The end of the night (22 page)

"You haven't said a hell of a lot yet."

"I'm guessing on some of these roads but from the places they hit, these roads are pretty good guesses. They were picked smart. They're fast secondary roads. All traffic patrol is spread so thin these days, about all they can cover is the main high-

ways. You take the little roads, the only trouble you can have is in the towns and small cities. And if you take it easy in those places, you can stay safe, even with the hottest plate in the country."

"If you say so, Sheriff."

"What I'm doing out loud, Mase, is building up a half-ass M.O. on this bunch. What they've had luck with, they'll keep doing. Keep switching cars, keep taking secondary roads, hole up in the davtime. It's my guess they won't split up, and that's only a guess."

"I have that hunch too, Gus. Particularly hopped up. They won't want to change the dice."

"Now let's put some of this stuff together and see where we get. Extend the rough line and its aims at New York. We got to make some assumptions if we're going to come up with anything, so let's just say it's New York. Why the hell not? If you want to lose yourself, get in the middle of the biggest crowd you can find. Okay?"

"Unless one of them is from someplace else and they have a good place to hole up, and how the hell can you tell that?"

Kurby stepped over to his desk and picked up a soft pencil and a ruler. He went to the map, made a measurement against the scale, and then drew a black arc, one third of a circle, northeast by east of Monroe.

"That's four hundred miles," he said. "So let's say they went about that far and holed up Sunday morning. They could have dumped the girl, dead, or kept her with them. Last night they got on the road again. They'd be in Pennsylvania, the way it looks. They'd stick to the M.O. and change cars. So they've got Pennsylvania plates, and we don't know what kind of car, but it won't be a junker. They'd stick to secondary roads last night, heading across the state. And there's one thing that state hasn't got, it's a good fast way to get across it without you take the turnpike."

"I remember the days before the pike," Mase said. "It was a life work crossing that state."

"So let's say they got maybe to this area by daylight this morning, and holed up again." Gus Kurby drew an elongated oval on the map, the long dimension of the oval north and south, fairly close to the Jersey border. "Let's just say they're somewhere inside this area right here, sacked out this minute."

"You make it sound real, Gus," Mase said with a grin that pulled the corners of his mouth down.

*'Let's say they haven't pulled anything since killing Crown except one auto theft. We know they had the use of a car radio in the Buick. They know, even hopped up and crazy confident, they're the hottest thing in twenty years. What they don't know is they're so hot that it makes confusions that work to their advantage."

"Where is this heading, Gus?"

"Now I got to contradict myself. If they stick to the M.O., I'm licked. If they take secondary roads across Jersey, I'm in deep left field. They want to get to New York. They're close. They're hot. They're pooped. Three In the morning is no time to hit New York City. It stays hght until damn near nine. They're close to the Pennsy Pike that feeds into the Jersey Pike. Evening traffic in the summer is heavy. Put yourself in their place, Mase. What would you do?"

Mase chewed his lip and then nodded. "I might chance it, Gus. I might get rolling earlier, take a chance on the pike, and get to the city before midnight. But, on the other hand, instead of holing up, once I got so close, I might have pushed all the way on through and be in New York already."

"There's that chance. But they've been a long, long way, and maybe the girl used up some time, and getting their hands on a car used up some time, and they had to fight those Pennsylvania roads all night. Maybe they didn't make it any further than the Harrisburg area."

"What we're talking about, Gus, is whether you're going to stick your neck out, and how you're going to do it."

"You take those big pikes, you got a problem. You got two places to check. One is from the entrance booths. They've got phone communication to the control towers where you've got the short wave to the cars on patrol. The other place is the cars on patrol. You've got normal traffic loads, plus the vacation load. At least it's not a weekend. You get three abreast, bumper to bumper traffic, wheeling at sixty-five—if you're looking for something, you got to be looking for something simple."

"I can see that."

"So suppose the toll-booth boys in the twelve entrances from Harrisburg to the Jersey Pike are alerted to watch for three men and a woman in a pretty good car with Pennsylvania plates. Or, on the off chance, three men and two women."

