“Are there any cops there?”
“Not now. They’ve all gone. Marty, I’m scared.”
You’re scared? The sweat was dripping from my hands. I was afraid to look behind me. I knew what I’d see if I did. Hilligan.
Or the devil. Riding my tail.
“Look. There’s been a mix-up. We still got a little time. But we got to get out of town while we can.”
“All right, Marty.”
“I mean we got to go far — and for a long time.”
“I don’t care. As long as I’m with you.”
That was what I wanted to hear. Then why in hell didn’t I stop shaking like that?
“All right. Get a car ready. If you’ve got one that you haven’t used too much, get it. It won’t matter, they’ll check all the license plates you own anyhow and put ’em on the wire, but the less known the car the better. Pack a bag. Only make it light, Liza.”
“I will, Marty. I will.”
“I want you to come to this restaurant.” I gave her its name and address. “Pick me up. In the meantime, I’ll make arrangements to get us out of the country.”
“All right, Marty.”
“Trust me.”
“I do. I do, Marty. I know, if anybody can get me out of this, you can.”
That was right. If anybody could. But maybe nobody could. Anyhow it was going to be narrow. It was going to be close. “Twenty minutes, Marty.” Liza promised.
“You can hang in twenty minutes, Liza. You get here in ten.”
“Yes, Marty. As soon as I can. I’ll need some clothes.”
“To hell with that. I’ll buy you clothes.”
“I love you, Marty.”
“Thank God for that.”
As soon as she’d hung up, I dropped in another coin. This time I dialed an Ybor City number. I waited a long time. A woman answered.
“I’d like to speak to Tony Ricales,” I said.
“Un momento. Who do I say calls?”
“Tell him it’s a friend. And urgent.” Funny. I was afraid to tell Ricales it was Marty Carter. Suddenly I was remembering the way I had slammed him out the back door of the Dutch Slipper. I was afraid he wouldn’t talk to me.
After a moment Ricales answered. “Ricales here. Who is this?”
“Tony. This is Marty. Marty Carter.” I could feel the frost. “What do you want?”
“I — I uh — You can do something for me, Tony.”
“What is it?”
“Tony. I’ve got to get someone out of the country. To Cuba. I know you can arrange it. I know you have arranged it — ”
“I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“Tony! Stop stalling! For God’s sake, stop stalling! I’m not talking as a cop. I need your help. There are plenty of guys making trips to Cuba, and you know them all. I want you to arrange a passage. Whatever it costs, I’ll give you a check. I’ll wait until you certify it.”
“I still don’t know what you are talking about.”
I was really sweating now. The sweat was turning into icy globules of fear and pelting down from my arm pits. I was beginning to itch inside that cheap suit.
“Tony! I’ll pay you. Stop giving me the run-around. You’re the only guy I know who can arrange to get someone out of the country, Tony. You got to do it.”
There was a shrug in the tone of Ricales’ voice. “I’m sorry, Carter.”
“Tony, whatever I’ve done to you, I’m sorry. But I’ll pay you — ”
“Let’s say what you have done to me, I cannot forgive.”
“Tony!”
“My dignity. It is more to me than a personal vanity. Though I admit it is that, too. But when I lost my dignity in this town, I lost my importance. I lost my position. People lost confidence in me. You — a man like you could never understand the deep hurt you have done Ricales.”
“I’ll make it up to you, Tony.”
“No, Señor Carter. I don’t think so. I don’t think you’ll ever make up to anybody the wrongs you have done them. You’ll excuse me now. I’m a busy man.”
“Tony!”
“Let us say our accounts are cancelled. Good-bye Señor Carter.”
The telephone went dead.
Chapter 17
I REPLACED the receiver. The inside of the booth was like an oven. There was a hot fetid odor in there. The stink of fear. I pushed open the door and stumbled out to a table.
A small, dark-skinned waiter came over.
“Señor?”
“Bourbon.”
