He towed the Continental in beside the Cadillac, and unwinched the chain, letting the car down with a clang. Tom got out and lit a cigarette, leaning against the truck.
“Whew!” he gasped, “that was damned damned close.”
Eddie playfully dug him in the ribs with an elbow. “Close, nothing. That’s as close as they’ll ever get. D’you ever read a story by Poe called ‘The Purloined Letter’?”
Tom shook his head, and Eddie said, “Well, it was simple. This letter was stolen, and they knew it was in a guy’s room, so they hunted and hunted, but they couldn’t find it, even though it was there.”
“Where was it?”
“In a letter box, with a bunch of others, right up on the wall, where they could see it all the time. Y’see what I mean? The cops can’t see what’s in front of their noses. They’ll see us, but what’s more logical than a tow truck draggin’ a car away for repair?”
Tom grinned, started to say something.
Eddie cut him off. “I know. What if a guy comes out and yells at us for hooking up his car? We just say, ‘Oh, excuse me, Mister, we got a call for a repair on a crate like this…must be the wrong car,’ and we drive off, grab another one down the line.
“And if the cops spot us, they check the truck registration and not the car we’re hauling. No point to that!”
Tom nodded, clapped Eddie on the back. “Ed, buddy, you’re a goddam genius.”
Eddie smiled. “I owe it all to the Warden.”
Eddie worked steadily on the cars over the weekends, filing down serial numbers on the engines, repainting when necessary, changing plates and other identification. Benny, who owned the junkyard, made sure he was let strictly alone, and they moved five to eight cars a week.
The money was rolling in, but Eddie was playing it cool. He checked with his parole officer, and he buried his share of the money, living no higher than his garage salary allowed.
He was becoming a pillar of the community.
The auto theft toll mounted alarmingly, but the police were stymied. Somehow, a phantom was boosting cars in broad daylight and running them out of the state before anything could be done about it.
On their thirty-eighth haul, Eddie stole a Pontiac parked outside a grocery store, and as they pulled away, Vinny swore he saw a woman come rushing out onto the curb, screaming.
“Let her scream,” Eddie said. “We’ll be long gone before she can do anything about it.”
He left Vinny to check with the broker about getting rid of the new heist, and took the Pontiac to the junkyard. All the other cars had been removed, and it stood alone.
Eddie jacked it down, and left it there. He was due back at the garage.
It was three days before he could get to work on it, but before he could leave work the scheduled night, three men came to the garage.
They talked to Mickey, and they studied the tow truck, and when they started back into the repair shop, Eddie knew something was wrong. He made a run for it.
He got as far as the window, ready to leap through and break down the alley, when they drew their guns.
“Hold it, hold it! Don’t shoot!” he yelled, and they lowered their aim. Must be another gang, Eddie thought. They don’t look like plainclothes.
“Looks like this is our boy, Paul,” one of the men said to the other. They were all hard-eyed, ruthless.
“Where’s the car, fellow,” the man addressed as Paul said.
“What car?” Eddie tried to bluff it.
Paul’s hand, holding the .32 Police Positive, came around in an arc, slashing at Eddie Cappen’s face. The pain penetrated all the way to Eddie’s brain, and he staggered, putting a hand to his cheek. Blood was flowing down his face.
“In—in the junkyard, crosstown,” he said, in pain. “Who are you? How’d you find me? Who squealed?” Anger boiled in him.
Paul answered as he slipped the cuffs on Eddie Cappen. “Nobody squealed. The woman saw a red tow truck, and this thing was big enough to call us in, so we searched the city till we found a red tow truck that fit the description. Then we found you. Too bad it took us this long.”
“What are you talking about? What do you mean, ‘Big enough to call us hi?’ Who are you?”
“FBI, Mister. You pulled a beaut this time.”
Eddie Cappen reeled, his legs felt like soggy soda straws. “What’re ya talkin’ about? I only swiped a car. That’s maybe a few years, but with parole I’ll get out!”
The Federal agent shook his head. “Uh-uh, buddy. We don’t want you for the car job. We’ve got you on kidnapping, and probably murder.
