It was stone, and old. Stubbs could just barely see it ahead and to the right, through the tree trunks. He backed up just a little, till the house was out of sight, and then he turned the engine off. There was no place to pull off the road, so he just left the car where it was and climbed out.
It was nearly evening, seven-thirty or so, and the spaces between the trees were getting dimmer. Stubbs moved away from the car and the road, going in among the trees, moving at an angle toward the house. Soon he could see it again, and then he crouched and moved more slowly.
The house was big, two stories high and rambling. There was a screen-enclosed wooden porch around the first floor and the rest was stone. To the right of the house, the blacktop road ended at a three-car garage, stone like the house and with white doors.
A slate walk joined a small side door in the garage and the side of the house, with an arched roof over the walk, supported by rough unpainted wooden posts. The garage had a second story, with windows in it, but they were dark, without curtains or shades. In the house, two windows on the ground floor showed light, and so did one window upstairs.
Stubbs crept forward toward the house until he came to the edge of the trees, where the blacktop widened in front of the house before coming to a stop at the garage. He could try to cross the bare blacktopped area here, or he could go to the right through the trees and around the garage, to come at the house from the back. That would probably be better.
He remembered how easily Parker and the other one had turned the tables on him, and he didn’t want it to happen again. If Wells wasn’t the one and it was Courtney, it wouldn’t be too bad; but if Wells was the one and he turned the tables on Stubbs it would be the end.
He made his decision, and started to the right. He’d taken two steps when a voice behind him said, “That’s far enough.”
He stopped. In that second, he cursed himself, cursed the brain that had gone rotten and prevented him from doing what he had to do, that made him such a feeble hunter and such easy prey.
“Drop the gun,” said the voice, “and turn slowly around.”
There was nothing else to do. He hoped it was Courtney, and that Wells was in the clear. He dropped the gun and turned around, and saw Wells standing at the edge of the blacktop. The man had been in among the trees even before Stubbs had got there, and had followed him when he left the car. It was still getting darker, but not dark enough to prevent a good shot, and in the hand not holding the gun Wells carried a flashlight.
Wells looked at him, frowning, and then smiled. “The chauffeur,” he said. “I’d forgotten about you.”
Stubbs licked his lips, wanting to ask the question but afraid it had already been answered.
“You shouldn’t have phoned,” Wells went on. “That put me on my guard, you know.”
Stubbs shook his head, and was about to say he hadn’t phoned, but just then Wells shot him. Something heavy, feeling much larger than a bullet, hit him in the chest, knocking him backwards. His mouth was still open. He still wanted to tell Wells that a mistake had been made, that he hadn’t phoned, but he couldn’t manage to exhale. No air came out, he couldn’t make a sound.
He felt himself falling. It was getting darker much more rapidly all of a sudden. Then he saw Wells’ face, and Wells was looking past him, at something behind him. There was on Wells face an expression of astonishment and terror. Stubbs, falling forward toward the blacktop and the spreading blackness, wondered dully why Wells looked so astonished and so terrified.
But he never found out.
Four
1
Parker got back into the Ford, and drove away from the farmhouse. He turned the car toward New Brunswick, north-westward. First things first.
Stubbs was gone. Parker had to find him again before he got himself killed and gave the cook back in Nebraska a reason to blow the whistle, but first things came first. Riding in the Ford with Parker was thirty thousand dollars in green paper, and until he’d found a safe place for that boodle he couldn’t afford to do anything else.
He had to follow the plan, with or without Stubbs.
But as he drove along he was nagged by a feeling of incompletion. There was a spiel worked out in his head that he’d been planning to give to Stubbs: “You come with me on this one side trip. It’ll take a couple of days. Then we take a plane to Nebraska and square things with the cook, and after that I’ll give you some help finding the man you want.”
The last part was the only lie, but it was a necessary lie because it would give Stubbs a reason for going along with no fuss. The whole spiel was good and simple and direct, and it would have gone down with no trouble at all.
Except that Stubbs was gone, and the spiel would never be delivered. He didn’t like sloppiness, loose ends that unraveled, complications of things that ought to be simple. Stubbs was a complication in what should have been a simple job, and now he was complicating the complication. So Parker did what he always tried to do — keep it simple, keep close to the plan, don’t let yourself get knocked off balance.
First things first. The boodle had to be unloaded, that came first. The cook in Nebraska would wait two more weeks before blowing the whistle, and it might take Stubbs a while to find the other two men he was looking for. So first things first.
At New Brunswick, he picked up route 1, and that took him southward again. The afternoon sun lowered to his right. At Trenton he switched to 206, and got on the Jersey Turnpike at Mansfield Square. He hadn’t seen a single roadblock, and that made sense. The robbery was more than three hours old when he’d left the farmhouse, and the law would have to figure that the thieves were either out of the area by then or holed up somewhere in it. Parker had used the principle of the delayed getaway before, but never quite this way — getting out of the area fast and then going back into the area and coming out again.
He took the most direct route south, sometimes on 1 and sometimes on quicker roads. He bypassed Washington the same way as when he’d come north with the truck, and when he passed through Richmond it was ten o’clock at night. He stopped in a motel on the other side of town, and brought both his suitcases into the room, the one with his clothes and the one with the money.
He picked a stack of twenties, all used bills, stuffed fifty of them back into the suitcase with the rest of the money and the other fifty into his wallet. The wallet was so thick then it didn’t want to fold. Then he went to the motel office and got a cardboard box and some string and wrapping paper.
Eleven thousand went into the box, which he then wrapped up and addressed: Charles Willis, c/o Pacifica Beach Hotel, Sausalito, California, Please Hold. Unless the Pacifica Beach had changed hands in the three years since he’d last been there, they would know enough to stick the carton into the hotel safe and forget about it till Parker showed up again.
There was stationery and envelopes in the drawer of the writing desk in the room, and Parker addressed five envelopes to Joe Sheer in Omaha and put ten twenties in each envelope, wrapped in sheets of blank stationery. Joe wasn’t a drop and it wasn’t any kind of a debt, just a friendly gesture.
There was still sixteen thousand in the suitcase. In the old days, before Lynn and the syndicate trouble had loused things up, he’d had small bank accounts here and there across the country. After a job he’d send off a lot of hundred dollar money orders from different towns, and spread a few thousand of the take that way. Then when he needed money all he had to do was withdraw a little from here and a little from there, and avoid the kind of unexplained large bank transaction that might call attention to itself. But Lynn had closed out all those accounts when she’d thought she’d killed him and had run off with Mal. So now he had to start all over again.