The Name of the Game is Death (6 page)

I made the turnoff in an hour and thirty-five minutes, fog and all. I had to fight my eyes closing down, and I hit the shoulder a couple of times, dozing off, but at twenty minutes to midnight I turned onto 90 and headed south.

It was a narrower road, less traveled. I began to watch for a motel. I'd tucked a lot of miles under my belt that day. When I found a motel with a car parked close to the road, I'd drive a mile beyond, walk back, jump the switch on the car in the motel yard, and take off. There'd be nothing to tie the abandoned Ford to the stolen car if I hid the Ford off the highway.

I couldn't have gone more than twenty miles on 90—everything as black as the inside of a closet—when a pair of headlights appeared suddenly in my rear-view mirror. Then a red flasher started bouncing off the Ford. The cruiser must have come up behind me with his lights off, because I hadn't seen a thing. I took a quick look at the speedometer. Sixty-five. No sweat there. I heard no siren, but the car behind me pulled out alongside, then burst ahead and cut in.

I had to smash the brakes and cut the wheel hard to avoid scraping fenders as the cruiser herded me to the side of the road. I could see it was an unmarked car, though I hadn't known the Rangers used unmarked cars. Live and learn.

I was ready when he leaned in the window I'd rolled down. I handed him my driver's license made out to Earl

Drake. Paper-clipped to it was a twenty-dollar bill. I could see a trooper hat silhouetted against the dark, but I couldn't see the face beneath it. I could sense rather than see him looking around the Ford's interior before he walked to the rear and put a flash on the license plate.

He returned and handed me my license. The twenty-dollar bill was gone. "Drive up the highway a quarter-mile," he said in a voice that sounded as if he regularly had steel filings for breakfast. "Turn right at the first opening. A hundred-fifty feet in, there's a white fence. Turn left and stop. I'll be right behind you." He walked back to his car. I hadn't gotten to say a word.

I could feel a slow burn taking over. If this sonofabitch thought he was going to take my twenty and then haul me up before a justice of the peace, he was damn well going to find out differently. When I buy someone, I expect him to stay bought.

He pulled ahead to let me out of the cramped edge-of-the-highway situation, and I eased back out on the road. I rolled along slowly, watching for the turnoff he'd indicated. Even at that I almost missed it. It was hardly more than a dirt dropoff. Halfway into my turn I thought I'd made a mistake, but the headlights behind me turned in, too. I came up to the white fence and turned left. Twenty-five yards farther on I faced a deadend, an impenetrable, junglelike brush tangle looming in the headlights.

I was gelling hotter by the minute. I was losing valuable time. I had missed a turn somehow despite his directions, and I'd wound up in this jackpot. I started to back out, but a red glow filled my rear view mirror. I turned my head to see the cruiser was backing into the clearing, sealing me in. Even as I looked he cut his lights.

All of a sudden I had a feeling.

I switched off my lights and motor, fumbled a flashlight from the glove compartment, and went out the door on the passenger's side Something wasn't kosher. The unmarked car, the absence of a siren, the dead end deserted spot to which I'll been directed . . .

I put the Hash on him when I heard brush crackling

under his feet. He stopped dead in the beam of light. He was holding a gun, a blued-steel job. His campaign hat looked like a Ranger's hat, especially in the dark. His clothes didn't even look like a uniform except for the color. The bastard was no more a cop than I was.

He brought his gun up and snapped off a shot at me just as I let go at him with the Woodsman. He turned as if to run. I put one into his ankle that brought him down with a crash. He landed all sprawled out, his gun flying off into the bushes. I got over to him fast in case he had another.

When I got the flash full on him, I saw it wouldn't have made any difference if he'd had a machine-gun. He'd been moving on reflex. The hard core of light shone down on a round, dark hole between his eyes, just to the right of center. The little old Woodsman might not have the stopping power of a .38, but it gets there just the same.

It was quiet in the clearing after the sound of the gunshots. I walked over and put the flash on the bandit's car—a Ford, too, but apparently in better shape than mine. I got his car keys from his pocket, got under the wheel, and started it up. The engine
vrom-vroomed
with power. Something extra under the hood.

