by Jerry eBooks
And then, one night when he was on duty in the medical ward, he thought he could hear the bugs swarming inside his own skull for one terrible second.
Fesden got rid of that feeling right away. But he knew what his getting it meant. He was going stir-crazy!
He was still all right, but if he didn’t get out of here, quick, he wouldn’t be all right long. He had to get out! He had to get out of here tonight and leave Galt to die with his secret locked between his thin, blue lips.
Galt wouldn’t die with his secret! Fesden had figured that long ago, and he knew he was right. When Galt knew he was about to die, he’d tell someone. He’d tell . . . he’d tell Bert Corbett.
No! No, damn it!
Not after the four years he’d spent trying to worm that out of the old fool. Not after all he’d gone through. If Galt didn’t tell Wolf Fesden, he’d tell no one.
Fesden remembered the bottle on the stool by Galt’s cot, the bottle of stuff to stop the coughing spell the old man always got around five in the morning. Doc Lowrey had said never to give him more than ten drops in a half glass of water. There was morphine in the colorless mixture, and a little too much would put the old man to sleep permanently.
Fesden knew just what he was going to do! He’d go around there, get talking to the guy on duty in there, watch his chance to kick Collucci’s cot, near the door. Collucci always started coughing like mad when he was waked up sudden, so while the trusty was fussing with him, Fesden would have a chance to dump a big gob of the morphine mixture in the water glass that would be waiting ready on Galt’s stool.
This done, Fesden decided, he would go down to the kitchen and start boiling the coffee for the guards. He’d take the little pillbox of veronal from behind the sink and spill it in the coffeepot, and he’d make the coffee extra strong so the guards wouldn’t notice the taste of the veronal. And then . . . and then he’d wait till half past four and walk out of Lornmere. As he was going over the wall, the trusty would be putting ten more drops of the morphine mixture in the glass—would be giving Galt the dose that would finish him and his secret together.
Murder? Sure. But he’d be in the clear. If they tumbled, it would be the other trusty would catch hell. Abruptly Fesden’s lank jaws opened in a silent, wolfish laugh. He’d-just remembered who was on duty in the T. B. ward. Corbett! That made it perfect.
He stopped laughing and went out of his ward, and went down the hall to the door of the lung room—and stopped in that doorway, his mouth going dry, his eyes slitting.
A green screen was around the head of Evar Galt’s bed! That meant Galt was kicking the bucket! Tonight! And not only that, there was a sound of voice from inside the screen. Bert Corbett was in there, and Galt was talking to him!
II.
Wolf Fesden went down the length of the T. B. ward, the thick soles of his prison shoes making no sound on the concrete floor. He reached the screen and went down on one knee, and laid his ear against the green burlap.
“The devil you’re dying,” he heard Corbett say. “I just put the screen around you to keep the light out of your eyes.”
“Don’t . . . try to . . . deceive me.” Galt’s voice was a mere shadow of a voice, as if he were a ghost already. “I’m . . . dying. I’ll never . . . leave this place . . . alive.”
How could he get Corbett out of there?—Fesden thought frantically. How could he get to the old man, to tell him this was his last chance to talk, his last chance to take care of Mary? If that didn’t work, he’d tell him he’d snatch the kids, he’d snatch Mary, he—By Moses! He’d terrify the old fool into spilling—
Wait! What’s this Corbett was saying? “—good news today, and I want you to know it. My parole’s coming through. I’ll be out of here in a week.””
“Glad—” That ghostly shadow voice again. “You’ve been . . . kind . . . eased my last days.”
“Tried my best, but it wasn’t much. Look, Mr. Galt. If there’s anything I can do for you when I get outside, give your daughter a message or anything, I’ll be happy to—”
“Message?” the dying man gasped, and Wolf Fesden stopped breathing. “To . . . Mary? Thank Heaven! Bert . . . lift me . . . nearer you.”
“Sure.” Creak of rusted spring, rasp of harsh cotton sheet on harsh prison nightshirt. “There. That better?”
