by Dean Ing
“Turned out someone was after a payroll in the Daniel mill. Don’t ask me what it was doing there on a Friday night, some of these old outfits keep a bushel of raw cash around with only a steel-faced door between themselves and bankruptcy. About eighty-five thousand in cash was taken, minus the change.
“Then a Eugene prowl car spotted something proceeding east at high speed. The officer gave chase. Very excited. Said the thing ran on legs across a suburban mall but that he was catching it.
“And then it caught him. It evidently grabbed his cruiser near the front window and picked it up, judging from the debris, and threw two tons of prowl car into the Safeway front window, setting off the alarm. And incidentally,” her jaw twitched once, “killing the officer.
“We were fit to be untied after that hot-pursuit crash. A bright cadet found oval depressions big as coffee tables in the mall and surmised it truly was a hellacious big machine on legs. Road blocks all negative. Then Pacific Tel reported vandalism on some old phone lines over a street in the east outskirts of Cottage Grove. Something tall as a telephone pole took the lines down like a grizzly through a spiderweb. But no oval tracks. Then a drunk convinced us there was a gaping hole up on the Daniel Building.
“From then until now, it’s been our biggest Chinese fire drill since the Bowles escape in the Seventies. A Mr. Howard Scortia reported the theft of his Magnum from his very own personal parking lot in the night, and you can imagine the confusion then.” Kelley and I swapped miserable chuckles. She continued, “When we realized he was talking about a big vehicle instead of a handgun, we first hypothesized Scortia was involved. But he had some things going for him: an alibi, a local rep any politician might envy, and the nearest thing to a genuine speechless rage I ever expect to hear. He put us in touch with Mr. Kelley. I was already airborne so I lifted for Ashland.
“We got some fingerprint ID’s then, but prints can be planted. Mr. Kelley couldn’t believe either of his top operators had done anything offbase, but he gave us a pair of names. The Ashland force is very sharp. I suppose it helps when they know everyone in town.”
She gave a little snort. “Oh, yes: there’s a traffic control officer in Cottage Grove who verified that Scortia could’ve driven your monster machine. Said officer is in deep yogurt for failure to report your attractive nuisance meandering through congested traffic yesterday. If he’d logged a description in, we’d’ve been hours ahead.”
I explained the traffic incident, adding, “There are lots of odd agriculture rigs. Since we didn’t by-God disturb traffic, maybe he dismissed us as just another new plow or something.”
“He may shortly face another kind of dismissal. I can’t even guess all the ways your new plowshare can be used as a sword.”
I was in a better position to guess. Even in darkness, Infante could use infrared video to guide an extensor through a hole in a wall, using his gangsaws. I didn’t see how an extensor could scoop up cash, but since Infante’s prints were in the cash room, that one was simple enough. He had shinnied up the duralloy beam and personally ransacked the place. “If he filled his plenums first,” I offered, “he could do it all on air pressure for several minutes without using his turbine. Quieter, except for going into the wall. You could park nearly a half-block away and run the gangsaws out to a wall, so long as there was room to extend the remote axle as a balancing moment.”
Meta Satterlee broke out a sheaf of faxed maps, confirming that Infante could have done it that way. “Your inferences are awfully good,” she said, “for someone who hasn’t seen an aerial map of the scene.”
“Maps,” I yelped. “You have charts of the terrain east of here?”
She did. Kelley came alive then, and we began tracing the likely paths Infante might take. Satterlee was optimistic about the Six and called to get its fuel tanks topped off by Scortia’s crew. As we swung up a valley I could see Cottage Grove to the northwest. Copter lights blinked in and out of a low voluptuous cloudbank advancing on us from the Cascade range. Patrol copters were running search patterns with IR, radar, and gas analyzers, but had turned up nothing promising. That wasn’t surprising, our pilot announced. The Cascades are so steep, with so many sources of heat and emissions to check, it might take days to find a Kelley Magnum. Especially if Infante was smart enough to minimize the use of his turbine. The heavy weather front made it worse. It doesn’t rain all the time there in May; only half the time.