He went away. I watched him walk away. But I was listening for the sirens. He came back. Still there were no sirens. None except those inside my head.
“‘You are all right?” he said.
“Me? Yeah. Sure. I’m swell.”
I gulped down the drink. I could feel it burn its way to my stomach and then it started roiling around. I thought I was going to be sick.
I saw a dark blue car pull into the no-parking zone in front of the restaurant. I recognized Liza at the wheel. Lovely Liza. Lovely deadly Liza. I threw over everything in the world so I could have you. And now baby I’m going to have you.
I threw a bill on the table and brushed past the waiter. He stood watching me hurrying toward the front door. I knew one thing. When the cops came with their questions, he would remember me. Hell, by then I’d be out of here.
I hurried across the walk. She reached over and opened the door. I hurled myself into the seat beside her. I saw she’d thrown a small overnight suitcase on the rear seat. I smiled. “Let’s get out of here, Liza.”
“Are you all right?”
“Everybody worrying about me. Sure. I’m swell. I’m glad you picked a dark car. They’re better. Always better.”
“I’m glad I pleased you. You know what?”
“what?”
“This morning. On the carpet. On the floor. It was heaven. It was what I’ve always wanted, Marty. A man I could belong to.”
I tried to smile. “That’s me, baby.
“That’s you, baby.” Her hand came over and touched my knee. “What will we do, Marty?”
“First, we’ll get out of town. Fast. Keep about five miles above the speed limit. That’s not enough to make a cruiser pick you up — and keep moving.”
“Where will we go?”
“Don’t keep yammering at me. Let me think.”
The blood seeped from her face. “I’m only trying to help, Marty.”
“I know you are. But talking don’t help. We got to find some place where we can hole up in. We got to hide.”
“Marty. I know.”
“What?”
“I know where we can hide.”
“Yeah? I hope it’s good, baby. Time is running out.”
“The Odessa Lake region. George and I own a little rustic lodge on Sky Lake up there. It’s secluded. We’ve got a wire fence all around our property.”
I thought it over. Where I was, right then, you didn’t just jump at opportunities. You weighed them. You thought them over. You considered the angles.
“It sounds good,” I said.
“It’s good,” she said. “And while we’re there we can make arrangements to fly out. I know some young fellows with planes. Two-place little things that they’d be willing to fly crowded. For enough money. Friends of Jerry’s. Crazy kids doing anything for thrills.”
Like me, I thought. Like Marty Carter. Martin Carter whose mother raised him to be a cop. Tough. But just. A man who hated crooks and killers. Fleetingly I remembered Ricales. I had been tough with him. Too tough.
At Dale Maybry Boulevard I told her to take a right. “Marty,” she said. “Gas. We better get gas.”
I looked at the gas gauge. It looked all right. Not nearly full, but it was less than twenty miles up to the lakes. “Looks okay.”
“We better be sure. No telling what might happen. No telling what we might have to do.”
I cranned my neck, looking for prowl cars. I nodded. “Ok
ay. Pull in here and let’s hurry.”
But when she pulled into the tank and the young attendant came out, she told him to fill the tank and check the oil. “My Lord!” I whispered. “We got to hurry.”
She patted my leg. “Maybe we can hurry more by being sure, darling. This car has been sitting up. We don’t want anything to happen, do we?”
“Okay.”
“We want everything to run right from now on.”
She slid out of the car. I glared at her. “Now where are you going?”
“Nerves,” she said. She smiled. “To the little girl’s room.”
I nodded again. Sweating. “Hurry. Will you?”
But she didn’t hurry. The kid finished filling the tank. It took less than six gallons. When he checked the oil, the level showed it was brim full. I paid him for the gas and looked for Liza.
I opened the door and swung out. There was a sign pointing to the right side of the small yellow building. Ladies.
I started around there when I saw Liza. She was at the pay telephone inside the office. She had gone in through the side door. Angered, I strode into the room. She turned and smiled at me. At the same instant, she replaced the receiver.
