The End of the Night

eleven

By mid-afternoon on Monday the twenty-seventh, Herbert Dunnigan made the executive decision to pull his special group out of Monroe. All investigative possiblities had been exhausted. It was a valid assumption that the wanted ones had slipped through the net. He left one agent for administrative co-ordination and, after dismantling the emergency communications network, emplaned for Washington with the rest of his group. The death watch could be endured with more efficiency there, and the press kept under better control.

The important journalists and the roving tape crews and the few radio people also moved out on Monday. Monroe had lost its priority. After the wolf is long gone, the nervous flock can begin to feed again.

Both Dallas Kemp and the Wister family took this mass departure to mean the abandonment of hope for the life of Helen Wister. There had been a meager comfort in the presence of top authority — in much the same way that troops on a hopeless front will cherish the presence of the commander of an army. When he leaves they once again remember how easily they can be overwhelmed.

By three o’clock on Monday afternoon, Helen Wister had been captive over forty hours. Criminologically speaking, the prognosis was bad.

The departure of top authority left a hole. Sheriff Gus Kurby had an instinct about such things. There were times to keep your head down. There were other times when you could safely stomp and bellow. But you had to come up with something usable.

He sat in his big corner office on the second floor of the County Courthouse, in his big red leather swivel chair, his hat shoved back, his belt comfortably loosened over a late and heavy lunch. The day had turned humid. There was distant thunder, and a brassy quality to the afternoon sunlight.

On the pale-gray walls of his office were the framed evidences of many small triumphs. On the desk, mounted on a cherrywood base and a slender silver pedestal was the misshapen slug, 38 caliber, which, in 1949, had punched a raw hole under his collarbone, nicked the top of his right lung and cracked the shoulder blade and won an election. With the slug in him Gus had disarmed his assailant with such emphasis that he had snapped both the man’s wrists.

Gus Kurby sighed mightily as he watched his favorite deputy, Roily Spring, working on the map. Roily was a spare little man, a crickety fellow with seven kids, a genius for loyalty, a sour outlook, and the single flaw of being entirely too quick and willing to put random patterns of hard knots on surly heads with his hickory nightstick.

The map was new and large. It was a map of the United States and it covered most of the big bulletin board. It was printed in black and white, so the track of red crayon being applied by Deputy Spring stood out vividly.

The work was also being watched by a local newspaperman named Mason Ives. Mase was, occupationally speaking, a displaced person. He was in the classic mold of the old-time reporter, lean, rumpled, bitter, iconoclastic, skeptical, imaginative and compulsively curious. Any alert producer would have cast him immediately as the reporter who beat the mob. But the reporting was all being done by wholesome tractable journalism graduates who drew Guild wages, kept regular hours and did exactly as they were told. And so Mase was relegated to doing an op. ed. column for the Monroe Register, rather weakly syndicated around the state, plus sporadic feature-story work. He had learned to so mask his corrosive irony that it delighted the bright reader without awakening the indignation of the dullard majority.

Mase Ives was the only newspaperman Gus Kurby trusted implicitly. Mase was the only man who had an understanding of what Gus was accomplishing, and Gus’s way of accomplishing it. Mase, with tactical advice and some speech writing, had helped Gus win elections.

“You got to realize,” Gus said, “I’m just a plain shurf.”

“Sure, sure, sure,” Mase said. He was sitting on a small table beside one of the large windows. “A plain little ole country sheriff, trying to get along. A simple graduate of the top police schools, with one of the biggest libraries on criminology in the state. Tell me more, simple man.”

“Hell, Mase. Some very bright people are doing this same job of studying this thing out, maps and all.”

“And any ideas they get, they got to go through channels and committees. They’re big for staff work, Gus.”

Gus sighed again. Spring had finished and checked his work. “I got me a couple of ideas. I could check ’em out with you, Mase.”

“I’ll listen and try to confuse you.”

Gus got up and latched his belt and went over to the map. Roily Spring had drawn a red line, following specific highways, from Uvalde to Monroe.

Gus studied it in silence for a few moments. “I’m just guessing, now. There’s a make on one of them. Hernandez. From the record, he’s got just enough upstairs so he can feed himself. And he isn’t what you’d call a playful type. Those kids in the barn heard all that smart talk, that wise-guy talk from the one with glasses. He’s bright. So let’s say he’s running things. And he’s playful. He does things on impulse. He was driving when they stopped to kill Crown and take the Wister girl. There’s something playful about killing the salesman, like they toyed around with him some. I say they’re using drugs. It smells that way. But not something to make them crazy enough and reckless enough to get caught easy. Okay so far?”

“You haven’t said a hell of a lot yet.”

