Cop Out by Ellery Queen Page B

the Lake in November.”
    â€œThat’s not so. A few people from downstate rent cabins by the year—use them for weekends after the summer season. We patrol that Lake road the year round.”
    Ellen was considering his argument stubbornly. “I don’t know. It sounds too dumb to me. I mean robbing and killing and still planning to hide out for any length of time within walking distance of where they did it. It seems to me that’s the last thing they’d do.”
    â€œAnd maybe that’s just why they did it,” Malone insisted. “Who’d think of looking for them practically on the scene of the crime? The more I think about it the more I’m sure we’ve got something. I’m going to find that cabin, Ellen. Do you feel up to staying here alone while I scout around? I don’t think they’ll try coming back before dark.”
    â€œDon’t worry about me. Do you think you can locate it in one day, Loney? There’s an awful lot of cabins around Balsam Lake.”
    â€œI’m not starting at the Lake. I’m starting in town.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œIf they rented a cabin, it had to be through a real estate agent.”
    â€œLoney, be careful! You’ll get people suspicious asking questions.”
    â€œNot if I do it right. I wish to hell I knew how the real pros go about a thing like this.”
    â€œJust keep remembering Bibby. Please, Loney?”
    She clung to him, begging with her whole body. He kissed her and pulled away. She remained in the kitchen doorway.
    Malone went upstairs. As he was rummaging through the clothes closet in their bedroom he suddenly remembered his hunting rifle. He had not used it in years. Had they searched the upstairs before he got home last night and found it? Ellen might have forgotten to mention it.
    It was still on the top shelf of the closet, wrapped in oil rags.
    He took it down and unwrapped it. After all this time not a speck of rust. That was one thing the Marines had taught him, how to take care of a weapon. With the rifle in his hands the tiredness was rubbed out. He felt around on the shelf and found the boxes of .22 long-rifle cartridges.
    You pulled a boner, Mister Furia.
    He could have shouted with joy.
    But he stood there, weighing and sorting. As he weighed and sorted the tiredness came back.
    Not with Bibby in their hands. And a .22 wasn’t much. You could kill a rabbit or a fox with it, but a rabbit or a fox wasn’t a man with a Colt Trooper and a Walther automatic. I wish I could have afforded that .303 at the discount store. But the shells for it came to five-six dollars a box. Or that M-1 carbine they had on sale.
    â€œLoney, what are you doing up there?”
    He rewrapped the rifle and stowed it along with the cartridges at the rear of the shelf and went out into the hall to the linen closet and got some bathmats and went back and covered the gun and ammunition.
    He changed into sneakers and put on his oilstained green-and-black plaid hunting jacket and cap and went back downstairs. Ellen was still standing in the kitchen doorway.
    â€œWhat were you doing up there?”
    â€œDon’t let that bag out of your sight,” Malone said, and left.
    Malone drove the Saab off The Pike a few hundred yards north of the cloverleaf into the gravel driveway past the gilded white sign T. W. HYATT & SON REAL ESTATE and pulled up before the one-story frame building. It was his fourth stop of the morning.
    He went in.
    â€œHi, Edie.”
    â€œWell, if it isn’t the lawman,” Edie Golub said, looking up from her typewriter. There was a pencil stuck in her dead-black-dyed hair. “Don’t shoot, Officer, I’ll come quietly.” She was one of the girls from high school who wouldn’t give him the time of day. She had never married. “Don’t you ever crack a smile, Wes?”
    â€œI’m off duty, I guess I can risk it,” Malone said,