A voice said: “Cold as a son of a bitch, ain’t it?”
Another voice answered: “I don’t know. It’s not so cold back here.”
“Some rain,” the first voice said.
“The trouble with you, George, you don’t like being dragged out of your house on a night like this.”
“Ah, it ain’t that.”
“But what the hell,” the voice next to me in the back seat of the car said. “He’s desperate. He can be violent. I don’t have to tell you. I couldn’t bring him in alone, could I?”
The last man in the world groaned. He couldn’t help it.
“Coming out of it, Drum?”
I opened my eyes cautiously. The lurid red haze retreated. Sheriff Lonegran and I were seated in the back seat of a speeding car that had the wet highway all to itself. I mumbled something and wished I was the last man in the world again.
Sheriff Lonegran settled himself comfortably. Seated in the rear of the car with his dwarfed legs bent he looked bigger than he was. Every now and then he leaned forward to stare out the windshield of the car. The rain fell like molten gold in the headlight beams.
We drove through a small town, then the road went straight across flat farmland. Lonegran had a big automatic on his lap with the fingers of one hand draped loosely on the butt. If you didn’t know who he was, you’d think he was asleep sitting there, sunk morosely in an unpleasant dream. In a little while he lit a cigarette.
“What time you got, Sheriff?” George asked.
“Almost eleven-thirty.”
I wondered what had happened to the rest of the afternoon and the early evening. I moved my shoulders and tried to get comfortable. Pain moved in pulsing waves at the base of my skull. When Lonegran finished his cigarette he rolled the rear window on his side of the car down far enough to flick the butt out. Then he rolled it up again. The wet cold air made me feel a little better.
The windshield wipers were a pair of metronomes measuring the slow black passage of time and space. George whistled tunelessly and interminably through his teeth. Then I heard another sound, faint and far away through the rain. It was the lonely moan of a train whistle, and it came closer.
We drove another mile or so. A red light winked on and off ahead of the car. I felt myself shifting forward as George stepped on the brake.
“Train coming,” George said disgustedly. “We ain’t never gonna get home.”
WE STOPPED before the tracks. There wasn’t any gate, but the red warning lights blinked on and off, on and off. No cars pulled up across the tracks. No headlights glowed behind us. The locomotive came hurtling by, roaring and hissing, with an aura of rain water dancing about its great black bulk. A long line of freight cars rumbled by. George lit a cigarette and cursed them in the fluid way that only a Southerner can curse. Sheriff Lonegran was leaning forward slightly, the automatic gripped tightly in his fist.
“Just sit still, Drum,” he said.
I didn’t say a word. I hadn’t moved.
The long freight slowed down, its couplings clanking and squeaking. After about ten minutes, you could see the red light on the caboose. Then the caboose drew up even with us.
Lonegran half got up in the back seat of the card and slammed the automatic down on George’s head. As he did so he shouted: “Hey, look out, damn it!”
George slumped in the driver’s seat, his head falling on the horn ring. In one motion Lonegran yanked at George’s collar until the horn stopped blowing and turned to face me with the gun. He jerked the muzzle toward the door on my side of the car.
“Okay. Out.”
Death waited put there in the darkness and the rain. I knew it, and Lonegran knew I knew it.
“I said out.”
George groaned. If he regained consciousness in the next few moments, I might live. He slid to the right and fell out of view on the front seat of the car. His breathing was deep and low.
“I supposed to make a break for it?” I asked.
“Just get out.”
“What will you tell George I hit him with?”
“Out, damn you.”
Lonegran leaned across me and opened the door. He was very close but I didn’t try anything. I figured it wouldn’t have made too much difference to him if he shot me in the car. Cold wind blew a gust of rain in at us. The caboose light of the train was a tiny red pinpoint fading into the night.
I got out and took two dejected steps, head down, shoulders sagging. That was easy. Standing up had turned the waves of pain in my head into hammers.
After the first two steps I fell into a low crouch and ran. My shoes pounded on concrete, then crunched on gravel. I didn’t near Lonegran behind me at all. It was as if the night had swallowed him, gun and all.
When my shoes hit wet grass, Lonegran’s gun roared.
Simultaneously, my feet flew out from under me and I went down head-first on the grass. Maybe that was why Lonegran missed. He fired again, at shadows. Down on the ground he couldn’t see me.
I stayed there, but I was too close to the road, too close to Lonegran and his gun. I began to crawl.
When I had gone about ten feet I heard Lonegran’s shoes striking gravel. I didn’t turn my head to look at him. I thought my face might shine in the rain. If I turned, and if it did, he’d blow a hole in it. I kept going on hands and knees.
Then I didn’t hear his running steps. That meant he was on the grass, coming after me. I knew he couldn’t see me. If he saw me I was a dead man. I did not know how long it would be before he saw me.
I crawled. Something whipped across my head and stung me just above the stitches the police doctor had taken in my brow. I stopped crawling and reached out with one hand. I felt a strand of barbed wire.
