Read Online Cop Out by Ellery Queen - Free Book Online Page A

shutting the door with a bang.
    â€œYes, this is the one. Somebody named Pratt, William J. Pratt. Signed the lease May twenty-third. How’s that for a memory? You want to see this, Wes?”
    â€œIf you don’t mind.” Malone took the lease as casually as he could manage. William J. Pratt typed in. The signature unreadable. Deliberately so, he was positive, a disguised handwriting. It had to be a phony!
    For Hyatt’s benefit he produced a list and added the name and location of the cabin to it. He could have found it with his eyes shut. He could taste it. He handed the lease back and rose. “Thanks a lot, Tru. I’ll check this one out with the others.”
    Hyatt waved. “Think nothing of it.”
    The real estate man went back to his mail, still a little miffed. Malone jumped for the Saab.
    The description on the lease placed the cabin at the southeast end of Balsam Lake where it narrowed to muddy shallows. It was the least desirable section of the Lake. According to Malone’s list, “Pratt’s” rental was the only one in this scattered cabin area that extended beyond the summer season. Made to order for a post-season hideout.
    He drove off the blacktop into a lane, little more than a dirt path, and cached the Saab behind a clump of diseased birch trees in a thicket of wild huckleberry bushes. The bushes were nearly bare, but they made a tall tangle and they camouflaged most of the car. He draped fallen evergreen branches over the parts that showed, and when he was satisfied that the Saab was effectively hidden he left on foot.
    He was a mere three hundred yards from the cabin, but his approach took the better part of a half hour. After a few yards he got down on his belly. It was the Marine game of his boyhood over again, traveling on hips and elbows, never raising his head above the underbrush, avoiding dried-out branches, sticking where he could to the cushioning ground pine. He made so little noise that once he surprised a squirrel on the ground; he could have killed it with a stone.
    At last Malone reached the clearing.
    He did not enter it. The clearing had been hacked in a rough circle out of a thick stand of pine woods and along its perimeter wild azalea, laurel, and sumac had taken root in an almost continuous band of bush. Here Malone settled himself.
    He had a good view of the cabin. There were some expensive handhewn log structures along the Lake, but most of the cottages were of cheap clapboard or shingle construction, labeled “cabins” by the Balsam Lake Properties Association, whose brochures leaned heavily toward fiction. The “Pratt” cabin was a slapped-together shack of green-painted shingle walls streaked with years of damp. It had a badly weathered shake roof and a midget open porch with two sagging steps. The power line that provided its electricity dropped in from above the woods and hooked onto a naked insulator attached to the outside of the house. A bluish haze seeped out of the tin chimney pot on the roof. Like all the Lake cottages it used propane gas for cooking; Malone could see the silvered tank at the side of the cabin.
    The haze coming out of the tin vent told Malone what he wanted to know.
    The cabin was occupied.
    They were there.
    Malone had been lying in the bushes for almost two hours—he had just looked at his watch, it was half-past noon—when the door of the cabin opened and a man stepped out. He was not wearing a mask but his face was in shadow and Malone could not make out the features. He was sorry now that he had not stopped in town to pick up a pair of binoculars or at least borrow a pair from Jerry Sampson at the drug store, well it was too late for that. The man was a very big man with very heavy shoulders and Malone knew he was the one the small man had called Hinch.
    The man looked around and then he jumped off the porch and strolled toward the woods east of the cabin. Malone got a good look at him in