A Question Of Time, Fred Saberhagen [best fiction books to read .TXT] 📗

half parking lot, surrounded by pine woods, much used by summer crowds. Now the place was all but deserted, only one other car stood there, besides the Pontiac.

      Three men were sitting in this second vehicle; Smith was behind the wheel, Brainard beside him on the right, and Preston in the rear seat.

      “We’re just gonna sit here for a while,” Smith was saying. “No hurry, is there? We got all day, right?” He turned his head slightly. “Pres, was there anything else you wanted to do this afternoon?”

      “Nope.” Preston was lighting a cigarette. He made no move to offer a smoke to anyone else. “I got all day. Nothing I want to do but sit here this afternoon and talk about money. How the man we work for is going to recoup a certain investment.”

      Brainard had nothing to say. Pale and shivering, he was staring straight ahead of him, at the band of snowy woods some distance beyond the windshield.

      “I want some suggestions, Brainard. Deadbeat.”

      “I don’t have the money to pay you now. I—”

      The speech ended in a yelp. Preston had reached forward to burn the back of Brainard’s neck with his cigarette.

      “Just sit still, sweetie. That’s not what I call a suggestion. You’re gonna come up with some better ones than that.”

      “Nobody here in this part of the park,” Smith remark conversationally. “You couldn’t plan to find a deserted place like this around here at the holiday season, could you? But it’s our lucky day. I’m waiting, deadbeat. How are you going to come up with a hundred and twenty grand?”

      “I’ll pay it,” said Brainard. He started to pull his coat collar up, covering the back of his neck. Preston behind him pulled it down again.

      A moderate snow was falling. “They say,” said Smith, “that sometimes the whole park gets snowed in for days.”

      “No tourists in sight anywhere,” said Preston from the rear. “No rangers. Nobody here but us. We’re waiting, deadbeat.”

      He burned Brainard again.

* * * * * *

      And then, suddenly, they were not alone. The figure of a bearded man, wearing a broadbrimmed hat, was standing at the edge of the woods. And then purposefully approaching the occupied vehicle, passing the empty Pontiac.

      Brainard made a little sound, almost too faint to be called a groan, deep in his throat.

      “What the hell now?” remarked Smith.

      Drakulya stopped some twelve or fifteen feet in front of the car. He stood there motionless, hands in pockets. His lips moved and he was saying something.

      Smith ran a window partway down, and the voice of the man standing outside could be heard plainly. “Mr. Brainard, patience. You will shortly be free to leave.”

      At those words Brainard made a convulsive effort to open his door. The man behind him grabbed him by the collar and pulled him forcibly back into his seat. Then Preston opened his rear door and got out of the car, which resettled itself on its springs with the removal of his considerable weight.

      “Get lost, punk,” fur-collared Preston told Mr. Strangeways. “Go chase the squirrels somewhere. This is a private conversation.”

      Brainard started a desperate cry for help, a cry he choked off when the man in the driver’s seat beside him jabbed him with an elbow.

      Drakulya looked from one of Brainard’s captors, behind the windshield, to the other who stood in open air. “Mr. Smith, I presume? And Mr. Preston? I see it is too late to urge you to allow this man to leave the Park unharmed. Well, I suppose I must make allowances. I hesitate to interfere in the collection of a just debt. So may I ask—”

      “I already told you once,” interrupted Preston. “I told you nice, go chase a squirrel. You wouldn’t listen. Okay.” He strode forward purposefully, heading straight for Mr. Strangeways.

      At the last moment, just before he reached his goal, a frown as of puzzlement appeared on Preston’s face.

      Then he reached out for the waiting Strangeways. But the grip he wished to obtain had been pre-empted. Mr. Strangeways already had him with both hands by the front of his furred jacket, and a fraction of a second after that Mr. Preston squawked aloud, in sheer surprise that his body had so rapidly become airborne. He made a shrill noise for such a large man. And for a mere breather he was quite well-coordinated, able to execute a kind of dance step in midair, a doomed attempt to regain balance that had, alas, already been lost forever.

      His body, carefully aimed, smote with considerable force the front end of the occupied but motionless vehicle. In the first phase of the impact, the flying man’s legs struck the hood. A fraction of a second later his bulky torso crashed into the sloping windshield. Strong glass caved in, but did not shatter. The hurtling body glanced from the deeply slanting surface, mounting almost straight up into the air for a distance of several car-heights before coming down on pavement covered with, so far, only a very inadequate padding of new snow.

      Even before Preston’s body had undergone this secondary impact, Drakulya was standing beside the driver’s door, pulling it open. Incautiously Mr. Smith had neglected to fasten his seat belt, a fact which did not escape his caller’s notice.

      Taking the back of his second subject’s neck firmly in one hand, and with the other seizing the steering column just below the wheel, Mr. Strangeways brought the two together with an effort that approached the maximum force he could exert.

      A fraction of a second later he was recoiling in startlement, and hissing his annoyance as he realized that this part of the exercise would have to be done over again. His effort with the steering column had only succeeded in popping an airbag, leaving Mr. Smith hardly worse than disconcerted, rather as if a shotgun loaded with creampuffs had been fired in his face. Smith tried to wave his arms, and let out a rabbit-like squeak that some listeners might have found comical.

      But Mr. Strangeways still had him by the