It was an hour to lunch when the copter whirred down in the clearing next to the Magnum Six. Satterlee shook her head in dismay, perhaps beginning to realize the full destructive potential of the beast we hunted. With lifting heart, I saw Scortia in the Six’s bubble, manfully trying to hotwire her ignition. Standing alert in the drizzle were a dozen of his gang. Not one lacked a shotgun.
While I checked out the Six and filled her plenums, the others lifted to Scortia’s dome to confer with remote units by com set. My head was clear by then and, best sign of all, I was hungry. I highballed back to the dome and was met outside by an oddly different Meta Satterlee.
“Whether your friend Infante is working alone or not,” she said, “I’m happy to report he is not your friend.”
“Where were you yesterday,” I grumped.
“It’s where the Ashland lab people have been that’ll interest you,” she said, matching strides with me toward the dome that shed rivulets of Oregon rain down its faceted flanks. “You, sire, were drugged like a horse. Ah-it’s safe to say you didn’t brush your teeth or gargle this morning.”
“Jeez, is it that bad?” I tried to smell my own breath.
“Could be worse, dear. Somebody hypoed more alkaloids into your toothpaste, and made an interesting addition to your mouthwash.”
“For Christ’s sake! What for?”
“To zonk you out the minute you became functional again. A cute little notion favored by the Families back east, I’m told. Which ties in nicely with George Infante-if you call that nice.”
“Mafia?”
“Splinter groups of it. The man with George Infante’s fingertips was believed to be wheelman on a major crime last year in Gary, Indiana. Not arraigned; lack of evidence. They gave him a long, long rope and it led here. Nice of ’em to warn us. Oh, hell, too much of that and I suppose we’d have a police state.”
Infante a getaway driver: it figured. The sonofabitch was a natural. I began to shake with anger as well as low blood-sugar. In the dome I calmed down with sweet coffee and eggs served up by Scortia himself. My only cheering thought was that Satterlee seemed to be accepting my innocence as very likely.
A burly captain of the Oregon Highway Patrol mumbled with Satterlee over the high-relief area charts. He had some trouble with her gender; not because she was all that attractive a miz, but because she insisted on doing her job like any other cop.
Reluctantly he offered her a heavy parcel, which she pocketed. “Pretend you’re using a carbine,” he said. “Forget about long leads or aiming high. And watch that recoil,” he sighed, with a glance at her narrow shoulders.
“I’ve qualified with boosted ammo,” she said a bit crossly. “I only wish we had some of the new API stuff.”
“It’s coming from Salem,” he said helplessly. “Can you wait?”
I interrupted her negative headshake as I approached their work table. “I still don’t see why Infante tried to poison me when he could’ve just as easily cut my throat,” I said.
“He wanted you alive but on ice,” Satterlee explained. “My guess is, he didn’t expect to be seen, and thought he’d have until Monday before we connected the payroll job with a missing Magnum. Since you could’ve done it as easily as he did, he wanted you as a live decoy. By the time you were on your feet, he could be back in Ashland, maybe having switched your mouthwash. Then he could wallop himself with his own drugs and have a story at least as good as yours. He just didn’t plan on his murder spree.”
The OHP man rasped, “Sure as hell didn’t shrink from it.”
&nb
sp; “Lieutenant, you really think George Infante planned to stick around after the job, with his known background, and put his word against mine? Does that make sense?” I asked.
Satterlee tapped a finger against the projection of the Three Sisters wilderness area in impatient thought. “Not really. From the profile we’re developing on him it’s hard to say. I could give you a long academy phrase for Infante, but let me give it to you without the bullshit: I think we’re dealing with a crazy man.”
“Foxy crazy,” the captain reminded her. “We may never find out how he got from Ashland to Cottage Grove so fast; and you don’t know how he got a fix on that payroll. But he damn well did it. And unless the forestry people are crazy too, he tried to get up here to your other unit-the Six?-early this morning.”
This brought Howard Scortia onto his feet, his stool over backward. It suddenly occurred to me that this old gent had started in his business when it was a brawler’s job. “You didn’t tell me that,” he roared.
