There was no disturbance. Thirty yards from the front door he pulled the car to a cautious stop and got out. He started to walk toward the building. Each step seemed to take whole minutes, and everything he had thought raced through his mind again.
Nothing seemed to move anywhere, except Malone himself.
Was he right? Were the PRS people really here? Or had he been led astray by them? Had he been manipulated as easily as they had manipulated so many others?
That was possible. But it wasn’t the only possibility.
Suppose, he thought, that he was perfectly right, and that the PRS members were waiting inside. And suppose, too, that he’d misunderstood their motives.
Suppose they were just waiting for him to get a little closer.
Malone kept walking.
In just a few steps, he would be close enough so that a bullet aimed at him from the house hadn’t a real chance of missing him.
And it didn’t have to be bullets, either. They might have set a trap, he thought, and were waiting for him to walk right into it. Then they would hold him prisoner while they devised ways to....
To what? He didn’t know. And that was even worse; it called up horrible terrors from the darkest depths of Malone’s mind. He continued to walk forward, feeling about as exposed as a restaurant lamb chop caught with its panty down.