by Jim Thompson
Falling, he triggered the gun; it was all he could do now.
Instantly Rudy whirled, gun blazing, whirling the woman in front of him. But his bullets passed above Doc, and Doc’s drilled through the woman and into him.
And in seconds they lay dead on the ground, one of Rudy’s hands still holding her arm behind her back.
From a couple of blocks away, the cabdriver heard the racket. But he did not place it as coming from Golie’s, and certainly he did not connect it with his recent fares. Then he saw Doc and Carol running down the street toward him—and, hey! look at that old gal run, would you?—and puzzled he stopped the cab and got out.
“Somethin’ wrong, folks? Somebody givin’ you some trouble?”
“Yes,” Doc told him. “I’ll explain it while you’re driving us into the city.”
“Into Diego? But what about your grub? What…”
Doc jabbed a gun into his stomach, gave him a shove toward the cab. “Do you want to go on living? Do you? Then do what I tell you!”
The driver obeyed, but sullenly. With the dragging deliberation of the very stubborn. As they reached the highway and turned toward town, he gave Doc a self-righteous glare.
“This won’t get you nothin’, Mac,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re after, but this won’t get you a thing.”
Doc looked at him, tight-lipped. In the back seat, Carol leaned forward anxiously. “Doc—I think he’s right. There’s probably an alert out for us already. Golie’ll spill everything now. How far can we get in this circus wagon?”
Doc asked her curtly how far they would get without it. With an alert on the air, what chance did they have of grabbing another car? “The cops won’t know what we’re traveling in. Or whether we’re traveling in anything. Maybe we can make it to the border before they find out.”
“To the border! But what…”
“You’ll never do it, Mac,” the driver cut in doggedly. “The best thing you can do is give yourselves up. Now—oof!”
“Like it?” Doc gave him another prod with the gun. “Want some more?”
Teeth gritted, the man shook his head.
“All right, then,” Doc said mildly. “Make a left here, and head straight up Mission Valley until I tell you to turn.”
The cab swung left. They sped down the curving, cliff-shadowed road, and after a time Doc spoke over his shoulder to Carol. They couldn’t get through the border gates, he said. That, obviously, would be impossible. But they might be able to slip across the line at some unguarded point.
“People do it all the time,” he went on. “It’s not the best bet in the world, and we’ll still have problems if and when we get across, but…”
“You won’t make it,” the driver broke in, dogged again. “Not anywhere near the gates where you’ll be tryin’. I know that border, mister, and I’m telling you…”
His sentence ended in a scream. The cab swerved, and he turned pain-crazed eyes on Doc. “You t-try that again!” he gasped. “You do that again and see what happens!”
Doc promised that he wouldn’t do it again. “Next time I’ll shoot you. Now go right at this next turn. We’re hitting crosstown to the Tijuana highway.”
The cab made the turn with an angry skidding of tires. They raced up the steep road into Mission Hills, then down the long arterial street which skirts San Diego’s business district. The traffic began to thicken. There was the wail of a siren—fading eerily into the distance.
Above the windshield the blurred murmuring of the radio squawk box became a crisp voice:
“Cab Seventy-nine! Cab Seventy-nine! Come in, Seventy-nine…”
The driver was elaborately disinterested. Doc glanced at the identification plate on the instrument panel, and spoke to him sharply. “That’s you. Answer it!”
“What d’you want me to say?”
“Tell her you’ve got a couple of people on a sightseeing tour. You’ll be tied up for about an hour.”
“Sightseeing tour?” The driver squirmed in the seat, leaned slightly over the wheel. “She won’t never go for that, mister. She’ll know I got a couple of crooks headin’ for Tijuana.”
“Wh-at?” Doc frowned. “How will she know?”
“She just will. She’ll even know where we are right now. Just making the turnoff for National City.”
Doc got it then. He linked the driver’s seemingly senseless speech with the breathless silence of the squawk box. And savagely, his nerves worn raw, he smashed the gun barrel into the man’s stubborn, doughish face.
