Murder in the Wind

by John D. MacDonald

  The thing that caused it was the color of the car. It was a car as gray as the rain, and the tail lights were not on. The car blended, merged with the rain and the road so that Dix Marshall did not see it soon enough. The car was going at a speed of twenty miles an hour through the heavy rain. It had Indiana plates. It was driven by a retired doctor with a mild heart condition.

  The big blue and yellow rig was traveling at fifty-five miles an hour when Dix Marshall saw the faint bulk of the slow-moving gray sedan. Within a fractional part of a second he had known that he could not hope to slow down in time. He had a choice to make almost instantly—to cut to the right and take his chances on the sloppy shoulder—to cut around the sedan to the left and risk a head-on with something coming the other way—to brake as hard as he could and hit the sedan and hope to hit it without enough force to kill.

  Marshall was an expert. His reflexes were good—his experience was wide. His emotions, not his lack of skill, had trapped him into this situation. He had been in other tight places and he had survived. During the three-quarters of a second it took him to make his decision, the big rig traveled nearly sixty feet. He decided to take the chance of a head-on with something that might be coming through the gray opacity of the rain. It was a calculated risk. With the difference in the relative speeds of the two vehicles, he would not be in the left lane for more than two long seconds. The rain would slow down oncoming vehicles.

  He did not hit the brakes. He hit the gas pedal to cut down the duration of the moments of danger. He swung out and he leaned forward further and stared ahead, looking for the twin glow of oncoming dimmers. He passed the gray sedan. He saw something ahead of him, and he snapped the big rig back into the right lane. He snapped it hard and as he did so he saw that the object was the thick concrete railing of the bridge. It was the bridge over the Waccasassa, but he did not know that. He felt the skid of the two sets of duals on the rear of the trailer. He saw the thick rain-wet railing on the right side, saw the rain bouncing from it, haloing it. The trailer kept skidding and he felt it slam against the concrete. It did not seem to be a hard impact. But in the next moment the cab was angled toward the concrete on the left side. He tried to turn away from it and felt the dizzy sense of the cab tipping, the whole rig tipping. As it went over he knew all at once how he would handle that talk with Gloria, how he could make it come out all right for both of them. There wasn’t time to put it into the words of the mind, but he knew how it could be.

  The heavy cab smashed into the thick railing, burst through it, and pieces of concrete as big as bushel baskets fell into the river. By then the cab and trailer lay on the right side, sliding with a raw noise of ripping metal, sliding, wedging the big trailer from side to side, across the bridge, while the cab, having punched its hole, was nipped off by the continuing motion of the trailer and fell into the shallow river, making one further quarter turn as it fell, landing with the four heavy wheels in the air, then settling, sighing, suckling against the mud of the bottom, air bubbles bursting against the rain pocked surface. Only the front right tire was completely under water. The two rear tires were locked. The front left tire spun for a very short time, braked by the water that came to the hub cap.

  Dr. Dudley Stamm had never driven through such a heavy rain. He kept wondering if it would be wiser to pull over to the side of the road and wait it out. He would have done that had it been a thunder shower. But this rain seemed constant, interminable. He did not wish to spend untold hours along the side of the road, with the possibility of the soaked engine not starting again when the rain let up.

  “Ever see a rain like this, Myra?”

  “Never in my life, Dud. Never. Do you feel all right, dear?”

  “I feel fine. But if we can find anything along here, we better hole up.”

  “But how about the Sheridans?”

  “We can phone them. They’ll understand. If it’s raining as hard in St. Pete as it is here, they’ll damn well understand. Good Lord, it looks like the end of the world.”

  She studied the map. “There should be nice courts down by Crystal River and Homosassa Springs.”

  “How far?”

  “About thirty miles from here.”

  “An hour and a half at this rate.”

  “Are you getting too tired, dear?”

  “No. You keep asking me that and I keep telling you. If I get tired, I’ll let you know.”

  “You never do.”

