The Second Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 20 More Classic Mystery Stories

A moment passed while we faced each other. LaFarge was rubbing his shoulder, but if it hurt, he didn’t seem to mind.

“You’ve made it personal now, Rogers,” he said softly. “I’m going to enjoy taking you to the others. Enjoy it real personal, believe it.”

I looked at the piece of metal in my hand, useless now. I opened my fingers and watched the strap hit the dirty cement floor with a small explosion of grit.

Finally, I looked up and saw the bars banded over the image of LaFarge’s face. “Who are these others? What’s this all about? Why me, LaFarge?”

“Because you were in the right place at the right time, jimbo.”

“This is crazy!”

“Can you think of many things in this world that ain’t?” He slipped the handcuffs from his belt. “Cool it while you can, jimbo. I won’t take any more chances with you. Now then, you just stick your hands out here... both hands through the same opening between bars so’s I don’t hook you to the door... and we’ll fit the bracelets. Then the two of us will march the little distance to the helipad behind the jail and take a little trip in the Department chopper. You’d be surprised at the crime in this bayou country: poachers, moonshiners, thieves and killers. Chopper’s the only way to chase some of them down.”

The ride wasn’t as short as LaFarge had promised. He flew us due south until the shoreline of the Gulf was below. Then we followed the coast eastward. We whirred over a traffic-clogged expressway, bisected the wake of a tanker steaming to the busy port just below the horizon to our rear.

Streaming along far beneath us were Gulf-front homes with private docks, pink-and-white resort hotels claiming miles of cake-icing beaches, little white sails cavorting offshore.

Then the interstate veered north through a wilderness of piney woods and cypress trees dripping Spanish moss, and we veered south with the curve of a shoreline that lost all traces of people.

In eight to ten minutes, LaFarge put the shoreline to our tail, and a scattering of small wilderness islands slid beneath the Plexiglas bubble. None of these interested LaFarge. Then the finger, one-quarter pure plush and three-quarters raw jungle, came into view, and the chopper began to drop.

As we whirred closer to the estate, three people came out of the west wing of the palatial home and started jogging southward across the lawn.

“On their way to meet us,” LaFarge said.

“The others?”

“The others, jimbo.” LaFarge gave a short laugh. “Ten grand to me every time I bring them a tiger, jimbo. Helps a poor country sheriff make ends meet, though I don’t find a special nobody on a motorcycle every day who meets the purely rigid requirements. Make you feel any better, knowing you’re worth ten thousand dollars?”

LaFarge had settled the copter a considerable distance from the house, not more than a hundred yards from where the jungle began.

As LaFarge prodded me out with his gun, the three men who’d trotted from the house came to a halt, semicircled about me and looked me over.

They were all young, very close to my own age, dressed in khaki shorts, bush jackets, and laced boots. Each carried a carbine, lightweight brush guns, in the crook of his right arm.

I had a vague feeling of having seen them before, of knowing them from some time or place, which seemed impossible.

The man on my right was very tall and thin, with muscles like wire, a gaunt face, a corrugated skull that was already totally bald, though he was only in his middle-twenties.

Facing me most directly was a heavyweight whose dark face and build reminded me of LaFarge. On his flank, the third member of the party was tall, broad-shouldered, round-faced, with ash-blond hair done in the wildest Afro style I’d ever seen.

“Rogers,” LaFarge said, “meet the Quixote Hunt Club. Hepperling the bald. McMurdy with the beef. And Convers, the panther here with the big blossom of white hair.”

I knew, hearing the names, why they hadn’t seemed total strangers. I — along with millions — had met them at a distance in newscasts and Sunday supplements.

Hepperling meant sugar millions; McMurdy, shipping; Convers, oil. The three were the latest stems on family trees that in all branches meant a good slice of a billion dollars in economic wealth and power. For each of them the coming of age had meant trust funds, allowances, and inheritances the rest of us wouldn’t risk dreaming about. The three might have pooled their resources and bought themselves a small, undeveloped country rather than a mere island.

As Quixotes, they’d frequently made headlines; crashing a plane and disappearing in Alaska for a week after a Kodiak hunt, going after jaguar in restricted tribal grounds in South America, creating an international incident when Kenyan authorities had arrested them for poaching bull elephants, and they’d taken pains to insult the Kenyan government before a bank of international television news cameras.

LaFarge was saying, “Rogers is completely safe, fellows. No family ties, no close friends. Nobody to ask the first question about his disappearance.”