One Monday We Killed Them All

by John D. MacDonald

  I raced to the phone. Raglin was on the desk. I told him to relay the word to Wheeler, Brint and Rice as fast as he could, and have somebody come pick me up right away, and have Mrs. West come get the kids.

  By the time I got to headquarters D. D. Wheeler and Larry Brint were there, and Rice was on the way. They read the note simultaneously, Larry reading over Wheeler’s shoulder.

  Wheeler said in a tired, cold voice, “I knew something would go sour. I knew there’d be some damn fool complication. She got a hell of a start on us. But there’s no need of letting her commit suicide. All we can do now is try our damnedest to pick her up before she disappears, and pray it takes her a long time to get a line on where they’re hid out. Larry, let’s get the description of her and the car to all points up there, and anybody you think might help. Damn fool woman! Hillyer, I wish you hadn’t slept so heavy. Where’s the map? Where’s Chickenhawk, for God’s sake? Get those unmarked cars bracketing that Chickenhawk Road, because from the note it sounds like that’s the place she’ll go last before she goes to see her brother.”

  “How about the airplane?” Larry asked.

  “Hell, let’s use that too.” He turned to me. “Probably, if we miss her, that old man won’t give a message to anybody but you, so soon as we get this organized, you and me are going in an unmarked car and find that old boy.”

  We left a half-hour later in a green sedan equipped with a short wave set. I drove. If Meg was picked up, they were going to alert us immediately.

  The sun was up and beginning to be hot as I made the turn off Route 60 onto 882 and we started climbing. Wheeler didn’t look like a Sheriff. He looked like those men who run carnival concessions, sallow, drab, cynical and tough, a sharp-eyed loner, with no fund of small talk.

  The map indicated no good way to get to the obscure Chickenhawk Road. We had to go all the way to Laurel Valley, and then cut back on the old Laurel Valley to Ironville Road, potholed macadam, with blind unbanked corners, where the old hills closed in close around us.

  “Rugged,” D. D. Wheeler said.

  “There’s worse places. I used to drive back in here with Meg. There’s some clay roads back in here that are passable only four or five months of the year.” I remembered the secret valleys she had shown me, gloomy except at midday, the icy ponds, the black pine shadows, the jumbees of old gray boulders loking like the ruins of temples built before man walked the earth.

  “Damn radio is bad,” D. D. Wheeler said.

  “The iron in these hills does it.”

  I drove as fast as I dared, yelping the tires, banging the shocks against the frame. He counted the dirt roads that branched off to the right, and we stopped at the fourth one. I saw a shack down on a creek bank, through the trees. I left Wheeler in the car and walked down to the shack, remembering everything Meg had told me about how best to approach her people. I made myself stroll. An enormously fat woman sat on a shallow open porch. A hound raised its head and made a low warning sound in its throat, audible above the spring clamor of the creek.

  I stopped ten feet from the porch and said it was a fine day. She nodded. The hound watched me. I said I was a stranger in these parts, and I was sorry to trouble her, but could she tell me if that dirt road there might lead to a place called Chickenhawk.

  She hawked and spat and said, “It be.”

  “Does a man named Jaimie Lincoln live along that road?”

  “I wouldn’t be sayin’.”

  “I drove along that road a long time ago with my wife. I remember it was over ten miles to Chickenhawk and then about another twenty miles down out of the hills until we came out on the paved road from Slater to Amberton, east of the hills. I remember her pointing out where old Jaimie lived, but I can’t remember where it was.”

  “She be knowing him?”

  “From when she was a little girl, living over in Keepsafe.”

  “They be nobody to Keepsafe now, it being half-burnt out, and then the bridge gone and the road washed, all long ago. What was her name?”

  “She’s a McAran.”

  “They be a lot of them long long ago, sinners most all of them, but Jaimie’s Ma was a third way cousin to some McArans, so she could be knowing him.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me how to find Mr. Lincoln.”

  “What you be wanting of him?”

  “A family matter. I can swear he’d like you to tell me.”

