Charlie was famished, dehydrated, and otherwise spent. Worse, his sweat had seeped into his wounds, along with sap, turning each step into its own ordeal. They had negotiated underbrush and low-hanging branches for miles. Even Drummond was breathing hard.
Finally the woods thinned, providing a glimpse of the general store’s yellow clapboarding. It felt like coming upon an oasis.
Charlie stopped behind a bush to study the area. The only vehicle in sight was the rusty Chevy pickup, in the same spot as this morning. The dirt lot and vast, colorless fields surrounding it offered hiding places. Although Drummond had been mostly cloudy throughout their trek, often humming discordantly, Charlie looked to him now to devise a tactic for approaching the store.
He found Drummond ambling out of the woods.
Praying this meant his countersurveillance software was firing, Charlie caught up to him.
“What are they called again?” Drummond asked.
“Who?”
“Those birds.”
“What birds?”
“Woodland birds with brown camouflaged plumage. Known for their degree of challenge as game…”
“I hope you don’t mean snipes?”
“That’s it, snipes, thank you.”
Charlie’s heart turned into a jackhammer.
“They search for invertebrates by stabbing at the mud with their bills with a sewing-machine motion,” Drummond went on.
“What made you think of snipes?”
“The woods, I guess. An interesting piece of information is the first sewing machine was invented by a French tailor in 1830. He nearly died when a group of his fellow tailors, fearing unemployment as a result of the invention, burned down his factory.”
Crossing the field, Charlie couldn’t shake the mental image of himself and Drummond seen through crosshairs.
As Drummond ushered him into the store, there was a gunshotlike crack.
Just the door-Drummond had let it fall too fast into the frame in his rush to inspect the snack aisle.
Charlie’s relief lasted maybe a second. The store itself, with five tall aisles and a crowd of large, free-standing racks, had a dark-alley feel. The reedy teenager behind the counter seemed to be the only person present. TUCKER was stitched onto his gas station attendant uniform shirt. Tobacco ballooned one of his cheeks. His sleeves were rolled up past his biceps, revealing a tattooed likeness of racecar driver Dale Earnhardt and a second tattoo of a dagger dripping blood.
After the bodega on Ludlow Street, Charlie couldn’t help wondering whether Tucker was a plant. He quickly dismissed the notion. Vaudeville would do a Tucker with greater subtlety.
When his index finger reached the end of a paragraph in the sports section, Tucker looked up, spat a string of tobacco juice into an oilcan, then took in Charlie and Drummond. Most of their scrapes and bruises, along with the tears in their clothing, had been impossible to cover up.
“How y’all doin’?” he asked warily.
“Better, now that the hunting trip from hell is over,” Charlie said.
“Been there,” Tucker said with understanding. “So whatchy’all be needing?”
“For starters, do you sell any clothes?”
“Yes sir, there’s tons down there.” Tucker waved at the central aisle.
Like the other aisles, it was crammed floor to ceiling with all manner of provisions. This was the sort of store where it’s a challenge to find something they don’t carry, and where there almost always was a Racing Form.
“And magazines?” Charlie asked.
With his newsprint-blackened finger, the kid pointed to the far wall, where a magazine rack ran the length of the store.
Following Charlie to it, Drummond asked, “We were on a hunting trip?”
Thankfully Tucker was engrossed again in his newspaper.
“If being the prey counts,” Charlie replied.
The magazine rack was packed with hundreds of publications. Few weren’t pornography. The Daily Racing Form’s iconic bright red masthead shone like a beacon. While pleased to get it in hand, Charlie felt a trickle of depression that the publication central to his existence was used by clever and righteous men to transmit messages without fear that anyone of consequence would see them.
The masthead appeared to perk up Drummond. He pulled a copy from the rack and flipped as if by habit to the classifieds, which ranged from offerings of services to personals and want ads.
“So I’m guessing it won’t be as simple as ‘Wanted: spy to come in from cold ’?” Charlie said.
“It would be encrypted.”
“Any idea how?”
“Bank code, maybe?”
“What’s bank code?”
Drummond shook his head as if to align his thoughts. “I mean book code.”
“Okay, what’s book code?”
“Take this here.” Drummond pointed to the ad placed by Theodore J. Tepper, a lawyer specializing in quickie divorces. “The numbers in his address or phone number might really be page numbers.”
“Of a book?”
“The first letters of the fourth lines of those pages, say, would spell out the message to us.”
“What’s the book?”
“We would need to know.”
“If your friends know we’re on the lam, would they expect us to go find a Barnes amp; Noble? We were lucky just to get the Racing… ”
Charlie let his voice trail off as Drummond thrust a finger at the ad below the divorce lawyer’s.
Stop Duck Hunting! (212) 054-0871
“Duck means Drummond Clark,” Drummond exclaimed.
“How’s that?”
“If you drop out all but the letters beside D, U, C and-?”
“Got it,” Charlie said with mounting excitement.
Drummond’s brow bunched in skepticism. “On second thought, it doesn’t feel right.”
“Why not? You’re being hunted, the Cavalry’s trying to stop it, and this can’t be a real ad. If you’re an animal rights advocacy group, the Daily Racing Form is the last magazine you’d expect to rally support, save maybe the Daily Cockfighting Form.”
Drummond tried to find the handle on what was troubling him.
Charlie stabbed at the 212 area code. “Also the area code’s Manhattan. Where we were when the Racing Form went to press.”
