I gunned at him without answering. 'They're going to sit you down in a square-looking chair one of these days, kid,' he told me. 'They'll turn on the juice, and there'll be a sizzling noise while they burn your ass up, but you won't hear it. Think it over.' He walked away from me.
Harry Coombs and his predictions didn't bother me either.
By October I knew more about Sergeant Edwards than his wife did, but he never gave me an opening. I began to get restless. I didn't know what I was going to do after I got through with him, but I wanted to get it over with and find out.
Then early in November we had an unexpected sleet and ice-storm. Edwards mounted his porch steps that night, careful of the slippery footing, his chin shrunken into his coat collar. He never saw the piece of iron pipe I got him with before he reached his front door. When I finished with the pipe, I rolled him back down his porch steps and went home. Edwards was lucky. Someone found him before he froze to death.
I didn't find that out until morning. At least the clock said it was morning, but it was still dark outside. A police cruiser came by for my father and me. They hardly gave us time to dress. My father kept asking them what had happened. They wouldn't say anything, and my father kept sneaking looks at me from the corner of his eye.
At the station Chief Mullen really gave me a going-over. He tried to scare answers out of me. He should have known better by that time. I sat there for twenty solid minutes and smiled at him. It was no effort to smile; I really felt like smiling. My father horned in finally and asked Mullen what basis he had for his unfounded accusations.
That really flipped the chief. He went into orbit. He shook a finger under my father's startled nose. You've got a wild animal running loose in this town, Mullen told my father. So you've got a choice. Cage him, or leave town. Leave town, Mullen repeated with emphasis. It would be better all around.
I nearly laughed until I saw the stricken look on my father's face. I couldn't understand it. The chief couldn't do anything. Nobody could do anything. I didn't give a damn what they thought they knew about me. They couldn't prove anything, so they couldn't do anything.
On the way home my father said tiredly he hoped some day I'd realize it was necessary to live with people. I didn't understand him. He said a lot of other things that made me feel sorry for him, because he just couldn't stand up to a situation.
I couldn't believe it when the 'For Sale' sign went up on our front lawn. I was completely disgusted. My father was letting them bluff him right out of the game. They couldn't make him do a thing he didn't agree to do. I simply couldn't understand it, but my father was a weakling.
Still, I couldn't let his spinelessness affect my mother and sisters. I left home that same night. I knew I could manage, and obviously my father couldn't.
I left, and I never went back.
I had to switch cars.
The minute my potbellied Mexican guide's tongue came unlatched, the police would get a description of the Ford and me from the motel. It didn't matter a damn that they wouldn't know why they were looking for me. It was up to me to change the appearance of what they'd be looking for.
Highway 80 east out of HI Paso is a long, straight, dark stretch of road. Nobody palled me, and not many headlights came at me. Ground fog, began to drift in from the fields on either side of the highway. It began to close in over the road. I wanted to make time, and if this kept up I couldn't do it.
Must of the gas stations I passed were closed. When I came upon a lighted one, I slowed down, tempted. I finally hit the gas again and went on by. Grabbing the attendant's car or one he was fixing wouldn't solve anything. Unless I buried him in his greasepit he'd pass on the word that would tie me to the new car. The presence of the abandoned Ford would put another collar around my neck.
I needed a setup that would let me run the Ford over a cliff, or the equivalent. Even more I needed to get off Highway 80. The john in a girl's dorm doesn't get much more action than that damn highway, even with the addition of the newer Interstates.
I went over it in my mind. Van Horn is a hundred-twenty-odd miles east of El Paso. A dozen miles the other side of Van Horn Highway 80 continues east, but Highway 90 heads south. It seemed a better choice. I couldn't count on Jimmy's keeping the covers over his head forever. The police could even be out looking for the pistol- packing
I made the turnoff in an hour and thirty-five minutes, fog and all. I had to fight my eyes closing down, and I hit the shoulder a couple of times, dozing off, but at twenty minutes to midnight I turned onto 90 and headed south.
It was a narrower road, less traveled. I began to watch for a motel. I'd tucked a lot of miles under my belt that day. When I found a motel with a car parked close to the road, I'd drive a mile beyond, walk back, jump the switch on the car in the motel yard, and take off. There'd be nothing to tie the abandoned Ford to the stolen car if I hid the Ford off the highway.
I couldn't have gone more than twenty miles on 90—everything as black as the inside of a closet—when a pair of headlights appeared suddenly in my rear-view mirror. Then a red flasher started bouncing off the Ford. The cruiser must have come up behind me with his lights off, because I hadn't seen a thing. I took a quick look at the speedometer. Sixty-five. No sweat there. I heard no siren, but the car behind me pulled out alongside, then burst ahead and cut in.
I had to smash the brakes and cut the wheel hard to avoid scraping fenders as the cruiser herded me to the side of the road. I could see it was an unmarked car, though I hadn't known the Rangers used unmarked cars. Live and learn.
I was ready when he leaned in the window I'd rolled down. I handed him my driver's license made out to Earl
Drake. Paper-clipped to it was a twenty-dollar bill. I could see a trooper hat silhouetted against the dark, but I couldn't see the face beneath it. I could sense rather than see him looking around the Ford's interior before he walked to the rear and put a flash on the license plate.
He returned and handed me my license. The twenty-dollar bill was gone. 'Drive up the highway a quarter- mile,' he said in a voice that sounded as if he regularly had steel filings for breakfast. 'Turn right at the first opening. A hundred-fifty feet in, there's a white fence. Turn left and stop. I'll be right behind you.' He walked back to his car. I hadn't gotten to say a word.
I could feel a slow burn taking over. If this sonofabitch thought he was going to take my twenty and then haul me up before a justice of the peace, he was damn well going to find out differently. When I buy someone, I expect him to stay bought.
He pulled ahead to let me out of the cramped edge-of-the-highway situation, and I eased back out on the road. I rolled along slowly, watching for the turnoff he'd indicated. Even at that I almost missed it. It was hardly more than a dirt dropoff. Halfway into my turn I thought I'd made a mistake, but the headlights behind me turned in, too. I came up to the white fence and turned left. Twenty-five yards farther on I faced a deadend, an impenetrable, junglelike brush tangle looming in the headlights.
I was gelling hotter by the minute. I was losing valuable time. I had missed a turn somehow despite his directions, and I'd wound up in this jackpot. I started to back out, but a red glow filled my rear view mirror. I turned my head to see the cruiser was backing into the clearing, sealing me in. Even as I looked he cut his lights.
All of a sudden I had a feeling.
I switched off my lights and motor, fumbled a flashlight from the glove compartment, and went out the door on the passenger's side Something wasn't kosher. The unmarked car, the absence of a siren, the dead end deserted spot to which I'll been directed . . .
I put the Hash on him when I heard brush crackling
under his feet. He stopped dead in the beam of light. He was holding a gun, a blued-steel job. His campaign hat looked like a Ranger's hat, especially in the dark. His clothes didn't even look like a uniform except for the color. The bastard was no more a cop than I was.
He brought his gun up and snapped off a shot at me just as I let go at him with the Woodsman. He turned as if to run. I put one into his ankle that brought him down with a crash. He landed all sprawled out, his gun flying off into the bushes. I got over to him fast in case he had another.
When I got the flash full on him, I saw it wouldn't have made any difference if he'd had a machine-gun. He'd been moving on reflex. The hard core of light shone down on a round, dark hole between his eyes, just to the right
