Let’s give this one a full mile on the clock, Trooper Duckbundy thought, just to be sure he doesn’t wiggle out. Ninety-two miles an hour. Oh, my, yes.
But within half a mile the Cadillac’s brake lights suddenly went on. Had the driver noticed he was being paced? The Hope exit was near here, maybe the Cadillac meant to leave the Interstate there. If so, Trooper Duckbundy would have to pull him over now, with less than a mile on the clock.
But the Cadillac was more than merely slowing down. Its right directional was on, it was angling over onto the shoulder of the road. Trooper Duckbundy slowed to a crawl, watching the events occurring ahead of him. There’s something funny about that, he thought.
The Cadillac stopped. A well-dressed man hopped out of the back seat, picked up a piece of trash from the highway verge, and hopped back into the car again. Trooper Duckbundy’s gray Fury II was almost even with the Cadillac when the Cadillac suddenly surged forward again, spraying gravel out behind itself and shouldering itself out onto the highway directly in Trooper Duckbundy’s path.
Well, enough is enough. As the Cadillac tore away along the highway, tires screaming, Trooper Duckbundy switched on the red flasher light mounted on his dashboard, hit the siren, and gave chase.
“Damn,” Kirby said, looking in the rearview mirror. They were just passing the off ramp for the Hope exit.
Harrington, struggling against the acceleration to get the message out of the tomato juice bottle, said, “What’s wrong?”
“State trooper,” Kirby said. “One of those goddam unmarked cars.” He braked reluctantly, angling over toward the shoulder again.
Harrington at last got the paper out of the bottle. Then he looked around, saw the flashing red light and saw the siren, and said, “State trooper? But there aren’t supposed to be any police around!”
“I’ll get rid of him,” Kirby said. “No problem.’
The Cadillac came to a stop next to the railing of the overpass. The patrol car stopped in front of it, angled across to block it from getting away. The siren was turned off, but the flashing light remained on. Trooper Duckbundy, adjusting his hat and his belt and his trousers and his tie, came walking slowly back to the Cadillac, where Kirby pressed the button that slid the window down. “Going a little fast there, fella,” Trooper Duckbundy said.
Kirby flashed his FBI ID card. “It’s okay,” he said. “A special situation.”
Trooper Duckbundy saw that it was an ID card, but that was all. “License and registration is all I need,” he said. He saw the prosperous-looking fella in the back seat. Mm-hm.
“You don’t understand,” Kirby said. “I’m FBI. This is a special situation here.”
“Oh, yeah?” Trooper Duckbundy knew about this stuff, too. “And I guess that’s a Senator or something in the backseat, is it? Well, let me tell you, we don’t like you people thumbing your noses at New Jersey.”
“No, you’ve got it wrong. This-”
“No, I don’t have it wrong,” Trooper Duckbundy said. “We get a lot of this over on the Turnpike-diplomats, political big shots, going from the UN down to Washing. ton, do eighty, ninety, a hundred miles an hour down through the chemical plants.”
“It isn’t-”
“You think you got immunity,” Trooper Duckbundy said. “Just say a tire blows at ninety miles an hour, what kind of immunity you got then? And how many innocent people are you endangering, you ever think of that?”
Another police car, this one very well marked indeed, pulled to a stop behind the Cadillac, and the trooper got out to join the action. Harrington said to Kirby, urgently, “They’re not supposed to be here!” He’d read the note from the tomato juice bottle by now. “This is where we leave the money!”
“Oh, hell,” Kirby said.
The second trooper arrived. “We got a problem here?”
“What we have here,” Trooper Duckbundy said, “is some sort of politico, a big shot. Thinks he’s immune to blowouts.”
“Is that right?”
“Now look,” Kirby said.
The second trooper said to Kirby, “Just a minute there. I’m speaking with the other officer.”
Coming like hell, Murch roared toward the intersection of the county road and Interstate 80. As they neared the overpass Dortmunder said, “Isn’t that police cars?”
