“Here’s the fresh tire tracks coming out of these woods here at the west,” Major Rice said. “They turn onto the road and come right up here. No mystery about what building they’re using. These marks are where they’ve made paths through the tall grass, going over to this creek on the north. The cars are in this shed, from the way the tracks go. Here’s footprints in the mud by the creek. Here’s where they’ve fixed fires. No washing hanging out and no cans and bottles thrown around, and nobody outside, so they think they’re being careful, but they might have just as well have written their names on the roof. This house is the center point of every pattern of tracks.”
“Can we safely assume they’re still holed up in that house?” Wheeler asked.
“Why would they move? I don’t think the plane would spook them. If having the woman arrive gave them the jumps, they wouldn’t set up a new place right in the same area. They might take off in the night for a new spot a dozen miles away. We’re ready for that, if they go by car. But I say they’ll stay put. They’re confident. They wouldn’t have picked up the Perkins girl if they weren’t. Maybe having the Lieutenant’s wife arrive this morning upset them a little, but McAran would know—and be able to convince the others—that she would be able to find them a lot easier than anybody else could. But let’s not ignore the most important clue we have, gentlemen. They must be ready to make their move, otherwise they wouldn’t risk detaining Mrs. Hillyer, or risk kidnapping the Perkins girl. Perhaps they even wanted the Perkins girl as a hostage in case something went wrong with the job they’re planning. Now they have two.”
After a few seconds of silence, Wheeler said, “Let’s figure the positions for our three groups on the map. Three groups of ten.”
“I want to be with the group you can spot closest to the house,” I said.
As both Wheeler and Rick looked at me dubiously, Larry Brint said, “Fenn has earned that much, and it will be a good place for him to be. He’ll do as he’s told. And he has more reason than any of us to see it work out just right.”
At midnight I avoided the night watch of reporters by going down the back stairs and out a side door onto the dark grounds behind City Hall. I walked through the deep shadows and sat on the base of the World War I monument. I lit a cigarette and looked toward the invisible hills, remembering how the top of Burden Mountain had looked in the midday sunlight.
I remembered Meg telling me, “There was a path up Burden Mountain, and I used to climb up there all by myself on clear summer days. There was always a smoky haze over Brook City. I knew it was the highest place in the world. Sometimes I could look down on the hawks flying. I used to pretend things, all those shiny and wonderful things, all the kings and castles little girls pretend. I kept a secret treasure back under the twisty old roots of a pine that grew out of the rocks. I kept it in a little square tin box—a Chinese coin with a hole in it, a real sea shell, a piece of red silk ribbon and a button with a green stone in it. I was certain the stone was an emerald. For a while I kept a note in there. I had printed it. All it said was ‘I love you.’ It wasn’t written to anybody, and it wasn’t supposed to be something written to me. It was just something to put in a treasure box. When I left, there wasn’t time to get it. It’s still there, I guess. Sometimes I remember it. Some day I’ll go back and get it.”
“Alone?” I had asked.
“You may come with me.”
Suddenly a voice startled me. “Busy day, Fenn?”
I turned sharply and saw Stu Dockerty outlined against the lighted windows of the police wing. “No comment. Orders from on high. No comment about anything.”
“I filed the last ounce of crud in person, and I was strolling back and saw your face when you lit the cigarette, Fenn.” He sat beside me on the weathered black marble, and leaned back, as I was, against the chiseled names of the long dead. “As soon as they’ve aged a little, all wars are alike.”
“What? Oh, I guess so.”
“Romantic, gallant, kinda quaint.”
“I suppose so.”
“None of those guys had any personal problems you or I couldn’t recognize in a minute, Fenn. The world changes, but everything stays just the same as it ever was.”
“Tell me what my problem is, Doctor.”
