One Monday We Killed Them All (22 page)

Johnny Hooper said, “Fenn, they’ve had a lot of time to plan something big, and they’ve had the money stashed to finance it. It could be a hell of a lot more ambitious than we figure. By now they’ll be sold on their own luck. The only thing that’s gone wrong for them has been Kelly getting hit. They may have the idea of cleaning out this whole town, of hitting us wherever the money is. You ask me, I’m damn glad Meg is going to be the bird dog. I just think it ought to be scheduled sooner than Sunday.”

“You heard Major Rice. By Sunday we’ll have it set up so nothing can go wrong. And all the week-end traffic of people coming back out of the hill country will cover us on moving into position. And on Sunday we can cover Meg with unmarked cars without making anybody suspicious. And we do have a hint on their timing, based on what McAran told the Perkins girl.”

But we both knew, as did Larry Brint and Major Rice, that we weren’t dealing with people whose mental processes we could predict. They had somehow reached into a maximum security prison and released their friends and helpers. None of them had anything to lose, and they were motivated by something beyond greed. They were riding
on the conviction of infallibility, ignoring the fact they could win in no final way, but were capable of attaining many more small bloody victories before the inevitable destruction.

xi

By Saturday night, when I got home at nine o’clock, everything was properly set up for the next day. The weather forecast was good, and it promised to be one of those hot still days which would send the valley people up into the hills. Detective Chuck West’s wife was going to stop by early Sunday morning and take our kids off our hands.

A joint operation was set up which we believed would cover every possibility. Sheriff Bub Fischer and his inept cronies had been quietly given leaves of absence, and one of the truly professional Sheriffs in the state, D. D. Wheeler, had been brought in from a neighboring county along with some of his top people. Major Rice had brought in a special cadre of troopers. Larry Brint had detailed our best men to it. The communications people had tied the three separate radio links into a single control system.

Not only had we brought in all the special equipment we thought we might need, but we also had a light plane standing by at the Brook City Airport equipped with a big photo reconn camera and Air Reserve technical personnel to operate it. And by a combination of good luck and savage threats, we had managed to keep the lid on any news leaks.

Without making any fuss about it, and by picking the right places for a continuing observation, we had every road out of the hills watched for the sudden appearance of the station wagon. Under D. D. Wheeler’s direction, the hill area had been divided into six basic areas, so that once we knew which area we would be concerned with, we knew in advance the best way to move our people in, the best routes whereby we could escape observation, and the best places to use as observation points when we brought the patrol cars in to seal a much more restricted area.

I took one of the master maps with the overlay home with me and spread it out on the kitchen table and explained it in detail to Meg, using pennies and sugar cubes to show where the cars would be.

“You’ll take off in our car at ten tomorrow morning, honey,” I told her. “We’ll have some unmarked cars up in there, and they’ll look like people on picnics and Sunday rides. You don’t have to know who they are. When you’ve gotten it pinned down, and you know just about where Dwight is, you come back out. Come out on 882 as far as that picnic place just this side of the bridge. I’ll be parked there, ready to get the message back up to the unmarked cars.”

“And what will they do?”

“They’ll have their picnics at just the right places so nobody can leave whatever area you name without being noticed—if they leave by car. After dark we’ll be set to move in close, and go the rest of the way at dawn.”

“It’s a big game, isn’t it? A wonderful game of hunting. Guns and tear gas and even an airplane to take pictures.”

“It isn’t a game.”

“Why do you have to make such a big thing out of it?”

“It’s good police procedure, honey. It keeps people from getting hurt.”

“Even Dwight?”

“Yes, dear.

I woke up on Sunday in the first gray light of dawn, not knowing what had awakened me. I was surprised to see that Meg was already up. I put on my robe and went looking for her. The kitchen light was on. There was a note to me on the kitchen table. Before I read it I ran out and saw that our car was gone. I hurried back in and read her note.

