A Touch of Death (Hard Case Crime Book 17)

  “Get out that window!”

  But she was gone. The flashlight snapped off and I was in total darkness, alone. I swept my arms around madly and felt nothing. Somehow I remembered the other flashlights in my pocket. I clawed one out and started to switch it on, but some remnant of sanity stopped me just in time. We had less than one chance in a thousand of getting out of there now before the whole town fell in on us, and we wouldn’t have that if we showed any light.

  I started groping toward where the window should be. Maybe she was already there. Light flared behind me. I whirled. “Turn that out!” I lashed at her. Then I saw what she was doing. It was the ultimate madness.

  It wasn’t the flashlight. She had struck a match and was setting fire to the mountainous pile of old papers and magazines beside the coal bin. An unfolded paper burst into flame. I leaped toward her. She grabbed up another and spread it open with a swing of her arm, dropping it on the first. I slammed into her and beat at the flames. It was hopeless.

  Another caught. The fire mounted, throwing flickering light back into the corners of the basement and beginning to curl around the wooden beams above us. I fell back from it.

  “Run!” I shouted.

  She went toward the window. I pounded after her. I stumbled over something. It was the small traveling case I had set down. Without knowing why, I grabbed it up as I bounced back to my feet and lunged after her. I boosted her out the window. I threw the bag out. Then I knelt beside Diana James. I touched her throat, and knew it made no difference now whether we left her there or not. She was dead.

  We ran across the black gulf of the lawn. The night was still silent, as if the peace of it had never been broken by the sound of shots. At the gate I looked back once. The basement windows were beginning to glow. In a few minutes the house would be a red mountain of flame.

  Chapter Eleven

  WE SHOT OUT THE GATE and across the pavement. As we plunged into the path by the power line I heard a siren behind us, somewhere in town. Somebody had reported the shots.

  I could hear her laboring for breath, trying to keep up. She stumbled in the dark and I yanked her up savagely by her arm. I wished she were dead. I wished she’d never been born, or that I had never heard of her. She had wrecked it all. I didn’t even know any more why I was dragging her with me. Maybe it was pure reflex.

  I had the keys out of my pocket before we reached the dense shadow under the trees where we’d left the car. I threw the bag in and began to punch the starter while she was running around to the other side and climbing in. The ceiling light flicked on and then off again as both doors closed, and in that short instant of time and in all the madness some part of my mind was still clear enough to grasp the awful thing I hadn’t noticed until now, until it was too late.

  She didn’t have her purse.

  Her hands were empty. She had left the purse back there in the house. Tires screamed as we shot ahead down the hill. I ground on the throttle, peering ahead into the lights for the turn that would come flying back at us. She didn’t have the purse. I saw the turn just in time. We slammed into it and threw gravel over into the field as we skidded around, and then we were straightened out again.

  The highway was coming up now. No cars were in sight. We hurtled onto it, headed south. I was raging.

  She’d killed Diana James and brought the cops down on us. All the roads would be blocked inside of an hour. And the big, final, most horrible joke of all was that the thing I had been after all the time, the thing that had got me into this, was gone. I thought of those three keys fire-blackened and lost forever in the ashes of the house. Even the thousand dollars in cash was gone. We had nothing. We were wanted by all the police in the country, and didn’t have enough money to hide ourselves for a week.

  She took a cigarette out of the breast pocket of the robe and lit it, and leaned back in the seat. “You appear to be unhappy about something,” she said.

  “You little fool!”

  “Didn’t you appreciate the funeral pyre for your charming friend?” she asked calmly. “I thought it rather a nice touch. Something Wagnerian about it.”

  “You stupid—”

  I choked. It was no use. It was beyond me. I could only watch the highway flying back at us in the night. And watch the rear-view mirror for cars behind us. Where would they try to block us? Beyond that next town? Or before?

  “You are provoked, aren’t you?”

  I found the words at last. “Don’t you realize yet what you’ve done?” I raged at her. “You might as well have called them on the phone and told ’em where we were. We’ve got about a chance in a million of getting away. And on top of that, you went off and left the thing we came back for.”

  “Oh,” she said easily. “I see now what’s bothering you. You mean the keys?”

  “Where did you leave the purse? Not that it matters now.”

  “I didn’t leave it,” she said. “It’s in that bag.”

  I felt suddenly weak. Then I remembered that the only reason I had picked the bag up back there in the basement in all that confusion had been the fact that I’d stumbled over it. I felt even weaker. It was nearly a minute before I could even talk.

  “All right. But look. By this time your whole lawn is full of cops. They’ve got radio cars. And there are only four highways out of Mount Temple. They’re all going to be plugged. We may not get past the next town.”

  “Quite right,” she said. “We don’t even go to the next town. About six miles ahead, just before you go down into that river bottom, a dirt road turns off to the right. It runs west about ten miles and crosses another country road going south.”

  “How far south can we get on it?”

  “I’m not sure. But there are a number of them, and by switching back and forth we should be able to go over a hundred miles before we have to come back on a highway. And they can’t watch them all.”

