At that moment I was utterly defeated. All I could think of was—this is the end of the line! The hand had been played out.
For several minutes, maybe longer, I wallowed in the muck and slime of self-pity—but finally I pulled myself out of that. By God, I told myself, I've got to get myself out of this!
But one thought kept hammering at me. Jesus, if I only had a gun! I was rapidly becoming a nut on the idea of not having a gun. What I needed right now was a friend like John Venci to give me a gun and a bankroll.
I might as well have wished for a platinum plated key to Fort Knox. No sir, I thought, it's going to take more than wishing to get out of this, Surratt....
Then one word, one name crossed my mind.... Pat!
I hadn't dared think of her until now. The minute that letter had been intercepted I made myself stop thinking about her. No matter what I had felt about her, or what she had felt about me, I had to accept the fact that Pat must now hate my guts because she knew that I had killed Alex Burton.
But now I started thinking in a new direction, almost another dimension.
The question I asked myself was: Did Pat actually know that I had killed Burton? All she had was the word of an unbalanced woman, to put it kindly, and was there any particular reason that she should take the word of a gangster's wife against mine?
Jesus, I thought, the excitement of the idea beginning to grip me, I wonder if I actually could bring her around! I wonder if I could somehow make her believe that I had nothing to do with that Burton killing!
The fact was, I had very little choice in the matter. My position right now was much the same as it had been in prison. Lake City was my prison, all exits were locked to me, and to crash out successfully I simply had to have help... and Pat was the only possible person who might give it.
I could hear my every heartbeat as I crouched there by the tractors. If I bring this off, I thought, it will be the most audacious action of my career.
However, any debate on the matter would be purely academic, for Pat held my life in her hands. Either she would help me, or she wouldn't. Either I would die, or I wouldn't. Strangely enough I was perfectly calm as I considered the possibilities. The first thing I've got to do is get to a phone, I thought. I've got to contact Pat and I've got to give the most convincing performance of my life!
Beyond that point there was no sense making plans.
In the distance I could hear those out-of-tune electronic chimes banging out every quarter hour. The distance that those discordant sounds could cover was positively amazing, but at least they were functional. By paying attention to the chimes I now knew that it was five o'clock and that seven full hours had passed since the police cars had first started closing in on my apartment.
Only seven hours? It seemed like a lifetime ago!
Getting started was the tough part. I had begun to associate a feeling of security with this flatcar. I began to hate the thought of leaving it. I began to think what a nice thing it would be if I could curl up into a tight little knot and lie there in the quiet darkness and pretend that everything was going to work out fine, just the way it was, and it really wasn't necessary to return to that jungle fury that lay on the other side of the tarp.
I lifted the tarp just a little and looked outside. Just as I had figured, the string of cars had been left on a siding. I looked out at an amazing network of steel tracks only slightly less complicated than the human nerve system, and beyond the tracks there were several sprawling redbrick buildings and a high wire fence. I had a look on the other side of the car and decided this would be my best bet. In this direction there were very few tracks. There was a maze of cattle pens and loading chutes. Most of the cattle pens were empty and there was no sign of unusual activity—certainly there were no cops in sight.
Well, I thought, I might as well take the plunge.
CHAPTER TWENTY
THE AFTERNOON papers were in a wire rack in front of a drugstore and I could read the headlines from half a block away.
KILLER LOOSE IN LAKE CITY.
I'd been almost an hour getting completely away from the freight yards, finding my way out of that maze of cattle pens and trying to watch out for cops at the same time. I had finally made it this far, maybe two or three blocks away from the yards, to that crummy, down-at-the-heel section of the city that always seems to thrive close to the tracks. I had made it this far with no trouble. Not a single pair of eyes had given me a second glance, and just as I was feeling that everything was going nicely, that headline hit me.
What really jarred me was the picture. I had never been news like this before—I wasn't accustomed to seeing a three column cut of myself on the front page just below a black two inch screamer.
Are all these people blind! I thought. How can they look at me and fail to recognize me as the “killer”?
Then I looked at myself in a plate glass window and understood. The man I saw in the glass was not the best looking man in the world, and certainly not the neatest, but he was wearing a good suit, a tie, a shirt with a button-down collar. “Even I had trouble believing that the man who had sat for those prison mug shots in the paper could be the same man looking back at me from the plate glass window. Well, I'll be damned! I felt an impulse to laugh.
But I put it down immediately.
A trained eye, a cop's eye, would spot me in an instant... and the cops were the only ones who counted in this game of life and death that I was playing. Don't forget that, Surratt. Don't forget it for an instant!
I didn't forget it, but I did feel a little better until a cop stepped onto the sidewalk about four doors down from where I was standing!
My heart stopped still. He was a big sonofabitch, two hundred at-least; he had just stepped out of a chili joint and still had a toothpick in his mouth. He wiped his mouth, then planted himself solidly in the middle of the sidewalk and glared hard at some point in the distance that seemed to anger him.
You stay just like that, I thought, easing into a doorway. You turn your head, you fix those steelball eyes of yours on my face, copper, and you'll be the deadest sonofabitch in Lake City!
It was complete nonsense, of course, because I had no gun and I certainly couldn't have handled a cop his size with my bare hands... but it made me feel a little better just thinking it. As I thought it I eased into the doorway. I reached behind me and opened a door. Make it look natural, I told myself, as I turned and stepped through the doorway into what seemed to be another hash house.
The last I saw of that cop he was still standing there in that same spot, rocking slightly on the balls of his feet, his gaze still fixed angrily on that uncertain point in the distance. Maybe his feet hurt. Maybe he was mad because the captain had passed him over for promotion. You just keep thinking about it, I thought, whatever it is.
I closed the door and began to breathe again.
There was a woman behind the counter who looked at me when I came in but all she saw was just another drifter, in a world of drifters, who might be worth the price of coffee and sinkers, but that was all. There were two customers at the counter having the house special, stew, but they were too busy eating to be curious.
I headed for the phone booth.
I was perfectly calm until I-dropped the coin in the slot and began to dial. That was when my insides began to crawl, that was when I fully realized how important these next few minutes or seconds could be to me. They could mean that I would either live or die—that's how important they were! All Pat had to say was “no” and I was dead. Just as sure as she could point a pistol at my head and pull the trigger. She could kill me. I absolutely had to have her help or I was cooked, really cooked this time, and nobody was more aware of that fact than I.