“Who were you calling?”
“Darling! Don’t you trust me?”
I looked at the kid. He was grinning at us. I exhaled. “All right. Let’s get out of here.”
She laughed and took my arm. I half dragged her out to the car. This time I got under the wheel. I roared out of the station and back onto the through lane of the busy highway.
Liza snapped on the radio. As though it were speaking to us alone it began to intone: “Police Sergeant Carl Dill and a young woman companion Helen Shires are missing. They are believed to have been abducted by another Police Sergeant, Martin Carter. Both these officers are members of the City Homicide Squad and have been working on the murder case in the death of State Senator George Flynn. An intensive and widespread search is being made — ”
“That’s us,” I told her. “Let’s get out of here. That is pap for the people. I can tell you this much. Hilligan has put your license numbers on tape, and they are looking for us right now.”
“They won’t get us, Marty. We’re going to be all right.”
I looked at her. Her eyes were shining. She loved excitement even more than I did.
But the funny part of it was, she was right. We passed cruisers with cops riding together in them. They didn’t even look at us. A traffic cop on Hillsborough Avenue waved us through. I turned left and went across to Waters and right on it to Florida.
When I hit Florida Avenue, I headed north as fast as the little blue car would go.
“Back there, who’d you call back there?” I yelled at Liza over the whistle of the wind.
“One of the flyers I knew. I thought it wouldn’t hurt to get in touch with him, kind of feel him out before we got too much notoriety.”
“You knew we were going to get it?”
“Didn’t you?”
• • •
At Lutz, I slowed down for a school zone and poked at twenty miles an hour to a turn off on a ribbon of black road that led back into the cypress country. “If I go slow enough there’s no reason for anyone to remember a dark car that turned off here,” I told Liza.
She closed her fingers on my arm. “I want you to hurry, darling. I want to get there. I want to love you.”
“You must really love me.”
“I do. But mostly it’s this excitement. It’s got me all keyed up.”
“What excitement?”
“You know. The radio. You must have killed them, didn’t you? Helen and the Sergeant. You killed them. They’d never have let us go, otherwise.”
“Yes. I killed them.” I felt a chill go through me.
“For me.”
“For you.”
“That makes us even. That makes us more alike. It makes me love you more.”
This was what I wanted, wasn’t it? A deadly doll? Well, I had her. Calmly she was telling me that we were alike. We were killers. Now we were one. My stomach crawled.
There were three-foot signs on the barbed wire fences around the forty acres that Liza owned. The signs were signed by Senator George Flynn, Owner. The wording was briefer than the signature. Brief and to the point: Keep Out.
Liza got out and unlocked the gate. She held it open while I drove through. Then she closed and locked it after us. She jumped in the car beside me and laughed. “Not much longer, baby.”
But it was slower going through the senator’s property. The roads were deep ruts and through black marsh lands. We passed a dozen places where people had been stuck before us and had piled cabbage palmettoes and long planks in the ruts.
I began to smell the cypress black water of Sky Lake. It was really back in the country. A hideaway. We drove out into a small cleared place. The black earth had been leveled and graded. A rustic cabin sat in the middle of the cleared place and overlooked the lake.
It was late afternoon when we arrived. I killed the engine and slid out of the car, breathing in the good fresh air. The lake was like a mirror. There wasn’t a ripple in it. A bird wailed in the distance.
I felt the flesh crawl across the nape of my neck.
I saw Liza reaching back for her overnight bag. “I’ll get it for you.”
Her voice was sharp. “That’s all right.”
I pulled her back. “Don’t be silly. Let me wait on you. I’ll carry your bag, lady. I got to start sometime.”
She struggled. “You can carry me.”
“I’m a big boy. I’ll carry both of you.”
She started to say something and then shrugged. She slid out of the car on the other side and walked toward the house, fumbling inside her pocketbook.
I reached over the front seat and lifted her overnight bag. I put some heft into it, expecting weight. There was almost none. I nearly fell out of the car.
