He came so fast that he almost got by me. If his car had been facing out instead of in I'd never have made it. As it was, I started scrambling down the slope the instant I saw the white car with the flasher on the roof lurch out of the driveway in reverse. By the time he'd got it going in the right direction-towards me, as I'd gambled-and covered the stretch of highway between us, I'd made it down the hill, under the fence, and over the ditch. I jumped out into the glare of the headlights, first waving my arms to flag him down, then jumping back to safety as, brakes locked, he screeched to a halt where I'd been standing. The near window was open, and I could hear him swear.
"Who the hell…"
I shoved my classy ID folder at him through the window. "Federal Government," I said. It didn't mean much, but I hoped it sounded important.
He pushed the leather case away. "To hell with you!" he snapped. "I'm busy! Come to the office in the morning, C-man." Then, starting to drive off, he had an afterthought as I'd hoped he would, and hit the brakes once more. "Well, maybe… Okay, get in but make it fast!'
xvii.
Neither of us spoke for a minute or two. As I caught my breath, I was glad I'd decided to use the direct approach instead of playing devious games with beautiful female decoys. Fast as it had happened, the girl would have loused it up for certain; besides, this way I got to talk to him more or less as one public servant to another.
I noted that he had his big hat on once more, but that his revolver and cartridge belt were missing. As far as I could make out in the dark, even the car had been disarmed. There were brackets that might have held a rifle and a riot gun, but they were empty.
"What's your name, Mr. Federal Government?"
His voice carried less of a cornpone accent than I'd expected of an Oklahoma lawman. it reminded me that it's always a mistake to classify people into types before you know something about them.
I said, "Well, it isn't Janssen, if that's what you're thinking."
That could be a mistake, giving him information he didn't have, but I was gambling that he'd done his homework and already determined the names of his most probable suspects. Apparently he had. Carl's name seemed to cause him no surprise. He just laughed shortly.
"It did cross my mind just now that the murdering bastard could have told me to meet him in Budville just to see if I was playing it straight, while all the time he was planning to pick me up right across the road where I wouldn't be expecting him."
"Budville," I said, keeping the elation out of my voice. My gamble had paid off handsomely. The information I'd ventured had brought back information 1 needed, for which I would have paid much more. "Budville? Where's that?"
He looked as if he regretted letting the name slip. Then he shrugged. "Hell, it's on any road map," he said. "Thirty miles east. Just a store and a gas pump by the side of the road. And I didn't say where in Budville, C-man."
"By your description, there's not much choice."
"There's a way it's to be done. No other way will work, the voice said on the phone."
"Sure."
"And if your name isn't Janssen, you're no use to me. If you know so much, you know he's got my boy, Ricky. There isn't a damn thing you can do to help and I don't want you even trying."
"Ricky?" I said. "Eric?"
"That's right. Why?"
"Never mind," I said. I was neither superstitious nor sentimental, and the fact that the missing boy's name was the same as my code name had nothing to do with anything, I told myself. "Talking about names, how did you learn Janssen's?" I asked.
"There were three obvious candidates. Two could be checked on by their local authorities. They'd been right where they were supposed to be, all the time a couple of good men were dying with wires around their necks. The third was a mysterious Washington character with a government job that seemed to involve a lot of traveling. Nobody could find out just what it was. They hit an official security wail when they tried. This man was missing. Anders Janssen." Rullington glanced my way. "One of yours?"
I nodded. "One of ours. And we want him back."
"To hell with you, Mister. He's a murderer, a kidnaper, and probably a maniac. The law has first crack at him now."
I said, "You're heading out to make a deal with this murderer and maniac, aren't you?"
"He didn't leave me much choice. If I didn't come, he said, fingers and toes and ears and… and things would start arriving in the mail. But once I get Ricky back…" He gripped his steering wheel hard. "If I ever get my hands on that sadistic sonofabitch…"
I laughed. He turned to look at me, startled and angry. I said, in a superior and condescending way, "Cut out the melodrama, Sheriff. Settle down. As far as Janssen is concerned, we're not really too much concerned about his ultimate fate-agents are expendable-but we don't want you to make a public spectacle of him. We can't afford that."
He drew a long, ragged breath. "If the bastard is yours, you ought to keep him in a cage."
"Shit," I said. "Don't tell us what we ought or oughtn't, or we'll just tell you that you oughtn't to go around shooting people's kids, Sheriff. Sometimes it makes them real mad."
He glanced at me once more and started to speak hotly but checked himself. That told me something. He wasn't really happy about that campus affair, professionally speaking, which meant that, as an undercover big shot from Washington, 1 could lean on him a bit and get away with it.
After a pause, he said without expression, "The Janssen girl was an accident."
"Sure," I said. "An accident. You and your boys fired a couple of dozen rounds at a mob less than fifty yards away, if the newspaper reports are correct. Out of that whole barrage, you got one solid bulls-eye on a legitimate target-the Dubuque kid with a brick in his hand-you got a few scratch hits, and you sent so many wild bullets flying around that you killed two innocent bystanders seventy-five and a hundred yards behind the line of scrimmage. Now, really, Sheriff, what the hell kind of marksmanship do you call that? That's not an accident, that's just plain incompetence!" I grimaced. "Janssen's a pro. He knows that things happen and people get killed. What he can't face, what's sent him off his rocker a little, is having his daughter shot that way, quite unnecessarily, by a bunch of panicky uniformed jerks who were then patted on the back by a local jury instead of having their guns and badges taken away from them and shoved up their stupid incompetent asses."
He was close to exploding, but he still managed to control himself. He said sharply, "I suppose it would have been better if we'd got two dozen dead college kids to go with those two dozen bullets!"
I sighed. "If that's supposed to be sarcasm, Sheriff, you're not reading me at all. I'm trying to give you the professional viewpoint, Janssen's viewpoint, the viewpoint of a man who knows guns. Sure it would have been better."
"You and your friend have a damn funny way of looking at things!"
I said patiently, "If you'd had a dead body to show for every bullet fired, it would have proved, at least, that you and your people knew what you were doing, whether or not it was the right thing ~o do. it would have demonstrated that you didn't shoot until you knew where your shots were going; that you weren't all just banging way blindly without knowing or caring whom you might kill. And if you'd been picking your targets the way you should, Emily Janssen wouldn't have died, or the Hollingshead boy, either." I shook my head. "Well, if your boy dies tonight, you'll have one consolation, Rullington. You'll have the satisfaction of knowing he was killed because somebody had a reason for wanting him dead, not just because some trigger-happy cop or deputy couldn't be bothered to aim his pistol properly."