“I’m guessing on some of these roads but from the places they hit, these roads are pretty good guesses. They were picked smart. They’re fast secondary roads. All traffic patrol is spread so thin these days, about all they can cover is the main highways. You take the little roads, the only trouble you can have is in the towns and small cities. And if you take it easy in those places, you can stay safe, even with the hottest plate in the country.”

“If you say so, Sheriff.”

“What I’m doing out loud, Mase, is building up a half-ass M.O. on this bunch. What they’ve had luck with, they’ll keep doing. Keep switching cars, keep taking secondary roads, hole up in the daytime. It’s my guess they won’t split up, and that’s only a guess.”

“I have that hunch too, Gus. Particularly hopped up. They won’t want to change the dice.”

“Now let’s put some of this stuff together and see where we get. Extend the rough line and its aims at New York. We got to make some assumptions if we’re going to come up with anything, so let’s just say it’s New York. Why the hell not? If you want to lose yourself, get in the middle of the biggest crowd you can find. Okay?”

“Unless one of them is from someplace else and they have a good place to hole up, and how the hell can you tell that?”

Kurby stepped over to his desk and picked up a soft pencil and a ruler. He went to the map, made a measurement against the scale, and then drew a black arc, one third of a circle, northeast by east of Monroe.

“That’s four hundred miles,” he said. “So let’s say they went about that far and holed up Sunday morning. They could have dumped the girl, dead, or kept her with them. Last night they got on the road again. They’d be in Pennsylvania, the way it looks. They’d stick to the M.O, and change cars. So they’ve got Pennsylvania plates, and we don’t know what kind of car, but it won’t be a junker. They’d stick to secondary roads last night, heading across the state. And there’s one thing that state hasn’t got, it’s a good fast way to get across it without you take the turnpike.”

“I remember the days before the pike,” Mase said. “It was a life work crossing that state.”

“So let’s say they got maybe to this area by daylight this morning, and holed up again.” Gus Kurby drew an elongated oval on the map, the long dimension of the oval north and south, fairly close to the Jersey border. “Let’s just say they’re somewhere inside this area right here, sacked out this minute.”

“You make it sound real, Gus,” Mase said with a grin that pulled the corners of his mouth down.

“Let’s say they haven’t pulled anything since killing Crown except one auto theft. We know they had the use of a car radio in the Buick. They know, even hopped up and crazy confident, they’re the hottest thing in twenty years. What they don’t know is they’re so hot that it makes confusions that work to their advantage.”

“Where is this heading, Gus?”

“Now I got to contradict myself. If they stick to the M.O., I’m licked. If they take secondary roads across Jersey, I’m in deep left field. They want to get to New York. They’re close. They’re hot. They’re pooped. Three in the morning is no time to hit New York City. It stays light until damn near nine. They’re close to the Pennsy Pike that feeds into the Jersey Pike. Evening traffic in the summer is heavy. Put yourself in their place, Mase. What would you do?”

Mase chewed his lip and then nodded. “I might chance it, Gus. I might get rolling earlier, take a chance on the pike, and get to the city before midnight. But, on the other hand, instead of holing up, once I got so close, I might have pushed all the way on through and be in New York already.”

“There’s that chance. But they’ve been a long, long way, and maybe the girl used up some time, and getting their hands on a car used up some time, and they had to fight those Pennsylvania roads all night. Maybe they didn’t make it any further than the Harrisburg area.”

“What we’re talking about, Gus, is whether you’re going to stick your neck out, and how you’re going to do it.”

“You take those big pikes, you got a problem. You got two places to check. One is from the entrance booths. They’ve got phone communication to the control towers where you’ve got the short wave to the cars on patrol. The other place is the cars on patrol. You’ve got normal traffic loads, plus the vacation load. At least it’s not a weekend. You get three abreast, bumper to bumper traffic, wheeling at sixty-five — if you’re looking for something, you got to be looking for something simple.”

“I can see that.”

“So suppose the toll-booth boys in the twelve entrances from Harrisburg to the Jersey Pike are alerted to watch for three men and a woman in a pretty good car with Pennsylvania plates. Or, on the off chance, three men and two women.”

“Wouldn’t there be hundreds of those?”

“A hell of a lot less than you’d think. It isn’t a normal traveling group. The cars with one, two and three people in them account, I’d guess for ninety-nine out of a hundred cars. When there’s four, it’s two couples or four women or four men. I’m leaving kids out of this. I’d give orders to suspend normal traffic control procedures so your road patrols would be looking too, and I’d put the best guys available on the logical exits from the Jersey Pike.”

Mason Ives thought for a few moments. “Have you got time to sell this?”

“Not direct. But I think Dunnigan would buy it, and he could sure as hell sell it. Maybe it’s all set up already.”

“Somehow I doubt that, Gus. What worries you? You’ve stuck your neck out further than this many times.”