“Dearest Fenn, I couldn’t sleep at all because I know that what I promised you is not right. I am afraid that you would have to kill him if it is done your way. Even if he is all alone, and knows nothing about the others you think are with him, it would fill him with a crazy, reckless anger to have people sneaking up on him before dawn. And I can’t be sure that with so many people, someone might be too tense and shoot too quickly. For a lot of the years of my life I took care of him, and no matter what
he is or what he has become, I would not want to live with knowing he died because I found out where he is and told people who think he is some sort of a monster. I am not especially brave, but I want to find him and go to him, so that if everything is all right with him, I can perhaps talk him into coming back out with me, so that nothing will have a chance to go wrong. I can’t forget the look in Cathie’s eyes when she told me she wishes him dead. Maybe he never did have enough of a chance with anything he ever wanted or tried to do, but I want to ask him about Cathie. I do not think he would ever hurt me, and if there are other people there, the ones from the prison, I don’t think he would let them hurt me. I will try to come back out once I have talked to him, but I know there is the chance he or they won’t let me leave. I won’t tell him or anyone else what is being planned if they don’t let me go, and once I have found out just about where to look for him, I will leave word with an old man named Jaimie Lincoln who lives on the Chickenhawk Road. If he’s still living, he’ll still be there, and if he isn’t, I’ll leave some sort of note for you. I am sorry if my doing it this way is going to spoil all the plans which have been made, and make people angry at you. But sometimes a person has to do things their own way. I will be careful, and you be too. I love you. Meg.”

I raced to the phone. Raglin was on the desk. I told him to relay the word to Wheeler, Brint and Rice as fast as he could, and have somebody come pick me up right away, and have Mrs. West come get the kids.

By the time I got to headquarters D. D. Wheeler and Larry Brint were there, and Rice was on the way. They read the note simultaneously, Larry reading over Wheeler’s shoulder.

Wheeler said in a tired, cold voice, “I knew something would go sour. I knew there’d be some damn fool complication. She got a hell of a start on us. But there’s no need of letting her commit suicide. All we can do now is try our damnedest to pick her up before she disappears, and pray it takes her a long time to get a line on where they’re hid out. Larry, let’s get the description of her and the car to all points up there, and anybody you think might help. Damn fool woman! Hillyer, I wish you hadn’t slept so heavy. Where’s the map? Where’s Chickenhawk,
for God’s sake? Get those unmarked cars bracketing that Chickenhawk Road, because from the note it sounds like that’s the place she’ll go last before she goes to see her brother.”

“How about the airplane?” Larry asked.

“Hell, let’s use that too.” He turned to me. “Probably, if we miss her, that old man won’t give a message to anybody but you, so soon as we get this organized, you and me are going in an unmarked car and find that old boy.”

We left a half-hour later in a green sedan equipped with a short wave set. I drove. If Meg was picked up, they were going to alert us immediately.

The sun was up and beginning to be hot as I made the turn off Route 60 onto 882 and we started climbing. Wheeler didn’t look like a Sheriff. He looked like those men who run carnival concessions, sallow, drab, cynical and tough, a sharp-eyed loner, with no fund of small talk.

The map indicated no good way to get to the obscure Chickenhawk Road. We had to go all the way to Laurel Valley, and then cut back on the old Laurel Valley to Ironville Road, potholed macadam, with blind unbanked corners, where the old hills closed in close around us.

“Rugged,” D. D. Wheeler said.

“There’s worse places. I used to drive back in here with Meg. There’s some clay roads back in here that are passable only four or five months of the year.” I remembered the secret valleys she had shown me, gloomy except at midday, the icy ponds, the black pine shadows, the jumbees of old gray boulders loking like the ruins of temples built before man walked the earth.

“Damn radio is bad,” D. D. Wheeler said.

“The iron in these hills does it.”

I drove as fast as I dared, yelping the tires, banging the shocks against the frame. He counted the dirt roads that branched off to the right, and we stopped at the fourth one. I saw a shack down on a creek bank, through the trees. I left Wheeler in the car and walked down to the shack, remembering everything Meg had told me about how best to approach her people. I made myself stroll. An enormously fat woman sat on a shallow open porch. A hound raised its head and made a low warning sound in its throat, audible above the spring clamor of the creek.

