“For a roadblock? He isn’t there,” Cal insisted, and a black car suddenly passed them on their left and angled to a stop across the front of the Jetta. Cal’s one eye stared. “What
The driver of the other car got out, looking over its roof at them, and, of course, it was Ed Smith. Cory reflexively shifted into reverse as Smith took a step down the other side of his car, as though he wanted to come around and talk to them.
Cal didn’t give him the chance. All at once he was lunging out of the Jetta, and when Cory turned to him, he had that automatic in his hand. Cory yelled, “Don’t!” at the same time Cal yelled some damn thing at Smith and lifted the automatic as though to shoot Smith, and in the same instant Smith laid his own hand on the roof of his car, with something small and black in it that coughed a dot of red flame and Cal went reeling backward, the automatic dropping onto the gas station’s concrete.
Cory screamed, and tromped on the accelerator, and the Jetta tore backward past the pumps, the open passenger door not quite hitting them but rocking as though it would come off its hinges, until Cory pounded his foot on the brake and the door slammed.
Ahead of him across the gas station, Smith was striding forward, that gun in his hand down at his side. Cory spun the wheel, shifted into drive, and tore away from there northward, leaving Cal and Smith and the Ford and the roadblock and everything else to shrink and disappear in the rearview mirror.
Absolute panic compelled him to drive hard for three or four minutes on a road with no traffic until he overtook a slow-moving pickup and had to decelerate. As he slowed, the panic receded and clear thought came back, and he knew he had to go take care of Cal. He was the younger brother, but he’d always been the one with brains, the one who went along with Cal’s stunts but then—sometimes—got them both out of trouble when things went too far.
Cal was hit. Shot. How bad?
Cory made a U-turn and headed south again, and would have missed the gas station this time if he hadn’t seen that roadblock far ahead. But there was the station, and Cory pulled in, went past the pumps to where he’d stopped the last time, and stopped again. Smith and the black car were gone.
Afraid of what he would find, Cory got out of the Jetta and looked around on the right side of the car. Cal’s automatic lay on the pavement where it had fallen, but there was nothing else there. No Cal.
Cory got back into the car, put the automatic on the passenger seat, and drove this way and that so he could use the headlights to look at every part of the gas station property. He found nothing.
There was a night-light inside the station office. Cory got out of the Jetta again and looked through the windows there. He looked everywhere. Cal was gone.
13
State Police Captain Robert Modale looked at the artist’s rendering of the bank robber, crumpled and greasy from having been in a desk drawer in Brian Hopwood’s gas station, and now that he knew the truth, he could see it, he could see that face, the same face as the man he’d talked with just yesterday up in the St. Stanislas parking lot. They’d talked about Lyme disease, and who would have ever guessed he was this fellow all along? The felons a man met up with usually weren’t that bold.
Captain Modale was a calm man, not given to extremes of temperament, but even for him this was a moment out of the ordinary. A lesser man might have sworn or punched a wall, but Captain Modale merely clenched his lips and flared his nostrils a little and nodded down at that picture he held in his unshaking left hand and thought, I’ll know you next time.
At the moment, eight-fifty on this Sunday evening, the captain was standing in the brightly lit living room of an old fellow named Jack Riley, whose report of a stolen revolver, a .22-caliber S&W Ranger, had started the unraveling of tonight’s events. Riley, bright-eyed and eager, perched on the forward edge of the easy chair where he obviously usually spent his time watching that television set over there. His granddaughter, Suzanne Gilbert, a good-looking woman if a little peremptory in manner, seeming apparently none the worse for wear after having been knocked around and tied up by the bank robber, sat on the arm of the same chair, her right hand protectively on her grandfather’s left shoulder. Brian Hopwood, still in his dirty work clothes, stood beside the sofa, talking on Riley’s phone to his wife, explaining to her all that had happened and reassuring her, possibly, that everything was all right now. Trooper Oskott stood at semi-attention over by the front door.
They were all waiting for Captain Modale to sort things out and decide what to do next, but by God, there was a full dossier here of things to sort out. There were too many people in this incident, it seemed to the captain, and too many relationships.
Start with the bank robber, who everyone here had known as Ed Smith, a name that had produced thousands of results upon the captain inputting it into the onboard computer in the cruiser, none of them seeming to be helpful in any way. So start with Mr. Ed Smith, whose name was certainly not Ed Smith, but who, for convenience’ sake, would be given that name, at least for now. What were the relationships between Smith and the other people in Pooley—or Fred Thiemann, too, let’s not forget the fellow just recently shot down by the captain’s own officers just across the road there—and how deep and long-standing might those relationships have been?
On entering this room, after being driven down here by Trooper Oskott from Barracks K, greeting the people already assembled here by the troopers who’d been the first responders to Jack Riley’s complaint, the captain had dropped onto the dark wood coffee table in front of the sofa the yellow legal pad he’d brought along with him, so that he could accept the Wanted poster Hopwood insisted on handing him, and now he sat down on the sofa facing that pad, Riley and the Gilbert woman to his right, television set to his left, Hopwood standing at the end of the sofa to his left, and took a retractable pen from his pocket. Clicking it open after putting the Wanted poster under the legal pad, he said, “I’d like first to close with this fellow Smith, and everybody’s relationship with him.”
Suzanne Gilbert, as though she might become offended, said, “Relationship? None of us had a relationship with that man.”
“I never even met him,” Jack Riley added.
Brian Hopwood, just off the phone, pulled over the small wooden chair from beside the television set, sat on it as though afraid to make it dirty, and said, “I only saw him that one time in my life, this afternoon, when he came in for gas.”
“But you recognized him.”
“Not right away. But I thought about it, and when he came back in to get his change—he didn’t use up the cash he gave me—I had it doped out who he was, and I went ahead and did one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done in