  It was our only chance, and it might work. I could feel the beginnings of hope. And at the same time I was conscious of a terrible yearning to get off that highway before it was too late. The six miles were a thousand. I rode on the throttle. We blasted on into the tunnel the lights made. We came around a long curve and I saw the taillights of a car far ahead. I slowed a little, hating it. We couldn’t pass anybody at that speed. It might be a cruising cop.

  Minutes dragged by while we crawled along at fifty-five. “We’re getting near,” she said. I slowed, watching the mirror. Another car was behind us, but it was far back. We swung around another curve, and I saw the signboard. Nobody was in sight when we made the turn. I sighed with relief. The tension was off, for a while, anyway.

  Then it rolled up from behind and caught me, the instant I relaxed. The tension wasn’t off. And maybe it never would be.

  She had pulled the trigger, but I was in as deep as she was. I’d been there, it was the gun I was carrying, and I had helped her to escape. And if they ever caught us, it’d just be my word against hers. That was nice, wasn’t it? A jury would take one look at the two of us, and hang me without going out of the room. I felt sick.

  It was a narrow gravel road, very rough and full of right-angled turns going around cotton fields. After a mile or two we went up over a slight rise and plunged into a dense forest of pine. There were no houses, no lights anywhere. I stopped.

  “You drive,” I said. I got out and went around to the other side while she slid under the wheel.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “Look at the map. If I can find one.”

  She started up. I took the flashlight out of my pocket and pawed through the usual collection of junk in the glove compartment. Down at the bottom I found a state highway map. I unfolded it.

  Here was Mount Temple. Two hundred miles south, on the Gulf, was Sanport. I ran my finger along the main north-south highway and found the faint line that was the unnumbered secondary road we were on. It went on and came out on another north-south highway about forty miles west. But I could
see, just ahead of where we should be now, the intersecting road she had mentioned. It ran south for about thirty miles before it ended on another east-west secondary road. We could shift west on that one for about fifteen miles and we’d hit another going south. I traced on through the maze of faint lines. It could be done. We could get down through that back country for nearly 150 miles before coming back on a main highway again, and when we did, we’d have a choice of at least three roads converging on the city. They couldn’t cover all of them.

  Gasoline?

  I shot a glance at the gauge. It was a little over half full. It might be enough. But this would be poor country to try to cut it fine. I looked back at the map. About seventy-five miles south we’d go through a small town. We could fill up there.

  I lit a cigarette and glanced around at her. The soft glow of the dash lights was on her face. I studied it for a moment while she rammed the car ahead between the dark walls of pine. What kind of woman was this, anyway? It hadn’t been thirty minutes since she had killed another woman, she had probably murdered her husband, she had burned down that enormous house she had lived in all her life, she was running from the police, and yet she could have been merely driving over to a neighbor’s to play bridge for all the emotion she showed.

  But still it wasn’t in any way an expressionless dolls face. It was just intensely proud and self-contained. Maybe she felt things and maybe she didn’t; but win, lose, or draw, it was her business. She didn’t advertise. There was a cool and disdainful sort of arrogance about it that didn’t give a damn for what anybody thought—or for anybody, for that matter.

  At least that made us even on that. I didn’t care much for her either.

  “Not so worried now?” she asked. I could hear the faint undertone of contempt.

  “Look, Hard Stuff,” I said. “I’ll make out all right. Don’t fret about it. It’s just that if you’re trying to hide from the police, I don’t see any sense in telling them where you are by killing people just for laughs. Or starting a bonfire to attract attention. So let’s don’t try it again. You might get hurt yourself.”

  “Careful,” she said mockingly. “Remember how much I’m worth to you alive.”

  “What do you think I’ve been remembering? The touch of your hand?”

  “Quite proud of your tough attitude, aren’t you?”

  “It’s a tough world.”

  She said nothing. In a few minutes we hit the crossroad. She turned left. The road began to drop a little toward the river country. It was wild and sparsely settled, and we met no cars.

  “See if you can find a place to get off the road,” I said. “You’ve got to change those clothes.”

  “All right.”

  She slowed. In a few minutes we saw a pair of ruts leading off into the timber. She pulled off far enough to be out of sight of the road, and stopped in a small open space where there was room to turn around.

  I got out, but before I did I lifted the keys out of the ignition. She saw it. She smiled. “Trust me, don’t you?”

  “You think I’m stupid?” I gestured toward the traveling bag. “Change in the car. And let me know when you’re ready to go.”

  I walked back a short distance toward the road and lit a cigarette. The sky was still overcast, and night pressed down over the river bottom with an impenetrable blackness and a silence that seemed to ring in my ears. Nothing moved here. We were alone.

  Alone?

  They were drawing circles around us on the map. The radio was snapping orders, efficient and coded and deadly. Police cars raced down highways in the darkness all around us. Like hell we were alone. We had lots of company; it was just spread out around us, waiting.

  I turned my head and I could see the red glow of the car’s taillights behind me. We could beat them. They had everything in their favor except the two things they had to have to win: a description of the car and a description of me. They didn’t know who I was or what I looked like, or even that I existed. If I could keep them from seeing her, we could make it.

