In a moment it was gone.
Sam turned away from the street and slumped with his back to the belfry wall. “On their way to the mill?”
“Looks like it,” Paul said. “But why?”
“Good question. I would have asked the same thing myself if you hadn’t.”
“Another thing,” Paul said. “What if they’ve figured out how we escaped? What if they realize we know the code phrase?”
“That’s not very likely.”
“But if it’s the case?”
“I wish I knew,” Sam said worriedly. He sighed. “But remember that even under the worst circumstances, it’s just us against them. If they realize how much we know, we lose the advantage of surprise. But they’ve lost the advantage of an army of programmed bodyguards. So it balances out.”
Jenny said, “Do you think both of Salsbury’s friends are aboard the helicopter?”
Sam held his revolver before him. He was unable to see more than the outline of it in the darkness. Nevertheless, studying it with dread fascination, he said, “Well now, that’s another thing I sure wish I knew.”
Paul’s hands were shaking. His own Smith & Wesson felt as if it weighed a hundred pounds. He said, “I guess we go after Salsbury now.”
“It’s past time we did.”
Jenny touched her father’s hand, the one that held the gun. “But what if one of those men did stay with Salsbury?”
“Then it’s two against two,” Sam said. “And we sure as hell can handle that.”
“If I went along,” she said, “it would be three against two, and that would have to improve the odds.”
“Rya needs you,” Sam said. He hugged her, kissed her on the cheek. “We’ll be okay, Jen. I know we will. You just watch after Rya while we’re gone.”
And if you don’t come back?”
We will.
“If you don’t?” she insisted.
“Then-you’re on your own,” Sam said, his voice almost breaking. If there were tears in the corners of his eyes, the darkness hid them. “There’s nothing more I can do for you.”
“Look,” Paul said, “even if Salsbury does know how much
we’ve learned, he doesn’t know where we are. But we know exactly where he is. So we still have some advantage.”
Rya clung to Paul. She didn’t want to let him go. She spoke in a quiet but fierce voice, and she virtually demanded that he not leave her in the tower.
He stroked her dark hair, held her tight, spoke softly to her, calmed and reassured her as best he could.
And at 10:20 he followed Sam down the tower stairs.
8
10:20 P.M
PHIL KARKOV, the proprietor of Black River’s only service station and garage, and his girl friend, Lolah Tayback, tried to leave town a few minutes past ten o’clock. As programmed, the deputies who manned the roadblock sent them to the municipal building to have a talk with Bob Thorp.
The mechanic was soft-spoken, courteous, and obviously liked to think of himself as a model citizen. He was a tall, broad-shouldered, red-haired man in his middle thirties. His good looks were marred only by a bulbous and somewhat misshapen nose that appeared to have been broken in more than one fight. He was an amicable man with a ready smile; and he was most anxious to help the chief of police in any way that he could.
After he opened the two of them with the code phrase and spent a minute interrogating them, Salsbury was satisfied that Karkov and Lolah Tayback were fully, properly programmed. They hadn’t been trying to escape. They hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary in town today. They had only been going to a bar in Bexford for beer and sandwiches.
He sent the mechanic home and told him to stay there for the rest of the night.
The woman was another matter altogether.
“Child-woman” was a better word for her, he thought. Her Silvery-blond hair hung to her narrow shoulders and framed a face of childlike beauty: crystalline green eyes, a perfectly clear and milky complexion with a light, cinnamon like dusting of freckles across her cheekbones, an upturned pixie nose, dimples, a blade-straight jaw line and round little chin . . . Every feature was delicate and somehow bespoke naïveté. She stood perhaps five feet two and weighed no more than one hundred pounds. She seemed fragile. Yet in her red-and-white-striped T-shirt (sans bra) and blue jean shorts, she presented a strikingly desirable, quite womanly figure. Her breasts were small, high set, accentuated by an extremely thin waistline, the nipples delectably silhouetted through the thin material of the T-shirt. Her legs were sleek, supple, shapely. As he stood in front of her, looking her up and down, she regarded him shyly. She was unable to meet his eyes. She fidgeted. If appearance could count for anything, she ought to have been one of the most malleable, vulnerable women he had ever met.