Although the car was not designed for kicking, Mary tried it wildly, and was rewarded by a further pressure on her neck. She and Jenny wouldn’t be here with this deadly presence if she had had the wit to analyze what he had given as an explanation for his anxiety while he waited for her in the shadows outside her room: “I couldn’t find your car anywhere.”
But at no time had he seen her in it, so he couldn’t have identified it unless he had followed it from Santa Fe in his blue one, and disabled it to insure her presence in Juarez through tonight.
“How does it feel now?” asked St. Ives curiously, leaning back from the desperately reaching hands that felt attached to arms of cotton. “How do you like it, Mary Vaughan?”
The pain in her lungs, the outrage from her heart, were intolerable. At the moment he didn’t really care what happened to him, thought Mary dimmingly; he was obsessed. Her brain seemed to flicker like a light bulb about to fail, and there was an eruption from the back seat and the terrible grip loosened and then fell away from her throat.
Jenny, swimming, tennis-playing Jenny, had an arm tight around the neck of the man in front of her, her wrist locked in her other hand, so that his head was tilted sharply back. She was crying in a broken and frantic way, as if she had been bottling up sobs for minutes, but she managed to say, “Oh, run, quick!”
And leave Jenny here with him, now that she had turned from simple cargo into a witness? She had to. To run, screaming, was the only hope for them both, because St. Ives had commenced a grim thrashing. How many more seconds could Jenny hold on, wiry though she was?
Still gasping, her throat feeling lined with briars, Mary stumbled out into the road, nearly fell, steadied herself in dimness; in order to see what he was doing, in this dark deserted place, St. Ives had left his parking lights on.
They snapped off as Mary began to run. He might be—he had to be—still imprisoned in that armlock, but he had remembered that. She screamed, frightening herself further, thinking with despair that it was like lighting a match in a vast black cellar, and a pair of cars came careening around the corner. The second one was a police car, its roof-light wheeling furiously.
Daniel Brennan whipped his door open and caught Mary as she staggered against his fender. His headlights were on full, and they reflected off two dull red star-shapes down the road. She gasped, “Jenny,” pointing, and without a word he raced toward them. Two brown-uniformed policemen pelted after him, shouting in Spanish; one of them drew his gun.
Oh, God, they’ll shoot him, thought Mary drearily. The road came up to meet her, but so gradually that it didn’t even hurt.
At the police station, there was a buzz of excitement when, along with Brennan and St. Ives, Mary and Jenny gave their names and their address in Juarez. A fast order was issued, and a man departed at speed. Mary did not risk a glance at Brennan, because the police did not appear particularly friendly, but heard him give a small recognizing cough.
He had already paid severe fines for speeding and running a red light in the course of following St. Ives’ car with its glowing stars. When stopped, and in the erroneous belief that Mary was somehow compulsively in the company of the drug-planter, he had managed to convince the police that there was someone in danger in the car he was pursuing. St. Ives had surprised him with that sudden unsignalled turn, and with the pattern of one-way streets and the police on his tail, he had had to go around two blocks.
St. Ives was handcuffed because he had resisted the police, but in spite of that, to Mary, he did not look particularly safe. Now that he no longer had to maintain a pose, the very cast of his features had altered, and it seemed impossible that he had ever smiled at her, speculated lightly on the invisible man at the Casa de Flores, given her what he had discovered as they drove—to divert her attention as he prepared to swing away from the hospital? His eyes were terrifying.
Although her tongue slipped and slurred occasionally, Jenny was shakily sober. She had told Mary and Daniel Brennan on the way to the police station in his car, closely shepherded by the police with St. Ives, that her whiskey sour before dinner had tasted bitter, but she didn’t know what to expect of a whiskey sour and she had drunk it. Yes, she had been away from the table once when St. Ives told her smilingly that she had a smudge on her cheek, although, when she got to the ladies’ room, she hadn’t.
It was the pain from the bump to her head upon being bundled into the car—intentional, it might be supposed, as further insurance that she stay incapacitated—which had begun to penetrate the fog of a double dose of tranquilizers with unaccustomed alcohol on top. She had heard the mention of a hospital, which had spurred the wakening process, and then the frightful accusation leveled against Mary.
Now, under the bald lights and the suspicious stares of the police because she still gave off an aroma of brandy, Jenny said across the room to St. Ives, “It wasn’t Mary, it was me,” and, as he gave a contemptuous stir, “I had a yellow shower cap on.”
The police gazes narrowed with incredulity and tennis-match attention. They were allowing this, Mary was sure, because they were waiting for the report on the luggage searched at Jaime’s Hotel.
“I thought it was a man—she had such short hair and
