I asked her how long she thought that bank would last two people on the run. She hesitated, then talked some more until it turned out that the “couple thousand” was nearer fifteen grand.
That was more like it.
“Why?” I wanted to know.
“Why what?”
“Why the sudden overwhelming concern for my health and welfare? A day or two ago you didn’t care if you never saw me again. Now you want to follow me to the ends of the earth. Hell, you want to lead me to the ends of the earth. What’s your angle?”
She gave me a pouting look that made me feel lower than the underside of a rattler’s belly for so much as asking. She held the look until I wanted to crawl under the rug, and then told me.
“I don’t have anything now,” she said. “Not a damn thing. I had Caroline but you killed her.”
Yeah.
“And I … I like you, Jeff. I told you that you were the best I ever had and I wasn’t kidding. I’d rather be with you than anybody else.”
I wasn’t sure whether or not I believed her. Maybe it made sense and maybe it didn’t.
“Besides,” she said, “you killed Caroline because of me. I didn’t … didn’t know you loved me that much. It makes me feel kind of funny.”
I nodded slowly.
“Jeff?”
I looked at her. It wasn’t hard to do—she was as beautiful as ever, more beautiful than ever, and soft and pink and naked and wonderful. And now we were together, inseparably together, lost together and on our way to hell together.
I kissed her.
“We can’t waste time,” she said. She tried to say it briskly and efficiently but a trace of sexy huskiness crept into her voice. She swept on as if she was unaware of the huskiness—or as if she was trying to deny it.
“We’ve got to hurry. We can catch a bus out right away and we’ll be out of New York before they discover the body. Carrie never had many friends and the ones she did have never came to our apartment. She had a town house, too, you know, and she only had the apartment so the two of us would have a place to be together. But there’s a maid who comes in every morning to clean up and the body’ll be discovered tomorrow morning at the very latest. We can’t afford to stay around that long.”
I fumbled for a cigarette and got a match to it. I drew on the butt and blew out a cloud of smoke. I took a second puff, then bent over and ground the cigarette out in the carpet.
“I’ve got one suitcase packed for myself,” she said. “I don’t think we should chance going back to your hotel or anything. If they discovered the body they’ll be waiting for you there and we can’t afford to take the chance. Just wear what you’ve got on and … what’s so funny?”
“I don’t have anything on. Neither do you.”
She giggled, then broke the giggle off in midstream. “You know what I mean,” she said. “When we leave the bus we’ll buy a fresh change of clothing same place we get the car. Same town, I mean.”
“I’ve got money at the hotel.”
“How much?”
“A few hundred.”
She shook her head. “It’s not worth the risk, Jeff. For a few hundred we’re risking your life. There’s no sense doing that.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Of course I am. Let’s get dressed now and hurry on down to that bus station.”
I looked at her again. I reached out a hand and touched her throat. I let the hand slip down over her body, over her breasts and her round belly.
“Don’t rush me.”
“We don’t have time,” she said. “I told you we don’t have time.”
“Of course we do.”
“Jeff—”
“We have plenty of time,” I told her. “For some things there’ll always be time.”
I cupped her breast with one hand. Her cheeks were flushed and she was trying to keep from breathing hard. The battle was won.
“Please,” she said. “Jeff, there’ll be time for that later. After we get off the bus, Jeff. And when we get to Mexico we’ll have the rest of our lives. That’s a long time, Jeff.”
“Not long enough.”
She couldn’t sit up any more. She was lying down and her breathing was out of control.
So was mine.
“Jeff, Jeff, Jeff. Oh, you fool. Jeff, we have to get out of here. We have to—”
I stopped her mouth with mine.
“Jeff—”
I was touching her everywhere and her whole body was responding like a fish to a lure.
“Jeff—”
I didn’t take her. I kept handling her, kissing her, fondling her, working her up to a pitch so that if I stopped it would have killed her.
Then, when she was panting so loud that they must have heard it in Outer Mongolia, when sweat covered her breasts and ran down the valley between them, then I hoisted myself up on one elbow and turned away from her.
“You’re right,” I said with difficulty. “There’ll be loads of time later. We’ll have the rest of our lives for this sort of thing. No point in wasting valuable time here and now. You’re one hundred percent right, Candy.”
Her nails dug into my back and drew blood. She called me the filthiest names anybody could possibly think of and sank her teeth into my upper lip.
Then all the desperation and all the excitement and all the tension in our two fevered bodies exploded and the world fell off its axis and the day turned to night and the floodwaters rose and the sun blazed and the moon eclipsed it and the rock of Gibraltar crumbled into dust.
Time vanished, space spread out and disappeared. I forgot my name and my life and the world.
I forgot that I was a rapist and a murderer.
A bus is sort of a subway on dry land. A subway is bad enough but there just ain’t no subway that goes more than ten or twenty miles. The Greyhound took us to Louisville and that was a damn sight further.
It was a drag.
It was worse than a drag. It was boredom and agony and hell without flames, and it would have been sheer torture even if we hadn’t been running away from the electric chair. Even without the tension, a trip like that would have been miserable, and the way I felt it was as though the bus was standing still. It wasn’t—Greyhounds make better time than most cars and this guy driving our crate hit close to seventy a good part of the time.