“There was a baby asleep in the back seat of that car, and this long without attention, it’s probably dead.”
The third man said, “That’s the chair in this state, brother, if they reinstate the death penalty; and if they don’t it means twenty-to-life on death row. You’ll never make it, I can tell: you shake too much.”
Eddie Cappen felt sickness backing up in him. A baby in the back seat. Dead…yes, after three days…dead!
Be observant.
Toe the line.
He would never make it.
DOWN IN THE DARK
Griff could hear Ivy’s husband moving toward him in the darkness. Only the faintest sounds of gravel betrayed his movements. Down here, deep in the gut of the Earth, it was another world. A world Griff knew well as a geologist. A world in which Kenneth Cory was at a disadvantage. That was why Ivy and Griff bad lured him down here. To kill him.
The coffin silence of the great limestone cavern pressed down on Griff as he lay there, the vaguely cool breeze only accenting the comfortable temperature. Off somewhere behind him, where the ceiling of the cave suddenly sloped sharply, nearly joining with the moist cool floor, he could hear a stalactite drip-drip-dripping its eternal water message; a message that would end only when the spear joined with the floor, flowed into one continuous bar from above to below a thousand years from now. And there was the sound of a man crawling on his belly toward him.
Griff smiled in the darkness. Poor Cory, that ass. He actually thought he had trapped Griff down here. He actually thought that revolver was going to work for him down here. (That revolver, what pride he took in it. A Ruger .256 Hawkeye, scope-mounted for varmint hunting. It would be as much help down in the dark as an arbolest or an ICBM.)
Griff hugged the powerful spring-driven crossbow to his chest, lying doggo and hearing Cory slithering through blackness in his general direction. Release that trigger and the metal-frame crossbow would drive a steel-tipped hunting arrow under eighty pounds of thrust, straight through the hairless chest of Ivy’s cuckolded husband. Come on, Kenny baby, just crawl to it. A little farther, you jerk, just a little farther.
Cory started moving too far right and, fearing he might lose the channel that would bring him into the line of fire, Griff snuffled softly, as though stifling a cough, the way a man might who was hiding in terror. Cory moved sidewise on elbows and knees and came forward again, crablike. Griff grinned.
Griff was not only a trained speleologist, he was a trained hunter. Kenya, Ranchipur, sharks with a spear gun in the Java sea, even a little human game—inadvertently—while red-balling supplies in the Mekong Delta. How odd, he mused, that his most significant kill would occur here, deep in a side-cave of New Mexico’s Chaco Caverns. But of all the trophies he had collected for his stalking of predators, Ivy was the most exciting.
The name echoed back through his skull, back through his memories, and he let his head down onto his crossed arms, closing his eyes, thinking about her. It would take Cory time to get close, and Griff was a trained hunter. He let his mind slip back through the events of the past week…back…back…
“I want to hunt javelina,” Cory said, chain-lighting a fresh cigarette from the stub of the old one. The smell of dead tobacco was all over him. You could smell him coming half a room away. The second and third fingers of his right hand were ochre from nicotine stains. To an outdoorsman like
Griff, whose senses had never been dulled by tobacco or drugs, and only occasionally by alcohol, Kenneth Cory was a perversion of nature.
Outside the cocktail lounge the Santa Fe mid-afternoon burned hot as the mouth of a volcano. Bright white light shattered against impeccably clean stucco buildings and cascaded down on asthmatics from Bayonne, New Jersey, suffering deliciously in the hammering heat under the delusion it would cure their sniffles. But in the hotel cocktail lounge it was cool with the purring of air conditioners and Griff sat across from Cory, wondering how the hell he had wound up tapped-out in Santa Fe, of all places.
“Are you listening, Mr. Griffen?” Cory asked, annoyed.
“I suppose you could call it that,” Griff said slowly. He was a big man, narrow in the waist and burned a leather tan by hundreds of suns over hundreds of landscapes. The kind of tan that was melted and fused in. His pale blue eyes looked out from under heavy brow-ridges in that dark face; totally incongruous.
“The undertaking doesn’t appeal to you?”
