trailer and let you ride in that, out of sight, but I don’t think it’ll be necessary if your appearance can be changed enough. You can take out a Social Security card under the name of Susie Mumble or something and go to work. They’ll never get you—if you lay off the juice and keep your mouth shut.”
“Go to work as a waitress, I suppose?”
“Waitress. Carhop. B-girl. Who cares? As a matter of fact, with your looks you’d never have to work anywhere very long.”
“Well, thank you. Do you mean my looks as they are now, or after I’ve suffered a month of your remodeling?”
I shrugged. “Either way. You’d come out a beautiful wench no matter what we did. There’d be plenty of wolves drooling to support you.”
“I like your objective appraisal. I take it you don’t include yourself among them?”
“You’re a business proposition to me, a hundred and twenty thousand dollars’ worth of meat to deliver on the hoof. I like my women warm to the touch. And not quite so deadly with a gun.”
“I am already aware of the vulgar depths of your taste. Diana James, for instance.”
I saw Diana James turn a little, as if someone had twitched at her clothing, and collapse, sprawling on the concrete floor.
“Why did you call her Cynthia?” I asked, remembering.
“Because that was her real name. Cynthia Cannon.”
“Why did she change it?”
“Why does any criminal?”
“I thought she was a nurse.”
“I believe she was.”
I shrugged. “All right. It’s nothing to me. I don’t give a damn. I don’t care how you killed Butler, why you killed him, or where, or who helped you. I don’t care who those two blonds were, or how they got in it, or why they wanted to kill you. I don’t care why you shot Diana James, or whatever her name was, or why she changed her name.”
“Well, that’s good,” she said.
“Shut up till I finish. There’s just one thing I care about, and you’d better be telling the truth about that. If there’s not any hundred and twenty thousand in those three boxes, or you try to run out with it, hell will never
hold you.”
“Don’t worry. It’s there.”
“Baby,” I said, “it had better be.”
Chapter Twelve
We tried the radio.
It crooned, and gave away thousands of dollars, and told jokes cleaned up with kissing, and groaned as private eyes were hit on the head, and poured sirup on us, and after a long time there was some news. Big Three, it said, and investigation, and tax cut, and budget, and Senator Frammis in a statement this morning, but nothing about Butler.
It was too soon.
We were pounding over a rough road in a vacuum of dead silence and blackness while all around us the sirens were screaming and teletypes were chattering and police cars were taking stations on highways intersecting a circle they had drawn on the map like a proposition in plane geometry, but it was too soon for anybody to know
about it except the hunters and the hunted.
I cursed and turned the radio off.
She lit a cigarette and leaned back in the seat. “Don’t be so intense, Mr. Scarborough,” she said with amusement. “We’ll get through. Cyclops is feeling only the backs of the sheep.”
“What?”
“Never mind. I guess they haven’t made a comic book
of it yet.”
“Go choke yourself,” I said.
“A month. One whole, enchanting month.”
“Don’t worry. If I can stand it for a hundred and twenty
grand, you should be able to put up with it to stay out of the electric chair.”
“It would seem so, wouldn’t it?”
I shrugged her off and concentrated on driving. We came out at last on the intersecting east-west road and
turned right, watching for the one that crossed going south. I looked at the time. It was nearly eleven. The few farmhouses we passed were dark. I began to watch the gasoline gauge. It was dropping faster than I had expected. It must be nearly thirty miles to that small town on the map. And if we got there too late, everything might be closed.
It was a race between the gas gauge and the clock. When we saw the lights of the little town ahead it was ten minutes till midnight and the gauge had been on empty for two miles.
“Get down out of sight while we go through,” I said.
“Aren’t we going to get gasoline?” she asked.
“Not with you in the car.”
She got down, squatting on the floor with her head and shoulders on the seat. I drove through without stopping, looking for an open gas station and knowing that if we didn’t find one we were sunk. It was a one-street town two blocks long, with half a dozen cars parked in the puddle of light in front of the lone cafe. There was a garage at the end of the street, on a corner.
It was open.
The attendant in white coveralls stood in the empty drive between the pumps and watched us go past. I’d been afraid of that. But it couldn’t be helped. Anything moving at all in a town like this would be seen.
I drove on, past the scattered dark houses at the edge of town, hoping there would be enough left in the tank to get back. We went around a curve and the lights were gone, swallowed up in the night behind us. I slowed. We crossed a wooden bridge where willows grew out over the roadside ditch. I slid to a stop.
“Wait right here,” I said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. And don’t show yourself on the road until you’re sure it’s
me. I’ll flip the lights up and down before I stop.”
“All right,” she said. She got out of the car.
There were no cars in sight. I made a fast U turn and
headed back.
I stopped in the pool of light in the driveway. The attendant came over. He was a big black-headed kid with a grin. “Fill ‘er up?” he asked, looking at me with faint curiosity. He knew it was the same car he’d just seen going past headed south.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s empty. Just lucky I noticed it before I got clear out of town.”
He shoved the nozzle in the tank. It was the automatic type that shuts itself off. He went around in front and checked the oil and water and started cleaning the windshield while the bell on the pump tinkled away the gallons. I could hear a radio yammering in the office. It sounded funny, like a cab dispatcher’s radio, cutting off, coming on, going off again. I couldn’t tell what it was saying.
The kid jerked his head toward the car’s license tags and said, “Lot of excitement up your way tonight.”
I could feel my mouth dry up. “Hows that?”
“Mrs. Butler again. You don’t happen to know her, do you?”
“No,” I said. “Why?”
“Just thought maybe you did, seeing as you’re from the same county. She’s got this whole end of the state in an uproar. With all the cops looking for her, she comes right back to her own house. Or at least they figure it must have been her. Some man with her, too, from the looks of it. They slugged a deputy sheriff and shackled him with his own handcuffs, and the house got afire some way”
“All this on the radio?” I asked. “I didn’t hear anything about it.”
