Assassins Have Starry Eyes (16 page)

He said, “You’re bluffing.”

“Try me and see.”

“I don’t think you’re that crazy.”

“I’m pretty damn crazy,” I said. “I’ve been shot, knifed, more or less widowed, and suspended from my job. I’ve been called plain and fancy names and heard my wife called the same. By using a few brains, of which I seem to have a monopoly around here, I’ve got myself a tip on what’s going on. Not much of a tip, but enough that when I started to follow it up, I got a reaction. Some people don’t like the direction in which I’m working. I’ve forced a move out of them, which is more than anybody else has done—everybody else being too damn busy watching the posts and borders for hypothetical Russian spies. So now all of a sudden I’m too valuable to risk. Well, nuts to you, my fine federal friend. You have a couple of seconds in which to decide how badly you want to keep me here. The way to do it is pull out the gun you’re undoubtedly packing and squeeze the trigger carefully. You get one shot free. We charge for the rest.”

He sat beside me in silence for a space of time, while two cars whipped past from the south with a flash of headlights, and a big semi-trailer job thundered past from the north. At last he laughed shortly.

“I still think you’re bluffing,” he said.

“Sure.”

“I could have you arrested.”

“You could try. Washington would love the publicity.”

“I don’t know why I gave up a nice peaceful job running down simple-minded criminals in order to come out here and ride herd on a bunch of temperamental intellectual screwballs.”

I said, “Are we through showing each other how tough we are?”

“I wasn’t—”

“The hell you weren’t. Throwing cops at my head and ordering me back to town and threatening me with arrest. Can we talk like sensible people for a moment?”

“It would be a pleasant change,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to Hanksville. Short of shooting me, you can’t stop me. I’m going in from the north by way of Green River since I don’t know if I can make the road over Kite’s Ferry in this Detroit dreamboat so early in the season. It’s supposed to be a lulu. As you’ll gather, I’m driving. That’ll give you time to fly a man up to Moab or Green River and have him drift casually into Hanksville before I get there. Don’t send anybody you’re awfully fond of, because they’ll undoubtedly be looking for him; they’ll probably spot him since it’s not much of a town, and they may be figuring to take him out fast when the action starts.”

“I’ll go myself,” he said.

“That’s fine,” I said. “If you sent a nice guy and he got killed, somebody might miss him. And don’t expect any help from me. I won’t be dropping rose petals along the trail for you to follow. In fact, you can count on not getting a damn bit of co-operation from me. I’m going to play along with these birds, just as convincingly as I can, until I see what it’s all about.”

“And after that?”

“After that,” I said, “we’ll see how it breaks.”

“I still think you’re making a mistake,” he said.

“Well, I’m sure you’ll do your damnedest to save me from it,” I said. “Just so you keep out of sight and don’t spook the game, that’s all I ask.”

TWENTY-ONE

I HIT MOAB, UTAH, around ten in the morning, having crossed about a quarter of New Mexico and a small corner of Colorado during the night. You can make a lot better time on those straight southwestern highways, even the smaller ones, than you can back east on anything but a turnpike. Moab, the self-styled uranium capital of the world, was a small, feverish, boom-town sort of place even this early in the spring; every other vehicle on the street seemed to be a jeep and every other man a prospector. Every kind of equipment was being offered for sale or rent, from a geologist’s pick to an airplane complete with pilot and scintillometer—I understand they do a lot of prospecting from the air these days. I had no interest in the town except gasoline; when the tank was full I climbed back in the car and kept on going, wishing Tony Rasmussen had seen fit to slice me in front instead of in back. I was rubbing pretty raw against the cushions from all the driving.

I reached Green River, a small desert town, early in the afternoon, and parked in front of a café that advertised a couple of popular brands of beer. These signs should not be taken too literally. Utah beer has only three per cent of what it takes, since the Mormons who run the state are abstemious people. Inside, the café had the lunch-counter look of a place where no serious drinking is done. There was a sign on the wall:
Why don’t you spit on the ceiling? Any fool can spit on the floor!
Another read:
If you’re so smart why ain’t you rich?
A third declared:
No deals under $100,000 discussed at this bar.
There were two or three tables besides the counter and stools. I had a bottle of the emasculated beer while I waited for my food. Drinking it slowly, I looked around at the other customers. There weren’t many, and none of them seemed interested in me.