He smashed it; he smashed it again. The driver groaned and flung himself against the door of the car. It shot open, and he went tumbling and bouncing into the street.
The door swung shut again. Doc fought the wheel of the cab, swinging it out of the path of an oncoming vehicle. There was a frozen silence from Carol; a wondering silence. Then, answering her unspoken question, the voice of the squawk box:
“Seventy-nine? Seventy-nine—I read you, Seventy-nine…”
Doc found the switch and closed it.
He turned off the highway, sped along roughly parallel to it on a gravel county road.
He asked, “Is there a radio back there?” And Carol said there was none.
It didn’t matter, of course. They both knew what would be happening now.
The county road got them around National City. Then, implacably, it veered back toward the highway.
Doc tried to get away from it. Lights turned off, he weaved the cab through a network of outlying side streets. That got them only a little farther south, and in the end they were led back to the highway. Doc stopped just short of it, his mind racing desperately to the lazy throb of the cab’s motor.
Take to the fields—run for it on foot? No, no, it was too late. As impractical and impossible as trying to hook another car.
Well, then, how about—how about moving in on one of these suburbanites? Holing up with them, holding the family hostage until there was a chance to make a break for it?
No again. Not with them penned in in so small an area. Holing up would simply eliminate the almost no-chance they had now.
Doc shrugged unconsciously. He watched the intermittent flash of lights in front of them, listened to the swish-flick of the cars speeding past the intersection. And finally, since there was nothing else to do, he drove back onto the highway again.
Other cars whipped past them, and laughter, snatches of happy conversation spilled out into the night. Pleasure seekers; people in a hurry to begin their evening of wining and dining across the border, and with nothing more to fear than a hangover in the morning.
People who had earned their good time.
Doc drove slowly. For once in his life, he had no plan. He saw no way out. They could not turn back. Neither could they cross the border, through the gates or any other way.
The police had only to wait for them. To close in the net until they were snared in it.
After a time he turned off the highway again, pursuing a winding trail until it came to a dead end by the ocean. He backed up headed back in the direction from which he had come. And then he was again on the highway, moving south.
The other cars were not moving so quickly now. They shot past the cab, then a few hundred yards beyond they began to slow. And peering into the distance, Doc saw why.
So did Carol; and she spoke for the first time in minutes. Spoke with a tone that was at once angry, frightened, and a little gleeful. “Well, Doc. What do you figure on doing now?”
“Do?”
“The roadblock. What are you going to do?” Her voice broke crazily. “Just drive on into it? Just keep on going, and say yessir, I’m D-Doc McCoy, and th-this is my wife, Carol, and—a-and…”
“Shut up!” Doc cut in. “Look!”
“Don’t you tell me t-to—look at what?”
“Just ahead of us there. That thing at the side of the road.”
It seemed to be suspended some six feet above the roadside embankment,
an illuminated oblong blob topped by a larger and shadowy blob. Then, as the cab crept toward it, the outlines of the two blobs became clearer, revealed themselves as a woman’s face beneath a man’s hat.
She was holding a flashlight in her hand, shining the beam into her face. Swinging loosely from her other hand was a shotgun. A rawboned giant of a woman, she wore overalls and a sheepskin coat. She stared at them—at the cab rather; flicked the beam of the flashlight across it.
Then she made a brief swinging motion with it, the light disappeared, and so did she.
Doc let out a suppressed shout. He glanced over his shoulder quickly, waited for the two cars behind him to pass.
Carol shook him fiercely. “Doc, what’s the matter with you? Who—what was that?” And Doc laughed a little wildly, babbled that he couldn’t believe it himself. And then he slammed the cab into low gear, cut the wheels to the right, and went roaring up over the embankment and into the field.
It was wasteland, an expanse of eroded topsoilless rock. Ahead of them, the tall shadow of the woman beckoned, then moved away swiftly, guiding them up over a rise in the land and down into a cuplike valley.
There was a house there, a dark, deserted-looking shack. Two great forms came bounding from behind it—mastiffs—and streaked toward the cab in deadly silence. But the woman spoke, gestured to them, and they came meekly to heel. Trotted along with her as she strode past the shack, and on into the darkness beyond it.