“Any undertaking that will put some flesh on my wallet appeals to me, Mr. Cory. But I hope you know what you’re looking for. It’s called aggravation, and it’s spelled jablí with an accent over the i.”
Cory sat up straighter in the foam-padded lounge chair. He was bigger than he seemed, a barrel of a chest, huge hands, thick bull neck. His features were regular and well-formed, but rather than melding into handsomeness, there was something coarse and porcine omnipresent. Griff had instantly disliked the man when he’d come up to the table, asking if Griff was the guide that had been recommended by the hotel manager.
“Get this, Mr. Griffen. I’m a wealthy man. Unashamedly and filthy rich. I’ve been everywhere, I’ve done everything, and the only fear I’ve got at the moment is that I’ll run out of kinds of animals to hunt before they plant me.
“I tried the Coronado National Forest in Arizona, but the hunting’s been controlled for the past seven years. One of the game wardens said there was peccary over here in New Mexico. I want mine.”
He settled back and drained the bourbon-and-branch.
“What were you planning on using?”
Cory considered. “I’d like to try the new Remington XP-100, the pistol-rifle.”
Grift chuckled. “Single shot. I suppose, you’d use a Bushnell ‘Phantom’ scope, too. Right?” Cory looked off-balance. He nodded.
“Mr. Cory, the jabalina live in caves. They run in packs. He’s got teeth that are damned near fangs, and when he runs, friend, he runs like a two-cushion bank into the hip pocket. A single-shot bolt action weapon would give you just enough time to kill one—accepting you’re a decent marksman—before the rest of the pack ripped you in half.”
Cory’s brow furrowed. “You’d suggest?”
“Something light, semi-automatic, no scope. You’d have to get up close anyway, that’s the only way to flush ’em. A 30.06 would be enough power, but it’s too heavy. Ever hear of the ArmaLite AR-7?”
Cory nodded. “Isn’t that a bit too gadgety for big varmint?”
Griff paused a second. “Yeah, it’s mickeymouse, no question about it. But it’s light, clip-fed, eight shots, and the accuracy is good on short distances…”
He continued talking, explaining weaponry to the layman with his superficial knowledge, but his eyes were over Cory’s shoulder. A woman had entered the lounge, was looking around.
She was as tall as Griflfen, with wider shoulders than he usually liked, but the shoulders were necessary to support the weight of breast the woman carried. Her hair was black, dead black and nearly invisible against the gloom of the cocktail lounge. But it was the face that had caught Griffen’s attention. She was the most carnal-looking woman he had ever seen. Instinctively he sensed her as a biter, a groaner, a woman who panted and made little animal noises in bed with a man.
Cory became aware that Griff’s attention was elsewhere, and he half-turned in the chair as the woman saw him and started in their direction. Cory turned back, and there were bits of burning coal in his dark eyes. “That’s my wife, Mr. Griffen.”
Griffs jaw muscles jumped. “I think we can make a deal, Mr. Cory.”
Later that night, after they had joined up for dinner and more talk about the impending hunting trip, Griff carried Cory to his suite. Cory may not have had fear, but he had inabilities. One of them was holding his liquor. He had passed out around midnight, long after Griff and Ivy Cory had exchanged the glances and mouth movements that meant she was anxious to try him.
Griffen tossed Cory down on the king-sized bed and turned to see Ivy standing in the doorway, tilted onto one hip. “If you say, ‘Now we’re alone,’ Mr. Griffen, it may blow the entire romance.”
He moved toward her, and she retreated into the living room of the suite. He closed the door behind him. “I’m a man of very slim dialogue, Mrs. Cory.”
“At least call me Ivy.”
“Afterward, I’ll call you Ivy. Familiarity breeds.”
She beat him out of his clothes by a pair of socks and his undershorts.
And when it was over and they lay there, she said, very gently, “How would you like to help me kill my husband, Mr. Griffen?”
He considered calling her Ivy. But decided Mrs. Cory was better.
