Ellery Queen - Cop Out

She popped her hairdo in. “Yes, Mr. Hyatt?”

“Didn’t we write a lease for one of the Lake cabins around May, June, somewhere around there?”

“I really don’t remember.”

“Well, look it up, will you?” Hyatt sat back. “Y’know, Wes, I can never figure you out.” Find it Edie.

“What have I done now, Tru?”

“Here you are off duty and you’re working. What are you, bucking for John’s job? Don’t you ever relax?”

“I guess I’m not the relaxing type.”

Find it Edie.

“That’s the thing with you married suckers. You don’t know how to live. Now you take me.”

“The way I hear it,” Malone said dutifully, “you’ve been taken by experts.”

“Who, me? The hell you say! Who said that?”

“Here it is, Mr. Hyatt.” Edie Golub had a lease in her hand. Malone watched it all the way across the rug. Hyatt took it from her, and she stood there. But when he stared up at her she left quickly, shutting the door with a bang.

“Yes, this is the one. Somebody named Pratt, William J. Pratt. Signed the lease May twenty-third. How’s that for a memory? You want to see this, Wes?”

“If you don’t mind.” Malone took the lease as casually as he could manage. William J. Pratt typed in. The signature unreadable. Deliberately so, he was positive, a disguised handwriting. It had to be a phony!

For Hyatt’s benefit he produced a list and added the name and location of the cabin to it. He could have found it with his eyes shut. He could taste it. He handed the lease back and rose. “Thanks a lot, Tru. I’ll check this one out with the others.”

Hyatt waved. “Think nothing of it.”

The real estate man went back to his mail, still a little miffed. Malone jumped for the Saab.

The description on the lease placed the cabin at the southeast end of Balsam Lake where it narrowed to muddy shallows. It was the least desirable section of the Lake. According to Malone’s list, “Pratt’s” rental was the only one in this scattered cabin area that extended beyond the summer season. Made to order for a post-season hideout.

He drove off the blacktop into a lane, little more than a dirt path, and cached the Saab behind a clump of diseased birch trees in a thicket of wild huckleberry bushes. The bushes were nearly bare, but they made a tall tangle and they camouflaged most of the car. He draped fallen evergreen branches over the parts that showed, and when he was satisfied that the Saab was effectively hidden he left on foot.

He was a mere three hundred yards from the cabin, but his approach took the better part of a half hour. After a few yards he got down on his belly. It was the Marine game of his boyhood over again, traveling on hips and elbows, never raising his head above the underbrush, avoiding dried-out branches, sticking where he could to the cushioning ground pine. He made so little noise that once he surprised a squirrel on the ground; he could have killed it with a stone.

At last Malone reached the clearing.

He did not enter it. The clearing had been hacked in a rough circle out of a thick stand of pine woods and along its perimeter wild azalea, laurel, and sumac had taken root in an almost continuous band of bush. Here Malone settled himself.

He had a good view of the cabin. There were some expensive handhewn log structures along the Lake, but most of the cottages were of cheap clapboard or shingle construction, labeled “cabins” by the Balsam Lake Properties Association, whose brochures leaned heavily toward fiction. The “Pratt” cabin was a slapped-together shack of green-painted shingle walls streaked with years of damp. It had a badly weathered shake roof and a midget open porch with two sagging steps. The power line that provided its electricity dropped in from above the woods and hooked onto a naked insulator attached to the outside of the house. A bluish haze seeped out of the tin chimney pot on the roof. Like all the Lake cottages it used propane gas for cooking; Malone could see the silvered tank at the side of the cabin.

The haze coming out of the tin vent told Malone what he wanted to know.

The cabin was occupied.

They were there.

Malone had been lying in the bushes for almost two hours-he had just looked at his watch, it was half-past noon-when the door of the cabin opened and a man stepped out. He was not wearing a mask but his face was in shadow and Malone could not make out the features. He was sorry now that he had not stopped in town to pick up a pair of binoculars or at least borrow a pair from Jerry Sampson at the drug store, well it was too late for that. The man was a very big man with very heavy shoulders and Malone knew he was the one the small man had called Hinch.

The man looked around and then he jumped off the porch and strolled toward the woods east of the cabin. Malone got a good look at him in the sun. He was wearing a black leather jacket and tight black pants and blue Keds, and he had red hair that bushed down over his bull’s neck. He had a broken nose and a face that went with it, brutal and stupid.

Here’s one guy I’d better stay out of his reach. He’d stomp me to death and not even breathe hard.

Malone stopped thinking and started tracking.

He slid back on his belly until he was protected by the trees and then he got up in a crouch and keeping to the ground pine made a rapid quarter circle to the east, traveling on his toes. He knew where Hinch was headed, the other dirt road that led to the cabin. They must have their car hidden there.

He was right. They had parked it off the road and made an attempt to hide it but it was clumsily done and Malone could see it from the bushes across the road. It was the black sedan, the Chrysler New Yorker, covered with dust.

Hinch was bulling around in the underbrush. He got to the trunk and unlocked it and dug in for something inside. When the hand reappeared it was holding a half gallon of whisky by the neck. The seal on the bottle looked intact. He closed the trunk lid and shambled back toward the clearing.

Malone backtracked. He was just in time to see Hinch step into the cabin and shut the door.

He settled himself in his original hiding place. It would be a long wait if they were starting on another bottle. He did not know exactly what he was waiting for. A chance. A break. Anything. They might not show at all. Or they might all get drunk and pass out. The whisky might do the trick. I’ll have to see where I go from there.

I should have taken the rifle. Why did I chicken out? I could have shot this Hinch in the brush. From ten yards away even the measly.22 cartridge in the right spot would have taken him out for good.

Yes, and what would the other two do to Bibby when they heard a shot?

No. Wait them out.

If only they hadn’t taken his revolver. There was always something reassuring about the Colt’s weight on his hip, even though he had never fired it except on the state police pistol range during refreshers, and once at a marauding bobcat.

He could see Ellen’s face. Waiting.

Ellen’s face wavered, and Malone became aware of another, immediate danger.

His eyes insisted on drooping.

Those damned four days and nights on duty, and that heavy cold before that. The couple hours’ sleep I got last night were an appetizer, worse than nothing. He began to fight the droop.

His eyes kept doing it.

He fought them desperately. He pushed them up with his fingers. But even holding them open did no good. The clearing shimmered, fogged over.

If they’re drinking in there they’re maybe frightening Bibby. Don’t be scared, baby. Daddy’s coming.

The sky began to swing like Bibby’s swing in the backyard. Up… down…

If I maybe shut my eyes for just a few seconds.