  He did not know where the truck came from. He did not know it had been behind him. He saw a faint oncoming glint of lights in his rear view mirror and then it was upon him, roaring and steaming by, hurling solid water against his windshield. Dr. Stamm instinctively tromped on his brakes. He heard Myra give a little cry of alarm.

  “Maniac!” Dr. Stamm said fiercely.

  The wiper cleared the water and he saw it all, not clearly because it was obscured by the rain, a rain that would have made it difficult to see across the street clearly. The truck swung in. The trailer swung and slammed the bridge abutment on the right with a noise muted by the rain roar. The truck swerved and the cab burst through the bridge rail on the left side as the whole thing was tipping over. The cab fell from view and the trailer slid on, slid on its side, wheels toward them and came to a jarring stop as it wedged itself across the road from concrete rail to concrete rail, an immense obstacle. The top wheels, and there seemed to be many of them, kept spinning, hurling the rain from them, encircled by spray.

  Dr. Stamm came to a stop just short of the bridge. He opened the door and hurried across the road, hearing but paying no attention to Myra’s despairing cry behind him. He slithered down the muddy grassy bank and moved cautiously into the river. The water came up to his knees and then to mid-thigh. He paused and moved his wallet to his breast pocket. The next step brought him up to his waist. He looked at the upside down cab and mentally estimated the height of it and saw that it was in water that would be over his head. He was steeling himself to plunge forward when he felt a familiar constriction in his chest, an odd area of spurious warmth about his heart.

  It was the message of the heart that brought him back to reality, to the here and now of a sixty-seven-year-old man who stood drenched in a muddy little river. The accident had made him forget himself entirely. From the moment he left his car until this moment he had been no age. He had been a man who reacted as a man. It had not occurred to him that the body would fail to obey. Now he was himself again, and he felt ridiculous as he stood there. Quixotic and enfeebled old man who had thought the worn body would serve him in the same way it had thirty years ago. He could do nothing for the driver. He realized with a certain grim humor that it would be very awkward to faint at this moment. Myra would have the devil of a time explaining what had happened, both to the police and the Sheridans.

  He reached with great care into his pocket, below water level, and found the little box and took it out. It was dry inside. He opened it and put two of the small white pills on his tongue and swallowed them. He put the box in his breast pocket. He felt the stricture begin to fade, felt the cooling of the deceptive warmth. Only then did he turn slowly and walk back across the muddy bottom to the bank. He heard Myra and he looked up. She stood drenched at the top of the bank, her light flowered dress clinging to her, her gray hair rain-matted against her head, and she was crying, “Come back! Please come back!”

  He clambered slowly and with difficulty up the bank. She put her arm around him and they walked back to the car. They got in, wet as they were. He took off his glasses and took a Kleenex from the seat and began to dry them.

  Myra was crying and smiling at him. “Oh, Dud! Honestly! Dud, you fool.”

  “Ancient fool.”

  “He’d be dead anyway.”

  Dudley Stamm said slowly, “If not then, he is now.”

  “He could have killed us too.”

  He took her hand. His chest felt easier. “But he didn’t.”

  A brown car stopped behind them and a ma
n came up in a green battered raincoat. He knocked on the car window and said, “What’s happened?”

  Stamm rolled the window down an inch. “Go take a look. It’s pretty obvious. The driver is still in the cab.”

  “How do we get through?”

  “I don’t imagine we do.”

  Dan Boltay of the State Highway Patrol was driving north on patrol when he came to the bridge over the Waccasassa. He put on his brakes when he saw the thing across the bridge. He went into a controlled skid and stopped twenty feet from the barrier and stared at it, unable to comprehend what it was for a few moments. It looked as if a metal fence about eight feet high, slightly buckled, had been erected across the bridge. Then he realized what it was.

  “Holy jumping Marie,” he said softly. He turned on the red revolving dome light to warn oncoming traffic. He started to radio in and then thought he better take a closer look. He got out and put on his black rain cape. He went to either end of the trailer and saw how forcibly it had wedged itself across the bridge. The metal frame members were gouged into the concrete. He climbed up onto the railing and walked around it, leaning his hand against it. He saw the twenty-foot hole in the side rail, and saw the upside down cab down in the water.

