Calhoun got his driver’s license from his wallet and told Helena to give him hers and the car registration. Silently she took them from her bag and gave them to him.
The inside lane had moved a trifle faster than the outer one. The black Ford containing the two small, dark men reached the checkpoint one car before the Buick did. Calhoun noted again that the driver seemed highly nervous as he got out to open the trunk.
A wild hope struck him. Was it possible that the Ford was the bandits’ car? It would be a highly unlikely coincidence, a near miracle even, for the police to net their prey at this precise instant. But the little dark man certainly was acting in a suspicious manner. And he had attempted to get the motor officer to let him turn around. Now it struck Calhoun that it would be a remarkable coincidence if the Ford actually had been heading for Crestwood Beach, as the driver had claimed. It seemed much more likely that he had jumped at the name as an excuse to avoid the checkpoint.
Calhoun peered forward at the Ford’s trunk with growing hope as the little man reluctantly let it swing open. His hope collapsed abruptly when he saw the interior of the trunk. It was piled high with dead fish.
The little man peered fearfully sidewise at the state trooper as the latter glared into the trunk.
“Well, well,” the trooper said in an ominous tone. “Must be at least a hundred black bass in there.”
“Seventy-two is all,” the little man said. “There was twelve of us out fishing, officer. Honest. The others went on ahead in different cars. We just happen to be carrying all the fish. We only took six apiece.”
“Twelve of you all in one boat?” the trooper inquired sarcastically.
“We had three boats,” the little man said.
“Explain it to the judge,” the trooper said. “Pull over on the shoulder, mister.”
Dejectedly the little man climbed back in his car and drove off on the shoulder. He was no more dejected than Calhoun.
“Why couldn’t it have been the bandits?” he muttered under his breath. “Instead of a couple of lousy fish hogs.”
“What?” Helena asked.
“Nothing,” he said wearily.
The car ahead was waved on, and Calhoun drove the Buick into the checkpoint.
As he got out of the car and handed over the registration certificate and two drivers’ licenses, he said to the officer who was peering into the back seat, “I’m afraid I can’t open the trunk. The lock’s jammed.”
“Yeah?” the trooper said. He finished his examination of the car’s interior. “Let’s have the key, sir. Maybe I can work it.”
Calhoun handed him the key ring. “This one,” he said, indicating the Packard trunk key.
The trooper tried it. Then he tried the ignition and glove-compartment keys, but neither of them would work, either.
Handing the keys back to Calhoun, he said, “Pull over on the shoulder, sir. Afraid you’re going to have to wait.”
Then he called to a trooper seated in a state patrol car parked on the shoulder, “Jammed trunk lock, Jim. Better put in a call for Brady.”
Calhoun retrieved the registration and licenses from the other trooper, got back into the car and drove over onto the shoulder ahead of the patrol car. The black Ford had parked behind it, and the little driver was sullenly giving personal data to a trooper who was taking down the information in a notebook.
Calhoun climbed from the car and went back to the patrol car.
“Who’s Brady?” he asked the trooper named Jim.
“Lock expert, sir. Take him maybe fifteen minutes to get here.”
“Oh,” Calhoun said. Then, after a pause, “I suppose it’s that payroll loot you’re looking for, isn’t it?”
“That’s right, sir.”
“Well, you certainly can’t think we have it. The bandits were two men, not a man and a woman. And they’d probably be in a stolen car. We’re on vacation up here and our papers are in order. Why do we have to be held up?”
“The orders are to search all cars, mister. Sorry, but you’ll have to wait.”
Calhoun went back to the car.
Helena said, “Shall we chance making a sudden break and running for it?”
Calhoun shook his head. “We’d never make it. Besides, they have our names and license number.”
She settled back, drew a cigarette from her purse, and lit it with the dash lighter. Examining her face, he saw that it was completely calm.
“You don’t look very worried,” he said.
She shrugged. “Why worry about the inevitable? We’re caught. I don’t intend to wring my hands over it.”
Despite himself, he had to admire her fatalism.
Ten minutes dragged by. Then the officer named Jim climbed from the patrol car.
He called to the men working the checkpoint, “You can knock it off, boys. Checkpoint Three just called in that they’ve been netted.”
One of the troopers who was checking car interiors and trunks paused in the act of unlocking a trunk. “Yeah?” he said. “The loot, too?”
“The works. No shooting. They surrendered like little lambs. Captain says to break it up and come in.”
The officer withdrew the key from the trunk lock and handed it back to the car owner. The trooper named Jim walked forward to the Buick and said to Calhoun, “Guess you can move on, sir. Sorry you were held up.”
In a voice he barely managed to keep steady, Calhoun said, “Thanks.”
He started the engine, drove on a half mile, then pulled over on the shoulder and lit a cigarette with shaking hands.
Helena said, “Why are you nervous now? The crisis is over.”
He controlled an impulse to bat her.
The roadblock had delayed them nearly twenty minutes. It was a quarter past nine when they drove down the dirt road and stopped next to the boat livery. Calhoun had Helena synchronize her watch with his.