“There are a lot of organizations in Manhattan.”
“But the only thing anybody hunts for there are apartments that rent for less than two thousand bucks a month.”
“Radio silence is maintained during all battlefront operations,” Drummond said. Another recitation.
Regardless, Charlie got the point. “What’s to lose by calling them?”
Drummond’s eyes widened in alarm. “On the telephone?”
“The Ministry of Voiceprints, right. How about if we have the kid over there speak for us?”
Drummond shrugged. Which was better than a no.
They approached the counter. While pointedly unfolding a twenty-dollar bill, Charlie said to Tucker, “I was hoping you would call a number for me and ask when and where the meeting is. It’s, how can I put it…?” He writhed in discomfort, as he imagined someone calling about an AA meeting would.
“No problem, sir,” said Tucker, happily accepting the twenty.
Charlie wrote the number between the greasy fingerprints on a scrap sales receipt. Tucker uncradled the wall phone, mouthed the numbers to himself as he read them, then dialed. Charlie made out a faint ringing followed by a greeting from a deep male voice.
“Afternoon, sir,” Tucker said into the mouthpiece, “I’m calling for a customer who wants the info for the meeting.” He listened for a moment, studying Charlie and Drummond meanwhile, as if per something the man on the other end was saying. Placing a hand over the mouthpiece, he said to Charlie, “He needs the name of your calculus teacher at Clara Barton.” If Tucker thought the request was strange, he kept it to himself.
Huddling with Drummond, Charlie asked, “What do you make of that?”
“A false subtraction cipher, maybe,” Drummond said.
“What is a false subtraction cipher?”
“I–It’s on the tip of my tongue.”
“Hang on for just a bit, sir?” Tucker said into the phone.
Charlie asked Drummond, “Could it just be a straight question?”
“Why would they do that?”
“If they suspect we’re too addled to remember what false subtraction is. Also it’s the sort of information that wouldn’t have made it onto any database. But you might have told it to a friend.” Drummond had followed Charlie’s progress in math like other fathers did their sons’ accomplishments on the ball field.
“I’m sorry, Charles, I just…” With a hangdog look, Drummond sought refuge in the Racing Form.
“Mrs. Feldman,” Charlie told Tucker.
Tucker repeated the name into the phone, listened, and relayed to Charlie, “The meeting’s at seven thirty at the Montezuma Restaurant on a hundred sixty-fourth.”
“Dad, Montezuma Restaurant?”
“A Mexican restaurant?”
If the clock above the refrigerated shelves was accurate, it was now 2:10 P.M. Charlie estimated they could make it to New York by 7:30-if he drove like Dale Earnhardt. Which would entail having a car. The Cavalry man had had no reason to think they were on foot, but surely he knew, as soon as his phone rang, where they were.
Charlie turned to Tucker, “Can you ask if he means tonight, or-?”
Tucker was glaring at the receiver, as though that would chasten the man on the other end of the line for the abrupt hang-up.
Charlie huddled with Drummond. “Could ‘Montezuma Restaurant on one sixty-fourth’ be code?”
“What isn’t code, really?” Drummond said.
Charlie might have considered the question profound, but Drummond’s eyes were bobbing along with the hot dogs on the roller grill.
Charlie reflected that he and Drummond had demonstrated proficiency with the Drummond Clark-to-Duck cipher. So maybe the Cavalry was rolling with it.
From a spinning rack stuffed with road maps, he plucked one that included Monroeville and its environs, then tried to apply the cipher to 164th Street.
There was no 1st Street in the area, no 6th either. No Route 4, no 4th Street, no 4th anything. There was a narrow Country Route 1 ten miles north of Monroeville. Also, a few miles up Country Route 1 was a tiny blue soldier icon, labeled MONUMENT. And by dropping certain letters from Montezuma Restaurant…
Charlie’s thoughts went to an old track axiom: “If you hear hoofbeats behind you, it’s a horse.” He felt the horse’s breath on the back of his neck.
But what about the time of the rendezvous? 7:30 would mean five and a half hours to kill. Or to be killed-7:00 helped, but not enough; 0 would mean midnight, by which time their bones might be licked clean by buzzards; 3:00 was doable.
If they had wheels. Drummond could surely hot-wire the old pickup parked outside. But absconding with it would entail either bringing Tucker along or incapacitating him so he couldn’t call the cops.
“Charles, what do you say I treat you to lunch?” Drummond said, digging a sheaf of bills from his bowling pants.
“Is that the motel manager’s money?” Charlie asked, delighted as much as anything by the measure of justice in recouping his $157.
“No, the fellow who also lent us his wristwatch.”
They’d strapped Cadaret’s watch to a stick and floated it down the first stream they came upon. When tying him up, Drummond must have “borrowed” his wallet too.
Five hundred dollars bought four hot dogs, two big bottles of Gatorade, the road map, two pairs of dungarees, two coats, a pair of sneakers for Drummond, and the decrepit 1962 Chevrolet short bed Tucker probably would have happily parted with for just the price of a fifth hot dog.
The truck’s engine coughed rheumatically on ignition and the tailpipe sprayed the yellow clapboards with black oil. But soon enough, Charlie and Drummond were on their way to the monument, at fifty miles an hour, and in excellent spirits.
“All things considered,” Charlie said, “we really owe that Cadaret a nice note.”