  Just how the hell, he thought, did that joker manage to do this? A fragment of an old joke fled across his mind. Where did he stand when he threw it?

  He jumped down to the road on the far side of the trailer. There were three cars piled up. He walked to the first car. Gray Buick. Indiana plates. Old couple inside. Holding hands. Probably scared. Probably saw it.

  The old geezer rolled the window part way down.

  “Did you see this happen?”

  “The driver is still in the cab, officer.”

  “How long ago did it happen?”

  “Ten minutes, maybe a little longer.”

  “Anybody try to get him out?”

  “I tried, but I couldn’t get to him. These other two cars arrived about five minutes ago.”

  Boltay was caught by indecision. Take time to radio in for help. Ten minutes wasn’t too long. Sometimes they came out of it. He made up his mind and trotted, cursing, down to the river bank. He stripped down to his shorts, covered his uniform with the black rain cape and went in. He swam to the cab, used the things he could grasp on the cab to pull himself down. The windows were shut. He felt the door handle, turned in the water and braced his feet and, hoping it was not too badly sprung, gave a heave. The door sprang open, the edge of it scraping his shin just below the knee. He went up for a breath, then went down and reached in and felt the man. He got hold of a wrist and the back of the man’s neck and pulled him out through the door and came to the surface with him. He pulled the man to shore, hoisted him on his shoulder, carried him up and laid him down on his back. Only then did he see the driver’s head. The whole left temple area and the left frontal lobe was crushed inward. Water had washed the blood from it and he could see the white edges of the shattered bone. It was a hole you could have put your fist in. Boltay looked at the driver with both anger and disgust. He was annoyed with the man for being dead.

  He looked up and saw five or six people looking down at him, looking at the dead driver with that funny blank expression they always wear when they look at the dead. They look steadily and they lick their lips and they swallow, but they don’t stop looking.

  Boltay, with a twinge of regret, put his uniform shirt over the man’s broken head, dressed in the rest of the uniform and put the rain cape on. He wasn’t soaking wet. Just sodden.

  He went up and got the story from the old couple.

  “How fast would you say he was going?”

  “I’d say about sixty, officer. It was very fast for the road conditions.”

  “How fast were you going?”

  “About twenty-five, I think.”

  “Have your lights on?”

  “Lights? Why, no. I don’t guess I did. I should have, shouldn’t I?”

  “Yes, I think you should have.”

  “My husband is soaked, officer. And he’s not well. Can we go now. We’ll go back and find a motel.”

  “Okay. When you get settled phone the State Highway Patrol and tell them where you’re located. There may be more questions.”

  He climbed up and got the name off the side of the trailer and went back to his car. There were six other cars stopped. He made his call. “Boltay in 26. I got a bad one. On the Waccasassa Bridge. Big truck trailer wedged right across it. Cab went into the river through the rail and killed the driver. No other vehicles involved. No wrecker is going to haul it out of the way. We’re going to have to use torches to cut it free. It looks like a long job and I’m getting a fast pile-up here. Maybe fifteen cars so far.”

  He released the button and the metallic voice said, “Is the trailer on its wheels?”

  “No sir. On the right side, wheels toward the north. The name on it is Twin X Express, out of New Orleans. I got the driver out of the cab and he’s on the north bank, east of the bridge. We’ll have to set up traffic control and do some rerouting.”

  “We’ll have to close it at Inglis on the south and Otter Creek on the north. Wait a minute. There’s a wooden bridge or something in the area. A detour used quite a few years back. It might still be passable. Hold it while I ask.”

  Boltay waited. “Here it is. A dirt road that turns off a mile south of you. It turns west. There’s two other cars on the way. You check that detour and then call in and let us know if it’s passable.”

