They were in the middle of a curve. Parker spun the wheel hard, slammed his left foot on the brake, and cut the lights and the ignition. He heard Formutesca make a sudden sound. Jock’s limp body came rolling into him more because of the tight turn they were in, and the rear tires scraped and gouged sideways across the dirt and the roadside weeds. Parker couldn’t move with Jock all over him, and he kept trying to push the body away.
The left rear of the car hit something, and they jolted to a stop. Parker shoved Jock hard and called to Formutesca, “Out of the car!” At the same time, he leaned over the back seat for the guns.
Formutesca was lying on them. Either he’d been hit by another bullet or he’d knocked himself out when Parker slammed on the brakes. In any case, he was out of the action. Parker pulled him out of the way, and he rolled on to the floor. Parker grabbed a gun butt, pushed open the door, and dove out of the car. The interior light had gone on when he’d opened the door there hadn’t been anything he could do about that and he heard the sound of two quick shots as he leaped into the darkness at the side of the road.
He rolled, came up against a tree trunk, and scrambled around to the other side of it. The car door was still open, lighting the center of the stage. When he stopped there was no longer any sound.
It was the shotgun he’d grabbed. Disgusted, he almost threw it away, but changed his mind and kept it. Holding it in his left hand, he took out his pistol and waited behind the tree for whatever would happen next.
It had been impossible to tell where the last two shots had come from. He’d been in motion himself at the time they were fired, and they could have come from any direction at all. The first shot, having hit the middle of the windshield and then the person on the right side of the front seat, must have been fired from in front and off the road to the left, but that had been while they were in the middle of a curve. The car had slued farther around the curve after the shot, and by now that guide to Marten’s direction was almost useless. The only thing that could be said for sure, since the curve was to the right, was that Marten had to be on this side of the road.
Dawn was coming. Here in the woods on the hillside it was still pitch black night, but Parker remembered the vague paleness against the mountains in the eastern sky. In half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes, it would be possible to see in here.
The question was, should he wait or not? The alternative was to try to get past Marten and on over the hill and down to the farmhouse. Marten himself might try that, preferring to be safely hidden indoors when daylight came. But it would be impossible to get to the farmhouse in the dark without sticking to the road, which could be dangerous.
If Marten would make a noise, any kind of noise, it would help. But he was silent; the woods were silent. Far away Parker could faintly hear birds starting to announce morning to each other, but the gunfire in this part of the woods had silenced everything.
Could he draw Marten’s fire? Parker felt around on the ground, picked up a small stone, and tossed it in the direction away from the road and the car. It fell into a bush with a faint rustling noise.
Nothing.
Parker waited, watching and listening. No response.
He didn’t dare wait for daylight. Marten could be on his way to the farmhouse now. Aside from Claire, there was the problem of letting Marten get set inside the house.
Parker moved. He inched around the tree and moved away at a diagonal away from the lit automobile in the road. When he could barely see the light through the trees he angled back toward the road again. He moved silently, the pistol in his right hand and the shotgun in his left, going in quick spurts from tree to tree, stopping and listening, hearing nothing, moving on.
He reached the road and crossed it in three running leaps. He progressed again on the other side, going uphill now, keeping the light from the car just barely in sight. He knew the road curved over there, and he curved too, planning to come back to it far enough along so he wouldn’t be silhouetted on it in the light from the car.
It was black here, totally black. He could see only objects between himself and the car; otherwise he had to move by feel. He’d put the pistol away now and was holding the shotgun down along his left side so it wouldn’t bump into anything and make noise. He moved along with his right hand out in front of him guiding him along among the tree-trunks.
He knew he’d reached the road again when his hand found no tree. He stood where he was a minute, the dim light from the car down to his left and behind him, and listened to the silence of the woods. The bird sounds were closer now but still not in this immediate area. Parker turned right and began moving cautiously along the road.
He bumped into the car, not seeing it. He felt his way around to the left side, but the window was rolled up and if he opened the door the interior light would go on.
This had to be Marten’s Ford Mustang. Parker would have preferred to put the car out of commission some way, but he had no knife with him and so had no silent way to do it. He felt his way on past the car and continued on down the road.
He’d gone three steps, when he was suddenly bathed in light. He spun around in the glare of four headlights, hearing the Mustang’s engine kicking into life.
Marten had gone back to his car. He’d been waiting there, probably for daylight, figuring that inside the car was the one place Parker wouldn’t expect to find him. He’d known that sooner or later Parker would have to come up this road.
Parker reacted at once, almost without thinking. The lights flashed on, he spun and saw them, he heard the engine turning over, and he raised the shotgun and fired. The right barrel. The left barrel.
The lights went out.
8
There was no one in the Falcon, though the door was still open and the light still on. Parker walked deliberately within range of that light and called softly, “Formutesca.”
“Here.”
Formutesca came grinning from the woods at the roadside. “I heard you blast away up there,” he said. “Then I heard the pistol shot, so I didn’t know who was the winner.”
“The pistol shot was me too,” Parker said. Marten had been wounded by the shotgun blast but not killed, and