"Wouldn't there be hundreds of those?"

"A hell of a lot less than you'd think. It isn't a normal traveling group. The cars with one, two and three people in

them account, Fd guess for ninety-nine out of a hundred cars. When there's four, it's two couples or four women or four men. I'm leaving kids out of this. I'd give orders to suspend normal traffic control procedures so your road patrols would be looking too, and I'd put the best guys available on the logical exits from the Jersey Pike."

Mason Ives thought for a few moments. "Have you got time to sell this?"

"Not direct. But I think Dunnigan would buy it, and he could sure as hell sell it. Maybe it's all set up akeady."

"Somehow I doubt that, Gus. What worries you? You've stuck your neck out further than this many times."

Gus sat down again and grinned hke a pirate. "You got this one backwards, Mase. If it doesn't work, who ever knows or cares? But if it does work, there should be some horn blowing going on."

Ives looked startled for a moment. He grinned. "Okay, you big ambitious bastard. That's why you got me up here. I'll go over to the shop and set it up, all ready to file. Kurby devises traffic trap that tonight snapped jshut on the Wolf Pack and so forth."

"And you could sort of set it up with Peterson over at the station?" Gus asked humbly.

"And make sure he gets a network tie-in too, for God's sake. I'll go pick fresh laurel and make a wreath. Now it's safe to call Dunnigan."

"I called him an hour ago," Sheriff Kurby said mildly. "He seemed to like it. I had to go through maybe nine people to get to him, but I finally did, and I kept getting that fifteen-second beep, so I know they got a good record of it. And I got one too, Mase. I strictly don't know the law about using such a thing, but while I was talking to Dunnigan I was thinking that if it does work out, it might make a nice tape Peterson could play for the people, so I was careful, the things I said. I put in a part about how wonderful it is to live in a society where the world's greatest police department will listen to a plain county sheriff.'*

"Have you ever thought of being governor, Gus?"

"Only late at night when I can't get back to sleep. A man'U think of a lot of foolish things in the small hours."

On Route 30, between York and Lancaster, and not far from the Susquehanna River, on the north side of the road, on a wide curve, in rather pleasant rolling country, is the Shadyside

Motor Hotel. Steam Heat, Tile Baths, Innerspring Mattresses, Home Cooking. The units are separate, small brick buildings, square and rather ugly. There are only six of them. They are set well back from the highway at the foot of an apple orchard hill. The highway sign is in front of a large white farmhouse set much closer to the road.

The brick cabins were constructed over twenty years ago by Ralph Weaver, then fifty-five, who had farmed those eighty acres all his life, as had his father and grandfather before him. When he became crippled by arthritis he put his savings into the construction of the six cabins, despite the continuous opposition of his wife, Pearl. He died of a stroke two years after he completed the final cabin. Neighbors expected her to sell out. There was nothing to hold her there. Pearl had had four children. Accident, disease and a war had taken all four of them before any of them had married. She could have lived on a tiny income, with great care, and that's what the neighborhood expected her to do.

But she sold off all but five acres, and she ran the small business. Had Ralph Weaver built less solidly, maintenance would have eaten up the marginal income. At seventy-two. Pearl Weaver was a tall, erect woman with a square powerful figure, and an alarmingly loud, shrill voice. A half-wit woman from over the hill came in once a week to help with the heavier cleaning. A neighbor boy helped with the big lawn. Once a week Pearl Weaver drove her ancient Dodge truck to York and did her marketing. Each year she planted a large kitchen garden, and canned what she could not use. For those who wanted it, she would provide a gargantuan country breakfast for sixty cents. The cabins rented for five dollars a couple, four dollars for a single, during the summer. In the last few years it had become a great rarity for them to be all filled—unlike the early days when sometimes all the cabins were filled and so were all the spare bedrooms in the main house. It had been three years since she had had anyone in the main house, but she kept the whole house just as spotless as the cabins.