  I finished the cigarette and flipped it outward in the darkness. She called softly. I turned. She had opened one of the car doors so the ceiling light would come on. When I walked up, she was holding a mirror and putting lipstick on her mouth.

  She had changed into a skirt and a dark blouse about the color of her eyes. The sleeves of the blouse were full and then tight-fitting about the wrists, and below them her hands were slender and pale and very beautiful. She finished with the lipstick, put the mirror back in her purse, and looked up at me.

  “How do I look?” she asked.

  “Fine,” I said. “For a woman who’s just murdered another one, you look great.”

  “You have a deplorable command of English,” she said. “Don’t you find murdered a bit pretentious as applied to vermin? Why not exterminated? Or simply removed?”

  “Yes, Your Highness. Excuse me for breathing. Now, take those three keys out of your purse and hand them here.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I like your company. I adore you, and wouldn’t have you leave me for anything.”

  “They’re no good to you alone.”

  “I know. But they are to you. And if we get clear of here tonight you might suddenly decide you didn’t need any more help—not at today’s prices. I can’t watch you all the time. I have to sleep occasionally, and I don’t intend to follow you to the john. So just to remove the temptation, I’ll take charge of them.”

  Her eyes met mine coolly, not quite defying me, but just testing me and watching.

  “There’s an easy way,” I said, “and a hard way. How do you want it?”

  She took the three keys out of her purse and put them in my hand.

  “That’s better,” I said. I put them in my wallet.

  I looked at my watch. It was nine-twenty. I could feel that awful urge to run and run faster and keep on running take hold of me again. I got behind the wheel and we rolled back on the road. We shot ahead in the darkness.

  We crossed the river on a long wooden bridge. The road began to rise again. We couldn’t make much speed. There were too many chuckholes in the road. I managed to keep it around forty.

  “Just where, precisely, are we going?” she asked.

  “Sanport. Thirty-eight-twenty-seven Davy Avenue. Memorize it, in case we get separated. My apartment’s on the third floor. Number Three-o-three.”

  “Number Three-o-three. Thirty-eight-twenty-seven Davy,” she repeated. “That’s easy to remember.”

  “And my name’s Scarborough. Lee Scarborough.”

  “Is that authentic? Or another alias?”

  “It’s my right name.”

  “To what do I owe this unprecented confidence? You wouldn’t tell me before,”

  “With those two people listening? You think I’m crazy?”

  “Oh,” she said. “And, in case we do get to Sanport alive, what do we do with the car?”

  “I’m going to take it to the airport and ditch it. After I get you into the apartment. I’ll take a taxi or limousine back to town.”

  “That’s a little obvious,” she pointed out. “I mean, if we were really taking a plane, we’d leave the car anywhere but at the airport.”

  “I know. But they’ll never be sure. As a matter of fact, they may never get a lead on this car, anyway. But even if they do, and find it out there, all they can do is suspect you’re in Sanport. You’ll be on ice. You’ll never go out on the street.”

  “We can’t get the money out of the vaults unless I go out.”

  “I know. But we can wait until some of the heat’s off. How long is the rent paid on them?”

  “For a year. A year from July, that is.”

  “All right. It’s easy, if we just get there. You stay right in the apartment for at least a month. Maybe longer. We do what we can to change your appearance. I’m working on that now. Maybe we’ll make you a redhead. Change you from the skin out, cheap, flashy clothes, that sort of thing.
There’s only one thing, though. How many times have you been in that bank where you rented the boxes?”

  “Banks,” she said. “They’re in three different ones. I was in each of them only once.”

  “Well, it’s all right, then. They won’t remember what you looked like. If you’ve changed from a brunette to a redhead, they’ll never notice. I understand it’s been done before, anyway.”

  “So if I don’t go mad in a month of being shut up in that apartment, and I manage to get the money out without being recognized, what then? You murder me, I suppose, and leave the country? Is that it?”

  “I’ve already told you,” I said. “I take you to the Coast. San Francisco, for instance. In my car. I could buy a trailer and let you ride in that, out of sight, but I don’t think it’ll be necessary if your appearance can be changed enough. You can take out a Social Security card under the name of Susie Mumble or something and go to work. They’ll never get you—if you lay off the juice and keep your mouth shut.”

  “Go to work as a waitress, I suppose?”

  “Waitress. Carhop. B-girl. Who cares? As a matter of fact, with your looks you’d never have to work anywhere very long.”

  “Well, thank you. Do you mean my looks as they are now, or after I’ve suffered a month of your remodeling?”

  I shrugged. “Either way. You’d come out a beautiful wench no matter what we did. There’d be plenty of wolves drooling to support you.”

  “I like your objective appraisal. I take it you don’t include yourself among them?”

  “You’re a business proposition to me, a hundred and twenty thousand dollars’ worth of meat to deliver on the hoof. I like my women warm to the touch. And not quite so deadly with a gun.”

  “I am already aware of the vulgar depths of your taste. Diana James, for instance.”

  I saw Diana James turn a little, as if someone had twitched at her clothing, and collapse, sprawling on the concrete floor.

  “Why did you call her Cynthia?” I asked, remembering.

  “Because that was her real name. Cynthia Cannon.”