Paul Kavanagh - Such Men Are Dangerous

On the way back he took a vial of pills from his breast pocket, swallowed two capsules without water, offered the tube to me. I asked what they were.

“Bennies,” he said. “We’ll be up all night.”

“I don’t want them.”

“You’ll need them later.”

“Maybe.”

He capped the vial. “Suit yourself,” he said. “Let me know if you change your mind. If you feel yourself slipping, speak up.”

I told him I would. He told me to drive back to the motel. I parked the Chrysler in the back. I started to get out, but he put his hand on my arm. He said my room probably wasn’t bugged but he didn’t want to take any chances. I agreed and said I wanted to get my maps. He told me to come back to the car.

The map was in my money belt but I hadn’t wanted to flash it. I took it out in the room and put all the Walker and Lynch identification in it. Then I changed my mind and returned the Lynch card to my jacket pocket. I returned to the car and we sat there in the darkness. He left the dome light off and used a pencil flashlight to study the map.

“I like the second ambush point best,” he said. “You know why?”

“No.”

“More space between access roads. And it’ll take them another ten or fifteen minutes to get there, and we need every extra minute we can get.”

“Okay.”

“We might pull this off, Paul. They’ve made it pretty easy, and then they complicated everything by screwing up the timing on us. And those four buggers with M-14s. I don’t like those four buggers with M-14s.”

“Neither do I.”

“I had a van lined up but that’s out. I had everything set. I had three long-haul movers booked for Thursday. They would come to an address in Pierre with their trucks empty, and they’d be tied up in a basement while I took their van. I booked three so that two of them could do a no-show and we’d still be covered.”

“That’s out now.”

“Don’t I know it. Wait a minute—”

I put a hand on his arm. “George,” I said.

He didn’t say anything.

“Just take it easy, George. Forget the elements that fell in. Let’s start with now. There are certain things we need. We’ll go over them one by one and find out what they are, and then we’ll see if there’s any way we can make it work.”

“All right.”

“We had a good thing planned but it’s blown to hell and gone. We have to start in fresh and there’s not much time.”

“Right.” He nodded slowly. “A van. Some highway signs, a couple planks and sawhorses. Forget guns. I’ve got a Thompson broken down in the back seat. In the suitcase. And a few extra handguns. Let’s see now, we’ll need—”

It was past nine when I got out of his stolen car and into my own rented one. I made myself forget how I felt about driving in snow and made the car do tricks all the way to Sioux Falls. It was a long drive, and it should have taken even longer than it did, but fortunately I had a maniac behind the wheel. I got in a fancy spinout once that almost took me off the road and into a tree, but the car somehow stayed on the road and I somehow got to Sioux Falls without getting killed.

I went to four trucking firms, plus four more that were closed for the night, before I found the man I was looking for. His name was Sprague, and his firm was Sprague Trucking Corp., and the sign on his desk said that this was a republic, not a democracy, and let’s keep it that way.

Another sign, on the wall, said, “I have an agreement with Hoffa/He stays out of my office/and I stay out of his cell!”

He looked up at me over a desk piled high with papers. He was a big man gone to fat, with a flushed face and a lot of unruly white hair. His beard stubble was white mixed with gray. He was wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the collar open.

I said, “Mr. Sprague, I’d like to talk to you in private.”

“We’re alone,” he said.

I took out the Lynch ID and handed it across the desk. He scanned it very quickly, nodding to himself as he did so. Then he snapped it shut and returned it to me. He stood up, a finger at his lips, and he walked in a half crouch to the door. He stood in the doorway, looking both ways like a well-schooled child at a traffic intersection. Then he cocked an ear — I have heard this expression, but I never before saw anyone do it. He cocked an ear, and listened, and then he closed the door and came back to where I was standing.

“Mr. Sprague,” I said, “I’m giving you the opportunity to serve your nation and the cause of freedom.”

I spent close to an hour in Sioux Falls and broke my own record driving back to Sprayhorn. A cop flagged me down outside of Oak Bend but my Agency ID changed his mind. He offered me a police escort. I told him I didn’t want to attract attention. He went back to his car and I went back to Sprayhorn.

The Chrysler was gone when I reached the motel. I went to my room and packed everything. I put my suitcases in the trunk of the car and gave the inside of the room a fast fingerprint wipe. There seemed little chance that they would fail to identify Richard John Lynch as Paul Kavanagh, but I saw no point in making it easier for them. If O’Gara’s snap of my ID got lost, and if I managed to wipe up my office before I left, I had a chance of staying covered.

When Dattner returned I told him I wanted a gun. “A cop stopped me,” I told him. “The ID changed his mind, but suppose he decided to take me in anyway? Give me something heavy. I want to knock down anything I wing.”

I picked out a .44 Magnum that was guaranteed to stop an elk. He had a spare shoulder rig, and I adjusted it over my uniform jacket and under my overcoat.

I told him about Sprague.

“Can he get men?”

“Four of them.”

“They might talk.”

“No. He’s not telling them what it’s all about. He says they’re politically reliable anyway, though what that means to him is anybody’s guess. But he won’t tell them what he wants them for until he’s got them rounded up and ready to play, and after that they won’t have any chance to talk. He’s got a good sense of theater for a trucker.”

“He sounds like a good man.”

“He’s gung ho, if that’s what you mean. He’d lead a charge up San Juan Hill if I told him to, but I think he’s an idiot. He has no idea what’s going on. For all he knows I’m Mao Tse-tung’s brother-in-law.”

“You no look Chinese.”

“I don’t think it would matter to him if I did.”

“Maybe not. Get any signs?”

I opened the back door and hauled out a metal frame with a rectangular sign that said men working. “The best I could do,” I said. “How did you do?”

“Pretty good.” He hoisted his sign, carried it over to the Chrysler. He opened the trunk, and I looked at two small sawhorses and a couple of detour signs. There were several little black smudge pots, too. “I had to get rid of the spare and the jack to make room,” he said. “Left them both on the side of the road, and all I could think of was what would I do if I had a flat. The answer was I would stop the next car and shoot somebody, but at this hour on these roads you can wait for hours for the next car.” He took out his pills and swallowed two of them. He offered them to me but I shook my head.

“You’ve got to stay alert,” he said.

“I’m all right. You’re eating those like candy.”

“Don’t worry about me.”

“You can get excessively hopped up on those, can’t you? I mean to the point where they get in your way.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ve used them before, I know how they work.”

“All right.”

“They beat falling asleep, I’ll tell you that.”