“Was I making it that obvious? I’m losing my touch. Your problem, my dear Lieutenant, is being afraid of warmth. I think you have some, but you’ve stowed it too deep. You refuse to trust emotions. You try to believe you can live in a rational world. You seem to think warmth is weakness, my friend. It makes you a bit of a prig. It starves your wife of her proper due, and it isolates you from your kids. And somehow I don’t think it makes you any better in your job.”
“Everybody seems to be judging me lately. You know, it might not do much good. I might have nobody left to apologize to.”
“Pathos, eh? What froze you, Fenn? Your tragic youth?”
“There’s nothing tragic about the way I grew up. It was a very ordinary situation. Very trite.”
“No drama at all?”
“My father was a mill worker. You know that. My mother’s people thought she’d married beneath her. But she was very happy. She laughed and sang all day long. She was a very emotional woman, Stu. She could cry at card tricks, like they say. She made everything seem—like wonderful games and adventures.”
“Until?”
“Those things end.”
“How did it end in your house?”
“I guess she sort of became the victim of one of her own games and adventures. Maybe things got a little dull for her. I don’t know what happened. She didn’t want to stay with us any more. She fell in love with a neighbor, a widower five years younger than she was. My father wouldn’t agree to divorce. She stayed with us for a whole sorry year, and then went off with him to Cleveland. They both died in a fire. An apartment house fire. It killed a lot of other people too. I was fourteen when it happened. My brother was sixteen. He left a year later. Just took off. When I was seventeen my father had a stroke. There was a little money coming in. Insurance, compensation. I took care of him. Neighbors helped. He lived two more years. A woman in Oregon wrote about my brother. He died of flu in a lumber camp.”
“Just an ordinary situation?” Dockerty said gently.
“Isn’t it?”
“Meg knows all this, of course.”
I do not talk to people about my life. Not to people like Dockerty. It isn’t anybody’s business. I don’t need sympathy, praise, blame or participation. But it was a quiet night, warm in the valley, cool in the hills. And I had been numbed by what was happening to me. It did not seem so important not to talk.
“Amateur psychology,” he said, “is an easy way for a man to feel superior to his friends. A million years ago, I suppose, some joker sat in his cave in the evening and told his friends why their luck in the hunt was so bad—a little carelessness about wind direction, and a badly balanced spear, and the wrong shape on the arrow heads.”
“Go ahead with it, if you have to.”
“Fenn, you had all that warmth and love, and you believed it was real. Then you decided it had all been faked, so you’ve never really trusted it—in yourself or anybody else, ever since.”
“She left, didn’t she?”
“Do you think about her much? Do you try to remember?”
“I remember how it was after she left.”
“Remember the good part of it. She wasn’t faking.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about. It had no application to me. It was meaningless talk. Meddling. Suddenly the tears were running out of my eyes, running down my face. I could not understand why it was happening. I felt a sob building up in my throat, threatening to burst out in a hard ugly sound, so I stood up quickly and coughed, and kept my face turned from the faint light. When I knew I could trust my voice I said, “I’ve got to go back in. We’ve got to brief the men we’re taking up there.”
“I’ll be going along. Not all the way. Me and
the big media boys, we’ll watch you go in and wait for you to come out. They’ll have the mountains wired for wide screen, and I’ll keep out of their way, clutching my slate and nibbling my stylus. Be lucky, Fenn.”
“That’s about all I can ask for, isn’t it?”
I was with Rice’s group, attached but not in the chain of command. We sat near the black bulk of the truck parked next to the grassy ditch on the Chickenhawk Road. I sat a little apart from Rice’s troopers, and we waited for the first light of Monday. They talked in low tones, cupped the glow of cigarettes in big hands.
A big man was saying, “This time of the night was when we’d be heading on back, so we’d come home just at first light. No eager patrols in our outfit, man. We didn’t want to fuss with anybody, or go no further than we had to. We wanted to get out and get back alive. One time a gook patrol came within twenty feet of where—”
“Let’s roll it,” Major Rice said from the darkness.
