We got into the car. «Drive down a piece, about two hundred yards,» Barron said. «Make plenty of noise.»
Andy started the car, raced the motor, clashed the gears, and the car slid down through the moonlight and around a curve of the road and up a moonlit hill sparred with the shadows of tree trunks.
«Turn her at the top and coast back, but not close,» Barron said. «Stay out of sight of that cabin. Turn your lights off before you turn.»
«Yup,» Andy said.
He turned the car just short of the top, going around a tree to do it. He cut the lights off and started back down the little hill, then killed the motor. Just beyond the bottom of the slope there was a heavy clump of manzanita, almost as tall as ironwood. The car stopped there. Andy pulled the brake back very slowly to smooth out the noise of the ratchet.
Barron leaned forward over the back seat. «We’re goin’ across the road and get near the water,» he said. «I don’t want no noise and nobody walkin’ in no moonlight.»
Andy said: «Yup.»
We got out. We walked carefully on the dirt of the road, then on the pine needles. We filtered through the trees, behind fallen logs, until the water was down below where we stood. Barron sat down on the ground and then lay down. Andy and I did the same. Barron put his face close to Andy.
«Hear anything?»
Andy said: «Eight cylinders, kinda rough.»
I listened. I could tell myself I heard it, but I couldn’t be sure. Barron nodded in the dark. «Watch the lights in the cabin,» he whispered.
We watched. Five minutes passed, or enough time to seem like five minutes. The lights in the cabin didn’t change. Then there was a remote, half-imagined sound of a door closing. There were shoes on wooden steps.
«Smart. They left the light on,» Barron said in Andy’s ear. We waited another short minute. The idling motor burst into a roar of throbbing sound, a stuttering, confused racket, with a sort of hop, skip and jump in it. The sound sank to a heavy purring roar and then quickly began to fade. A dark shape slid out on the moonlit water, curved with a beautiful line of froth and swept past the point out of sight.
Barron got a plug of tobacco out and bit. He chewed comfortably and spat four feet beyond his feet. Then he got up on his feet and dusted off the pine needles. Andy and I got up.
«Man ain’t got good sense chewin’ tobacco these days,» he said. «Things ain’t fixed for him. I near went to sleep back there in the cabin.» He lifted the Colt he was still holding in his left hand, changed hands and packed the gun away on his hip.
«Well?» he said, looking at Andy.
«Ted Rooney’s boat,» Andy said. «She’s got two sticky valves and a big crack in the muffler. You hear it best when you throttle her up, like they did just before they started.»
It was a lot of words for Andy, but the sheriff liked them.
«Couldn’t be wrong, Andy? Lots of boats get sticky valves.» Andy said: «What the hell you ask me for?» in a nasty voice.
«Okay, Andy, don’t get sore.»
Andy grunted. We crossed the road and got into the car again. Andy started it up, backed and turn and said: «Lights?»
Barron nodded. Andy put the lights on. «Where to now?»
«Ted Rooney’s place,» Barron said peacefully. «And make it fast. We got ten miles to there,»
«Can’t make it in less’n twenty minutes,» Andy said sourly. «Got to go through the Point.»
The car hit the paved lake road and started back past the dark boys’ camp and the other camps, and turned left on the highway. Barron didn’t speak until we were beyond the village and the road out to Speaker Point. The dance band was still going strong in the pavilion.
«I fool you any?» he asked me then.
«Enough.»
«Did I do something wrong?»
«The job was perfect,» I said, «but I don’t suppose you fooled Luders.»
«That lady was mighty uncomfortable,» Barron said. «That Luders is a good man. Hard, quiet, full of eyesight. But I fooled him some. He made mistakes.»
«I can think of a couple,» I said. «One was being there at all. Another was telling us a friend was coming to pick him up, to explain why he had no car. It didn’t need explaining. There was a car in the garage, but you didn’t know whose car it was. Another was keeping that boat idling.»
«That wasn’t no mistake,» Andy said from the front seat. «Not if you ever tried to start her up cold.»
Barron said: «You don’t leave your car in the garage when you come callin’ up here. Ain’t no moisture to hurt it. The boat could have been anybody’s boat. A couple of young folks could have been in it getting acquainted. I ain’t got anything on him, anyways, so far as he knows. He just worked too hard tryin’ to head me off.»
He spat out of the car. I heard it smack the rear fender like a wet rag. The car swept through the moonlit night, around curves, up and down hills, through fairly thick pines and along open flats where cattle lay.
I said: «He knew I didn’t have the letter Lacey wrote me. Because he took it away from me himself, up in my room at the hotel. It was Luders that knocked me out and knifed Weber. Luders knows that Lacey is dead, even if he didn’t kill him. That’s what he’s got on Mrs. Lacey. She thinks her husband is alive and that Luders has him.»
«You make this Luders out a pretty bad guy,» Barron said calmly. «Why would Luders knife Weber?»
«Because Weber started all the trouble. This is an organization. Its object is to unload some very good counterfeit ten-dollar bills, a great many of them. You don’t advance the cause by unloading them in five-hundred-dollar lots, all brandnew, in circumstances that would make anybody suspicious, would make a much less careful man than Fred Lacey suspicious.»
«You’re doing some nice guessin’, son,» the sheriff said, grabbing the door handle as we took a fast turn, «but the neighbors ain’t watchin’ you. I got to be more careful. I’m in my own back yard. Puma Lake don’t strike me as a very good place to go into the counterfeit money business.»
«Okay,» I said.
«On the other hand, if Luders is the man I want, he might be kind of hard to catch. There’s three roads out of the valley, and there’s half a dozen planes down to the east end of the Woodland Club golf course. Always is in summer.»
«You don’t seem to be doing very much worrying about it,» I said.
«A mountain sheriff don’t have to worry a lot,» Barron said calmly. «Nobody expects him to have any brains. Especially guys like Mr. Luders don’t.»
TEN
The boat lay in the water at the end of a short painter, moving as boats move even in the stillest water. A canvas tarpaulin covered most of it and was tied down here and there, but not everywhere it should have been tied. Behind the short rickety pier a road twisted back through juniper trees to the highway. There was a camp off to one side, with a miniature white lighthouse for its trademark. A sound of dance music came from one of the cabins, but most of the camp had gone to bed.
We came down there walking, leaving the car on the shoulder of the highway. Barron had a big flash in his hand and kept throwing it this way and that, snapping it on and off. When we came to the edge of the water and the end of the road to the pier, he put his flashlight on the road and studied it carefully. There were fresh-looking tire tracks.
«What do you think?» he asked me.
«Looks like tire tracks,» I said.
«What do you think, Andy?» Barron said. «This man is cute, but he don’t give me no ideas.»
Andy bent over and studied the tracks. «New tires and big ones,» he said, and walked towards the pier. He stooped down again and pointed. The sheriff threw the light where he pointed. «Yup, turned around here,» Andy said. «So what? The place is full of new cars right now. Come October and they’d mean something. Folks that live up here buy one tire at a time, and cheap ones, at that. These here are heavy-duty all-weather treads.»