  She thought it over, spat again and said, “Go most of seven mile, you come to a hollow where the road winds north, and where it turns sharpest, is a path going south, where you walk in.”

  Wheeler was surprisingly patient with the time it had taken. The fresh spring grasses grew high in the middle of the dirt track to Chickenhawk, and he pointed to places where the grass was bruised and smeared with grease, and said, “Nice to know somebody used it since the Civil War.”

  Again I left him at the car, and I walked the path to Jaimie Lincoln’s shack. When the path curved and I saw it in a small clearing, I stopped and called, “Mr. Lincoln! Mr. Lincoln!”

  “Lord God!” a quavering voice said so close behind me I gave a great start of surprise. I whirled and looked at an old, old man, as brittle, spare and dusty looking as a dried grasshopper. He stared at me with disgust. “You come through there like a bear wearing wooden shoes. She described you better looking than you be, but it must be you on account she said you got a long mournful face like a circuit preacher.”

  “She was here?”

  He gave me a pitying look, stood an old Remington bolt action against a tree, shoved a shapeless old brown felt hat onto the back of his head and wiped his face with a faded bandanna. “Who the Lord Jesus am I talking of? Here well past an hour back, big handsome woman with tearful eyes, almost pretty as her ma, who died younger, and too rushed to set polite with an old man, but she says to tell you of a time a road was growed up with brush so she couldn’t take you to see things she’d told you of.”

  “I see.”

  A cackle of frail laughter doubled him over. “Now look at you with a big secret like she thought she had, fooling an old man. Wanted to take you that old back way to Keepsafe, did she? Over the log road. She could have come to old Jaimie first, saving miles and questions. Old but I ain’t deef, and when I got twenty years of traffic roaring up and down in two weeks, I’m not just going to set here and wonder what the hell it is now am I? Just two miles more, and it goes off to the left, cleared careful so not to show much from the Chickenhawk Road, but cleared careless once you get back in. I circled over and clumb Fall Hill on a still night a time back and I see the auto lamps winding slow through all those woods, showing now and again like a fire beetle in the summer, the motor grinding slow until the sound was too far from my ears, and then coming out way over there just this side of Burden Mountain, onto the old-time road that was the way to get into Keepsafe afore the bridge was took out. Miss Meg looking for strangers, all she had to do was come right to Jaimie Lincoln, and I could even told her—which she didn’t say no word to me about—one of them is maybe that mean son of a bitch half-brother of hers, the one stomped the face about clean off the middle Jorgen boy twelve, fourteen year ago, on account of a week ago yesterday I walked into Chickenhawk for salt and tobacco, and Bone Archer mentioned him, and his brother been over there to take a look in case it was the alcohol tax folks and said it was a McAran, of about the age to be the mean one come back from State Prison, camping in there with a bald city man and a big tit city woman. The way I see it—”

  “Mr. Lincoln, I’ve got to go.”

  “Nobody has time to set polite, and there’s no respect for age any more, and so many folks roaring up and down the Chickenhawk Road, I swear to God I’m moving clear over the other side of Fall Hill, this keeps up.”

  “Thanks a lot, Mr. Lincoln.”

  “Come back with Miss Meg when you can set, and if you want to just run through my dooryard, the two of you, like stung-up hounds, don’t bother coming back.”<
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  I ran all the way back to the car. As I drove another two miles toward Chickenhawk, I told D. D. Wheeler what I’d learned from the old man. I watched the shoulder on the left and when I saw where cars had turned off I started to pull over. “Keep going!” Wheeler ordered.

  “But I tell you she—”

  “Keep moving! Can’t you follow a direct order?”

  I drove on. We went through the hamlet of Chickenhawk. Four miles beyond Chickenhawk, the road hair-pinned down a steep slope, and when we were on the floor of a narrow valley, he had me pull over as far as I could and park.

  “Brint kept telling me you’re a smart officer.”

  “My wife is back there, Sheriff.”