I looked up, and I could just make out the treetops against the sky, even though it seemed as dark as ever. D. D. Wheeler took his people into the black mouth of the logging road first. Larry Brint had decided he couldn’t maintain the pace that would be required, so one of Wheeler’s deputies took the second group. The troopers were the third and last group.
We had estimated the distance at four miles. There was a lot of blundering for the first mile, too much stumbling and falling, too much crashing into the brush where the road curved unexpectedly. The sound of vehicles would have carried too far in the night silence of the hills, and it would have been impossible to travel without lights. The stub of a hacked branch gouged my cheek painfully. Twice I stumbled and went down to one knee.
But after the first mile enough of a faint grayness came through the leaves to enable everyone to keep visual contact with the man ahead of him, and the going was easier.
Just before we came to the place where the logging road came out of the woods to join the old road to Keepsafe, we came upon my car. It is an odd and eerie thing to come across an object so familiar under such circumstances. Meg had driven it to this place in the brightness of the afternoon, and had been stopped by a long sapling trunk which had been wedged across the road from crotch to crotch at waist height.
We all edged by the car, stooped under the barricade and soon came to the edge of the woods, where Rice halted the group. Visibility was less than a hundred feet, looking out into the open. There was a perceptible pallor in the eastern sky. Scrub maple rose out of the ground mist in black silhouette, in a still and windless morning. The birds were making their first sounds. I heard the thin howl of a farm dog from beyond some other ridge. The four legged hunting things were going to ground, and the two legged hunting things had begun their work. Rice gave the first two groups their allotted five-minute lead. The hunt appeals to an area which lies below the heart of man. And man himself provides the most meaningful game. The flavor of the group was holiday, with a checking of weapons, hitch of belt, retying of shoes.
The first group had gone to the left, the second to the right.
“Okay,” Rice said, and we headed out, crossing the old road, moving into the fields where fencing had rusted away, turning right a hundred feet beyond the road and moving parallel to it, with about a ten-foot spacing. I was fourth in line, counting Rice.
It seemed to be growing light too quickly. Pallor in the east had a golden tinge. The trees were ceasing to be silhouettes as the leaves began to have definition. We went at a fast walk for a few hundred yards. The heavy dew in the tall grass soaked the legs of our trousers.
We swung away from the road, were slowed by hand signals, went at a crouch for a time, keeping out of sight of the house behind a half-acre tangle of raspberry thicket. From that point we crawled on our bellies through the wet grass, avoiding the nettles which had grown rankly in the old pasture, moving slowly, maintaining the interval. We stopped, and Rice came worming his way back. He changed the spacing slightly, and sent us, one at a time, at a right angle toward the house.
I moved cautiously, as ordered. Soon I could see the roof peak above the fringe of the tall grass directly in front of me. It was a dark gray triangle against the paler gray of the morning sky. I kept as flat as I could and moved forward. Off to my right, ten feet away, something bulked taller than the grass. I angled toward it, and found it was the wheel-less moldering carcass of an old farm wagon. It helped me orient myself more precisely. It had showed clearly on the aerial photographs, and was approximately eighty feet from the rear of the house, almost in line with the rear porch. Vines grew on it and the grass was rank around it. I moved to the far end of it and looked cautiously around it. I could see the house clearly through a curtain of grass, see the tumbled stoop, with the half-collapsed roof sagging over it, see the rear door, two ground floor windows and two upstairs windows.
I pulled back and looked toward the eastern sky at my left. It was streaked with lemon and rose and, above that colorful area, the sky was changing from gray to a pale clear blue. I closed my eyes and listened. I could hear the increasing clamor of the birds. I heard a thin remote droning and it took me a moment to identify it as the sound of a truck a long way away, going down a long grade in low gear. I could hear no other sound, but I knew there were men on either side of me, advancing to the closest protected positions they could find, using every advantage of terrain and cover. Wheeler’s men would be in position on the east and south, covering the house, but not from the closeness we could achieve. The third group was on the south and west.
