Close. Too close. For some reason, he had trouble seeing. Everything seemed blurred, wavering in a kind of fog. The rain! The rain, of course. He felt a vast, consuming relief that made him want to shriek with laughter. For a moment, he’d thought it might be the effect of the wound.
Rocking up over the brow of a hill, the Buick boomed down. Ahead, abruptly, the highway disappeared, and the light of headlamps lay yellow across swirling water. It was too late to slow down, and he ploughed in, water fanning up and out from the shuddering car in a giant V. The sudden retardation of speed again hurled him brutally against the wheel. Again the sheet of fire, the lurid pain. But even in the midst of it, at its most terrible intensity, he thought with despair of the motor. He heard it cough and sputter on the edge of death, and finally, with that vast, hysterical relief, heard it catch fire and resume its steady roar.
That guy in the bus. That tall, lanky guy in the rear seat. There’d been a feeling about him from the beginning. One of those things. One of those odd little threats of danger that seem to come like faint electrical impulses from certain people. He’d felt the guy’s eyes on him during the ride. Like two hot projections burning into his skin just where the hair feathered on his neck. As if the sun had been focused there through the magnifying glasses.
For Jefferson Pitt, whose name he didn’t even know, he possessed a virulent hatred that worked on him with a physical ravishment that was almost equal to that of his wound. Damn the guy! Oh, damn him, damn him, damn him! The curse repeated itself over and over in his mind with the effect of an evil incantation. Pray for his damnation. Pray, pray to the devil.
After a long time, he saw ahead of him the sign of the by-pass, a detour established for traffic that Wanted to circle the city. It rejoined the highway beyond the limit on the other side. At the junction, with the instinctive caution of a wounded and hunted animal, he wheeled the Buick onto the by-pass. Probably there was no immediate danger in the city. Probably the heavy rain had interrupted telephone service out of Hogan. But you couldn’t be sure. Maybe not. Maybe the news had gone ahead of him.
He was driving now with one hand. His left lay useless in his lap. His torso was gutted and drained and he seemed to be sitting in a puddle of something warm and wet. It was, moreover, increasingly difficult to think. He was unable, somehow, to give proper consideration to the details of escape, which were things he should certainly be considering. Funny, the curious coloring the night had acquired. It was more red, now, than black, as if the world were ending in the fulfillment of fiery prophecy.
Brenda. Brenda would know what to do. Brenda was a kind of beautiful panacea, and he had only to reach her to make everything right again. He saw her quite clearly in a pink froth, and he fought for the vision, shutting everything else out. He did recall briefly, however, the fifty grand that was, contrary to what he’d said, still in his pocket He thought of the money only because it had become in his mind her constant associate. He would take the money to her, and she would get them safely away, because she was beautiful and clever and all things were possible to her.
They’d go south, maybe. To the hot countries. Mexico, Brazil, Argentina. He’d never cared for the tropics. Colder climates for him. Climates of energy and drive and ruthlessness. But with Brenda it would be all right. With Brenda, all things would be all right. That fool back there. That lanky fool. Thinking he had kidnapped Brenda. Thinking he could do it. Hot and cold, tender and cruel, complex, contradictory, beautiful, beautiful Brenda.
He never knew when he regained the highway. Nor when he turned off into the hills on the narrow gravel road. At the end, he was only dimly, redly conscious of turning up the sharp climb to the cabin, of the Buick’s skidding out of control and slamming into a stand of scrub oaks.
Opening the door, he pitched out. He lay on the wet mat of dead grass and leaves for several minutes, sobbing with pain. Finally he crawled erect and continued afoot, elbow in guts, shoulder crumpled forward. Slipping and sprawling, always regaining his feet by a fierce exertion of will. Up the slope and across the cleared area in front of the cabin. Up the steps onto the porch. Three steps. Three, arduous, body-wracking, heartbreaking miles. Clawing at the plank door, beating at it desperately with the meaty side of a clenched fist.
A light came on inside, and the door opened. He plunged headlong into the room, and Brenda stood looking down at him with her breath caught in a hard, hurting knot in her throat.
“Connie,” she said. “Connie.”
Chapter IV
He was heavy. She had not dreamed that he was so heavy. Tugging, straining, staining herself with his blood, she got him onto a leather sofa and stripped him naked to the waist. She saw with a black wave of despair that the wound was bad, that he was barely alive. His chest heaved. Pink bubbles formed and broke on his lips.
Working like an automaton, not stopping to wonder what had gone so wrong, she did what she could with hot water and towels and an inferior antiseptic she found in the bedroom. It wasn’t much. His heaving chest quieted, his breath becoming dangerously shallow. The pink bubbles formed more slowly, growing gradually in dimension to the bursting point, inflated gently by his diminished breath.
It was only after she had done all she could for him that she thought of the money. She took it from the inside pocket of his sodden coat and stood holding the thick packet in her hands. It was smeared with blood. Connie’s blood. She stood here for a long time, looking down at the fifty grand, the stained stuff of the big plan, balancing in the mental columns of her own perverted accounts the green against the red. With a sudden, violent backhand motion of her arm, she threw the packet away from her. It struck the opposite wall and flew apart, the green leaves fluttering to the floor. Her voice came up on a dry, rasping sob.
“Connie,” she said again. “Connie.”
Kneeling beside the leather couch, she laid her face against his naked body below the wound, and it was several minutes before she realized that he was dead. Then, in spite of a grief that was real, she began to think, with the predatory coldness that had always been independent of her emotions, of her own survival. She understood that money would be essential, and she got up and began gathering the scattered notes. She was engaged in this when the door swung open, and a tall man stood in the opening. In a kind of strange immunity to shock that was the effect of too much already, she was not frightened, nor even startled, and she saw that this man, too, had been shot. His right arm hung stiffly at his side. In his left hand was a gun. His eyes moved from her to Connie’s body on the sofa and back again.
“He’s dead?”
“Yes.” And then, quickly, “I didn’t kill him.”
“I know you didn’t. I did.”
At his words, hate flared within her, a hot blue flame, like the flame of an acetylene torch. So this was the man. This was the man who had done it. The intensity of her emotion made her feel scorched and withered inside, but with craft born of danger she gave no sign. This was a man. Whatever else he might be, he was still a man. And men were to use. They were to be used for chosen ends in whatever methods were necessary at the moment.
“I don’t understand.”
“I shot him at Hogan, and how he ever lived this long to drive a car this far is God’s own miracle.” The lips moved again, giving the angular, face no warmth. “I thought he was a kidnapper. I see now that he wasn’t. I see now that he was only the partner in a conspiracy. In a way, I can’t blame him. A woman like you. The old man told me you were beautiful, but the word isn’t good enough.”