“Sawmill. The car’s there.”
He sounded more confident than I felt, but he was right. When we approached the outline it became a building surrounded by other outlines, and closer up they became stacks of lumber. I saw the car first, off the road, in between the second and third stacks, which were twice as high as my head. We went up to it. It was a car all right, an old Chewy sedan, and the hood was warm to my hand, but it was empty.
“What the hell,” I said. “No driver? I have no road map.”
“He’ll come.” Wolfe opened the rear door and was climbing in. “There’ll be four of us, so you’ll have to ride with me.”
I put the knapsacks in, taking care not to drop them on his feet, but stayed out on the ground. With my hands free, I had a strong impulse to get the Marley in one and the Colt in the other, and I had to explain to myself why it would be a waste of energy. If someone not Danilo arrived I certainly wasn’t going to shoot on sight, and I wouldn’t even know what his viewpoint was until Wolfe interpreted for me. I compromised by transfering the Colt from my hip to my side pocket.
It was Danilo who arrived. Hearing footsteps, I looked around the corner of the lumber pile and saw him coming down the road. When he was close enough to recognize I took my hand out of my pocket, which shows the state of mind I was in. According to me, he was as likely to saw off our limb as anyone. He turned in, brushing past me, went to the car and spoke to Wolfe, turned, and pronounced a word that sounded something like Steven. Immediately a man appeared beside him, coming from above. He had jumped down from the lumber pile, where he had been perched, probably peeking down at me, while I had been talking myself out of drawing my guns.
“This is Stefan Protic,” Danilo told Wolfe. “I have told him about you and your son Alex. Seen anything, Stefan?”
“No. Nothing.”
“All right, we’ll go.”
Danilo got in with Wolfe, so I circled the car and climbed in beside Stefan. He gave me a long, hard, deliberate look, and I returned it as well as I could in the darkness. About all I could tell was that he was some shorter than me, with a long narrow face that certainly wasn’t pale, and broad shoulders. He started the engine, which sounded as if it would appreciate a valve job, rolled into the road, and turned right, without turning his lights on.