“Doc! Do you hear me? I want to know what this is all about!”
Doc didn’t answer her. It was in his mind perhaps that he had already explained fully; and all his thoughts now were on the woman and the deliverance which she represented.
About a hundred yards beyond the house, she came to a stop; turned and faced them, beckoned them forward slowly until they were almost upon her. Then she stopped them with a pushing motion of her hand and yanked open the door of the cab. “Got anything in here that you want to save, Doc? Well, pile out then. We’re gettin’ rid of it for good.”
They piled out. Just back of the point where the woman had been standing was a broad crater, the dull gleam of moonlight on dark water.
“Gravel pit,” the woman explained succinctly. “Ain’t got no bottom to it that I ever found. Now, we’ll just give this buggy a good hard push…”
They pushed, straining, then trotting sluggishly as the cab gathered speed. Then, at a warning grunt from the woman, they came to a halt. And the cab shot over the brink of the pit, descended with a resounding splash and disappeared beneath the oily surface.
The woman turned and gripped Doc’s hand. “Doc, you’re a sight for sore eyes, and that’s a fact. Couldn’t hardly believe it was you when I got the word on the radio tonight.”
“And you, needless to say, are also a sight for sore eyes,” Doc murmured. “You were waiting for us down there on the highway?”
“Yep. Knew you was headin’ this way. Just took a chance on you spotting me. Incidentally,” her voice altered slightly, “not that I really give a whoop, but what happened between you and Rudy?”
“Well—” Doc hesitated. “You know Rudy. He never was quite right in the head and he’d gotten a lot worse. The more reasonable you tried to be with him, why…”
“Yeah, sure. Finally blew his top, huh? Well, I been expecting it for a long time.” The woman shook her head wisely. “But to hell with the poor devil. Right now we got to hide you an’—and…”
She paused with rough delicacy, glancing at Carol.
Doc apologized hastily. “I’m sorry. Ma—Mrs. Santis—I’d like you to meet my wife, Carol.”
It is scarcely to be wondered at that Carol’s handshake had been a little limp. She had heard so much of this gaunt, craggy-faced woman for so long that she had almost come to regard her as a myth.
Ma Santis. Daughter of a criminal, wife of a criminal, mother of six criminal sons. Two of Ma’s boys had died in gun battles with the police; two others—like their father—had died in the electric chair. Of the remaining two, one was in jail, and the other, Earl, was at liberty. The Santises were hill people, rebels and outlaws rather than criminals in the usual sense of the word. They never forgot a favor nor forgave an injury. They were that rare thing in the world of crime, people with a very real sense of honor. In another era, they might have been pirates or privateers or soldiers of fortune. It was their misfortune and perhaps the nation’s as a whole that they had been born into a civilization which insisted upon conformity and pardoned no breakage of its laws, regardless of one’s needs or motives.
The Santises were unable to conform. They would have died, and did die, rather than attempt to. And now at age sixty-four, and after more than twenty years in prison, Ma was as completely unreconstructed as she had been at fourteen.
Her son Earl was living over in the back country, she explained. Doin’ enough farming to look respectable, and livin’ high on the hog from cached loot. “Been so long since me or him turned a trick that people plumb forgot all about us,” Ma chuckled. “So I figured we’ll probably get a good goin’ over here at my place, but no more’n t’any other. You just hole up where I put you until Earl shows up, an’—by the by, you was headin’ for El Rey’s, Doc?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, don’t you never doubt you’ll make it,” Ma said firmly. “Me’n Earl, we helped plenty of friends to get there—Pat Gangloni, Red Reading, Ike Moss an’ his woman. ’Course, you’re maybe a little hotter’n any of them, but—come here.”
She turned and went back to the brink of the pit; squatted there, pointing with the beam of her flashlight. “You see that? Them two clumps of bushes? Now look right below them, there at them kind of shady places just under the water line.”
“I see them,” Doc nodded. “Caves?”
