Those box cars are out, I thought immediately. They load those things and lock them tight before they are coupled with the train... and I sure didn't want to find myself a prisoner in a box car. The refrigerated cars were out too. They offered the advantage of having ventilating and icing doors at the top, but too many people were apt to get curious about the contents of a refrigerated car, so that left only the flatcars, which didn't seem very promising at first.
But that changed when I saw the two workmen stretching the big gray tarp over the tractors. They were bright red high-wheeled farm tractors, four of them anchored down with cables and pulleys on one of the flatcars, and now the workmen were stretching the big tarp over them so they would look nice and new when they got to wherever they were going.
It didn't take the workmen long to get the tarp lashed down to everyone's satisfaction. They dropped off the flatcar, got in a truck and drove away. Most of the trucks and workmen were gone now... it looked like the cars were loaded and ready to pull out.
Sure enough, the switch engine began backing up, the engineer leaning out the far side of the cab to get his signals from the brakeman.
Now! I thought. It's now or never if you want to get out of Lake City alive! I broke into a jog, being careful to keep a box car between me and the brakeman. I swung up to the flatcar and squeezed under the edge of the tarp.
This was the dangerous time. This was a time for holding my breath and hoping that brakeman hadn't seen me.
Apparently he hadn't. Nobody yelled, nobody stuck his head under the tarp to see what the hell I was doing there, so apparently I had brought it off perfectly and nobody at all had seen me.
I breathed easier... everything was coming out just right. Of course this flatcar couldn't be called first class travel, but it would do. Up ahead I could hear the cars coming together, coupling, with teeth-jarring rattles. And then the car directly ahead smashed into my flatcar and slammed me back against one of the tractors. One of the big lugs on the tractor's rear wheel tore my coat as I grabbed for something to hold to—but that didn't bother me. Nothing could bother me now. I was as good as out of Lake City! In spite of the police, in spite of their elaborate communication system and their road blocks! _.
At last the entire string of cars was coupled together and we began to move forward. We moved forward for maybe ten minutes, then stopped. Then we moved in reverse for a short distance, then forward again. I couldn't see what was going on, but I knew that a certain amount of switching had to be done to get us on the right track.
I don't know how many times we went forward, stopped, then went backward and finally forward again. It seemed like a long time, as I crouched there under the tarp in semi-darkness, being slammed against the steel of those tractors every time the engineer changed directions. Finally we stopped and this time we didn't move again. I heard the switch engine break off and move away by itself. It won't be long now, I thought. We're on the right track, now all I have to do is wait.
I waited for what seemed like hours and nothing happened. Nothing at all. Every so often I could hear somebody crunch past on the cinders beside the track, and I died a little every time, and thought: What the hell am I going to do if it's a railroad inspector and he sticks his head under this tarp, or the cops coming back for a second look! But they always went on, and after a while my heart would start beating normally again.
If only I had a gun, I kept thinking....
But I didn't have a gun.
And what was holding up this string of cars? Why didn't a train pick it up and get it moving?
I didn't know the answer, and I didn't dare stick my head under that tarp to try to find out. I crouched there, and the long minutes and hours crawled by, and at last I realized that the sun had moved from one side to the other on the tarp and that at least four or five hours must have gone by since I first swung onto this flatcar that I was now beginning to hate.
That was when I finally realized that that string of cars wasn't going anywhere. Not today, anyway. Maybe not for a week, or even a month!
The realization came slowly, but probably it had been in the back of my mind all along and I had simply refused to look at it. But there was no getting around it now. I was stuck! I was on a train going nowhere!
At that moment I was utterly defeated. All I could think of was—this is the end of the line! The hand had been played out.
For several minutes, maybe longer, I wallowed in the muck and slime of self-pity—but finally I pulled myself out of that. By God, I told myself, I've got to get myself out of this!
But one thought kept hammering at me. Jesus, if I only had a gun! I was rapidly becoming a nut on the idea of not having a gun. What I needed right now was a friend like John Venci to give me a gun and a bankroll.
I might as well have wished for a platinum plated key to Fort Knox. No sir, I thought, it's going to take more than wishing to get out of this, Surratt....
Then one word, one name crossed my mind.... Pat!
I hadn't dared think of her until now. The minute that letter had been intercepted I made myself stop thinking about her. No matter what I had felt about her, or what she had felt about me, I had to accept the fact that Pat must now hate my guts because she knew that I had killed Alex Burton.
But now I started thinking in a new direction, almost another dimension.
The question I asked myself was: Did Pat actually know that I had killed Burton? All she had was the word of an unbalanced woman, to put it kindly, and was there any particular reason that she should take the word of a gangster's wife against mine?
Jesus, I thought, the excitement of the idea beginning to grip me, I wonder if I actually could bring her around! I wonder if I could somehow make her believe that I had nothing to do with that Burton killing!
The fact was, I had very little choice in the matter. My position right now was much the same as it had been in prison. Lake City was my prison, all exits were locked to me, and to crash out successfully I simply had to have help... and Pat was the only possible person who might give it.
