One Endless Hour (7 page)

    He led the way to it. It was parked four cars away. If Kern and I had entered it and started through the hospital grounds, Rafe James would have been right behind us, shotgun at the ready. When I handed over the supposed five thousand to Kern for aiding my escape, my life would have run it's useful course as far as the two attendants were concerned. James would have stepped in with the shotgun.

    I had the shotgun now. I held if on James while he got under the wheel of Kern's car, then slid into the passenger's seat myself. "Drive to the farthest corner of the dark side of the lot and park it again," I said. "Then we'll walk back to your car." James did as he was told. There was a sheen of perspiration on his face. Walking back to his car, he held his arms stiffly at his sides as though he didn't know what to do with them. "Now out to the highway," I directed.

    I knew that it was a mile to the highway. "Stop here," I said when I judged we were halfway. The headlights showed thick bushes on either side of the road and a ditch on the left. "Get out," I said when James hit the brakes. He started to whimper. "Out," I repeated.

    I nudged him with the shotgun. He started out slowly, then bolted and started to run. His lank frame zigzagged as he picked up speed. "Stop running!" I yelled at him. I had intended to knock him out, tie him up, and leave him in the ditch. I scrambled out after him. I couldn't wait. I didn't know the load in the shotgun. At twenty yards I touched off the front trigger.
Ker-blamm-m-m!
Whatever the charge was, it picked up Rafe James's running figure bodily and rolled him down into the ditch.

    I looked up and down the road for advancing headlights. There were none. I climbed down into the ditch to check on James. From the look of him, the shotgun had to be loaded with buckshot. Even with the unchoked, sawed-off barrel, he must have caught half the charge. Rafe James was no longer a part of the problem.

    I left Spider Kern's hospital keys and car keys beside the body. It might help to confuse the issue when James was found. I thought I knew how Kern would think when he regained consciousness. He would look first for his keys, then for his car. When he couldn't find either, and couldn't find James, Kern would assume I'd somehow got the drop on James and forced him to drive me away in Kern's car. Spider's self-preserving account of the situation should have the police looking for two men, one with head bandages, in Kern's car.

    Instead, I'd be alone, without head bandages, in Rafe James's car. Kern's car wouldn't be noticed until daylight disclosed it in the morning. It gave me a few hours incognito. I rolled away from there.

    When the gateway leading out to the highway loomed up in the headlights, I pulled off onto the shoulder of the road again. I removed my bandages and took one of the tubes of facial makeup, squeezed some onto my palm, and worked it into my scalp and face. In the hospital I had seen in the case of Willie Turnbull how the makeup dulled the pink gloss of new skin,

    I put the hat back on. Without the bandages, it fitted more loosely. I opened the glove compartment when I was ready to take off. There were half a dozen loose shotgun shells in it. I examined one in the dash light. All were number 0 buckshot Each pellet was the equivalent in size of a.32-caliber bullet. No wonder a single barrel had cut James down. At twenty yards a quarter of the load must have gone right through him.

    It was ironic that the attendant I would have preferred to see dead, Kern, I had had to leave alive, while the one I didn't care about either way, James, had copped it because he expected me to blast him as he had intended to blast me.

    With luck, by the time Kern's car was noticed in the morning and a corrected all-points went out on the police radio, I'd be close to where I wanted to be. Bunny's cabin where the Phoenix loot was buried.

    I started up the car again, turned on the radio, and moved out onto the highway.

    

    

    Rafe James's car wasn't much automobile.

    In the first mile I noticed a shimmy in the front wheels; in the second, a lack of acceleration indicating fouled plugs or pistons. I hadn't looked at the tires, but there wasn't much point in stopping to inspect them now. They were all the tires I had. I hoped they'd hold up. A lot of things depended upon my reaching Hudson before daylight.

    I found that the turn signals didn't work when I turned off the main highway at the first intersection. Staying on the heavily traveled main route was a risk I couldn't afford. Secondary roads were a risk in a different way. The gas tank was only half full, and I had only a slim chance of finding an all-night filling station open on a byroad. Getting off the central highway would probably stretch my driving time to five hours or more too, but it was still a lot safer.

