It wasn’t the flashlight. She had struck a match and was setting fire to the mountainous pile of old papers and magazines beside the coal bin. An unfolded paper burst into flame. I leaped toward her. She grabbed up another and spread it open with a swing of her arm, dropping it on the first. I slammed into her and beat at the flames. It was hopeless.
Another caught. The fire mounted, throwing flickering light back into the corners of the basement and beginning to curl around the wooden beams above us. I fell back from it.
“Run!” I shouted.
She went toward the window. I pounded after her. I stumbled over something. It was the small traveling case I had set down. Without knowing why, I grabbed it up as I bounced back to my feet and lunged after her. I boosted her out the window. I threw the bag out. Then I knelt beside Diana James. I touched her throat, and knew it made no difference now whether we left her there or not. She was dead.
We ran across the black gulf of the lawn. The night was still silent, as if the peace of it had never been broken by the sound of shots. At the gate I looked back once. The basement windows were beginning to glow In a few minutes the house would be a red mountain of flame.
Chapter Eleven
We shot out the gate and across the pavement. As we plunged into the path by the power line I heard a siren behind us, somewhere in town. Somebody had reported the shots.
I could hear her laboring for breath, trying to keep up. She stumbled in the dark and I yanked her up savagely by her arm. I wished she were dead. I wished she’d never been born, or that I had never heard of her. She had wrecked it all. I didn’t even know any more why I was dragging her with me. Maybe it was pure reflex.
I had the keys out of my pocket before we reached the dense shadow under the trees where we’d left the car. I threw the bag in and began to punch the starter while she was running around to the other side and climbing in. The ceiling light flicked on and then off again as both doors closed, and in that short instant of time and in all the madness some part of my mind was still clear enough to grasp the awful thing I hadn’t noticed until now, until it was too late.
She didn’t have her purse.
Her hands were empty. She had left the purse back there in the house. Tires screamed as we shot ahead down the hill. I ground on the throttle, peering ahead into the lights for the turn that would come flying back at us. She didn’t have the purse. I saw the turn just in time. We slammed into it and threw gravel over into the field as we skidded around, and then we were straightened out again.
The highway was coming up now. No cars were in sight. We hurtled onto it, headed south. I was raging.
She’d killed Diana James and brought the cops down on us. All the roads would be blocked inside of an hour. And the big, final, most horrible joke of all was that the thing I had been after all the time, the thing that had got me
into this, was gone. I thought of those three keys fire-blackened and lost forever in the ashes of the house. Even the thousand dollars in cash was gone. We had nothing. We were wanted by all the police in the country, and didn’t have enough money to hide ourselves for a week.
She took a cigarette out of the breast pocket of the robe and lit it, and leaned back in the seat. “You appear to be unhappy about something,” she said.
“You little fool!”
“Didn’t you appreciate the funeral pyre for your charming friend?” she asked calmly. “I thought it rather
a nice touch. Something Wagnerian about it.”
“You stupid—”
I choked. It was no use. It was beyond me. I could only watch the highway flying back at us in the night. And watch the rear-view mirror for cars behind us. Where would they try to block us? Beyond that next town? Or before?
“You are provoked, aren’t you?”
I found the words at last. “Don’t you realize yet what you’ve done?” I raged at her. “You might as well have called them on the phone and told ‘em where we were. We’ve got about a chance in a million of getting away. And on top of that, you went off and left the thing we came back for.”
“Oh,” she said easily. “I see now what’s bothering you. You mean the keys?”
“Where did you leave the purse? Not that it matters
now.”
“I didn’t leave it,” she said. “It’s in that bag.”
I felt suddenly weak. Then I remembered that the only reason I had picked the bag up back there in the basement in all that confusion had been the fact that I’d stumbled over it. I felt even weaker. It was nearly a minute before I could even talk.
“All right. But look. By this time your whole lawn is full of cops. They’ve got radio cars. And there are only four highways out of Mount Temple. They’re all going to be plugged. We may not get past the next town.”
“Quite right,” she said. “We don’t even go to the next town. About six miles ahead, just before you go down into that river bottom, a dirt road turns off to the right. It runs west about ten miles and crosses another country road going south.”
“How far south can we get on it?”
“I’m not sure. But there are a number of them, and by switching back and forth we should be able to go over a hundred miles before we have to come back on a highway. And they can’t watch them all.”
It was our only chance, and it might work. I could feel the beginnings of hope. And at the same time I was conscious of a terrible yearning to get off that highway before it was too late. The six miles were a thousand. I rode on the throttle. We blasted on into the tunnel the lights made. We came around a long curve and I saw the taillights of a car far ahead. I slowed a little, hating it. We couldn’t pass anybody at that speed. It might be a cruising cop.
Minutes dragged by while we crawled along at fifty-five. “We’re getting near,” she said. I slowed, watching the mirror. Another car was behind us, but it was far back. We swung around another curve, and I saw the signboard. Nobody was in sight when we made the turn. I sighed with relief. The tension was off, for a while, anyway.
Then it rolled up from behind and caught me, the instant I relaxed. The tension wasn’t off. And maybe it never would be.
She had pulled the trigger, but I was in as deep as she was. I’d been there, it was the gun I was carrying, and I had helped her to escape. And if they ever caught us, it’d just be my word against hers. That was nice, wasn’t it? A jury would take one look at the two of us, and hang me without going out of the room. I felt sick.
It was a narrow gravel road, very rough and full of right-angled turns going around cotton fields. After a mile or two we went up over a slight rise and plunged into a dense forest of pine. There were no houses, no lights anywhere. I stopped.
“You drive,” I said. I got out and went around to the other side while she slid under the wheel.
“What are you going to do?” she asked. “Look at the map. If I can find one.” She started up. I took the flashlight out of my pocket
and pawed through the usual collection of junk in the glove compartment. Down at the bottom I found a state highway map. I unfolded it.
Here was Mount Temple. Two hundred miles south, on the Gulf, was Sanport. I ran my finger along the main north-south highway and found the faint line that was the unnumbered secondary road we were on. It went on and came out on another north-south highway about forty miles west. But I could see, just ahead of where we should be now, the intersecting road she had mentioned. It ran south for about thirty miles before it ended on another east-west secondary road. We could shift west on that one for about fifteen miles and we’d hit another going south. I traced on through the maze of faint lines. It could be done. We could get down through that back country for nearly 150 miles before coming back on a main highway again, and when we did, we’d have a choice of at least three roads converging on the city. They couldn’t cover all of them.