vault door. I watched it. At eight seconds after nine by my watch the red light went out and a white light came on. I didn't need to say anything to Barton. He stepped up to the vault door with its huge combination dial. He spun the dial once right and once left with his body shielding his movements, then backed away. Mace moved in and did the same, then took hold of the door handle and tugged. The massive door slid open silently on its oiled tracks.
'Inside,' I said to them. I followed them into the steel-lined room. A metal cart with seven canvas sacks on it was just inside the door. It was the cart we had seen used for unloading the armored car two weeks in a row. I dug my toe into the sacks. Three were heavy, obviously filled with coin. I pushed them off the cart onto the vault floor. The others I slit with the knife near the wax-impressed seal on the locked cord around the necks of the sacks, just enough to get my hand inside. Two sacks contained bundles of canceled checks, two contained neatly wrapped packages of greenbacks. I shoved the sacks with the cancelled checks onto the floor. 'Is this vault vented?' I asked.
'Yes, it is,' Barton replied. It was the only thing I'd heard him say since we left the Barton home.
'Then relax until they come and get you here.'
I pushed the cart outside, swung the monstrous door closed, and spun the dial. I rolled the cart through the lobby to where Harris was still waiting just inside the side door. 'One latecomer still due or else there'll be an absentee today,' he reported. He eyed the cart. 'That's it?'
'That's it. Skip out and drive Mace's station wagon alongside this door.'
It took him only a moment. I pitched the two sacks into the station wagon. It was a critical moment if anyone walked around from the front of the bank, but nothing happened. I kicked the cart back inside, set the latch so no one could get in without a key, and slammed the door. Harris drove us out of the bank parking lot. My watch said 9:08.
I fumbled around inside a sack until I found two packages of fifty-dollar bills, each wrapped a hundred bills to the package. I showed them to Harris before taking my prepared box and wrapping paper from my jacket pocket. 'Paying off a bill,' I explained. He nodded, his eyes swivelling back to the roadway. It wasn't until later that I realized he thought I meant the Schemer.
I crammed the bills inside the box, wrapped it in the paper, sealed it, applied the address label and the stamps, which covered one whole side, and Scotch taped the whole thing again. I dropped the parcel in my pocket. When I looked up, we were within a block of the Mace house. 'I'll get Dahl,' I said. 'You switch the sacks into the rental car and leave Mace's car in the driveway.'
'Right,' Harris said. He parked in front of the house, leaving the driveway unobstructed.
I walked up the driveway and went in the back door. I knew something was wrong the instant I entered the kitchen. The basement door stood open, and I could hear a feminine voice talking in the front of the house.
I drew my gun and crept through the dining room and living room. In the front hallway, Ellen Barton, nude, was gabbling into the telephone. '-Barton's daughter,' she was saying. 'They must be at the bank.
She hadn't heard my approach. I reached her in two jumps and sapped the back of her pretty neck with the butt of the gun. A corner of my mind wondered if I would recognize this girl with clothes on. The telephone receiver clattered and banged to the floor as she fell forward in a loose-limbed sprawl over the telephone table, then slid to the carpeting, unconscious.
I sprinted toward the basement stairway. At the foot of the stairs the stockade door stood wide open. I slid to a stop in the entrance. Thelma Barton, Shirley Mace, Tommy Barton, and Margie Barton were still lined up in a row against a wall, tied wrist and ankle.
Rachel Mace was not.
The four against the wall stared bug-eyed at the naked idiot girl crouched above Dick Dahl's prostrate figure, her hands at his throat. She was crooning softly to herself. Dahl's face was blue-black. To one side a tilted camera tripod and a smashed movie camera indicated how he had been spending his time.
Rachel looked up at my entrance. She drooled at me as I charged her. She fastened a hand like a steel claw on my ankle. With fantastic strength she began to pull me down onto the mattress. I swung the gun at her head. It crashed against her temple and she crumpled. The steel claw fell away. I took a closer look at Dahl and changed my mind about trying for a pulse indication. Dick Dahl was gone.
I couldn't remember if there was anything incriminating on his film aside from what he'd been shooting here. With Dahl one never knew. I grabbed up the smashed camera, jerked out the film cartridge, jammed it into my pocket, and threw the camera down. 'Don't leave us here with her!' Shirley Mace screamed at me as I started for the door. 'She'll kill us all!'
I kept on going. I knew the police would be there before the idiot regained consciousness. And after the police saw what had happened, Rachel Mace would be someone else's responsibility from that day forward, not the Maces'.
The early-morning rain had renewed itself in a steady drizzle as I ran down the driveway to the rental car Harris had parked at the curb. 'Dahl won't be coming,' I said as I slid into the front seat. 'It just became a two-way split.'
Harris paled. 'The police!' he guessed.
'No, but they'll be right along. Drive to my VW in front of the tourist home.' Harris started up the car like a sleepwalker. I looked into the back seat. There were no sacks. 'Where's the money?'
'In the trunk,' Harris said. He appeared to be having difficulty in swallowing. He turned two corners and pulled in behind my car. 'What do we do now?'
'Get onto the highway leading into Philadelphia. You know the route. I'll follow you. If we become separated, take a room in the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel and wait for me. Leave the car in the hotel garage.' I punched him on the arm. 'We'll lick this thing yet.'
'Yeah,' he said, but his attempted smile was wan.
I opened the door of the rental car. 'Stay within the speed limit,' I warned him, and ran for the VW. Harris moved away as I started it up. I followed him, but not too closely. At the first traffic light I inched into the curb and dropped my package addressed to Dr. Afzul into the gaping maw of the curbside mailbox. When the light changed, I slid in behind Harris again.
One loose end bothered me. Harris was now driving Dahl's rental. His own was parked downtown near the bank. If things had gone properly, we'd have gone back for it. Now the police would find it eventually, with the risk that the rental clerk might be able to identify Harris. We couldn't venture downtown again, though.
The homes in the residential area thinned out. As we approached open country, I pulled off my red wig. I reached into the glove compartment, took out the black one, put it on one-handed, and fastened the tabs. I threw the red wig into the glove compartment. I'd take care of a makeup change during my first gas stop.
When the trees began flying by too rapidly, I looked down at the speedometer. Harris was driving too fast. I backed off my accelerator, and he drew away from me at once. It was panic scraping at his nerves. I could see the rental swaying from side to side on the rain-slick road as he forced it. In minutes he was out of sight, a curve or two ahead of me.
I felt no sense of shock when I saw fresh heavy black skidmarks in the middle of a sharp curve. I came out of the turn myself to find the rental across the road with its driver's side wedged solidly against a big tree. A puff of smoke or a cloud of dust still was poised above the crumpled hood. The car had hit so hard parts of it had exploded from the frame. Pieces of metal were still rolling in the street. As I braked the VW, a tongue of flame licked up over the back of the rental, and burning gasoline trickled down the rain-washed gutter.
I pulled off onto the shoulder and ran across the street. I could hear the ominous sound of crackling flames. The whole car was catching fire, the back end the worst. One look into the driver's side was enough to show that it made no difference to Preacher Harris whether anyone got him out or not. His neck was broken, wrenched completely around on his left shoulder. Blood was running from a corner of his mouth.
I reached in through the smoke, wincing, and snatched the car keys. The money was locked up in the trunk. I dashed to the rear of the car and tried to force the key into the burning trunk. The heat drove me away. I tried it again, but as I did I heard the words of Dr. Afzul in the hospital as though on a tape recorder: 'Do not get burned again, at least not in the same areas. What I do this time, no one can do a second time.'
But the money was in the trunk.
I tried it again.