    The car radio squawked country music and drawled an occasional weather bulletin. My head began to feel hot under the plantation-style straw hat. It didn't seem as though I was perspiring. It seemed more as if the new flesh were drawing. The makeup on my face had dried rapidly but now began to feel moist again.

    I encountered only two other cars in the first twenty miles away from the main highway. With the front-wheel shimmy, I had to concentrate on my driving. I passed two blacked-out gas stations at darkened crossroads. When I came up on a station with lighted pumps, I was afraid to pass it by. I pulled in.

    For a moment nothing happened. I thought the owner might have gone home, forgetting to turn off his lights. Then a shaggy-haired, sleepy-eyed kid stumbled out the door of the shacky-looking building and approached the car. "Fill it up," I told him.

    The kid went to the pump with the regular gas and lifted down its hose. I leaned out the window to tell him to put in premium gas, then closed my mouth. James's car had probably never run on anything but regular gas. Premium might give it mechanical dyspepsia.

    The zombie-like teenager reappeared beside the front window. "Three forty," he yawned.

    I gave him four one-dollar bills. "Bring me a state road map with the change."

    When he did, I lost no time moving out. In the rearview mirror I could see the kid already shuffling his way back to the shack. There shouldn't have been anything memorable about our encounter that would cause him to remember me. Even without the shadowing hat, the feeble light from the gas pumps had hardly turned the service area into Times Square on New Year's Eve.

    Forty-five minutes down the road, the singing voice of Eddy Arnold was cut off in mid-bar. "We interrupt this program for a special bulletin," the radio said. "A prison-ward patient from the state hospital has escaped and is presumed to be heading north in a stolen automobile. The car is a late model, green and white Dodge sedan with Florida plates two four four dash three five six. The occupant is considered armed and dangerous. Do not attempt to apprehend this fugitive. Any person seeing an automobile filling this description please notify the nearest State Highway Patrol post immediately."

    There followed an accurate description of the clothes I was wearing, and then the entire bulletin was repeated. There was no description of me as an individual. It amused me to think of the dispatcher's frustration. "Where's the guy's description? What the hell do you mean you don't know what he looks like?"

    The police had probably had the flash thirty minutes before it went out over the commercial station. Spider Kern's car was a late model green and white Dodge with Florida plates 244-356. I was in fairly good shape as long as the police kept looking for that car I had to get out of the clothes Kern had provided, though. Just as soon as I had my hands on the sack with the Phoenix loot buried in the ground near Bunny's cabin, getting rid of that clothing assumed top priority.

    I pulled over to the side of the road, opened up the map, and studied it in the light from the dash. I saw that if I back-tracked five miles I could get off the black-topped secondary road I was on and complete the remainder of my drive to Hudson on little-traveled dirt roads. It would add to my driving time, but country roads were less likely to have troopers in prowl cars on the lookout for me. I dropped the map to the floorboards, covering up the sawed-off shotgun, and started up again.

    I swung around and headed back along the macadamed road toward the dirt road turnoff I'd seen on the map. When I swung onto it, I almost chickened out in the first hundred yards. It was narrow, no more than eighteen feet wide, with a high crown and a deep drainage ditch on either side. The road was covered with a fine powdery layer of reddish dust. In the rearview mirror I could see it streaming behind in the taillights like a granular fog.

    The map had showed it as a usable road, though, and the weather had been dry for days, so I kept on. The headlights bored a bright path in the darkness through a green tunnel of huge trees meeting over the road. I saw the trunks of jackpine, cypress, chinaberry, and shagbark hickory fringing the edges of the ditches.

    I had no watch, so I could only estimate the time. I knew that sunrise came about six-thirty at this time of the year. I hunched over the wheel, apprehensive about the sideways drift of the rear wheels in the loose dust every few hundred yards. My doubts increased with each passing moment. If someone took the notion, one man alone could roadblock an army on a road like this.

