Game Bet

by Forrest, Richard;

  Before the reverberation of the last shot had died, he swung himself into the car and yelled over his shoulder. “Go!”

  Ginny threw the car in gear and careened over the gas-station apron. A fusillade of shots was fired at them from the police car; and a siren wailed in the distance.

  Facing out over the rear of the convertible, Cory fired another series of shots: two into the front tires of the unmarked car, and the final one into the upper part of the grille. He hoped that his weapon had enough muzzle velocity to carry the projectile through the radiator and across the engine block, shattering spark plugs and the carburetor.

  Ginny took the corner on two wheels, and they were safe from the firing detectives. “Where to?” she yelled back without turning.

  “Keep going. We’re not out of this yet.” He fumbled with the cartridges in his pocket and jammed them into the empty magazine.

  As he pushed the magazine back into place, a police cruiser rocked around the corner behind them. Its revolving dome light flashed and its siren blared.

  Cory levered himself into a comfortable position on the rear seat. The rifle protruded over the recessed convertible top. The pursuing car, as if the driver were aware of his intention, began a weaving pattern as it pulled closer behind them.

  Cory fired a series of three.

  The second shot took out a front tire. The car began to skid as its driver fought for control. It turned sideways and screeched to a halt against a parked car. A uniformed officer jumped from the vehicle and snapped a shotgun to his shoulder. He fired twice in rapid succession at the fleeing convertible.

  Cory heard a few shotgun pellets rattle against the bottom of the trunk. Ginny turned the next corner, and they had evaded another of their pursuers.

  “What happened in the store?” he yelled at her.

  “The owner was of a suspicious nature. He called the bank and found my check was NG. He must have suspected that I’d be back today—those big guys were waiting for me. Have we lost them?”

  Again, the sound of sirens. The street, before and behind them, was empty, but the siren sounds seemed to surround them. “I think they’re running parallel to us,” he yelled as he swung his feet over the seat. “At an intersection, somewhere ahead, they’ll block the road. Be ready for them.”

  “Great.”

  Cory sat tensely with the rifle balanced on his knees. When the sound of sirens on either side of them stopped, he knew they were nearing the roadblock.

  The road made a gentle sweep to the left. When they completed the turn, they saw the barricade ahead. Two police cruisers were parked across the road. Three uniformed men waited. Two were behind the cars, with revolvers braced on the roof. A third stood between the two cars, with a shotgun.

  “I’ll try and swing through one of those side yards,” Ginny yelled.

  Their approach to the roadblock seemed to be in slow motion. Cory didn’t like the assured appearance of the cop with the shotgun. He seemed calm, cool, and calculating. He raised the rifle and slowly led them as they approached. The man with the shotgun was bent slightly forward to cushion the impact of the recoil; one elbow was stuck out at right angles to his body. He stood in a professional shooting stance.

  Cory balanced his rifle on the rim of the windshield and leaned forward to sight. “Steady, steady, steady,” he mumbled under his breath. The cop with the shotgun appeared to be sighting directly at him. Cory could almost feel the gentle increasing trigger pressure as the distance between the car and barricade rapidly closed.

  “I’m going to turn in a sec,” she called.

  “Steady,” he murmured. He had one advantage in that his rifle had the greater range, and two disadvantages in that the man with the shotgun was not shooting from a rocking platform, and his shot pattern was far wider. Cory knew that when Ginny made her last-second swerve to go around the blocking vehicles, the shotgun would fire one or more times. They would be hit.

  Cory began to shoot. He walked his rounds across the side of the blocking vehicles at knee level. The Buick rocked violently and it was a difficult shot. The man with the shotgun seemed unperturbed by the approaching shot patterns and still aimed, coolly waiting for the distance to close.

  Cory’s fourth shot caught him in the lower leg, and he crumpled to the pavement.

  Ginny swerved the car across a side yard, pushed over three mailboxes and a bike, and rocked back into the street.

  A battery of shots was fired at them. The acute angle of their new path caused them to miss.

  “I’m beginning to feel like Bonnie and Clyde,” Ginny said.

  “Remember, in those days the police didn’t have radios to coordinate with.”

  “I’ll turn on the interstate. We can make better time.”

  “That would be certain capture. The state police are probably already setting up blocks in both directions. Stay on back roads and weave in and out of residential streets. We’ll dump this car and get another method of transportation.” Cory jammed the rifle butt under the dashboard and wedged the barrel between the seats.

  “They’re going to get us, Cory.” For the first time during the harrowing chase an edge of panic tinted her voice.

  “A couple of miles and we’ll be in Old Saybrook. We’ll park this clunker, with the roof up, in a commuters’ parking lot. There’s one near the train station.”

  “If you say so.”

  They made it to the town of Old Saybrook and pulled into a secluded parking lot. The main New York-to-Boston Amtrak line passed through here, and Cory had ridden it a number of times when he returned to school.

  He had difficulty getting the car roof up, but finally managed to release it and wedge it shut over the front windshield. There were two bullet holes in the fabric.

  They left the rifle hidden in the car and walked through an old cemetery that abutted the railroad tracks. Once inside the station, Cory discovered that the next train left in ten minutes.