I heard a movement behind me. It was almost completely dark. I could see—dimly—about five feet, and that was all. To my left at the farthest range of vision I saw Lonegran’s shoes. He had stopped at the barbed wire. He wasn’t more than five or six feet from me. I didn’t look up. All I saw was his shoes. I didn’t move. I held my breath, then let it out very gently through my mouth and breathed in that way.
LONEGRAN did not know I had fallen. He was looking for me, but he was looking too high. For all he knew, his first shot or his second might have got me. But if they had, I wouldn’t have come this far. His gun was a .45, and you do not crawl more than a few feet with a .45 slug in you, even if it means your life.
Lonegran’s left shoe stepped down on the barbed wire. He stood that way a long time. He must have been trying to pierce the gloom of the rain and the night with his eyes. His weight made the wire creak where it was attached to an unseen fence post.
His foot shifted. I followed it with my eyes. It stepped up to the second wire and the wire sagged and then went taut under it. Then, crouching, Lonegran went through between the middle and upper strands of wire. He muttered softly when his jacket caught on a barb. I heard cloth rip. Then he was through.
He began to walk on the other side of the barbed wire fence. He stopped right in front of me. If the fence wasn’t there I might have chanced jumping him. Then he walked away from the fence. He had heard something. I don’t know what it was. I didn’t hear it. He started to run.
I got up and ran back to the car.
George met me coming out.
His eyes widened, and he shouted. He was groggy but he had a gun too. I hit him in the belly with everything in me that said I wanted to go on living. He jack-knifed and fell back against the fender of the white and black sheriff’s car. His gun clattered on the pavement. I made a dive for it, but George bounced off the fender and fell on top of the gun.
I plunged into the car. The engine was still idling. George had never shut it off waiting for the train, and Lonegran had been in too much of a hurry to come after me to worry about the car.
Orange fire blossomed in the night as Lonegran’s gun roared. The right rear window of the car turned into an opaque spider web with a small round hole in the middle
of it.
I swung the car across the tracks and back in a lurching U-turn. As I came around, Lonegran was silhouetted in the headlights. I ducked my head below the level of the dash board and tried to run him down. He fired wildly. He must have waited until the last moment and then flung himself off the road.
In less than ten seconds I was doing sixty. I kept my foot, to the floor and watched the speedometer needle climb to seventy, then eighty, then eighty-five. I kept it there, driving into a wall of rain with only one headlight. Lonegran’s final wild shot must have got the other one.
“That’s fine,” a voice said. “That’s really swell. Now we’ve got a crooked sheriff who wanted to kill you.”
It was my own voice, and it was too high. My arms began to tremble as reaction set in. I slowed to seventy-five. It still felt like flying. Rain beat furiously against the windshield, clattering like hail, making it all but impossible to see. I slowed to fifty and that was a little better.
I couldn’t keep quiet. It didn’t matter that no one was there, I had to talk. “Take it easy,” the strange, too-high voice said. “You’re all right now. They wanted to kill you. They wouldn’t dare to take you alive. It’s like the hearing all over again. Because you could raise a stink that would make every paper from here to D.C. and back again. So why don’t you? Why the hell don’t you?” Two of me sat there arguing in the car, both tired and hurt and lonely. “Because I can’t. Because I can’t prove a thing. And because there’s still only one way to get my license back.”
But why Lonegran? I couldn’t answer that one. At the moment I hardly cared. All I wanted to do was get away.
I SLOWED the black and white official car down driving through Toano. Near the north end of town a cop coming out of a restaurant waved. I waved back and kept driving. Pretty soon I reached the big hedge of Judson Bonner’s estate. A car followed its headlights out of the driveway just as I passed. It started south toward Toano, but I heard the complaint of abused brake-linings and gave a look through the rear-view mirror. The car skidded to a stop on the wet pavement, fishtailing close to the right shoulder, of the road. Whoever was driving began to see-saw it back and forth and then swung it around in a U-turn. By then I was a quarter of a mile away with my foot to the floor. I kept it there and saw the headlights way back.
The miles slipped by. The car behind me couldn’t gain, but I couldn’t lose it either. Just this side of Richmond I swung around a wide curve that I knew would hide me from view for maybe half a minute. I braked and drove off the road and down a steep muddy path to a culvert. I rolled the window down and waited. In a few seconds I heard whoever was following me go speeding by. This seemed as good a place as any to ditch the sheriffs car, so I left it there on the bank of a boiling, rain-swelled stream and climbed back to the road.
A mile of walking along the shoulder of the road through the rain brought me to a gas station. No cars passed me. There weren’t any cars at the pumps. I Walked across the asphalt and opened a glass door. Warmth and light flooded over me.
When I opened the door there had been a kid at a desk with his feet up and his eyes in one of those exposé magazines. He dropped the magazine and stood up.
“Whisky,” I croaked.
He took another look at me and produced a bottle without a word. I took off the cap and drank until the bottle made gurgling sounds and I started to cough.
“What the hell happened to your mister?”
“I got lost. You have a number for a taxi garage?”
He had a number, and called it. Then he asked: “You sure you-all don’t want an ambulance?”
I grinned and shook my head. Whatever the grin did to my face made his face turn white.