It looked like I'd won myself an automobile.

I switched on both cars' dimmers and opened the trunks. I loaded his gear in mine and mine in his, took both cars' license plates off, and chopped them up with a hammer and chisel. With a screwdriver I finally loosened the red flasher on the roof of the bandit's car. I removed the bulb and knocked down the edges of the socket; then I slapped black friction tape, which blended with the color of the car, over the hole.

I rummaged around through saws and climbing irons in my toolchest till I found a set of Florida plates that I put on the new Ford. I always carry a number of different identifications until it becomes dangerous to do so.

I cleaned out my wallet and started from scratch. Someone in Hudson, Florida would be looking for Earl Drake, so Earl Drake had to disappear. When I put the wallet on my hip again, I was Chester Arnold of Hollywood, Florida. I had business cards identifying Chet Arnold as a tree surgeon. When it's necessary, I am a tree surgeon. A good one.

I went back for my unknown benefactor when I had everything ready. I dragged him to the new Ford and stuffed him into its trunk on top of my toolchests. It was a tight squeeze, but I finally got the back deck lid closed.

Then I took off.

Every five miles, I threw a chopped-up piece of license plate out the window. It helped me to stay awake. Then it started to rain. It doesn't rain too often in west Texas, but when it docs, it doesn't fool around. I hunched down over the wheel, watching the highway through the streaming windshield as I pitched license plate fragments.

Forty miles further, I ran into a torn-up section of road under repair. In those parts they're so sure it won't rain, they don't bother with the nicety of preserving one lane of macadam. They tear up the road from shoulder to shoulder, roll it, and drive on the dirt till they get the blacktop back on. A wrong guess means a driving rodeo through four to six inches of Texas gumbo.

It was raining so damn hard that in less than a mile the entire graveled roadbed was solidly under water. The new Ford slipped and slithered along. Even at five miles an hour, a couple of times I wasn't sure I was able to keep on going. It was like driving across a ten-mile lake. To be sure I was still in the channel, I had to watch the highway department right-of way slakes glistening in the headlights.

I finally emerged on blacktop again, and for the next ten miles I listened to Texas mud slurp from the undercarriage at every little jounce. From what I saw, I could have won a few bets from people who thought they knew the car's original color. I concentrated on driving and staying awake.

When the odometer said I was two hundred miles from El Paso, I started looking for a deep culvert. I pulled over on the shoulder when I found a likely-looking one. As I walked around to the back of the Ford, I never saw a night so black—and raining as though someone had turned on a petcock and gone off on vacation. I was soaked in less than a minute.

I got the trunk open, then hauled out my passenger. When I rolled him down the high bank, he went in with a satisfying splash. After I got back under the wheel, I started slogging up the highway again. No one would connect my benefactor to me or to much of anything else when they found him. Ditto the Ford I'd left behind in the brushy clearing.

I'd passed Marfa and Alpine a long way back, clusters of lights in the dripping darkness. I was between Marathon and Haymond when I dumped the body. Twice on the long stretch between Sanderson and Del Rio I nearly went to sleep. By that time I was driving myself as hard as I was driving the car.

Dawn was breaking in a dirty gray sky outside Bracketville when I got a leg cramp so bad it pulled my foot right off the accelerator. I stopped the car and got out and limped around it a couple of times, but I couldn't shake off the cramp. I drove through town with my left foot on the gas pedal and hobbled into a motel on the outskirts. I woke up the owner, shut up his grumbling about the ungodliness of the hour, took the key he gave me, and headed for the room he pointed out.

I was 450 miles from El Paso, and it had been a long, long day.

I shed clothing all the way from the door of the room to the bed, and I was asleep before I was halfway down to the pillow.

A year after I left home I worked the midnight-to-eight shift in a gas station near the edge of a northern Ohio town. It was colder than a whore's heart in December, but it kept me eating. From two to seven in the morning I wouldn't average half a dozen cars. I'd sit inside with my feet cocked up on the heater and wait for daylight.

Or listen to Oily Barnes.