Gus sat down again and grinned like a pirate. “You got this one backwards, Mase. If it doesn’t work, who ever knows or cares? But if it does work, there should be some horn blowing going on.”

Ives looked startled for a moment. He grinned. “Okay, you big ambitious bastard. That’s why you got me up here. I’ll go over to the shop and set it up, all ready to file. Kurby devises traffic trap that tonight snapped shut on the Wolf Pack and so forth.”

“And you could sort of set it up with Peterson over at the station?” Gus asked humbly.

“And make sure he gets a network tie-in too, for God’s sake. I’ll go pick fresh laurel and make a wreath. Now it’s safe to call Dunnigan.”

“I called him an hour ago,” Sheriff Kurby said mildly. “He seemed to like it. I had to go through maybe nine people to get to him, but I finally did, and I kept getting that fifteen-second beep, so I know they got a good record of it. And I got one too, Mase. I strictly don’t know the law about using such a thing, but while I was talking to Dunnigan I was thinking that if it does work out, it might make a nice tape Peterson could play for the people, so I was careful, the things I said. I put in a part about how wonderful it is to live in a society where the world’s greatest police department will listen to a plain county sheriff.”

“Have you ever thought of being governor, Gus?”

“Only late at night when I can’t get back to sleep. A man’ll think of a lot of foolish things in the small hours.”

On Route 30, between York and Lancaster, and not far from the Susquehanna River, on the north side of the road, on a wide curve, in rather pleasant rolling country, is the Shadyside Motor Hotel. Steam Heat, Tile Baths, Innerspring Mattresses, Home Cooking. The units are separate, small brick buildings, square and rather ugly. There are only six of them. They are set well back from the highway at the foot of an apple orchard hill. The highway sign is in front of a large white farmhouse set much closer to the road.

The brick cabins were constructed over twenty years ago by Ralph Weaver, then fifty-five, who had farmed those eighty acres all his life, as had his father and grandfather before him. When he became crippled by arthritis he put his savings into the construction of the six cabins, despite the continuous opposition of his wife, Pearl. He died of a stroke two years after he completed the final cabin. Neighbors expected her to sell out. There was nothing to hold her there. Pearl had had four children. Accident, disease and a war had taken all four of them before any of them had married. She could have lived on a tiny income, with great care, and that’s what the neighborhood expected her to do.

But she sold off all but five acres, and she ran the small business. Had Ralph Weaver built less solidly, maintenance would have eaten up the marginal income. At seventy-two, Pearl Weaver was a tall, erect woman with a square powerful figure, and an alarmingly loud, shrill voice. A half-wit woman from over the hill came in once a week to help with the heavier cleaning. A neighbor boy helped with the big lawn. Once a week Pearl Weaver drove her ancient Dodge truck to York and did her marketing. Each year she planted a large kitchen garden, and canned what she could not use. For those who wanted it, she would provide a gargantuan country breakfast for sixty cents. The cabins rented for five dollars a couple, four dollars for a single, during the summer. In the last few years it had become a great rarity for them to be all filled — unlike the early days when sometimes all the cabins were filled and so were all the spare bedrooms in the main house. It had been three years since she had had anyone in the main house, but she kept the whole house just as spotless as the cabins.

Summer was the best time. In the winter a whole month might go by without a single customer. The summer money had to last out the winter, and each summer she took in a little less. She was realist enough to hope that she could survive in this fashion until she died. She did not want to give up the house. Her life was in that house, all the remembered voices and gestures of love. Her only concession to her loneliness was a six-year-old television set, and she felt guilty every time she sat and watched it.

Two cabins were occupied on Sunday night. She had hoped for more. The single said he would leave too early for breakfast. The young couple said they’d like breakfast at eight. And that was another dollar twenty.

Though she had great need of every bit of income, she was careful about the tourists to whom she rented her cabins. Each night before going to bed she would go out and turn on the floodlight that shone directly on her sign, and take down the board that masked the legend, “Ring Night Bell for Service.” A fat, red arrow pointed at the bell button set into the sign itself.

Her bedroom was in the front, overlooking the sign. The night bell rang in her room. Whenever it would ring, she was up and out of bed in an instant, and she would look out the window at them. They would be illuminated by the floodlight. She would watch them carefully for the look of drink, the staggering and the loud voices. And she would be wary of the too-young giggling couples. When she did not like what she saw, she would fling open the window and yell down in that terrible voice that cut the night like a sword, “Closed. Go away. Go away.” No one argued with a decision delivered with such finality.

On Monday morning, not long before dawn, the night bell awakened her. She stood at the window in her nightgown and looked down through the copper screening and saw a good-looking automobile parked near her sign, and a man standing quietly beside it. He turned and said something to someone in the car and she heard him answer, but could not hear what was said. He seemed respectably dressed, and she could read fatigue in his posture.

