barn. The acid is up in the loft, eight glass jugs of it buried under some moldy hay. You won’t have any trouble finding it, because there’s also a few five-gallon cans of paint hidden with it.”
“Right,” I said.
“When you get back, mail the money. I’ll call you within a week, as soon as I know for sure who it’s going to be.”
“That long?”
”They’ve got to wait at least till you reopen the place, haven’t they?”
They apparently watched every move I made. I felt like a man trying to set up housekeeping in a lighted display window. “All right,” I said. “Incidentally, where are you calling from now?”
“You’re cute.”
“Where did you call from before?”
“Why, I thought I told you. From somewhere else.” She hung up.
* * *
Traffic was only moderate on the highway. I could see five cars strung out at varying distances behind me as I settled down to about forty-five and started checking them in the mirror. About half a mile ahead, on the right, was the El Rancho motel. I glanced at it as I went past. It was in the same class as the Spanish Main, only perhaps somewhat larger. It looked as if there were twenty-five or thirty units spaced around the semicircular drive, with a pool and a lot of colored umbrellas and lawn furniture out in front. Apart from all the rest of it, she was bucking rough competition in the motel business.
Three of the cars passed me and went on out of sight at about sixty or sixty-five. Another joined the two still behind me, coming up from far back. It passed the three of us and disappeared. Neither of the other two made any move; forty-five appeared to suit them perfectly. When I came to the concrete bridge we were still strung out in the same order. I saw the mailboxes, marked the location of the dirt road, and began easing in the throttle until I hit sixty. They dropped back, and in a few minutes were out of sight. About ten miles ahead I spotted a road leading off to the right. Wheeling into it, I parked just around the first bend and walked back to where I could watch the highway. In two or three minutes they went past, still traveling at the same moderate rate of speed. I was in the clear. I turned and went back. When I came to the mailboxes and swung off into the dirt road there was no one behind me and nothing coming from the opposite direction except a big tandem rig.
I passed the two farmhouses in the first mile. Beyond the cattle-guard, the road deteriorated into an unfenced and poorly graded affair running through scrubby pine and palmetto. Dust boiled up to hang in the still hot air behind me. The road tilted up a slight rise after another ten minutes and the cleared fields appeared, sloping away to the right. They were abandoned, grown up with weeds and dead, brown grass. A pair of ruts turned off the road into the old farmyard at the top of the slight grade. I swung into them and stopped the station wagon in the shade of a lone tree growing in front of the foundation blocks and the fire-blackened monolith of the chimney where the house had been.
When I cut the ignition and got out, the drowsy stillness of summer afternoon closed in around me. There was something peaceful and timeless and utterly isolated about the place that made it almost attractive. A painter would love it, I thought. Heat waves shimmered above the brown and empty expanse of the fields stretching away towards the timber beyond. The old barn, gray and weather-beaten and its roof full of holes, leaned in an attitude of precariously arrested collapse some eighty or a hundred yards away. I crushed out my cigarette and walked down to it through the brittle weeds. Some kind of burrs stuck to the legs of my trousers and shoe-laces. The door was at this end. It was closed, but I could see no padlock on it. Above it was a small square opening through which I could see the edge of the pile of hay in the loft.
The door was secured with only a doubled strand of baling wire pulled through two holes and twisted together on the outside, but when I had unfastened it I had trouble forcing it open far enough to squeeze inside because of the sand that