The flames were roaring viciously, and they drove me away.
I gave up.
I stood there for what seemed minutes, just a few yards away, watching the bank loot burn up. Then another car pulled around the same curve and brakes screeched as the driver saw the burning wreck. I threw the rental's car keys back into the front seat and ran across the wet street to the newcomer. 'Call an ambulance!' I yelled at him to get him away from the scene. He nodded and gunned his car ahead down the road.
I got into the VW, made a U-turn to reverse direction, took the first left to angle back onto the Philadelphia highway, and was at the Bellevue-Stratford in half an hour.
It hadn't really sunk in that no one was going to meet me there.
14
It was six months before I found out what actually happened at the Mace house that night.
I stayed in a motel for three days after checking out of the hotel the next morning. When I felt sure the initial heat was off, I drove to Texas. I worked for three months as boss in a sawmill in Sweetwater. Then for a change of pace I went up to Hugo, Oklahoma, and worked a couple more months as assistant on a survey crew. One reason I stayed with it so long was that I needed the money. Another was that I needed a breather to assess what the bungled job had done to my nerve.
Then I moved on to the west coast. In Los Angeles I found a back-street film processor who agreed to develop the cartridge of color film I'd scavenged from Dick Dahl's movie camera. The processor almost backed out when I insisted upon going into the darkroom with him. He finally went through with it. I was taking no chances on him making a duplicate negative on spec since he knew I would hardly come to him with anything legitimate.
So almost six months to the day after the fiasco I rented a projector and sat down in my motel room one night. There were no surprises at the opening of the film. It started with views of the wide-hipped woman in the airport parking lot. Then it shifted abruptly to a vacantly staring Rachel Mace, who somehow managed to appear more naked than any female without clothing I had ever seen.
Then suddenly a pinpoint-eyed Ellen Barton was doing a dance of the seven veils in front of the lens, without any veils. Dahl hadn't been able to resist the chance to film the two nude girls. The camera, which had been handheld previously, suddenly shifted to a new, higher perspective. It was now on the tripod I had seen, I decided.
And I found that I had seriously underestimated Dick Dahl. He walked into focus in front of his own camera without a stitch on. He coupled with the willing Ellen for some time, then turned his attention to Rachel. I could see the idiot's pleased reaction at the attention turn to doubt and then to anger. I saw the unbelieving look on Dahl's face when those terrible hands clamped down on him. And I watched Rachel Mace strangle Dick Dahl to death while Ellen Barton stood by, laughing.
When the film ran out, I didn't rewind it. I stripped it from the reel, took it into the bathroom, and burned it. It stunk like hell. I flushed the residue down the toilet.
Dahl would probably never forgive me for not burying the reel of film in a pot of flowers and taking it east and putting it on his grave.
Too bad I'm not the sentimental type.
So I'm at a loose end right now.
I'm trying to make up my mind what comes next.
There's the Schemer, for one thing. I owe him money. Not 12 1/2 percent of $225,000, since I wound up with nothing, but on the other hand he can't sell the Thornton, Pa., job again. I owe him something, and I don't have it.
I could go to Colorado and dig up the jar at timberline and set myself up so that I could pick and choose on the next job. But I still consider that jar mistake money.
Right this minute I can't seem to make up my mind.
Once in a while I even think I might run up to Ely, Nevada, for a few days and look up Hazel Andrews.
I'll shake myself out of it one of these days, though, and then everything will be back to normal.