I could hear my every heartbeat as I crouched there by the tractors. If I bring this off, I thought, it will be the most audacious action of my career.
However, any debate on the matter would be purely academic, for Pat held my life in her hands. Either she would help me, or she wouldn't. Either I would die, or I wouldn't. Strangely enough I was perfectly calm as I considered the possibilities. The first thing I've got to do is get to a phone, I thought. I've got to contact Pat and I've got to give the most convincing performance of my life!
Beyond that point there was no sense making plans.
In the distance I could hear those out-of-tune electronic chimes banging out every quarter hour. The distance that those discordant sounds could cover was positively amazing, but at least they were functional. By paying attention to the chimes I now knew that it was five o'clock and that seven full hours had passed since the police cars had first started closing in on my apartment.
Only seven hours? It seemed like a lifetime ago!
Getting started was the tough part. I had begun to associate a feeling of security with this flatcar. I began to hate the thought of leaving it. I began to think what a nice thing it would be if I could curl up into a tight little knot and lie there in the quiet darkness and pretend that everything was going to work out fine, just the way it was, and it really wasn't necessary to return to that jungle fury that lay on the other side of the tarp.
I lifted the tarp just a little and looked outside. Just as I had figured, the string of cars had been left on a siding. I looked out at an amazing network of steel tracks only slightly less complicated than the human nerve system, and beyond the tracks there were several sprawling redbrick buildings and a high wire fence. I had a look on the other side of the car and decided this would be my best bet. In this direction there were very few tracks. There was a maze of cattle pens and loading chutes. Most of the cattle pens were empty and there was
no sign of unusual activity—certainly there were no cops in sight.
Well, I thought, I might as well take the plunge.
CHAPTER TWENTY
THE AFTERNOON papers were in a wire rack in front of a drugstore and I could read the headlines from half a block away.
KILLER LOOSE IN LAKE CITY.
I'd been almost an hour getting completely away from the freight yards, finding my way out of that maze of cattle pens and trying to watch out for cops at the same time. I had finally made it this far, maybe two or three blocks away from the yards, to that crummy, down-at-the-heel section of the city that always seems to thrive close to the tracks. I had made it this far with no trouble. Not a single pair of eyes had given me a second glance, and just as I was feeling that everything was going nicely, that headline hit me.
What really jarred me was the picture. I had never been news like this before—I wasn't accustomed to seeing a three column cut of myself on the front page just below a black two inch screamer.
Are all these people blind! I thought. How can they look at me and fail to recognize me as the “killer”?
Then I looked at myself in a plate glass window and understood. The man I saw in the glass was not the best looking man in the world, and certainly not the neatest, but he was wearing a good suit, a tie, a shirt with a button-down collar. “Even I had trouble believing that the man who had sat for those prison mug shots in the paper could be the same man looking back at me from the plate glass window. Well, I'll be damned! I felt an impulse to laugh.
But I put it down immediately.
A trained eye, a cop's eye, would spot me in an instant... and the cops were the only ones who counted in this game of life and death that I was playing. Don't forget that, Surratt. Don't forget it for an instant!
I didn't forget it, but I did feel a little better until a cop stepped onto the sidewalk about four doors down from where I was standing!
My heart stopped still. He was a big sonofabitch, two hundred at-least; he had just stepped out of a chili joint and still had a toothpick in his mouth. He wiped his mouth, then planted himself solidly in the middle of the sidewalk and glared hard at some point in the distance that seemed to anger him.
You stay just like that, I thought, easing into a doorway. You turn your head, you fix those steelball eyes of yours on my face, copper, and you'll be the deadest sonofabitch in Lake City!
It was complete nonsense, of course, because I had no gun and I certainly couldn't have handled a cop his size with my bare hands... but it made me feel a little better just thinking it. As I thought it I eased into the doorway. I reached behind me and opened a door. Make it look natural, I told myself, as I turned and stepped through the doorway into what seemed to be another hash house.
The last I saw of that cop he was still standing there in that same spot, rocking slightly on the balls of his feet, his gaze still fixed angrily on that uncertain point in the distance. Maybe his feet hurt. Maybe he was mad because the captain had passed him over for promotion. You just keep thinking about it, I thought, whatever it is.
I closed the door and began to breathe again.
There was a woman behind the counter who looked at me when I came in but all she saw was just another drifter, in a world of drifters, who might be worth the price of coffee and sinkers, but that was all. There were two customers at the counter having the house special, stew, but they were too busy eating to be curious.
I headed for the phone booth.
I was perfectly calm until I-dropped the coin in the slot and began to dial. That was when my insides began to crawl, that was when I fully realized how important these next few minutes or seconds could be to me. They could mean that I would either live or die—that's how important they were! All Pat had to say was “no” and I was dead. Just as sure as she could point a pistol at my head and pull the trigger. She could kill me. I absolutely had to have her help or I was cooked, really cooked this time, and nobody was more aware of that fact than I.
