Cop Out (7 page)

“And maybe that's just why they did it,” Malone insisted. “Who'd think of looking for them practically on the scene of the crime? The more I think about it the more I'm sure we've got something. I'm going to find that cabin, Ellen. Do you feel up to staying here alone while I scout around? I don't think they'll try coming back before dark.”

“Don't worry about me. Do you think you can locate it in one day, Loney? There's an awful lot of cabins around Balsam Lake.”

“I'm not starting at the Lake. I'm starting in town.”

“What do you mean?”

“If they rented a cabin, it had to be through a real estate agent.”

“Loney, be careful! You'll get people suspicious asking questions.”

“Not if I do it right. I wish to hell I knew how the real pros go about a thing like this.”

“Just keep remembering Bibby. Please, Loney?”

She clung to him, begging with her whole body. He kissed her and pulled away. She remained in the kitchen doorway.

Malone went upstairs. As he was rummaging through the clothes closet in their bedroom he suddenly remembered his hunting rifle. He had not used it in years. Had they searched the upstairs before he got home last night and found it? Ellen might have forgotten to mention it.

It was still on the top shelf of the closet, wrapped in oil rags.

He took it down and unwrapped it. After all this time not a speck of rust. That was one thing the Marines had taught him, how to take care of a weapon. With the rifle in his hands the tiredness was rubbed out. He felt around on the shelf and found the boxes of .22 long-rifle cartridges.

You pulled a boner,
Mister
Furia.

He could have shouted with joy.

But he stood there, weighing and sorting. As he weighed and sorted the tiredness came back.

Not with Bibby in their hands. And a .22 wasn't much. You could kill a rabbit or a fox with it, but a rabbit or a fox wasn't a man with a Colt Trooper and a Walther automatic. I wish I could have afforded that .303 at the discount store. But the shells for it came to five-six dollars a box. Or that M-1 carbine they had on sale.

“Loney, what are you doing up there?”

He rewrapped the rifle and stowed it along with the cartridges at the rear of the shelf and went out into the hall to the linen closet and got some bathmats and went back and covered the gun and ammunition.

He changed into sneakers and put on his oilstained green-and-black plaid hunting jacket and cap and went back downstairs. Ellen was still standing in the kitchen doorway.

“What were you doing up there?”

“Don't let that bag out of your sight,” Malone said, and left.

Malone drove the Saab off The Pike a few hundred yards north of the cloverleaf into the gravel driveway past the gilded white sign
T. W. HYATT
&
SON REAL ESTATE
and pulled up before the one-story frame building. It was his fourth stop of the morning.

He went in.

“Hi, Edie.”

“Well, if it isn't the lawman,” Edie Golub said, looking up from her typewriter. There was a pencil stuck in her dead-black-dyed hair. “Don't shoot, Officer, I'll come quietly.” She was one of the girls from high school who wouldn't give him the time of day. She had never married. “Don't you ever crack a smile, Wes?”

“I'm off duty, I guess I can risk it,” Malone said, smiling. “Young Tru in?” Old Tru had retired the year before and taken his grouch and arthritis to St. Petersburg, Florida. The whole town had breathed out. He had always been the one who stood up in town meeting and threw a monkey wrench into the works.

“He's going through the mail.” She got up and opened the door to the inner office. “It's Wes Malone, Mr. Hyatt. Can you see him?”

“Wes? Sure thing!” Young Tru sounded eager.

Here we go again.

Malone went in. Hyatt was waiting with his best sales smile. He was a tall thin man with a badly pockmarked face, dressed as always like an
Esquire
ad. He was one of New Bradford's ladies' men, big on church socials and parties, the last one home. He was supposed to have been sleeping with Edie Golub for years—he had an old black leather couch in his office—with her “Mr. Hyatts” in the presence of third parties as their coverup.

“Sit down, Wes, park it. How's the manhunt going?”

“Oh, they got away.” It was the fourth time he had had to say it.

“I understand Tom Howland was in on it up to his fat ass.”

“Where did you hear that?” It was impossible to keep a secret in New Bradford.

