he saw the big man had hit the back window an angry blow with his fist. It had cracked the window glass. He saw Roebuck back in the street floundering the way a big man flops around when he tries to stop running abruptly, and he heard what Roebuck shouted. “I’ll fix you. Thieving bastard, I’ll fix you good.” Roebuck stopped, turned, ran toward his own car.
The filling station was on the north edge of a small Missouri town named Carrollton. The sun was shining on the concrete highway. There was a ridge of snow mixed with dirt along the shoulder on each side of the pavement where the highway plow had pushed it. There was some snow in the fields with weeds and corn stalks sticking out of it.
Harsh’s car went faster and faster, passing several signs in fields.
He veered to the center of the highway to get a full swing at a curve he saw ahead, figuring that way he could go into the curve ten miles an hour faster. There was some howling from the tires in the curve. When he straightened out, he looked back, saw Roebuck seemed to be gaining on him already.
They were headed north. The highway went straight for a while, but with ups and downs over the hills. He began to wonder, suppose he couldn’t outrun Roebuck, what he was going to do? There was no use to try to talk the man out of anything. Talk was what Roebuck had already heard. Talk was what had cost Roebuck seven hundred and twelve dollars. The company had forced Roebuck to make the bad credit good out of his own pocket. He had told Harsh about this in a bar in St. Joseph, and Harsh had said he thought Roebuck was a damn fool for working for that kind of a company, which was when Roebuck grabbed a bottle off the display on the backbar. Roebuck was an enormous man with long powerful arms, a bad-tempered man. He chased Harsh out of the bar and for two terrifying blocks before Harsh outdistanced him. It had been a shattering experience. The man would have killed him.
Roebuck was gaining, all right.
Harsh reached down and punched the choke button with the ball of his thumb to make sure the choke was not pulled out. His car engine was cold-blooded these winter days and had to be choked before it would start; sometimes he forgot and left the choke out. He thought of something and eased the choke back out a little to enrich the mixture to see if that would add any speed. The speedometer dropped from ninety-five to ninety. He pushed the choke back in. He couldn’t think of anything more to do. The old heap just didn’t have it. Put off the valve job too long, he thought.
On a road as straight as this it did not help a man to be a skillful driver. Any fool could tramp the gas and tool down the middle of the road. A crossroads snapped past. What about trying to make it into the next crossroads, he wondered, and take off down some country road. Try to lose Roebuck that way. Oh sure, he thought, let the son of a bitch catch me on a lonely back road and he’ll kill me sure.
The car behind continued to gain on him.
He gripped the steering wheel and kept the gas pressed down with all the strength in his foot. He saw now what he should have done was stay put in the service station— that way there would have been a witness handy when Roebuck jumped him. He had seen one man around the filling station, a tall fellow with pale curly hair, who would have been a witness. One witness was better than none.
Roebuck’s car was about three hundred feet behind.
Harsh was not panic-stricken, he did not think he was going to pieces or anything, but he knew there was real danger from Roebuck. He remembered Vera Sue had said Roebuck was dangerous. “Walter, I know you’re fixing to screw Mr. Roebuck, and I wish you wouldn’t. He gets real wild when he’s excited, real awfully wild. I am afraid you’ll wish you hadn’t messed with him.” Vera Sue Crosby was Harsh’s business associate and she had lent him a little help, at his suggestion, in suckering Roebuck. “Walter, the guy goes nuts, you get him excited.” At the time, Harsh had laughed because he knew that being in a hotel room with Vera Sue would make most fellows rattle their marbles.
One hundred feet behind.
Harsh supposed that using the girl to con Roebuck out of seven hundred and twelve dollars worth of photo supplies was what had driven the man crazy. If Harsh had stuck to the straight con and left out sex, maybe Roebuck wouldn’t have blown his top. However it made no difference now, it was water past the bridge. Harsh had used the photo supplies. He did not have money to pay up. All he could do was run for it. The roar from his engine was deafening and the whole car pounded and shuddered. Son of a bitch trying to fly to pieces, he thought.
The chase was beginning to look like a matter of time, time and providence. If they would only pass a highway cop. But he knew they wouldn’t. When you needed a highway cop they were always gassing a waitress in a restaurant. If he hadn’t been fleeing for his life, if he’d been burning up the highway at ninety-five just for kicks, a cop would be popping from behind every fencepost. That was the way it went, he thought, the potlickers never around when you wanted them.
Fifty feet.
He glanced over the inside of his car looking for something he could use for a weapon to defend himself. In the front seat there was nothing. The only loose objects in the back seat were his camera in its case and the tripod, but the tripod was strapped tight to the camera case, and he knew from experience it would not be easy to unstrap it at this speed. The camera had cost too much money to use it for a weapon. Bust it all to hell, he thought, if I go banging it on that bird’s thick skull. Traveling at this speed he wondered if he dared fool around unstrapping the tripod. It was not very heavy anyway, not much use if he did get it loose. The car took another curve, not much of a curve, but the tires skidded and gave out high girllike shrieks. Coming out of the curve the speedometer read ninety miles and it quickly climbed to ninety-seven.
When the roar of passing air began to have a different quality, he knew what caused it before he swung his head to look. Roebuck was pulling abreast in the left lane.
“Hey, Harsh! Stop your car!” Roebuck had rolled down his right-hand window. “You want me to knock you off the road?” He sounded as if he was chewing rocks now.
“Get away from me,” Harsh shouted. The road ahead lay straight over rolling hills. “Let me alone!”
The cars touched, bounced, wobbled. Harsh brought his machine under control readily enough. He was afraid to hit the brakes because at this speed no telling if it would throw the car off the road. They sped on, the other car drawing up slowly until it was nearly abreast. His throat felt tight. Let the other car get far enough ahead, nudge his front wheel, and he was a goner. He threw a look at Roebuck. The man was steering with just his left hand on the wheel, and there was a metal object in his right. Roebuck’s thick body began squirming toward the middle of the seat. The metal object was a small hydraulic jack weighing about twenty pounds, and he was going to hurl it at Harsh’s head. Oh Jesus, Harsh thought, and he threw up his left hand to fend off the jack. But the wind-stream struck his arm a blow, driving the arm back and actually causing his hand to bang against the outside of his car.
At that moment the cars came together. The impact did not seem violent. A gentle kiss of heavy metal bodies. But Harsh’s left hand was hanging out between the cars and his arm was broken. The ends of the bones appeared through the cloth of his coat sleeve like two large fangs.
Roebuck’s car swerved left and the outside pair of wheels dropped off the slab. Both machines were going downhill, speed slightly over 100 mph. Roebuck’s car hooked into the snow, slewed over and collided with a concrete culvert. The culvert wall, reinforced concrete three feet high, a foot thick, nearly fifteen feet long, sliced through Roebuck’s car like a hatchet through a shoebox. What was left of the car went end over end, hitting and bouncing, hitting and bouncing, landing on Roebuck’s body the third hit, passing through a barbed wire fence and rolling about one hundred feet further into a bean stubblefield. A large cloud of snow and loose earth accompanied it into the stubblefield.
Harsh did not know he was injured until he noticed his left arm was still hanging out the window, and he started to draw it back. He almost screamed from the pain. He looked at the arm, the grayish bone ends sticking through the cloth of his sleeve. He found he had no control of the arm from the shoulder down. He felt a warm slippery quality in his trousers, decided he had shit his pants. He cursed his luck, his carelessness, his stupidity. The arm had been between the cars when they came together, he thought, and it was busted all to hell.
He cut his speed down to about twenty, which seemed awfully slow by comparison, almost as if he could
