I moved within a yard of the door. I took the tightly rolled newspapers, found my matches, and lighted the paper. When I was sure it was going well, I positioned myself, shotgun in left hand, burning newspaper in right. I took a step backward, then slammed my heel into the cabin door with all the force in my leg muscles.
The door flew open. I tossed the flaming newspaper ahead of me into the center of the room. Startled exclamations greeted me as I darted inside and knelt down, out of line with the door. The newspaper sputtered, almost went out, then flared brightly. I recognized Blaze Franklin in a turtleneck sweater and slacks. Alongside him stood a trooper in uniform. Both were rigid in grotesque attitudes of surprise.
"Freeze!" I demanded, leveling the shotgun halfway between them. Moody reacted first-and fast. His right hand dipped toward the gun on his hip. I shifted my aim slightly and touched off the forward trigger. In the confined space the shotgun's roar shook the cabin. Moody was still upright while half his head and all his brains were plastered on the wall behind him. Then he spun in a half turn and fell forward on what was left of his face.
"Hold it!" I ordered Franklin, swinging the sawed-off toward him. I wanted him alive, but his gun was already halfway out of his shoulder holster. There was no time for further conversation. I squeezed the second trigger and gut-shot him. He went backward in a stutter step until he smashed into the stove, rebounded, doubled up, and hit the deck. The blast had almost cut him in two, but he was still alive. He crawled in circles on the floor like a huge wingless beetle.
He was still alive, but the first look was indication enough he was never going to tell me where the money was. I crossed the cabin and put a foot on him to stop the crawling. I went through his clothes rapidly. I took his wallet, keys, and.38, wiped the blood off my hands on his trouser legs, then backed toward the door. The crawling started up again, but more slowly.
Outside, I thought of putting a match to the cabin. It didn't seem necessary. If Moody didn't know why they were there, Franklin hadn't told anyone. It would be a long time before they were found, if ever. I still had one chance left at recovering the money and no time to waste.
I walked rapidly from the cabin to the road.
Dawn was painting the eastern sky flame-red when I reached the police cruiser. I stripped off the clothing that Spider Kern had provided, took Moody's uniform from its hanger in the back of the cruiser, and tried it on. It was too big, but that was much better than having it too small. I took reefs and tucks in it to make it look as presentable as I could. The trooper's hat was far too large. I padded its sweat band with the necktie that was also on the hanger. That helped considerably.
There was less than half an hour until full sunrise. I wadded up the discarded clothing and placed it on the front seat beside me as I got under the wheel. I backed the cruiser out onto the road and headed away from town. It was the wrong direction for what I eventually had in mind, but first I had to get back to Rafe James's car.
I parked the cruiser and scrambled through the brush to James's car. I started up the engine, backed out to the road to get traction and a short run, then rammed it straight ahead with the accelerator floored. Metal scraped and brush crashed. The front end reared up as the axle scaled a low stump. For a moment I thought that was it. Then the car slithered off the obstruction and lurched ahead again. The rear end bucked as the same stump caught the housing. That did it. The rear wheels whined as they spun without traction. I got out and made my way back to the road.
I looked back toward the car from the roadway. I couldn't see anything. I threw the keys into the woods on the other side of the road. It would take the combination of an accident for someone to find it and a major effort on the part of the finder if that automobile were ever returned to civilization.
I climbed into the cruiser again. There was a flashlight in the glove compartment, and by its light I read the address on Franklin's license. Three twenty-seven Riverside, Hudson, Florida. It was the same boarding house where he had lived when he and Lucille Grimes had been shaping nooses for my neck. I rolled the cruiser down the road until I found a spot where I could turn around without dropping a wheel into the ditch, then headed toward town.
The powerful motor made the cruiser feel as though it had wings compared to James's car. I switched on the police radio when I swung onto U.S. 19 and turned toward downtown Hudson. If the cruiser were labeled missing, I needed to know it. I didn't think it would be, though. Everything overheard at the cabin indicated that Franklin had enlisted Moody during the deputy's off-duty time. Since it was a fact of life in Hudson that deputies drove home in their cruisers, this one shouldn't be missed for a while.
I drove to Franklin's address and parked in front of his boarding house. Both boarders and neighbors were used to seeing cruisers parked there. I took Franklin's keys and his flashlight and ran up the front steps. The streetlights were still on, but a dirty gray daylight was infiltrating the area.
The front door had a Yale lock. That made it easy; there was only one Yale key on Franklin's key ring. Inside, I put the flash on the mailboxes in the hallway. The beam picked up the card with its faded typing in the name slot: Franklin, 2-C. I climbed the stairs, making no effort to move quietly. The boarders were used to all-hours comings and goings.
In the dark second-floor hallway I shone the light on doors until I found 2-C. I had to try three keys before the door opened. I went right to work inside. There was no point in being subtle. I opened drawers and dumped their contents. I stripped the bed and dragged the mattress onto the floor. I opened the closet and threw the clothing item by item into the center of the room. I checked the baseboards, the pictures on the walls, the lighting fixtures, the radiant heat unit. I checked every possible place where Franklin might have hidden the money.
I found ten fifty-dollar bills lying openly in a bureau drawer, and that was all. Franklin had cached the bulk of the money elsewhere, and he was never going to tell me where. I hadn't realized how much I had geared all my planning to recovery of the Phoenix loot. Counting the money in Franklin's wallet and what I'd found in the room with what I'd brought with me, I had less than four thousand dollars. Hiding out was expensive, and four thousand dollars wouldn't last long enough for me to lay low until my appearance became more normal. I would have to drive on to Colorado to dig up the other jar, or pull a job a lot sooner than I would have liked.
The sun was above the horizon when I closed the boarding house front door and walked down the steps to the cruiser. I headed north on U.S. 19. The cruiser was the least likely car on the road to attract official attention as long as it wasn't reported missing. The fact that I wore a uniform wouldn't hurt either.
I passed out of range of the Hudson sheriff department's radio after forty minutes. New voices took up the routine police calls on the same wave band. I knew that all law enforcement agencies except the state police and the largest cities used a common wavelength. Nothing appeared to be disrupting the even tenor of police routine that morning. I put plenty of highway behind me for four hours at ten mph above the speed limit, then turned west at Capps on Route 90-A.
I stopped at a large carwash on the outskirts of Talahassee and got a sandwich from a vending machine, then set out again. When I came to the city limits of DeFuniak Springs, I slowed down and took the river road. A few miles along it I saw what I was looking for, a freshly painted sign that said, tom walker's cabins. I was happy to see the fresh paint because it meant that Walker, a blind Negro, was still operating his seedy cabin camp as an underworld underground railway.