“You could call ’em that. Really ain’t much more than holes. Just about big enough to crawl into and get out of sight, but that’s all you need, ain’t it?” Ma laughed jovially.
Doc hesitated, shooting a quick glance at Carol’s taut face. “It—you think this is necessary, Ma? I mean…”
“Wouldn’t have you do it if I didn’t think so.” There was a hint of tartness in her voice. “It ain’t so bad, Doc. There’s fresh air seeps in from somewhere, and it ain’t really so cramped. Pat Gangloni took it, and you know Pat. Makes two fellas your size with half a man left over.”
Doc forced himself to laugh at the joke. “We’ll have to strip, I suppose?”
“I’d say so. Unless you want to keep on your unmentionables. They’s blankets down there, an’ it’s kind of hot anyways.”
“Fine,” Doc said. “Well…”
He unbuttoned his jumper and dropped it to the ground. He sat down and began taking off his shoes and socks. Ma looked at Carol. She said, “Prob’ly need a rope,” and disappeared into the darkness.
Carol remained standing, motionless, making no move to remove her clothes.
“Carol,” Doc said. Then, “Carol!”
“No-no,” Carol said shakily. “No, I can’t! How do I know that—that…”
“You’re with me. You’re riding on my ticket. Now get out of those clothes!”
He stood up, stripped out of the jeans. He unbuckled the money belt and dropped it on top of the pile of clothing. He waited a moment, working up an encouraging smile, storing up warmth for his voice. Then, hand outstretched, he took a step toward Carol.
She backed desperately away from him. “N-no! No!” she gasped. “I know what you’re planning! You’ll get me down there and…”
“Stop it! What else can you do, anyway?”
“I know you! I’d never get back up again! She’s your friend, not mine! She—y-you’d leave me down there under the ground and…”
“Well, here we are.” Ma Santis was suddenly back with them. “Trouble?”
“I’m sorry,” Doc said. “My wife’s a little upset.”
“Uu-huh,” Ma drawled. “Thought she kind of sounded like sh
e was. Me, I’m just a leetle upset myself. Figured I was goin’ a long ways to do you two a favor, and now I ain’t so sure. Like to get set straight before I go any farther.”
Doc repeated that he was sorry. Ma shifted the shotgun under her arm, and behind her the two mastiffs suddenly came to attention. She waited, staring stonily at Carol. And as if from some great distance, Carol heard her own voice; felt her face stiffen in a conciliatory smile.
She was sorry. She hadn’t meant what she said. She was very grateful to Ma. She…
She broke off, stooping to pull the voluminous black dress over her head. Almost eagerly she unfastened the money belt, made a tentative gesture of offering it to the older woman. Ma motioned laconically with the gun. “Just drop it on the pile. An’ don’t worry about none of it showin’ up missing.”
“You help yourself to as much as you want,” Doc said warmly. “I mean that, Ma. We…”
Ma nodded. She knew he meant it, but she wasn’t needin’ nothing. “Always thought you was a hell of a guy, Doc. Heard a thing or two to the contrary, but you was always square with me an’ mine. Ain’t a one of us that didn’t think the world of you.”
“And I’ve felt exactly the same way about all of you, Ma.”
“But,” she continued. “I ain’t buyin’ in on no one else’s fight. I ain’t putting myself any further in the middle than I am already. You two got a quarrel, which I hope you ain’t, you settle it somewheres else. Elsewise, I’ll do the settlin’ and it won’t be no fun for the party that starts the trouble.”
She paused, looking from one to the other, waiting for their acknowledgments of her statement. Carol’s was somewhat readier than Doc’s.
“Well, that’s fine,” Ma said mildly. “Now there’s some water in them holes; prob’ly a little stale but you can drink it if you’re thirsty enough. No grub, o’course. You can do without for as long as you’re down there. No smokin’ and no matches; ain’t enough air to allow it. Well, that about does it, I guess. Want me to help you down, Doc?”
Doc shook his head. “I can make it all right, thanks. Have you any idea how long it will be, Ma?”