Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“Sometimes to teach some son of a bitch a lesson. Sometimes to get the anger out. And sometimes — look, you ever go hunting?”

“Years ago, with my old man.”

“You remember what it felt like?”

“Just that I was scared all the time,” Waldron said, remembering. “That I’d do something wrong, miss a shot or make noise or something, and my dad would get mad at me.”

“So you never got to like it.”

“No.”

“Well, it’s like hunting,” the man said. “Seeing if you can do it. And there’s you and him, and it’s like you’re dancing, and then he’s gone and you’re all that’s left. It’s like a bullfight, it’s like shooting a bird on the wing. There’s something about it that’s beautiful.”

Waldron couldn’t speak.

“It’s just a once-in-a-while thing,” the man said. “It’s a way to have fun, that’s all. It’s no big deal.”

He drove all day,eastbound on 66, his mind churning and his stomach a wreck. He stopped often for coffee, sitting by himself, avoiding conversations with other drivers. Any of them could be a murderer, he thought, and once he fancied that they were all murderers, unpunished killers racing back and forth across the country, running down anyone who got in their way.

He knew he ought to eat, and twice he ordered food only to leave it untouched on his plate. He drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and just kept going.

At a diner somewhere he reached for a newspaper someone else had left behind. Then he changed his mind and drew away from it. When he returned to his truck he took the manila envelope of newspaper clippings from his bag and dropped it into a trash can. He wouldn’t clip any more stories, he knew, and for the next little while he wouldn’t even read the papers. Because he’d only be looking for stories he didn’t want to find.

He kept driving. He thought about stopping when the sky darkened but he decided against it. Sleep just seemed out of the question. Being off the highway for longer than it took to gulp a cup of coffee seemed impossible. He played the radio once or twice but turned it off almost immediately; the country music he normally liked just didn’t sound right to him. At one point he switched on the CB — he hardly ever listened to it these days, and now the chatter that came over it sounded like a mockery. They were out there killing people for sport, he thought, and they were chatting away in that hokey slang and he couldn’t stand it...

Four in the morning, or close to it, he was on a chunk of Interstate in Missouri or maybe Iowa — he wasn’t too sure where he was, his mind was running all over the place. The median strip was broad here and you couldn’t see the lights of cars in the other lane. The traffic was virtually nonexistent — it was like he was the only driver on the road, a trucker’s Flying Dutchman or something out of a Dave Dudley song, doomed to ride empty highways until the end of time.

Crazy.

There were lights in his mirror. High beams, somebody coming up fast. He moved to his right, hugging the shoulder.

The other vehicle moved out and hovered alongside him. For a mindless instant he had the thought that it was the man with the deep-set eyes, the killer come to kill him. But this wasn’t even a truck, this was a car, and it was just sort of dipsy-doodling along next to Waldron. Waldron wondered what was the matter with the damn fool.

Then the car passed him in a quick burst of speed and Waldron saw what it was.

The guy was drunk.

He got past Waldron’s rig, cut in abruptly, then almost drove off the road before he got the wheel straightened out again. He couldn’t keep the car in line, he kept wandering off to the left or the right, he was all over the road.

A fucking menace, Waldron thought.

He took his own foot off the gas and let the car pull away from him, watching the taillights get smaller in the distance. Only when the car was out of sight did Waldron bring his truck back up to running speed.

His mind wandered then, drifting along some byway, and he came back into present time to note that he was driving faster than usual, pushing past the speed limit. He found he was still doing it even after he noticed it.

Why?

When the taillights came into view, he realized what he’d subconsciously been doing all along. He was looking for the drunk driver, and there he was. He recognized the taillights. Even if he hadn’t, he’d recognize the way the car swung from side to side, raising gravel on the shoulder, then wandering way over into the left-hand lane and back again.

Drivers like that were dangerous. They killed people every day and the cops couldn’t keep the bastards off the roads. Look at this crazy son of a bitch, look at him, for God sake, he was all over the place, he was sure to kill himself if he didn’t kill someone else first.

Downhill stretch coming up. Waldron was loaded up with kitchen appliances, just a hair under his maximum gross weight. Give him a stretch of downhill loaded like that, hell, wasn’t anyone could run away from him going downhill.

He looked at the weaving car in front of him. Nobody else out in front, nobody in his mirror. Something quickened in his chest. He got a flash of deep-set eyes and a knowing smile.

He put the gas pedal on the floor.

The capture ofthe man called Anselmo amounted to the gathering together of innumerable threads, many of them wispy and frail. For almost two years the terrorist had been the target of massive manhunt operations launched by not one but over a dozen nations. The one valid photograph of him, its focus blurred and indistinct, had been reproduced and broadcast throughout the world; his features — the jagged and irregular yellow teeth, the too-small upturned nose, the underslung jaw, the bushy eyebrows grown together into a single thick, dark line — were as familiar to the general public as they were to counterintelligence professionals and Interpol agents.

Bit by bit, little by little, the threads began to link up. In a cafe in a working-class neighborhood in Milan, two men sat sipping espresso laced with anisette. They spoke of an interregional soccer match, and of the possibility of work stoppage by the truck dispatchers. Then their voices dropped, and one spoke quickly and quietly of Anselmo while the other took careful note of every word.

In a suburb of Asunción, a portly gentleman wearing the uniform of a brigadier general in the Paraguayan army shared the front seat of a four-year-old Chevrolet Impala with a slender young man wearing the uniform of a chauffeur. The general talked while the chauffeur listened. While Anselmo was not mentioned by name, he was the subject of the conversation. At its conclusion the chauffeur gave the general an envelope containing currency in the amount of two thousand German marks. Three hours later the chauffeur — who was not a chauffeur — was on a plane for Mexico City. The following afternoon the general — who was not really a general — was dead of what the attending physician diagnosed as a massive myocardial infarction.

In Paris, in the ninth arrondissement, three security officers, one of them French, entered an apartment which had been under surveillance for several weeks. It proved to be empty. Surveillance was continued but no one returned to the apartment during the course of the following month. A thoroughgoing analysis of various papers and detritus found in the apartment was relayed in due course to authorities in London and Tel Aviv.

In West Berlin, a man and woman, both in their twenties, both blond and fair-skinned and blue-eyed and looking enough alike to be brother and sister, made the acquaintance of a dark-haired and full-bodied young woman at a cabaret called Justine’s. The three shared a bottle of sparkling Burgundy, then repaired to a small apartment on the Bergenstrasse where they shared several marijuana cigarettes, half a bottle of Almspach brandy, and a bed. The blond couple did certain things which the dark-haired young woman found quite painful, but she gave every appearance of enjoying the activity. Later, when she appeared to be asleep, the blond man and woman talked at some length. The dark-haired young woman, who was in fact awake throughout this conversation, was still awake later on when the other two lay sprawled beside her, snoring lustily. She dressed and left quickly, pausing only long enough to slit their throats with a kitchen knife. Her flight to Beirut landed shortly before two in the afternoon, and within an hour after that she was talking with a middle-aged Armenian gentleman in the back room of a travel agency.