Kells put his two hands forward and pulled the emergency brake back hard. The car skidded, turned half around, stopped.
Kells said, “Drive, Fat,” wearily. He looked down at Granquist and went on patiently: “Listen. We’ve got one chance in a hundred of getting away. Every police car and highway patrol in the county is looking for us by now...”
Borg had opened the door, jumped out. He ran around the car and opened the other door and climbed in. Granquist and Kells moved over to make room for him.
Then, before Borg could close the door, a car bore down on them on Borg’s side — a car without lights. Yellow-orange flame spurted from its side as it swerved sharply to avoid hitting them — Borg sank slowly forward over the wheel, sank slowly sideways, fell out the door into the street. The car was going too fast to stop suddenly — it went on towards the next corner, slowing. Flame spurted from its rear window; the windshield shattered and showered Kells and Granquist with glass.
Kells moved very swiftly. He crawled across Granquist, slammed the door shut, had flipped off the emergency and was headed west, in a second, before the other car had turned around. He shifted to high, pressed the throttle to the floor.
Granquist was slumped low in the seat.
Kells glanced at her, asked: “You all right, baby?”
“Uh-huh.” She pressed close against him.
They went out Sunset at around seventy miles an hour, went on through Beverly Hills, out Beverly Boulevard. At the ocean they turned north. The road was being repaired for a half-mile or so; Kells slowed to forty.
Granquist had been watching through the rear window, had seen no sign of the other car. She was close against Kells, her arm around his shoulders. Her eyes were wide, excited.
She kept saying: “Maybe we’ll make it, darling — maybe we’ll make it.”
Kells started coughing again — Granquist held the wheel while he leaned against the door, coughed terribly, as if his lungs were being torn apart.
Rain swept in through the broken windshield.
Kells took the wheel again, said in a choked whisper: “I’ll get a doctor in Ventura — if we get through.” He stepped on the throttle until the needle of the speedometer quivered around seventy again.
There were very few cars on the road.
A little way beyond Topanga Canyon, Kells threw the car out of gear, jerked on the brake.
He said: “I guess you’d better drive...”
Granquist helped him slide over in the seat, crawled across him to the wheel — they started again.
Kells leaned back in the corner, was silent.
As they neared the bridge south of Malibu, Granquist slowed a little. There was someone swinging a red lantern in the middle of the road. Then she pressed the throttle far down, veered sharply to the left past a car that was parked across the road.
She glanced back in a little while and saw its lights behind her, pressed the throttle to the floor.
The road curved a great deal. Granquist was bent forward over the wheel and the rain beat against her face; her eyes were narrowed to slits against the wind and the rain.
There was the faint sound of a shot, two, behind them, a metallic thud as a bullet buried itself somewhere in the body of the car.
Kells opened his eyes, turned to look back. He grinned at Granquist and his face was whiter than anything she had ever seen. He glanced ahead, said: “Give it hell, baby.” Then he groped in his pocket, pulled out the big automatic. He smashed the glass of the rear window with the muzzle and rested the barrel on his forearm. He sighted and fired.
He swore softly. “Missed,” he said.
He fired again, and as the car behind them swerved crazily off the road and stopped. “Bull’s-eye.” Kells laughed soundlessly.
They passed two cars going the other way. Kells, looking back, saw one of them stop and start to turn around. Then they went around a curve and he couldn’t see the car any more.
He glanced at the speedometer. “You’ll have to do a little better. I think there’s a fast one on our tail now.”
She said: “The curves...”
“I know, baby — you’re doing beautifully. Only a little faster.” He smiled.
Granquist asked: “How’s the cough?”
“Swell — I can’t feel it any more.” He patted his chest. “I feel a lot better.”
She braced herself and used the brake hard as they went around a sharp curve.
“There’s a pint of Bourbon in the side pocket. We got it from Jake back at the trick speakeasy...”
Kells said: “My God! Why didn’t you tell me about it before?” He reached for the bottle.
“I forgot...”
She jerked the wheel suddenly, hard, screamed between clenched teeth.
Kells felt the beginning of the skid; he looked outward, forward into blackness. They were in space, falling sidewise into blackness; there was grinding, tearing, crashing sound. Falling. Black.
There was a light somewhere. There was a voice.
Kells moved his arm an inch or so, dug his fingers deep in mud. The rain beat hard, cold on his face.
The voice come from somewhere above him, kept talking about light.
“I can’t get down any farther,” it said. “We got to have more light.”
Kells tried to roll over on his side. There was something heavy on his legs, he couldn’t move them, couldn’t feel them. But he twisted his body a little and opened his eyes. It was entirely dark.
He twisted his body the other way and saw the broad beam of a flashlight high above him in the darkness. The rain looked like snow in the light.
He pushed himself up slowly, leaned on one elbow, saw something white a little distance away. He got his legs, somehow, out of the dark sharp metal that imprisoned them and crawled slowly, painfully, towards the whiteness.
The whiteness was Granquist. She was dead.
Kells lay there awhile in the mud, on his belly, with his face close to Granquist’s face.
He could not think. He could feel the awful, barbed pain in his body; after a while, fear. He looked up at the light and a wave of panic swept suddenly over him, twisted his heart. He wanted to go into the darkness, away from the light. He wanted the darkness very much.
He kissed Granquist’s cold mouth and turned and crawled through the mud away from the light, away from the voices.
He wanted to be alone in the darkness; he wanted the light to please go away.
He whispered, “Please go away,” to himself, over and over.
The ground was rough; great rocks jutted out of the mud, and there were little gullies that the rain had made.
After a while he stopped and turned and looked back and he could not see the light any more. Still he crawled on, dragged his torn body over the broken earth.
In the partial shelter of a steep sloping rock he stopped, sank forward, down.
There, after a little while, life went away from him.
Afterword
The novel Fast One was originally serialized in Black Mask magazine in five episodes between March 1932 and September 1932. These five related tales attracted intense comment by both Black Mask magazine readers, and by its writers, all of whom recognized that these stories represented a kind of culmination of the hardboiled style upon which Black Mask’s fame rested.
In the years following the serialization of Fast One, especially in the wake of comments by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the literary masters of the Black Mask narrative, Paul Cain’s achievement became recognized as something more than merely the toughest, most compact, and visceral example of Black Mask story-telling.