Such Men Are Dangerous

by Lawrence Block

  “I like the second ambush point best,” he said. “You know why?”

  “No.”

  “More space between access roads. And it’ll take them another ten or fifteen minutes to get there, and we need every extra minute we can get.”

  “Okay.”

  “We might pull this off, Paul. They’ve made it pretty easy, and then they complicated everything by screwing up the timing on us. And those four buggers with M-14s. I don’t like those four buggers with M-14s.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “I had a van lined up but that’s out. I had everything set. I had three long-haul movers booked for Thursday. They would come to an address in Pierre with their trucks empty, and they’d be tied up in a basement while I took their van. I booked three so that two of them could do a no-show and we’d still be covered.”

  “That’s out now.”

  “Don’t I know it. Wait a minute—”

  I put a hand on his arm. “George,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Just take it easy, George. Forget the elements that fell in. Let’s start with now. There are certain things we need. We’ll go over them one by one and find out what they are, and then we’ll see if there’s any way we can make it work.”

  “All right.”

  “We had a good thing planned but it’s blown to hell and gone. We have to start in fresh and there’s not much time.”

  “Right.” He nodded slowly. “A van. Some highway signs, a couple planks and sawhorses. Forget guns. I’ve got a Thompson broken down in the back seat. In the suitcase. And a few extra handguns. Let’s see now, we’ll need—”

  It was past nine when I got out of his stolen car and into my own rented one. I made myself forget how I felt about driving in snow and made the car do tricks all the way to Sioux Falls. It was a long drive, and it should have taken even longer than it did, but fortunately I had a maniac behind the wheel. I got in a fancy spinout once that almost took me off the road and into a tree, but the car somehow stayed on the road and I somehow got to Sioux Falls without getting killed.

  I went to four trucking firms, plus four more that were closed for the night, before I found the man I was looking for. His name was Sprague, and his firm was Sprague Trucking Corp., and the sign on his desk said that this was a republic, not a democracy, and let’s keep it that way.

  Another sign, on the wall, said, “I have an agreement with Hoffa/He stays out of my office/and I stay out of his cell!”

  He looked up at me over a desk piled high with papers. He was a big man gone to fat, with a flushed face and a lot of unruly white hair. His beard stubble was white mixed with gray. He was wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the collar open.

  I said, “Mr. Sprague, I’d like to talk to you in private.”

  “We’re alone,” he said.

  I took out the Lynch ID and handed it across the desk. He scanned it very quickly, nodding to himself as he did so. Then he snapped it shut and returned it to me. He stood up, a finger at his lips, and he walked in a half crouch to the door. He stood in the doorway, looking both ways like a well-schooled child at a traffic intersection. Then he cocked an ear—I have heard this expression, but I never before saw anyone do it. He cocked an ear, and listened, and then he closed the door and came back to where I was standing.

  “Mr. Sprague,” I said, “I’m giving you the opportunity to serve your nation and the cause of freedom.”

  TWELVE

  I SPENT CLOSE to an hour in Sioux Falls and broke my own record driving back to Sprayhorn. A cop flagged me down outside of Oak Bend but my Agency ID changed his mind. He offered me a police escort. I told him I didn’t want to attract attention. He went back to his car and I went back to Sprayhorn.

  The Chrysler was gone when I reached the motel. I went to my room and packed everything. I put my suitcases in the trunk of the car and gave the inside of the room a fast fingerprint wipe. There seemed little chance that they would fail to identify Richard John Lynch as Paul Kavanagh, but I saw no point in making it easier for them. If O’Gara’s snap of my ID got lost, and if I managed to wipe up my office before I left, I had a chance of staying covered.

  When Dattner returned I told him I wanted a gun. “A cop stopped me,” I told him. “The ID changed his mind, but suppose he decided to take me in anyway? Give me something heavy. I want to knock down anything I wing.”

  I picked out a .44 Magnum that was guaranteed to stop an elk. He had a spare shoulder rig, and I adjusted it over my uniform jacket and under my overcoat.

  I told him about Sprague.

  “Can he get men?”

  “Four of them.”

  “They might talk.”

  “No. He’s not telling them what it’s all about. He says they’re politically reliable anyway, though what that means to him is anybody’s guess. But he won’t tell them what he wants them for until he’s got them rounded up and ready to play, and after that they won’t have any chance to talk. He’s got a good sense of theater for a trucker.”

  “He sounds like a good man.”

  “He’s gung ho, if that’s what you mean. He’d lead a charge up San Juan Hill if I told him to, but I think he’s an idiot. He has no idea what’s going on. For all he knows I’m Mao Tse-tung’s brother-in-law.”

  “You no look Chinese.”

  “I don’t think it would matter to him if I did.”

  “Maybe not. Get any signs?”

  I opened the back door and hauled out a metal frame with a rectangular sign that said men working. “The best I could do,” I said. “How did you do?”

