“Run over him! Run him down! Smash that machine!”
The Demon dived, slid on his face, clawed at the .45.
The Buick had stopped, started forward, toward him. He propped himself on his elbow, fired at the windshield. A cobweb of shattered glass spread out in front of the girl.
She swerved the Buick away, into the road. From the running-board, Medini’s revolver barked twice more, like a threatening puppy, before the sedan sped out of range.
The Demon was straddling Minnie by the time a short-order cook in a stained apron and a stout man in a leather jacket reached him.
“That’s Medini!” Escaped con!” He had no seconds to waste on explanations. “Call state police!” Minnie responded to the spark. He zoomed onto the highway.
It was rough going. His right wrist had no feeling in it at all. Might be a bone busted, he thought. He had to hold the .45 in his left. Minnie would have to take the bit in her teeth, practically steer herself.
“Saved my life, ole gal,” he muttered, leaning his elbows on the handlebars. “If you hadn’t deflected that pill, I’d be a sick boy right about now.”
The Buick’s tail-lights vanished over a crest. They might stop, over the hill, ambush him. Had to risk that. Probably wouldn’t, wanting to get away from the hue and cry.
He fed Minnie power. She shivered, wobbled, when the speed indicator topped fifty.
“Cry sake,” he grumbled. “Hit your fork, did he, Minnie?! Threw your sprockets out of kilter!” He held her at fifty.
When he topped the rise, there were no purplish tail-lights in sight. They couldn’t have gained that much, could they?
They hadn’t. At the foot of the hill, a wood road opened out. Headlights emerged from it, swung toward him, coming fast.
He flicked on his blinker, threw the siren on. The oncoming car stuck to the middle of the road. Then he knew.
They’d run him down. Head-on smack-up. Wouldn’t damage the Buick too much to travel. But for the Demon to hit a car at this speed would be like jumping out a ten-story building and landing on the pavement.
He waited until the headlights were twenty feet away, heading way over on the wrong side of the road, pinning him. Then he flung himself to the left, let Minnie ride on her crash bar into the ditch.
The Buick lurched toward him, too late. The girl had to fight the wheel to keep the sedan on the road. The Demon crawled out of an icy puddle, rubbed the skid burns on his left hip, cursing futilely. He hauled Minnie back to the road, remounted, gave her the ethyl.
They’d come about three miles from One-Eyed Jack’s; on the back track the Demon met only one pursuing car, a Mercury, driven by the man in the leather jacket. The Demon didn’t even bother to wave him around; the Buick was out of sight again.
The Demon poured it on, whizzed past the neon-lit road-house with Minnie clattering like a Model T on a corduroy road.
“Old gray mare — ain’t what she used t’be,” he mumbled, through swollen lips. “Just hold together another ten, that’s all I ask, Minnie. Then I’ll turn you out t’ pasture.”
At the turn where he’d spotted the wet sign he saw the tail-lights again. Disappearing west, toward Placid.
He began to gain. Another half-mile. A yellow pencil of flame pointed at him from the right hand window. He couldn’t hear the shot.
He waited another minute before he rested the barrel of the .45 on the windshield and fired at the gas tank. He emptied the clip into the back of the car at tank level. Maybe there were sharpshooters who could hit a tire at sixty mph. But not the Demon. Not with his left hand — riding a bronc that shivered like one of those barber’s massage gadgets.
He could have passed the Buick then. But he dropped into third, watched the iridescent film widening on the smooth satin of ice beneath his headlamp.
Minnie’s affliction became suddenly aggravated. Her front wheel slewed wildly. He slowed to forty. The motorcycle threatened to shiver itself apart. He cut to thirty, to twenty-five, before he could handle her.
The tail-lights began to narrow together, draw away into the darkness of a long upgrade. At a bend, they blacked out momentarily. He didn’t dare push Minnie too hard but in a quarter-mile, he caught sight of them again.
If he hadn’t drilled those punctures low enough in the gas tank, they might still have enough fuel to escape. He kept his siren going full blast to inform any late wayfarer which way the chase was going.
The Buick hit the crest of the big hill a full mile ahead. When he got to the peak, he saw the loom of the headlights far below. They were swerving, turning. Maybe they meant to make another stab at crashing into him.
No! The car was in a skid. A long, sweeping slide. The gas had been used up. The motor’d died. They hadn’t had power to use on the curve.
He was a hundred yards behind when the headlights dipped, somersaulted, lunged off into the darkness of the pine woods, came to rest, pointing up into the night from a deep gully.
He slurred Minnie around in the middle of the highway, kicked down the stand, left her chuttering softly with her blinker light still going. That would halt any passing traffic and tip off any of the troop cars that might be answering a phone from One-Eyed Jack’s.
He plunged off into the soft, wet mulch of leaves and spruce needles — flashlight in his right hand, 45 in the fist he could depend on.
The Buick lay on its side, far below on the steep slope — the broken ice of a brook wriggling alongside it like a spotted snake. The Demon could see no sign of movement.
But after fifty yards of scratching his eyes out on thorny scrub and barking his shins on ice-coated boulders, he saw something that looked like a raveling of red yarn on the ice. It was above the car; it couldn’t have dripped from the Buick.
Someone had been hurt, had managed to get out. It wasn’t the girl. He could make out her blond curls tangled with the wheel where she lay slumped over, clamped in the wreckage.
The Demon kept rigidly quiet, heard nothing. He went on twenty steps, stopped again. There was no sound other than the whining of the wind in the evergreens, the lashing of sleet against branches. But through the aromatic pungency of the pines — the clean, fresh fragrance of the spruce — he caught the unmistakable odor of garlic.
Medini was coming toward him! Heading straight for the road — with the idea of kidnaping Minnie and riding her out of the danger zone!
The Demon knelt in the slime of sleety leaves and twigs and needles. The smell became stronger. He thumbed on the flashlight switch, threw the plastic tube down the slope. The cone of light turned and twisted like a landing beacon gone crazy.
The brusque bark of the .32 answered, but the Demon was dazzled by his own pyrotechnics. He couldn’t see the finger of flame to shoot back.
The flashlight bounced off a tree, caromed onto a rock, slid a few feet, came to rest on its side — the beam half pointing toward the Demon!
A tapering evergreen, silhouetted against the luminous blur, became suddenly thinner at its base. A shadow; like that of a misshapen boulder, detached itself from the trunk.
The Demon held his automatic with both hands, sighted, fired.
The answering snarl was that of a wounded animal. The Demon crawled toward the sound. He couldn’t see Medini. But there was no difficulty about smelling him.
The .45 held stiffly before him, the Demon inched nearer. The man might be playing ‘possum.
Medini coughed — a harsh, strangling cough. “I told Katie — I should’ve taken time — to punch your ticket — back there at the joint—”
The Demon shoved the automatic against the killer’s ribs, reached for the hammerless. The stench of garlic seemed overpowering. It didn’t come from the man’s breath. It was on the gun. It had been on Medini’s right hand.