“He’s fixed the radio!” he snarled, groped and found trailing wires.
Hollis was already out of the car and peering with the aid of his flashlight into the engine.
“He’s taken the distributor cap!”
The sound of the retreating car had now faded away. “We’ve got to get to a telephone,” Davis said. “Loss must have a car!”
“Yes. You go, Jerry. I’ll take care of Mason. Franklin said two cars were coming, but God knows how long they’ll take.”
As Davis ran towards the three barns in search of Loss’s car, Hollis returned to the bungalow. He knelt by Mason’s side. Lifting him, he saw Mason’s eyes open.
“Did he get away?” Mason mumbled, then his eyes closed and he sank back into unconsciousness.
Hollis snatched a pillow from the settee and put it under Mason’s head, then went out into the lobby and peered into the wet darkness.
He waited several minutes, then he saw Davis running towards him.
“Loss’s car and the truck are out of action,” he said, coming into the lobby. “Looks as if we’re stuck, Sarge.”
Hollis grunted. “Franklin said two cars were coming. So we wait.”
“And the sonofabitch gets away!”
“He won’t get far.” Hollis walked into the living room and pulled off his slicker. “We’ll get him.”
He looked down at Mason. “This poor guy needs fast medical treatment. He’s in a bad way.”
Davis looked down at Mason. “Think he’s going to croak?”
“I don’t know. I guess he was wearing his hat when he was hit. This punk can hit.” Hollis glanced at the bodies of Jud and Doris and grimaced.
“A real, vicious killer.”
“Suppose our guys don’t make it?” Davis said. “Look, there’s a telephone box at the end of the road. How about that?”
“That’s five miles, Jerry. No, we wait. With luck our guys could arrive any minute.”
“Yeah. Okay, so we wait.”
Neither of the men was to know that the two patrol cars heading their way had run into trouble. Both of the drivers, driving too fast, had skidded in the thick mud. The leading car got out of control and crashed into a ditch. The second car just managed to stop in time, only to find that the driver of the first car had a broken arm. In the pelting rain, the driver of the second car managed to tow the first car out of the ditch, then, leaving it, he continued on towards Loss’s farm.
There had been over an hour’s delay.
Chet Logan, wearing Mason’s slicker and hat, with Mason’s gun on the seat beside him, drove along the highway, safe for the moment from pursuit.
Chapter 2
As Perry Weston drove his Hertz rental Toyota along the almost deserted highway, his headlights scarcely coping with the pelting rain, his windshield wipers working furiously, he listened on the car radio to some woman screaming pop with a drummer and a saxophone player sounding as if they were out of their minds.
Perry was drunk enough not to care about the screeching voice or the rain.
He had been warned at Jacksonville airport that the weather was turning bad, and that “he must expect to encounter very heavy rain.”
He had smiled at the Hertz girl.
“Who cares about rain?” he had said. “Who cares about anything?”
Well, it was certainly raining, that was for sure. Tomorrow, he told himself hopefully, there would be blue skies and hot sunshine.
He had come from New York and, during the flight down to Jacksonville, he had been drinking Scotch on the rocks steadily, to the concern of the air hostess who kept giving him a refill. At the Jacksonville airport he had bought a bottle of Ballantine to be his companion for the long drive to Rockville. Well, he told himself, it wasn’t all that long, some seventy miles, but this rain was forcing him to drive at a crawl.
He looked at the clock on the lighted dashboard. The time was 9:05. Although Perry wasn’t to know it, at this exact time both Sheriff Ross and Deputy Tom Mason were telephoning the outlying farms, warning the farmers there was a vicious killer loose.
Maybe, Perry thought as he stared at the rain hammering down on the highway, he should have stayed over at Jacksonville. Although he had been warned about the coming rainstorm, he hadn’t bargained for this goddam downpour. Feeling the Scotch dying on him, he pulled up at the side of the highway.
He searched and found the bottle of Ballantine, unscrewed the cap and took a long swig from the bottle.
Better, he thought, as he re-screwed the cap. He lit a cigarette. The woman was still screeching over the radio and he became aware of her raucous voice.
He switched stations. The voice of a man, desperately trying to imitate the voice of Bing Crosby, filled the car. After listening for a few moments, Perry grimaced and turned off the radio. He took another swig from the bottle, then put the bottle back into the glove compartment. He stubbed out his cigarette and lit another. He felt relaxed and pleasantly drunk. There was no hurry, he told himself. If he reached his fishing lodge any time this night, so what?
His mind shifted to the events of yesterday. How long into the past those events seemed now. Well, he thought, those events certainly started this trip down to his fishing lodge which he had bought some three years ago. It was an isolated wooden structure, right by the river, surrounded by trees and flowering shrubs and some two miles from the village of Rockville. He had bought it for practically nothing, but had spent money on it. It had two bedrooms, a big living room, and he had put in a modern bathroom and a fully equipped kitchen. He had planned, when he wasn’t working in NYC, he would relax at the lodge, fishing for black bass, cooking for himself and enjoying a solitude that was rare in New York.
It hadn’t worked out like that. It was now two years since he had visited the fishing lodge. He had made the fatal mistake to have married a girl fifteen years his junior. It wasn’t her scene to spend two months in some dreary fishing lodge, miles from the bright lights, while he fished. He accepted that, but there were often times when he thought of that peaceful river, the silence, the excitement of landing a black bass and cooking it for a late dinner.
He had now been married for two years. He had done his best, but Sheila was one of those young girls who were never satisfied. She hated him going into his study to work. She was always interrupting, demanding to be taken to some place or the other, places that bored him out of his mind. A fatal marriage, he told himself. Once the glamor of her young, beautiful body became routine, he realized how far, mentally, they were apart.
Then yesterday, when Sheila and he were having a shouting match — something that was now happening pretty well every day — the telephone bell had rung. Sheila had picked up a small Chinese vase which Perry valued and had thrown it at him. He had dodged and the vase smashed against the wall.
Perry had said, “Get out of my sight!”
“You’re a goddam drunk!” Sheila had screamed, and had run out of the room, slamming the door.
The telephone bell was persistent. For a long moment Perry had stared at the shattered pieces of Chinese porcelain, then he had crossed the room and answered the telephone.
“Mr Weston?” A woman’s cool voice.
“Yes.”
“This is Mr Hart’s secretary, Mr. Weston.”
Startled, Perry said, “Oh... why, hello, Grace. How’s life with you?”
“Mr Hart would be glad to see you this morning at eleven o’clock,” Grace Adams said. She always spoke on the telephone as if she had the President of the United States waiting on another line. “Mr Hart will be leaving in three hours for Los Angeles. Please be punctual.”