Of course that wasn't all I had to worry about. I had the cops to think of—all those cops with their elaborate organization. How much did they really know or could guess about me and Pat? Were they guessing enough to figure it would be a paying proposition to tap her telephone? If they were, I was still cooked. I might as well go back to the flatcar and wait for the end.
Those were a few of the things that went through my mind at that moment, but I kept dialing. There was nothing else to do.
I listened to the ringing at the other end. Once... twice... three times... I listened so hard that I began to imagine that I could hear someone breathing on the line. But that was not possible. If Pat were playing seriously with the cops, and they had her line tapped, I would know it. They would have an extension connected and would try to lift the receivers at the same exact instant, and a man on the other end could tell when two circuits were opened instead of one, if he only listened hard enough.
I kept telling myself that I could tell the difference, but every time that phone rang at the other end I became less and less sure of myself. Four times it rang... Five times....
Why didn't she answer? If she was is the apartment, certainly she would have had plenty of time to get to the phone by now! It hadn't occurred to me that she might not be in the apartment. It simply hadn't occurred to me that she wouldn't be there when I needed her!
Six times the phone rang.... Still no answer.
I wanted to hang up and get out of there. Every instinct told me that something was wrong—maybe the cops were holding things up for some reason. Maybe they were putting their tracer to work, or maybe they simply had got their equipment fouled somehow, but with every second that passed I felt it stronger and stronger. Something was wrong.
Then the receiver came off the hook. It was absolutely clean. Click, and it was off, and Pat's voice was saying:
“... Hello?”
It was a strange thing, the way I felt at that moment. I forgot the cops, I forgot all fear for that instant, as Pat's voice sounded in the receiver—a quiet voice, somehow soothing the ragged edges of my nerves. For the first time, I guess, I was beginning to realize how much I missed her, how much I needed her. Not just for the present, as a means of escape, but really needed her.
“Pat,” I said quickly, “don't hang up! Please don't hang up until I've explained something! It's very important!”
I didn't know how much the cops had worked on her; I didn't know how many of the papers she had read or how much she had believed. I was taking no chances. I simply couldn't let her hang up until I had a chance to convince her that I hadn't killed Alex Burton.
“Pat, do you hear me!”
For one long moment she said nothing. I was afraid that she was going to hang up. I was afraid that she wasn't going to give me a chance to talk her around... and there was nothing I could do to stop it. All she had to do was replace the receiver, refuse to talk to me....
At last she said, “The police were just here, they left just a few moments ago.” There was nothing soothing in her voice now. It was tightly drawn and rough with hate. “They'll find you, and I hope it's soon. It can't be too soon to suit me!”
“Listen to me!” I said, the words coming as fast as I could talk. “Pat, you've simply got to listen to me! I know what the cops have been telling you, and I know what you've been reading in the papers, but those things simply aren't true, not all of them anyway. You'll listen to me, won't you, for old times' sake if for nothing else?”
She made no sound at all.
“Sure,” I rushed on, “my name is Roy Surratt, and once I killed a lousy sadist, a guard named Gorgan, but even that was in self-defense. I don't care what the cops told you or what you read in the newspapers. I didn't have anything to do with that Burton killing!”
This time she did make a small sound, a very small sound that meant absolutely nothing except possibly a kind of bitter interest had been aroused.
But I wasn't getting anywhere. I could fee
l it. Maybe I was crazy about, her, but that didn't mean that she had to feel the same toward me. Oh, no, I was thinking, this is no time to kid yourself about a thing like that, Surratt. The only real tie you ever had to her was money, money that could buy Lincolns and Paris coats. So don't get the idea that soft soap will bring her around. Money, that's the thing women understand!
“Now listen to me, please!” I said. “This is very important; my life depends on it. Maybe your future depends on it, too, Pat. I'm going to tell you the truth, the absolute truth, so will you listen?”
She didn't say yes, but she didn't say no, either. I had the feeling that she was holding her breath... waiting.
“All right,” I went on quickly, “do you remember what I said about giving this town a shaking? Well, that's just what I did. I had it by the throat, I had the sweetest, most lucrative setup a man can imagine, but... Well, something went wrong. What I'm trying to say is this: I need help, but I'm ready to pay for it. I'm not asking you to take chances for the sake of friendship or anything like that. I'm ready to pay.”
But I was getting the uneasy feeling that she wasn't even listening. Goddammit, I thought savagely, what have I got to do to make her listen to me! I could almost see her, standing there like a stone cold statue, as unfeeling and deaf as a statue. “Jesus!” I said, “won't you please listen to me, Pat! Are you still thinking about Burton”; is that what's bothering you?”
Still she said nothing.
“Look,” I said quickly, changing directions again, “you're not going to believe anything Dorris Venci said, are you? Let me tell you something about Dorris Venci; she was nuts! Absolutely and completely nuts! Somehow she got the crazy idea that she loved me, and that's the reason she wrote you the letter. I brushed her off and that burned her up. She wanted to hurt me, so she wrote you that letter full of lies.”
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