The door opened suddenly, swinging back and snubbing against the toe of my moccasin. The night jailer walked grumbling along the corridor, shielding a match flame. Ten feet beyond me the match went out. I went through the dark doorway and turned to the right, crossed the small room cautiously, found the knob and opened the door to the main corridor. There was a light at the far end. The staircase was shadowy. I went down as quietly as I could. On the main floor I could hear someone typing. I went in the opposite direction. I found an unlocked door and went in. Streetlights outside illuminated the orderly rows of desks and filing cabinets. I slid one of the big windows open. It made a great deal of noise. It was a six-foot drop into shrubbery. I landed and hit my chin on my knee, biting my lip until it bled. I ran across the midnight expanse of the courthouse lawn, keeping to the shadow. I thought I could hear hoarse yelling behind me. I stopped, oriented myself, and turned north.
Every time a car passed, I moved back onto dark lawns, crouching behind bushes. I heard a siren, back where I had come from. I felt slightly hysterical suddenly and made a grotesque giggling sound. This could not be Paul Cowley, that bold slayer of crab grass, that desperate man who always says pardon me when you step on his foot, that desperado of the cellar workshop, that pirate of the purchasing section. The siren faded and then I heard it again, further away.
Hill had indirectly recommended a senseless move. I had really made one.
At the north edge of town I came upon a rustic bar set back from the road. Local cars were thick around it. I moved in on the cars in shadow and felt through open windows for ignition keys. A girl spoke, quite near at hand, and a man answered her. I crouched down. I realized, after a moment, that they were in a parked car, and only luck had kept them from seeing me. I wanted to be out of sight. I found a pickup truck. I crawled cautiously into the back, found a tarp and pulled it over me. The tarp smelled of ancient fish.
It was at least a half-hour before people got into the truck. Two young boys, I judged. They backed out briskly. I held my breath. They turned north. The road was smooth and they drove fast. The wind whistled, tugged at the corners of the tarp. I tried to make an estimate of the miles. Suddenly the truck began to slow down. I risked looking. The truck was slowing down to turn into a driveway out in the country. A single light was on in a house set back under the pines. I thrust the tarp aside and, as the truck made the turn, I vaulted out into the wide shallow ditch and fell headlong. I rolled onto my back and looked at the stars. Mosquitoes whined around my ears. A truck rumbled by. When I looked again the house light was out. I got up and began to walk north. I walked spiritlessly, forcing myself. I was one of those children’s toys powered by a coil spring. The spring had been wound up tightly, and now all the force was gone.
I had never done anything remotely like this. Perhaps I had assumed that I would be like men I had read about, tireless because of their anger and desperation. But I wanted to lie down in the ditch, or flag a car headed south. My feet hurt and I felt cross and tired. My bites itched. I plodded along through the night, feeling dulled and purposeless. For back of me I heard the thin lost whine of a siren, coming closer. I walked as before, telling myself I didn’t give a damn.
Then unexpected fear made me come alive. I plunged across the ditch and tripped and fell flat. I rolled into deeper shelter. The siren, on a high sustained note, screamed by and faded into the north. This could not possibly be me, this man who hid like an animal and heard, in the stillness, the quick hard beating of his own heart. That other Paul Cowley could never do this. Yet maybe he had ceased to exist when the finger had pulled the trigger. Perhaps the ridiculously small lead pellet had killed him as expertly as it had killed all that was Stella Jeffries.
I had no watch. I guessed it could be nearly four when I reached the turnoff to Verano Key. My eyes had adjusted to the night. I walked a half-mile down the sand road to the old wooden bridge. I stopped and listened. I could hear no far-off sound of a car. I did not want to be caught on the bridge. I ran across and turned into coarse grass and crouched on one knee, listening again. Far down the bay I could see the Coleman lights of the commercial fishermen spreading gill nets for mullet. Linda would be a mile down the key. I wondered if she slept calmly, quietly, without regret or conscience.
I trudged down the key road. From time to time I could see the night Gulf, inky under the sky, with a starlit paleness where small waves broke on the even paler sand. A shell worked its way into my left moccasin and I took it off, dumped the sand out of it. I realized that I was walking more slowly. I had no idea what to do once I arrived at the cottage.
I saw headlights ahead of me, rounding a bend in the sand road. I ran up over the sand bank to my right and stretched out. The car lurched by. It had a noisy motor, and I heard gear clattering on metal. I went back up onto the road. Finally I knew I was close. I rounded the last bend and I could see the two cottages. There were lights on in the near one, the Jeffries cottage. I stood for a moment, then turned abruptly to the left, forcing my way through the heavy jungly growth. The footing was bad, at places it was so thick I could not force my way through and had to detour. I moved as quietly as I could. I worked my way with difficulty over the tangle of mangrove roots near the water line. The bay stretched back in front of me, stars quivering on the surface of it. I stepped slowly into the warm water, moved out until I was five or six feet from the overgrown shore line. My shoes sank deeply into the mud with each cautious step.
A glitter and splash close at hand stopped me in my tracks, heart thumping. A fish had jumped. The spreading ripples made the star reflections dance. Far off I heard the commercial fishermen beating on the wooden sides of the boats, to frighten the encircled school into darting into the gill nets.
After about two hundred feet of cautious progress I saw the cottage lights on the water, making the dock visible to me. I stopped in the shadows and wondered how I could get closer. The far side of the dock was in darkness. I waded slowly out until the water was up to my chest. I lowered myself, swam with a noiseless side stroke, rounding the far end of the dock. I came in, in the darkness, until my knee struck bottom. I crawled, dripping, keeping below the level of the dock. I reached the overturned boat. I lay beside it on my back, got my arms braced and tilted it up. I eased under it, let it down slowly. The upcurve of the bow rested against the ground, so that there were two or three inches of free space on either side of me.
As I had worked at the boat, I had heard voices. Now I stretched out, waited until my breath quieted and then tried to listen. I could make out the timbre of Linda’s voice, but no word that she said. There were two men. I knew I could not risk trying to get closer.
Suddenly I heard the brisk slap of a screen door and realized they had been talking on the front porch of the Jeffries cottage. I recognized the voice of the man called Dike Matthews as he said, raising his voice a bit, “Like I said, there’s no need to get the jitters about it. He hasn’t got a gun, and you look like you could handle him, Mr. Jeffries. Besides, I don’t figure he’d head for here. What would be the point? Unless he’s nuts like some folks think, in spite of what those fancy doctors said. I suspect you can go on back to sleep and not give it another thought. We got the state boys co-operating and road blocks out, and by first light they ought to pick him up.”