I rolled onto my side and hitched the holster around to where I could conveniently unbutton it and take out the hand gun I had chosen to bring along. It is not a duty gun. It is too bulky and unwieldy for such use. It is a thirty-eight caliber Colt revolver with an eight-inch barrel, heavy frame, custom grip to fit my oversized hand. As a confirmed gun nut I know it is a theatrical-looking weapon, but I have done so much competition shooting with it, I have replaced the barrel twice. It fits my hand. More than any other weapon I own, I have little sense of aiming it. The slug seems to go where I will it to go, with the little jolt of recoil coming as a surprise. I eased the hammer back to full cock. The acid sweet scent of gun oil mingled with the ripe smell of the spring grass. I moved back to where I could see the house. I hitched a little further and found I could see into the shed on the east side of the house. McAran’s wagon was there, with its apparent load of lumber intact. It was headed out. Beside it, also headed out, was a gray Ford sedan, a new-looking car. As I was trying to make out the license on the Ford, I saw movement beyond the shed.
I moved slightly to cover it, and saw it was one of the troopers snaking his way through the grass. He disappeared beyond the edge of the shed and then I saw vague movement inside the semi-open shed, and knew he had gotten in with the cars. It made good sense. He could silently disable them and take his position there, ready to ambush anybody who tried to get to them.
The edge of the sun appeared, and all the gray went out of the morning. The long morning shadows appeared, and exposed places were touched with that silvery-white glare which announces a hot day. Down in the valley the light would be more golden, more diffused.
I had a strange vision of what would happen down in the valley. Fenn Hillyer and his wife were asleep down there, in the big double bed, with her arm across his waist. In a little while the neighborhood sounds would begin. She would get up and stand at the window and look at the morning. He would awaken when he heard the running of water in the bathroom. He would hear her get the children up for school, and hear her humming to herself in the kitchen.
That was reality. This dawn vigil was absurdity. My Meg could not be in that silent crumbling house, with men as dangerous as men can become.
Keepsafe drowsed as the sun climbed. The mist was burned away. Heat brought the insect songs. A hawk drifted, turning his head from side to side, his mind on a breakfast mouse.
The back door opened suddenly, noisily, and a man
came out onto the back stoop. I recognized him from the mug shots we had studied. George Kostinak. He was a stocky blond man. He wore denim work pants. He was bare to the waist. His chest and shoulders were matted with pale hair. Where the skin was exposed, his meaty torso was sunburned a painful-looking red.
His vocalized an enormous yawn, scrubbed his head with his knuckles, then shuddered and hugged himself and squinted toward the morning sun. He jumped down over the broken steps, walked about six feet, then stood spraddled and urinated onto the baked poisoned dirt of the dooryard.
Just as he finished, a big, strong-bodied blonde woman came through the door he had left open. She wore a bulky sweater in a bright cheap shade of blue and tight lime-green slacks. Though her hair was tangled and her face, without make-up, had a doughy look, there was a vitality about her which made her curiously attractive. She had the purposeful, controlled arrogance of one of the big jungle cats. She exuded competence, recklessness and danger.
“I told you to go further from the house, George,” she said. She held a toothbrush, toothpaste and a paper cup of water.
“You told me. Sure, Angie. You told me. But we aren’t living here forever.”
“Once a pig always a pig.”
He laughed at her. “Who’s calling who a pig, honey?”
She stepped down off the stoop. She looked at him in a deadly way. “You just took yourself off the list, friend.”
“Now Angie,” he said, with a wheedling note in his voice. “Now Angie, I was just kidding around. That’s all it was.”
“Two more broads around and all of a sudden I don’t look so good?”
“I didn’t mean anything like that.”
“You got the happy idea you’re going to get a chance at either one of them?”
One Monday We Killed Them All Page 19
