'What's this about Cleveland?' Richards demanded (it was easy, he found, to demand of Elton).
Parrakis shrugged. 'Oh, he's a fellow like me. I met him once in Boston, at the library with Bradley. Our little pollution club. I suppose Mom said something about that.' He rubbed his hands together and smiled unhappily.
'She said something,' Richards agreed.
'She's . . . . a little dim,' Parrakis said. 'She doesn't understand much of what's been happening for the last twenty years or so. She's frightened all the time. I'm all she has.'
'Will they catch Bradley?'
'I don't know. He's got quite a . . uh, intelligence network.' But his eyes slipped away from Richards's.
'You-''
The door opened and Mrs. Parrakis stood there. Her arms were crossed and she was smiling, but her eyes were haunted. 'I've called the police,' she said. 'Now you'll have to go.'
Elton's face drained to a pearly yellowish-white. 'You're lying.'
Richards lurched to his feet and then paused, his head cocked in a listening gesture.
Faintly, rising, the sound of sirens.
'She's not lying,' he said. A sickening sense of futility swept him. Back to square one. 'Take me to my car. '
'She's lying,' Elton insisted. He rose, almost touched Richards's arm, then withdrew his hand as if the other man might be hot to the touch. 'They're fire trucks. '
'Take me to my car. Quick.'
The sirens were becoming louder, rising and falling, wailing. The sound filled Richards with a dreamlike horror, locked in here with these two crazies while-
'Mother-' His face was twisted, beseeching.
'I called them!' She blatted, and seized one of her son's bloated arms as if to shake him. 'I had to! For you! That darky has got you all mixed up! We'll say he broke in and we'll get the reward money-'
'Come on,' Elton grunted to Richards, and tried to shake free of her.
But she clung-stubbornly, like a small dog bedeviling a Percheron. 'I had to. You've got to stop this radical business, Eltie! You've got to-'
'Eltie!' He screamed.
'Quick,' Elton said, his face full of terror and misery. 'Oh, come quick.'
They crashed and blundered down the stairs and out the front door, Elton breaking into gigantic, quivering trot. He was beginning to pant again.
And upstairs, filtering both through the closed window and the open door downstairs, Mrs. Parrakis's scream rose to a shriek which met and mixed and blended with the approaching sirens: 'I DID IT FOR YOOOOOOOOO-'
Minus 049 and COUNTING
Their shadows chased them down the hill toward the park, waxing and waning as they approached and passed each of the mesh-enclosed G.A. streetlamps. Elton Parrakis breathed like a locomotive, in huge and windy gulps and hisses.
They crossed the street and suddenly headlights picked them out on the far sidewalk in hard relief. Blue flashing lights blazed on as the police car came to a screeching, jamming halt a hundred yards away.
Gigantic, megaphone-booming voice.
'Your car . . . up ahead . . . see?' Elton panted.
Richards could just make the car out. Elton had parked it well, under a copse of run-to-seed birch trees near the pond.
The cruiser suddenly screamed into life again, rear tires bonding hot robber to the pavement in lines of acceleration, its gasoline-powered engine wailing in climbing revolutions. It slammed up over the curb, headlights skyrocketing, and came down pointing directly at them.
Richards turned toward it, suddenly feeling very cool, feeling almost numb. He dragged Bradley's pistol out of his pocket, still backing up. The rest of the cops weren't in sight. Just this one. The car screamed at them across the October-bare ground of the park, self-sealing rear tires digging out great clods of ripped black earth.
He squeezed off two shots at the windshield. It starred but did not shatter. He leaped aside at the last second and rolled. Dry grass against his face. Up on his knees, he fired twice more at the back of the car and then it was coming around in a hard, slewing power turn, blue lights turning the night into a crazy, shadow-leaping nightmare. The cruiser was between him and the car, but Elton had leaped the other way, and was now working frantically to remove his electrical device from the car door.
Someone was halfway out of the passenger side of the police car, which was on its way again. A thick stuttering sound filled the dark. Sten gun. Bullets dug through the turf around him in a senseless pattern. Dirt struck his cheeks, pattered against his forehead.
He knelt as if praying, and fired again into the windshield. This time, the bullet punched a hole through the glass.
