somebody, even if you aren’t aware of it.”
“I don’t see how.”
“Again, neither do I. But somebody does. Somebody considers you an obstacle. Somehow, you’ve got in the way of whoever it is who’s trying to take over where your husband left off.”
“And I don’t even know what it is they’re trying to take over. Narcotics smuggling? Crooked politics? What?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“No. No. No, I don’t.”
“Carrie, a while ago you said how those federal people and the police had bothered you… unmercifully, I think you said. Is that why you haven’t asked me to take you to the police?”
“Oh, you’re wondering if that’s occurred to me. That I should be thinking, if my life’s really in danger, shouldn’t I run to the police? Why put myself in your hands instead, the hands of a stranger? Well, why not? Who else do I have? I put myself in your hands last night, willingly enough. Why not again.”
There was an uneasiness in her voice, despite her artificially flip attitude, that disturbed me. A resignation, that seemed to say, If you’re my lover, fine… but if you’re my murderer, well that’s fine, too… it just doesn’t matter that much to me, one way or the other, anymore.
“Carrie,” I said. “If you think I’ve kidnapped you, you’re wrong. If you want to go to the police, just say so. I’ll turn this heap around and drop you off at the station in Davenport. Just say the word.”
“No. No police. I told you about my husband’s political ties. People in local government and beyond could be involved in the same illegal things he was involved in, and if there are people trying to kill me, it could very likely be them. So, no, I don’t have the urge to call the police. But I would like to know what you hope to do for me. Besides hide me out for a while. How can you stop killers, anyway?”
“The same way they stop you.”
“Oh. I think I see what you mean.”
“Maybe you’ll want to change your mind about the police, after all, Carrie. Knowing that.”
“Knowing what? That some people are going to die? And that you’re going to kill them? No. My husband was murdered. I’m apparently next on the list. People want to murder me. No, it doesn’t bother me if people like that are killed. It doesn’t even bother me if you’re the one who does it. I just don’t want to hear about it. Lie to me if you have to. But don’t tell me.”
We were coming into a small town, a cemetery on our left, a sign welcoming us to Blue Grass, population 1032, on the right.
“You might be holed up at that cottage several days,” I said. “Got any food on hand there?”
“Not to speak of,” she said.
“Well, if something’s open here, we’ll stop and pick some up.”
A block later I pulled up along the curb in front of an old-fashioned clapboard grocery store and sent her in. Then I drove down another block and pulled in to get gas.
While the Buick was being filled, I went in and got change and used the pay phone.
I called the number Ash had given me earlier today.
The call went through immediately; one ring and a well-modulated baritone voice answered.
“Who’s speaking?” I demanded.
“Curtis Brooks.”
“Brooks, are you the man, or just a stooge? I don’t want to talk to another go-between.”
“You must be Mr. Quarry.”
“Do you have ten thousand dollars handy?”
“Why?”
“Have it handy by tomorrow morning. Early. I’ve got the Broker’s widow and that’s what it’ll cost you, if you want her.”
I hung up, paid for the gas and drove over and picked her up at the grocery store, and we headed through the fog and mist toward her cottage.
20
I let her carry the groceries. There was only one bag and it didn’t kill her. I carried the guns, the silenced Ruger I got off the dead backup man, and my. 38, which I’d packed as a spare, the only thing I’d bothered to dig out of my suitcase for the stay at her cottage; the Ruger I kept in hand, the. 38 I tucked in my waistband. And I did carry a six-pack of Coke, too, so don’t get the idea chivalry’s entirely dead.
Fifteen miles or so out of Blue Grass we had turned off the highway to cut over to the older highway that followed the river, and to do that we had to take side roads, gravel country roads that were winding and hilly and lined with trees, a journey that even under the best of conditions would have been a roller coaster ride, let alone in this weather. So we didn’t do much talking: I drove, and she helped navigate, and finally we came down a particularly steep hill and she pointed out the abandoned farmhouse she’d told me about, on the right-hand side of the road, near the bottom of the hill, just barely visible in the fog and looking like every kid’s idea of a haunted house. She’d said this would make a good place to leave the car, and as I pulled in there I wondered for a second what she was leading me into, but she wasn’t leading me into anything, as it turned out, except a good place to leave the car. With the Buick parked behind the sagging barn next to the deserted farmhouse, we set off through the fog on foot, her lugging the groceries, me the six-pack of Coke and guns.
We, walked on the gravel road about a quarter-mile and then hit the highway, which immediately to our left was blocked, a sign on a fence-type barricade saying “Bridge Out-Detour,” with an arrow pointing back the way we’d come, and flashing lights to make it all clearly visible even on a night like tonight. We skirted the barricade and followed the highway another quarter of a mile and then she led me off onto a graveled drive, which wound through a marshy area that was heavy on dead trees and strange shrubs and gnarled vines that stuck up out of and hovered over pools of water whose surfaces were as blotchy as a disease of the skin; it was a nice area, if you were looking for a preserve for water moccasins. Maybe that explained the privacy afforded a cottage that wasn’t particularly fancy, just a little white house with a shingle roof, sitting way up on flood-precautionary stilts made of stacked cement blocks, above a snow-patched lawn that fell to the river and a modest dock; very ordinary-looking, really, the sort of place you’d expect to see as one of a cluster of such cottages, not isolated, like this. Huddling around protect- tively were tall thick-trunked trees that didn’t at all have the sinister appearance of the nearby swamplike area that gave this oasis its seclusion. There were wooden steps with rail along the side of the cottage, and she went up, and I followed, onto a sun deck. She put the grocery sack down to unlock the door and I asked her if this was the only entrance. She said it was. She asked if that was good or bad. I said probably good.
And it was. Unless somebody planned to set the place on fire or shoot tear gas in at us or something, having a single way in and out was a good thing. At this height, it would take mountain-climbing gear to come in a window anywhere but off that sun deck, where the front of the cottage made a sort of porch, with windows that were slatted, like oversize Venetian blinds made of glass, cranking shut from within and backed with screens and impossible to use for entry short of taking an ax to them. The only practical way into the place was through the front door, which, not surprisingly, is how we went in.
Stepping into the porch area, Carrie flicked on a standing lamp, explaining there was no overhead lighting at all inside, and I had a look around. The porch had a sofa and several soft-cushioned lawn chairs and a Formica top table with chairs and a portable television on a stand and a braid rug on a tile floor. The walls were pine, though three sides of the room were dominated by those slatted windows; the back wall was decorated with framed prints of fishing and hunting scenes.
I asked Carrie if there’d been any trouble with vandalism, a lot of stuff in here to leave unattended, but she said before her husband died, he’d all but lived down here, keeping the place in use pretty much year round, and, too, the constable of a little town a few miles from here kept an eye on the place, so seldom was it ever bothered. She doubted the constable would be around tonight, though, what with the heavy fog and all, but if he was, she could handle him.
If the porch area was the equivalent of a living room, the larger, single room beyond was all the other rooms:
