Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 121, No. 2. Whole No. 738, February 2003

Contraband by Raymond Steiber

We close this issue with the last Raymond Steiber story submitted to EQMM prior to the author’s death in 2000. Unless stories we have not yet seen should be discovered by his executors, this is, sadly, the last time we will be able to treat our readers to an original work by this talented purveyor of mystery, adventure, and intrigue. It is our hope that someday someone will bring out a collection of the best of the Steiber stories.

Start with names. That’s the best way.

Mine’s Bill Riley, and I work for Blue Grass Investigations in Lexington, Kentucky. BGI is owned and operated by Lew Wallace — no relation to the guy that wrote Ben-Hur, but he’d certainly claim it if he thought about it.

BGI’s just Lew, me, and a full-time secretary, and what with a couple of moonlighting cops, that’s all we need. We do auto-insurance work mostly — hunting up witnesses, checking out claimant’s stories — and since I-75, one of the most heavily trafficked roads in the country, runs right past our doorstep, we stay pretty busy.

What else do you need to know about me? This, I guess: About ten years ago I went deaf for a while. I’d been having trouble with a buzzing in my ears, and then overnight I completely lost my ability to hear. They put me in a school for the deaf where I learned to sign and read lips. In time, I had a couple of operations, and now, with the help of a hearing aid, I’m pretty close to normal.

The thing about losing my hearing is that it did two things for me. It introduced me to my wife Sarah, who’s profoundly deaf, and it got me my job with BGI.

My wife first. At home I turn down my hearing aid so that we’re on a more equal footing, and that’s kept me up on my lipreading and signing. A couple of years ago I ran into Lew in a bar, and we got to b.s.ing. I bragged about my ability to lipread, and with the help of a couple of fellow barflies put on a demonstration for him. Lipreading’s a real art, by the way. You only catch about half the words, and you have to put the rest together based on the context. And if somebody talks fast, you’re liable not to pick up anything at all.

Right away, Lew, who’s a degenerate gambler, dragged me off to another bar where he began making bets based on my ability. Not that he told anybody what I could do — that was the trick of it. Many drinks later, he proposed that I come to work for him. He said: “That lipreading stuff of yours could come in mighty handy in my line.” Which it hasn’t — until recently, that is, which is what this long preamble’s been about: getting to the point where I can tell you about the contraband gang and how the bastards — and bastardette — almost made roadkill out of us.

Lew plopped the file down on my desk. He looks like a big old country boy, which is pretty much what he is — a briarhopper from the hills around Paris. That’s Paris, Kentucky, not Paris, France.

I’m a Midwesterner myself, from Chillicothe, Ohio, which is an old Miami Indian name.

“What’s this one about?” I asked.

“Margery Li. She tangled with a tractor-trailer just south of here, and she’s no longer among the living.”

“A tractor-trailer will do that to you—” I opened the file and looked at the pictures inside — “particularly if you’re driving a little Honda Civic.”

“This is a weird one, and her insurance company wants to snake its way out of any liability.”

“Like all good snakes,” I said.

“Hush. Those people pay our salaries.”

“And then turn around and screw it back out of us with rate hikes.”

Lew grinned his country-boy grin. “That’s why I always ream ’em on expenses.”

“So what’s weird about this thing?”

Lew told me about the accident. It had happened about nine o’clock in the evening on I-75. Mrs. Li, an immigrant from Taiwan, had run her Honda into the back of the tractor-trailer. Since the tractor-trailor sat high and the Honda sat low, the roof of her car was crushed in, and her along with it. Then, driverless, the Honda had swung into the path of a Ford Focus and totaled it. There’d been a dog in Mrs. Li’s car as well — a golden retriever — but it had come out of the wreck with nothing worse than a limp and a bad scare.

“When they finally pried her and the dog out of the car,” Lew said, “she was still clutching a cell phone in her hand. What the State Patrol figures is that she was trying to punch in a number and didn’t realize how fast she was overtaking the tractor-trailer.”

“Anybody hurt in the Focus?”

“A man and wife and their young child. Nothing fatal, but some pretty serious hospital time just the same.”

“What about the tractor-trailer?”

“The driver didn’t even notice anything had happened. You know what those big rigs are like. A mile long and twice as heavy. All he felt was a bump, so he kept on trucking. It wasn’t till he pulled into a rest stop a couple of hours later that he spotted the damage.”

“So where’s the weird part?”

“That’s a three-lane road at that point. The Honda was in the middle lane, the Ford Focus in the right lane, and there was another car about a hundred feet back in the left lane. The driver of that car claims he saw a big black SUV come up and kiss the Honda in the rear end just before it hit the truck. Or at any rate he thinks it was before the accident. The SUV sort of obstructed his view.”

“Any black paint on the Honda?”

“Loads of it. But since the Focus was black, too, it don’t tell us much.”

“Analyze the paint. See what car company uses it.”

“The insurance company isn’t ready to go to that expense yet. And besides, if the SUV was a Ford product, it won’t mean squat.”

“What did the witness say about the SUV?”

“He said it might’ve been a Chevy Suburban or it might’ve been a Ford Expedition. Either way, it was humongous.”

“And it just ran off after the accident — like the tractor-trailer?”

“Swung into the left lane ahead of our witness’s car and vamoosed.”

“So how do we tackle this thing?” I asked.

“Look for another witness.”

“Fat chance of finding one.”

“You know it and I know it, but as long as the insurance company is footing the bills, who cares?”

Well I did, for one. There’s nothing more frustrating than chasing will-o’-the-wisps.

Lew sat his well-padded bottom on the edge of my desk. “Here’s what we’re going to do. There’s people who for business or other reasons make regular trips on I-75. Corbin to Cincinnati, Knoxville to Detroit. People like that have their favorite pit stops — places where they always pull in and stretch their legs. So you’re going to work the rest areas south of Lexington, and Larry” — one of our moonlighting cops — “is going to work the ones to the north. You’re going to see if you can’t find some regular — a truck driver, maybe — who witnessed the accident and saw the SUV.”

“What’re you going to be doing, Lew?”

“I got a lot of paperwork to catch up on.”

I thought: Not with the ponies running at Keeneland, you don’t. But I didn’t say it.

Lew let me use the company car. It was a little Neon, but he charged expenses on it to our clients as if it were a Lincoln Continental.

I rolled the windows down and headed south. Well, there were worse ways to spend a mild April afternoon, I thought. We were right in the middle of horse country, and there were well-kept paddocks with white fences around them and rolling wooded hills.

I thought, not for the first time, what a well-kept secret this part of the world is. The area north and south of the Ohio River, I mean. The Kentucky River with its deep rocky gorge, the steep, forested hills of southern Indiana, The Land Between the Lakes, the skyline of Cincinnati, particularly just after sunset when there’s still a glow in the sky. Then there were the wonderful old Indian names for the rivers — the Great Miami and the Little Miami, the Wabash, the Kanawha, the Scioto, the two rivers that meet to form the Ohio: the Allegheny and the Monongahela. The Indians who inhabited this region were a bloodthirsty crew, but they invented place names that roll around the tongue like a shot of smooth Kentucky bourbon.

I drove on south to the first rest area and climbed out of the car. There’s a technique to asking questions of complete strangers. If you just wade on in, half the time they’ll brush on by. What you need is a hook, and photographs are the best hook ever invented. Hold one up, and people will generally look at it. And they’ll answer any question you ask, even if it’s only to mutter, “No, don’t know anything about it.”

I’d brought along a picture of Mrs. Li and a picture of her battered Honda. People will always look at a photo of a wreck, even if it’s only out of the corner of the eye.

I set to work. From time to time I left my post beside the facilities and strolled on over to where the big rigs were parked. Truckers can go two ways — the ornery way or the talkative way — but at least with the photographs I had a way of breaking the ice.

Around four in the afternoon I took a break to chug a Coke. Then I made another stab at the truckers and, contrary to expectations, hit pay dirt.

The guy said: “Yeah, I saw that woman. Or at least, I think it was her. A lot of these Asians look alike to me. I saw her right here in this rest area. And about an hour and a half later, when the traffic began to move again, I drove past her mangled yellow car.”

He had blond hair that had mostly gone white and a face as seamed as a southern New Jersey road map.

“That poor woman — you know, she acted kind of strangely that night. For one thing, she walked her dog over here by the truck park instead of taking him out toward the woods there. I was fiddling with my trip record and I happened to glance in the side mirror and there was her dog hiking his leg against one of the tires of the next rig down. I felt like walking back and asking her how she’d feel if I hiked my leg against her car. Not that I had anything to do with that other rig — it was an Acme, I think.”

That last bit lit up the pinball machine in my brain. Acme was the owner of the truck that’d been hit.

He went on. “I go back to my trip record and the next thing I know I hear that woman shouting in Chinese. I look in the side mirror again, and her mouth’s hanging open like a gate, and just then the rig starts to pull out and almost clips her. She runs across the parking lot, dragging her dog behind her, and then, about a minute later, she whips on by in her yellow car — or anyway, I think it was her. Then right after that a big black Ford Expedition goes shooting after her. It was like everybody had just gone crazy or something.”

I asked if he’d give me a written statement and, surprisingly, he didn’t make any fuss about it. I stuck around another half an hour, then headed back to BGI. A black Ford Expedition, and it had taken off like a bat out of hell after the Honda.

But what was the reason? And why had Mrs. Li suddenly begun shouting in Chinese and then run hell for leather for her car?

I got back to the office around quarter of six. Lew was slumped at his desk with a can of Dr Pepper in front of him. It was a little soon for him to be back from Keeneland, but maybe the ponies had cleaned him out early.

He gave me his squinty-eyed Clint Eastwood look. Clint makes it come out mean and dangerous, but on Lew it just made him look like he needed a pair of glasses.

“You do any good today?” he asked.

I told him about Mrs. Li. I told him about the black SUV and the Acme tractor-trailer. I told him how all three had gone chasing off after one another.

“This is starting to look like more than an accident,” he said.

“That’s what I think, too, but I’m damned if I know what. Why did that woman start yelling in Chinese, for instance?”

“You sure it was her?”

“Who else would it have been? Her golden retriever?”

He thought about it a moment, then came up with a plan.

“Tomorrow I’m going to put Larry in that rest area and see if he can’t roust out another witness or two.”

“What am I going to be doing?”

“Acme’s located down in Rollsville. It’s just a two-bit outfit, although I guess a couple of eighty-thousand-dollar rigs isn’t too two-bit. Anyway, I want you to go down there and snoop around a little and see what you find. Tell the people there you’re doing some follow-up work for the insurance adjustor.”

“Can I use the Neon?”

“Yeah, go ahead. And one other thing, see if any of those people down there speaks Chinese.”

“How am I going to do that?”

“Hell, Bill, you’re a detective. Figure it out for yourself.”

One look at Rufus and Maude Blaney, the proprietors of Acme Long Haul Trucking, and you knew that the only Chinese they spoke was “won ton” soup. And they probably mispronounced that.

Rollsville was about an eighty-minute drive down I-75 from Lexington. Acme wasn’t in the town proper. It was located ten miles out a narrow, winding road with woooded ravines on one side of it and high hills on the other. I pulled up in front of the place and climbed out of the car and looked it over.

It was on an acre of land and had a chain-link fence around it and a cinder-block building in the middle of it. I counted two tractors in the lot, one of them with its front end hitched forward so that a mechanic could get at the engine.

I went through the wide-open gate and walked around to the tractor that was being worked on. A big, rawboned guy in gray coveralls was hunched over the engine. He looked up at me. He had electric blue eyes, the kind that tell you two things — namely, that the owner is mean and stupid.

“Bill Riley,” I said.

The guy hard-eyed me. “You looking for him or is that you?”

I handed him a card. It said I was from the insurance company, not BGI.

He squinted at the card, then at me.

“What’s this all about?”

“I got to take a look at the rig that got bent up.”

“Somebody already did.”

“Yes, but now I’ve got to do it, too.”

“No wonder people’s insurance rates are so high.”

“Don’t blame me. I’m just an employee.”

“Go see Maude. She’s in the office. She’ll take you around.”

I thanked him and headed off across the gravel toward the cinder-block building. As I did, I remembered to look around for the black SUV. All I saw was a battered Chevy pickup.

The guy working on the tractor had been Rufus Blaney. I’d caught that much from the nametag on his coveralls. Now I had my first encounter with Maude Blaney.

She sat behind a greasy metal desk, and there were a lot of yellow invoice forms on it. I caught sight of the logo printed on one of them. Mangrove Tropical Sportswear. If they had anything to do with Maude’s current attire, they’d better keep quiet about it. It consisted of denim cutoffs, work boots, and a man’s workshirt.

She looked up at me. She’d probably once been pretty in a honky-tonk sort of way, but Time had thrown a flying tackle at her and mashed her looks into the AstroTurf.

I tried a smile on her. “I’m Bill Riley. I’m with the insurance company.”

“Don’t you boys ever stop coming around?” she asked.

“It’s part of the service.”

“Well, it ain’t much of a service for me, particularly since our own insurance company is completely different.”

“You don’t know. They might be interconnected. You’d be surprised.”

“I’d be surprised if you boys ever pay off on our insurance claim.”

“These things take time,” I said.

“I wonder how much time it’d take if I complained to the state insurance commission.”

“Look, I’m just here to look at the damage. Why don’t you let me do that?”

She came out from behind the desk. She was big-breasted and big-assed, and she looked like if she put a shoulder to you, you’d go bouncing right across the floor.

I followed her outside and around the back of the building. There was a tractor parked there that I hadn’t seen before, and it had a trailer attached to it.

“That’s her,” she said. “See what you can make of her.”

I gave her a smile and got out a notebook and walked around to the rear of the trailer. Maude Blaney followed me and stood behind me as I squatted down.

“That a hearing aid in your ear?” she asked.

“Yes, it is.”

“Tiny little rascal. I didn’t know they made them that small.”

“They do a lot of things these days.”

“Except settle insurance claims.”

I examined the trailer. The high bumper was pushed in a little and had yellow paint scrapings on it. There’d been some damage underneath, too, but not a whole lot. Hitting this thing with a Honda Civic was about like me hitting Mike Tyson with a jelly donut.

I made a lot of unnecessary notes. Maude Blaney got bored after a while and drifted away. I rose cautiously out of my squat. The rear doors of the trailer had a padlock on them, but it was hanging open. I slipped it out and laid it down on the gravel.

I eased open one of the rear doors, and sunlight flooded in and illuminated the interior of the trailer. I noticed the smell first. An antiseptic smell such as you encounter in a hospital. Somebody’d been swabbing the place out with something that had hypochlorite in it. Then I saw the cage. Not really a cage, I guess, but a chain-link barrier three-quarters of the way down the trailer. It had a padlocked gate and, inside, tier after tier of wooden shelves, each with about a foot and a half of space in between. I noticed something else. A white plastic drum with a lid on top. A chain ran around it and then through the links of the barrier. So it won’t topple over, I thought.

Then a hand shot past me and slammed the door shut.

I had to jerk my hand back to keep it from getting crushed.

It was Maude Blaney, and she went eyeball-to-eyeball with me.

“What were you looking in there for?”

“I wanted to see if there was any interior damage.”

“Well, there wasn’t, and we didn’t claim any, so you just keep your nose out of there. You damned insurance people — they ought to horsewhip the bunch of you.”

“I’m just a gofer, Miz Blaney.”

“Well, how about you go for the gate and leave us alone.”

I took the hint and eased on out of there. Rufus raised up out of the truck engine and watched me as I went. Of the two of them, I think I would’ve rather tangled with him than his wife.

I asked a few questions in Rollsville. Everybody I talked to knew the Blaneys, but nobody had much to say about them. One old boy got a funny smile on his face when I mentioned Maude, and I wondered if, when he was younger, he hadn’t enjoyed her favors in the back of a pickup truck somewhere.

I also asked about the black SUV. I got pointed in the direction of one, but it turned out to be a Toyota Land Cruiser.

I drove on back to Lexington, drinking Coke out of a can and puzzling about the cage I’d seen in the back of the trailer. Animals? Did they haul caged animals in that thing? But I knew that wasn’t it. The plastic container proved it wasn’t.

Damn, I thought. They’re hauling people, and that container’s so they’ve got a place to relieve themselves.

I went into Lew’s office as soon as I got back to BGI, but he was on the phone. He waved me into a chair, then slid a sheet of paper across to me.

It was a printout from the Louisville Courier’s Web site, and it was headed News from Indiana. Louisville sat right across the Ohio from Indiana.

I read a story about a small-town police scandal. I read a story about a school bond issue that was about to be voted on. And finally I read the story about the dead Chinaman who’d been found at a rest stop off I-64.

Bang. Tilt. That pinball machine in my head just about went ape.

The rest stop had no facilities. It was just a place for truckers and car drivers to pull off if they had to. And it was surrounded by National Forest land.

Some traveler from Missouri had gone back in the woods to relieve himself. He’d just zipped open his fly when he looked down and saw a naked foot sticking out of a pile of leaves. He’d raced back to the car and told his wife to call the cops on her cell phone. When the cops had finally cleared away the leaves, they’d found a naked body underneath. An Asian, probably a Chinese. And when they’d autopsied him, there’d been a balled-up handkerchief stuffed halfway down his throat.

Lew put down the phone.

“You find out anything?” he questioned.

“They’re hauling illegal immigrants. I saw the cage in the back of the truck where they put them. Then they probably pile a legitimate load in front of it to hide it.”

“Damned right that’s what they’re doing,” Lew said.

“How’d you figure it out?”

“A lot of ways. One was getting a copy of the statement Rufus Blaney, the driver of the truck, made to the state police when he got back to this area. He said he was hauling finished goods to an outfit in East St. Louis called Mangrove Tropical Sportswear."

“I saw one of their invoices on Maude Blaney’s desk.”

“What’s a garment factory doing in East St. Louis, Bill? All the garment factories in this country have picked up and moved to Guatemala or somewhere.”

“Maybe it’s just a warehouse,” I ventured. But I knew it wasn’t.

“You visit that place and I bet it’s got a wall around it with barbed wire on the top. And if you managed a peak over that wall, I bet you’d see a guard with a big revolver on his hip and a pit bull for company.”

“Sounds about right for East St. Louis.”

“Sounds about right for a place where they’re bringing illegal aliens and then making them pay for their trip from China by working them eighteen hours a day at a sewing machine. They probably got a dormitory somewhere in the building with boarded-up windows and sleeping mats on the floor. And the food’s probably rice with a little pork in it and all the weak tea you can drink. And there won’t be any other buildings close-by, and those that are will be so dilapidated that even the rats’ve deserted them.”

“What do you think happened to that Chinaman, Lew?”

“While you were futzing around down in Rollsville, I’ve had time to think this thing over, and this is how I put it together. They pick these people up somewhere remote — maybe a creek in the Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina just off the Inland Waterway. Then they take them to where the truck’s parked and dope them up somehow. Maybe they give them doctored food or something. That’s to keep them from making any trouble during the trip. Then they load them up like cordwood and take off. Farther along they probably give them another dose of dope.

“Now here’s what probably happened. That Chinaman that got himself killed came to a little early. Maybe he didn’t get enough dope in him, or maybe he threw it up. Anyway he wakes up in the back of the truck and it’s pitch black and everywhere he feels around him there’s nothing but inert bodies. So he huddles there and he gets more and more frightened and finally, after hours and hours, the truck pulls over. He stays where he is waiting for something to happen. Then the truck engine starts, and he knows they’re not going to let him out. So he starts screaming and here’s what probably comes out: They’re all dead! Everyone but me! Get me out of here!"

I said: “And just by chance Mrs. Li’s standing right outside.”

“And since she grew up in Taiwan, she understands every word. The truck pulls out. She runs for her car and takes out after it. Probably she wants to get the license-plate number so she can call it in to the police.”

“But there’s a black SUV riding shotgun,” I said.

“Yeah, and I’d guess Maude Blaney was driving it. She’s seen this Chinese woman standing beside the truck, and then the Chinese woman starts running around like she’s nuts and Maude puts two and two together. So she catches up. She sees Mrs. Li has a cell phone in her hand and knows she’s got to stop her right now. Well, this Maude’s probably a pretty slick driver. Anybody that can handle a big truck can sure handle an SUV. So she moves on up and kisses bumpers and then steps on the gas and runs Mrs. Li right into the back of the trailer. Probably she had no intention of killing her. She just wanted to stop her using the cell phone. But she whacked her all right and almost whacked three other people in the bargain.”

“What about the Chinaman? How’d he end up dead?”

“Figure it out, Bill. First chance they get they pull over someplace quiet. Then they climb into the back of the truck with a couple of pistols in their hands and hogtie the Chinaman. Stuff a wadded-up handkerchief in his mouth and slap a piece of duct tape over his lips. No more screams out of that fellow. Then, a couple of hours later, they stop over in Indiana and check on him and find he’s choked to death on the handkerchief. So what do they do? They strip him naked so his clothes won’t be a giveaway, and as soon as the coast is clear they haul his body out in the woods and cover it with leaves.”

I thought about it. “It makes sense, Lew. But it’s a hell of a stretch putting it together like this.”

“I’m not saying it happened exactly the way I described. I could be way out on the details. But I bet something like that happened.”

“So where do we go with this?”

“I want some photographs of that cage you saw.”

I thought about Maude Blaney’s seething eyes. “Fat chance of that.”

“We’ll get them all right. And as soon as we do, we’ll gather up somebody from the insurance company and traipse on over to the State Patrol headquarters in Frankfort and lay it out for them. Then they can sort it out. And as far as how we came by the pictures, you took them this morning when Maude Blaney wasn’t looking.”

“I see where this is going, Lew, and I don’t think I like it.”

“After dark we’re going to drive on down there and climb their fence and get inside that truck.”

“What if they got a dog?”

“You seen one?”

“I saw Maude, and that was enough.”

“We’ll take a pound of hamburger along. I’ll mash up some sleeping pills in it.”

“What about the lock on the back of the truck?”

“We’ll use a pair of bolt cutters on it.”

I hesitated a moment. “Do I get overtime for this?”

“Sure. But not if we get caught and go to jail. Then you’re on your own damned time.”

I swung by the house and had supper and told Sarah that I’d be out on a job that night. Sarah, who works at a school for the deaf, indicated that she’d curl up with a good book and wait for me. I just hoped she wouldn’t have to wait too long.

I drove over to Lew’s place, and we piled in the company Neon and headed for Rollsville.

Lew said: “I wonder what this bunch gets for hauling illegal aliens.”

“We could call up and ask.”

“Somebody’ll ask them, you can bet on that. But they’ll be wearing badges when they do.”

We reached Rollsville on schedule and turned off on the road that ran up to Acme Long Haul Trucking. About halfway along, Lew had me pull off on a gravel-and-dirt lay-by. Probably a road crew had put it there so they’d have someplace to park their equipment.

Lew got out the pound of hamburger and doctored it with mashed-up sleeping pills. He put enough in to cold-cock a horse, let alone a dog.

We got back in the car and drove the rest of the way to Acme. We parked around the next bend, then hoofed it back to the gate. It was padlocked, but we’d expected that. We worked our way around the perimeter of the fence to the rear of the lot. Since the area was choked with brush, I figured I’d end up with six kinds of poison ivy before we were through.

Lew stopped at one point and pounded on the fence. No pit bull came out to challenge us, and we moved on.

Finally Lew began using the bolt cutters on the fence. We bent it back and crawled through, me first, with the pound of hamburger in case the dog had just been playing possum. No flash of pointed teeth, no slop of savage saliva — just a curse from Lew as he ripped his pants leg on the fence.

“Somebody’s going to pay for this,” he muttered.

Probably the insurance company, I thought.

“Where’s this rig of theirs?”

“Right there in the shadow of the building.”

Lew took the lock off the back of the trailer with the bolt cutters, then heaved it over the fence into the woods. We climbed into the trailer. I shined my flashlight around. Everything looked the same as it had earlier that day.

“Look at that vent back there,” Lew said. “That’s probably where the Chinaman did his shouting.”

He pointed out that the shelves had tick marks on them, each about twenty inches apart.

“They had them jammed in here like sardines. Just like on one of those old slave ships.”

I’d toted the camera bag along from the car. I unzipped it and got out the powerful battery-powered lantern we kept there. I set it up so that it would illuminate the cage. Lew got out the camera, and a minute later the flash cubes began going off.

He used up two rolls of film just to be sure. Then we began packing up again. As we did, Lew said: “These people sure goosed the moose, you know it? Murder One for Mrs. Li, Murder Two or Manslaughter for the Chinaman, and who knows what all for all the other stuff they did — conspiracy and transporting illegal aliens and all that stuff. Well, maybe they’ll be able to plea-bargain it all down to a hundred and twelve years.”

I jumped off the back of the trailer with the camera bag and walked right into the twin barrels of the shotgun Maude Blaney was holding in her delicate hands. I let out a gasp that could’ve been heard in Texas. Rufus was there, too, and he had a mean-looking pistol in his hand.

“You can come on down, too,” he said to Lew.

Lew jumped off the truck and stood there.

“See what’s in that bag,” Maude said

Rufus took it from me and unzipped it.

“Camera stuff.”

“Well, we know what to do with that.”

Rufus zipped the bag back up and tossed it to one side.

Maude said: “I guess you two know you’re guilty of breaking and entering.”

Lew kept his mouth shut. He had a look on his face like that of a dog who’s tried to leap a fence and caught a certain part of its anatomy in the barbed wire.

“By rights,” Maude said, “we could gun you down and nobody’d say a word.”

“You can’t do that,” Lew managed. “We’re unarmed.”

“What about those bolt cutters leaning against the wheel of the trailer? After we shot you, we could wrap your hand around them and say you tried to jump us with them.”

“Now, you don’t want to do anything foolish,” Lew said.

“How do you know we don’t?”

Lew had no answer for that.

I thought about what Lew had said in the truck. Murder One, Murder Two. This pair was capable of foolishness all right. They were capable of cold-blooded murder.

“You two got a car?” Maude demanded.

“It’s parked up the road,” I said.

“It’s the one we saw coming in,” Rufus supplied.

“Which way’s the hood pointed?”

“Toward Rollsville.”

“Well, here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to walk out through the gate and drive on out of here. Ha, you thought we were going to shoot you, didn’t you? Well, we will shoot you if you ever show your faces around here again.”

“What about the camera?” Lew ventured.

“That’s ours. And lucky we don’t take your car, too, and make you walk. Now get moving.”

Maude stood to one side, and I eased on past her and started walking toward the now open gate. Lew quickly joined me. I saw the black SUV then, parked just inside the fence. Humongous was right. They make them any bigger and they’ll have to add an extra set of wheels.

I kept walking. Rufus and Maude had fallen in behind us, and at any second I expected them to blow us into the next galaxy.

As we got closer to the SUV, I noticed that the paint was wavy on the front bumper. A sure sign that it’d been repaired and repainted.

The Blaneys’ footsteps halted behind us. That made me more nervous than if they’d continued. Finally, as we passed through the gate, I had to look back. Rufus had his back to us, listening as Maude hissed a message at him. I managed to lipread exactly three of her words — know and kill and bastards — but that was enough.

I caught up with Lew.

I said: “I lipread what Maude Blaney was saying back there, and here’s what it comes down to: They know too much. We got to kill the bastards."

He stopped in his tracks. “You sure about that?”

“You want to stick around and see?”

The SUV rumbled to life behind us, and Lew’s feet got moving again.

We piled into the little Neon. I got the keys down from the visor and jammed them in the ignition and pulled out into the road. As we sped past the Acme place, the big headlights of the SUV swung out behind us and blazed blindingly through the rear window.

“Holy crap,” Lew said.

I jammed the gas pedal to the floor. The SUV stayed right where it was — about a foot from our rear bumper.

“You ever hear of a tailgate party, Lew? Well, they’re putting a whole new spin on the concept.”

“They kiss our rear bumper and we’ll go whipping right off this twisty road into a ravine.”

“Yeah, and then they’ll climb down with tire irons and make sure we never get out again.”

Lew began fumbling with his cell phone. Fat chance that’d do us any good — not unless there was a county mountie around the next bend.

We rounded a sharp curve. The SUV had to fall back. Then it was right back on our bumper. I couldn’t see who was driving — Maude or Rufus. Not that it mattered. Either of them was capable of making mincemeat out of us.

I kept waiting for the kiss of their rear bumper, but it didn’t come. They got a place in mind where they’re going to do it, I thought. A place where we’ll for sure buy the farm.

I thought about the old .38 police special I kept locked in the bottom of a filing cabinet at work and hadn’t even looked at since Michaelmas. As for Lew, he could’ve turned himself into a walking arsenal. He owned a MAC-10 and a Chinese-made AK-47 and a gnarly automatic that took a twenty-round clip. He even had an ankle-holster gun that fired.18-calibre ammunition. The trouble was, none of it was registered, and he was afraid to carry it in case he ran into a cop. So all we had between us was my Swiss Army pocketknife. Well, if they get close enough, I thought, I can always use the fold-out corkscrew on them.

The SUV stayed on our tail. It was almost as if they were playing with us.

Lew cast aside the cell phone.

He said: “That place where we pulled over to dope the hamburger.”

“What about it?”

“It’s right up ahead. When we get to it, jerk the wheel over and slam on the brakes.”

I didn’t ask what he had in mind. I was too busy trying to stay away from the SUV. And here came the lay-by — directly in front of us on the right.

I spun the wheel to the right, spun it back again, jammed on the brakes. The Neon did a tango, a schottische, and a Virginia reel, but somehow came to a stop in a cloud of dust and gravel.

Rufus, Maude, whoever was at the wheel of the SUV tried to follow us. Then he or she realized their mistake and whipped the wheel left and hit the brakes. That was how stupid the Blaneys had become with the need to kill us. That was how panicked they were at the idea we might get away.

One wheel on the gravel, three wheels on the pavement, the brake pedal jammed against the floorboards — it was the perfect scenario for a disaster. The front end danced, then the rear end spun clear around in a circle. I saw one of the front tires creep off its rim under the strain. Then the SUV slammed sideways into the guard rail on the other side of the road and rolled over it and went crash-banging into the ravine below.

We heard all of it. The breaking of glass, the rending of metal, the snapping of tree trunks. Then, after a final, almost comical tinkle, a dead silence — as if nothing had happened at all.

We climbed shakily out of the Neon. We peered down into the ravine. A single headlight gleamed in the darkness below. Then it winked once and went out.

“Acme Trucking,” Lew mused. “Wasn’t the Acme company the outfit that was always selling stuff to Wile E. Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons? You know, rocket belts and jet-powered roller skates and a lot of other things that didn’t work? Well, it looks like this Acme outfit didn’t work, either.”

He lit a foul-smelling cigar, which was preferable to his other bad habit — chewing Red Man tobacco.

We waited for the cops to arrive. It took them a long time, and all the while I had to stand there and breathe Lew’s secondhand cigar smoke. But that was probably better than what the Blaneys were breathing just then.

Copyright © 2002 by the Estate of Raymond Steiber.