“Come to the front door of the house,” she called. “I’ll be down in one minute.”

She put on her robe and went down. She turned on the bright overhead porch light and looked at him again before she unlatched the door. He was a big young man, quite nice-looking.

She talked to him in the hall and he told her what he wanted and she named the price, and she took him into the parlor and had him sit at the old breakfront desk and write the names in the book. He did not want to look at the cabins first. She assured him they were clean and equipped. She told him to take the last two on the right as you stood facing the row of them, and please be careful about noise because folks were sleeping. She asked him when they’d be leaving, and he said he didn’t know, but somewhere around the end of the day.

After she had walked him to the door and waited until the car drove out to the cabins, the lights touching the trunks of the big elms in the yard, she walked back into the parlor with the ten-dollar bill in her hand and looked at the names he had signed in the book. Mr. and Mrs. J. D. Smith. Mr. W. J. Thompson. Mr. H. Johnson. All of Pittsburgh.

She stood with her lips compressed, sensing a wrongness that she could not identify. The young man had been very tired. And yet he had seemed to feel the need to force himself to be quite jolly. He had laughed a few times at nothing at all, an empty, social laugh. She remembered that it was exactly the way Ralph used to laugh when his conscience bothered him. The young man’s hands had been quite dirty, and that did not fit the rest of his appearance, or the cultivated sound of his voice. And his hands had trembled as he had written in the book. The writing was shaky. And they were such terribly ordinary names. But lots of people had ordinary names. That’s what made them ordinary, of course. And people with ordinary names could travel together. And it was a nice-looking car.

She shrugged away her feeling that something was wrong, and went back to her bed. She was up an hour later, and she was hanging the board that masked the night bell when the single drove out, a salesman who had stayed with her before. He waved and she waved back. The young couple appeared for breakfast at eight-thirty. She insisted they eat until they begged for mercy. She felt great satisfaction in sending them on their way with what was probably the first decent breakfast they’d eaten in a year.

All the time she did her housework she was conscious of the car out there, the four people sleeping. They had parked the car between the two cabins, heading out. It was a brown-and-tan car, with double headlights, and the big front grill was a shiny frozen grin.

It always irritated her when people slept through the day, even when she was perfectly aware they had driven all night. There was something obscurely wicked about daytime sleep. A body should be up and doing under God’s sun. Even though their money was in the old brown purse hung way up in the back of the upstairs hall closet, she couldn’t stifle her resentment, and several times she caught herself mumbling to herself as she did the day’s chores, and told herself that talking to yourself was a sign of senility. She had planned to drive into York, but she didn’t want to leave the place untended with people there. Tomorrow would be soon enough. As was her habit, she worked off her irritation by finding something she had been putting off. After her meager lunch she went out and scrubbed the whole length of the front porch on her hands and knees, and then scrubbed the porch railing, posts and all.

She heard the old water pump start up at a little after four and it pleased her to know those people were finally getting up. She remembered she hadn’t spoken to the young man about breakfast. It was a funny time of day for breakfast, but if they could eat it, she could cook it, and you couldn’t sneeze at another two dollars and forty cents. Before going to ask them, she went to the kitchen to make certain she had enough to feed four of them. Just enough eggs and more than enough of the corn bread, but the bacon would be skimpy. Two good melons, and oatmeal for those as wanted it, and use the middle-size coffeepot. That should do it just fine.

She took off her apron and hung it on the back of the kitchen door, gave her hair a few pats and went out the back way to walk back to the cabins. When she was twenty feet from the back stoop she heard the slamming of car doors and heard the motor start. She was walking along the driveway, and she began to hurry, adjusting a social smile of invitation.

As the car came toward her she returned its wide smile and held up her hand for them to stop.

The car made a much greater sound and it suddenly seemed to leap upon her. The awareness of death flashed bright and hot in her mind. She had the feeling that she stood frozen by terror for a very long time. In actuality she moved almost as nimbly as an athlete. She whirled and plunged to her left, diving rather than making the mistake of trying to run, diving so that both feet left the ground, her arms reaching forward to break her fall. Even so, the wide right edge of the bumper cracked her painfully on the right ankle bone, turning her slightly so that she landed in the softness of the grass on her right arm and shoulder with a jarring thud and rolled up and over onto her back, legs high and kicking.

She sat up, dazed. Over the years she had had to purchase ever stronger reading glasses, testing them at the counter of the five-and-ten in Lancaster. But her distance vision would have gratified a hawk. In the moment before her eyes filled with tears, blurring everything, she saw the car a hundred feet away, slowing for the turn onto the highway. She was too dazed to think of license numbers. She looked at their faces. A raggedy-headed girl with a mean, pouty look. A man so ugly he could get work in a cage at the carnival. A man driving, going bald, wearing glasses. A pointy-faced one he was, like an egg-sucking fox. She saw them vividly for one instant and then her eyes filled. The car was a shiny blob, turning onto the highway, heading toward Lancaster.

Close at hand she heard a red squirred scolding her. Her eyes cleared. She saw him on a low, fat limb, staring down at her.

“Tried to kill me!” she told him. “Sure as I live and breathe.”

The squirrel survived the first two syllables, before the sheer volume drove him back up into his hole, high in the tree.

Pearl Weaver stood up very slowly, testing every muscle. Her shoulder was wrenched, her right arm numbed. Her right ankle was beginning to puff, and it hurt to put weight on it, but not too much. She hobbled toward the house, and her thinking was still not clear.

“Ready to say something about breakfast and they run you down,” she grumbled.

She went into the parlor and sat in the big leather chair. It had always been and would always be Ralph’s chair, and she would never sit in it without feeling she used it on sufferance.

“Why?” she demanded of the fringed lamp, the pottery cats on the mantel, the floral wallpaper. “Why?” she asked the imitation Oriental rug, the Boston rocker, the cataract eye of the silent television set. She had heard a whoop of shrill derision after she had jumped out of the way. “For fun?” She kept looking at the television set. “Or... didn’t they want to be seen?”

Something stirred in the back of her mind. She’d followed it on television. A terrible thing! That poor girl. And they matched the words said about them, the descriptions, every one of them.

“Lord God Almighty!” she said, and she said it very softly. “They missed me,” she said, “and they can come back for me and finish it.”

She moved with desperate haste. She did not feel partially safe until she had all doors locked, and had Ralph’s shotgun that she had always meant to sell and somehow never had, with a dark-green-and-brass shell in the single chamber, and the hammer back.

She had had the phone taken out six years ago. She waited for them to come back for a full fifteen minutes before deciding they were gone for good. And then she walked down the highway to the Brumbarger place nearly a half mile away, carrying the shotgun just in case. She was limping very badly by the time she got there, and her shoulder had begun to ache.

Two minutes after Pearl Weaver entered the Brumbarger home, a sergeant in the Pennsylvania State Police sat with a comedy look of consternation on his face, holding a phone almost at arm’s length, while two men in the office chuckled. But suddenly the words began to get through to him. The dispatcher nailed the car nearest the area and sent it to the Brumbarger house on the double.

Fifty long minutes later, every entrance booth previously alerted had a new and specific piece of information to put with their previous emergency instructions. Look for a ’58 or ’59 Mercury, brown and tan, two- or four-door sedan, fog lamps, radio aerial, Pennsylvania plates, three men and a woman.

The old lady had been observant, and she was pleasingly positive.

Laughlintown, Pennsylvania, is a not unpleasant small town in the Laurel Hill area of the state, not too far from the 2684-foot summit of that range of not-quite mountains. No resident of Laughlintown could approach in the intensity of his disgust and dismay at having to live there, the strong emotions of Michael Bruce Hallowell. That was not his official name. He was registered in the local high school as Carl Lartch. He was certain that this summer, between his sophomore and junior years, was fraught with more misery than one spirit could safely contain.

In the confidential records maintained on him in the high-school files he was recorded as being highly intelligent, imaginative, a poor organizer, poorly adjusted socially, no athletic ability, inclined to be argumentative and sarcastic. Dedicated teachers considered this limp, spindly, myopic gangling, acned, large-headed, unorganized child a challenge. The journeyman teacher was delighted to pass him through the course and be rid of him. His more muscular contemporaries believed they could make of him a more socially desirable citizen by beating him on the head at every opportunity. But they could never whip him past the point where he could still wipe his bloody mouth and in iciest contempt call them peasants.

His two sisters thought of him as an almost unendurable social handicap. His parents were baffled by him.

Carl Lartch was not confused at all. He had read his way through better than half the books in the Laughlintown library. The world of the books was infinitely more satisfying than the world around him. He kept a private secret journal and wrote his opinions and impressions in it, comfortably aware of the danger that, should it ever be made public in his home town, the reaction would be murderous. A recent exposure to early Mencken had solidified his contempt for the booboisie. His was a total confidence that one day the people of Laughlintown would be astonished that such a man could have once lived among them, and so gratified even his continuing contempt for them would be a welcome recognition of the place of his birth.

On this particular summer Carl had learned that books could be made even more enjoyable if devoured far from the foolish clatter of mankind, and so on every day when the weather was favorable, he would load books, his private journal, his peanut butter sandwiches and his Thermos of milk into the basket on the front of his bike and pump his way up into the hills.

