six inches from the floor. He wore faded blue-and-white flannel pajamas. The over-turned chair was off to his left. The cord was tied to the metal handle of the trap door set into the bedroom ceiling. His thick-knuckled hands hung at his sides, curled as though to grasp a tool. The cheap teeth were clamped into the swollen blue tongue and, all around the dead irises, the muddy whites showed.
Burns kicked a hole in the screen and yanked it out. He started to climb over the sill when Shay yanked him back.
“What the hell are you—”
“If a mouse couldn’t sneak in, a mouse couldn’t sneak out, either.”
Burns stood very still for a moment. “Worth a try,” he said.
Twenty minutes later it was broad daylight. When the man broke from cover near the garage, running like a rabbit, Burns drew the .38 special without haste. He held the muzzle high and slowly lowered it, intersecting the line of flight. The sound of the shot was flat in the still morning air. The running man did a complete somersault and rolled to a stop.
“Knee?” Shay asked.
“Hip. It’s a safer shot.”
He had a sullen, stolid face. He bore the pain without any change of expression.
The doctor worked on him back in the trooper station. Shay, Burns, a few others, and myself stared at him.
“He hasn’t got a name,” Burns said gently, “and he doesn’t know what he was doing on Garver’s land.”
“The Maydo twins are going to be very unhappy,” Shay said. The man’s eyes betrayed a sudden surprise, then went blank again. The doctor applied the final strip of tape and stepped back quickly as if he had been touching something dirty.
“We can convince him he ought to talk,” Burns said.
“Oh, he’ll talk right now,” Shay said. “He’ll tell us who told him to kill Garver.”
“Are you nuts?” the man said hoarsely.
Shay was smoking a cigarette. He nibbled a half moon of thumbnail from his left hand and laid it across the horizontal cigarette, just above the glowing tip. He held it close to the man’s face. When the flame touched the nail, it curled and stank.
“Smell that? That’s the way a man smells after they kick the switch, friend. He jumps up against the straps three, sometimes four times. A husky kid like you might go for five. It sure makes a terrible stink.”
The man on the table swallowed hard.
“Sure,” Shay said, almost fondly, “you can keep your mouth shut. You can be a hero. You make your little jumps against the straps and then, before the worms even have a chance to go to work, they’ll forget who the hell you were. At least, even when you get life, which you might not get, you get to see sunshine once in a while, a chance to walk around the yard.”
The man licked his lips. “You got somebody to write this down?”
Shay and I came out of the restaurant. He climbed into the car as though he had suddenly grown old. The lump on his forehead was an angry purple. He sat woodenly beside me.
“Big callous character,” I said.
“Shut up, Robby.”
“No, you don’t feel these things a bit, do you? A dead old guy and five thousand salted. The five is what counts.”
“I told you to shut up!”
“I can’t shut up. It’s such a shock to me to find out that you become emotionally involved in these shoddy little affairs.”
“Why the hell do I keep you around?”
“You mean why do I stay, don’t you? Maybe I stay because once every six months I get a look at the vulnerable part of you, Shay, the part that can grieve for strangers. It’s the only thing that makes you human. You’ve got the dough. If you don’t want to be hurt, why don’t you just sit on your fanny at Sharan Point and add to your collection of statues of the female form. Maybe underneath you’re some sort of white knight looking for grails.”
He boiled out of the car and raced around the hood. I was out of my side before he could reach the door. The restaurant was a truck stop. They came out fast and stood back to give us room. The right that I blocked numbed my left arm from elbow to fingertips. I put a lot of pent-up irritation into the counter and the shock went all the way down to my heels. It stopped him. His arms sagged, and he shook his head like a great blond bear. In his second rush he got me back against the car. I hurt my knuckles on his head, then opened his mouth with an overhand left while he worked on my middle. He was tearing me apart in the middle. I had to fake out of it, so I sagged. He stepped back. I came up out of the crouch, all my wind gone, and drove ahead behind a straight right. But there wasn’t enough left for me to keep my feet. I went down onto my hands and knees at the same moment he dropped onto the gravel. We glared at each other for three seconds, and then he began to grin. In a moment we were laughing at nothing at all.
“Aren’t you guys even mad?” a trucker asked in an awed voice.