They crashed a light.
Unintentionally, but the cop whose motorcycle was parked by the curb took after them and they were dragged to a stop.
He berated them, checked the truck registration — not the registration of the car in back — and let them go with a warning. On that job, Tom sweated; Eddie laughed all the way to the junkyard.
The four cars that had been previously stolen were all parked side by side in the yard. In the center of the deep yard, surrounded on all sides by chrome and rusting parts of old autos. Work had to be done on them, and Eddie did it in his spare time, cut off from the world, safe from cops.
He towed the Continental in beside the Cadillac, and unwinched the chain, letting the car down with a clang. Tom got out and lit a cigarette, leaning against the truck.
“Whew!” he gasped, “that was damned, damned close.”
Eddie playfully dug him in the ribs with an elbow. “Close, nothing. That’s as close as they’ll ever get. D’you ever read a story by Poe called ‘The Purloined Letter’?”
Tom shook his head, and Eddie said, “Well, it was simple. This letter was stolen, and they knew it was in a guy’s room, so they hunted and hunted, but they couldn’t find it, even though it was there.”
“Where was it?”
“In a letter box, with a bunch of others, right up on the wall, where they could see it all the time. Y’see what I mean? The cops can’t see what’s in front of their noses. They’ll see us, but what’s more logical than a tow truck draggin’ a car away for repair?”
Tom grinned, started to say something.
Eddie cut him off. “ Iknow. What if a guy comes out and yells at us for hooking up his car? We just say, ‘Oh, excuse me, Mister, we got a call for a repair on a crate like this … must be the wrong car,’ and we drive off, grab another one down the line.
“And if the cops spot us, they check the truck registration and not the car we’re hauling. No point to that! ”
Tom nodded, clapped Eddie on the back. “Ed, buddy, you’re a goddam genius.”
Eddie smiled. “I owe it all to the Warden.”
Eddie worked steadily on the cars over the weekends, filing down serial numbers on the engines, repainting when necessary, changing plates and other identification. Benny, who owned the junkyard, made sure he was let strictly alone, and they moved five to eight cars a week.
The money was rolling in, but Eddie was playing it cool. He checked with his parole officer, and he buried his share of the money, living no higher than his garage salary allowed.
He was becoming a pillar of the community.
The auto theft toll mounted alarmingly, but the police were stymied. Somehow, a phantom was boosting cars in broad daylight and running them out of the state before anything could be done about it.
On their thirty-eighth haul, Eddie stole a Pontiac parked outside a grocery store, and as they pulled away, Vinny swore he saw a woman come rushing out onto the curb, screaming.
“Let her scream,” Eddie said. “We’ll be long gone before she can do anything about it.”
He left Vinny to check with the broker about getting rid of the new heist, and took the Pontiac to the junkyard. All the other cars had been removed, and it stood alone.
Eddie jacked it down, and left it there. He was due back at the garage.
It was three days before he could get to work on it, but before he could leave work the scheduled night, three men came to the garage.
They talked to Mickey, and they studied the tow truck, and when they started back into the repair shop, Eddie knew something was wrong. He made a run for it.
He got as far as the window, ready to leap through and break down the alley, when they drew their guns.
“Hold it, hold it! Don’t shoot!” he yelled, and they lowered their aim. Must be another gang , Eddie thought. They don’t look like plainclothes.
“Looks like this is our boy, Paul,” one of the men said to the other. They were all hard-eyed, ruthless.
“Where’s the car, fellow,” the man addressed as Paul said.
“What car?” Eddie tried to bluff it.
Paul’s hand, holding the .32 Police Positive, came around in an arc, slashing at Eddie Cappen’s face. The pain penetrated all the way to Eddie’s brain, and he staggered, putting a hand to his cheek. Blood was flowing down his face.
“In — in the junkyard, crosstown,” he said, in pain. “Who are you? How’d you find me? Who squealed?” Anger boiled in him.
Paul answered as he supped the cuffs on Eddie Cappen. “Nobody squealed. The woman saw a red tow truck, and this thing was big enough to call us in, so we searched the city till we found a red tow truck that fit the description. Then we found you. Too bad it took us this long.”
“What are you talking about? What do you mean, ‘Big enough to call us in?’ Who are you?”
“FBI, Mister. You pulled a beaut this time.”
Eddie Cappen reeled, his legs felt like soggy soda straws. “What’re ya talkin’ about? I only swiped a car. That’s maybe a few years, but with parole I’ll get out!”
The Federal agent shook his head. “Uh-uh, buddy. We don’t want you for the car job. We’ve got you on kidnapping, and probably murder.
“There was a baby asleep in the back seat of that car, and this long without attention, it’s probably dead.”
The third man said, “That’s the chair in this state, brother, if they reinstate the death penalty; and if they don’t it means twenty-to-life on death row. You’ll never make it, I can telclass="underline" you shake too much.”
Eddie Cappen felt sickness backing up in him. A baby in the back seat. Dead … yes, after three days … dead!
Be observant.
Toe the line.
He would never make it.
Seven: Down in the Dark
Griff could hear Ivy’s husband moving toward him in the darkness. Only the faintest sounds of gravel betrayed his movements. Down here, deep in the gut of the Earth, it was another world. A world Griff knew well as a geologist. A world in which Kenneth Cory was at a disadvantage. That was why Ivy and Griff had lured him down here. To kill him.
The coffin silence of the great limestone cavern pressed down on Griff as he lay there, the vaguely cool breeze only accenting the comfortable temperature. Off somewhere behind him, where the ceiling of the cave suddenly sloped sharply, nearly joining with the moist cool floor, he could hear a stalactite drip-drip-dripping its eternal water message; a message that would end only when the spear joined with the floor, flowed into one continuous bar from above to below a thousand years from now. And there was the sound of a man crawling on his belly toward him.
Griff smiled in the darkness. Poor Cory, that ass. He actually thought he had trapped Griff down here. He actually thought that revolver was going to work for him down here. (That revolver, what pride he took in it. A Ruger .256 Hawkeye, scope-mounted for varmint hunting. It would be as much help down in the dark as an arbolest or an ICBM.)
Griff hugged the powerful spring-driven crossbow to his chest, lying doggo and hearing Cory slithering through blackness in his general direction. Release that trigger and the metal-frame crossbow would drive a steel-tipped hunting arrow under eighty pounds of thrust, straight through the hairless chest of Ivy’s cuckolded husband. Come on, Kenny baby, just crawl to it. A little farther, you jerk, just a little farther .
Cory started moving too far right and, fearing he might lose the channel that would bring him into the line of fire, Griff snuffled softly, as though stifling a cough, the way a man might who was hiding in terror. Cory moved sidewise on elbows and knees and came forward again, crablike. Griff grinned.