On Monday morning, the twenty-seventh day of July, Carl pedaled up the long slopes of highway, panting audibly by the time he came to his turnoff, a sandy road that was wide and clear for a hundred yards before it faded away to an impassable track. As he rested, before hiding his bike in the brush, he noted that a car had turned around with some difficulty and gone back out, leaving the only set of fresh tracks since the last rain. He also saw a jumble of footprints. Picnickers or neckers, he thought. It was correct to assume their activities were trivial, whatever they were.

He hid his bike and, clasping his packaged possessions, went down the short, steep slope from the road to a fast, wide, noisy brook, crossed by stepping from stone to stone, and climbed the long hill beyond the brook until, winded once more, he came to his favorite place, level, grassy, shaded by old trees. From there he could see for miles but it was a view undefiled by man, consisting of only the gentle contours of the uncontaminated hills.

He spent the long summer day in reading, writing and peaceful contemplation. When he was finally warned by the angle of the sun, he gathered up his things, took a look at his private landscape, and trudged back down to the creek. His view was obscured by the brush that grew on the hillside. Sometimes he angled to avoid especially steep places. Consequently he came out at the creek at least thirty yards downstream from where he had crossed in the morning.

As he crossed the creek he noticed something out of the corner of his eye, not far away. He turned and saw, sprawled against the small round boulders at the water’s edge, the silent, lovely symmetry of a woman’s legs, a soiled white skirt wrenched upward to mid-thigh, a quiet curve of back in close-fitting green, a hand stubbed cruelly against a boulder, wedged there by her weight. The face was hidden, but the water, moving with chill insistence around a small pebbled curve, tugged with endless persistence at a floating strand of blond hair.

He stared, then burst up the abrupt bank in front of him, running wildly toward the hidden bicycle. But as he ran he began to realize that his reactions were not suitable to a Villon, a Mencken, a Christopher Fry. Detachment was the epic quality of his whole galaxy of heroes. And so he stopped and turned and went slowly back to the woman and knelt there for a moment, studying her closely. He then reclimbed the bank and began to saunter toward home. After he had reached the highway, he remembered his bicycle. Once he had retrieved the bicycle, the empty basket reminded him of his books. By retracing his steps he found them beside the creek.

He was able to coast a good part of the way to Laughlintown. He went directly to the police station and strolled in.

“I should like to report something,” he said haughtily to a bored shirtsleeved man working at a scarred desk, typing a report with two fingers.

The officer looked at him with growing distaste. “Report what, kid?”

“Perhaps twenty minutes ago I found the body of a woman up in the hills. She’s either dead or seriously injured. She’s blond, barefoot, possibly in her twenties, wearing a white skirt and a green blouse. From tracks on a sand road near where she’s lying, I’d say she’s been there since last night.”

After a few moments of astonishment, the officer jumped to his feet and said, “Tell me exactly where you saw this woman, kid!”

“We could be there before I could possibly explain to you how to get there. So why don’t you get a doctor and an ambulance and more officers if you need them, and I’ll ride in the lead vehicle and show you the way.”

“If this is some kind of a gag...”

Carl said icily, “If I enjoyed jokes, I’d think up better ones than this.”

It went well because it was handled by experts, and because the plan was flexible, imaginative and airtight. And there had been advance warning from so high a place that it was taken seriously.

The instructions from the control centers were monitored and recorded, and so this particular pickup was sufficiently well documented to become a classic — written up in the mass magazines, and used as a case study in the police schools.

When a pickup is badly handled, it becomes a bloody, dramatic, unorganized thing. Where it is done properly, it can happen so quietly that people ten feet away are unaware of it.

This pickup presented a unique problem. A high-speed, high-density, limited-access highway is no place for heroics with sirens. A car can’t be forced over onto the shoulder without the risk of a gigantic pile-up. A chase could result in heavy casualties among the innocents on vacation. And so it was decided that it had to be a stalk, a stalk so discreet that the prey would be lulled into a place where they could be taken quietly. It could be assumed that if it was fumbled, their desperation could result in explosive violence. And it was assumed the vehicle was a rolling arsenal. There can be no room for optimism in such an operation.

At 5:22 the target car entered the Pennsylvania Turnpike at Station 22 at Morgantown. The attendant phoned the nearest control center immediately and reported the license number. It checked out as a car reported stolen in the Pittsburgh area Sunday night. As any law enforcement agency will confirm, plate numbers and descriptions of stolen cars are constantly circulated, but they are next to useless in apprehending car thieves. The volume is just too great. A very few patrol officers with excellent memories make a hobby of constantly checking for stolen vehicles as a way of combating the boredom of patrol, but generally speaking, if a stolen car is operated in a legal manner by a person who does not excite suspicion, apprehension is exceedingly rare. Routine checks of operators’ licenses, arrest due to traffic violations, and abandonment of the vehicle are the usual channels through which recovery is made.