“It's all over town,” Hyatt said. “I heard it in the bank a few minutes ago. Is it true, Wes?”

“I wouldn't know. I went off duty before the case broke. Tell you what I dropped in for, Tru—”

“I knew that outfit would get shlogged some day,” Hyatt said. “Whoever heard of a company in this day and age still paying their help in cash? If they'd invest a few bucks in a modern bookkeeping system—with an honest bookkeeper, ha-hal—put in one of those computers, pay off in checks … But I guess they got a big inventory in pay envelopes.”

“You're right, Tru, they asked for it all right,” Malone said. “Oh, what I'm here for. We've been having a little trouble over at the Lake. Now that the season is over some kids have been going down there nights to booze it up and generally raise hell—they've broken into a few cabins—and we've had some complaints from people who lease by the year. I've been getting up a list of the year-round renters to make sure we don't miss any. You know how some people are, afraid to make a complaint. Did you place any one-year rentals at the Lake in, say, the past six-seven months, Tru?”

“I don't think so. Bob Doerr gets most of that Lake stuff. Did you try Bob?”

“I got a few names from him. Well, I won't keep you.” There was only one real estate office in town he had not covered. If I strike out at Taugus Realty …

“No, wait a minute,” Hyatt said.

He sat still.

“Now that I think of it, I seem to recall there was one. Edie?”

She popped her hairdo in. “Yes, Mr. Hyatt?”

“Didn't we write a lease for one of the Lake cabins around May, June, somewhere around there?”

“I really don't remember.”

“Well, look it up, will you?” Hyatt sat back. “Y'know, Wes, I can never figure you out.”

Find it Edie.

“What have I done now, Tru?”

“Here you are off duty and you're working. What are you, bucking for John's job? Don't you ever relax?”

“I guess I'm not the relaxing type.”

Find it Edie
.

“That's the thing with you married suckers. You don't know how to live. Now you take me.”

“The way I hear it,” Malone said dutifully, “you've been taken by experts.”

“Who, me? The hell you say! Who said that?”

“Here it is, Mr. Hyatt.” Edie Golub had a lease in her hand. Malone watched it all the way across the rug. Hyatt took it from her, and she stood there. But when he stared up at her she left quickly, shutting the door with a bang.

“Yes, this is the one. Somebody named Pratt, William J. Pratt. Signed the lease May twenty-third. How's that for a memory? You want to see this, Wes?”

“If you don't mind.” Malone took the lease as casually as he could manage. William J. Pratt typed in. The signature unreadable. Deliberately so, he was positive, a disguised handwriting. It had to be a phony!

For Hyatt's benefit he produced a list and added the name and location of the cabin to it. He could have found it with his eyes shut. He could taste it. He handed the lease back and rose. “Thanks a lot, Tru. I'll check this one out with the others.”

Hyatt waved. “Think nothing of it.”

The real estate man went back to his mail, still a little miffed. Malone jumped for the Saab.

The description on the lease placed the cabin at the southeast end of Balsam Lake where it narrowed to muddy shallows. It was the least desirable section of the Lake. According to Malone's list, “Pratt's” rental was the only one in this scattered cabin area that extended beyond the summer season. Made to order for a post-season hideout.

He drove off the blacktop into a lane, little more than a dirt path, and cached the Saab behind a clump of diseased birch trees in a thicket of wild huckleberry bushes. The bushes were nearly bare, but they made a tall tangle and they camouflaged most of the car. He draped fallen evergreen branches over the parts that showed, and when he was satisfied that the Saab was effectively hidden he left on foot.

He was a mere three hundred yards from the cabin, but his approach took the better part of a half hour. After a few yards he got down on his belly. It was the Marine game of his boyhood over again, traveling on hips and elbows, never raising his head above the underbrush, avoiding dried-out branches, sticking where he could to the cushioning ground pine. He made so little noise that once he surprised a squirrel on the ground; he could have killed it with a stone.

At last Malone reached the clearing.