“Kind . . . so kind—” Galt’s voice was now so faint that Fesden, listening finger to chin, had to close his eyes to hear it. “Listen, lad. Tell Mary . . . Mary Lane . . . 230 Morris Street . . . tell her . . . Frog Creek Railroad . . . Bridge . . . west side . . . north abutment . . . dig . . . dig—” That rasping was a long sigh as an old man’s last breath left his wasted body. It was the scrape of harsh sheets as skin-bagged bones settled down into them.
Fesden was on his feet and out of the ward, his clodhopper shoes on the concrete floor as silent as his lank-jawed laugh. Stir nuts, was he? Screwy, was he? But Evar Galt had told him his secret at last, and that Corbett had heard it, too, didn’t matter in the least because Corbett wouldn’t be out of Lornmere for a week. By that time Wolf Fesden would be a thousand miles away from the railroad bridge over Frog Creek, just outside Sea City, and the jewel case no bigger than a camera would be with him.
Brewing the coffee in the hospital kitchen, pouring the pillbox full of veronal into the pot, Fesden kept silently laughing to himself. Only a second he stopped laughing, when the thought struck him that if he put in too much of the white powder he might kill the guards instead of just putting them to sleep. Then he remembered that he’d worked it out, experimenting with the stir nuts.
The guards came tramping in, the six of them, and Fesden kidded around with them, and he thought it was very funny that the coffee they were drinking to keep them awake was going to make them fall into a sleep from which they wouldn’t wake till morning. He even picked up Jim Carroll’s rifle, and squinted through its sights, and knew he could shoot with it as well as he’d shot when he was a sniper in the War.
They tramped out. Fesden started watching the clock over the stove for the half hour to pass that he figured he’d have to wait till the guards were safely asleep in the towers.
It got quiet in the hospital kitchen, so quiet that the clock’s ticking was like a fast little hammer, tapping his skull.
There were footfalls walking along the hall outside! Hell! Doc Lowery had come in for a late look-around, like he sometimes did.
The knife drawers were locked, but Fesden snatched up a heavy wooden potato masher. He switched off the kitchen light and opened the kitchen door, soundlessly.
In the dim light from the ward doors he saw a slender figure going toward the front end of the hall. Not Doc Lowery! White coat, striped trousers—it was Bert Corbett. What was he—
Corbett stopped at the phone on the wall just inside the door of the hospital, the emergency phone they used to call Doc from his house outside the walls in case he was needed in a hurry. Fesden grinned with relief. He ought to have known. Corbett was calling the Doc, of course, to tell him that Galt had passed out.
Doc would grunt sleepily, say: “All right. Wash him up and I’ll sign him out in the morning.” He always—
“Doc?” Corbett said into the phone “Galt’s gone, Doc . . . No. I got the dope out of him, the last moment.” Wolf Fesden’s skin got tight across his forehead. “Yeah,” Corbett said. “Yeah. I’m sure glad this job’s over. I’ll never let myself in for another one like it.”
He was a lousy dick! A plant! Fesden went down the hall, his feet making no sound. “Look, Doc. Will you get me a line through to—No. I guess I’d better not risk spilling it over the phone. Tell you what. You phone Mr. Boswell for me. Tell him to get me out of here first thing in the morning.” Fesden was right behind him, the potato masher’s handle gripped tight in a sweating hand. “Thanks, Doc. Thanks for everything. Night.”
Bert Corbett put the receiver back on its hook. Fesden swung, the masher against the back of the detective’s shaved skull hard. So
hard the bone crushed in like papier-mache.
Wolf Fesden dropped the wooden mallet on the crumpled heap at his feet. His gaunt jaws opened in the noiseless, yellow-fanged laugh that had given him his moniker. Nobody was going to get Corbett out of here in the morning. Nobody was ever going to get him out of here. And he wasn’t ever going to tell anyone Evar Galt’s secret.
A minute later Fesden was out of the hospital. He walked briskly, but unhurriedly, toward where the end of the guardhouse jutted out of the outer wall. There were no windows there, but there was a little door and he was watching it. There was a chance, the barest chance, that door might start to open—
His spine prickled with the sensation of eyes on him! He didn’t move his head, but his own eyes slid sideways, focused the low bulk of the administration building. A single window was alight in the dark wall, a yellow rectangle black-striped by the cage of bars over it. The light silhouetted the form of a man standing in the window, peering out at him. The deputy warden!
