Flagg smiled a little and then frowned. Of course, that was it. They were storing the bootleg in the underground tanks. But it made his job that much more difficult. They brought the bootleg in the tankers from the point where it was being made, and he had no idea where that was. He had hoped they had the actual still operation here at Tru-Test. That would have made things one hell of a lot simpler.
He listened to the machinery sounds coming through the wall and thought about the door marked no admittance. With the moon being stored here, and distributed from here, they were obviously bottling it here, too. He knew what he would find on the other side of that door: a long three-sided roller belt, with stainless steel machinery along it which would fill, cap, label, and stamp the bottles of “Old Pilgrim,” with a direct pipeline to the storage tanks outside. But he didn’t need to get a look inside there, now.
Patiently, Flagg allowed fifteen minutes to pass by his wristwatch and then he closed up the toolbox and unlocked the door and stepped into the warehouse. He found his way to Door 5. Lou was writing on the clipboard again. “All fixed?” he asked as Flagg approached.
“Yeah.”
“What was the trouble?”
Flagg made up something.
Lou laughed. “I’m glad I don’t have your job.”
“Sometimes I wish I didn’t either,” Flagg said sourly. “Well, hang in there.”
“You too.”
He went down the steps and put the tool kit in the rear of the panel. He drove back to the front gate, and the same guard came out of the sentry box. “That was quick.”
“Sure,” Flagg answered. “That’s our motto.”
The guard opened the gates and Flagg drove out and turned south on Hathaway Road. He parked the rented panel in the parking lot behind a supermarket in Emmetville a quarter mile away. In the rear, he changed out of the coveralls and the baseball cap, back into his fishing clothes. Then he retrieved the camper and drove back to a spot on Hathaway Road where he could watch the main gates of Tru-Test through a pair of binoculars.
Half an hour later, he saw the diesel tanker come out through the gates. It turned south and passed him. Flagg waited until it got a good distance down the road, then started the camper and swung out after it.
The tanker turned west onto a county highway just before Emmetville. The highway looped around to the north, bypassing the town, and then swung east, climbing into the mountains. Flagg followed at a discreet distance. They had gone some fifteen miles when the tanker turned off onto another county road, this one in relatively poor repair. A mile into there, it turned again, this time onto a packed earth road flanked with signs reading PRIVATE PROPERTY-TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.
Flagg passed by, looking up the private road. A couple of hundred yards along he could see two men with rifles. A third man was swinging a heavy wooden gate open to allow the tanker admittance.
Flagg followed the county road for another mile, turned around, and came back again. The tanker had disappeared, and the gate was closed. The men were still there.
He drove directly to Barney’s Oasis.
Cabin 15 had green shutters and an old, rusty-framed swing in one corner of its narrow porch. Flagg knocked on the door. After a moment it opened and Terry Kenyon looked out. She was wearing the short miniskirt and tight white blouse that composed her waitress uniform.
“Are you alone?” he asked.
She nodded, standing aside, and he went in. The interior was furnished spartanly, but it was clean and had a comfortable feminine touch. Flagg barely glanced at it. He put his hands on her shoulders. “Listen, how well do you know this area?”
She didn’t draw back from his touch. “I grew up in Emmetville,” she answered. “What is it, Flagg? Did you find out something?”
“Maybe,” he said, and told her where he had followed the tanker. “Do you know where that private road leads?”
“To an old abandoned mine. There are a lot of them around here, from the old gold rush days, I suppose.”
“Anything else in the area?”
“Just woodland.”
“What about this mine?”
“Well, for a while it was turned into a gravel pit. Some special kind used in making concrete. But even that was abandoned, about ten years ago. I remember that a lot of gravel was taken out of the base of the hill, so that the pit almost reached the main mine shaft.”
“It’s still abandoned, as far as you know?”
“I heard that somebody had bought the property and was going to reactivate the pit,” Terry said. “But if they’ve begun yet, I wouldn’t know about it.”
“Okay,” Flagg said. “Now, is there any way in there besides that private road?”
“The road itself only goes as far as the gravel pit. There’s a spur track which comes in from the other side and reaches all the way up to the mine tower. I think it goes inside the hill through an auxiliary tunnel there.”
“Foot trails?”
“None that you could follow for very long.” She paused. “Do you think that’s where the moonshine is being made?”
