One Endless Hour (2 page)

    She turned to her handbag on a chair. "Chet, please let me come with-"

    "Tell them I took the keys away from you," I cut her off. I knew I couldn't take her with me now. I was less than even money to make it. Hazel handed me the keys, and I punched her in the eye. Big as she was, she still went over backward, landing on the couch. The eye would be her alibi when the sheriff came asking questions. "So long, baby," I said from the curtained opening. I didn't look back. I didn't want to see the expression on her face.

    

    

    I drove down to the Lazy Susan in her car. I thought they'd be watching for my souped-up Ford. It turned out they were watching for anything. I'd no more than rolled into the motel yard and opened the car door when some eager beaver tapped his headlights. Three more sets came on instantly. I was semicircled by cruisers. The yard looked bright as day.

    Blaze Franklin came roaring out of the nearest cruiser, waving his gun. He had to get me fast, since he couldn't afford to let me talk about some of his recent activities. At ten yards I put five in a row from the.38 into his groin. A playing card would have covered them all. He went down in the dust, bellowing like a castrated bull. He
was
a castrated bull. He'd live, but he wouldn't enjoy it as much.

    I put the last bullet into his jaw as he flopped on the ground. If I made good on the getaway, I didn't want him talking until I'd gone back for the sack. Firecrackers were going off all around me, but they couldn't shoot worth a damn. I dived back under the wheel and aimed Hazel's car through the largest gap in the encircling headlights. Gravel spurted beneath my wheels.

    Someone shot out my windshield as I got moving. Prickling splinters of glass laced into my face. I bumped across the lawn, through the flower bed, around the swimming pool, and over a white picket fence. I jounced out onto the highway and floored the accelerator. For the first five hundred yards part of the fence kept banging against the front wheels of the car. Then it fell away.

    I reloaded. Practice almost makes perfect. I dropped only one oil-slick bullet while making ready the warm-barreled.38. Behind me were lights and sirens. No shortage of either. I busted right through the town's square and set sail for the Dixie Pig. In Hazel's car, I could just about smell the overheated engines behind me. With the Ford's high-powered mill, I at least had a chance of outrunning them.

    A thousand yards from the Dixie Pig I cut the headlights, moved over onto the shoulder, and drove in darkness. If anything had been parked on the edge of the highway, it would have been all she wrote. I whirled the steering wheel when I saw the lighter surface of the Dixie Pig's crushed-stone driveway. I took out a section of hedge, but I made the turn. Out on the highway the cruisers screamed by.

    I yanked up the emergency and lit running. The door on the driver's side of the Ford stood open. I didn't remember leaving it open. I slid to a stop with my hand on the butt of the.38. I came within a tick of blasting the dark figure on the passenger side of the Ford's front seat before I recognized Hazel. "Get the hell out!" I ordered, trying to listen for sounds on the highway.

    "Take me with you, Chet," she pleaded. "Give me a gun."

    "Don't make me do it, baby," I said. "Get out of the car."

    She climbed out. I could see that she was crying. "Please, Chet, I don't care what-"

    "Get yourself a winning horse, woman." I got in under the wheel and slammed the door. "Get back inside and keep your mouth shut." I backed up, swung around, and rammed the Ford down the driveway. The last glimpse I had of Hazel was the glitter of the silver conches on her cowboy boots in the swing of the headlights.

    I doubled back toward town. On Route 19 there'd be road blocks north and south. I'd head east from the square. The added power of the Ford felt good under my foot. I blasted it down the road, then slowed approaching the traffic light. I'd just started my left-hand turn when a siren went off practically in my ear. Somebody in the posse had had the brains to leave a trailer.

    He was headed the wrong way, but I saw the shine of his lights as he corkscrewed around after me. My 45-mph turn carried me onto the sidewalk before I straightened out, headed east. I really rolled it away from there. I was doing eighty-five on a road built for forty. The Ford was all over the highway. I watched the thin, dark ribbon of macadam unroll in the headlights while behind me the wailing shriek of the siren pierced the night. I was outrunning him, but then I burst out of a curve onto a long straightaway, and far up the road were the_ blinking red lights of trouble.