He did not enter it. The clearing had been hacked in a rough circle out of a thick stand of pine woods and along its perimeter wild azalea, laurel, and sumac had taken root in an almost continuous band of bush. Here Malone settled himself.

He had a good view of the cabin. There were some expensive handhewn log structures along the Lake, but most of the cottages were of cheap clapboard or shingle construction, labeled “cabins” by the Balsam Lake Properties Association, whose brochures leaned heavily toward fiction. The “Pratt” cabin was a slapped-together shack of green-painted shingle walls streaked with years of damp. It had a badly weathered shake roof and a midget open porch with two sagging steps. The power line that provided its electricity dropped in from above the woods and hooked onto a naked insulator attached to the outside of the house. A bluish haze seeped out of the tin chimney pot on the roof. Like all the Lake cottages it used propane gas for cooking; Malone could see the silvered tank at the side of the cabin.

The haze coming out of the tin vent told Malone what he wanted to know.

The cabin was occupied.

They were there.

Malone had been lying in the bushes for almost two hours—he had just looked at his watch, it was half-past noon—when the door of the cabin opened and a man stepped out. He was not wearing a mask but his face was in shadow and Malone could not make out the features. He was sorry now that he had not stopped in town to pick up a pair of binoculars or at least borrow a pair from Jerry Sampson at the drug store, well it was too late for that. The man was a very big man with very heavy shoulders and Malone knew he was the one the small man had called Hinch.

The man looked around and then he jumped off the porch and strolled toward the woods east of the cabin. Malone got a good look at him in the sun. He was wearing a black leather jacket and tight black pants and blue Keds, and he had red hair that bushed down over his bull's neck. He had a broken nose and a face that went with it, brutal and stupid.

Here's one guy I'd better stay out of his reach. He'd stomp me to death and not even breathe hard.

Malone stopped thinking and started tracking.

He slid back on his belly until he was protected by the trees and then he got up in a crouch and keeping to the ground pine made a rapid quarter circle to the east, traveling on his toes. He knew where Hinch was headed, the other dirt road that led to the cabin. They must have their car hidden there.

He was right. They had parked it off the road and made an attempt to hide it but it was clumsily done and Malone could see it from the bushes across the road. It was the black sedan, the Chrysler New Yorker, covered with dust.

Hinch was bulling around in the underbrush. He got to the trunk and unlocked it and dug in for something inside. When the hand reappeared it was holding a half gallon of whisky by the neck. The seal on the bottle looked intact. He closed the trunk lid and shambled back toward the clearing.

Malone backtracked. He was just in time to see Hinch step into the cabin and shut the door.

He settled himself in his original hiding place. It would be a long wait if they were starting on another bottle. He did not know exactly what he was waiting for. A chance. A break. Anything. They might not show at all. Or they might all get drunk and pass out. The whisky might do the trick. I'll have to see where I go from there.

I should have taken the rifle. Why did I chicken out? I could have shot this Hinch in the brush. From ten yards away even the measly .22 cartridge in the right spot would have taken him out for good.

Yes, and what would the other two do to Bibby when they heard a shot?

No. Wait them out.

If only they hadn't taken his revolver. There was always something reassuring about the Colt's weight on his hip, even though he had never fired it except on the state police pistol range during refreshers, and once at a marauding bobcat.

He could see Ellen's face. Waiting.

Ellen's face wavered, and Malone became aware of another, immediate danger.

His eyes insisted on drooping.

Those damned four days and nights on duty, and that heavy cold before that. The couple hours' sleep I got last night were an appetizer, worse than nothing. He began to fight the droop.

His eyes kept doing it.

He fought them desperately. He pushed them up with his fingers. But even holding them open did no good. The clearing shimmered, fogged over.

If they're drinking in there they're maybe frightening Bibby. Don't be scared, baby. Daddy's coming.

The sky began to swing like Bibby's swing in the backyard. Up … down …

If I maybe shut my eyes for just a few seconds.

Bibby I'm out here. It won't be long.

He was still talking to her when sleep washed everything out.

“No more,” Furia said. He took the bottle from Hinch and screwed back the top. Hinch was left with a few drops in his glass.