“Betcherass I didn’t.” The OHP man grinned. “You’d be chasin’ around up there with a willow switch-”
“And my eight-gauge!”
Kelley spoke up from his well of gloom. For the first time since I’d known him, he was sounding his age. “Barring luck, Howard, you might as well have one as the other. They’re right, it’s plain stupid to go after the Seven without special weapons. But what’s this about it being around here?”
Infante was no longer roaming the heights above us, but there were fresh prints skirting a nearby ridge, and they hadn’t been there the day before: prints only a Magnum’s feet could make. I calculated this would’ve been about dawn if Infante went crosscountry. And he would not have kept to the roads. Infante wasn’t that crazy. “One thing sure,” I said. “Infante didn’t intend to switch to the Six. Hell, he won’t even operate it, he thinks it’s hexed. Maybe he wanted to destroy it.”
“Probably something scared him off,” the captain said.
“Beats me what it would’ve been,” Scortia mused. “I called and put a crew on guard only after I realized my Magnum was gone, around eight A.M. or so.”
“Damn, that’s right.” Satterlee was tapping like mad. “This is rough country; knowing it halfway is infinitely better than not knowing it at all.” Scortia nodded. “What if he wasn’t interested in the other vehicle?”
“Then why come up this way?” This from Kelley.
“I don’t know. He could buy time by evasion in these wilds. He probably has the money with him. All he needed to do was ditch the vehicle and catch the valley monorail to Portland. Unless he had further plans for the Magnum!”
Kelley and I burst out talking, convinced she had doped it right. The OHP man was vehicle-oriented, sending us back to the relief charts with: “If that thing can do only seventy on wheels, how does he expect to escape in it?”
One answer was, he could select a mountain lake and ditch the Magnum in it. But he might not get it back. A second was, he had a rendezvous with an equipment carrier within fuel range of the Magnum. The third answer was that Infante was nuts.
If it were number one, the Magnum was already underwater. I didn’t think Infante would drown his alter ego. If number two, we might try searching every road that could accommodate a semi-rig or transporter. And if number three, logic could gather dust on the shelf. Infante might be reasonable all the way, or some of the time, or not at all. Or he might change modes every time a bell rang in his noggin. The OHP and Eugene forces were patched into the captain’s neat com set and, given time, would have all the people needed to comb the area. But Satterlee decided against waiting and prepared to lift up to some nearby lakes in her copter, to check on the “drowned Magnum” hypothesis.
She had already lifted off when the OHP announced paydirt. A hint from copter radar was followed in dense fog by a highway cruiser. An old diesel transporter was stashed away not far off Highway 58 near Willamette Pass. It was on firm ground, fitted with wheel ramps, and had jacks under one set of duals but nothing evidently wrong to justify the jacks. It could have been there a week or more.
We heard Satterlee’s cool contralto ask for a stake-out at the transporter, and she was trotting back to the dome a few minutes later. “This looks likely,” she said, “but could Infante have parked it himself during the past ten days? It’s crucial: he may have help in this, and there are”-her gaze flickered past me-“complications if a second equipment operator is in on this.”
I knew, but let Kelley think it through for himself. Satterlee would value it at zip, coming from me. “Yes,” Kelley said slowly, “last weekend. We all knew we’d have both Magnums up here for the Scortia demo.”
“So did fifty people in my organization,” Scortia rumbled. “It wasn’t exactly a state secret.”
Satterlee smiled, a brief sunburst of good teeth. “Which gives us fifty more suspects-but no matter. The patrol officer took microscan prints from the transporter, and we can get positive print ID by video.” She was standing as if relaxed, but if I had said boo she would have ventilated me by reflex action. I realized Satterlee had returned with the idea that somehow I was, after all, tied in with Infante. I liked her, and I didn’t like her. Perhaps it was just that I couldn’t blame her, but I wanted to.
I walked to the coffee pot, a huge old veteran that had seen campfires long before it saw the inside of a geodesic dome. I was nervous as a rabbi in Mecca, knowing that Meta Satterlee was gauging my every move.