“Liza!”
She turned around, the keys to the lodge in her hands, I shook her overnight bag. “This thing is empty.”
She laughed. “Must you always find fault? You said hurry. What woman can pack in a hurry?”
She turned around and went up on the porch. She unlocked the front door and marched inside without waiting for me. She snapped on the lights and I stopped in the front door, my mouth hanging open.
“What’s the matter, Marty?”
“This place. Electric lights. A telephone. Radio. If this thing is rustic then the Waldorf is a flophouse.”
“It used to be rustic.” She shrugged. “When we first bought it it was rustic. We didn’t like it, so we had it fixed up.”
“I’ll say you did. This place is only slightly smarter than your city place.”
“Is that all you’re going to do now that you’re here, just stand there and admire the house?”
I dropped the empty overnight bag and reached for her. She met me more than halfway.
• • •
She only made it as far as the wide divan in the living room of the lodge. It was like thunder and lightning in that room. It was all the hellfire of this morning with all the heaping brimstone that the excitement and the running had added to it.
Afterwards, she fell asleep. Like a kitten. Like a baby. Like a doll with nothing on her conscience.
I shivered. Like a woman without a conscience.
I sighed heavily. Deep in my belly. I knew I was nobody to point a finger or view with alarm. But I knew I couldn’t fight it. That girl lying there, that murderess was what I had to have. Without her I was lost. I didn’t live.
I sat up on the side of the couch and scratched my stomach. Those cheap clothes really made me itch. Quietly I got up and tiptoed out of the room. I searched until I found the shower. It was tiled and done in aquamarine and yellow. Very fetching. Very rustic.
One thing was rustic. There was no hot water. I guess there was a heater or something you had to light. We hadn’t taken time to attend
to the details of living here. Maybe later. Meantime a cold shower put new life in me.
I came out of the bathroom with one of the large towels tied around my middle. I dried as well as I could but I was still damp. I began to shiver the minute I stepped out of the shower. Wind was pouring through this house from somewhere.
I padded along the corridor to the front room to see where the draft was originating. I found it. I saw the front door was still standing open. Outside it was dark. The heavy dark of the back country.
An owl sobbed. I shivered again and started across the room to close the door. That was when I saw Jerry. Jerry Marlowe. He was sitting in a club chair across from the divan where Liza was sprawled as I had left her.
There was a gun in Jerry’s hand. It was leveled right at the place where I had knotted the bathtowel over my navel.
Chapter 18
I DIDN’T say anything. But Liza woke up. Maybe my breathing woke her. Or maybe the cry of the owl. Or maybe she hadn’t been to sleep. She sat up and straightened her dress over her knees.
“Funny,” I said. “How clear it all is all of a sudden. The empty suitcase. The one you packed is in Jerry’s car, isn’t it? And the telephone call? You had to call him as soon as you found out where we were going, didn’t you? So it’s Jerry, Liza. The beautiful boy. It’s been Jerry all the time.”
Marlowe smiled. “Are you surprised?”
I faced him. I hated him. I wanted to smash that pretty face. But I managed to keep my voice cold. “I shouldn’t have been. She’s shown me how badly she needs a man. I should have guessed you were the reason she was starved.”
Marlowe laughed. “I don’t know, Carter. Did she need a man? Or did she need a sucker?”
I nodded. “You’re right. It was a sucker she needed, Marlowe. That’s what she got.”
He stood up. “Well, thanks for everything, copper. You’ve done fine. I’ll take over now.”
I laughed in his face. “How do you expect to get out of here?”
“Ricales.”
“He’ll never help you. He laughed at me.”
“At you, he laughed. Not at me. You see, Marty, Ricales and I are very close. We have been for some time. Where it pleased him to refuse you, he’ll want to help his boss. Surprised you didn’t tumble when you saw us together at the Dutch Slipper. I was expecting it — and was ready.”
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