But that wasn’t fast enough the way I felt. A jet plane wouldn’t have been fast enough. A rocket would have seemed like crawling. I was so tense I couldn’t see straight, and despite the relative speed of the bus it was a far cry from a rocket or a jet plane.
I did not like that bus.
We had seats near the back, seats together, and there was just me and Candy and her suitcase. As soon as Candy was settled in her seat next to the window with the suitcase on her lap she was out like a light, sleeping like a babe in arms. She was the type of person who could do that. She was under the same strain I was, or at least she should have been, but she had the ability to put it all out of her mind and make like a junkie on the nod.
Not me.
It was night on the bus. The lights were out and the bulk of the passengers, like Candy, were busy counting sheep and sawing wood. I felt annoyingly lonely, a stranger and afraid in a world I had neatly unmade, and I wanted to crawl out of the bus and lie down in the road and let the bus run over me.
I told myself that it was ridiculous; that I should give myself up and let them throw the switch and send me to hell where I belonged. I told myself that I wasn’t built to run away, that this just wasn’t my scene.
That’s what I told myself.
And for a while I believed it.
But then I started devoting some concentrated thought to the matter—which is always a good way to louse yourself up, and at this point I began to see that running away was old stuff for Jeff Flanders. Old stuff—hell, it was my way of life. I’d been spending my whole life running away from something or other and I ought to take to the current situat
ion like a duck to water.
Running. Not always from John Law—this was in the nature of a brand-new experience. But always from somebody and generally from myself. I was running away from myself when I took up with Candy in the first place instead of straightening up and flying right and sticking with Lucy. I was running away from myself when I moved out of the apartment on 100th Street and into the Kismet. And if the bouts with the bottle hadn’t been running, what the hell were they?
Now the preliminaries were over. This was the big race, the one I’d been spending my whole life shaping up for. Now I was running for the comparative safety of the Mexican border with the New York police baying at my heels and the world’s greatest lay sitting beside me.
Uh-huh.
I chain-smoked the night away. I lit one cigarette from the butt of another and prayed that I’d live long enough to die of lung cancer. I dropped the used-up cigarettes on the floor of the bus and ground them into shredded tobacco-and-paper and kicked the shreds into the center aisle.
It’s hard to say just when the full impact of it all hit home. Shocks of this magnitude don’t hit at first; you think you know what it’s all about and two hours later you start shaking. It’s like the time the car I was driving and the car somebody else was driving had a car-fight. It was the other guy’s fault—he missed a stop sign and I got a glimpse of his car out of the corner of my eye and we both hit our brakes about the same time. There was a disgusting brake-squeal and a moment’s silence and an incredible montage of unpleasant sounds as the two automobiles chewed each other up.
I reached for my door handle and it wouldn’t open—the crash had knocked things together. So I nonchalantly got out the other side, strolled over to the moron who had done such terrible things to my new car, lit a cigarette and offered one to him.
That was that.
And two hours later I was trembling so terribly that I couldn’t stay on my feet.
It was the same thing now, years later. What Candy had told me jarred me right at the start, knocked me off my pins, and I thought it was as much of a shock as I was going to get. But I still hadn’t adjusted to it at the time and I was calm enough to make love to her a few minutes after she clued me in on the happy fact that I was a murderer.
You see, I never completely accepted it. I made the neat mental entry on the immaculate mental file card, the pen-scribble that testified that one Jeff Flanders had brutally murdered one Caroline Christie. But the entry on the little white card was simply a definition, an equation. Jeff Flanders—murderer. That’s the equation, and in itself it was not reassuring.
The mental picture that took time to develop was even less reassuring and it damn near jolted me out of the bus. It did not hit all at once; it grew on me, snuck up on me until suddenly it was there and was awesome in the full force of its presence.
It was Caroline Christie, the attractive dyke with money in the bank and Candy in the bed, and she was lying on the floor of her apartment as dead as a lox. What had killed her? It might have been the beating, or the rape, or any one of a number of things I had done to her. How did she look now? Would there be the odor of death from her body when they found her?
How will the roses smell
When we are all blown to hell?
I looked down at my hands and they were the hands that had murdered Caroline Christie. I wanted to cut them off and fling them out the window.
And then, true to form, I began to think seriously of my own skin.
My own skin. Not the most ideal skin in the world, but one which had been with me for quite some time. I had grown rather attached to it over the years.
I could read the newspaper headlines in my mind, could imagine the tabloidic progress reports on the relentless pursuit and inevitable capture. The Daily News, direct and brutal, would say:
COPS CAPTURE
CHRISTIE KILLER
while the Mirror, in a rare display of ingenuity, would headline it:
CHRISTIE KILLER
CAUGHT BY COPS
We’d all have fun.
I thought about the trial. Maybe Lucy would cry, and maybe that bird Hardesty would be on hand to defend me, and the papers would have a field day with the whole scene. There’d be a conviction, and an appeal, and a denial of the appeal, and another appeal, and denial of that appeal. And then I’d sit in a cell on Death Row at Sing Sing and wait and wait and wait until they came along and took me to a room and strapped me in a chair and threw a switch.
