He gestured for her to stay where she was and went through into the sheriff’s kitchen. There was a sharp hunting knife hanging on the wall, but it wasn’t a weapon for throwing.
He went back past her to the top of the stairs, crawling forward to extend his view of the office below, but all he could see was the corner of a desk, the bottom of the open street door, and floorboards. He lay there thinking. He could go down with the dead man’s rifle, probably get the sheriff, and if Gerd was still conscious they’d manage the other man between them. But the whole town would be awake, the camper’s tire still wasn’t fixed, and the crates were still in the camper. He couldn’t fire the gun.
The sheriff didn’t know that, though.
He felt a tug at his ankle, turned, and found Amy sitting behind him. She indicated with her head for him to follow her back into the room, then whispered in his ear. “The sheriff told this one to behave himself. If I make noises as if he isn’t, maybe he’ll come up.”
“Maybe he’ll call his man down,” Paul whispered back.
She shrugged. “And when he doesn’t come?”
“Okay.”
She got back on the bed. “Please, no,” she said in a trembling voice. “Please don’t” — this time louder.
“Jesse, whatever you’re doing, don’t,” the man downstairs shouted up.
Amy groaned, a long shuddering groan that seemed to go on and on.
“Jesse!”
“Aw, let him have some fun,” Jake shouted.
“Yeah, and you’ll explain it all to the Feds, I suppose. Jesse, answer me!”
“Come and get the pig off me,” she sobbed.
“Jake,” they heard the sheriff say, “go up and bring ’em down here.”
Paul took up position behind the door, the hunting knife held in his hand like a brush, as if he were about to cut a line on a wall. They could hear Jake tramping up the stairs, and Amy began to groan again as he opened the door. “Jesse…” he began, then the knife slit his throat from ear to ear, splashing blood down his bare chest.
Paul lowered him silently to the floor, picked up his rifle, and signaled Amy to walk in front of him. As they began their descent the sheriff glanced up at her, still handcuffed, then resumed his watch on the door.
“Put the rifle down, Sheriff,” Paul said softly, and the man’s head jerked around, his mouth dropping in disbelief. He laid the rifle down on the desk in front of him.
“Throw the keys for the handcuffs onto the floor over there.”
“You…”
“Shut up. I don’t want to use this gun — it’ll wake up the whole town — but if you’re going to do that anyway, then it won’t make much difference… The keys.”
He reached into his shirt pocket, threw them where he’d been told. Paul unlocked Amy’s handcuffs with one hand, holding the rifle aimed at the sheriff with the other.
“Let’s go and get our friend,” he said, pointing the sheriff toward the door that led through to the cells.
Gerd was waiting for them. “You took your time,” he said.
Paul unlocked the cell, and pushed the sheriff in. “I thought you’d have started a tunnel by this time.”
“Where’s my brothers?” the sheriff asked.
“They’re dead.”
The sheriff sat down on the bunk, his head between his hands.
“We have to talk,” said Amy from the next cell. She’d been examining Kuznetsky, who was still unconscious but seemed to be breathing regularly. “But not in front of him,” she said, reappearing and nodding in the sheriff’s direction. “And we’d better get the lights out.”
Without waiting for an answer, she walked through to the office and up the stairs. Her feet faltered at the top, but she went on in, ignoring the two corpses. When she came back down Gerd was fixing the “Gone Fishing” sign back in the door window. Paul came through from the cells, switching off the office lights.
“There’s something you don’t know, Paul,” Amy said, grateful that she couldn’t see his face in the dark. She told him what she’d told Gerd back on the road.
“And this was Berlin’s plan from the beginning?” he asked bitterly.
“Yes.”
“And the sixty men on the U-boat?”
She said nothing.
“The bastards.”
“We never thought they were saints,” Gerd said. “Or even normal people, come to think of it. Anyway, we’re stuck with the plan. And no matter what we think of the bastards, we’ve still got to get out of this country.”
“How long to change the tyre?” Amy asked Gerd.
“Ten more minutes. I’ll get on with it.” He opened the door, looked right and left, then came back in. “We’ve forgotten their car.”
“When we leave I’ll drive it,” Paul said. “We can dump it a few miles down the road… No, why don’t we take it, use it as a recon vehicle? I can keep half a mile ahead and look out for trouble.”
“Right.” Gerd disappeared.
Amy and Paul sat in silence, each absorbed with the other. He wondered where the woman who’d sobbed on his shoulder not ten minutes before had gone; she remembered the look on his face as he’d tightened the barbed wire around Jesse’s neck. It was for the best, she thought; at least she knew now that neither of them were the same people who’d fallen in love all those years before. Or did she just want them to be different? Stop it, she told herself. Gerd was right: all that mattered for now was getting out of America, or all four of them would be dangling from nooses, or whatever it was that happened to murderers in this state.
And then she remembered the sheriff, opened her mouth to say something, but closed it again. It was up to her this time. She didn’t know why, but it was.
The camper pulled up outside the door. “You and Gerd bring out Smith,” she told Paul, and went out to find her bag in the front seat. After screwing together the revolver and a silencer, she waited for them to come out, and as they were maneuvering Kuznetsky into the back, she walked again through the office, trying to conjure up anger against this man who’d let his idiot brother slobber all over her. It didn’t work. The moment she saw his petrified expression the anger dissolved, leaving her with nothing but logic. Quickly, Amy told herself. She aimed and fired before he had time to speak or shout, one bullet through the chest, then another through the head.
The dull pops seemed to echo through the cells, and she turned to find Paul staring at her as if he’d never seen her before.
“We can’t leave any witnesses,” she said, almost succeeding in keeping the tremor out of her voice.
“Makes sense,” he said automatically.
She walked straight past him and out to the camper. Gerd was already behind the wheel. She got in beside him, heard Paul gun the motor of the convertible, and they were on their way again. As they left the shelter of the buildings she could see the first hint of dawn in the eastern sky.
Eleven
Lieutenant Jeremiah Allman examined his watch by the light of his car’s headlamps. It was 4 A.M., another two hours till dawn, perhaps an hour and a half. Not that he particularly wanted to see the scene in the cold light of day. Seven corpses, one of them just a kid. And they still hadn’t found the fireman. Of course he might have been one of the gang. If it was a gang.
It didn’t look like an ordinary holdup: two of the victims bore the signs of execution rather than simple murder. It would help if he knew what the train had been carrying; maybe Walsh would enlighten him when he arrived from Bridgeport.