  “Pretty good.” He hoisted his sign, carried it over to the Chrysler. He opened the trunk, and I looked at two small sawhorses and a couple of detour signs. There were several little black smudge pots, too. “I had to get rid of the spare and the jack to make room,” he said. “Left them both on the side of the road, and all I could think of was what would I do if I had a flat. The answer was I would stop the next car and shoot somebody, but at this hour on these roads you can wait for hours for the next car.” He took out his pills and swallowed two of them. He offered them to me but I shook my head.

  “You’ve got to stay alert,” he said.

  “I’m all right. You’re eating those like candy.”

  “Don’t worry about me.”

  “You can get excessively hopped up on those, can’t you? I mean to the point where they get in your way.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’ve used them before, I know how they work.”

  “All right.”

  “They beat falling asleep, I’ll tell you that.”

  “All right.”

  Maybe the reason I didn’t want the benzedrine was that I felt as though I was already on it. There was the same utter absence of fatigue, the same ability to concentrate intensely upon one thing at a time, the same jittery feeling that was not so much nervousness as the sensation of moving at a faster speed than the rest of the world. This was probably caused by a number of things, adrenalin not the least of them, but the effect was the same as if one of my endocrine glands was secreting amphetamines into my bloodstream. My last night’s sleep had been brief, and too many hours had passed since then, but even so nothing like fatigue ever hit me. Even on the endless ride back from Sioux Falls I had stayed on top of things.

  There was one bad time, not exhaustion but a sort of misdirection of attention. It came along between the time when George drove away in the Chrysler and my own departure for the base. For a few minutes I had little to think about and less to do, and I made the mistake of letting my mind wander.

  This had one good effect—I thought of a possible future hangup and figured out how to handle it if it came up—but it also eventually led me away from the entire operation. I started thinking about the future, not the future of the job but the future future.

  I thought about my island. I should have known right away that something was wrong, because the island and
the job had nothing to do with each other and didn’t belong in the same day’s thinking. And I thought about certain things I might do with my million dollars. I would have to buy the island, of course, and I would have to set up some sort of system to pay the taxes on it through a third party. And I might want to make certain improvements on the island. Water, for example. Maybe there was a way I could pipe in fresh water without drastically altering the present arrangement.

  There was also the hurricane threat. The hurricane season wasn’t far off, and the Keys were usually hit hard, and any strong wind would tear the living hell out of my shack. If I could put up the same sort of structure with concrete block instead of timber, it might make the difference between living through a hurricane or getting spattered all over the Gulf of Mexico. Of course concrete block would be a radical departure, but maybe the improvement in safety justified it.

  Things like that.

  And then, before I knew it, I was thinking about Sharon. My first reaction was one of surprise that I had thought about her at all, and after that I tried to remember how long it had been since I had last thought about her. A long time, I decided, and I let that play around in my mind, and I worked variations on the idea of Sharon combining with the idea of my island, and I began having imaginary conversations with her, and—

  And I just caught myself in time.

  I started the engine and got the hell out of the motel lot. It was too early to go to the base, but I had to be somewhere doing something or I was in all sorts of trouble. I had to stop thinking of Sharon, or of anything else not related to what was happening at the moment. The future had a million million unknowns, some about which I might speculate and others which could never be foreguessed, and there were things I knew I would do and things I knew I would not do and things I had as yet no inkling of, and they could all get together in the gray limbo of tomorrow. I had enough worries handling today.

  The night sentry knew me. I had gone to my office once before in the middle of a sleepless night, largely to determine what the drill was in the off hours but also to let the night man familiarize himself with me. I was lucky. He didn’t get many visitors at that hour, and he remembered me, so I got in now without the static that had attended my earlier night visit. I parked my car and looked around to see if Bourke and O’Gara were on the job. Their car wasn’t around. I showed myself to the guard at my building. He was new, and didn’t know me, but neither did he challenge me. I went to my office and gave it a quick sweep for prints, then went outside and did the same for the car on the chance that I wouldn’t use it again. It wasn’t much of a chance, but I did seem to have time on my hands.

  Back in the office, I dug the Walker paraphernalia from my money belt and emptied the rest of the Walker garbage from my wallet. I had the feeling that I might be burning a bridge, but I also had a hunch that this was my last shot at this particular bridge, so I started a fire in a green metal wastebasket and fed Major John NMI Walker to it a scrap at a time. I saved Walker’s driver’s license because Lynch didn’t have one.

  I looked at my watch. It said it was 4:55. I picked up my phone and got the operator and asked what time it was and was told it was 4:59. I corrected my watch and started wiping the surfaces I had touched since my last print-sweeping job.

  D-Day, 5 A.M. H-Hour less ninety minutes.

  No. H-Hour less, say, somewhere between one hundred ten and one hundred fifty minutes. The trucks might not roll on the dot at 6:30, and it would take them at least twenty minutes to reach the ambush location.

  H-Hour less two hours, roughly.

  In two hours George Dattner and I would have to stop four armored trucks and a two-door Ford sedan. We would have to do something about four drivers armed with handguns, four front-seat passengers armed with automatic rifles, four guards in the Amarillo truck toting M-14s, and two MI majors armed with God knew what.

  I left my office and headed across to the warehouse. It was snowing again, coming down fairly hard. It seemed as though this ought to be either good or bad for our side, but I couldn’t figure out which, so I stopped thinking about it.