“I’ll give you a half hour,” he said. “Blink your lights exactly at nine forty-five, then again every five minutes after that until I dock. Okay?”
“I understand,” she said.
He collected his fishing gear from the back seat, leaving the anchors and sash cord, and got out of the car. Helena drove off without a word.
Calhoun found the old man sitting on the screened-in porch again, still reading a Bible.
“Evening,” the old man said. “Beginning to think you wasn’t coming.”
“You saved my boat, didn’t you?” Calhoun asked quickly.
“Oh, sure. No call for it anyway. And it’s paid for.”
He led Calhoun down to the boat dock to show him his boat.
Another boat with two men in it was tying up at the dock just as they got there.
The old man called, “Not quitting so soon, are you?”
“Ran out of bait,” one of the men called back. “Just came in to get more. They’re really hitting.”
He held up a string of about a dozen fish averaging about a half pound each.
“Nice string of calicoes,” Calhoun commented.
The old man gave him a curious glance. “Yeah,” he said after a moment.
The boat the old man gave him was a flat-bottomed scow about ten feet long. In addition to the motor, it contained a pair of oars and a gas can with an extra gallon of gas. The Coleman lantern had a bolt welded to its bottom that fitted into one of the oarlocks.
Calhoun had to wait while the old man picked two dozen night crawlers from a large box of moss. Calhoun didn’t have a use in the world for them, but it would look peculiar to go fishing without bait.
When he was settled in the boat, the old man said, “Looks like a good night for walleyes.”
Calhoun looked out over the water, which was as smooth and moonlit as it had been the previous night.
“Yeah,” he said sardonically. “Just a little choppy.”
The old man cackled. “Them little six-inch perch is good eating anyway, even if they ain’t much sport. You ought to catch a bushel. O
r maybe some of them enormous crappies like the other fellers just brought in.”
Calhoun started the motor and pulled away while the old man was still cackling at his own humor.
16
For about a quarter mile Calhoun set a course straight out from shore; then he swung right and followed the shoreline for what he judged to be about a mile. The water was dotted with lights of other night fishermen, some farther out and some between Calhoun and the shore.
At nine forty he picked a spot several hundred yards from the nearest fisherman’s light, cut the motor, and let the boat drift. There was a slight inshore current, but he figured he would maintain the same relative position to the other boats because they would be taking advantage of the current for drift trolling instead of anchoring and doing still fishing.
At nine forty-four by his watch he began studying the shoreline, concentrating on the point he judged would be Crestwood Beach. Minutes passed and nothing happened.
With his eyes straining at the shoreline, dotted here and there by cottage lights and silhouetted by the lights of moving traffic on the highway beyond it, he sat motionless for minutes more. Finally he risked lowering his gaze long enough to glance at the time, and was shocked to see it was five of ten. By now Helena should have flashed her lights three times.
Just as he raised his eyes again, a pair of headlights blinked twice off to his right, a good quarter mile from where he had been searching for them. He barely caught them from the corner of his eye, and they blinked on and off too fast for him to take a fix. There was nothing to do but wait another five minutes with his gaze fixed in that direction.
Eventually they blinked twice again.
He started the motor and headed at full throttle toward the point where he had seen the lights. But running a boat in the dark is confusing. He was fifty yards offshore, had turned out his Coleman lantern, and was heading confidently toward a narrow dock he could see protruding out over the water when the lights blinked again, a hundred yards to his left.
Changing course, he cut the throttle way down and slowly chugged up to the small dock Helena and he had stood on the night before. As he tied up, he could make out the dim shadow of the convertible next to the dark and boarded-up cottage.
Helena greeted him with a calm, “Hello, Barney.”
“Any trouble?” he asked.
“Not since I got here. But I missed the turn and was a few minutes late. No one from the other cottages has come out to ask why I was blinking my lights.”
Looking in both directions, Calhoun could see no one. The cottages both sides of them were still dark. He went behind the car, lifted the trunk lid, and took the dead body of Lawrence Powers in his arms.
As he lurched past the front seat with his burden, he said, “Bring the gunny sacks.”
Calhoun was a fairly strong man, but it’s quite a trick even for a strong man to carry an inanimate hundred and fifty pounds over uneven ground in the dark. Once he stumbled and nearly dropped the body, and as he started to lower it into the boat, it slipped from his grip and nearly tumbled into the water before bouncing off the gunwale and settling just where he wanted it on the bottom of the boat.
He was drenched with sweat.
When he finished wiping his face with a handkerchief, he found Helena standing on the dock beside him, the three burlap bags in her hands. Carefully he covered her husband’s body with them.
Then he returned to the car for the two anchors and the sash cord.
When he was finally reseated in the boat and ready to start, Helena still stood on the dock.
“Can’t I go along and help?” she asked.
“I’d never find this place again in the dark,” he told her. He looked at his watch, noting it was ten after ten. “Pick me up at the boat livery at a quarter to eleven.”
When she didn’t say anything, he glanced up at her. Maybe it was only an effect of the moonlight, but he imagined there was a look of disappointment on her usually expressionless face, as though he had refused her some pleasure she particularly wanted to enjoy.
“Quarter to eleven,” he repeated.