  They sat quietly on worn benches inside the station, with their knees touching. It was the longest ten minutes of their lives.

  CHAPTER 14

  “It’s got to be them!” Sergeant Pierce slammed the teletype flimsies down on Wilton James’s desk. “Look at the goddamn marksmanship. No one but him shoots like that.”

  “What about the description of the girl?”

  “It could be her. The guy wore a beard, and her hair was different, but I tell you, it’s him.”

  “Uh huh.” Wilton James arrayed the flimsies in heat rows across his bare desk. He puffed contemplatively on his pipe. “We better let Rook know about this.”

  “He won’t help.” Pierce snorted. “It’s ours.”

  “It looks like they’ve been hanging paper all along the coast.”

  “They’d need bread.”

  “Yes, wouldn’t they?” James took a map from his center desk drawer and spread it across the flimsies. He made half a dozen marks on various towns along the shore. “I like the pattern. They hit every affluent town in a row except”—he pointed with his pipe—“except Lantern City.”

  Pierce snorted again. “Amateurs.”

  “Yes, aren’t they? Lantern City. Interesting choice. There must be a reason for it, Pierce. There’s always a reason.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.” The sonorous voice of the announcer was replaced by applause as the tall man walked across the stage and stood behind the podium. He waited for the room to quiet and, leaning slightly forward, gripped the sides of the lectern. His words were soft and measured and yet filled with deep sincerity.

  “I have decided to take my cause to the people of this country,” the President said. “I have the utmost faith that the will of our populace will express itself in support of my program. The currents of distrust, ignorance, and hysteria must be turned aside. I say this not for this administration, or for those in this room, or for those listening across the land. I speak for the uncounted. I speak for the unborn, those unable a
s yet to express themselves or exert their will. I speak for the children of our children, who must be protected and allowed to flourish.”

  Half the audience of journalists and cabinet members stood to give resounding applause to the President’s words. Others sat mutely with their hands by their sides. Their countenances were cold in disagreement.

  “It is time for the great thaw,” the President continued. “Forty years of cold war have shown it to be an impractical and fruitless response to our adversary. Détente has proven to be a myth. As your President, I am prepared to make the leap of faith and truly enter into a partnership of peoples. And that shall be the name of this crusade, and I place my reputation, my life, and my presidency on that course.”

  Cory snapped off the television set. “They’re going to kill the poor bastard,” he said softly.

  “You don’t agree with him?” Ginny asked.

  “Jesus, I don’t know. I was in the military. When you train for years to kill people, you tend to think along the lines of killing people. I’ve never been very political—a reaction to my father,” he said with a rueful smile.

  “They’re going to try again, aren’t they?”

  “You know it.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Ginny, if I knew that, we wouldn’t be hiding here.”

  “We don’t have to stay here. We’ve got the car we bought. We can go, Cory. We can leave here, leave this state … go to California.”

  “I just told you, they’re going to kill President Crescatt.”

  “You said you weren’t even sure he was right.”

  “I don’t, but I do know we can’t change foreign policy by killing our leaders. When the Romans began doing that, they went downhill fast.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “My beard’s long enough; we have a little money and a clean car. I can’t put it off any longer. I have to start with the beginnings.”

  “Which is where?”

  “Atkins of the FBI. I’m also interested in Detective Wilton James and what happened out at the Hunt Club. I’ll start with Atkins and see if I can arrange a safe meeting.”

  “Can you trust him?”

  “It would seem that I’m going to find out.”

  Cory sat in his room on the third floor of the Arriwani Hotel, across the street from the federal building in downtown Deerford. It was a transient place filled with dreamless older men existing on social-security or welfare checks, and hard, rootless younger men who drifted from city to city in an endless search for “the break.”

  It was taking too much time, and that was the very thing he had little of. He sat in his room all day and watched the entrance of the building across the street. Atkins arrived for work early, usually before eight. He exited from the building at nine, for coffee at a small shop next to his office. During the remainder of the day he would be in and out in the course of business.

  On the third day Cory began to formulate his approach. It was simple, straightforward, and dangerous. The special agent had one cup of coffee and browsed through a newspaper. Cory would use that time for the contact.

  Special Agent Ralston Atkins of the Federal Bureau of Investigation did not arrive at work early to make “points.” He was the first at his desk for the simple reason that when he drove eight-year-old Deborah to school, it didn’t make sense to drive all the way back home for that final cup of coffee. He was first at the office, put in an hour’s work, and then went out for coffee at nine.

  Two more years and he would have twenty with the Bureau. It was time to pack it in. He had feelers out with the Armond Machine Company in Deerford, and they were receptive to a new chief of security. In two years their present security head would retire, and that corresponded nicely with Atkins’s twenty in the Bureau. The hours would be more regular, and the ache in the pit of his stomach might pass away forever. He knew the ache well. He had first felt it in the closing days of the Korean War. It occurred again when he was first fired upon during an arrest.

  The ache had recently returned for a more intangible cause, but he knew it concerned Cory Williams. He had a feeling about the case, and for inarticulated reasons believed Williams’s wild story. A hundred pieces didn’t fit, and yet somewhere there was an answer. He had another feeling that he had read something that was a part of the puzzle, but he couldn’t place it.