  Bourke and O’Gara were already on the job. They didn’t seem to be doing anything vital. Bourke was watching a supply sergeant issue ammunition to a group of enlisted men, while O’Gara was putting up a fair show of overseeing things in general.

  It was O’Gara who noticed me. “What do you know? We didn’t expect you for at least an hour. Wear that uniform long enough and you’ll start acting like a soldier.”

  “And lie in bed all day waiting for reveille?” I shook my head. “I’m only awake because I never got to bed. I spent the whole night running around like some kind of a nut.”

  “They finally reached you?”

  “They finally reached me. They decided telegrams were unsafe and they sent some idiot in a private plane. He had to land in Sioux Falls and called me from there.”

  “So?”

  “So they told him to deliver the word in person, and orders are orders in our league, too. He was stuck in Sioux Falls, so the mountain had to go to Mohammed. I drove there.”

  That reminded Bourke of something that had happened to him once in London, and he killed a few minutes telling us about it. I don’t remember what it was, but I don’t think it could have been very exciting.

  When he was done, O’Gara asked me where I stood.

  “I go along,” I said. “Our office seems to be taking this Texas bit more seriously than I thought. It sounds as though they have half the state roped off.”

  “Beautiful.”

  “Uh-huh. I go along, I stay out of your way but I make myself generally useful, whatever that means. My main function is liaison. They’re keeping a line open for me, and whenever we stop to take a leak I call home.”

  “It’s our job, but your people want to watch us do it.”

  I nodded. “That’s about the size of it. I had no sleep and it’s how far to Amarillo? Seven hundred miles?”

  “If you’re a crow,” O’Gara said. “Our route, we figure closer to nine.”

  “What do you figure to average? Forty-five?”

  “Forty-five, but I’d settle for an honest forty. Figure an ETA of 5 A.M. tomorrow. Twenty, twenty-two hours on the road.”

  I looked at him.

  “If you want dexedrine—”

  “I’ve got bennies, but there’s a limit anyway. I wish to hell I’d slept last night.” I hesitated. “If I didn’t have to drive, it would not exactly break my heart.”

  “You’d rather not take your car?”

  “That says it.”

  They looked at each other. “I’d ask you to come with us—”

  “I’d accept.”

  “—but I don’t know that I can, Dick. We’ll bend regs if we can get away with it. In this case it would be a clear contravention of orders. It’s supposed to be Phil and me in that car and nobody else, and we’d get called down. We could stretch a point if you were military, but you’re not, and it’s our ass if they find out.”

  “Would they have to find out?”

  “No way to keep it from them. I’m afraid there’s no choice.”

  Bourke nodded in agreement. “We could grab a kid and have him drive for you,” he suggested. “Give you a chance to sleep as far as Omaha, say, and then you could drop the kid off and take over.”

  That was just what I didn’t want. It would lengthen the odds by one more man. I pretended to think about it. “I’ll tell you,” I said, “it’s the stretch after Omaha that I’m worried about. I’m all right now, I’m just worried that the bennies might give out on me sooner or later. Suppose I take the car myself, and if I’m beat when we hit Omaha I pick up a driver there.”

  “Anyway you want it.”

  We left it at that, and I was where I’d started, no better and no worse. I hadn’t expected them to let me tag along in their car. George and I had figured that as the best possible break, and had allowed for it as a chance, but we weren’t c
ounting on it.

  “Let’s give the routine a once-over,” I suggested. “If there’s time. I wasn’t paying much attention yesterday to the original convoy setup, you know, from here to Omaha.”

  “That’s the easy part.”

  “I realize that, but I’d like to know the order of vehicles and whatever emergency procedure you’ve arranged. Are you last in line or do you follow the Amarillo car? Or is the Amarillo vehicle last anyway? And where do you want me to be?”

  We went into an all-purpose office and they laid it out for me with pencil and paper. The Amarillo truck was to be placed last in line, so that their Ford could ride on its tail and bring up the rear all at the same time. Later, when they picked up other convoy vehicles and got rid of the other three trucks, the procedure would be changed. I could ride almost anywhere else in the procession I wanted, except that they did not want me in the lead, directly in front of the Amarillo truck, or between it and them.

  “So I can be the caboose?”

  They said I could. We went over a few other points, and then I had another idea.

  “Suppose I ride in the Amarillo truck?”

  “It only seats two, Dick.”

  “I mean in the back,” I said. “You’ve got four men with M-14s, a fifth hand wouldn’t hurt. I could sit and doze, and if anything came up there would be one more man with a gun.”

  “No room,” Bourke said. “They’re cramped with four.”

  “Are you sure? I could curl up on top of a crate, as far as that goes.”

  It was over-ruled, which didn’t surprise me. They pointed out that I wasn’t authorized to ride in army transport. Besides that, any spare space belonged to the guards. I made the point that it might be a better idea to load the guards in Omaha, so that they would be fresh for the last leg of the trip. They had already thought of this and planned to switch guards at the Omaha stop. Then why, I wondered, have guards along at all on the first stage of the journey?