"Wait for me at the border," I said. "Or I'll wait for you. They don't open it until eight anyway, I heard somebody say. There'll be time for me to stir us up something to eat in the camper before they let us through."
"I'm not hungry," she said and hesitated. When she spoke again, her voice was soft. "Matt."
"Yes?"
"It was nice," she said. "Whatever happens, last night was nice."
I looked at her for a moment. She wasn't the sweetest, gentlest woman I'd ever met, or even the most beautiful. I still wasn't quite sure of her motives and loyalties. Nevertheless, we'd managed to share something special for a few hours-something a little different from the enjoyable but meaningless man-woman stuff we'd indulged in previously-but it wasn't the sort of thing you could talk about without spoiling it.
"Yeah," I said. "Nice. Be careful, doll. We don't know what we'll be running into on shore."
This was a lie, of course. I knew-or hoped I knew- exactly what we'd be running into: a professional killer named Holz. But I couldn't warn her further, no matter how nice it had been. I just turned away and squeezed between the parked cars to the camper and checked on Hank. There wasn't time to let him out for his morning airing. The first cars were already driving off the ship, including, I noted, an old white Plymouth station wagon.
I told the pup to hold everything, closed the door on him, and took a quick look under the truck to see if any bombs had been added or any brake lines or steering linkages removed in my absence. I checked the engine compartment. Even commercial vehicles are encumbered with a lot of Mickey Mouse gadgets these days-that big, rugged, powerful truck engine was decorated with a cute little automatic choke, for God's sake! Apparently modern-day truck drivers are considered too stupid and feeble to pull a knob out of a dashboard. But there didn't seem to be any gimmickry that hadn't been there before.
Well, I didn't really think the Woodman would go the sabotage or explosives route. There are guys who like to see guys blow up or fall off cliffs by remote control, and then there are guys who prefer to have them die, if they must die, with neat little personalized holes in them. Having studied his dossier carefully, I'd come to the conclusion that Holz, like me, belonged in the latter category.
Still, I was glad when the engine started without extraneous fireworks. Presently I was driving away from the ferry slip in the misty morning twilight, in a slow-moving line of cars winding along the shore, headlight to taillight. At the first suitable spot, I pulled out and turned the pup loose.
Libby's car passed without slowing up. Pete's station wagon was somewhere up ahead in the parade. The converted Ford delivery van rolled by with two up front, but the visibility was too poor for me to make out whether young Smith or his bearded partner was driving. Where the rest of the boyscouts were-the ones who were supposed to be keeping tabs on me and anyone who approached me-I didn't know or care, as long as they stayed out of my way. I had to admit they'd done a pretty fair job of it so far. Their moral attitudes might be childish, but their tailing techniques seemed to be adequate.
I let the pup sniff and explore happily along the stony beach, wet with the night's rain. He'd been locked up on shipboard a long time and deserved a run. It was chilly standing there on the shore-after all, these were Arctic waters. Ahead were the lights of the town of Haines; behind was the ferry dock. As I looked that way, the Matanuska pulled out and headed up the bay for Skagway and the end of her northward voyage. I was on my own once more, doing my own navigating. When Hank had fired both barrels and become thoroughly reacquainted with terra firma, I loaded him back into the camper and cruised through the sleeping town in the vague, slowly growing light.
Watching the rearview mirrors, I saw Pete's station wagon pull out from behind a darkened filling station and fall into place close behind me. Apparently he was going to stick to his open-surveillance routine, hoping it would make me mad or scared or guilty. It was too bad. I mean I admire loyalty as much as anybody, but the guy was overdoing his devotion to his defunct comrade. He was crowding me.
The delay had let the cavalcade of cars from the ship pull ahead of us. We had Alaska pretty much to ourselves as we pulled out of town on a paved two-lane highway that followed the bank of a sizeable river upstream. I could see the water gleaming through the trees, an odd, murky, milky, light blue-green color, rippled with current eddies. I jacked up the speed as civilization, such as it was up here, dropped behind us, and looked for a suitable spot to teach friend Pete that tailgating is bad driving.
What I needed was a reasonably sharp curve, and a reasonably steep drop-off on the left, or river, side of the road. I found just the right spot after a few miles. I took the curve fast, hit the brakes just beyond, switched on the right-turn signal, and veered over as if to park.
Pete, rounding the curve right behind me, had no real choice. He was too close to stop; he had to swing around me, or try. Maybe he even thought I was actually parking. As he came up, I threw the long shift lever from fourth to third, the real acceleration gear. I put my foot down hard, and all four barrels of the big carburetor opened wide, and all two hundred and forty horsepower-truck horsepower, remember-came in with a roar. The pickup leaped forward just as Pete drew abreast.
He tried to make it clear, but he didn't have a chance. The old station wagon had neither the power nor the gears. He couldn't get past me and he was going too fast to drop behind. I put my cab door even with his front wheels and, slightly ahead of him like that, holding it there, moved deliberately left across the highway. He didn't even try to ram. I guess the big truck-and-camper rig towering over his flimsy passenger job looked just too massive and invulnerable, and maybe it was. Anyway, trick driving was apparently not his specialty. He just let himself be herded across the road and over the bank. It was finished in an instant.
I looked into the left-hand mirror… He could have ridden it out alive, but I saw no reason to go back and look.
Some sixty miles farther on, I came upon the little white Canadian customs-and-immigration building that marked the international border. The geography up there is pretty scrambled, with a strip of U.S. territory-the Alaska panhandle, so-called-running down the coast for hundreds of miles and Canadian real estate inland. Since there are no roads along that rugged shoreline, we now had to leave the U.S. and head across the Canadian interior, through British Columbia and Yukon Territory, to pick up the northern end of the Alaska Highway, which would then lead us back across another international boundary into Alaska proper.
The customs man had apparently just got out of bed. The office was open, but there was a line of cars still waiting to be processed through. Libby's convertible was parked at the side of the road a little back from the mob scene. I stopped the truck behind it, and she came over and joined me in the camper, reacting in typical feminine fashion to Hank's muddy feet and affectionate tongue.
"You really ought to teach that dog some manners," she said, wiping a smudge off her corduroy pants.
"He's just being friendly," I said. "Down, Stupid. The lady doesn't like dogs."
"You can say that twice," Libby said. "My God, that poodle they saddled me with in Seattle! The idiot bitch was carsick all the way to Pasco and back, and I was a total wreck by the time I got rid of her-well, you saw me."
Her voice was a little challenging. We were proving something. Perhaps we were demonstrating that, even if last night meant something, I was going to have to take her as she was. She wasn't going to be a hypocrite, no matter how nice it had been. She wasn't going to pretend to be a dog-lover, or anything else, to please me.