    Roadblock.

    I lifted my foot from the gas pedal, but I still rolled up on it fast. A spotlight came on when they saw me. A tiny figure stood out on the road, waving me down with flapping arms. I sized it up. Two cruisers across the road, their snouts extending onto the shoulders. Three-quarters of a car's width between them in the center. Ditch on the right. Open field on the left. And in the rearview mirror the lights of the trailing cruiser gaining fast.

    A roadblock you do or you don't. I mashed down on the gas and headed for the center opening between the cruisers. I just might spin one and rip my way through. The fool with the flapping arms stood right in the center of the gap. The lights picked him up solidly. Roaring down on him, I was suddenly staring through the windshield at the white, strained face of part-time deputy Jed Raymond, my only male friend in Hudson.

    I hoped he'd jump. Jed was a nice kid. If he didn't, though, he'd have to take his chances, like I was taking mine. I couldn't have been more than twenty yards from him when Kaiser, my big police dog that I'd left with Jed for safekeeping, pranced out in front of Jed, head cocked and tail waving.

    My brain sent me straight through, over the dog, over Jed, to try the odds with the cruisers. Instead, my hands spun the wheel, hard left. Somebody else will have to explain it to you. I missed them both, caromed broadside off the left-hand cruiser in a whining, ear-splitting wail of tortured metal, then hurtled a hundred and fifty yards down into the open field.

    The front wheels dropped into a ditch and the Ford stood up on its nose. There was a loud
Whump!
The door flew open. I flew out, hit hard, and rolled. I didn't lose consciousness, and I still had the gun.

    I started to crawl toward the Ford, and knew in the first second that my right leg was broken. Up on the highway the spotlight pivoted and crept down through the field. It caught me, passed on, hesitated, and came back. There was a sharp crack, and a bullet plowed up the ground beside me. The rifle sounded like a.30-.06.

    I dragged myself over the uneven ground to the Ford and crouched beneath its elevated back wheels. I could see the road and the spotlight, and I got it with my third shot. They turned the other cruiser around-the one I hadn't smashed into-and its spotlight started down through the field. I popped it before its light reached the Ford. Not that it made much difference. More red lights, spotlights, and sirens were whirling up to the roadblock every second now.

    I reloaded the Smith and Wesson again. Nothing for it now but the hard sell. Nothing but to see that a few of them shook hands with the devil at the same time I did. To get to me in a hurry they had to come through the field. By now they knew better than to be in a hurry. The.30-.06 went off again, and a large charge of angry metal whanged through the body of the Ford, just above my head. The rifle would keep me pinned down while they circled around behind me.

    The spotlights were crisscrossing the field in an eerie pattern. A hump in the ground ahead of the Ford kept its underside in shadow. I couldn't see anyone coming through the field. I heard the rifle's sharp sound again, and above me there was another loud
ping!
Suddenly I was drenched to the waist in gasoline. The.30-.06 slug had ripped out the belly of the gas tank. I swiped at my stinging eyes and shook my dripping head. I looked up toward the road again just as gas from my hair splashed onto the hot exhaust.

    
Whoom!

    I saw a bright flare, and then I didn't see anything. The explosion knocked me backward, out from under the car. I dragged myself away. I didn't feel the broken leg. I could hear the crackle of flames. Part was the Ford. Part was me. I was afire all over.

    I rolled on the ground, trying to smother the flames. It didn't help. I still had the gun. I hoped they could see me and were coming at me. I knelt on the good leg and faced the noise up on the road. I braced the Smith and Wesson in both hands and squeezed off the whole load, blindly, waist-high in a semicircle. Then I threw the empty gun as far as I could in the direction of the road.

    There was a dull roaring sound in my ears.

    I tried to put out the fire in my hair.

    I rolled on the ground again.

    I could smell my own burning flesh.

    The last thing I heard was myself, screaming.

    

    

    The leg healed in six weeks.

    I was in darkness a lot longer than that.