Fesden’s throat went dry, but he didn’t hurry his pace, didn’t change his direction. He still had twenty feet or so to go, and he had to get across those, at least, before things started to pop. There was a good chance he might make it. He had the white coat of a hospital trusty, and only cons with the best of conduct records rated that. If he acted like he had every right to be doing this, the warden might figure that one of the guards on the reserve patrol had phoned for him to bring over some bicarb for indigestion or creosote for a bum tooth.
Fifteen feet more. Ten feet. Fesden’s long legs ate up the concrete and still no yell. Nothing. Five feet. Now! He veered into black shadow in the angle the projecting side of the guardhouse made with the wall—bounded to the corner.
His toes found roughness of stone. His back found stone behind it. He was hitching up the wall angle, knees and back as a mountaineer ascends some Alpine “chimney,” as he himself had done so many times to reach some second-story window left unlocked because it was “impossible” for a thief to reach it. His shaven head came above the guardhouse roof, into the light again—
An incoherent yell broke the prison silence. Fesden gained the roof, leaped for the iron ladder, was climbing it with monkeylike swiftness. “Escape!” the warden shouted. Fesden threw a glance over his shoulder, saw him leaning out against the bar cage, saw his arm clawing for a gun.
“Escape!” the warden yelled again. There was rattle of door bolts below Fesden as he reached the wall’s top, leaped into Tower 1, at the head of the ladder, snatched a rifle from the hands of the sleeping guard, was out again in the open. The hinges of the guardhouse door creaked as it started to open. The warden’s arm flung out through the window bars, pointing out Fesden and aiming his revolver in the single act.
The pound of that revolver, the rifle’s sharper crack, were one sound. Fesden heard whistle of futile lead past him, saw the warden slump in the bar cage, heard shouts, thud of running feet beneath him.
The reserve guards! They’d opened the door too late to see the warden point. They’d never think of looking up here. Wasn’t the wall covered by the men in the towers?
They were pouring across to surround the administration building, to skirt the hospital, looking for the killer. Fesden put the rifle down on the runway, let himself down over the outer edge of the wall.
He hung by his hands an instant, glancing narrow-eyed down at the next tower, where the wall turned. Tough luck, he thought, that bloke had to look out of the window just at the wrong time, so he’d had to bump him. But it could have been lots worse. The guy could have been a better shot, or the wall could have been built straight up and down instead of sloping out a little, like this.
Fesden let go. He slid down, keeping hands and face away from the rasping granite. That threw him away from the support of the slight slant, but his free fall was only about eight feet, and he landed in soft grass. He leaped to his feet at once and darted across a wide belt of close-cropped turf to the black mass of bushes and second-growth trees beyond it.
Dew-wet leaves, twigs, slapped his face. Then he’d gone far enough in so that the illumination from the wall no longer made bright spangles in the darkness. He slowed, worked deeper into the thicket, only a slight rustle betraying his movements.
The pale glimmer of three slender birches gave Fesden his direction. The earthy smell of leaf mold was in his nostrils and there were sudden scutterings about him as small woods creatures were disturbed by his passage. A glacial boulder, moss-covered, blocked his way. Instead of going around it, Wolf Fesden dropped to his knees, shoved against it with his hands, muscles straining across his back with effort.
A low moan began, back where he’d come from. It increased in volume, swiftly, till it was the enormous howl of Lornmere’s siren. The boulder started to roll, moved more quickly, was stopped by a hummock of earth behind it. Fesden’s steady hand felt in a hollow in the ground where the big rock had rested, found the suitcase-sized metal box he had buried here four years ago.
The siren probed the night with its howl, rousing the countryside. Under it lay the roaring chug of the prison’s big pursuit cars, filling with armed men. For fifty miles around State troopers were rushing to bar the crossroads and warn late-traveling autoists not to let themselves be stopped between towns on any pretext. Householders were waking to doublelock doors, windows. A radio operator’s drone was broadcasting Fesden’s description and teletype wires were carrying it to the police of seven States so that they could watch the entrances to their cities for him.
