expected, or so it seemed. Out here there were no streetlights and the moonlight wasn’t much, and it took me a while to start to adjust to being able to see in the dark. My mouth was dry, and hunkering down like that was starting to hurt my calves, and I was about to switch positions when I saw headlights coming and then I heard the roar of a car.
When I could see the car well enough to determine that it was the car I had seen our trackers in, I braced the shotgun against me and waited until the car was almost even with me, and fired a little in advance, the blast lighting up the night and knocking the right front tire to shreds. The car swerved and twisted and threw up dirt as it went over the other side of the road and down a hill and out of sight. I heard a crash, trotted across the road and looked down. It was about a thirty-foot drop, but they had most likely rolled most of the way, and the slant was just enough so there weren’t a lot of hard falls on the trip down, at least not as hard as I would have liked. The car was lying on the driver’s side, and the right-side passenger doors were heaved open, and out came the four dark figures. No, seven. They had been stuffed in that car tight as impacted turds in a colon. One of them fell out on the ground, then got up to one knee and stayed there a moment. I could see the car was near a little deer path down there that dipped into the woods and ran back in the other direction, up toward the road where they had been driving. It wasn’t much of a path, but if they could get the car upright, and if it still ran, they might be able to drive out of there.
I turned and started running up the road as fast my legs would carry me. I could tell when I was about halfway up the hill that I needed to get back to road work because my heart was pounding against my ribs hard enough to break them and my vision was a little blurry. I looked back and saw one of the thugs coming up over the edge of the hill, carrying a long gun of some kind. I took to the woods and went along there, getting whacked in the face with limbs for a while, and then when I was sure the road was sloping down, I stumbled out of the woods and went down the hill where I saw Leonard’s car, and Leonard outside of it, standing by the passenger side with the deer rifle.
I huffed out some cold air and waved the shotgun above my head and started down at a speed I didn’t know I had in me. Leonard got in the car and cranked it up, and when I made the passenger side, I was nearly out of wind. Climbing in, closing the door, I looked over at Leonard, said, “There are seven of them.”
He said, “You dumb ass.”
54
“Now where’s the Volkswagen?” Leonard said. “You’ve caused us to lose it.”
“But I managed to knock the bad guys off a hill and now they’re on foot.”
“Okay I guess that’s something. You get a pass. Seven, huh?”
“It was like a goddamn clown car.”
We continued driving and where there hadn’t been roads going off the main road there were now plenty. Leonard said, “He took one of these, or we would have caught up to him by now. I’m driving this thing like it’s got a real engine in it.”
Pausing at a dirt road that turned to the right, I got out of the car and bent down and tried to check the ground in what little light there was. Finally, Leonard backed the car so that the lights shone on the ground, and then I could see there were recent tire marks.
I got in the car, and Leonard said, “Well, Hawkeye?”
“There are tire tracks that look fresh,” I said. “It could be him. It could be someone else, but it could be him.”
“It’s what we got,” Leonard said, and started down the road. It was dark down there and the trees ate up the sides of the road until there was only room for the car, and then we came to a bridge that looked as if the headless horseman ought to be on the other side of it. We rattled over it and went around a curve that climbed through some trees with winter-dried moss hanging down. When we broke over the hill there was a clearing and an A-frame house, not too big, sitting at the peak of the hill and we could see the Volkswagen parked in the yard. There was a little road that went into the trees on the right and there was one on the left. Leonard took the one on the right and we drove down it a piece and found a place where the road was a little wide and parked on the right-hand side and got out, me with the shotgun and him with the rifle. We were carrying our handguns and we each had a nifty blackjack and a jaunty stride.
When I loaded up the shotgun, Leonard said, “Here, you’re a better shot. I should have the shotgun.”
We swapped, and I gave him the shells. I took the box of shells for the deer rifle and put the whole box in my coat pocket.
“How long will it take them to get up here on foot?” Leonard said.
“A lot longer yet,” I said, “and then they have to be smart like us and look at the tracks.”
“I’m going to give them that much smarts,” Leonard said. “Let’s get this over with. Maybe we can be in and out and in our car and down the hill before they realize it’s us coming back and they’ll be so startled they won’t shoot at us.”
We started crawling up the hill, down close to the earth, in line with the Volkswagen. It took about a century for us to make it that way, but we thought it might be preferable to being spotted and shot. When we got to the Volkswagen, I stood up behind it and glanced in. My blue envelope was on the seat next to the stationery I had written “Hi” on, and beside it was a black mustache and a cap with a headful of black hair.
I hunkered back down behind the Volkswagen, said, “Unless the driver has some kind of skin disease and his mustache fell off in the altogether along with all the hair in his hat, the guy who picked up Vanilla Ride’s mail was Vanilla Ride.”
“A master of disguise.”
“Well, I think maybe for us she doesn’t have to be all that masterful.”
“That’s certainly true. Now what?”
“I think the now what is I get my wind back.”
“Too many late dinners and not enough exercise, Hap. I’ve been telling you that.”
“Yes, you have. Now shut up.”
“So, in a couple hours when you get your wind back, what do we do?”