After eating, I filled up the tank again, since I didn’t know how long it might be before I got another chance. The man at the filling station said that if the weather stayed dry I could probably get to Hanksville somehow if I was fool enough to try, but damned if he, personally, would take a good car over that road. I drove to the intersection four miles out of town and got the general drift of what he was talking about.

It was a dirt road leading to the south and west. At this point in Utah, according to my road map, there was nothing between me and Highway 66 crossing Arizona three hundred miles to the south except a lot of sand and rock, the Colorado River, and some Navajo Indians—that is, except for the road I was looking at and the town of Hanksville. If you dropped a couple of New England states into this blank space on the map you’d have a hard time finding them again. The road itself was dry, but that was all that could be said for it. It had obviously been very wet quite recently, perhaps during the same storm we had felt in New Mexico. Trucks had churned up the resulting mud and cut it into ruts; cars had stuck in it and been dug out by guys who weren’t particularly concerned with how the next fellow was going to get through. Furthermore, a stiff wind was beginning to blow from the southwest, and dust and sand were beginning to fly.

I studied the map. It had an informative legend neatly boxed in red:
Roads in this area often impassable; tourists planning trips should make inquiries locally and carry water.
I threw the transmission into low range and headed in. It was slow, rough work and not much fun for a man with a sore back. The wind picked up as I went along, throwing sand and gravel rattling across the windshield. Every so often I had to pause for the visibility to improve enough so that I could see what hole which wheel was going to fall into next. At last I said to hell with it, pulled off into a jeep track, and drove over into the shelter of a tall reddish butte. It was only three o’clock but I was bushed; besides, it occurred to me that, considering all the circumstances, I had probably come far enough. I climbed in back, therefore, laid the rifle and shotgun on the floor, wrapped up in the blanket, and went to sleep.

It was dark when I awoke for no particular reason, feeling cold, hungry, cramped, and uneasy—mostly the latter. I picked up the shotgun as the better weapon for night operations, and broke it to check the loads. The twin brass heads of the shells gleamed dully in the darkness. I closed the piece again and got out of the car. The wind had not let up noticeably. The dust was still blowing along the ground but the sky was absolutely clear overhead. The stars were large and bright. The moon was rising in the east. Magnified and colored by the dusty atmosphere near the horizon, it looked orange and enormous. You’ve never seen a real moonrise until you’ve seen it on the desert; and when you do see one you won’t believe it. There was something eerie about the wind rushing past under a cloudless sky.

I stood there for a while. Nothing moved within my range of vision, except the dust and a tumbleweed that, rolling past in the live and bouncing way they have, almost got the benefit of a twelve-gauge Magnum load of #2 shot. I walked around the car and stood on the other side for a while, gaining a great deal of respect for the old mountain men who lived with this kind of nagging uneasiness most of their lives, never knowing when death might be lying in wait for them out in the dark.

Finally I shrugged, opened the trunk of the car, unloaded the shotgun while standing clearly visible in the light from the trunk lid, and put the gun away in its case. Then I went back and got the rifle and did the same for that. Instinct told me I wasn’t alone in this part of the desert; but it could have been the same kind of instinct that makes you hear noises in the kitchen at night when there’s nobody but you in the house. And if Van Horn had put some men to following me, and they were hanging around out there, I certainly didn’t want to shoot them; and if it was somebody else, I had driven five hundred miles to meet him, and I didn’t want to shoot him, either—at least not yet. Of course there was the possibility that he might want to shoot me; but if I wasn’t willing to take that chance I shouldn’t have wasted my time and that of a lot of other people coming out here. I was gambling on the hunch that somebody had gone to more trouble to set this up than seemed necessary for a simple assassination. There was no sense in decoying me all this way just to kill me; it was a waste of effort. Whoever was running the show had something more elaborate in mind, I hoped.