Then the com set displayed a pair of apparently identical thumbprints. Eugene confirmed: George Infante had recently driven the transporter-and placed the jacks, too. The OHP man whistled. Satterlee shook her head wonderingly. “This little man has had some busy days, and some luck. How much is the Magnum Seven worth, Mr. Kelley?”
“Six hundred thou,” Scortia replied instantly, accusingly.
“Or to some other firms, ten times that,” Kelley answered the accusation.
“No telling how much it might be worth to factions of the underworld,” Meta Satterlee said. “Keith Ames, I apologize for some reservations about you. I didn’t say so, but . . .”
“The hell you didn’t, it was all over your face. ‘Act natural, Ames, or I’ll letcha have it,’ ” I said, aping the old Bogart style.
She tried not to grin, failed, then sobered. “Sorry. But you have been in rough company. Bear in mind that your Mr. Infante has intimate connections among the Families.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning his reference groups are pretty restrictive,” she said. “More simply: he is as likely to care about most human life as he is about a bug on his windshield. I don’t want you to be in any doubt about that.”
“Why me, especially?”
“Because this weather front is going to impede air search for days. Because Infante might run across dozens of hikers or workers during that time. And because you’re the only person trained and able to cut that time short, if you’re willing to be deputized to run him down with me.”
It was Satterlee’s idea to use the transporter as a jumpoff point, and mine to run the Magnum Six in wheel mode up Highway 58. We estimated that Infante could already be nearing his transporter after several hours’ head start in heavy rains across the Diamond Peak wilderness area. There were no navigable trails short of the highway, so we’d be unlikely to cut him off. If we simply trailed him, we could only learn what he’d done after he’d done it. Better, thought Satterlee, to intercept him. I had a half-formed notion I could reason with him if we managed to confront him from a position of more or less equal footing. I believed as Satterlee did; real or spurious, the equivalence of the two Magnums might alter Infante’s plans to muscle his way through, leaving still more grief in his wake.
Kelley was right; with no load but Satterlee and her riot gun behind me in the bubble, the Magnum Six exceeded seventy miles an hour on level stretches. An OHP cruiser ran interference for us most of the way and at two P.M. we were at Infante’s transporter. The lone
stakeout man was considerably more nervous when we left him, having seen from ground level what kind of vehicle he was to stop. Satterlee’s ammunition did not fit his weapon. His orders were to blow tires if possible, then aim for the air plenums. Without a prime mover Infante was only a hundred and sixty pounds of maniac, instead of eight tons of it. Or he could make it sixty tons if he chose to use a tree for a battering ram. Satterlee put in an urgent call for more help at the stakeout. They were promised within the hour.
Satterlee made an obvious target perched up behind me. If he had a weapon capable of penetrating the bubble, and if his own bubble were raised, Infante might bushwhack us from cover. She saw the logic of hunkering down in the equipment hopper. She didn’t have to like it. I could receive police frequency, but dared not reply and we had not thought to patch in an extension for Satterlee outside the bubble. Infante could monitor us, and I didn’t want him hearing my voice or the strength of my signal.
A damnable dialog kept looping through my head. What would I do if I were Infante? The refrain was always . . . anything at all. Still, Satterlee made sense. If Infante did something really wild it would probably impede him. If her quarry were smartest he’d he most dangerous-and he’d rendezvous with the transporter.
I went to walk mode en route to a knoll a half-mile from the transporter. Poised on the forty-five-degree talus slope, sliding only a little, I heard a patrol copter pass in the low overcast. A few moments later a strong negative report signal reached my com set. And if they couldn’t detect us with our turbine running, they might pass over Infante the same way. The ugly handgun Meta Satterlee gave me seemed like useless weight in my coverall. I had more confidence in the boosted slugs her riot gun carried. Though far from muscular, she handled herself with grace and confidence. The twelve-gauge would be a double armful but she was one smart, tough miz and I never doubted she could use it. If she got the chance. Trouble was, Infante was sheer entropy on wheels; one of those people who lives on uncertainty.