about Edgar Allan Poe’s The Purloined Letter. He did not suppose there
was much danger of that because he did not think Sharp had ever in his
life read anything other than skin magazines.
“He’s down in those woods,” Sharp said at last, turning his back on the
station wagon, showing Ben his heels.
“Down toward the lake. He can see us now, I’ll bet.
Letting us make the next move.
“We have to get another car,” Peake said.
“First you’ve got to go down in these woods, have a look around, see if
you can flush him out.”
“Me?”
“You,” Sharp said.
“Sir, I’m not really dressed for that sort of thing. My shoes-”
“There’s less underbrush here than there was up near Leben’s cabin,”
Sharp said. “You’ll manage.”
Peake hesitated but finally said, “What’ll you be doing while I’m poking
around down there?”
“From here,” Sharp said, “I can look almost straight down through the
trees, into the brush. If you get near him down there on his own level,
he might be able to move away from you under the cover of rocks and
bushes, without you getting a glimpse of him.
But see, from up above here, I’m almost sure to see him moving. And
when I do, I’ll go straight for the bastard.”
Ben heard a peculiar noise, like a lid being unscrewed from a mayonnaise
jar. For a moment he could not imagine what it was, then realized Sharp
was taking the silencer off his pistol.
Sharp confirmed that suspicion. “Maybe the shotgun still gives him the
advantage-” “Maybe?” Peake said with amazement.
“-but there’s two of us, two guns, and without silencers we’ll get
better range. Go on, Peake. Go down there and smoke him out for me.”
Peake seemed on the point of rebellion, but he went.
Ben waited.
A couple of cars passed on the road.
Ben remained very still, watching Anson Sharp’s shoes. After a while,
Sharp moved one step away from the car, which was as far as he could go
in that direction, for one step put him at the very brink of the
embankment that sloped down into the woods.
When the next car rumbled along, Ben used the cover of its engine noise
to slip out from under the Dodge wagon on the driver’s side, where he
crouched against the front door, below window level. Now the station
wagon was between him and Sharp.
Holding the shotgun in one hand, he opened a few buttons on his shirt.
He withdrew the rock that. he had found in the forest.
On the other side of the Dodge, Sharp moved.
Ben froze, listened.
Evidently Sharp had only been sidestepping along the edge of the
embankment to keep Peake in sight below.
Ben knew he had to act swiftly. If another car came by, he would
present quite a spectacle to anyone in it, a guy in filthy clothes,
holding a rock in one hand and a shotgun in the other, with a revolver
tucked into his waistband. With one tap of the horn, any passing driver
could warn Sharp of the wild man at his back.
Rising up from a crouch, Ben looked across the station wagon, directly
at the back of Sharp’s head. If Sharp turned around now, one of them
would have to shoot the other.
Ben waited tensely until he was certain that Sharp’s attention was
directed down toward the northwest portion of the woods. Then he
pitched the round fist-sized rock as hard as he could, across the top of
the car, very high, very wide of Sharp’s head, so the wind of its
passage would not draw the man’s attention. He hoped Sharp would not
see the rock in flight, hoped it would not hit a tree too soon but would
fall far into the forest before impacting.
He was doing a lot of earnest hoping and praying lately.
Without waiting to see what happened, he dropped down beside the car
again and heard his missile shredding pine boughs or brush and finally
impacting with a resonant thunk.
“Peake!” Sharp called out. “Back of you, back of you.
Over that way. Movement over there in those bushes, by the drainage