"Sure," I agreed. "But you don't have any objection about telling me why I've got to face it, do you?"
"I wouldn't know, Mr. Thaxton, I really wouldn't. And I'll tell you something else. I really don't care to know."
I had figured that. He was a sharp big-city hood and he did nasty little jobs like this on consignment. He tidied up other people's garbage for them and he never asked questions. That's what kept him in business.
"But you know who hired you," I said.
"Um," he said. "I know that somebody pays me. Beyond that point I don't sweat it."
"You know the name of the person who paid you this time?"
"Could be."
A night-owl kid on a bike missed death by inches as we whoomed by him-his gawk-eyed blob of face appearing briefly in our lights and streaming by to be swallowed up in the winged blackness. Chad's eyes flicked to the left.
"Didn't you hear what I said, Bob?" he asked quietly.
"I gave the bastard a mile's clearance," the driver said defensively.
"I said slow. Is that right?"
The driver eased up on the accelerator.
"Look," I said to Chad. "I figure you're passing up a bet."
"I've been known to do it before."
"Yeah, but I mean one from the horse's mouth. There could be money in this. Fat money."
He didn't say anything for a moment. Then he said, "They always say the same thing. Different words, may be, but it always comes to the same thing. I'm being played for a sucker. I could grab a bundle instead of settling for peanuts. I don't know my ass from a hole in the ground."
His teeth flashed at me in the dark. "Is that right?"
"I'd say so," I said.
"I thought you would. Because they all do. All right, I've got to kill time anyhow. Go ahead. Tell me how I'm throwing away a fortune this time."
"First you'd better tell me who hired you for this."
"Oh," he said. "I see. You're just guessing. Fumbling around for an answer."
"But suppose I get the right answer? There is such a thing as blackmail."
"I'm afraid you're not very smart, Mr. Thaxton," Chad said. "Elimination and blackmail are two divergent businesses. If you try to mix them you end up bankrupt."
At least he had made one point clear. I was to be eliminated.
We turned off the main drag and went down a lightless back road at a casual forty. It wasn't paved. I could hear the pebbles banging off the bottom of the frame and a lot of sand or dirt was hissing inside the fenders.
"What you say, Chad? We have some exercise with him first, huh?" Pansy-face made another eager appeal.
Chad didn't take his eyes from me. He said no.
Thinking back I realized that the only time he had removed his eyes from me was in that split second when the kid on the bike had flashed by the car windows. That was good. He could be distracted. And a split second was all I needed.
Chad watched me. He said, "We close?" to the driver.
"Uh-huh. Any place along here. Nearest farmhouse is five miles."
I glanced out the window. A continuous murky scar on the dark earth was running along our right side. A drainage ditch, I supposed. Some kind of coulee.
"This will do," Chad said, and the driver applied the brakes.
"I'm going to ask you to conduct yourself with a little dignity, Mr. Thaxton," Chad said. "I wouldn't want you to kick up a row and have to put a bullet in you."
I wet my lips. The car had stopped. The twin beams of light converged and showed us fifty yards of drab dirt road rolling flatly on into the mystery wall of night.
"I see," I said. "A little incident is going to be arranged, huh?"
"A hit and run accident," he said. "Too bad about this, Mr. Thaxton, but business is business."
"Yeah, I know. The crumbled cookie."
"I did mention I was sorry, didn't I?" He didn't sound like he had too much remorse.
Pansy-face made a little giggle and leaned on the door handle.
"Lemme square him away, huh Chad?"
The door had opened about an inch. I said, "Any of you know what became of the hophead's Roscoe?"
They did what I thought they would. Pansy-face slapped a hand to his left armpit and Chad's eyes leaped right after Pansy-face's gesture.
I had the twentytwo out and I pulled the trigger at Chad's chest but it kicked and he caught the slug spang in the Adam's apple and it must have been a dumdum because what it did to his throat and all over the windshield behind him was not pretty to see in the sheet of flame that roared from the pistol.
I lunged all of me against Pansy-face and the door shot open and we went sprawling through it and hit the road together, me on top, and then I started rolling like a log as the driver's snubnose went WOW WOW WOW out the window after me.
I got behind the car and came up in a crouch and I had to do something fast because in a second Pansy-face would have Chad's gun and then he and the driver would come after me around either end. I took a running jump into the coulee and it was like leaping into a well at night, only it was dry and it wasn't as deep.
I was afraid it would be loose shale but it was dint so I didn't make any noise as I started crawling along it, working parallel to the road and going in the same direction as the headlights. The driver was yelling at Pansy-face.
"Take the right side. I'll take the left. He must a jumped in one ditch or other."
"He's mine, gawddamn you, Bob! You hear me? Wait'll I get Chad's gun." And then, a second or so later, Pansy-face cried, "Aw gee-_sus_, Bob! You see what he done to Chad?"
I kept on crawling along the ditch till that blazing streak of opaque light overhead lost its power of penetration and started to dissolve in the darkness beyond. Then I snaked up to the edge of the parapet and looked back down the road.
The car's headlights glowered at me like jack-o-lantern eyes. Pansy-face's silhouette cut across them. He was holding Chad's pistol at hip-level. I eased myself out of the ditch and sat down in the road facing the car and tested my gun arm on my cocked right knee and gave it support with my other hand and took a sight and called, "Down here."
Pansy-face spun around with the front of the car at his back and gave me a beautiful fullfront silhouette. I squeezed off but it went high again and nabbed him in the neck and threw him back against the nose of the hood. Then his knees buckled and he went down in the road like a dropped shirt.
I only caught a flicker impression of the driver piling back into the car and I snapped one at him but God knows where it went. The motor was still idling and all he had to do was flip off the emergency and punch a button and give it the gas.
But he forgot about Pansy-face.
"_Jesus Christ, Bob, wa-!_"
The car lurched forward and went thump over the meaty obstacle and a shriek like I never want to hear again ripped the fabric of the night.
The driver was already rattled and the good-god realization that he had just mashed Pansy-face must have unglued him completely. He floored it and that big rumbling crystaleyed sedan came hurtling down the road at me, but it was already slated for crashvile when I started jerking off shots at the windshield, and it swerved out of control and to the left and I took a frantic roll back into the ditch.
The tires howled and the brakes started to scream and all of it went into a great metallic crash and seemed to surround me in a shivering glass ball of sound. Then it popped and all I could hear was the quiet, tentative giving of ruptured metal parts and the plippity-plip of draining liquid puddling. The headlights were burning steadily at a crazy tilt.
I climbed out of the ditch and went across the road and looked down the other side. The car had turned turtle on the slope. It was on its top and two of the tractionless wheels were still spinning. The driver was partly out the window and he was in a crumple on his head and shoulders. The black liquid running over his face looked like oil but of course it wasn't.