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

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?”