The Matlock Paper (31 page)

“I don’t know … ‘Omerta’!… ‘Omerta’!”

The man opened his eyes wide, and in the dim spill of the fallen flashlight, Matlock saw that something had happened to his victim. Some thought, some concept overpowered his tortured imagination. It was painful to watch. It was too close to the sight of the panicked Lucas Herron, the terrified Alan Pace.

“Come on, I’ll get you down the slope.…”

It was as far as he got. From the depths of his lost control, the man with the blood-soaked face lunged forward, making a last desperate attempt to reach the gun in Matlock’s right hand. Matlock yanked back; instinctively he fired the weapon. Blood and pieces of flesh flew everywhere. Half the man’s neck was blown off.

Matlock stood up slowly. The smoke of the automatic lingered above the dead man, the rain forcing it downward toward the earth.

He reached into the grass for the flashlight, and as he bent over he began to vomit.

Ten minutes later he watched the parking lot below him from the trunk of a huge maple tree fifty yards up the trail. The new leaves partially protected him from the pouring rain, but his clothes were filthy, covered with wet dirt and blood. He saw the white station wagon near the front of the area, next to the stone gate entrance of the Sail and Ski. There wasn’t much activity now; no automobiles entered, and those drivers inside would wait until the deluge stopped before venturing out on the roads. The parking lot attendant he’d given the ten dollars to was talking with a uniformed doorman under the carport roof of the restaurant entrance. Matlock wanted to race to the station wagon and drive away as fast as he could, but he knew the sight of his clothes would alarm the two men, make them wonder what had happened on the East Gorge slope. There was nothing to do but wait, wait until someone came out and distracted them, or both went inside.

He hated the waiting. More than hating it, he was frightened by it. There’d been no one he could see or hear near the wheel shack, but that didn’t mean no one was there. Nimrod’s dead contact probably had a partner somewhere, waiting as Matlock was waiting now. If the dead man was found, they’d stop him,
kill him—if not for revenge, for the Corsican paper.

He had no choice now. He’d gone beyond his depth, his abilities. He’d been manipulated by Nimrod as he’d been maneuvered by the men of the Justice Department. He would telephone Jason Greenberg and do whatever Greenberg told him to do.

In a way, he was glad his part of it was over, or soon would be. He still felt the impulse of commitment, but there was nothing more he could do. He had failed.

Down below, the restaurant entrance opened and a waitress signaled the uniformed doorman. He and the attendant walked up the steps to speak with the girl.

Matlock ran down to the gravel and darted in front of the grills of the cars parked on the edge of the lot. Between automobiles he kept looking toward the restaurant door. The waitress had given the doorman a container of coffee. All three were smoking cigarettes, all three were laughing.

He rounded the circle and crouched in front of the station wagon. He crept to the door window and saw to his relief that the keys were in the ignition. He took a deep breath, opened the door as quietly as possible, and leaped inside. Instead of slamming it, he pulled the door shut quickly, silently, so as to extinguish the interior light without calling attention to the sound. The two men and the waitress were still talking, still laughing, oblivious.

He settled himself in the seat, switched on the ignition, threw the gears into reverse, and roared backward in front of the gate. He raced out between the stone posts and started down the long road to the highway.

Back under the roof, on the steps by the front door,
the three employees were momentarily startled. Then, from being startled they became quickly bewildered—and even a little curious. For, from the rear of the parking lot, they could hear the deep-throated roar of a second, more powerful engine. Bright headlights flicked on, distorted by the downpour of rain, and a long black limousine rushed forward.

The wheels screeched as the ominous-looking automobile swerved toward the stone posts. The huge car went to full throttle and raced after the station wagon.

There wasn’t much traffic on the highway, but he still felt he’d make better time taking the back roads into Carlyle. He decided to go straight to Kressel’s house, despite Sam’s proclivity toward hysteria. Together they could both call Greenberg. He had just brutally, horribly killed another human being, and whether it was justified or not, the shock was still with him. He suspected it would be with him for the remainder of his life. He wasn’t sure Kressel was the man to see.