He was an odd one. I couldn't figure why a good-looking guy with a college degree should spend his time hanging around a gas station till all hours in the morning, talking to a kid like me. At first I thought he was a queer, naturally. Then I decided he wasn't, but I still couldn't make him out.

He was slender, with a pale, narrow face dominated by a high forehead, straw-colored hair, and steel-rimmed spectacles. He was about thirty. His small, well-shaped hands usually fluttered nervously while he talked. He had a beautiful speaking voice.

Two or three nights a week he'd hang around the station till five in the morning. I never understood how he could keep his eyes open on his bookkeeping job. I noticed one thing about him: he talked a lot about the places he'd been and the things he'd seen, but never about the people. He talked travel, books, painting, opera, ballet; talked with a passionate intensity. I tried to tell him he was way over my head with what he had to say. Then I saw it didn't matter, and I shut up and listened. Oily brought me books I didn't read, and he tried to hide his disappointment when I didn't.

And then one morning the police came and took him away. It was about three-thirty, and he'd been talking about books as usual, when the cruiser pulled up outside. Olly's good-looking face crumbled like aspirin in water when he saw the big man in plainclothes walking toward the station entrance. I thought for a second he was going to run, but if he considered it he didn't have time.

The big man stood in the open doorway, cold air pouring in all around him. "Let's take a ride, Oliver," he said. He had a broad, flat face with high cheekbones and no more expression than an iron skillet.

"No," Oily whispered. "No!" The second time it was a scream. Then he started to run, all right, toward the garage area, but the big man cut him off and scooped him up by the shirt front, like I'd snatch a fly from a table. He half-carried, half-dragged Oily outside without saying another word. The door slammed behind them.

I went outside to the cruiser. It was none of my business, but I went out, anyhow. A uniformed man was driving. I rapped on the rolled-up front window. I could see Oily and the big man in the back seat. Oily was crying. The uniformed man lowered the window and looked out at me. "What's it all about?" I asked him.

lie sat with his head cocked as if he were listening for something from the back seat. Nobody said anything, and after a minute he rolled the window back up and wheeled the cruiser around the pumps and out onto the highway.

I watched the tail-lights diminishing up the road. It was a bitterly cold night, without stars or lights of any kind except at the station. It wasn't any of my business, and I couldn't walk off and leave the place. I went back inside, out of the cold. Olly's overcoat was still draped on a chair where he'd dropped it when he came in.

I called the police four times between then and seven o'clock. No one I talked to had ever heard of Oliver Barnes. I described the big man who had taken Oily away.

They knew him, all right. His name was Lieutenant Winick. No one had seen him, either.

A little after four it started to snow. Between calls to the police I was kept busy clearing the station's driveways. My dawn there was six inches on the ground, and it was blowing hard. After seven I was too busy to call any more. When my relief came on at eight I had to stay over an hour to help with the rush of cars.

There were no buses running by the time I was able to get away. I put Olly's coat over my arm and walked the mile-and-a-half into town. Drifts were already a couple of feet high in some places, and the wind was spraying line-drive sheets of snow. Cold as it was I was sweating by the time I reached the police station. That kind of weather made heavy going.

I didn't really know what I was doing there. I guess I'd always known Oily wasn't exactly a hundred cents on the dollar. Still, a deal like that—what if it had been me? Wouldn't I have wanted someone to find out the score?

I might as well have talked to a totem pole as the sergeant at the desk. He asked a hell of a lot more questions than he answered. Who I was. Where I lived. Where I worked. What my interest was. He finally made a pretense of checking the blotter and said that no Oliver Barnes had been booked for anything. For him that ended it.

I hung around anyway. Nobody actually tried to run me out, but they didn't make it easy for me to stay. I tried my questions on two or three newcomers, with the same results. The heat in the waiting room kept putting me to sleep every time I sat down. At eleven o'clock I gave up. J left Olly's overcoat with the desk sergeant in case he came in looking for it, I said—and went home to bed.

It was still snowing when I woke at four. I dressed and walked back to the police station after a quick meal. The same sergeant spoke before I could when he saw me come in. "Lieutenant Winick wants to sec you, kid," he said, pointing to a door. "Second door on the left inside."