I stopped ten feet from the porch and said it was a fine
day. She nodded. The hound watched me. I said I was a stranger in these parts, and I was sorry to trouble her, but could she tell me if that dirt road there might lead to a place called Chickenhawk.

She hawked and spat and said, “It be.”

“Does a man named Jaimie Lincoln live along that road?”

“I wouldn’t be sayin’.”

“I drove along that road a long time ago with my wife. I remember it was over ten miles to Chickenhawk and then about another twenty miles down out of the hills until we came out on the paved road from Slater to Amberton, east of the hills. I remember her pointing out where old Jaimie lived, but I can’t remember where it was.”

“She be knowing him?”

“From when she was a little girl, living over in Keepsafe.”

“They be nobody to Keepsafe now, it being half-burnt out, and then the bridge gone and the road washed, all long ago. What was her name?”

“She’s a McAran.”

“They be a lot of them long long ago, sinners most all of them, but Jaimie’s Ma was a third way cousin to some McArans, so she could be knowing him.”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me how to find Mr. Lincoln.”

“What you be wanting of him?”

“A family matter. I can swear he’d like you to tell me.”

She thought it over, spat again and said, “Go most of seven mile, you come to a hollow where the road winds north, and where it turns sharpest, is a path going south, where you walk in.”

Wheeler was surprisingly patient with the time it had taken. The fresh spring grasses grew high in the middle of the dirt track to Chickenhawk, and he pointed to places where the grass was bruised and smeared with grease, and said, “Nice to know somebody used it since the Civil War.”

Again I left him at the car, and I walked the path to Jaimie Lincoln’s shack. When the path curved and I saw it in a small clearing, I stopped and called, “Mr. Lincoln! Mr. Lincoln!”

“Lord God!” a quavering voice said so close behind me I gave a great start of surprise. I whirled and looked at
an old, old man, as brittle, spare and dusty looking as a dried grasshopper. He stared at me with disgust. “You come through there like a bear wearing wooden shoes. She described you better looking than you be, but it must be you on account she said you got a long mournful face like a circuit preacher.”

“She was here?”

He gave me a pitying look, stood an old Remington bolt action against a tree, shoved a shapeless old brown felt hat onto the back of his head and wiped his face with a faded bandanna. “Who the Lord Jesus am I talking of? Here well past an hour back, big handsome woman with tearful eyes, almost pretty as her ma, who died younger, and too rushed to set polite with an old man, but she says to tell you of a time a road was growed up with brush so she couldn’t take you to see things she’d told you of.”

“I see.”

A cackle of frail laughter doubled him over. “Now look at you with a big secret like she thought she had, fooling an old man. Wanted to take you that old back way to Keepsafe, did she? Over the log road. She could have come to old Jaimie first, saving miles and questions. Old but I ain’t deef, and when I got twenty years of traffic roaring up and down in two weeks, I’m not just going to set here and wonder what the hell it is now am I? Just two miles more, and it goes off to the left, cleared careful so not to show much from the Chickenhawk Road, but cleared careless once you get back in. I circled over and clumb Fall Hill on a still night a time back and I see the auto lamps winding slow through all those woods, showing now and again like a fire beetle in the summer, the motor grinding slow until the sound was too far from my ears, and then coming out way over there just this side of Burden Mountain, onto the old-time road that was the way to get into Keepsafe afore the bridge was took out. Miss Meg looking for strangers, all she had to do was come right to Jaimie Lincoln, and I could even told her—which she didn’t say no word to me about—one of them is maybe that mean son of a bitch half-brother of hers, the one stomped the face about clean off the middle Jorgen boy twelve, fourteen year ago, on account of a week ago yesterday I walked into Chickenhawk for salt and tobacco, and Bone Archer mentioned him, and his brother been over
there to take a look in case it was the alcohol tax folks and said it was a McAran, of about the age to be the mean one come back from State Prison, camping in there with a bald city man and a big tit city woman. The way I see it—”

“Mr. Lincoln, I’ve got to go.”

“Nobody has time to set polite, and there’s no respect for age any more, and so many folks roaring up and down the Chickenhawk Road, I swear to God I’m moving clear over the other side of Fall Hill, this keeps up.”