I jounced the little Porsche around the deep-rutted drive and parked next to the empty frame building that had once been the restaurant and bar.
I had plenty of time to think, for Dr. Whitney didn't arrive until two hours later.
It was sometime during those two hours that the Claggett gang smashed their way through a police roadblock just outside Lima, their guns blasting reply to the machine-gun bullets peppering their big sedan. Two policemen were seriously wounded; one died on the way to the hospital.
Shortly afterward, the bullet-riddled sedan was found by the roadside, but only one of the gang was in it. He was dead.
And some time later, a call aroused Sgt. Falasca from a sound sleep. He didn't even take time to don his State Police uniform, but merely pulled a trenchcoat on over his pajamas, got his revolver out of the bureau drawer, and kissed his wife on the way out the front door. He had three other State Troopers to pick up, off-duty as he was, before proceeding to the assembly point at Lima.
The Claggett gang had split up, some of them probably wounded, each of them armed and more dangerous than ever. They were wanted for murder now.
Dr. Whitney made the trip by helicopter, of course—the head of a scientific instrument company must keep up appearances. He'd waited as long as he could, hoping the weather might clear, then had taken off on instruments and reached the lake by ADF gridmap. He settled to the lake surface and crept in to shore, his landing lights probing the thick curtains of rain.
I heard the hollow roar of his turbine, rather than the throb of his rotor blades, and hurried around the slanting wing of the old hotel to meet him. The lakefront presented a macabre view that wrenched at my memory. The desolate, cracked-stucco walls with the black holes of their windows rising from mounds of rubble beside me, a weed-grown lawn and a straggle of trees half-masking the lake—stark-looking trees now, in the 'copter's landing lights—and a small boat-dock leaning half into the black water.
Once, as a rather obnoxious young high-school student, I had seen this lakefront on just such a night. A steady rain fell, lightning flickered, and thunder blasted its anger ... and, for a moment, I saw it as it had been, with that grand old British pioneer of space flight, Arthur C. Clarke, standing out there in the pelting rain with his camera, taking pictures of the lightning!