I got the gasoline lantern and lighted it to make myself look guileless and unsuspicious; then I got the stove out and started it in the lee of the car with my cardboard carton of groceries for an additional windbreak. It was about nine-thirty. I put on water for coffee and fried up some bacon in the big iron skillet I carry—aluminum is fine for boiling, and I have a nesting set of the stuff, but give me iron for frying any day in the week. When it was done, I laid the bacon aside to drain on a paper towel, anchoring it well against the wind, and cracked three eggs into the grease in the skillet. I could remember Nina Rasmussen rustling up the same menu in the snowbound cabin some mornings ago; and I could clearly recall the last time I had done it myself outdoors like this, in the Jemez Mountains the first morning of deer season, an hour before I took a bullet in the back that almost finished me. It did not seem advisable to dwell on the thought.

Squatting there by the car in the bright white light of the lantern, I had plenty of time to think of other things too. I thought about Jack Bates, and about Larry and Ruth DeVry, and about my wife’s scarf that had traveled, so Larry claimed, from the DeVry house to the lonely spot up in the mountains where Jack had been found dead. I should probably have mentioned that to Van Horn; however, it would have been only my word against that of the DeVrys should they decide to get together and deny it. But there was something very odd about the way the scarf had been left there by Jack’s body, not casually to look as if it had been dropped by accident, not even tied in place as would have been easy enough to do without damaging the cloth, but, according to Van Horn’s description, skewered brutally and obviously onto a dead limb by someone who, you could not help but think, must have hated its owner enough to take pleasure in feeling the thin silk tear; someone, you might say, who wasn’t really planting a clue but simply affixing a label to the crime…

Then the eggs were done and the water was hot enough for instant coffee—if I’d waited to boil the real stuff with that wind blowing I’d have been up all night—and I ate, cleaned up, and turned out the lantern. I picked it up by the bail as it flickered out, leaving me half-blinded by the sudden loss of light.

A voice behind me said harshly, “Just hold it right there, Dr. Gregory.”

My hunting training kept me from jumping too far. “I’m holding it,” I said. “Don’t get nervous.”

I heard footsteps moving closer. “Why didn’t you come to Hanksville as you were told?”

I said, “A government man read your note. I figured he’d get to Hanksville ahead of me, having planes at his disposal. In fact, I suggested it. What else could I do?”

“He’s there now.”

“Okay, then,” I said. “I thought you might be happier with another rendezvous, so I stopped off to give you a chance. I figured you’d be watching the road. The money’s in the game pocket of my hunting coat, in back.”

“Put the lantern down.”

I did so.

“Back up,” he said. I backed up slowly. He felt me for weapons in the customary places—hips and armpits especially—and did not find what he was looking for, since I had hidden it better than that. This time of year, with the amount of clothes I was wearing, it was no trouble. He reached into the big rear pocket of my coat and brought out a sample of the contents, examined it in the moonlight, and replaced it. At least I thought that was what he was doing; I didn’t venture to turn my head to look. He sounded like a man under strain and I didn’t want to worry him. I was under some strain myself. He spoke again. “Walk straight ahead. Don’t try anything.”

I walked straight ahead, following the butte around to the east. A jeep was parked there, looking black in the moonlight. As we approached it, another man came up from the right, carrying some kind of a rifle. I still did not know what kind of weapon the first man was pointing at me, if any; I was taking it on faith. They made a production of getting me into the vehicle. The second one covered me while the first one climbed into the rear, giving me a glimpse of the previously unseen gun—one of those small revolvers with the barrel sawed off at two inches. They both covered me while I got into the front seat. Finally the first man assumed the guard duty while the second got behind the wheel. Since I had no immediate plans for either escaping or attacking them, it seemed like a waste of effort. Then we drove for some miles across country. They used no lights and every little wash and arroyo looked like a black chasm across the moonlit plain. The wind was dying.

At last we entered what seemed to be the wide mouth of a canyon that narrowed rapidly to the west. There were sheer rock walls to the north and south. The wall to the south was in black shadow; the one to the north was silvery with moonlight. The driver turned the jeep on the level canyon floor and stopped it facing east. He turned on the lights once for about three seconds and turned them off again. We sat there without speaking for about ten minutes. At last he turned on the lights again and left them on. I heard the sound and saw the plane at the same time; it was almost on the ground before the lights picked it up. It taxied on by us.