    I gave them a hard time in the prison wing of the state hospital. I went the whole route: whirlpool baths, wet packs, elbow cuffs, wrist restraints, straitjackets, isolation. Then I stopped fighting them. They don't pay much attention to me now.

    I didn't talk to anyone, and my hands were burned so badly they couldn't take any prints. It bugged both the state and federal lawmen that they couldn't run a tracer on Chet Arnold. During their visits I listened to a lot of questions, but I didn't supply any answers.

    Even before I could see I knew how I looked. Hair gone. Eyebrows gone. Nose bulbous. Face scarred. Only my chin and throat had escaped fairly lightly. I could sense the reaction to my appearance when a new patient was admitted, or a new attendant came on duty. There was an almost tangible shrinking.

    I refused permission for Hazel to visit me. She came to the hospital four or five times, and then she stopped coming and went back to her hometown in Nevada. There was no point in letting her drag herself down with me.

    Because I don't talk, the attendants and the doctors think I'm crazy.

    They think I'm a robot.

    I'll show them.

    There's a hermetically sealed jar buried in Hillsboro, New Hampshire, and another in Grosmont, Colorado. There's money in both. There's a stripped-down gun in both. I don't need the money, but I do need a gun. One of these days I'll find the right attendant, and I'll start talking to him. It will take time to convince him, but time I've got.

    If I can get back to the sack buried beside Bunny's cabin, plastic surgery will take care of most of what I look like now. With a gun, I'll get back to the cabin.

    That's all I need-a gun.

    I'm not staying here.

    I'm getting out, and the day I do they'll never forget it.

    

    

    Spider Kern and Rafe James entered the prison wing of the state hospital together. Kern was a little man with big shoulders and hard-knuckled hands. He worked a spittle-soaked toothpick continually between his uneven teeth. His face was red and his thinning hair sandy. His key ring swung loosely at his hip where he dropped it after unlocking the heavy ward door with its wire mesh embedded in the glass. When my sight returned, one of the first things I noticed was that Kern's key ring was fastened to his studded belt by a metal clamp as well as a leather loop.

    Rafe James went to the desk in the niche in the corridor that served as a ward office. James was thin, dark, and had a long face with a lantern jaw. He had mean-looking eyes and a beard so heavy he always looked unshaven. A foul-smelling pipe that never seemed to go out was as much a part of him as Spider Kern's toothpick was of the senior attendant.

    James removed the inmates' folders from the old-fashioned wooden file behind the desk. Kern strutted down the ward in his short-man's swagger. He stopped in front of old Woody Adams, still a flaming queen despite his years. "Cigarette me," Kern ordered. The white-haired Woody simpered as he took a pack from his pajama pocket. Kern helped himself to half a dozen.

    I had overheard muttering among the inmates about Kern's mooching practices. Old Woody would never become the leader in attempting to do anything about it, though. Not that I ever entered into inmate conversations. I never spoke to anyone except in monosyllables.

    Cigarette going, Kern glanced around the ward. I was sitting in an armless rocker near a window overlooking the hospital grounds and part of the parking lot. The early-morning sun was still evaporating the night mist, which had sprinkled rose bushes and bougainvillea with a million drops of water that glittered like tiny pearls of light. I often sat by the window at night, too, after the lights went out on the visitors' side of the parking lot and only a single arc lamp was visible above the employees' cars.

    Nearby chairs contained half a dozen dozing men, but the majority of the inmates were at the other end of the big ward near the games table. We all wore the loose, white cotton pajamas, drab gray flannel bathrobes, and pressed-paper slippers, that were the twenty-four-hour-a-day patient uniform.

    "Everybody up!" Kern snapped at the sound of a key in the lock of the ward door. I didn't move, but there was a general shuffling of feet as the other men rose. I saw Rafe James's pipe disappear into a pocket of his white attendant's jacket. Dr. Willard Mobley, the hospital's chief psychiatrist, entered the ward followed by his usual entourage of doctors and nurses. With his bushy, snow-white hair and high coloring, Dr. Mobley had the look of a hard-boiled Santa Claus. He had a deep bass voice that lent authority to everything he said.