F.B.I. Showdown: A Classic Suspense Novel. Gordon Landsborough

expect anyone buttin’ in here, do you?”

      Frank’s eyebrows came suddenly together as he glared back down the track. He growled, “What are these cars, anyway? Find out before we start. For crissake, we can’t have people we don’t know looking on.”

      The party turned, Hymie among them, only Hymie wasn’t bothering to stop drinking while he looked. There were plenty more bottles of beer in that luggage compartment, he had noticed, and right now he could do with several himself.

      Two cars were jumping up towards them. Frank was glaring down at them as though exasperated. He was saying, “Why do people have to pick on this place tonight? You don’t get a car in a fortnight normally, and tonight....”

      Then another man, with a thin nasal, northern twang, interrupted. He said, “Quit worrying, Frank, They’re some of our cars. Heppy got a blowout, coming along Glades, an’ a coupla other cars stopped to give him a hand. One came on after; guess these are the other two.”

      Hymie did stop drinking then. He realised abruptly that strangers weren’t wanted in this party, and he had blundered into it under circumstances that had momentarily misled these men.

      But as he stared back down the track he was thinking that at any moment now they were going to discover him. They were expecting two cars—what would they say when three came?

      Hymie decided to get around as much beer as he could before they started to look for a strange car in their midst, As he drank he saw the two cars come roaring up, and then saw a third back among the trees.

      He waited for the exclamation that would prelude his exposure, but surprisingly none came. Then he realised that all the men, including Frank, were momentarily distracted by the bottles in the luggage compartment. The last car was within the circle by the time they straightened up and took another look round.

      Frank held a bottle by the neck and spoke again before departing. He had the kind of red rough face that comes from playing golf a lot, and the chins and facial curves that come from talking golf in the clubhouse for long hours after...and drinking along with the talking. He said, “Now look, you just keep watch back there like I said. Start blasting your horns if you see anything. Get me?”

      They stopped drinking long enough to assure him they’d got him, and at that he swung his big limbs into motion and went across to the big automobile that had led the party. Hymie, watching along the top of an inverting bottle, saw him call and wave to some other sporting types like himself, and they all came across and pulled a big bundle out of the back of the car.

      What followed took place less than thirty yards from where Hymie stood drinking, so that he heard and saw everything quite clearly.

      So, when he noticed that the long bundle was a gagged and bound man, he jerked the bottle away from his lips and stared.

      He saw them drag the prisoner upright, and there was an unnecessary roughness in the way they handled him. Again Hymie had that feeling of excitement—an excitement that had a touch of mob-hysteria about it. And then he knew that these men were up to something big and bad and against the law, and he stopped drinking because he didn’t like being mixed up in illegal activity. He had also begun to get an idea of what was going to follow, or he thought he had....

      Frank was the centre of the group. He was doing a lot of shouting and working himself up into an anger. Hymie, who was small, was in consequence an observer and not a doer of things, and he knew the signs because he had seen them many times before. Frank was wanting to do something that most men can’t do in cold blood, so he was working himself into a fury in which he’d be able to do anything that his bullying, sadistic soul demanded.

      Hymie looked around at the rest of the party and thought that there was probably not much to choose between any of them and Frank. Probably it was this common denominator of sadism that had brought them together in the first place.

      They took the bonds off the prisoner, except for the ones that tied his wrists together. Then they shoved him roughly from behind and made him walk across to the solitary oak in the glade. Hymie looked up and saw a right good lynching branch there, and the idea came to him that though the light wasn’t the best right now, he’d maybe get some good pictures of what would follow.

      He walked across to his car. He didn’t sidle across, didn’t make any furtive little movements that could have made men suspicious. The idea just came to him to get some pictures, so he stumbled across the open ground and got his smallest camera out and no one took any notice of him.

      That was the incredible part of the whole business, how Hymie got his pictures with everyone there to see him taking them, and nobody getting het up or anything.

      The truth, of course, was everybody assumed that Hymie must be all right to be there, and when he sat himself on top of his car nobody looked at him because of the absorbing tragedy that had begun under the oak tree away from the cameraman.

      So he sat and from time to time took shots of the murder of a man by this blood-lusting mob.

      Frank was doing most of the pushing and talking, but a few of his friends weren’t much behind. One of them, a man not much bigger than Hymie, but without Hymie’s fat weight, tore the tape off the man’s mouth and then hit him on the side of his chin. Hymie saw something white fly out of the prisoner’s mouth and guessed they were dentures.

      The little man was shouting excitedly. “Now talk, you son of a—! Now let’s hear what you got to say!”

      But the man couldn’t do any talking for the moment. He stood there in the last rays of sunshine, and the way his pursed up mouth moved around Hymie guessed he was tasting blood from the blow.

      The prisoner had turned, so that now Hymie could see him clearly, and he got some excellent pictures of him standing there.

      He was a pretty tall man, though a stoop robbed him of height. He was very spare and middle-aged, and he didn’t have much hair except just above his ears. The way he screwed up his eyes, Hymie thought that he probably wore glasses normally. Without his teeth he looked to have a very small face, but most people do look like that without plates to lengthen their faces.

      He stood and faced his aggressors, and his sunken features showed no trace of fear. Frank was working himself into a passion of rage.

      “Goddamn him,” Hymie heard him shouting. “Lynching’s too good for the buzzard. So why don’t we do what the Ku-Klux-Klan would have done to him? What say we burn him, eh?”

      He was bawling his head off, getting himself excited and trying to work up the passion of the crowd at the same time. And they didn’t need much stirring. They had come here for a lynching, so they were mostly much of a mind, and burning a man seemed a more interesting variation on the theme.

      A lot of men started shouting along with Frank, and they all put a growling note into their voices so that it sounded very stark and jarring up in those foothills with the peace of evening closing in around them.

      Hymie had an idea that a few of the men said something against burning the prisoner, but they didn’t shout so loud as Frank and they shut up very soon, as if they weren’t too minded what happened, anyway.

      The little fellow who did a lot of sonofabitching came up with a rope and started to tie the prisoner to the oak. Then someone else started to collect dry sticks, but Frank roughly told him, “Don’t be a dope! We got better ideas than that,” and went away and then came back with a can of gasoline.

      The prisoner was doing some talking now, as if realizing which way the mob was heading, but Frank kept shouting for him to shut his goddamned face, and that kept most of the crowd from hearing what the fellow was trying to say. Frank was red-faced and excited. This was the moment he had been leading up to, but he didn’t show the pleasure that the scene gave him because that wasn’t the part he was playing right then. Instead, he had to keep up this fearful rage, this anger that seemed natural upon righteous indignation.

      And somehow you don’t enjoy things as much when you have to keep yourself red-eyed with fury all the time.