Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 7, No. 9, September 1962

Burkett dispatched an agent into San Manuel for a driver and a pickup to transport Smetana’s body back to Santo Tomas. Burkett signed a release for the conductor, warning the crew to remain available for questioning. Then the late train moved out fast to meet its schedule.

In the gray light of that quiet day’s dawn they unloaded the entire car of its cargo. Clear to the duckboards on the floor. Long before they had lifted out and examined the last crate, Randolph had given in to a growing despair.

But Burkett put it into words. “Somewhere we have misread our leads. We’re off on a side trail into a box canyon.”

They were standing, dirty, damp, and disheveled, beside the track. There was suddenly nothing more to be done. Burkett was gloomy. His investigation was collapsing around him.

“Here we stand,” he said, “in the middle of the great Indian reservation, with our fingers up our noses and somewhere a madman has control of a blast maybe big enough to hoist a hundred and fifty thousand people into outer space.”

“There is radio,” Randolph said. “Pass the word. A massive net could be thrown around Phoenix with Army and Air Force personnel. A search could be made of every conveyance from a baby carriage to a Diesel tanker.”

“And aircraft?”

“Those, too.” Randolph studied the railroad car. “And this. Those are thick walls. There could be spaces hollowed out between them in the insulation.” He looked down at the heavy tracks. “It may be possible for a clever machinist to design a device that would look like a part of the rolling gear. Have them leave the car here, Burkett, and ask for someone with detection instruments to go over it.”

“I’m away ahead of you there,” Burkett said. “I radioed a request when we were at Santo Tomas. Technicians are on the way.”

There was nothing more for them here. They loaded Smetana into a pickup truck that the agent had commandeered. A shiny-faced fat Papago driver had no words and no interest in the blanket-wrapped body. He took off toward Santo Tomas. The pickup clattered tinnily over the washboard road with its tailgate chains rattling loudly in this quiet desert dawn.

An early trucker, wheeling a tarpaulin-covered one-and-a-half ton stake truck, thumped slowly over the railroad crossing in the pickup’s dust. The discouraged men standing by the unloaded car could hear both vehicles for a long time.

Now the agents could load themselves into vehicles and depart. For Randolph, again alone with Burkett, there was a vision of a long cold shower and twelve hours of sleep.

“Somebody is going to be unhappy about those cantaloupes,” he said.

“Don’t bother me with details,” Burkett said. “They are the least of my worries.”

Randolph had an idea of the way Burkett felt. This just wasn’t the kind of job you worked at for eight hours and then walked off and forgot.

The early morning sun was laying its orange paint and blue shadows across the land. The smell of stirred dust along with the background odors of mesquite and creosote bush came through the open window. Randolph drove around a long bend in the road. Ahead was the big tarpaulined stake body truck, using all of the road. It pulled slowly over at the command of Randolph’s horn.

Yellow dust coated the russet tarp and lay deep in its folds. And Randolph, as automatically as any law enforcement officer, noticed the, license plate as they drove by, and was more interested in it.

Once ahead, he found himself still thinking about that license plate. For one thing, it was a Sonora plate. For another, its numbers were S 6-65-67. He said them to himself again, in Spanish, In either language, they were a mouthful of sibilants. Ending in seven.

He was abruptly wide awake. He sat up straighter, startling Burkett, who was dozing. Burkett said, “Bee sting?”

“We’ve got to stop that truck.”

“What for?”

“Did you see the license?”

“With my eyes closed?” Randolph repeated it slowly. Burkett looked at him sharply.

Randolph said, “We assumed Gomez was shot from the train. We overlooked the fact that the train was backed up to the fence. The shot could have come from Mexico. I heard a truck starting up immediately after the sound of the shot. It could have been this one—”

“How?”

“It could have rolled east out of Santo Tomas along the fence. Then there is a locked gate south of San Manuel, but the Border Patrol is always finding the lock cut. The Papagos don’t like to have to come clear to Santo Tomas to cross the border if they happen to want to go south in a hurry.”

Randolph’s eagerness reached Burkett. He said, “To any sane man, it sounds like a straw. But at this point I’m grasping for them. We can try.”

So Randolph chose a site a hundred yards from the Santo Tomas junction to set up his road block. It was on a little knoll. They got out, two determined men, and waited for the oncoming truck in the freshness of this quiet morning.

Their shadows lay long in the dust behind them. Here in the road, Randolph thought, may lie the destiny of a city. Of a country. Or of the world.