Ten minutes later the taxi came. I took it into Richmond and over to the bus depot on Broad Street. Before the bus for Washington pulled in, making the long tidewater run from Norfolk to Newport News, I had time to clean up in the washroom. The barbed wire had opened another gash on my forehead and the rain hadn’t washed all the blood off my face. I did what I could in the washroom and went upstairs to wait for the bus.
I was hungry, but too tired to do anything about it. I dragged myself into the big white and blue bus when it was announced on the P.A. system. By then it was almost three o’clock. I found a seat in the rear of the bus. No one bothered me. I slept all the way through the four-hour run into Washington. The driver had to shake me awake. He must have smelled the whisky. “Come on, buddy. Come on. End of the line.”
I stepped out into a gray cold dawn, found a taxi, and went home.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE apartment wasn’t much, but it was home. It seemed as if I’d been gone a year. The place had a clean, unused look. Everything was tidy. The furniture in the living room gleamed as if it had just been waxed.
You cleaned up this morning, I told myself. So what? Make that yesterday morning.
But I hadn’t cleaned up. Despite that, the living room and kitchen would have got the Good Housekeeping seal of approval.
I went into the bedroom like papa, mama and baby bear.
Someone was sleeping in my bed too.
“Is it morning?” she asked, rubbing her eyes sleepily. “You’re home. Oh, you’re home!”
She sat up. The blonde hair was tousled. The blue eyes were instantly, beautifully alert. The lovely body was clad in a nightgown not quite as substantial as an industrious spider’s web.
She got out of bed and drifted over to me with her arms wide. She came over and squeezed me. I squeezed back. The way I felt, it was like two bears trying to hug each other to death.
She drew back and said, “I tried to call you. All day yesterday, I tried. I couldn’t get you. I decided to camp on your doorstep. I hope you re not mad, Chet.”
Then she saw my face. She touched it with her fingers. “What did they do to you?” she gasped. “What did they do to you?”
She had a warm, healthy smell, made of equal parts of sleep and perfume. She made clucking sympathetic sounds and her eyes went watery. Then they got a determined look in them and she said, “I don’t know what you’ve been doing the last few days, but now you’re going to listen to Bobby.” She pouted. I hadn’t said anything. “You understand?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and she led me into the living room. She was gone only a moment, but consciousness was dim and I began to think I had dreamed her up. I bunked. There she was again, Bobby Hayst, leaning down over me. A glass was thrust into my hand. Four ounces of whisky, neat. I drank it.
“Now get up and march into the bedroom. Get undressed.”
I went into the bedroom. I was going to get undressed. It had seemed like a fine idea. But when I sat down on the edge of the bed it seemed like an even better idea to kind of stretch out for a moment. I stretched out. From the bathroom I heard the sound of water rushing into the tub. I drifted.
Bobby was taking off my shoes and socks when I came out of it. “Come on, up. Sit up.”
I sat up. She removed my jacket and shirt. “Where’s your robe?”
I told her.
She brought it to me and I slipped into it. “Now take off your pants and march into the bathroom. Hot bath waiting for you.”
She was wearing a robe too, a no-nonsense blue thing that buttoned up to her neck. Still, she looked lovely enough to kiss. I kissed her.
“None of that now, mister. Let’s get you fixed up first.” She leaned down to kiss the lobe of my ear. “I’ll see you later.”
I wandered into the bathroom and made my way through a cloud of dense steam to the tub. When Bobby shut tine door behind me, I took off the robe and dropped into the tub. At first it was too hot, but pretty soon it felt great. For the second time, I let myself drift.
… door opening and closing.
“What are you trying to do, drown yourself?”
I sat up and coughed water out of my throat. “Hey!” I said.
BOBBY started to laugh. “You look so funny, sitting there and blushing
.”
“Who’s blushing? You made the water hot enough to boil a lobster in.”
“Well, soak for a while. When you’re parboiled, come out. It’ll do you a world of, good.”
“Git,” I said, lifting a dripping arm out of the water and threatening her with it.
She went out and closed the door. I soaked and scrubbed and soaked again. I felt more sleepy than ever, but less fatigued.
“Breakfast’s ready!” Bobby called.
After toweling myself I slipped into the robe and left the bathroom. By comparison the rest of the apartment was cold. I went into the kitchen.
“First you drink this,” Bobby said.
It was a steaming cup or coffee, laced with brandy. I took a sip. Maybe it was a steaming cup of brandy, laced with coffee. I drank it down and felt warm and drowsy.
“Three soft-boiled eggs and toast,” said Bobby.
That’s what I ate. Then there was more coffee, without brandy this time, and a cigarette. All the while Bobby watched me like a proud mother.
“How’d you get in here anyway?” I asked.
“Later. We’ll talk later. Finished? Then just crawl into bed.”
“Alone?”
This time Bobby blushed. It was worth seeing. “Alone, Chester Drum,” she said. “For now.”
She kissed me good night and tucked me in arid kissed me good night again. It was the last thing I remembered for some time.…
Her hair tickling my chin awoke me.
I was lying on my side with my arms around her. She felt warm and softly supple. She fit into my arms beautifully, with her head tucked under my chin and the rest of her lined up just where you’d want. She scratched my foot with her toes.
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