But there was no one else. Unless he returned to his apartment and stayed there until a federal agent picked him up. And then again, instead of an agent, there might well be an emissary from Nimrod.

There was a winding S-curve in the road. He remembered that it came before a long stretch through farmland where he could make up time. The highway was straighter, but the back roads were shorter as long as there was no traffic to speak of. As he rounded the final half-circle, he realized that he was gripping the wheel so hard his forearms ached. It was the muscular defenses of his body taking over, controlling
his shaking limbs, steadying the car with sheer unfeeling strength.

The flat stretch appeared; the rain had let up. He pushed the accelerator to the floor and felt the station wagon surge forward in overdrive.

He looked twice, then three times, up at his rearview mirror, wary of patrol cars. He saw headlights behind him coming closer. He looked down at his speedometer. It read eighty-seven miles per hour and still the lights in the mirror gained on him.

The instincts of the hunted came swiftly to the surface; he knew the automobile behind him was no police car. There was no siren penetrating the wet stillness, no flashing light heralding authority.

He pushed his right leg forward, pressing the accelerator beyond the point of achieving anything further from the engine. His speedometer reached ninety-four miles per hour—the wagon was not capable of greater speed.

The headlights were directly behind him now. The unknown pursuer was feet, inches from his rear bumper. Suddenly the headlights veered to the left, and the car came alongside the white station wagon.

It was the same black limousine he had seen after Loring’s murder! The same huge automobile that had raced out of the darkened driveway minutes after the massacre at Windsor Shoals! Matlock tried to keep part of his mind on the road ahead, part on the single driver of the car, which was crowding him to the far right of the road. The station wagon vibrated under the impact of the enormous speed; he found it more and more difficult to hold the wheel.

And then he saw the barrel of the pistol pointed at him through the window of the adjacent automobile.
He saw the look of desperation in the darting eyes behind the outstretched arm, trying to steady itself for a clean line of fire.

He heard the shots and felt the glass shattering into his face and over the front seat. He slammed his foot into the brake and spun the steering wheel to the right, jumping the shoulder of the road, careening violently into and through a barbed-wire fence and onto a rock-strewn field. The wagon lunged into the grass, perhaps fifty or sixty feet, and then slammed into a cluster of rocks, a property demarcation. The headlights smashed and went out, the grill buckled. He was thrown into the dashboard, only his upheld arms keeping his head from crashing into the windshield.

But he was conscious, and the instincts of the hunted would not leave him.

He heard a car door open and close, and he knew the killer was coming into the field after his quarry. After the Corsican paper. He felt a trickle of blood rolling down his forehead—whether it was the graze of a bullet or a laceration from the flying glass, he couldn’t be sure—but he was grateful it was there. He’d need it now, he needed the sight of blood on his forehead. He remained slumped over the wheel, immobile, silent.

And under his jacket he held the ugly automatic he had taken from the dead man in the raincoat on the slope of East Gorge. It was pointed under his left arm at the door.

He could hear the mushed crunch of footsteps on the soft earth outside the station wagon. He could literally feel—as a blind man feels—the face peering through the shattered glass looking at him. He heard the click of the door button as it was pushed in and
the creaking of the hinges as the heavy panel was pulled open.

A hand grabbed his shoulder. Matlock fired his weapon.

The roar was deafening; the scream of the wounded man pierced the drenched darkness. Matlock leaped out of the seat and slammed the full weight of his body against the killer, who had grabbed his left arm in pain. Wildly, inaccurately, Matlock pistol-whipped the man about his face and neck until he fell to the ground. The man’s gun was nowhere to be seen, his hands were empty. Matlock put his foot on the man’s throat and pressed.

“I’ll stop when you signal you’re going to talk to me, you son of a bitch! Otherwise I
don’t
stop!”

The man sputtered, his eyes bulged. He raised his right hand in supplication.

Matlock took his foot away and knelt on the ground over the man. He was heavy set, black-haired, with the blunt features of a brute killer.

“Who sent you after me? How did you know this car?”

The man raised his head slightly as though to answer. Instead, the killer whipped his right hand into his waist, pulled out a knife, and rolled sharply to his left, yanking his gorilla-like knee up into Matlock’s groin. The knife slashed into Matlock’s shirt, and he knew as he felt the steel point crease his flesh that he’d come as close as he would ever come to being killed.

He crashed the barrel of the heavy automatic into the man’s temple. It was enough. The killer’s head snapped back; blood matted itself around the hairline. Matlock stood up and placed his foot on the hand with the knife.

Soon the killer’s eyes opened.

And during the next five minutes, Matlock did what he never thought he would be capable of doing—he tortured another man. He tortured the killer with the killer’s own knife, penetrating the skin around and below the eyes, puncturing the lips with the same steel point that had scraped his own flesh. And when the man screamed, Matlock smashed his mouth with the barrel of the automatic and broke pieces of ivory off the killer’s teeth.

It was not long.

“The paper!”

“What else?”

The writhing killer moaned and spat blood, but would not speak. Matlock did; quietly, in total conviction, in complete sincerity.

“You’ll answer me or I’ll push this blade down through your eyes. I don’t care anymore. Believe me.”

“The old man!” The guttural words came from deep inside the man’s throat. “He said he wrote it down.… No one knows.… You talked to him.…”

“What old …” Matlock stopped as a terrifying thought came into his mind. “
Lucas Herron?! Is that who you mean?!
”

“He said he wrote it down. They think you know. Maybe he lied.… For Christ’s sake, he could have lied.…”

The killer fell into unconsciousness.

Matlock stood up slowly, his hands shaking, his whole body shivering. He looked up at the road, at the huge black limousine standing silently in the diminishing rain. It would be his last gamble, his ultimate effort.

But something was stirring in his brain, something
elusive but palpable. He had to trust that feeling, as he had come to trust the instincts of the hunter and the hunted.

The old man!

The answer lay somewhere in Lucas Herron’s house.

He parked the limousine a quarter of a mile from Herron’s Nest and walked toward the house on the side of the road, prepared to jump into the bordering woods should any cars approach.

None did.

He came upon one house, then another, and in each case he raced past, watching the lighted windows to see if anyone was looking out.

No one was.

He reached the edge of Herron’s property and crouched to the ground. Slowly, cautiously, silently he made his way to the driveway. The house was dark; there were no cars, no people, no signs of life. Only death.

He walked up the flagstone path and his eye caught sight of an official-looking document, barely visible in the darkness, tacked onto the front door. He approached it and lit a match. It was a sheriff’s seal of closure.

One more crime, thought Matlock.

He went around to the back of the house, and as he stood in front of the patio door, he remembered vividly the sight of Herron racing across his manicured lawn into the forbidding green wall which he
parted so deftly and into which he disappeared so completely.

There was another sheriff’s seal on the back door. This one was glued to a pane of glass.

Matlock removed the automatic from his belt and as quietly as possible broke the small-paned window to the left of the seal. He opened the door and walked in.

The first thing that struck him was the darkness. Light and dark were relative, as he’d come to understand during the past week. The night had light which the eyes could adjust to; the daylight was often deceptive, filled with shadows and misty blind spots. But inside Herron’s house the darkness was complete. He lit a match and understood why.

The windows in the small kitchen were covered with shades. Only they weren’t ordinary window shades, they were custom built. The cloth was heavy and attached to the frames with vertical runners, latched at the sills by large aluminum hasps. He approached the window over the sink and lit another match. Not only was the shade thicker than ordinary, but the runners and the stretch lock at the bottom insured that the shade would remain absolutely flat against the whole frame. It was doubtful that any light could go out or come in through the window.

Herron’s desire—or need—for privacy had been extraordinary. And if all the windows in all the rooms were sealed, it would make his task easier.

Striking a third match, he walked into Herron’s living room. What he saw in the flickering light caused him to stop in his tracks, his breath cut short.