The card-party guests exhibited for our bemusement a catalogue of startled white faces, and then whisked those faces away to left and right like the skeletons in a black-light ride at Disneyland. A path opened between us and the door, and we tore through it.
Trask and Slade appeared in the doorway, side by side, filling it. Black suits, black topcoats. Black guns in their hands, black scowls on their faces. Menace, menace.
I couldn’t have stopped if I’d wanted to. Whooping, I lowered my head and kept on going.
My shoulders caught them amidships, my left shoulder thudding into the breadbasket of Trask or Slade and my right shoulder chunking into the midsection of Slade or Trask. I heard, “Oooff!” in stereo, and then I was through the doorway and there was nothing pressed against my shoulders any more, and I was flailing forward in a wild attempt to get my feet back under my torso where they belonged.
I ran for the next little space of eternity completely off balance. My feet pumped and pumped, trying to catch up with the rest of me, and it seemed certain I was about to dig my nose into the gravel driveway and maybe ream out a furrow twenty feet long. At the same time that I was trying to catch up with myself, I was also trying to run around all the cars parked in front of Mr. Gross’s house, having no desire to run into any of them, not at my current speed, which I later estimated to have been about Mach point nine. I don’t think it was much higher than that because I didn’t hear any sonic boom.
What I did hear was a lot of shouting and hirruping, all from behind me. Ahead, once the last parked car had been cleared there was only the lit driveway and the lovely blank hole in the hedge that led to the street. Flailing, flying, I hurtled toward it, and on through.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t make the necessary right turn. I kept on going, turning in a slight arc that would have had me complete a right turn somewhere out around Montauk Point, and if it hadn’t been for the hedge on the other side of the road I don’t know where I might have gone.
Where I did go was into the hedge. Thunk! I got my arms up in front of my face just in time, and the hedge stopped me the way all that cotton batting stops bullets in ballistics test boxes in the movies.
I hung there, exhaling, for a second or two, until somebody pulled me by the back of Artie’s jacket, and Chloe’s voice said, with shrill insistence, “Come on! Come on!”
I came on, out of the hedge and off again. There had been no shots at all, and so far no one had come out as far as the road after us, but I thought I heard a car being started in there and that had to mean Trask and Slade were after us again. Now, I guessed, more than ever.
We pelted down the road, through the dim light at the intersection and into the lovely darkness beyond. I’d gotten into the lead again by then, having long legs and no sense of chivalry, and so I was first into the car, through the door on the driver’s side and across past the steering wheel, which caught me a good one in the ribs.
Chloe leaped in after me, slammed the door, and jammed the key into the ignition. Looking back I could see four headlights coming out of Mr. Gross’s driveway. You might know those guys would drive with their highs on.
“Hurry!” I said.
But as I said it the car leaped forward, and I cracked my head on the back of the seat, biting my tongue severely.
“They’ll never get us now!” Chloe cried, and crouched over the wheel with the smile of competition on her lips and the glint of motor madness in her eyes.
I closed my own eyes, and awaited the worst.
Chapter 17
Chloe said, not without pride, “I’ve lost them.”
It was the first word either of us had said in ten minutes or more. Not that the intervening time had been soundless, oh no; the shriek of tires and squeal of brakes had filled in nicely for the lack of dialogue.
I had spent the time — I never have claimed to be anything but a coward, I hope you’ve noticed that — with my eyes shut. Even so, I could visualize our screaming progress through the tiny towns of Long Island, the long bulky black 1938 Packard roaring down the night-dark streets, the natives peering fearful and open-mouthed from their cottage windows, the whole thing straight out of Carol Reed. I was so caught up in my imagery that now, when I did at last open my eyes again, I was surprised to see the world not in black and white.
Chloe said, “Where to?”
“Back to the city,” I said. That much thinking I’d been able to do down in there behind my shut eyelids, while the world had squealed and teetered around me. “I’ve got to find a policeman named Patrick Mahoney.”
“That should be easy,” she said. “I doubt there’s more than fifty Patrick Mahoneys on the force.”
“Well, I’ve got to find mine,” I said.
“Why?”
There was no quick answer to that. I had to fill her in on everything I had said to Mr. Gross, and everything he had said to me, and when I was finished with all that I said, “The way it looks to me, I’ve got to prove I didn’t inform to the police, and I’ve got to prove I didn’t kill Mr. Agricola. If I can prove I didn’t inform, that ought to help prove I didn’t do the killing.”
“Maybe,” she said. She sounded doubtful.
I said. “What’s wrong?”
“It all sounds too complicated,” she said. “You don’t know any of these people or what the real situation is or anything else. If you didn’t give information to the police, then somebody else did. And if you didn’t kill Mr. Agricola, then somebody else did that, too. Maybe the same somebody, maybe a different one. The point is, you don’t know who these people are or what they’re doing or what they’re after. You’re probably just a sidelight to them, one little corner of some great big thing that’s going on.”
“I’m learning,” I told her. “What else can I do? I keep moving, from name to name, from fact to fact, and I hope after a while I find out what’s going on and I get everything straightened out, and then I can go back to the bar and forget all this mess.”
“Do you think so?” She glanced at me, and then back out at the road again.
I didn’t get what she meant. “Do I think what?”
“After this is over,” she said. “Even if you get everything straightened out the way you want, do you think you’ll be content to go back to your old life again?”
“Ho ho,” I said. “You bet your sweet — you’re darn right I will. Content is hardly the word. Those cows on that evaporated milk can are nervous wrecks in comparison.”
She shrugged. “If you think so,” she said.
“I know so.” I looked around, out the windshield and the side window. “Where are we?”
“I’m not sure. On Long Island somewhere.”
“That much I knew already.”
“I think we’re going north,” she said. “If we are, we’ll cross one of the expressways sooner or later, and we can take it back into the city.”
“Fine.”
She said, “Charlie, something else.”
“Something else?”
“I don’t know if you’ve thought about this or not,” she said, and stopped.
“Neither do I,” I told her. “Maybe I will after you say it.”
She said, “If Gross thinks I’m Althea, and he thinks you are I are in cahoots, and he thinks we’re out to wreck the organization, where do you suppose he thinks we’re going now?”