I approached the open window on the driver's side noiselessly. The outline of Rafe James's horse-like features was dimly visible. He was watching the corner of the building around which Kern and I were supposed to appear. Something bulky rested on James's lap.
I took a step closer, reached inside the window with my left hand, and jabbed the steel pin of the caster into the back of James's neck, hard. "Don't move!" I barked. "Or I'll shoot!"
He stiffened, then froze.
I reached down with my hand and took the bulky object from his lap. It was a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun. The stock had been cut down, too. It wasn't any longer and not much heavier than an old-time dueling pistol, but probably fifty times as lethal. "Out of the car," I ordered James. He complied numbly. He was in a state of shock. I handed him the keys to Spider Kern's automobile. He looked down at them blankly. "Get into Kern's car," I said.
He led the way to it. It was parked four cars away. If Kern and I had entered it and started through the hospital grounds, Rafe James would have been right behind us, shotgun at the ready. When I handed over the supposed five thousand to Kern for aiding my escape, my life would have run it's useful course as far as the two attendants were concerned. James would have stepped in with the shotgun.
I had the shotgun now. I held if on James while he got under the wheel of Kern's car, then slid into the passenger's seat myself. "Drive to the farthest corner of the dark side of the lot and park it again," I said. "Then we'll walk back to your car." James did as he was told. There was a sheen of perspiration on his face. Walking back to his car, he held his arms stiffly at his sides as though he didn't know what to do with them. "Now out to the highway," I directed.
I knew that it was a mile to the highway. "Stop here," I said when I judged we were halfway. The headlights showed thick bushes on either side of the road and a ditch on the left. "Get out," I said when James hit the brakes. He started to whimper. "Out," I repeated.
I nudged him with the shotgun. He started out slowly, then bolted and started to run. His lank frame zigzagged as he picked up speed. "Stop running!" I yelled at him. I had intended to knock him out, tie him up, and leave him in the ditch. I scrambled out after him. I couldn't wait. I didn't know the load in the shotgun. At twenty yards I touched off the front trigger. Ker-blamm-m-m! Whatever the charge was, it picked up Rafe James's running figure bodily and rolled him down into the ditch.
I looked up and down the road for advancing headlights. There were none. I climbed down into the ditch to check on James. From the look of him, the shotgun had to be loaded with buckshot. Even with the unchoked, sawed-off barrel, he must have caught half the charge. Rafe James was no longer a part of the problem.
I left Spider Kern's hospital keys and car keys beside the body. It might help to confuse the issue when James was found. I thought I knew how Kern would think when he regained consciousness. He would look first for his keys, then for his car. When he couldn't find either, and couldn't find James, Kern would assume I'd somehow got the drop on James and forced him to drive me away in Kern's car. Spider's self-preserving account of the situation should have the police looking for two men, one with head bandages, in Kern's car.
Instead, I'd be alone, without head bandages, in Rafe James's car. Kern's car wouldn't be noticed until daylight disclosed it in the morning. It gave me a few hours incognito. I rolled away from there.
When the gateway leading out to the highway loomed up in the headlights, I pulled off onto the shoulder of the road again. I removed my bandages and took one of the tubes of facial makeup, squeezed some onto my palm, and worked it into my scalp and face. In the hospital I had seen in the case of Willie Turnbull how the makeup dulled the pink gloss of new skin,
I put the hat back on. Without the bandages, it fitted more loosely. I opened the glove compartment when I was ready to take off. There were half a dozen loose shotgun shells in it. I examined one in the dash light. All were number 0 buckshot Each pellet was the equivalent in size of a.32-caliber bullet. No wonder a single barrel had cut James down. At twenty yards a quarter of the load must have gone right through him.
It was ironic that the attendant I would have preferred to see dead, Kern, I had had to leave alive, while the one I didn't care about either way, James, had copped it because he expected me to blast him as he had intended to blast me.
With luck, by the time Kern's car was noticed in the morning and a corrected all-points went out on the police radio, I'd be close to where I wanted to be. Bunny's cabin where the Phoenix loot was buried.
I started up the car again, turned on the radio, and moved out onto the highway.
4
Rafe James's car wasn't much automobile.
In the first mile I noticed a shimmy in the front wheels; in the second, a lack of acceleration indicating fouled plugs or pistons. I hadn't looked at the tires, but there wasn't much point in stopping to inspect them now. They were all the tires I had. I hoped they'd hold up. A lot of things depended upon my reaching Hudson before daylight.
I found that the turn signals didn't work when I turned off the main highway at the first intersection. Staying on the heavily traveled main route was a risk I couldn't afford. Secondary roads were a risk in a different way. The gas tank was only half full, and I had only a slim chance of finding an all-night filling station open on a byroad. Getting off the central highway would probably stretch my driving time to five hours or more too, but it was still a lot safer.
The car radio squawked country music and drawled an occasional weather bulletin. My head began to feel hot under the plantation-style straw hat. It didn't seem as though I was perspiring. It seemed more as if the new flesh were drawing. The makeup on my face had dried rapidly but now began to feel moist again.
I encountered only two other cars in the first twenty miles away from the main highway. With the front-wheel shimmy, I had to concentrate on my driving. I passed two blacked-out gas stations at darkened crossroads. When I came up on a station with lighted pumps, I was afraid to pass it by. I pulled in.
For a moment nothing happened. I thought the owner might have gone home, forgetting to turn off his lights. Then a shaggy-haired, sleepy-eyed kid stumbled out the door of the shacky-looking building and approached the car. "Fill it up," I told him.
The kid went to the pump with the regular gas and lifted down its hose. I leaned out the window to tell him to put in premium gas, then closed my mouth. James's car had probably never run on anything but regular gas. Premium might give it mechanical dyspepsia.
The zombie-like teenager reappeared beside the front window. "Three forty," he yawned.
I gave him four one-dollar bills. "Bring me a state road map with the change."
When he did, I lost no time moving out. In the rearview mirror I could see the kid already shuffling his way back to the shack. There shouldn't have been anything memorable about our encounter that would cause him to remember me. Even without the shadowing hat, the feeble light from the gas pumps had hardly turned the service area into Times Square on New Year's Eve.
Forty-five minutes down the road, the singing voice of Eddy Arnold was cut off in mid-bar. "We interrupt this program for a special bulletin," the radio said. "A prison-ward patient from the state hospital has escaped and is presumed to be heading north in a stolen automobile. The car is a late model, green and white Dodge sedan with Florida plates two four four dash three five six. The occupant is considered armed and dangerous. Do not attempt to apprehend this fugitive. Any person seeing an automobile filling this description please notify the nearest State Highway Patrol post immediately."