But there might be some small advantage, I told myself, if I could make them think that I didn’t know all this. It was a good, cheap way of playing dumb, for whatever that was worth.
I reached the city limits and hit one of the west highways and let out the car a bit. I gained on my pursuer, but not by very much.
Ahead the road curved up a hill, with a sharper curve starting at the top. Leading off the curve, I remembered, was a country road. There was little traffic, and maybe, if I were lucky, I could duck into the side road and be out of sight before the black car cleared the curve.
I gained a little on him on the hill and put on a burst of speed when he was hidden by the curve. The road ahead was clear, and as I reached the side road I slammed on the brakes and turned the wheel hard over. The car hugged the ground like a crouching animal. The rear wheels started to skid a bit, squealing on the pavement; then I was into the country road and straightened out and pouring on the gas.
The road was hilly, one steep incline and then another, with sharp dips between them. And at the top of the third of them glancing up at the rear-vision mirror, I saw the black car topping the second hill behind.
It was a shock. Not that it meant so awfully much, but I had been so sure I had shaken him that it was a solid blow at my confidence.
It angered me as well. If that little pip- squeak back there .
Then I saw the trail. It was, I suppose an old wagon road of some years ago choked with weeds and with the branches of a grove of trees hanging down to shield it, as if the very branches were trying to hide the faint trace that was left.
I turned the car’s wheel sharply and went bumping over the shallow ditch. The overhanging branches blotted out the windshield and screeched against the metal of the body.
I drove blind, with the tires bouncing in the old, almost obliterated ruts. Finally I stopped and got out. The branches hung low on the track behind, and it was unlikely that the car could be seen by anyone passing on the road.
I grinned in minor triumph.
This time, I was sure, I had put one over.
I waited, and the black car topped the hill and came roaring down the road. In the silence of the afternoon, it made a lot of noise. It didn’t have too far more to run before it would need a major overhaul.
It went on down the hill; then there was a screech of brakes. They kept on screeching for some time before the car came to a halt.
Licked again, I thought. Somehow or other, they knew that I was here.
So they wanted to play rough. So if that was the way they wanted it, that was the way they’d have it.
I opened the front door and reached into the back to pick up the rifle. I swung it in my hand, and the weight and heft of it had an assuring feel. For a moment I wondered just how much good the rifle might be against a thing like this; then I remembered how Atwood had come apart when I’d reached for the pistol in my pocket and how the car on the road up north had gone rolling down the hillside when I’d opened fire on it.
Rifle in hand, I cat-footed down the trail. If the follower should come hunting me—and certainly he would—it would never do to let him find me where he thought I was.
I moved through a hushed and silent world, redolent with the scent of autumn. Crimson-leafed vines looped above the trail, and there was a constant rain of frost- tinted leaves, falling gently and slowly, running a slow-paced maze through the branches of the grove. Except for a slight rustling as my feet scuffed against a dry leaf here and there, walking was quiet. Years of fallen leaves and growing moss made a carpet that deadened every noise.
I came to the edge of the grove and crept along it to reach the top of the hill. I found a flaming sumac bush and squatted down behind it. The bush still held its full quota of glossy red leaves and I was in splendid ambush.
Below me the hill swept down toward a tiny stream, no more than a trickle of water that ran down the fold between the hills. The grove curved in toward the road, and below it was a brown expanse of hillside covered by high, dry weeds, with here and there the flaming fire of another sumac cluster.
The man came down the creek, then started up the long slope of hill, heading straight toward me, almost as if he knew I was hiding there behind the bush. He was an undistinguished-looking customer, a man walking with a slight stoop to his shoulders, with an old felt hat pulled down around his ears, and dressed in some sort of a black suit that even from that distance I could see was shabby.
He came straight toward me, not looking up. As if he were pretending he didn’t see me, had no idea I was anywhere around. He moved at a shambling gait, and not very fast, plodding up the hill, with his eyes bent on the ground.
I brought up the gun and poked the barrel through the scarlet leaves. I held it steady on my shoulder and put the sights on the bent-down head of the man who climbed the hill.
He stopped. As if he knew the rifle had been pointed at him, he stopped and his head came up and swiveled on his neck. He straightened and he stiffened, and then he changed his course, angling across the hillside toward a little swale that was grown high with weeds.
I lowered the rifle, and as I did I caught the first edge of the tainted air.
I sniffed to be certain what I smelled, and there was no mistaking it. There was an irate skunk somewhere, down there on the hillside.
I grinned. It served him right, I thought. It served the damn fool right.
He was plunging, moving rapidly now, through the patch of waist-high weeds, down toward the swale, and then he disappeared.
I rubbed my eyes and had another look and still he wasn’t there.
He might have stumbled and fallen in the weeds, I told myself, but there was the haunting feeling I’d seen it all before. I had seen it in the basement of the Belmont house. Atwood had been there, sitting in the chair, and in an instant the chair had been empty and the bowling balls had been rolling on the floor.
I had not seen it happen. I had not looked away. I could not have missed its happening and yet I had. Atwood had been there one moment and the next there’d been the bowling balls.
And this was what had happened here, in the bright sunshine of an autumn afternoon. One moment a man had been walking through the weeds and then he’d not been walking. He was nowhere to be seen.
I stood up cautiously, with the rifle held at ready, and peered down the hillside.
There was nothing to be seen except the waving weeds, and it was only in that one spot, in that spot where the man had disappeared, that the weeds were waving. All else on the entire hillside was standing deathly still.
The scent of skunk came stronger to my nostrils, drifting up the hill.
And there was something damned funny going on.
The weeds were waving wildly, as if there were something thrashing in them, but there was no sound. There was no sound at all.
I moved down the hill, with the rifle still at ready.
And suddenly there was something in my pocket, fighting to get out. As if a mouse or rat had sneaked into my pocket and now was trying to get free.
I made a wild grab at the pocket, but even as I did the thing came out of it. It was a tiny ball of black, like one of those small, soft rubber balls they give tiny kids to play with.
It popped out of my pocket and dodged my grasping fingers and fell into the grass, squirming madly through the grass,
heading for that place where the weeds were waving.
I stood and watched it go and wondered what it was. And all at once I knew. It was the money. It was that part of the money I still had in my pocket—the money I had been given at the Belmont house.
Now it had changed back into what it had been before and was hurrying toward the place where that other thing, the one shaped like a man, had suddenly disappeared.