In this instance the check of the license against the latest theft list was an additional confirmation of the identity of the vehicle.

As soon as word was received that the vehicle was on the pike, an all-points alarm was sent, and the nearest vehicles were diverted to the priority target. During the twenty miles and twenty minutes it took the target vehicle to reach the Valley Forge area, the pattern of the stalk had been established. An unmarked vehicle containing two officers had caught up at high speed, slowed, and drifted close enough to confirm the identification, and had then dropped inconspicuously back into position four hundred yards behind the Mercury. A standard patrol car followed approximately a mile behind the unmarked car. As quickly as possible other patrol cars were stationed at the exists ahead, one at each exit, each one in contact with the unmarked car tailing the target vehicle.

The procedure to be followed should the target vehicle attempt to leave the turnpike had been established. It would move over to the exit lane. The unmarked car would increase speed so as to exit immediately behind it. The patrol car a mile back would be alerted and would increase speed also, so as to exit as close as possible without creating alarm. The patrol car waiting outside the gates would be alerted. As soon as the target car had committed itself to one particular exit, the waiting car would move across the front of it and block it. The attendant would drop to the floor of the booth. The unmarked car would block any attempt to back away. The rear car would plug traffic at the exit ramp to keep the public away from the party.

Though it was not anticipated that the target vehicle would leave the pike until much later, this eventuality had to be covered with great care.

Pursuers and pursued rolled at a steady sixty miles an hour through the hot late afternoon toward the shadows of dusk gathering far to the east. Other vehicles moved steadily along with them, vacationers, salesmen, people heading for an evening in Philadelphia. A few cars caught up with them and moved slowly by, made cautious by the patrol car to the rear which they had recently edged by, eyes flicking back and forth from the highway to the speedometer.

At Central Control men watched the big electric map and talked in low tones. It was particularly important that there should be no news break. The Mercury had a radio. So far the lid had been kept on. And any news break which hinted at what was going on would bring a thousand idiots in their cars onto the pike, hoping to see blood.

The tanned young man is driving. Eyeglasses is in front beside him. Hernandez and the girl are in back. The girl seems to be asleep. It is a four-door vehicle.

The group of men made an executive decision. They checked with the New Jersey Turnpike. The interchange between pikes was an inefficient and potentially dangerous place to try to take them. The same tail car would follow. The Jersey people said they would be all ready and waiting by the time the guest arrived. The tail car was informed.

At 6:35 the target vehicle transferred at the interchange to the New Jersey Turnpike. The remote tail dropped off and a new patrol car picked up its function. It contained three officers, and heavier armament.

The break came at 7:18 when the Mercury slowed, moved over to the exit lane and entered the service area. With the unmarked tail car a hundred feet behind, it moved past the parking lot and the Howard Johnson’s to the banks of gas pumps.

The tail car reported. Control said, “Can you take them there?”

“It isn’t too good. Lots of cars at the pumps. Kids running around, but... hold it! The driver got out and the one with glasses is behind the wheel. The one who got out is pointing over toward the waiting area beyond the pumps. Looks like they’ll park it here. Now it looks good.”

“You got Car 33 with you, and we can back you up with 17 in... four minutes, and 28 in six minutes.”

“Put 17 down there ahead on the grass, ready to plug access back onto the pike just in case. We’ll take the driver right now.”

Kirby Stassen went first to the men’s room, from there to the cigarette machine, from there to the crowded order counter for take-outs where, When his turn came, he ordered four hamburgers and four coffees to go. When they were ready, the girl put them on the cardboard tray and put it on the counter. As Stassen reached out with both hands to pick it up, a big hand reached from the left and another from the right, and the cuffs snapped down snugly, with metallic efficiency, onto his wrists. He tensed for a moment, looking neither to left nor to right, staring incredulously at his wrists, then let all the air out of his lungs in a long, gentle sigh. The men who held the ends of the two sets of cuffs yanked his arms down to his sides. The few people who saw it gasped and murmured.

They walked him to the manager’s office, searched him roughly and thoroughly, handcuffed his wrists behind him and left him there under the cold eye of an enormous trooper in uniform.

When Nanette Koslov came clacking out of the women’s room in her slacks and high heels, hips swinging loosely, sullen hair bouncing against the nape of her neck, two large men moved in from the side and grabbed her, each one clamping one hand on her wrist and the other on her upper arm. Her scream silenced all the clatter. With her eyes gone mad, with foam at the corners of her mouth, she bucked and spasmed with such strength that the two strong men could barely hold her, and one of them, twisted off balance, went down to one knee. But they gained control, and half ran her into the private office. They held her arms straight out while the dining-room hostess, agreeable to this extra duty, searched her, found the knife, placed it on the corner of the desk. Nanette Koslov was still taut, waiting, savage as an animal, so they cuffed her by wrists and ankles to a heavy office chair.