  Boltay swung around and ignored the people who shouted questions at him and headed south. He found the turn-off. The road was narrow but the drainage seemed to be pretty good. It was soft, but not too soft. Both wooden bridges were one lane, but they felt solid. Solid enough for passenger cars. He followed the detour until he came out on the highway again.

  He called in. “It’s passable. Not for trucks, though.”

  “Okay. We’ll set up truck detour signs at Otter Creek and Inglis. You start routing your pile-up over the detour. We’ll have signs down to you in another twenty minutes. When Stark gets there, put him on the other end.”

  Within fifteen minutes the tangle was straightened out. Trucks that had gotten by Inglis and Otter Creek before the signs went up were routed back. The two highway patrol cars, parked crosswise of the road, dome lights flashing, routed passenger traffic over the old detour. An ambulance picked up the body to take it over to Gainesville. The first technicians had arrived. They walked around the trailer and looked at the job and made obscene comments about the job and the rain. They sent for heavier equipment and more torches. They told the highway patrol that if they had the bridge clear by eight o’clock at night, they would be lucky. They planned the job: Cut the ends free. Use two big wreckers to swivel it. Bring in another truck and off-load the cargo. Then, if the wheels were too badly damaged, drag it off the bridge. If not, rig lines and tip it up on its wheels. All this in heavy rain and a wind that was slowly, steadily increasing.

  And so passenger traffic rolled cautiously over the old detour, over the two wooden bridges, by the grim old house between them, back out onto the highway. They felt their way through the half world of gray driving rain. They inched across the old timbers of the bridges.

  The Stamms found motel accommodations a little north of Chiefland. They had changed to dry clothing, had phoned both the Sheridans and the State Highway Patrol.

  Dudley Stamm stood at the window looking out at the rain. Myra sat across the room, talking, talking.

  “Honestly, I thought you’d gone clean out of your mind. Dashing out of the car like that when you know you’re not supposed to do anything like that. I just didn’t know what to think. And then to come after you in all that rain and see you standing down there up to your middle in the water—why it was just about the worst shock I ever had in my life. I don’t know what in the world you had in mind. You certainly couldn’t do anything for that poor driver. I know it was his fault but I can
’t help feeling sorry for him. Even though it was terrible at the time. I can’t help thinking how strange you looked down there, how strange and queer standing there in that river. Do you see what I mean, dear?”

  “Yes dear,” Dudley Stamm said wearily.

  [By now the great anonymity of the highway has ended in other places. Fallen trees block the road from Shamrock to Horseshoe Point. A clot of cars has gathered and there are frightened conferences, many plans of action.

  Near Lecanto the wind takes control of a car from the unskilled hands of a young girl. She is lucky in that she is not injured. She is less lucky in her rescuers. The car is too deep in the ditch to be hauled out. They take the girl along. They are on their way from Lecanto to Holder, three of them, half drunk, excited by the storm, excited by the clinging wet clothes of the girl. Had the heavy rain not drowned the motor of the truck, she would have come to no harm. But they sat in the rain with her and finished the bottle and opened another one and forced her to drink a great deal of it and later they raped her.

  The six vehicles move steadily north, toward inadvertent rendezvous. Cadillac, station wagon, Mercedes, Dodge convertible, Plymouth, panel delivery—toward a road block and wooden bridges and high water and an ancient cypress house.]

  6

  Billy Torris was awakened by the sound of the rain on the metal roof of the stolen panel delivery truck. While still in half sleep he thought he was home again, sleeping in the room off the kitchen with two of his brothers and Mom was up early and standing at the sink and pumping water into the tin dishpan. But the dishpan didn’t get full and the spattery noise didn’t change and a few minutes later he woke up and it took him several minutes to figure out where he was. He lay on burlap sacks on the metal bed of the panel delivery and it was really raining. Really coming down.

  The rain made him feel safer. There was a gray anonymity in the rain. In the sunshine you felt people were looking at you. They had time to look and you stood out clearly. In the rain they were busy keeping dry and they didn’t look at you so directly.