  “Look at this map. Here’s this cow path we’re on. About here is where that logging road cuts off of it. Over here is where Keepsafe used to be, and it’s high ground, and it’s less than a mile from there to the top of Burden Mountain, which reads forty-four hundred feet high. There were some gaps where I got a look at it, and it looks pretty bare on top, like it was mostly rock. I looked over your list of the stuff McAran bought. There’s binoculars on that list. That damn mountain looks down on every little road in the area.”

  I swallowed and said humbly, “Meg has told me about a trail to the top of the mountain. Look, we could go back on foot, maybe.”

  “Just the two of us? Real heroes? Sneak up on ’em and rescue the woman?”

  “She’s my wife!”

  “She’s a cop’s wife, and you’re a cop. Because she’s been a damn fool is no reason for you to turn yourself into one, Hillyer. She found her brother and his friends over an hour ago. If she’s alive right now, she’ll probably be alive at dawn. If she’s dead, they may stay there and they may try to move out, depending on how nervous it made them to have somebody dropping in. One thing sure, they won’t let her go, because she saw too much in the first sixty seconds. I’ll bet they knew a car was on its way in from the minute she turned in there. So get me some place where this damn radio will work, and we’ll do all we can do with the idea they are looking down our throats every minute.”

  Three miles beyond the valley, when we came to a ridge that could not be seen from the crest of Burden Mountain, D. D. Wheeler had me stop. They couldn’t hear distinctly enough in Brook City, so Wheeler used the State Police setup at the Slater Barracks as a relay.

  He gave them the map co-ordinates for the aerial photography. He told them where to post four unmarked cars. He said we were coming in, the long way around, and to pull everything else out of the hills.

  “She wouldn’t be in this at all if I hadn’t let Chief Brint talk me into it,” I said.

  “She wouldn’t be in this at all if you hadn’t taken up police work. She wouldn’t be in it if the two of you had never met. None of us would be going to all this fuss if he hadn’t hit the Hanaman girl too hard. If I had two heads I’d be living in a jug in a side show.”

  “All I meant was—”

  “Shut up and let me do some thinking. We can’t go in there the way I wanted to. We got to go in there like climbing a glass ladder barefooted.”

  “If they don’t try to move out first.”

  “I don’t think they will, somehow. Everything has been working for them. Your wife said in that note she won’t tell them. And she sounds like a strong woman. She knows it’s set up for dawn. Maybe she’ll have a chance to move fast when we give those people the message. You see, Hillyer, people like Miller, Deitwaller and Kostinak have to get hit with a great big dose of helplessness. Right in that first tenth of a second is when you get your chance to take them easy, when all of a sudden they feel as exposed as a bug in a bathtub, with nothing to hit back at. Every time a holed-up man kills a law man, it makes me feel sick at my stomach because it’s never necessary. It comes about through a childish display of guts, or because somebody gets bored and careless. This thing is going to be run right.”

  And when we got back, they had a dirty surprise waiting for us. Rossman and Raglin had conducted the investigation, and Rossman repeated his verbal report for the information of D. D. Wheeler and myself.

  “At ten this morning Mr. Theodore Perkins reported his daughter Catherine missing. He said her bed hadn’t been slept in. He thought she was sleeping late because he thought she had probably gotten in late last night after he was asleep. Detective Raglin and I made the investigation. She had gone to the movies last night with a girl friend. We checked that out. They got on a bus downtown at about quarter of eleven. The Perkins girl got off the bus first. As the bus started up, the other girl saw the Perkins girl start to walk toward her home two blocks away, and saw a car which had evidently been following the bus pull up and stop, and saw the Perkins girl start over toward the car. She says it was a new-looking car, a sedan, possibly a Ford, gray or light blue, and then the bus was out of sight. Mr. Perkins said there was a phone call for his daughter at about nine o’clock, a call from a woman who did not give her name. He said he told her what movie the girl had gone to. We checked the houses in the vicinity of where the car had stopped. A man in the second house from the corner on the other side was letting his cat out at about five after eleven when he heard what he thought was a drunken argument. He heard a scream and a scuffling sound, and heard a man curse somebody. Then a car door was slammed and he saw the car drive away at a high rate of speed.”

