Vanishing Act by Thomas Perry Page A

must have damaged them prying them off somebody else’s, so they left their holder on to cover it." She was busy pushing shells into the long tubular magazine of the shotgun. "They’re waiting for us up there somewhere. If we go back the way we came, we’re a half hour from anywhere crowded enough to lose them."
    He checked the load of his pistol and then snapped the cylinder back into place. "There’s a box of ammo in my suitcase," he said. "I’d like to have that where I can reach it before we go ahead."
    "We’re not going ahead. We’re not dogs, remember?"
    "What, then?"
    "Take the backpack. Put your money in it, or whatever else you think is worth saving. Don’t leave anything here that will tell who you are—I mean tell anybody, even the police. Wipe off everything you touched."
    "We’re going to walk?"
    She didn’t answer, so he quickly did what she had told him to. The money wouldn’t all fit in the knapsack, so he put some of it in his pockets. Jane put her leather bag over her shoulder and held her shotgun in her right hand. "Time to go," she said, and walked across the road. She swung her legs over the stone fence and into the empty cornfield beside it, then stood still as he hurried to catch up.
    "All right," she said. "Walk only on the trenches between the rows. That’s the way the farmers do it because the corn is planted in the raised places."
    "You care about their corn?"
    "No, I care about leaving footprints you can see with a flashlight."
    She started off across the cornfield, taking two rows at a step, and Felker followed. She could hear him coming along behind her, and it made her comfortable, because if he had stepped on the soft ridges of dirt, it would have been silent. Now and then he stopped to glance up the highway, and that put him behind, but she didn’t care. He was tall and strong, and he wouldn’t have any trouble keeping up.
    She angled away from the barnyard, where there would be animals to smell them and bring the farmer out. When they reached the windbreak of trees at the north end of the field, she stopped and touched Felker. He leaned down and she put her lips to his ear. "We’ll watch from here."
    She set down her bag and sat on it, leaning against a tree trunk, the shotgun butt on the ground and the barrel upward. Felker slipped the backpack off his shoulders and sat by the next tree. It took five minutes. The Chevrolet’s headlights came over the horizon, aimed first up into the sky and then dipping at the crest of the hill. The car was moving fast, at least seventy, judging from the way it gobbled up the space between the telephone poles.
    When the driver saw the car parked by the side of the road, he slowed down. There were no heads visible in the borrowed Ford, so the driver had a decision to make. The Chevrolet veered to the center of the road and passed the parked car at about the speed of a walking man. It proceeded a hundred yards farther, and then its lights went out before it stopped. The doors opened and three of the four men got out and started to walk back along the road.
    Jane didn’t see the dome light go on, and she didn’t hear any door slam. None of this was reassuring. The one in the car left the lights off and kept going down the road, then stopped and turned around. It was too far from the parked car for Jane and Felker to have heard it if they were hiding on the floor. The three men on foot spread out when they were still a hundred feet behind the parked car. Two of them went into the fields behind the stone fences on either side of the road, and all three slowly approached the car. When one was in front of it and one on each side, they stopped, pulled guns out of their coats, and aimed them at the Ford.
    Felker leaned close to Jane’s ear and whispered, "If we’re going, shouldn’t we get started?"
    She shook her head. "I want to see one more thing."
    The Chevrolet began to move slowly up the road toward the parked car, its lights still off.