Chapter 13
The curtains blazed up. The gas had splashed as far as the opposite wall. The stolen equipment from the construction site, along with everything else, had been tumbled about by the collision. There had to be a fire extinguisher somewhere, but there was no time to find it.
The great tire blocked them off from the worst corner, and it was firmly lodged. The wall-to-wall carpet would be the worst problem. Frieda was wielding a heavy drape. The fire retreated after each swing, but instantly recovered. The sofa caught. Now they were blocked from the door.
As long as they continued to move at the same speed, they could hold the fire in this room. The instant they stopped, the whole thing would go up. Using the butt of his pistol, Shayne hammered the glass out of the bedroom window beside the pillows he had arranged to look like an unconscious man. Then he punched the talk button on the two-way phone.
“Your trailer’s on fire. Pull over.”
He knew at once from the deadness of the sound that the trailer’s swing had snapped the connection. There had to be some way to get the attention of the people in the cab. If he and Frieda came through opposite windows at the same time, they still might be able to make the capture.
He was looking for something to throw. The first thing he considered was the oxygen tank of a welding outfit. Another possibility hit him. He remembered throwing a torch into the payloader bucket. If he could find that, he could cut their way out and climb through into the pickup.
Frieda was pushing furniture into the fire, trying to make a firebreak. It wasn’t working.
“Hold it three minutes?” Shayne shouted.
“Try.”
He spotted the torch. He found the acetylene and made his connections in a hurry. Pushing too hard, he broke his last match. He tore a page from a cookbook, twisted it into a long spill, and lit it at the fire. In another moment, the torch was spitting. He adjusted the mixture, modulating the flame from orange to a hot, hard blue.
Kicking everything out of his way, he began work on the wall. The flame went through the thin sheet metal like a knife through ice cream, leaving a charred line from floor to ceiling. Frieda retreated down the passageway, using her drape as a flail, while he completed a crude door. As the cuts joined, the metal section fell inward.
“Frieda.”
She had lost her cap. Her hair had come loose, and her face was smeared with soot. She looked marvelous, as always.
Holding on with one hand, he reached across to the pickup and opened the back door. He stayed there, straddling the gap, while Frieda squeezed past. A sudden change of direction would have spilled them both on the highway, but the engineers who designed the highway had believed that the straightest road is the shortest and fastest and therefore the best. Flames filled the kitchen and one bedroom. Frieda shifted her grip from the jagged metal edge to Shayne’s shoulder, then to the roof of the pickup, and swung on in.
Shayne followed her across. Their speed had dropped to thirty and was still dropping. Perhaps the driver had realized finally that something unusual was taking place behind him.
Shayne crouched to disengage the hitch. He unhooked the chains and snapped the latch. The ball still rode snugly in its socket. Getting a good grip, he jumped hard on the bumper, and the burning trailer pulled free.
They would be changing vehicles in another ten miles. When Downey saw the headlights closing with him-an ordinary black Ford or Chevy, nothing to worry about, except that, being in charge, he was the one who had to worry about everything-be picked the dark glasses off his knee. He had killed the dashboard lights earlier. Pam was about to start a cigarette. He told her to wait till the car was past.
“In fact,” he said, watching the mirror, “get down on the floor. A pickup and trailer, two men and a girl. You never know, they might just remember.”
Pam slid to the floor and tugged at Werner’s pants until he followed, with a sigh of protest. The headlights came closer, much too slowly. Downey decided to brake as soon as they were alongside, timing it so they wouldn’t notice his brake lights, and let them scoot past. But it was the other car that braked and fell back.
Pam, on the floor, could tell something was wrong. “Jack?”
“Somebody wants to play games.”
The overhead mirror was blocked by the camper body. He was driving with the two big side mirrors. Their lights stayed in his eyes.
“Creeping paranoia,” Werner remarked. “Poor Jack, everybody’s chasing him.”
“If they want to pass, why don’t they pass? We’re only doing forty-five. Here that’s crawling.”
The lights came at him again even more slowly. Downey had an impulse to hog the center line until the next exit, and if they followed him off, he would know they were hostile. But with that enormous trailer behind him, he had to play it conservative. He wasn’t used to driving this much vehicle. He felt slow and unwieldy, like a pro basketball center in a room with ordinary people.
He glanced at the speedometer, wanting to see what they did if he dropped his road speed again. He felt a distinct jar, and his eyes jumped to the mirror.
“He cut in on me!”
The trailer was swinging. It swung away, back, away again.
“They’re on fire!”
The car behind them drifted out on the shoulder, definitely burning. Flames showed through the windshield. The others scrambled back on the seat, and Werner put his head out the window.
“What happened?” Pam said in the middle. “Tell me what happened.”
The burning car pulled over, and two figures jumped out, one of them ablaze. Downey came down on the gas. He wasn’t about to back up and help. Let the fuckers burn. Some kind of freak accident that couldn’t happen again in a hundred years. Brakes probably. They were driving with their emergency on, which was why the car had seemed slow to respond. When flames came up through the floorboards, the driver had been so startled that he jerked over and rammed Downey’s trailer. Drunk? Undoubtedly.
Werner said, “Man, they’re burning.”
“That’s their problem. How about our back lights? Are they on?”
Werner craned all the way out. “No,” he reported. “So if we pass a cop, we can expect to hear sirens.”
“Not for the first time tonight,” Pam put in.
“Nobody cruises this late,” Downey told them. “We’re going to do the last stretch on a side road, if I can get that son of a bitch to start tracking.”
He maintained a hard foot on the gas, but the trailer continued to wander. He was getting a bumping, an irregular oscillation. Perhaps the jolt had broken something loose, and it was rolling around in there. He could still see the glow from the burning car, and he decided against stopping until they had left the four-lane. The next exit was a quarter of a mile ahead, then presently an eighth of a mile. He shifted down for the ramp.
Suddenly his front wheels bucked, as though they had struck a speed bump like those in the trailer camp. But on the Interstate? He continued the turn, and the feel of everything changed. They were no longer pulling a load. The ramp curved away. Without quite believing it, he saw their unattached trailer, still on the main highway, continuing south. And it, too, was on fire!
That was the worst thing yet on a bad night. Some supernatural force must be working against them. Downey straightened the wheel in time to keep from leaving the ramp. The pickup was enjoying its freedom.
“There goes our million bucks,” Werner observed.
What was he talking about? The only million-dollar object around here-and then it came to him. A vise seemed to close on his head. Canada was inside that trailer, tied to a bed.
The trailer continued to pick up speed, coming down from the overpass. It was beginning to drift. Soon its outside wheels were off on the shoulder. It ran down a slight embankment, hit the fence, and kept going into a cultivated field. A million dollars. No chance of getting anybody out of that fire. It was out of control.
Pam clawed at his shoulder and pointed. He saw it, a big irrigation wagon standing all by itself well out in the field. He understood what she was shouting. But the way their luck seemed to be running, the wagon had to be empty. If there was water in it, there was no way to bring it to bear on the fire.
The trailer changed direction, moving less rapidly on the uneven ground, and headed straight for the water