  I explained the relationship between McAran and the Perkins girl to D. D. Wheeler. He cursed softly, steadily, thoroughly.

  “Mr. Perkins said the woman on the phone sounded sort of tough,” Rossman added.

  “It doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense,” Larry said.

  “There’s one way it makes sense,” Johnny Hooper said softly. “Suppose McAran told Miller he’d decided to send for the Perkins girl after the job was finished. If Miller didn’t like the idea, and didn’t trust the girl from what McAran told him about her, and couldn’t talk McAran out of it, he could send McAran and the Frankel woman down into the town here to pick her up and take her back where Miller could check her out. Wasn’t it a woman who got him messed up last time? And probably the Frankel woman has had some practice on picking a girl off the street like that.”

  “So we’ve got two of them up there,” D. D. Wheeler said wonderingly.

  “Why didn’t they make it real easy for us?” Larry grumbled. “Why didn’t they hole up in a kindergarten?”

  “We’ve got work to do,” Major Rice said firmly.

  xii

  My wife didn’t come down out of the hills and I knew she wouldn’t. I knew when I read her note we wouldn’t stop her, and she wouldn’t come back out. I phoned Fran West and asked her to keep the kids another night. She sounded slightly teary, so I knew Chuck had told her about Meg.

  All during the afternoon the news people kept moving in on us in ever increasing numbers. We no longer had anything to fear from newspaper coverage, but we knew that any leak over commercial radio might blow the whole thing. We had to settle for an off-the-record briefing, telling them that Meg’s life might depend on silence.

  When dusk came I could no longer sustain the sharp edge of my concern for Meg. I felt numbed and lost, as if I would never be able to feel anything very acutely again. I had the feeling that none of this was real.

  After dusk the command staff moved five patrol cars into position, five two-man teams, and the unmarked cars were pulled down out of the hills. Two teams took their positions right at the mouth of the old logging road, after some difficulty in finding it. They reported back that the road had been recently cleared, that trees over ten feet tall which had grown up in the middle of the road had been hacked down and pulled out of the way. They examined the tracks with a hooded light and reported that it was so narrow Meg had obliterated previous tracks as she drove in, but it looked as if at least two other cars had used it recently, one of them leaving the distinctive tread marks of the new tires McAran had purchased.

  They drove one car into the road,
without lights, and parked it just short of the first sharp curve. They took up positions on both sides of the logging road and rigged a stationary flare which could be activated with a pull wire and made themselves comfortable for a long wait. The other cars were spotted to cover any alternate exits we might not know about, spotted on the roads those exits would have to feed into. We got the aerials at 8 P.M., fresh from processing. The superb lens and the very fine grain of the film provided incredibly clear enlargements of the whole Keepsafe area. Looking at them was like being suspended a hundred feet in the air over the little plateau where the hamlet had once been.

  There had once been, as Meg had told me, a general store, a small church, a one-room schoolhouse and four homes in the village itself. The store, the church and one of the homes had been destroyed in the same fire. You couldn’t tell what they had been. The rectangles marking the foundations were obscured by weeds and alders and berry bushes. Of the remaining houses, one had collapsed into an overgrown clutter of weathered boards. Another sagged on the edge of collapse. There were some rickety barns and sheds standing. But it looked abandoned for ten generations rather than only twenty years. It drowsed by a weedy road. Some big trees shaded the unused yards. There had been about a hundred acres of open fields around it. This land was thick with alder, scrub maple, young evergreen and berry patches. The plateau was tilted slightly to the south. To the north was the mass of Burden Mountain. At the south the land dropped steeply into a wooded valley. There was forest to the east and west of the cleared area. The photo technicians had pieced the enlargements together, so that the picture of the area was one huge photograph, six feet by four feet, but hinged by the tape on the back so that specific areas could be examined conveniently.