“Look, my suit isn’t back from the cleaners yet.”
“I’ll pay you for one twice as good.”
He shrugged. He put the new manuscript in the bottom of the replacement suitcase he had purchased, when he had gone down to eat the evening before. She stood near the door. It was open a few inches.
“Where do you want me to...”
“Sssh!” she said. He looked at her in surprise. She stared tensely out at the hallway. He came quietly up behind her. Three men were just heading up to the third floor. One of them wore a Ranger uniform.
“What is it?” he asked in a low tone.
“We’ve got to get out of here!”
“Now look, honey. Let’s just say you have to get out of here. I think I’d welcome a nice warm friendly cop at this point.”
She turned on him. Her face had gone feline. “You would, eh? Listen, friend. They’ll grab me and you and your car. They know where you came from. And there’s no power in the world that’ll keep you from doing time for it.”
“I’ve done nothing wrong!”
“No? Lane, there’s a hundred forty ounces of heroin in your car. Refined diacetyl-morphine worth a quarter of a million dollars in the retail market, and you brought it in from Mexico. Do you still want to play innocent?”
“But you could explain how I happened to...”
“Either I get help from you right now, or what I’ll tell them about you will be something you won’t want to hear.”
“That’s a filthy trick!”
“Do you help me?”
“Just until I can get that damn stuff out of my car.”
“Come on, then.” She ran ahead of him down the corridor. She yanked open a broom closet and shoved her suitcase inside. She slammed the door. The back window was open. The outside fire escape reached down to the yard behind the hotel.
Diana looked out cautiously. “Okay. Come on.” She went down first. He followed her. A kitchen helper stood out by the garbage cans, a cigarette between his fingers, his mouth open in surprise.
“Which one?” she said.
“Over there. The blue car.”
They both ran to it. He threw his bag into the back seat, slid behind the wheel. She jumped in beside him and slammed the door. He fumbled with the key, got the motor started and stalled it.
“Come on! Come on!” she said.
The back tires skidded and threw gravel. He drove down the alley beside the hotel. Evidently the kitchen helper had run in to the desk. The clerk came along the sidewalk and jumped into the alley mouth, waving his arms, his face red and angry, blocking the way.
Lane lifted his foot from the gas. Diana reached her foot over and trod down on his. The car leaped forward. The clerk made a frantic dive for his life. Lane got a quick glance at the man rolling over and over on the sidewalk as they shot out into traffic. He wrenched the wheel hard to avoid a big truck. The tires screamed, horns blew and people shouted angrily at him.
The mid-morning sun beat hotly down on the town.
“Now slow and easy,” Diana said.
“Oh, fine,” he said bitterly.
“Head east out of town. Step it up once you’re outside the city limits.”
“Yessir, boss.”
He stepped it up to seventy. The two-lane concrete rushed at them and was whipped under the wheels.
“Can’t you make it faster?”
“Take a look at the heat guage, boss. The radiator needs flushing. Any faster and I burn up the motor.”
They sped through country full of reddish stone, cactus and sparse dry grass. Far ahead the road disappeared into a shimmer of heat waves.
After a full hour in which neither of them spoke, Lane saw a side road far ahead. It led over to a grove of live oaks that were livid green in the sun-baked expanse. It was a dirt road and he could only hope that the live oaks did not screen a house.
He stepped hard on the brakes, corrected a tendency to skid, and shot down the dirt road, the car bouncing high.
“What are you doing?” she shouted.
“Shut up, angel. There’s been a shift of authority. You’ve been deposed.”
She tried to grab the wheel. He slapped her hand away. The road turned sharply to the left once it reached the grove. A dry creek bed ran through the grove. There was no house. He pulled the car under the biggest tree and cut off the motor.
“What kind of a bright idea is this?”
“Please shut up.” He took the keys out of the switch and put them in his pocket. The world seemed silent after the roar of the motor. In the distance a mourning dove cried softly. On the highway three hundred yards away, a car sped by with an odd whistling drone, fading off into the distance.
He unlocked the back end and took out a screwdriver and an adjustable wrench.
“Would you know where they hide stuff on a car?”
Diana didn’t answer him. He shrugged, released the hood catch and shoved the hood up. The wave of motor heat struck him. He stared at the motor for a time. He didn’t know the characteristics of the drug, but he imagined it was a crystalline substance. Motor heat wouldn’t do it much good, probably. It was probably somewhere in the body of the car.
He told her to get out of the car. She didn’t move, didn’t look at him. He took her wrist and pulled her out. She walked woodenly over to a patch of grass under one of the trees and sat down, her back to him.
Lane began to sweat from exertion as he yanked the seats out. He examined them carefully and could see no evidence that they had been tampered with. He lay on his back and peered up under the dash.
It took him an hour to find the answer. The simplicity of it made him angry. They had merely removed the inside panel from the left-hand door. The long sausage-like package wrapped in pale yellow oilskin was against the bottom of the door below the window mechanism.
He took it out and held it in his hands, trying to guess its weight. Close to ten pounds. Nine, probably. He remembered the figure for the number of grains in a pound. Seven thousand sixteen. Nine pounds would be about sixty-three thousand grains. That would be about four dollars a grain retail to the addict, if the girl hadn’t lied about its value.
He put the package aside and replaced the panel. Then he put the seats back in. He tossed the package in onto the front seat, went over to Diana and offered her a cigarette. She took it silently, and he lit hers and his own. He sat down near her.
“Now I’ll tell you why this was a damn fool stunt,” he said.
“Don’t strain yourself.”
“In the first place it’s easy to recognize the car. Look over at the plates.”
She looked. “Why, they’re out-of-date!”
“Sure they are. It doesn’t make any difference in Mexico. I was going to buy Texas plates. That makes the car stand out like a sore thumb. How far could we get? Do you think the hotel hasn’t given the cops that license? I wrote it on the register when I checked in. Now here’s the second pitch. In this area you’re either on the main roads or you’re a dead duck. The secondary roads just aren’t there. It makes it awfully easy to block off a whole area. If we’d kept going, we wouldn’t have gotten out. Radio goes a lot faster than my blue wagon.”
“What can we do?” she asked hopelessly.
“I’ve been giving that a lot of thought. And I forgot about a witness across the border who can clear me. I was all kinds of a damn fool to let you stampede me into running. Running is always the worst thing you can do. I know. I’ve done too much running in the past. This is my first experience running from the law, though.”
“Do you expect me to go back there?”
“How can I say that? Lady, I don’t even know what your problems are. All I know about you is that you were in trouble, that in a weak moment I helped you out, that you’re mixed up in what I think is the most vicious business in the world, and that when the squeeze came you dropped your Lorelei role and switched to blackmail. That covers the information. The only other thing I know about you is that you’re probably the most provocative-looking item I’ve ever seen in my life.”