    But the miles fell away behind me with no sign of life except an occasional rabbit darting through the headlight beams, kicking up puffs of dust from the road. I changed course twice as I had plotted it from the map when intersecting dirt roads loomed up in the headlights. Sooner than I would have believed possible, I found myself approaching the outskirts of Hudson.

    I had planned my approach so there was no need for me to drive through the town. If anyone had the cabin staked out, they should be looking for me to drive in from U.S. 19. Instead, I took a seven-mile detour around three sides of a square. When I ended up on the road that led past Bunny's cabin, I was moving in on it from the side away from town.

    I drove until I estimated I was within a mile of the cabin, and then I pulled Rafe James's car as far off the road as I could manage. The brush was so thick I couldn't penetrate it deeply, but at least the car wasn't out in plain sight. I picked up the shotgun and started down the road on foot. The air was clammy, moisture-laden from the nearby swamps. Wisps of fog were beginning to curl up from the damp ground. My head felt hot and uncomfortable.

    I had only an occasional glimpse of the stars through the thick foliage of trees meeting far above my head. It was so dark I was beginning to wonder if I'd passed the cabin without seeing it when I heard a metallic ping from somewhere ahead of me. I stopped and listened. The faint ping was repeated. I moved over to the side of the road and advanced a cautious step at a time. Even at that, I almost ran into the automobile before I saw it.

    It was pulled off to the side as I had pulled James's car off. I eased up to it silently. No one was in it. I couldn't make out its color, but I could see the domed silhouette of the flasher on its roof. The car was a police cruiser. I was going to have unwelcome company at Bunny's cabin.

    I placed my hand on the car's radiator. It was warm, almost hot. The metallic plinking sounds I'd heard had been the metal of the radiator cooling and contracting. I opened the cruiser's door boldly, knowing that interior lights don't come on in a police car. I was hoping to find a spare handgun, but the only thing in the front seat was a riot gun locked into its boot. Even if I could have worked it free, it was no improvement over the shotgun I already had. A dark blur on the left side of the back seat turned out to be a trooper's uniform on a wire hanger. It was enclosed in a thin plastic bag. On the back seat lay a wide-brimmed trooper's campaign hat.

    I started up the road again, leaving the car door open. Two hundred yards ahead there was a break in the trees, and I knew I was at the cabin. I started to take off my shoes, then stopped. All I needed was to put my foot down on a cottonmouth. I edged in from the roadside a careful step at a time. A chill dawn breeze rustled the bushes on either side of me, reminding me that time was running out. I wanted to move faster, but I held myself down.

    The blacker outline of the cabin came into view. I studied it for a moment before moving in. At my first step there was the sound of a slap from inside the cabin, "Damn mosquitoes!" a hoarse voice muttered.

    "Shut up!" Blaze Franklin's voice replied instantly.

    "Don't get narky," the first speaker replied in an injured tone. "We'll see his headlights comin'. How 'bout a cigarette, Blaze?"

    "I told you no cigarettes, Moody! This bastard is smart and dangerous!"

    "At least you could tell me who this dangerous bastard is," Moody returned sulkily. "An' why you dragged me out here to wait for him at this God-forsaken place."

    "Because a friend put through a telephone call," Franklin replied. "You just stick with me an' you'll wear diamonds."

    "Like yours?" Moody said. His voice turned sly, "The boys been wonderin' where you're gettin' your money since you resigned from the force."

    "We should be listenin' instead of talkin', Moody."

    Moody grunted but subsided. I moved stealthily away from the cabin. I didn't like what I'd overheard. If Franklin were living high as a nonworking civilian, it almost had to be on the Phoenix money. He'd had plenty of time to look for it. The thought that he might find it had somehow never occurred to me.

    I looked up at the star-dotted sky and moved straight north from the cabin's front door exactly as I had that other night that seemed so long ago. Even in the dark I noticed that there was a lack of brush. Someone had cleaned it out. The ground was soft and shifting underfoot. Someone had patiently dug up the area foot by foot. Franklin had dug up the area. Franklin had found the money.