It was Caroline Christie, the attractive dyke with money in the bank and Candy in the bed, and she was lying on the floor of her apartment as dead as a lox. What had killed her? It might have been the beating, or the rape, or any one of a number of things I had done to her. How did she look now? Would there be the odor of death from her body when they found her?
I looked down at my hands and they were the hands that had murdered Caroline Christie. I wanted to cut them off and fling them out the window.
And then, true to form, I began to think seriously of my own skin.
My own skin. Not the most ideal skin in the world, but one which had been with me for quite some time. I had grown rather attached to it over the years.
I could read the newspaper headlines in my mind, could imagine the tabloidic progress reports on the relentless pursuit and inevitable capture. The Daily News, direct and brutal, would say:
COPS CAPTURE
CHRISTIE KILLER
while the
CHRISTIE KILLER
CAUGHT BY COPS
We’d all have fun.
I thought about the trial. Maybe Lucy would cry, and maybe that bird Hardesty would be on hand to defend me, and the papers would have a field day with the whole scene. There’d be a conviction, and an appeal, and a denial of the appeal, and another appeal, and denial of that appeal. And then I’d sit in a cell on Death Row at Sing Sing and wait and wait and wait until they came along and took me to a room and strapped me in a chair and threw a switch.
It would burn for a minute or two, I supposed, and then nothing would happen at all. Jeff Flanders would have paid his debt to society and gone to heaven or to hell or, as I prefer to believe, into the gaseous cosmos.
I was sweating and the sweat was cold on my forehead. I wiped it off and sweated some more and lit another cigarette and smoked and sweated and smoked and sweated and looked at Candy while she slept and watched the sky lighten and the dawn come up through the rarely-washed green-tinted window of the big Greyhound bus.
When we pulled into Louisville, Candy’s eyes snapped open and she was instantly awake. We left the bus. I was unsteady on my feet but she made up for it with her absolute composure. She held the suitcase tight in her hot little hand and led me out of the dusty bus terminal and into the thoroughly uninviting daylight.
The dealer wanted twelve hundred for a green Buick sedan that wasn’t worth a grand. He got a grand— Candy did the talking and I stood around saying silent prayers. Only Candy could have beaten the guy down on the price. Price didn’t matter, we had fifteen times the price and needed the car desperately. Two hundred dollars weighed against the possibility of discovery was infinitesmal and I couldn’t have argued for a minute but I had to admit to myself that she was playing it the way it had to be played. If we didn’t haggle he would be much more suspicious than if we did. And she knew it.
So we had a car and it drove nicely enough, a nice big car with the registration made out to Mr. and Mrs. David Trevor. Well, to Mr. David Trevor, actually. Mr. and Mrs. David Trevor were the names Candy had picked out for us, and I figured they were as good as any other names. I was a little put off by the fact that my driver’s license and my registration had nothing at all in common but there wasn’t much I could do about it. If the joker’s sales book had Jeff Flander’s name in it the jig would be up fairly soon.
I was too tired to keep my eyes open and too tense to close them so we got the hell out of Louisville after a quick bite to eat in a ptomainerie which shall remain forever nameless. The roads were good and the Buick hugged them like a long-lost brother. The car ran well even if it wasn’t much for looks and I hit ninety-five on one stretch of straightaway until Candy reminded me that getting picked up for speeding wouldn’t do us a hell of a lot of good. After that I drove a steady three miles under the speed limit and we made good time.
By nightfall I was too dead to keep going. We switched off on the driving—she was a damned fine driver—but I was still bushed and we put in at a motel and showered happily. I took a shave that I needed desperately and crawled into bed so tired that I could have slept on a bed of nails with ease.
Then Candy crawled in next to me and we didn’t get to sleep for a good half hour.
It was a strange type of lovemaking. We were too tired to be imaginative and too tense to really relax and enjoy it—at the same time our tension needed the release of sex or our sleep wouldn’t have done us much good. She was clean and sweet-smelling from the shower and I took her quickly and perhaps a little sadistically. We were two fools going to hell in an open boat and determined to get there in a hurry.
We slept for a long time. We checked out of the motel and gobbled fried eggs and black coffee at a diner on the road and off we went.
There was a radio in the car but it made both of us nervous. I’ve never liked music or chatter while I drive and Candy felt the same way about it. I turned the radio on a couple times to try to catch a news flash and once I managed to catch the tail end of one. It informed us brusquely that the police were hot on the trail of one Jeff Flanders, the rapist-killer of Caroline Christie. They piled on a few nasty adjectives, uncomplimentary things that sat not at all well with me, and then the announcer began to extol the merits of Bangaway Mattresses and I switched off the noisebox.
“They’re after us,” I mumbled. Candy didn’t catch it and I had to repeat what I’d said.
She nodded. “I knew they would be.”
“I wonder if they know where we’re headed.”
“I don’t think so.”
I shrugged. “They’ll figure it out,” I told her. “They’re supposed to be very efficient. Some joker at the terminal will remember selling us a ticket or something and that’ll be the end of it.”
“By that time,” she said, “we’ll be in Mexico.”
“I hope so.”
She lapsed into a sterile silence and I pushed the car on southward.
The next day another problem occurred to me. The cops had our names—by now the border patrolmen would also have our names and it would be relatively impossible to get across the line into Mexico. You don’t need a passport for Mexico but I remembered vaguely that you do need a tourist card and a vaccination certificate and sundry nonsense. You could get the tourist card automatically by showing identification, but where in hell were we going to get identification. The auto registration would hardly do it.
I outlined the problem for Candy but she was right on hand with a solution.
“There’s a place in Galveston,” she explained.
She left it like that and I asked her what she was talking about. It turned out that this place in Galveston of which she had heard tell was a place where you could get anything forged from a draft card to a passport, for anywhere from twenty to five hundred dollars.
The Galveston guy would fix us up with whatever we needed, and there was obviously no chance of a guy in his position reporting us to the police. He wasn’t exactly aboveboard himself, needless to say.
So when we hit Galveston we would become Mr. and Mrs. David Trevor for keeps. It was just as well that we’d bought the car under a phony name; in addition to keeping the name off the car dealer’s books it eliminated the necessity of forging that as well.
We drove days and stayed nights at motels. We ate pretty lousy food but we made pretty good love and the latter made up for the former. I thought about running for the rest of my life and this more or less bothered me; then I thought about sleeping with Candy for the rest of my life and this more or less compensated for the running.
The Buick burned a lot of gas. But it was a pleasure to drive and there was always a nice ribbon of road stretched out in front of us. It was a good thing. If we had stayed cooped up in one place hiding out I would have cracked. This way I had something to do and the monotonous routine of driving and driving and driving helped