She nodded, and he started the motor and pulled away.
He headed straight out from shore at quarter speed for about fifty yards, then stopped long enough to light his lantern. He didn’t care to have the Coast Guard or Coast Guard Reserve pick him up for running without lights.
When he started up again, he opened to full throttle and held it until he was even with the farthest boats from shore, approximately two miles out. He didn’t want to risk calling attention to himself by going out beyond them.
There weren’t many boats out that far, perhaps a half dozen spaced several hundred yards apart. He cut his motor halfway between two.
There was no risk working under the bright glare of the Coleman lantern; he could see nothing of the other boats except their lights, so he knew it was impossible for them to see what was going on in his. Working rapidly, he uncovered the body, cut a length of sash cord, and tied one of the anchors around Lawrence Powers’ neck. The other he tied firmly to Powers’ feet after lashing the ankles together.
He was standing up in the boat getting ready to heave the body over the side when a voice said almost in his ear, “Any luck?”
Starting violently, he lost his balance, made a wild grab for the side of the boat, and sat down with a thump on the body. He took one terrified look over his shoulder, expecting to see someone within feet of him, then drew a deep sigh of relief. There was a boat light slowly coming toward him, but it was still a good twenty yards away. He realized it was only the acoustic effect of sound traveling across water that had made the voice seem so near.
Since the two figures in the other boat were only faceless shapes to Calhoun, he realized they couldn’t see into his boat any clearer than he could see into theirs. Quickly he pulled the burlap sacks over the body and pushed himself up onto the rear seat next to the motor.
Only then did it occur to him that he hadn’t even answered the other boat’s hail. Belatedly he called back in as calm a voice as he could muster, “Couple of small perch is all.”
The boat was now within ten yards, and Calhoun could make out the two men in it. The one in front was in his early twenties and the man operating the motor was middle-aged. The motor was barely turning over, which was the reason Calhoun hadn’t heard their approach. But they hadn’t been trying to sneak up on him, he realized when he saw a line stretching back from either side of the boat. They were moving at that slow speed because they were trolling.
They passed within three yards of Calhoun’s boat. As they went by, the middle-aged man said, “We ain’t having any luck, either. We’re about ready to go in.”
Then they were past. Neither had glanced at the burlap-covered mound in the bottom of Calhoun’s boat.
He waited until he could see nothing of them but their light, then uncovered the body again, lifted it in his arms, and heaved it into the water. It landed on its back, the sightless eyes peering straight up at him for a final second before it disappeared in a gurgle of bubbles.
Calhoun tossed the burlap bags overboard after it. Then, with shaking fingers, he lit a cigarette and drew a deep and relieved drag.
He was halfway back to shore before it occurred to him that the old man at the boat livery might think it odd if he noticed his line wasn’t even wet. He cut the motor, tied a yellow and red flatfish to his line without even using a leader, and made a long cast out over the water. He knew the chance of getting a strike on an artificial lure at night was remote, but all he was interested in was getting his line wet.
His usual bad fisherman’s luck held. If he had been fishing seriously, he would have sat there all night without a single strike. Now, because the last thing he wanted at that moment was a fish, he nailed a northern pike that must have weighed close to five pounds. It took him nearly ten minutes to land it.
Then he had another thought. He didn’t have an Ohio fishing licens
e. And it would be just his luck to step out of the boat into the arms of a game warden.
So he unhooked one of the nicest northerns he had ever boated and tossed it back into the water.
The old man saw his light coming in and came down to the dock to meet him. When he pulled up alongside the dock, the old man said, “Any luck?”
“A five-pound northern,” Calhoun said. “But I tossed it back in.”
The old man cackled. Calhoun knew he wouldn’t believe it.
As he climbed out of the boat, the old man said, “No fooling, didn’t you even get a perch?”
“None I felt like keeping,” Calhoun said. “I like them bigger than four inches.”
“Should have got something. Most everybody is tonight. Perch and crappie mostly, with an occasional largemouth. Nobody’s brought a walleye in here yet, though. Got any bait left? They been cleaning me out.”
“A few crawlers left in the can,” Calhoun said. “You’re welcome to them.”
Lifting his fishing gear from the boat, he walked up past the cottage to the dirt road.
Helena had parked the car some twenty yards up the dirt road, facing the highway. She was sitting on the right side of the seat. After tossing his fishing gear in the back, Calhoun slid under the wheel.
“Everything go all right?” she asked.
“Okay,” he said. “I even caught a fish on the way in.”
“Oh? Do you like fishing?”
“Under ordinary circumstances,” Calhoun said. “It’s my favorite sport.”
“Then why didn’t you stay out awhile?” she asked seriously. “I wouldn’t have minded waiting.”
The question crystallized an opinion Calhoun had been forming. Beneath her beautiful exterior, Helena was almost psychotically callous. He remembered the casual way she had taken ice for their drinks from the tub containing the corpse of her husband. And now she was suggesting that Calhoun might enjoy a little fishing immediately after dumping the same corpse in Lake Erie.
He didn’t try to explain it to her. He just said, “I wasn’t particularly in the mood for fishing tonight.”
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