Sunomer was the best time. In the winter a whole month might go by without a single customer. The summer money had to last out the winter, and each summer she took in a little less. She was realist enough to hope that she could sur\dve in this fashion until she died. She did not want to give up the house. Her life was in that house, all the remembered voices and gestures of love. Her only concession to her loneliness was

a six-year-old television set, and she felt guilty every time she sat and watched it.

Two cabins were occupied on Sunday night. She had hoped for more. The single said he would leave too early for breakfast. The young couple said they'd like breakfast at eight. And that was another dollar twenty.

Though she had great need of every bit of income, she was careful about the tourists to whom she rented her cabins. Each night before going to bed she would go out and turn on the floodlight that shone directly on her sign, and take down the board that masked the legend, "Ring Night Bell for Service.** A fat, red arrow pointed at the bell button set into the sign itself.

Her bedroom was in the front, overlooking the sign. The night bell rang in her room. Whenever it would ring, she was up and out of bed in an instant, and she would look out the. window at them. They would be illuminated by the floodlight She would watch them carefully for the look of drink, the staggering and the loud voices. And she would be wary of the too-young giggling couples. When she did not hke what she saw, she would fling open the window and yell down in that terrible voice that cut the night like a sword, "Closed. Go away. Go away." No one argued with a decision delivered with such finality.

On Monday morning, not long before dawn, the night bell awakened her. She stood at the window in her nightgown and looked down through the copper screening and saw a good-looking automobile parked near her sign, and a man standing quietly beside it. He turned and said something to someone in the car and she heard him answer, but could not hear what was said. He seemed respectably dressed, and she could read fatigue in his posture.

"Come to the front door of the house," she called. "I'll be down in one minute."

She put on her robe and went down. She turned on the bright overhead porch light and looked at him again before she unlatched the door. He was a big young man, quite nice-looking.

She talked to him in the hall and he told her what he wanted and she named the price, and she took him into the parlor and had him sit at the old breakfront desk and write the names in the book. He did not want to look at the cabins first. She assured him they were clean and equipped. She told

him to take the last two on the right as you stood facing the row of them, and please be careful about noise because folks were sleeping. She asked him when they'd be leaving, and he said he didn't know, but somewhere around the end of the day.

After she had walked him to the door and waited until the car drove out to the cabins, the lights touching the trunks of the big elms in the yard, she walked back into the parlor with the ten-dollar bill in her hand and looked at the names he had signed in the book. Mr. and Mrs. J. D. Smith. Mr. W. J. Thompson. Mr. H. Johnson. All of Pittsburgh.

She stood with her lips compressed, sensing a wrongness that she could not identify. The young man had been very tired. And yet he had seemed to feel the need to force himself to be quite jolly. He had laughed a few times at nothing at all, an empty, social laugh. She remembered that it was exactly the way Ralph used to laugh when his conscience bothered him. The young man's hands had been quite dirty, and that did not fit the rest of his appearance, or the cultivated sound of his voice. And his hands had trembled as he had written in the book. The writing was shaky. And they were such terribly ordinary names. But lots of people had ordinary names. That's what made them ordinary, of course. And people with ordinary names could travel together. And it was a nice-looking car.

She shrugged away her feeling that something was wrong, and went back to her bed. She was up an hour later, and she was hanging the board that masked the night bell when the single drove out, a salesman who had stayed with her before. He waved and she waved back. The young couple appeared for breakfast at eight-thirty. She insisted they eat until they begged for mercy. She felt great satisfaction in sending them on their way with what was probably the first decent breakfast they'd eaten in a year.

All the time she did her housework she was conscious of the car out there, the four people sleeping. They had parked the car between the two cabins, heading out. It was a brown-and-tan car, with double headlights, and the big front grill was a shiny frozen grin.

It always irritated her when people slept through the day, even when she was perfectly aware they had driven all night. There was something obscurely wicked about daytime sleep. A body should be up and doing under God's sun. Even though their money was in the old brown purse hung way up in the back of the upstairs hall closet, she couldn't stifle her resent-