Donald Westlake - The Road To Ruin

That was as far as they knew. Unfortunately, they didn’t know everything. From time to time, on these trips, on some particularly empty back road, the wife would floor it, apparently just for fun, and all at once the Taurus would be alone on the road, poking along, following nothing. That’s when Ace started calling the Taurus the tortoise, which Buddy, who owned the car, took offense at, not even cooling off after Mac pointed out that the tortoise had won that particular race.

Something had to be done. They’d been staking out the Hall compound for weeks now, months, and except for the occasional gallop with the Mrs. they had nothing to show for it. They could only keep this stakeout going until their unemployment insurance ran out, which would be in just a very few weeks. Something had to be done.

As they drove along the country road, well back from the gleaming white Healey, the wife taking her time today, so far not zipping off unexpectedly over some hillock and out of sight, Mac said, “Listen, something has to be done.”

“We know,” Ace said.

Mac said, “Okay. What if we kidnap her ?”

Ace shook his head. “He’ll never pay.”

“She’s his wife .”

“He won’t pay,” Ace said. “You know the guy as well as we do, and he won’t pay. We could send him her fingers, one at a time, and he wouldn’t pay.”

Mac scrinched up his face. “ I couldn’t send him her fingers.”

“Neither could I,” Ace said. “Even if it would do any good. I’m just saying.”

“Besides,” Buddy said, steering around curves, keeping the Healey just barely in sight, looking from time to time in the rearview mirror, “ he’s what it’s all about. That was the agreement at the beginning.”

“None of us,” Mac said, “thought it would take this long.”

Ace said, “Sure. We thought he’d go out sometimes.”

“There used to be all these pictures of him in the magazines,” Mac said, “at the opera, at charities—”

“Hah,” Buddy said.

“Who knew,” Mac said, “he’d suddenly turn into a hermit?”

“It’s the publicity,” Ace said. “These days, he isn’t famous, he’s infamous, and he’s afraid to go out.”

“I don’t know,” Mac said. “I don’t wanna give up, but what are we doing here?”

“And it isn’t just for us,” Ace pointed out. “It’s for the whole local.”

“Hold on,” Buddy said. “Come on, lady, stop, then go.”

Up ahead, the Healey had reached an empty intersection, two minor roads crossing among evergreens, no houses or businesses around. The road they were on had the stop sign, and the Healey had stopped, but now it wasn’t moving on.

Buddy had slowed, not wanting to get too close, not wanting her to make a note of the Taurus and maybe remember it some other time, but he was also looking in the mirror again. “I got a guy behind me,” he said, “so I can’t slow down too much.”

Up ahead, a gasoline truck went slowly by, from left to right, explaining the wife’s delay, and once it cleared the road the Healey shot across the intersection and headed off around the next curve. Buddy accelerated to the stop sign, hit the brakes hard, the Taurus jolted to a stop that made Ace reach out to brace himself against the passenger air-bag compartment, and a black stretch limo crossed the intersection, also from left to right, very slowly.

Well, no. It didn’t cross the intersection; it entered the intersection, filled the intersection, and stopped.

“Now what?” Buddy said, and honked his horn. “Come on, Jack!”

Twisting around, Ace looked past Mac out the rear window. “What’s going on?”

Mac twisted around as well. Behind them was a big black Lincoln Navigator SUV, the most carnivorous vehicle on the road, the Minotaur of motoring. Both of its rear doors were open, and a man in a business suit and tie was getting out on each side. Both men wore sunglasses and were tall and thin and maybe forty.

“Holy Christ!” Mac said.

“God damn it!” Buddy cried. “They tipped to us!”

“Following the wife too much,” Mac decided, watching the men walk forward, taking their time, in no hurry.

“Lock the doors,” Ace said.

“Oh, come on,” Buddy said. “We’re past that .” And he rolled his window down.

The two men had reached their car now. The one on Buddy’s side bent down, hand on the Taurus roof as he smiled at Buddy and said, “Good afternoon.”

“Afternoon,” Buddy agreed.

“We thought maybe you’d like to join forces,” the man said. Across the way, the other man smiled at Ace through the window of his locked door.

So, Mac thought, these guys aren’t goons from the compound after all. This was something else.

Buddy said, “Join forces? Whadaya mean, join forces?”

“Well,” the man said, “we’ve got a stratagem aimed at Monroe Hall that doesn’t appear to be working out, and I’d say you gents also have some sort of plan in mind involving Monroe Hall that also isn’t working out.”

Buddy said, “Monroe who?”

The man’s smile was kindly, you had to say that for it. “You three have been staking out Hall’s place for weeks,” he said. “We’ve got enough Polaroids of you to fill a bulletin board. We’ve traced the registration of this car, so we know who you are, Alfred ‘Buddy’ Meadle, and we can pretty well guess who your friends are. Former coworkers. Mrs. Hall isn’t going to do anything interesting, she never does. We’ve got a nice stretch here, why not come on over, get comfortable, we can discuss the situation.”

“What situation?” Buddy asked him.

“I think we should do it,” Mac said. He didn’t know who these people were, but they looked to him as though they just might be the something that had to be done.

“The situation where we pool our resources,” the man said. His smile as he looked the Taurus up and down was pitying. “I believe we have more resources than you do. Your friend is right, you should do it. Why not leave your car on the side of the road here, and we’ll go for a spin in the stretch?”

IT WAS A WHILE before Alicia realized she’d lost the Taurus. She was just so used to it being there, in her rearview mirror, keeping its humble distance like a footman in a palace, that she hardly actually saw it any more, so it took a little while to realize she wasn’t seeing it. Her mirror was empty, like a vampire’s.

Had they given up, after all this time? She couldn’t believe it. They were so faithful in their fashion, following her everywhere, except for those moments when, just for the fun of it, she took them out to some extremely remote part of the countryside, suddenly accelerated, and zip, left them there. Other than that, they were always with her, like old dog Tray.

In fact, she mostly thought of them as the Three Stooges, bulky men hunched in their little tan Taurus. When the siege started—she supposed it had to be called a siege, however ineffective—they’d all worn plaid shirts, like lumberjacks on holiday, but as the weather had warmed they’d switched to T-shirts with words on them. She’d never been able to study those shirts, but she supposed most of the words were about beer.

The stop sign, that must be it, where she’d lost them. She’d had to wait for that gasoline truck to go by, but then she’d managed to dash across the intersection before that tasteless stretch limousine had arrived, and what was that thing doing in this neck of the woods?

It must have been the limousine that had made them lose her. Lord knows how long a thing like that would take to cross an intersection, so by the time the Three Stooges could once again take up the chase, their quarry was gone. What a shame.