It would burn for a minute or two, I supposed, and then nothing would happen at all. Jeff Flanders would have paid his debt to society and gone to heaven or to hell or, as I prefer to believe, into the gaseous cosmos.
I was sweating and the sweat was cold on my forehead. I wiped it off and sweated some more and lit another cigarette and smoked and sweated and smoked and sweated and looked at Candy while she slept and watched the sky lighten and the dawn come up through the rarely-washed green-tinted window of the big Greyhound bus.
When we pulled into Louisville, Candy’s eyes snapped open and she was instantly awake. We left the bus. I was unsteady on my feet but she made up for it with her absolute composure. She held the suitcase tight in her hot little hand and led me out of the dusty bus terminal and into the thoroughly uninviting daylight.
The dealer wanted twelve hundred for a green Buick sedan that wasn’t worth a grand. He got a grand—Candy did the talking and I stood around saying silent prayers. Only Candy could have beaten the guy down on the price. Price didn’t matter, we had fifteen times the price and needed the car desperately. Two hundred dollars weighed against the possibility of discovery was infinitesmal and I couldn’t have argued for a minute but I had to admit to myself that she was playing it the way it had to be played. If we didn’t haggle he would be much more suspicious than if we did. And she knew it.
So we had a car and it drove nicely enough, a nice big car with the registration made out to Mr. and Mrs. David Trevor. Well, to Mr. David Trevor, actually. Mr. and Mrs. David Trevor were the names Candy had picked out for us, and I figured they were as good as any other names. I was a little put off by the fact that my driver’s license and my registration had nothing at all in common but there wasn’t much I could do about it. If the joker’s sales book had Jeff Flander’s name in it the jig would be up fairly soon.
I was too tired to keep my eyes open and too tense to close them so we got the hell out of Louisville after a quick bite to eat in a ptomainerie which shall remain forever nameless. The roads were good and the Buick hugged them like a long-lost brother. The car ran well even if it wasn’t much for looks and I hit ninety-five on one stretch of straightaway until Candy reminded me that getting picked up for speeding wouldn’t do us a hell of a lot of good. After that I drove a steady three miles under the speed limit and we made good time.
By nightfall I was too dead to keep going. We switched off on the driving—she was a damned fine driver—but I was still bushed and we put in at a motel and showered happily. I took a shave that I needed desperately and crawled into bed so tired that I could have slept on a bed of nails with ease.
Then Candy crawled in next to me and we didn’t get to sleep for a good half hour.
It was a strange type of lovemaking. We were too tired to be imaginative and too tense to really relax and enjoy it—at the same time our tension needed the release of sex or our sleep wouldn’t have done us much good. She was clean and sweet-smelling from the shower and I took her quickly and perhaps a little sadistically. We were two fools going to hell in an open boat and determined to get there in a hurry.
We slept for a long time. We checked out of the motel and gobbled fried eggs and black coffee at a diner on the road and off we went.
There was a radio in the car but it made both of us nervous. I’ve never liked music or chatter while I drive and Candy felt the same way about it. I turned the radio on a couple times to try to catch a news flash and once I managed to catch the tail end of one. It informed us
brusquely that the police were hot on the trail of one Jeff Flanders, the rapist-killer of Caroline Christie. They piled on a few nasty adjectives, uncomplimentary things that sat not at all well with me, and then the announcer began to extol the merits of Bangaway Mattresses and I switched off the noisebox.
“They’re after us,” I mumbled. Candy didn’t catch it and I had to repeat what I’d said.
She nodded. “I knew they would be.”
“I wonder if they know where we’re headed.”
“I don’t think so.”
I shrugged. “They’ll figure it out,” I told her. “They’re supposed to be very efficient. Some joker at the terminal will remember selling us a ticket or something and that’ll be the end of it.”
“By that time,” she said, “we’ll be in Mexico.”
“I hope so.”
She lapsed into a sterile silence and I pushed the car on southward.
The next day another problem occurred to me. The cops had our names—by now the border patrolmen would also have our names and it would be relatively impossible to get across the line into Mexico. You don’t need a passport for Mexico but I remembered vaguely that you do need a tourist card and a vaccination certificate and sundry nonsense. You could get the tourist card automatically by showing identification, but where in hell were we going to get identification. The auto registration would hardly do it.
I outlined the problem for Candy but she was right on hand with a solution.
“There’s a place in Galveston,” she explained.
She left it like that and I asked her what she was talking about. It turned out that this place in Galveston of which she had heard tell was a place where you could get anything forged from a draft card to a passport, for anywhere from twenty to five hundred dollars.
The Galveston guy would fix us up with whatever we needed, and there was obviously no chance of a guy in his position reporting us to the police. He wasn’t exactly aboveboard himself, needless to say.
So when we hit Galveston we would become Mr. and Mrs. David Trevor for keeps. It was just as well that we’d bought the car under a phony name; in addition to keeping the name off the car dealer’s books it eliminated the necessity of forging that as well.
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