“A few hundred.”
She shook her head. “It’s not worth the risk, Jeff. For a few hundred we’re risking your life. There’s no sense doing that.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Of course I am. Let’s get dressed now and hurry on down to that bus station.”
I looked at her again. I reached out a hand and touched her throat. I let the hand slip down over her body, over her breasts and her round belly.
“Don’t rush me.”
“We don’t have time,” she said. “I told you we don’t have time.”
“Of course we do.”
“Jeff—”
“We have plenty of time,” I told her. “For some things there’ll always be time.”
I cupped her breast with one hand. Her cheeks were flushed and she was trying to keep from breathing hard. The battle was won.
“Please,” she said. “Jeff, there’ll be time for that later. After we get off the bus, Jeff. And when we get to Mexico we’ll have the rest of our lives. That’s a long time, Jeff.”
“Not long enough.”
She couldn’t sit up any more. She was lying down and her breathing was out of control.
So was mine.
“Jeff, Jeff, Jeff. Oh, you fool. Jeff, we have to get out of here. We have to—”
I stopped her mouth with mine.
“Jeff—”
I was touching her everywhere and her whole body was responding like a fish to a lure.
“Jeff—”
I didn’t take her. I kept handling her, kissing her, fondling her, working her up to a pitch so that if I stopped it would have killed her.
Then, when she was panting so loud that they must have heard it in Outer Mongolia, when sweat covered her breasts and ran down the valley between them, then I hoisted myself up on one elbow and turned away from her.
“You’re right,” I said with difficulty. “There’ll be loads of time later. We’ll have the rest of our lives for this sort of thing. No point in wasting valuable time here and now. You’re one hundred percent right, Candy.”
Her nails dug into my back and drew blood. She called me the filthiest names anybody could possibly think of and sank her teeth into my upper lip.
Then all the desperation and all the excitement and all the tension in our two fevered bodies exploded and the world fell off its axis and the day turned to night and the floodwaters rose and the sun blazed and the moon eclipsed it and the rock of Gibraltar crumbled into dust.
Time vanished, space spread out and disappeared. I forgot my name and my life and the world.
I forgot that I was a rapist and a murderer.
A bus is sort of a subway on dry land. A subway is bad enough but there just ain’t no subway that goes more than ten or twenty miles. The Greyhound took us to Louisville and that was a damn sight further.
It was a drag.
It was worse than a drag. It was boredom and agony and hell without flames, and it would have been sheer torture even if we hadn’t been running away from the electric chair. Even without the tension, a trip like that would have been miserable, and the way I felt it was as though the bus was standing still. It wasn’t—Greyhounds make better time than most cars and this guy driving our crate hit close to seventy a good part of the time.
But that wasn’t fast enough the way I felt. A jet plane wouldn’t have been fast enough. A rocket would have seemed like crawling. I was so tense I couldn’t see straight, and despite the relative speed of the bus it was a far cry from a rocket or a jet plane.
I did not like that bus.
We had seats near the back, seats together, and there was just me and Candy and her suitcase. As soon as Candy was settled in her seat next to the window with the suitcase on her lap she was out like a light, sleeping like a babe in arms. She was the type of person who could do that. She was under the same strain I was, or at least she should have been, but she had the ability to put it all out of her mind and make like a junkie on the nod.
Not me.
It was night on the bus. The lights were out and the bulk of the passengers, like Candy, were busy counting sheep and sawing wood. I felt annoyingly lonely, a stranger and afraid in a world I had neatly unmade, and I wanted to crawl out of the bus and lie down in the road and let the bus run over me.
I told myself that it was ridiculous; that I should give myself up and let them throw the switch and send me to hell where I belonged. I told myself that I wasn’t built to run away, that this just wasn’t my scene.
That’s what I told myself.
And for a while I believed it.
But then I started devoting some concentrated thought to the matter—which is always a good way to louse yourself up, and at this point I began to see that running away was old stuff for Jeff Flanders. Old stuff—hell, it was my way of life. I’d been spending my whole life running away from something or other and I ought to take to the current situation like a duck to water.
Running. Not always from John Law—this was in the nature of a brand-new experience. But always from somebody and generally from myself. I was running away from myself when I took up with Candy in the first place instead of straightening up and flying right and sticking with Lucy. I was running away from myself when I moved out of the apartment on 100th Street and into the Kismet. And if the bouts with the bottle hadn’t been running, what the hell were they?
Now the preliminaries were over. This was the big race, the one I’d been spending my whole life shaping up for. Now I was running for the comparative safety of the Mexican border with the New York police baying at my heels and the world’s greatest lay sitting beside me.
Uh-huh.
I chain-smoked the night away. I lit one cigarette from the butt of another and prayed that I’d live long enough to die of lung cancer. I dropped the used-up cigarettes on the floor of the bus and ground them into shredded tobacco-and-paper and kicked the shreds into the center aisle.
It’s hard to say just when the full impact of it all hit home. Shocks of this magnitude don’t hit at first; you think you know what it’s all about and two hours later you start shaking. It’s like the time the car I was driving and the car somebody else was driving had a car-fight. It was the other guy’s fault—he missed a stop sign and I got a glimpse of his car out of the corner of my eye and we both hit our brakes about the same time. There was a disgusting brake-squeal and a moment’s silence and an incredible montage of unpleasant sounds as the two automobiles chewed each other up.
I reached for my door handle and it wouldn’t open—the crash had knocked things together. So I nonchalantly got out the other side, strolled over to the moron who had done such terrible things to my new car, lit a cigarette and offered one to him.
That was that.
And two hours later I was trembling so terribly that I couldn’t stay on my feet.
It was the same thing now, years later. What Candy had told me jarred me right at the start, knocked me off my pins, and I thought it was as much of a shock as I was going to get. But I still hadn’t adjusted to it at the time and I was calm enough to make love to her a few minutes after she clued me in on the happy fact that I was a murderer.
You see, I never completely accepted it. I made the neat mental entry on the immaculate mental file card, the pen-scribble that testified that one Jeff Flanders had brutally murdered one Caroline Christie. But the entry on the little white card was simply a definition, an equation.
The mental picture that took time to develop was even less reassuring and it damn near jolted me out of the bus. It did not hit all at once; it grew on me, snuck up on me until suddenly it was there and was awesome in the full force of its presence.
