"All right, I'll try again later."
The youth nodded, shut the door. He was not sufficiently interested even to ask Harper's name. He was devoid of guilt and bored by the affairs of his sister, Miss Jocelyn Whittingham.
Harper spent an hour strolling aimlessly around the town, while his car was greased and serviced in a central garage. At twenty to six he returned on foot to the road, stationed himself by a bus stop fifty yards from the house and kept watch for the girl's homecoming.
He had only a rough description of his quarry but needed no more than that. One question would serve to stimulate self-identification voluntarily or involuntarily. There is no way of preventing the brain from registering its negatives or affirmatives, no matter how great the desire to distort it.
Once the girl got inside that house, the puzzle would be how to gain an interview contrary to her wishes. If she flatly refused to see him, he had no power to compel her to do so.
A face-to-face interview was imperative. If she were indoors, he could stand there all night picking up her thoughts, and sorting them out from other nearby thoughts, with no difficulty whatsoever. He. could, if he wished, spy upon her mind for a week.
It would do him not the slightest bit of good so long as her mind, and its thinking processes, moved only in channels having nothing to do with the case in hand. Questions were necessary to force her brain onto the case and make it reveal any cogent evidence it might be hiding. A vocal stimulus was required. To provide it, he must ask her about this and that, drawing useful conclusions from all points where her thoughts contradicted her words.
Twice, while he waited, a girl walked past and momentarily captured his attention. So long as they did not mount the steps to the house, he made no attempt to identify them mentally. He merely watched those girls until they had gone beyond the house, out of sight.
A bus pulled up at the stop, discharged four passengers and rolled away. One of them, a tall, sallow man, eyed him curiously.
"It'll be half an hour before there's another."
"Yes, I know," Harper said.
The other shrugged, crossed the road, entered the house facing the stop. Harper moved some distance down the road, where he could keep watch without being snooped upon from the windows by the sallow man.
At five to six a girl entered the road from the end nearest his former post, walked hurriedly along with a sharp click-click of high heels. She was of medium height, fresh-featured, plump and about twenty. Without glancing around, or noticing Harper, she climbed the steps to the house and felt in her handbag for a key.
From seventy yards away Harper probed at her, seeking confirmation of her identity. The result was shocking. The precise instant his mind touched, hers, she became aware of the contact; he, in his turn, knew that she was aware. She dropped the handbag in her flurry, bent and grabbed for it as he started to run toward her.
Getting the bag, she fumbled inside it with frantic haste while his feet pounded heavily along the sidewalk. Her eyes' held a luminous glare as she found the key, stabbed it at the door. Perspiration beaded the running Harper's broad features, while his right hand pawed under his left arm and his legs continued to race.
The key slid in and turned. Harper stopped at ten yards' distance, levelled his gun and squeezed its butt. The thing went spat-spat-spat with such swiftness that it sounded like somebody tearing a foot of canvas. The noise was not loud. A stream of matchhead sized steel balls hit the target dead center.
Miss Jocelyn Whittingham let go the key, sank to her knees without a sound and Keeled over, her head against the door. Harper stood sweating, watched the blood run out of her hair and listened to her brain packing up for keeps.
He stared around, saw no onlookers, no witnesses. The gunfire had attracted nobody's attention. He left her lying there and paced swiftly up the road. His face was strained and wet as he retrieved his car and raced out of town.
5. Not of the World
The police must have moved fast, and skillfully. Harper had covered a mere three hundred miles before he was advertised on the air and in the newspapers. He was having supper in a cheap hashery when he got an evening paper carrying the news. WANTED FOR MURDER, it said. There followed a fairly accurate description of himself and of his car, complete with tag number; he cursed under his breath as he read it. There were twenty customers in the place, most of them long-distance truckers. Half of them had read, or were reading, the same sheet. Some were unaware of his existence; the others glanced at him casually. He knew their lack of suspicion with absolute certainty, and that was about the only advantage he possessed.
Outside, in plain view, stood the car. Its numbers seemed to swell and grow enormous, even as he looked at them. Three big men in denims lumbered past its rear end, without giving it so much as a second look, got into an adjacent machine and pulled away. His luck might hold out like that for some time, but it just couldn't last forever.
He could leave the car where it was and help himself to another. When you're wanted for murder, theft can't make it worse. But the number of a stolen car would be broadcast in short time, leaving him no better off than before. Moreover, right now, the law did not know where he was heading. A car-swap would give away the direction of his escape and get every hick deputy on the lookout for him ahead. Also, it would reveal that he had crossed state lines to evade arrest — a federal offense that might bring in the F.B.I.
The F.B.I, needed bringing in; of that he was more than positive. He was in the most peculiar position of wanting to get to the F.B.I, before they could get to him.
The means by which the law had tagged him as the culprit could be guessed quite easily. Ledsom's knowledge that he was visiting the girl; her brother's description of the caller at the door, and the sallow man's evidence about the lounger at the bus stop. Above all, the missiles in the body which were like bullets from no other gun.
Stewing it over, Harper could not help wondering whether Ledsom now felt certain that he knew who had killed Alderson.
What he liked least about this sudden howl for a man named Harper was not that it boosted the official hunt for him, but that it might start an unofficial search. The forces of law and order should not be the only ones to take deep interest in the fact that he had killed Miss Jocelyn Whittingham. Certain others, undoubtedly, would be after him — those three fellows in the Thunderbug, for instance.
Swallowing the rest of his coffee, he got out of the place as quickly as he could, prudently, then drove at top speed into a dark, moonless night. He had more than five hundred miles yet to go.
At four-forty in the morning, with the pale halo of dawn beginning to show in the east, someone either read his plates or chased him on general principles.
Harper could not hear a siren, nor pick up following thoughts. He was too far ahead and too preoccupied with driving. He shoved the pedal down to the floorboards and let the machine leap ahead. If the pursuers were police, as their spotlight suggested, that alone would be enough to convince them that they were onto something worth running down.
With his needle trembling at over ninety, he tore through a crossroads, along a main artery darkened still more by large trees on both sides. The trees whizzed past like huge ghosts, arms out, transfixed by this night-time pursuit.
There was no traffic other than his own car and the one behind. Far ahead, and slightly to his right, he could see the sky-glow from street lights of a sizable city; he wondered whether he could make it that distance and, if so, what he'd do when he got there.