The sudden acrid scent of cigarettes came to Griff through his memory-fog, and he realized he had nearly fallen asleep, there in the mother-warm comfort of the underworld. Cory was nearly on him. He rolled sidewise without making a sound on the gravel. There was a tiny ledge that jutted out from the side of the main channel. In the rainy season, such as it was, every inch of this passage was underwater, and the flow had bitten a channel-ledge under which it was possible to lie supine when the water table sank in the summer months.
Cory crawled right past. Griff fitted the stock of the crossbow to his shoulder. The bowstring was iron-tight and merely waiting to be released by his finger on the trigger to send the slim powerful bolt straight through Cory’s back.
Then thoughts began to impinge. Strange thoughts that his memories of the past few minutes had dredged up.
He had accepted Ivy Cory’s suggestion: kill Kenneth on the hunting trip, make it look like an accident, and then if Griff didn’t think she was prize enough for a long, long time under some tropical sun, why then she would make a handsome settlement on him, they would kiss and bid each other fond adieu, and she would go off to Pantelleria or Papeete or Palma de Mallorca to play the grieving widow in the sort of affluent hedonism Kenneth’s hunt-fever and stinginess had never allowed.
He had made love to her every night since Santa Fe, purposely making it easy for Cory, but it had taken the clod almost a week to discover them in a parking lot, Ivy’s skirt up around her hips, underpants hanging off one ankle. Cory had gone a little mad, and Griff had dashed away, barely getting his pants zipped before Cory could get back with his revolver.
He had entered the caves and made his progress simple for Cory to follow. And there, well within the mouth of the cave, he had grabbed up the crossbow he had secreted for just this situation.
Now Cory was precisely where Griff and Ivy had wanted him. With his back bullseyed for a dead shot. Yet the scheme jangled out of focus for Griff. If Ivy had wanted Cory out of the way, there were simpler ways of doing it.
Drain the brake fluid out of his car.
Hire a torpedo to gun him in his sleep.
Simply shoot him herself and just say he was away on a hunting trip. They traveled enough for her to get away without suspicion.
Or simply divorce him.
He hesitated at the trigger. There was something far uglier here than simply murder. Griff bit his lip.
And there was a scream from Cory, well past Griff in the inky darkness of the cavern. The scream came again, and Griff rolled out from under the ledge, got to his knees and stared off into the nothingness. He could not see the man, but now there came the soft snuffling baby-sounds of a man in constant pain. Then silence.
Griff pulled the flashlight from his hip pocket and let it shine down the channel. The dripping perspiration of the limestone walls was all that met his light until he moved forward, around a slight bend in the channel, and saw that the ledge under which he had rolled had angled upward again, and almost met a similar ledge on the opposite side of the channel, thus forming an upper and lower channel, cut nearly in two by the ledges. Cory had clambered up on the ledges and had been crawling along till the channel opened out once more. He had slipped and fallen halfway through. His feet dangled off the floor of the cave, and-his arms were pinned in the thin space between the ledges. The razor-edges of moist limestone were literally cutting him in half.
Griff stared at the unconscious man for a long moment, then turned and crawled back down the channel, leaving him in darkness. It was simpler than perforating his body with a hunting arrow.
Ivy was waiting inside the mouth of the cave, where the side-tunnels all met.
“Where is he?” she asked, breathless, her eyes glowing with something malignant.
“He’s trapped down there. Between two ledges. No chance of his ever getting out. We can wait a week and come back. If the ledges haven’t cut him in half, he’ll be dead of starvation.”
Ivy smiled a terrible srnile, and brought the XP-100 out from behind her back. It was a huge Buck Rogers kind of weapon with the ungainly telescopic sight on it. “Thank you, Mr. Griffen,” she said, and fired. Griff threw himself sidewise just as the incredible report of the pistol-rifle shattered the stillness of the cave. The .221 Fireball cartridge zinged past his ear and clattered off one wall then another then another as it ricocheted down into the main channel.
He rolled and got to one knee and pulled the trigger of the crossbow. The bolt whizzed past her, missing her stomach by bare inches. She chuckled then, a soft deadly sound in the cave. He was up against the wall, with his back to a small ledge, but nowhere to ran. She reloaded the weapon and slammed the bolt home. Griff felt the terrible pain of fear in his stomach and the taste of antimony in his mouth.
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