myself, and another time I had to stop an attendant from chasing me by shooting over his head.
I was no high liver, and the money piled up. I had a purpose for it. I bought a secondhand car and learned how to drive it. Ten weeks after Oily started his sentence I drove the hundred-eighty miles back across the state.
Back to Winick.
I rang his doorbell at ten o'clock at night. He opened the door himself. Not that it made any difference; I was all ready to go right into the house after him.
I shot him in the face, four times. He went backward in a kind of shambling trot. 'That's for Oily, you bastard,' I told him, but I don't think he heard me. I think he was dead before his big shoulders hit the floor.
Winick was the first.
I woke at sundown in the Bracketville motel, humped myself across the street to a combination grocery- restaurant, and loaded up on bacon, eggs, and black coffee. I recrossed the highway and went right back into the sack. I woke the next morning at five-thirty, feeling better physically than I had in weeks.
I had breakfast at the same restaurant and was ready to leave. I climbed into the new Ford, listened appreciatively to the engine sound when I started it up, and tried to back out of my parking place. The car rocked back and forth, but it wouldn't budge. I sat there blankly for a moment before it dawned on me what had happened. All that Texas gumbo I'd driven through had frozen the brakes, including the emergency, when dried.
I went back across the road again. I rousted out a barefoot kid at the restaurant and brought him back to the car. He crawled underneath it and clawed out a couple of pecks of rich-looking mud. He had trouble freeing the emergency, but he finally managed it. I gave the kid two dollars, and he turned cartwheels all the way back to the restaurant.
It was a beautiful morning when I hit the highway. Everything was fresh and clear after the storm. The road was dry and there was no traffic that early in the day. I laid into the accelerator the first straight stretch to see what the engine in the Ford could actually do. I chickened out at 116, and it felt like I had an inch of gas pedal left. The thing was a fireball. It held the road well, too.
I drove on through Uvalde, San Antonio, Seguin, and Luling. I had lunch in Weimar. In the afternoon I plowed on through Houston, Beaumont, and Orange. I spent the night in Lake Charles, Louisiana. The odometer said 469 miles for the day.
I'd pushed it a little because I wanted to make Mobile the following night. I could get guns and other things I needed in Mobile from Manny Sebastian. I had to ditch the artillery I was carrying. One gun traced to two bank guards in Phoenix, the other to a body floating in a rain-swollen ditch. If Manny hadn't lost his contacts, I could get a Florida license and registration from him to match what I was driving.
1 was out on the highway again by six-thirty the next morning. Ten miles east of Lake Charles I turned north on Route I ON at a little place called Iowa. I stayed with the new route for twenty miles to Kinder, then headed east again on 190, the New Orleans bypass.
I sailed through Eunice, Opelousas, Baton Rouge, and Hammond in Louisiana, then crossed into Mississippi at Slidell. A few miles farther on 190 hooked back into 90 again, and I rolled along the Old Spanish Trail through Liny St. Louis, Pass Christian, Gulfport, Biloxi, and Pascagoula. Along that sunlit stretch I was seldom out of sight of white sand and blue Gulf. When I pulled into a motel in Mobile about five o'clock, the odometer said 343 miles.
I washed up, had dinner, and drove downtown to the Golden Peacock, Manny Sebastian's joint. After midnight the place swung like a steeple bell, but at this time of night it was quiet. Manny had a finger in a lot of pies. He hadn't seen me in quite a while, but he recognized me as soon as I walked in. He came over and shook hands. He'd put on weight since I'd last seen him, and his jowls and extra chins transformed the face I remembered as jovially ugly Into something sinister.
'The back room?' he asked with a cocked eyebrow.
I nodded. He walked behind the bar and engaged in small talk with a couple of the half-dozen customers. After live minutes he selected a key from a huge ring on his belt and opened an unmarked door at the end of the bar alongside one marked 'Office.'
I gave it a couple of minutes before I went to the door and tapped. Manny let me in and closed and barred the door. He had a bottle and glasses already out on a small table—the room's only furnishing except an old- fashioned Iron safe in one corner.
'Long time, man,' Manny said expansively. 'How's old hit-the-squirrel-in-the-eye-at-a-hundred-yards?' He poured and handed me a drink. 'What's your problem?'
'Not the same as yours, I hope. You talk too much, Manny.' I took a swallow from my glass. 'How are you fixed on Florida registrations?'
He nodded. 'What're you driving?'
'A Ford all over mud on your parking lot.' I handed him one of my Chet Arnold business cards. 'Have your boy match that up and run off a license while he's at it.'
Manny went to the door and unbarred it. He called someone over to whom he spoke in a low tone, then closed the door again. 'Ready in an hour. Like what else?'
'Hardware. Preferably a Smith & Wesson .38 police special and a Colt .22 Woodsman.'
He nodded again. 'I'll have to send for the Woodsman but I've got a .38 right here.' He was already whirling the dial on the old safe. He produced the Smith & Wesson with a flourish. 'Never been fired except by me an' never in anger.'
'Okay. What's the damage?'
He squinted up at the ceiling. 'Oh, say six hundred. Paperwork comes high these days.'
I paid him. Paperwork wasn't the only thing that came high, but I had to have those guns.
'Grab a seat at the bar,' Manny said. 'It's on the house. It'll give you the office when I get your stuff together. How're things in general?' Shrewd eyes in the larded-over features studied me.
'Quiet, Manny.'
He chuckled. 'A hundred seventy-odd thousand quiet?'
I forced my face into a smile. 'I read about that. A nice touch. It sounded like Toby Coates. Or Jim Griglun.'
'Toby's in Joliet,' Manny said smoothly. 'And Jim lost his nerve after the time in Des Moines.'
'Sometimes a man gets it back.'
Manny shook his head. 'Not if he didn't have too much to begin.' He grinned at me companionably. 'That Phoenix job had your pawprints all over it. 'You ought to miss a shot once in a while.'
Out of the mouths of fools.
I made a mental note.
'Sorry to disappoint you,' I said lightly. 'I've been in hibernation.' But I felt a growing sense of irritation. This kind of earache I didn't need.
I le seemed to sense my mood. 'Who should know better?' lie said, cryptically enough, then opened the door. 'Order up. It's on the house, remember.'
I sat at the bar and ordered a highball I didn't want. Through a window at the right I could see the parking lot. A slim redhead with a limp was walking around the Ford. He raised the hood as I watched, then opened the front door, leaned inside, and wrote something down. The engine number, I figured. The redhead went back to the hood and looked inside for two or three minutes before closing it.
I nursed my drink for half an hour, then had another. I was two-thirds of the way down to the bottom of it when Manny slid onto the next stool and laid a package in my lap. 'Eddie says that's a real fireball you've got on the lot,' he said softly. 'I got a wheelman would give his front teeth for it. You want to trade? I'll give you something to boot.'
'Not right now, Manny. I'll keep you in mind, though.'
I waited until he left and then went out to the car. I unwrapped the package, put the new license and registration in my wallet, and switched loads from the old guns to the new. I tried them for balance, and they felt all right. I'd check them out for sighting accuracy as soon as I had a chance.
I drove out of the lot. T doubled and twisted over a circuitous route back to my motel, more from force of habit than from any real belief that someone might be following me. Still, the conversation with Manny bothered me. Manny was a gossip. Never to the wrong people, so far as I knew, but a gossip is a gossip. This business of driving around the country so soon after a job bothered me, too. Usually I had a nice, quiet place to hole up in