Wolf Fesden knew every mesh of the net that was being thrown around him, but his hands were unhurried as he peeled off the adhesive tape that sealed the box against rot and mildew. He lifted the lid, propped it open on its hinges. In spite of the tape, a musty odor came up out of the box, and the inside of the lid’s edge felt sticky with mold.
A pallid searchlight beam scythed the sky, then slanted down to lay its glare on the river. The siren howled, deep-throated, heart-stopping. Fesden calmly stood up, unbuttoned his white coat and shrugged out of it, ripped open the buttons of his striped convict pants. The roar of the pursuit cars rose to a muted thunder that surged away down the road that led from the penitentiary. He sat down on his discarded clothing, noted that the sound of one of the cars stopped moving, backfired to silence. That would be the one that would lurk where the highway curved out of sight of the walls, waiting to shoot him down if he came out on it from the thicket. He unlaced his clodhopper prison shoes, swiftly but deftly.
From the direction of the howling siren, bushes started to rustle with the movements of the keepers assigned to comb them. Wolf Fesden reached into the box, took a hairy wig from it. He adjusted this to his shaven poll, recalling how many hours he’d practiced doing this just right in the dark. He found a flannel shirt next, corduroy trousers.
Flashlights flickered like fireflies in the Stygian foliage. Men called to one another hoarsely, something in their voices betraying the fear that was denied by their bluster. The threshing, wide-spaced line came on slowly, relentlessly, to flush Fesden and drive him out into the glare of headlights on the road.
He rose, fully dressed, bent, put his betraying prison garb into the empty tin box, closed it. Straightening, he went around behind the boulder, shouldered it down again over the hole.
The night throbbed with the incessant howling of Lornmere’s siren. It filled the air with alarm—and covered whatever small noises Wolf Fesden made as he pushed in between two interlacing bushes and waited.
Trees, bush leaves, abruptly became a black, shimmering pattern against light that struck through into the small clearing around the boulder. Wolf Fesden stiffened. A bluish-barreled revolver pushed a low bough away from in front of a heavy-jowled, wet-streaked face topped by a uniform cap. A keeper shoved through the bushes into the little opening.
He pulled in breath, wiped his forehead with the edge of his left hand, the beam from the flashlight it held darting across the leafy ceiling over
him. Fesden’s long arm shot out. The keeper’s mouth gaped open, but before the shout could come out, the stone in Fesden’s fist crunched against his forehead. The convict caught the flashlight as it fell from numbed fingers, caught the keeper’s body in his other arm and let it down gently to the ground.
Instantly, he pushed into the shrubbery, moving noisily in the same direction as, but dropping farther and farther behind, the line indicated by the rustlings and the blinkings of the other torches. After a minute or two, he clicked his own light off, stopped, stood taut, listening.
The noises the cordon of hunters made kept moving on through the thicket. Fesden laughed silently, slipped off to the right, toward the river.
Guards scanning the wide waters with the searchlights, intent on spotting a swimmer or a small boat, never thought to look directly beneath them where a tall, gaunt shadow flitted along the base of Lornmere’s towering outer wall. Police at the ferry to Ashley, a mile to the north, saw no reason to stop or question any of the roughly clad, yawning workmen who trooped past them and aboard the morning’s first boat.
One of the workmen was tall enough to match the description of the escaped prisoner, but he was hatless. While this Wolf Fesden might have procured some civilian clothes somewhere, he couldn’t have grown a thick shock of hair overnight, could he?
III.
“You’re a murderer!”
J. Latham Boswell, looking in pajamas and bathrobe like anything but the vice president in charge of Claims and Recoveries of the Sea City Burglary Insurance Co., licked fat lips and goggled at the man who’d called him that.
“You killed Bert Harris the day you sent him to Lornmere to pigeon Galt, under the name of Bert Corbett,” John Porter went oh, lowvoiced, gray eyes accusing, knotted small muscles ridging his blunt jaw. “That was no job to hand to a youngster just breaking in.” His undersized, deceptively slender frame quivered with rage. “It’s a wonder he lasted as long as he did with that gang up there.” The only hint about him that he was the singular bright star of the company’s private detective force was the puckered bullet scar over his left temple that was not quite covered by hair as black as midnight.