  A hundred informational memos passed across an agent’s desk each year. They were read and initialed, but the sheer bulk of information was such that most of it was lost in the exigencies of day-to-day work. He would glance through the complete file later today.

  As he was examining inter-agency reports, the official summary of the police blockade and shoot-out in the shoreline area caught his attention. The concise abstract of facts was written in the usual police verbiage, but he could vividly reconstruct the events. Few men in the country were able to duplicate the marksmanship of the man in the convertible. Cory Williams was one of those men.

  Atkins was still mulling over the report as he left his desk and went downstairs for coffee. He could have stayed at his desk and had coffee from the serving cart, but he always felt that the break in routine was beneficial.

  He slid onto a stool at the center of the counter in the small luncheonette, and coffee and a sweet roll were immediately placed in front of him.

  “Morning, Mr. Atkins.”

  “Morning, Sam,” he replied automatically and realized that he had forgotten to buy his usual newspaper at the stand in the building lobby. He couldn’t stop thinking about the man with the rifle.

  Something poked his side. He turned to face the man on his left. “Is that really a gun, Williams?”

  “I need to talk.”

  “Come up to the office.”

  “You’re out of your mind.”

  “We’ll take a walk over to the park.”

  “Now.”

  “Let me pay for my coffee.”

  “I’ll be right behind you,” Cory said softly. “Keep it cool.”

  “I will.” Atkins slipped a dollar under the rim of his saucer and slid off the stool. He walked slowly out the front door. He had made up his mind to talk with Williams. The park was only two blocks away, and while they walked its paths between sleeping derelicts they could exchange information. He would offer Williams sanctuary in a safe house out of state and assure him of the Bureau’s cooperation. It made sense. There was more here than he had initially imagined.

  Atkins stopped at the corner to wait for the traffic sign to blink to “walk.” He sensed Cory behind him but did not turn. On the far side of the street a bearded young man had set up a card table near the corner. A crudely hand-lettered sign was stretched across the front of the table and read:

  BAN THE NUKES COMMITTEE FOR THE CONTROL OF NUCLEAR ENERGY

  The “walk” sign came on, and Atkins stepped off the curb. He smiled toward the man at the card table. “Soon we’ll have a committee for everything,” he thought with a bemused smile.

  For an instant his stride broke, and he nearly stopped in the center of the street. He had the connection. It was the committee; there was a committee. It was in a report he had read six weeks ago that came out of the Toledo office. It had circulated for only the briefest of time. His early hours at the office had made him one of the few to see it before the call came from Washington, ordering all copies to be immediately shredded. Yes, that was a piece to the puzzle, a piece that he would tell Cory about.

  Ralston Atkins never felt his spine shatter. The truck with the high bumper caught him across the small of his back. Several vertebrae were instantaneously crushed, and conscious thought fled before his dead body hit the pavement.

  Cory assumed the speeding truck was meant for him, and he instinctively scrambled for the curb.

  It hit the FBI agent a dozen paces in front of him, and he saw the skewered posture of the man as he was flung to the street. He knew Atkins was dead.

  The truck accelerated down the s
treet and screeched around a far corner.

  There were quick and silent ways to open ordinary house locks, but Cory didn’t know any of them. He broke the rear window of the kitchen door with a brick he found edging a small garden. He reached through the broken glass, flipped the lock on the door and entered Wilton James’s darkened home.

  The rooms revealed the man. The fact that a woman had once lived, cooked, cleaned, and loved here was now obliterated. The furniture seemed new, as if it were purchased after the woman’s death. The rooms were filled with bulky leather chairs, deep ashtrays, and cannisters of tobacco. It was a man’s home and reflected strong masculine tastes.

  One room remained untouched, as it had for over ten years. It was a young man’s room, filled with a bookcase of adventure stories, athletic trophies, a traffic sign on one wall, and a line of odd-brand beer cans along the dresser. A silver-star medal was framed against a velvet backdrop. It hung near the news article concerning the death of Robert James in Viet Nam. The room was a shrine to a dead man.

  What had once been a third bedroom was now converted into a study. Several police citations hung along a wall over a heavy mahogany desk. Cory sat in the desk chair and began to search the desk drawers. The center drawer was locked. He located a tool box in the cellar and returned to the study to force it open with a hammer and chisel.

  There were three items in the drawer: a loaded .38 caliber police special, an address book, and a plaque. The plaque was identical to the one on the wall in Norm Lewis’s gun room. It announced that Wilton James was a member of the Committee of One Thousand.

  The connection was made. Lewis and the detective knew each other.

  He flipped through the address book. Under L there were the initials NL and a telephone number. Cory recognized the number as Norm’s.

  He tucked the revolver into the waistband of his trousers and continued searching. Deep in the bottom drawer was a large manila folder. He dumped its contents onto the surface of the desk.

  The news clippings had been meticulously snipped from a number of papers. They seemed to represent a time span stretching over the past two years and concerned the President. He shuffled through the lot and picked out several representative ones: