How much time did he have9 No telling; he hurried across the room to the nearest mound and shook it, whispering, “Wake up! Wake up!”
It was May. She partly sat up, blinking, bewildered, then astonished at seeing Jimmy. “What are you doing down here?”
Still whispering, Jimmy said, “There’s police outside!”
“What!” May sat upright, shedding blankets, showing she’d gone to sleep in her clothing.
“They’re waiting for this light to go out, then they’ll move in.”
May was waking up fast. Grasping Jimmy’s arm she said, “Are you sure?”
“I went outside. I heard them talking.”
“You went outside?”
“I was going to escape,” Jimmy said. “Just to prove a point, I guess. But I heard them, and I came back.”
Mom was now sitting up, nearby, and she said, “What’s going on?”
May told her, “Jimmy says there’s police outside.”
“Oh, no!”
“I have a way out,” Jimmy told them. “But we have to hurry.”
“Yes,” May said, suddenly in motion, pulling her shoes on. “Yes yes.”
The next five minutes were a frantic scramble. Jimmy had to explain over and over that he’d started to escape, that he’d heard the voices, and that he’d come back to warn the gang. He told them about the kerosene lamp delaying the onslaught, but he didn’t mention anything about the transmitter.
May and Mom and Stan and Andy all believed him at once. John was skeptical, for no good reason. “Why’d he come back?” he kept asking everybody. “Why’d he come back and tell us? Makes no sense.”
“You’ve been fair to me,” Jimmy said. “I wanted to be fair to you.” He didn’t say anything about his own plans for later.
They all wanted to know what his escape route was, but all he’d say was, “Upstairs. And we’d better hurry.”
Finally they were all ready to go. The kerosene lamp was left burning, and they all trooped after Jimmy up the stairs. Andy carried the suitcase, Stan carried the portable TV, Mom carried the hibachi, and John carried the flashlight. When Jimmy led the way into his room, John said, “Some day I got to find out how he does that.”
Jimmy picked up the Air France bag. “I packed when I was going to escape,” he said. “Can I keep it all?”
“Sure,” May told him.
“Thanks.” To John he said, “We’ll have to turn the flashlight off now.”
John switched off the flashlight. “I just want to know what we’re doing,” he said.
Jimmy briefly explained what he had done here, and was greeted with a kind of awed silence. Then he said, “We’ll have to go out one at a time. I don’t think the rope would be strong enough for more than that.”
Andy went first, with the suitcase. Then Stan’s Mom went, having trouble squeezing through the space, with her son shoving and holding and helping the best he can. “I can’t bring the hibachi,” she whispered. “I need both hands on the rope.”
“I’ll bring the damn hibachi,” John told her.
Stan helped his mother for the first part down the rope and Andy down below helped her for the last part. Then May went down, and after her, Stan. John said, “You next.”
“No, I’ll go last,” Jimmy said. “I’ll fix the boards over the window again, the way I did last time. I already locked the door, while everybody else was going down.”
“From the inside?”
“Sure,” Jimmy said.
John made some sort of guttural noise in his throat. “All right,” he said. “I’ll go next.”
John went down one-handed, carrying the hibachi. Then Jimmy, the Air France bag over his shoulder again, went out the window for the third and final time. He was very adept by now at replacing the boards, and then he skimmed down the rope and joined the others. “All set,” he whispered.
“You want to lead the way?” John asked him. It didn’t sound sarcastic, it sounded mostly heavy and fatalistic.
“Not me,” Jimmy said. “I don’t know what’s over there.”
“More trouble,” John said, and led off.
The six of them marched away from the house in the darkness, off across the scrubby pastureland, following one another mainly by the sound of their footsteps as they tramped through the dry autumn grass. John went first, carrying the flashlight, which he didn’t dare switch on. May followed, not carrying anything. Then Jimmy, carrying his Air France bag, Stan’s Mom, carrying her hibachi, Stan, carrying his portable TV set, and Andy, carrying the suitcase.
26
AT FOUR-TWENTY A.M., elements of the Federal Bureau of Investigation under the command of Field Agent Leonard Bradford, assisted by elements of the Warren County Sheriff’s Department under the command of Sheriff Larch K. Dooley, and elements of the New Jersey State Police under the command of Sergeant Ambrose Rust, broke in the front door of the deserted farmhouse known as the Pootey place, Hezakiah Township, Lot 19, Block 47, and shouted, “Hands up!”
And found the place empty.
Agent Bradford, entering with the second wave, announced, “They’re in here someplace! Tear it apart.”
They tore it apart. State troopers, sheriff’s deputies, and Federal agents reported to Bradford in streams, and all of the reports were discouraging. There was no one in the building. A second-floor room, furnished for a child and locked from the outside, was empty. Air mattresses, blankets, food, folding chairs, and other indicators indicated that the fugitives actually had been in this building—thus confirming the eyewitness report of Agent Wilson, who had peeked in and seen them all watching television—but they sure weren’t here now.
Nor, unfortunately, was there any way for them to have left. Every door and every window in the place was solidly boarded up, with the single exception of the front door, which had been under constant surveillance since late yesterday afternoon. There were no tunnels in the basement, no secret passages, no hidden rooms. They were not here, and it was not possible for them to have left.
And what made it worse, the radio trucks claimed they were still here. The three trucks were out roaming the world, triangulating and triangulating and triangulating, and every damn time the three lines crossed at the exact same spot on the map. This spot.
The gang wasn’t here. The child wasn’t here. The suitcase wasn’t here. But the gang and the child could not have left, and the radio trucks insisted the suitcase was here.
By dawn’s early light, Agent Bradford stood on the sagging front porch and watched his demoralized men wandering around that field out there, looking for clues. Sergeant Ambrose Rust of the New Jersey State Police came out of the house, after one last head-scratching inspection, and said, “Well, Mr. Bradford, what do we do now?”
“I don’t know about you, Sergeant,” Agent Bradford said, “but I’m going to start looking for somebody to pin this on.”
27
IN THE deep dark woods they huddled around the television set, for warmth as much as for entertainment. The movie now was Captain Blood, Errol Flynn’s first picture, directed by Michael Curtiz, best known for Casablanca. Jimmy was pointing out to an uncaring audience how the obsessive close-ups of Flynn from a low-angle camera made him separate from and above the surrounding action when Kelp came blundering back through the woods to say, “Well, I finally found something. It wasn’t easy out here, let me tell you.”
It was now shortly after dawn; Captain Blood would soon be giving way to Sunrise Semester. They had spent over an hour heading away from the house, first across open fields, then through woods, then across a county road and a plowed field and more woods until they’d felt secure enough to stop. Another county road was ahead of them; while the rest retired deeper into the woods to hide and watch television, Kelp had gone off to find them transportation, a vehicle to get them to New York.