Stanger ignored him. He said to me, “Ringside. Like it?”
We were sheltered on three sides by the pines. We could look under the bottom strand of wire and see the big oak tree about five hundred yards away. Stanger pointed out the gate they’d drive through. “Five after two,” he said. “Ought to get some action along about now.”
And we did. A dusty beetle-green Ford two or three years old appeared in the distance, trailing a long plume of dust. The rain of yesterday had dried quickly and completely.
“Broon,” Stanger said. The car slowed as it approached the open gate with the cattle guard steel rails paving the entrance, and then went on past, accelerating slightly. In a tone of approval Stanger said, “Took a look to see if Pike was early and now he’ll swing around the place. About four miles to go all the way around it. He’ll come right down this here dirt road behind us.”
We waited. It stirred old instincts, old training. Terrain, cover and concealment, field of fire. The brown pine needles underneath me had a faded aromatic scent. Skirr of insects. Piercingly sweet call of meadowlark. Swamp-smell of the ditch water nearby. Sway and dip of the grasses in the breeze. The motor sound became audible, grew, and it went by behind us, shocks and springs chunking as it hit the potholes in the clay road base. Faded off. A drift of road dust filtered the sunlight for a few moments.
Long minutes later we saw, far across the flat pasture-land, distant glints as he drove along the opposite road, the one that paralleled the road behind us. He was behind the hedgerow of scrub pine and palmetto, chrome winking through the few open places.
When he returned to the gate, he slowed and turned in and drove across the open pastureland, through the grass that had grown to over a foot high since the stock had been moved. The car rolled and bounced and he made a swing, a half circle and parked perhaps fifty feet beyond the lonely live oak.
When he got out, Stanger reached and took the binoculars away from Lew Nudenbarger. “Not now, you damn fool! He’ll be looking every direction, and you pick up the sun just right on a lens, he’s gone.”
“Sorry, Al.”
We watched the man walk slowly over to stand in the shade of the oak. Five hundred yards was too far for me to get much more than an impression of a smallish man with a trim and tidy way of moving, pale hair, brown face, white shirt, khaki trousers.
I thought I saw him raise a hand to his mouth, and was suddenly startled by a small, dry coughing sound that came from the monitor speaker of the receiver. It stood on a level place between Stanger and Nudenbarger, a few feet back from the small crest.
“Do the talking right there,” Stanger pleaded in a low voice. “Right there. Don’t, for God’s sake, set in the car and talk. We want you right there, you slippery little scut.”
Minutes passed. And then a red car appeared far away, pulling a high-speed dust tower. It braked and turned into the gate. It was the red Falcon wagon, and the last time I had seen it in motion, Helena’s daughters had been in it
It followed the same route through the grass that Broon had taken. It made a wider circle around the tree, in the opposite direction, and stopped on our side but not in the line of vision.
Stanger was looking through the glasses. He lowered them and hitched down and turned on the old Uher recorder, now functioning on battery pack and jacked into the receiver. He took another look through the glasses. “Dave got a gun in his hand,” he said.
Broon’s voice came over the speaker, resonating the diaphragm as he shouted across the sunlit space. “Whyn’t you turn off the motor and get out?”
Pike was so far from the mike his answer was inaudible.
“Talk in the shade, brothers,” Stanger pleaded. “Go talk in the shade of the nice big tree.”
“I wanted you to see the gun right off, Tom,” Broon called out to him. “So you wouldn’t get cute until I told you something. If I don’t make a phone call tonight to a certain party, an eight-page letter gets mailed special delivery to the state attorney. I spent half the night writing that letter. Now I’ll toss this here gun in my car and we can talk things out.”
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