“Yes!” She stormed. “Isn’t that why you picked on me? Because I was defenseless and… and decent? So you could use me, drag me down to your level and then laugh about it?”
“If you’re so decent how come you have six thousand New Dollars to buy this fancy car while my little girl dies of the flu?”
“What-” She looked startled. Her mouth started to open and she closed it with a snap. “You’re an enemy of the Network,” she said. “It says so on the Free-Vee. I saw some of those disgusting things you did.”
“You know what’s disgusting?” Richards asked, lighting a cigarette from the pack on the dashboard. “I’ll tell you. It’s disgusting to get blackballed because you don’t want to work in a General Atomics job that’s going to make you sterile. It’s disgusting to sit home and watch your wife earning the grocery money on her back. It’s disgusting to know the Network is killing millions of people each year with air pollutants when they could be manufacturing nose filters for six bucks a throw.”
“You lie,” she said. Her knuckles had gone white on the wheel.
“When this is over,” Richards said, “you can go back to your nice split-level duplex and light up a Doke and get stoned and love the way your new silverware sparkles in the highboy. No one fighting rats with broomhandles in your neighborhood or shitting by the back stoop because the toilet doesn’t work. I met a little girl five years old with lung cancer. How’s that for disgusting? What do-”
“Stop!” she screamed at him. “
“That’s right,” he muttered. “Dirty-talking old me.”
MINUS 043 AND COUNTING
They got farther than they had any right to, Richards figured. They got all the way to a pretty town by the sea called Camden over a hundred miles from where he had hitched a ride with Amelia Williams.
“Listen,” he said as they were entering Augusta, the state capital. “There’s a good chance they’ll sniff us here. I have no interest in killing you. Dig it?”
“Yes,” she said. Then, with bright hate: “You need a hostage.”
“Right. So if a cop pulls out behind us, you pull over. Immediately. You open your door and lean out. Just
“Yes.”
“You holler: Benjamin Richards is holding me hostage. If you don’t give him free passage he’ll kill me.”
“And you think
“It better,” he said with tense mockery. “It’s your ass.”
She bit her lip and said nothing.
“It’ll work. I think. There will be a dozen freelance cameramen around in no time, hoping to get some Games money or even the Zapruder Award itself. With that kind of publicity, they’ll have to play it straight. Sorry you won’t get to see us go out in a hail of bullets so they can talk about you sanctimoniously as Ben Richards’s last victim.”
“Why do you
He didn’t reply; only slid down in his seat until just the top of his head showed and waited for the blue lights in the rear-view mirror.
But there were no blue lights in Augusta. They continued on for another hour and a half, skirting the ocean as the sun began to wester, catching little glints and peaks of the water, across fields and beyond bridges and through heavy firs.
It was past two o’clock when they rounded a bend not far from the Camden town line and saw a roadblock; two police cars parked on either side of the road. Two cops were checking a farmer in an old pick-up and waving it through.
Go another two hundred feet and then stop,” Richards said. “Do it just the way I told you.”
She was pallid but seemingly in control. Resigned, maybe. She applied the brakes evenly and the air car came to a neat stop in the middle of the road fifty feet from the checkpoint.
The trooper holding the clipboard waved her forward imperiously. When she didn’t come, he glanced inquiringly at his companion. A third cop, who had been sitting inside one of the cruisers with his feet up, suddenly grabbed the hand mike under the dash and began to speak rapidly.
MINUS 042 AND COUNTING
The day was very bright (the constant rain of Harding seemed light-years away) and everything was very sharp and clearly defined. The troopers’ shadows might have been drawn with black Crayolas. They were unhooking the narrow straps that crossed their gunbutts.
Mrs. Williams swung open the door and leaned out. “Don’t shoot, please,” she said, and for the first time Richards realized how cultured her voice was, how rich. She might have been in a drawing room except for the pallid knuckles and the fluttering, birdlike pulse in her throat. With the door open he could smell the fresh, invigorating odor of pine and timothy grass.
“Come out of the car with your hands over your head,” the cop with the clipboard said. He sounded like a well-programmed machine. General Atomics Model 6925-A9, Richards thought. The Hicksville Trooper. 16-psm Iridium Batteries included. Comes in White Only. “You and your passenger, ma'am. We see him.”
“My name is Amelia Williams,” she said very clearly. “I can’t get out as you ask. Benjamin Richards is holding me hostage. If you don’t give him free passage, he says he’ll kill me.”
The two cops looked at each other, and something barely perceptible passed between them. Richards, with his nerves strung up to a point where he seemed to be operating with a seventh sense, caught it.
“
She stared around at him, bewildered. “But they won’t-”
The clipboard clattered to the road. The two cops fell into the kneeling posture almost simultaneously, guns out, gripped in right hands, left hands holding right wrists. One on each side of the solid white line.
The sheets of flimsy on the clipboard fluttered errantly.
Richards tromped his bad foot on Amelia Williams’s right shoe, his lips drawing back into a tragedy mask of pain as the broken ankle grated. The air car ripped forward.
The next moment two hollow punching noises struck the car, making it vibrate. A moment later the windshield blew in, splattering them both with bits of safety glass. She threw both hands up to protect her face and Richards leaned savagely against her, swinging the wheel.
They shot through the gap between the veed cars with scarcely a flirt of the rear deck. He caught a crazy glimpse of the troopers whirling to fire again and then his whole attention was on the road.
They mounted a rise, and then there was one more hollow
“Steer!” he shouted at her. “Steer, goddammit! Steer! Steer!”
Her hands groped reflexively for the wheel and found it. He let go and batted the dark glasses away from her eyes with an openhanded blow. They hung on one ear for a moment and then dropped off.
“Pull over!”
“They shot at us.” Her voice began to rise. “They shot at us.
The scream of sirens rose behind them.
She pulled over clumsily, sending the car around in a shuddering half-turn that spurned gravel into the air.
“I told them and they tried to kill us,” she said wonderingly. “They tried to kill us.”
But he was out already, out and hopping clumsily back the way they had come, gun out. He lost his balance and fell heavily, scraping both knees.
When the first cruiser came over the rise he was in a sitting position on the shoulder of the road, the pistol held firmly at shoulder level. The car was doing eighty easily, and still accelerating; some backroad cowboy at the wheel with too much engine up front and visions of glory in his eyes. They perhaps saw him, perhaps tried to stop. It didn’t matter. There were no bulletproof tires on these. The one closest to Richards exploded as if there had been dynamite inside. The cruiser took off like a big-ass bird, gunning across the shoulder in howling, uncontrolled flight. It crashed into the hole of a huge elm. The driver’s side door flew off. The driver rammed through the windshield like a torpedo and flew thirty yards before crashing into the puckerbush.
The second car came almost as fast, and it took Richards four shots to find a tire. Two slugs splattered sand next to his spot. This one slid around in a smoking half-turn and rolled three times, spraying glass and metal.
Richards struggled to his feet, looked down and saw his shirt darkening slowly just above the belt. He hopped back toward the air car, and then dropped on his face as the second cruiser exploded, spewing shrapnel above and around him.
He got up, panting and making strange whimpering noises in his mouth. His side had begun to throb in slow, aching cycles.
She could have gotten away, perhaps, but she had made no effort. She was staring, transfixed, at the burning police car in the road. When Richards got in, she shrank from him.
“You killed them. You killed those men.”
“They tried to kill me. You too. Drive. Fast.”
“
She drove.
The mask of the well-to-do young
They drove about five miles and came to a roadside store and air station.
