Jerry passed the truck and stopped at the newspaper long enough to scrawl a note to Duke, explaining what had happened, then he passed the truck again and drove furiously toward Seaford. He went by Salt Creek Bridge and parked his car in a pasture, then ran back to the bridge, made his way into the marsh and waited.
The trailer truck arrived, stopped, and put out flares, and three men got out. They jacked up the rear wheels of the trailer, then started to unload. By so doing, they had a perfect reason for being there. If a police car came along, they had only to explain that they had broken an axle and were replacing it, and that they had taken out part of their cargo to lighten the load until repairs were completed.
The stage was no sooner set than up the river came the flatboat from Creek House. It pushed its way into the marsh, toward Jerry. Not until the actual loading started did he discover his bad luck. He had taken a fairly well-defined path into the marsh. The path was artificial, made by the Kelsos. They had carried rocks to make both the path and the stone jetty to which the flatboat had come. The deception had worked, because the path and jetty surfaces, strong enough to carry the weight of men with heavy cases, were under an inch of mud and water!
Jerry had described the end simply. "They fell over me. I tried to get away, but there were too many of them."
But he had gotten in one good blow. His hand closed over one of the rocks of the path and he swung it effectively. The State Police, hearing his story, made a routine check of doctors and hospitals along the route the truck probably had taken; they assumed it would not turn around on the narrow shore road. The trucker Jerry had felled was in a small clinic two towns below Seaford, and an interstate alarm had gone out for the others, giving license numbers and descriptions supplied by the reporter. They wouldn't get far.
Jerry's luck had been bad, but Captain Douglas' luck had been good. The accumulated evidence probably would have been enough, but one of Brad's seamen had talked, hoping for a lighter sentence.
Rick was most pleased to find that his theory about Smugglers' Light had been close to the truth. The marks on the old tower had been made by a powerful light supplied by Brad Marbek. The light, once used for night purse seine fishing, was powered by a carbon arc. A cable, connected into the same junction box that supplied Smugglers' Reef Light, had furnished the power. The police officers had found signs of tampering in the junction box, but they had called the authorities responsible for the light to make a definite check. The light itself had been stowed in Brad Marbek's home. One quarter of the cylinder had been blacked out with paint. Red cellophane was pasted on to another quarter.
There were still no answers to who had phoned the warning to Rick, or why Carrots had trailed them into Whiteside, but those things weren't important, anyway. Probably their original guesses had been right.
The others had fallen silent, engrossed in reading Jerry's story. Rick went through it again, more carefully. The young reporter had done well. It was an exciting yarn. Then he looked at the "side pieces," other stories dealing with the case, written by both Duke and Jerry in the feverish rush to make the morning paper. There was a simple statement by Captain Killian, who long since was asleep in his own bed at Seaford. There was a photo of Rick and Scotty with the infrared camera and a story by Duke of its use in the collecting of evidence. The staff photographer had taken that one after they all returned to Whiteside, accompanying the police and the prisoners to jail. The entire back page was devoted to pictures, some reproductions from Rick's movie and some taken at the jail by the staff photographer. There was one of Cap'n Mike holding Carrots' rifle, and the caption explained how he had rescued the boys.
"How much per column inch did you say?" Rick asked Duke slyly.