But he’d only had a quick glimpse before the angle was wrong. Murch said, as he braked to a stop under the over. pass, “I don’t think so. What would they have police cars for?”
“Some sort of trap.”
“Be a dumb kind of trap,” Murch said, “with police cars.” Stopped, he shifted into park but left the engine running. “Better go see if it’s there already.”
“Right.”
Dortmunder got out of the car and went walking over to the other verge of the county road, where the suitcase would land. There wasn’t anything there. He walked farther from the overpass, looked up, and saw the Cadillac sandwiched between police cars. The one in back looked like a police car. The one in front was unmarked, but it had a flashing red light revolving behind the windshield.
“Uh huh,” Dortmunder said, and walked back to the Mustang and got in next to Murch. “Two police cars,” he said. “Also the Cadillac.”
Murch shifted into drive.
“No,” Dortmunder said. “We can’t leave.”
“Why not?”
“If it’s a trap, they’ll spring it when we try to get away. If we stay here after we’ve seen them, it could be a coincidence, we could be just two guys that stopped to look at a road map. We got a road map?”
Murch shifted into park. “I don’t know,” he said.
Dortmunder looked in the glove compartment and found a road map. He looked at it. “Illinois?”
“Don’t ask me,” Murch said. “I just took this car out of a parking lot. The plates I took off it were Jersey, same as the plates I put on.”
“A road map is a road map,” Dortmunder said. He opened it up, and he and Murch spent some time studying the highways of Illinois.
Up above, Kirby had managed finally to get the word kidnap spoken and heard. The second trooper had gone off to radio the barracks for confirmation. Trooper Duckbundy stood frowning at Kirby in a welter of uncertainty. Kirby was angry for more reasons than he could name. And Harrington was hopping up and down on the back seat, saying, “Get them away from here! Get them away!”
“As soon as I can,” Kirby said, through gritted teeth. “As soon as I can.”
The second trooper came back. “It’s okay,” he said. He nodded and gave Kirby a Clint Eastwood smile; tough, manly, distanced. “Sorry to horn in,” he said.
“Just get the hell away from here,” Kirby said.
Both troopers were offended. They went off to their respective cars, both checking their hats, belts, trousers, and ties. They got into their respective cars, switched off their respective flashing lights, and finaly drove the hell away from there.
“At last,” Kirby said. “Okay, Mr. Harrington.”
“I haven’t tried to throw my weight around,” Harrington said. “I’ve done what you people asked, because you’re the professionals. But I’m telling you right now that I do have influential friends in Washington, and I expect to be chatting with them very soon.”
“Yes, sir,” said Kirby.
Down below, Dortmunder opened the door of the Mustang and said, “I’ll go check it out again. See are they still there.”
“Sure,” Murch said.
Harrington got out of the Cadillac, carrying the money, and approached the railing. Behind him, Kirby called from the car, “Mr. Harrington!”
He turned around, exasperated beyond endurance. “What now?”
“That’s the wrong case,” Kirby said.
Harrington looked at the case in his hand, and it was the wrong case. It was his attach� case. “My God,” he said. “Good thing I didn’t throw that over, it has some rather important documents in it.” He hurriedly made the switch in the back seat of the car, getting the suitcase and leaving the attach� case. Then he went back to the railing.
The woman on the phone had emphasized that they shouldn’t hang, around, they shouldn’t be nosy, they should just toss the suitcase over the side and be off. So Harrington just tossed the suitcase over the side and was off. He turned at once, not even looking to see where it landed, and got back into the Cadillac.
As Dortmunder came out from under the overpass, the suitcase hit him on the head and knocked him cold.
“Ouch,” said Murch, when he saw that through the windshield. Dortmunder and the suitcase lay side by side next to the blacktop road. Neither of them moved.
Murch shifted into drive, steered the car over there, and shifted back into park. He loaded Dortmunder into the car, tossed the ransom on the back seat, and drove away to the hideout.
23
“I R E A L L Y am sorry,” Jimmy said. “I’m sure my father didn’t do it on purpose.”