He took Numbers’s right hand, put the cuff on it, and closed the other on his own left wrist. The reporter was filled with unexpected alarm; he did not know why, he could not even imagine why. He took a step forward but felt foolish about it, and anyway the squad car was pulling up in front. The other officer got out and the sergeant led the way, and all the while the reporter had the frantic feeling that he was about to remember everything he needed to answer the warden’s question and that for some reason it would be too late.
They were beside the car, a police special, a two-door with the engine running and the door at the curb open. The driver stood behind Numbers and the sergeant started climbing into the car ahead of him, awkwardly because of the handcuffs. It all happened like slow motion, but so shockingly fast and smooth that the reporter could not budge; yet his mind phrased this orderly sentence: This man called Numbers is left-handed, and he worked in the kitchen with a magician, and somehow these things have a bearing on the answer to the question of what to expect from the ex-con.
The cop behind Numbers had reached past him to hold the seat back and Numbers had reached forward under the cop’s coat with his left hand and slipped the gun out of the harness — and then shot the cop while the snub barrel was still pushed up against his armpit. It made hardly any noise, but when the cop’s body fell out of the car his coat was burning a little. The sergeant was hunched over, partly turned aside, with one arm stuck out beside him; his mouth came open but nothing came out because Numbers shot him once in the body and an instant later, as though there was something there he did not want to see any more, he shot the sergeant in the face. The reporter still stood there when the hand with the revolver came around and the front end of it, a .357, was as big as all the world.
“Drive,” Numbers said. “Now.”
The sound of his voice was what started time moving again. The reporter slid under the wheel and as the car started he saw that not even the guard behind the gate six feet away had moved. They had made it down the block and had turned away from the prison onto another street before a tower guard got into action. Numbers found the key to the manacles in the sergeant’s pocket and freed his wrist. After that he leaned forward holding the .357 in the split between the seats. The reporter thought that perhaps later he would be very angry with himself, but right now he did not feel any rage. He did not feel anything but the size of the revolver and the feel that was the feel of death behind him.
“You drive okay,” the man called Numbers said. “You ain’t got much of a percentage to work on but you’re doing okay. That is,” he said, “unless somebody crosses you up. Figures will always come out even — that’s the nice thing about figures — except when people mess them up. People are always messing them up on the Outside,” he added broodingly; “you got to help me keep track, otherwise they won’t come out even. Like now—” There was something he had to say and now he said it, “For seven years they owed me a cop. I paid for one cop before I got him, but now I got two of them.” He laughed a little and said, “Bargain day — two for the price of one.”
The reporter was getting ready to say something but meanwhile Numbers said, “They ought to add everything up before they frame a guy for killing a cop. A guy who could figure out anything at all to live for wouldn’t ever kill a cop.” Numbers paused, then he said, “Once you get past that, it’s not so hard.”
So the reporter did not say anything. He simply drove the car. It was a good car and could stand a lot of driving. There was no trouble for quite a while.
“Turn on the radio,” Numbers said. “Let’s see if we can get some music.” He had the tight deadly excitement in him that belongs to a man who has just come unscathed through combat for the first time, after all the months of waiting and preparation when you cannot quite believe how easily a man can die, nor how stubbornly.
The music on the radio was, of course, the voice of the metropolitan police dispatcher. Distance broke up the reception, so they could not hear what he was saying.
At the first town, nothing much happened except some girls in shorts outside the drug store on Main Street turned to look at the car, and a local policeman looked at it, looked away, and then as it passed, leaped out into the street and blew his whistle. No one could tell what he expected to happen after he blew it. It was just one of the things you do when something happens that is not supposed to happen, like a runaway killer going through your town when the girls are standing outside the drug store and it is the day before the firemen’s picnic maybe.
The only difference between that town and the next one was that in the next the police were waiting. The reporter turned into Main Street and up ahead were a couple of cars in the middle of the road and somewhere the telltale wink of a spotlight.
Numbers rubbed his free hand over his short haircut.
“Let’s tell ’em we’re coming.”
The reporter thought how you could not only get very bitter but very bored in seven years in prison.
“Let’s tell ’em loud,” and Numbers pushed up the special’s red spotlight, switched on the siren, and said, “Bet you a fin they get out of the way.”
They did.
It did not seem reasonable but it was another of the things you do because the habits of routine have their own kind of handcuffs on you when the routine is broken. The traffic officers heard the siren and saw the light, and they backed their cars out of the way in a real hurry, so the special could get through; and it went through all right. The reporter got a glimpse of their faces: astounded, foolish — whatever they felt as soon as they had a chance to realize what their reflexes had done.
“Cops,” Numbers said. “You always know what a cop is going to do. It’s a regular formula.”
“Then you know what they are going to do now,” the reporter said. “They are going to chase hell out of us.”
“That’s okay,” Numbers said. “I been alone in a cell for seven years, I don’t mind a little company, even cops. Just so they don’t get too close.” He leaned forward and the big ugly .357 jutted up a little. “And I got confidence in you that they won’t get too close, because then I’d have to screw up my bookkeeping. There ain’t any place in my books for a dead reporter.”
“I wouldn’t want you to upset your bookkeeping,” the reporter said grimly.
At the first crossroad they turned off the highway. Most of the cars after them now were traffic patrol cars built to catch almost anything on a straightaway. But on a winding back road the city special, with its souped-up acceleration, had a distinct advantage. The reporter tried to keep his mind on his driving because he had found it impossible to stop thinking altogether, and if he did not concentrate on the driving he would think about other things. So he thought about the road and was grateful when a squirrel started to cross ahead of them, decided not to, was undecided, and before it made up its mind it did not matter; either they hit it or they didn’t, he couldn’t tell. They passed a farm where a boy in overalls was driving a dozen cows up the lane because it was late afternoon now and time for milking. Just after they passed, the boy opened a gate and drove the cows onto the road because the barn was on the other side; and the man called Numbers laughed.
“There’s one for our side,” he said happily. “When those cops come over the hill and get mixed up with those cows, there’ll be steak scattered for miles around.”
The boy in overalls had waved and the reporter felt bad because he could not do anything about what was going to happen to the boy and his cows. Thinking about that was no good, so he thought about steak, which Numbers had just mentioned. The reporter was not hungry and when he forced himself to think about steak, he obstinately thought about the kind of steak he didn’t like; that reminded him of the way his wife fixed it and that brought him squarely to thinking about home and he didn’t want that, he didn’t want any of that. He did not even want to begin it, because that would lead to the men who would not go home any more; and the car already was thick with the sweetish smell of gunpowder and death that meant one man would not go home to a wife whom the reporter had never seen and to a boy whose picture the reporter had been shown at various stages over the years. Mostly he had been shown pictures of the sergeant’s boy during the time he played football in high school. After that they tapered off because the boy wanted to be a doctor and you don’t put anyone through medical school on a sergeant’s pay. The reporter did not know the other cop, but anyway he did not want to speculate about the home he would not be going back to either, nor his wife, nor his kid who might want to be a football player or a doctor or, worse yet, a cop. It was hard to see why anybody would want to be a cop, and why anybody would want to be a good cop was beyond comprehension. There was something preposterous about the whole thing, but just then the back road they were on came to a dead end on another broad straight highway.