Hernandez and Golden waited in the car. It was too far away from the main building for them to have heard Nan’s animal screamings. The long minutes passed. Golden got out of the car and stared toward the building. The dying sun glinted orange against the lenses of his glasses. He shrugged and started toward the building at a half trot. A man who had been stooped low, came angling out from behind a parked car at a dead run. Before joining the State Police he’d had three pro seasons with the Steelers. It was like hitting a rag doll with a hurtling sack of bricks. Golden went out and stayed out for twenty minutes. The glasses skittered forty feet across the asphalt without breaking. When the ex-defensive guard was halfway to his target, a man who had crawled into position suddenly rose up and filled the open window beside Hernandez with his big shoulders, his face wearing an expression of hard joy, rock-steady hand aiming the barrel of the .38 at the center of Hernandez’ face.

“Just move a little bit,” the officer pleaded in a half-whisper. “Move a finger, an eyeball. Move anything.”

Hernandez sat like a statue. A man opened the other door and got in. The wrists were so large the handcuffs were set at the last notch. After they got him out of the car, lumbering, docile, dazed, they found, wedged into the seat, a .45 Colt automatic pistol, army issue, with a full clip and a round in the chamber. It later proved to have been in the glove compartment of the stolen vehicle.

They were loaded in patrol cars and taken off the turnpike, jailed on suspicion of murder, printed, photographed, identified, given prison issue denim, and locked in isolation cells.

The finding of Helen Wister had been on the radio and television newscasts since seven. That story was vastly fattened by news of the capture released in time to hit the nine o’clock news.

The Stassens would have had the news before nine, had they been home. They were at a large cocktail and buffet dinner party. At nine they were just beginning to eat. Somebody turned on the television set. It was ignored until somebody yelled, “Hey! Listen to this!”

They listened. Ernie Stassen had a five-martini edge. She put her plate down with great care and went over and turned the set off, and turned and looked at all the other guests. She wore a curious smile. The room was very silent. “That’s all nonsense, of course,” she said in a high, flat voice. She laughed like a windup machine. “It’s a ridiculous mistake.” Walter got his wife by the arm and got her out of there. All the way out she talked about the mistake in her high, wild voice. When they got home the reporters were there, waiting for them, and it had just started to rain.

Millions heard the news and were gratified the four had been taken. Thousands realized they had been on the turnpikes at the same time. They told their friends, and had a sense of having participated in something historic. After the detailed account was published, hundreds upon hundreds changed their stories, a little bit at a time, until at last they were able to convince others as well as themselves that they had seen it all, that they had been in grave danger, that they had held themselves in readiness to assist if there had been any slip. Every big news story creates throngs of imaginary heroes.

At Bassett, Nebraska, reporters did not arrive at the Koslov farm until the following morning. Anton Koslov in his muddy barking accent had one statement to make. His daughter, Nanette, was dead. She had been dead long time. No more talk about Nanette. Go away.

One San Francisco reporter, familiar with the nether world where Nanette had lived, dug up a few anecdotes about her which he cleaned up enough to be usable, and tracked down some eight-by-ten glossies from her days of offhand modeling. One of those pictures, after the addition, by air brush, of halter and shorts, became the picture most often reproduced across the country.

In several score cellar apartments, cold-water flats and coffee houses, the acquaintances of Sander Golden gathered and marveled at his unexpected notoriety. They said it wasn’t like him. They said he was a mild and amusing type, a no-talent type with an erratic intelligence.

One freckled little poet with red handlebar mustachios did remember a time in New Orleans when Sandy Golden had been less than mild. “He was splitting a back alley pad on Bourbon, way over, with Seffani, the bongo man that killed himself a year ago, remember? and one night they’re like dead, man, and Seffani’s chick, a large one with runty little brown teeth she felt were killing her career, she strips them clean of bread and goes has her teeth capped pearly white, so a month later she’s in Kibby’s back room, loaded with horse up to here, snoring a storm, and Sandy went out, came back with pliers from someplace and he uncapped that big chick. That Golden could come out mean, man. Bear it in mind.”

The story had been sagging. The papers had been lighting to keep it alive. And suddenly they were rich. They’d had their fun with Hernandez, and now they had three new identities to pry apart. New backgrounds to search. They had a Rich Boy — Only Son, and they had a green-eyed Refugee — Ex-Model, and they had an honest-to-God Beatnik who was the Brains of the Wolf Pack Rampage.

They kept it dancing for a week, and then it finally died, falling off the bottom of page 16. But it wasn’t death. Only a coma. The trial would play big, bigger than all that had gone before. When the trial came along, they were all ready. And it fed an estimated one million dollars into the economy of the city of Monroe.