TALBOTT ON THE TRAIL: A Clem MacDougall Adventure, Take III

III. THE PURSUIT AND THE CAPTURE.

Except for the flies and beetles trying to crawl up his nose and the dripping brush which had soaked him through every layer of his military-surplus fatigues, Sly Talbott was in his element as he made his way up Hickory Hill in the mist. He moved with surprising stealth, keeping his beady close-set eyes on the large woman who seemed to glide up the path twenty yards to his left, muttering guttural syllables to herself in some strange tongue. His face streaked with daubs of black and green greasepaint, Talbott stayed downwind and slithered through the woods like a reptile stalking its prey.

Tailing Gladys Weingarten from her elegant townhouse in the Millionaires' Village section of Excelsior City had been easy enough. Her hot-pink Cadillac had seemed to waddle through the traffic like a hippopotamus through a flock of ducks. The surprise came when Talbott saw the Cadillac pull into a rundown shed behind a rust-streaked trailer in the old hobo jungle on the edge of town, where freight trains rumbled through every few hours from all points of the compass. Parked in his nondescript Chevy Vega under a scrubby tree about fifty yards away, he watched Gladys Weingarten emerge from a side door in the shed and enter the trailer. Ten minutes later, a large woman stepped out of the trailer, wearing a shapeless muumuu and a spotted linen apron, her straw-gray hair braided into a single long tentacle which crept down her back, knotted with dry-looking sprigs of vegetable matter. She carried a covered wicker basket.

The woman had glanced about quickly, then started up a path which led from the hobo jungle up the side of Hickory Hill. Talbott followed.

Talbott was not a bad stalker, but sometimes he got a little careless. Since the woman was talking, or chanting, or whatever she was doing, so loud she sounded like a steam engine with leaky gaskets, he threw caution more to the wind than was his custom.

Suddenly, the woman stopped muttering and froze in her tracks. A split second later Talbott stepped on a bone-dry dry stick, which snapped through the silence like a rifle shot. He cursed under his breath and went rigid, standing directly in the woman's line of sight. She seemed to be staring straight at him. Her eyes grew bigger and blacker with every passing microsecond, until they gaped before him through the fog like new-dug tombs. He didn't twitch a muscle.

He breathed a bit easier when the woman looked away, as if she hadn't spotted him after all. She took a few more steps up the trail, still seeming to glide as if on silent wheels, and Talbott prepared to follow.

After that, things happened so quickly that Talbott's recollection was hazy when he made his report to MacDougall two days later:

"I thought sure she heard me, and there I stood with my face hangin' out, but she just turns away an' starts back up the hill again. She moved pretty quick and quiet for a fat old broad. But then she just disappeared in the fog, like, so I rushed forward before I lost track of her, and damned if, next thing I know, I'm not hangin' upside down with a rope around my legs, ten foot off the ground. And here's this big ugly ape of a guy -- you remember that gorilla from the bar who kept givin' us the finger the other night? Looked just like him -- with a big machete in his hand, wavin' it at me. Well, he cuts me down an' stuffs me in a big gunnysack an' throws me over his shoulder an' hauls me off to God knows where....

"Mr. Mac, I'm gonna have to charge ya extra for this job. I was so scared I peed myself."

"Never ye mind that." MacDougall tilted back in his desk chair and regarded his henchman through narrowed eyes. "Ye'll get paid, just as ye always do. What happened next?"

"There I am. This guy dumps me out on the stone floor of some cabin up in a hollow, maybe on top of Hickory Hill, but who the hell knows? He grabs me and ties me to a chair. And there's this woman I was followin', stirrin' this big pot of stew or something over the fire. She's cacklin' away as if this is all just about the funniest thing that's happened all year. She stops every coupla minutes to look in a big book on the table -- looked like one of them big dictionaries they keep in the library and nobody ever reads 'em -- and then tosses stuff from a basket into the big kettle over the fire."

MacDougall scribbled a note on the pad before him. "A big book, eh? Did ye get a look at it?"

"Hold on, Mr. Mac. I'm comin' to that."

"Oh, aye. Sorry tae rush ye. I know ye think ye're a master storyteller, and I know ye think ye're bein' paid by the word. Tell it your way, then."

"I'm awful dry, Mr. Mac. Ya still got that bottle behind them books?" He pointed to MacDougall's leather-bound set of the Green County Circuit Court Reports.

"Ah, ye're a bloody extortionist, ye are." MacDougall pulled out the 1963 and 1964 volumes and extracted a bottle of Old Overholt rye whiskey and two glasses. He poured out two fingers in each glass and replaced the bottle and the books with an air of finality which said this would be the full extent of Sly Talbott's whistle-wetting on this particular occasion.

Talbott sipped delicately and smacked his lips. "That's lovely, Mr. Mac. Thanks. Just about washes out the taste of that stuff they poured down my throat up there on the mountain."

"Eh? They made ye drink something?"

"Yeah. The gorilla guy, he grabs me by the throat and pries my mouth open and tilts my head back. Man, I'm gettin' awful tired of that guy grabbin' me."

"Damn it, man! Enough editorializin'! Just tell the blasted story."

"Right. Well, the gorilla guy won't be botherin' us any more, anyway. So, the gorilla guy holds my mouth open and the hag ladles out a big spoonful of this stew she's been cookin' in the big pot and pours it down my throat like she's stuffin' a Christmas goose. I never tasted nothin' like it, an' I hope I never do again. Dead cat, worm guts an' poison ivy boiled up in sewer water -- somethin' like that."

"I'd be interested tae know how ye recognized the ingredients."

"Oh, I'm just guessin', Mr. Mac. . The stuff tasted like my ex-wife's cookin', only it wasn't burned, and she wasn't naggin' me while she poured it down my gullet. I felt the stuff churnin' around inside me for a few minutes. Then I passed out." OH, DEAR. WHAT NEXT?