I made the turnoff in an hour and thirty-five minutes, fog and all. I had to fight my eyes closing down, and I hit the shoulder a couple of times, dozing off, but at twenty minutes to midnight I turned onto 90 and headed south.
It was a narrower road, less traveled. I began to watch for a motel. I'd tucked a lot of miles under my belt that day. When I found a motel with a car parked close to the road, I'd drive a mile beyond, walk back, jump the switch on the car in the motel yard, and take off. There'd be nothing to tie the abandoned Ford to the stolen car if I hid the Ford off the highway.
I couldn't have gone more than twenty miles on 90—everything as black as the inside of a closet—when a pair of headlights appeared suddenly in my rear-view mirror. Then a red flasher started bouncing off the Ford. The cruiser must have come up behind me with his lights off, because I hadn't seen a thing. I took a quick look at the speedometer. Sixty-five. No sweat there. I heard no siren, but the car behind me pulled out alongside, then burst ahead and cut in.
I had to smash the brakes and cut the wheel hard to avoid scraping fenders as the cruiser herded me to the side of the road. I could see it was an unmarked car, though I hadn't known the Rangers used unmarked cars. Live and learn.
I was ready when he leaned in the window I'd rolled down. I handed him my driver's license made out to Earl
Drake. Paper-clipped to it was a twenty-dollar bill. I could see a trooper hat silhouetted against the dark, but I couldn't see the face beneath it. I could sense rather than see him looking around the Ford's interior before he walked to the rear and put a flash on the license plate.
He returned and handed me my license. The twenty-dollar bill was gone. "Drive up the highway a quarter-mile," he said in a voice that sounded as if he regularly had steel filings for breakfast. "Turn right at the first opening. A hundred-fifty feet in, there's a white fence. Turn left and stop. I'll be right behind you." He walked back to his car. I hadn't gotten to say a word.
I could feel a slow burn taking over. If this sonofabitch thought he was going to take my twenty and then haul me up before a justice of the peace, he was damn well going to find out differently. When I buy someone, I expect him to stay bought.
He pulled ahead to let me out of the cramped edge-of-the-highway situation, and I eased back out on the road. I rolled along slowly, watching for the turnoff he'd indicated. Even at that I almost missed it. It was hardly more than a dirt dropoff. Halfway into my turn I thought I'd made a mistake, but the headlights behind me turned in, too. I came up to the white fence and turned left. Twenty-five yards farther on I faced a deadend, an impenetrable, junglelike brush tangle looming in the headlights.
I was gelling hotter by the minute. I was losing valuable time. I had missed a turn somehow despite his directions, and I'd wound up in this jackpot. I started to back out, but a red glow filled my rear view mirror. I turned my head to see the cruiser was backing into the clearing, sealing me in. Even as I looked he cut his lights.
All of a sudden I had a feeling.
I switched off my lights and motor, fumbled a flashlight from the glove compartment, and went out the door on the passenger's side Something wasn't kosher. The unmarked car, the absence of a siren, the dead end deserted spot to which I'll been directed . . .
I put the Hash on him when I heard brush crackling
under his feet. He stopped dead in the beam of light. He was holding a gun, a blued-steel job. His campaign hat looked like a Ranger's hat, especially in the dark. His clothes didn't even look like a uniform except for the color. The bastard was no more a cop than I was.
He brought his gun up and snapped off a shot at me just as I let go at him with the Woodsman. He turned as if to run. I put one into his ankle that brought him down with a crash. He landed all sprawled out, his gun flying off into the bushes. I got over to him fast in case he had another.
When I got the flash full on him, I saw it wouldn't have made any difference if he'd had a machine-gun. He'd been moving on reflex. The hard core of light shone down on a round, dark hole between his eyes, just to the right of center. The little old Woodsman might not have the stopping power of a .38, but it gets there just the same.
It was quiet in the clearing after the sound of the gunshots. I walked over and put the flash on the bandit's car—a Ford, too, but apparently in better shape than mine. I got his car keys from his pocket, got under the wheel, and started it up. The engine vrom-vroomed with power. Something extra under the hood.
It looked like I'd won myself an automobile.
I switched on both cars' dimmers and opened the trunks. I loaded his gear in mine and mine in his, took both cars' license plates off, and chopped them up with a hammer and chisel. With a screwdriver I finally loosened the red flasher on the roof of the bandit's car. I removed the bulb and knocked down the edges of the socket; then I slapped black friction tape, which blended with the color of the car, over the hole.
I rummaged around through saws and climbing irons in my toolchest till I found a set of Florida plates that I put on the new Ford. I always carry a number of different identifications until it becomes dangerous to do so.
I cleaned out my wallet and started from scratch. Someone in Hudson, Florida would be looking for Earl Drake, so Earl Drake had to disappear. When I put the wallet on my hip again, I was Chester Arnold of Hollywood, Florida. I had business cards identifying Chet Arnold as a tree surgeon. When it's necessary, I am a tree surgeon. A good one.
I went back for my unknown benefactor when I had everything ready. I dragged him to the new Ford and stuffed him into its trunk on top of my toolchests. It was a tight squeeze, but I finally got the back deck lid closed.
Then I took off.
Every five miles, I threw a chopped-up piece of license plate out the window. It helped me to stay awake. Then it started to rain. It doesn't rain too often in west Texas, but when it docs, it doesn't fool around. I hunched down over the wheel, watching the highway through the streaming windshield as I pitched license plate fragments.
Forty miles further, I ran into a torn-up section of road under repair. In those parts they're so sure it won't rain, they don't bother with the nicety of preserving one lane of macadam. They tear up the road from shoulder to shoulder, roll it, and drive on the dirt till they get the blacktop back on. A wrong guess means a driving rodeo through four to six inches of Texas gumbo.
It was raining so damn hard that in less than a mile the entire graveled roadbed was solidly under water. The new Ford slipped and slithered along. Even at five miles an hour, a couple of times I wasn't sure I was able to keep on going. It was like driving across a ten-mile lake. To be sure I was still in the channel, I had to watch the highway department right-of way slakes glistening in the headlights.
I finally emerged on blacktop again, and for the next ten miles I listened to Texas mud slurp from the undercarriage at every little jounce. From what I saw, I could have won a few bets from people who thought they knew the car's original color. I concentrated on driving and staying awake.
When the odometer said I was two hundred miles from El Paso, I started looking for a deep culvert. I pulled over on the shoulder when I found a likely-looking one. As I walked around to the back of the Ford, I never saw a night so black—and raining as though someone had turned on a petcock and gone off on vacation. I was soaked in less than a minute.
I got the trunk open, then hauled out my passenger. When I rolled him down the high bank, he went in with a satisfying splash. After I got back under the wheel, I started slogging up the highway again. No one would connect my benefactor to me or to much of anything else when they found him. Ditto the Ford I'd left behind in the brushy clearing.