One Endless Hour

by Dan J. Marlowe

  There was another fact. An overriding factor, the more I considered it. From his conversations with me, Kern planned to take me to his car and drive me to the point between the hospital and highway at which I would presumably hand over the money. Almost surely Spider would want Rafe James along on the expedition so that when the moment came no mistakes would be made in disposing of me.

  James could hardly be waiting in Kern's car, though, since even a supposed dimwit like me might reasonably be expected to balk at two-to-one odds at such a critical moment. That meant Rafe James in another car, following us. The more I thought about it the more sure I was that was the way it had to be.

  And the more I thought about it, the better I liked the idea.

  Properly handled, it would give me the chance I needed to add to my lead time following my escape.

  3

  The final hour of waiting was the worst.

  I was ready mentally long before "lights out" arrived at 9:45 P.M. I waited another half hour for the ward to quiet down, then slipped out of bed and removed aerosol cans, gauze, tape, and cosmetics from under the mattress. I wrapped them loosely in my robe.

  I lifted the hospital bed, worked free the steel caster in its leg, and pulled it out. I walked around the bed and did the same thing on the other side. I stretched out on the bed again with fists balled around a caster in each hand, a precaution against Spider Kern's accelerating his intended double cross.

  It was forty minutes later when a shadow flitted by the end of the bed and tapped lightly on the metal. It was Kern's signal that everything was ready. I waited five minutes longer before I got out of bed and walked in darkness to the ward washroom, bundled robe under my arm, steel caster in each hand. There was only a night light on inside the long room with its familiar odor. The only sound was the water running in the urinals. I opened the door of the last cubicle. Piled on a stool were shirt, trousers, sport coat, socks, shoes, and a broad-brimmed straw hat.

  I added robe and casters to the pile, then closed the door. Kern was supposed to be standing guard outside to keep anyone from entering until I was ready. It still didn't leave much time. I went to the closet with its cleaning materials and pulled the case of toilet tissue toward the front. With no need for finesse, I pitched rolls of tissue until the back of the closet was waist deep before I reached the bottom layer in the case and once again retrieved my twelve hundred dollars.

  I retreated to the cubicle and dressed quickly. The clothing was cheap and ill-fitting. The jacket was too tight and the trousers much too loose. I managed. I distributed all my contraband in various pockets except the right-hand pocket of the jacket. That one I kept empty.

  I left the hospital clothing on the floor where I'd dropped it except for one white institutional sock. I put the two steel casters into the sock, then carried it to the nearest washbasin where I added a jumbo-sized bar of soap to it. I put the loaded sock into the empty right-hand jacket pocket.

  I stood in front of the washbasin mirror and tried on the plantation-style straw hat. It fitted snugly over my head bandages, but it fitted. The bandages extended downward only as far as my nose. Under the high-crowned, broad-brimmed hat, they were even more inconspicuous than I had hoped.

  When I left the washroom, Spider Kern was standing just outside the door, where he was supposed to be. There was no sign of Rafe James. "All set?" Kern asked me. He made no comment on my appearance. I could hear tension in his voice. The action was getting to him, I decided.

  "All set," I said.

  "Let's go, then."

  He led the way down the ward in the dim light. He glanced through the heavy glass door before unlocking it. No one was in sight in the outside corridor. We passed through the door. I heard it click behind me for what I had made up my mind was the last time. I wasn't coming back.

  Kern glanced across at me once as we walked side by side the twenty-five yards to the side door leading to the parking lot. I kept my right hand on the weighted sock in my jacket pocket. There was always the chance that Kern's sadistic tendency would outweigh his greed for money. He might lead me right up to the outside door, then shout the alarm and "capture" me. If he tried it, the steel casters in the sock were going to see to it that Spider Kern needed plastic surgery worse than I had.

  In the better light in the corridor I tried to locate a suspicious bulge on Kern that would pinpoint a weapon. Even in his thin hospital whites, I couldn't see anything. It had to mean that Rafe James was carrying the armament.

  I was keyed up so high for what I felt was the crucial moment at the side door that Kern had it unlocked and we were outside almost before I realized it. The night air felt warm and moist. It was my first breath untainted by the odor of hospital antiseptics in almost two years.

  "My car's around the corner," Kern whispered. He started alongside the building, walking on the grass. I knew where his car was. I fell in a half step behind him. The almost total darkness on the visitors' side of the huge parking lot was relieved only by a faint refraction of light around the corner where a single arc-light on its standard illuminated the employees' cars. I couldn't hear a sound except the soft pad-pad of our feet on the grass and the occasional distant cheeping of a brook frog.

  I took the loaded sock from my jacket pocket before we reached the corner of the building. I gripped it by the ankle elastic with the heavy soap and casters dangling in the toe, swung it twice around my head in a tight circle, and smashed it as hard as I could behind Spider Kern's right ear. He gave a kind of coughing grunt, stumbled, then pitched forward on his face in the grass.

  I knelt beside him quickly, sock upraised, but he was unconscious. I would have liked to finish him off, but I had a use for him alive. I went through his pockets rapidly. I took his car keys and his wallet. He had seven hundred of the thousand I'd given him, and seven or eight dollars in loose bills. I was glad to see them. I'd need them when I had to get gas later. My own money was in hundred-dollar bills.

  Amidst the clutter in Kern's pockets was a penknife. I used it to cut his metal-studded belt in two places and then I removed his key ring. The penknife saved removing his belt altogether. Without his keys, it would take Kern quite a while to get back inside the hospital. I listened for a moment to the sound of his stertorous breathing before I rose to my feet. He wouldn't be moving at all for a while. Long enough for me to handle Rafe James.

  I shook a caster out of the sock and placed it in my hand with the long steel pin protruding between my fingers. I left the side of the building and walked out into the darkness of the main parking lot. I made a deep circle and came up behind the little cluster of employee's automobiles around the corner. I moved along the row in a crouch until I saw a head silhouetted against the night sky.

  I approached the open window on the driver's side noiselessly. The outline of Rafe James's horse-like features was dimly visible. He was watching the corner of the building around which Kern and I were supposed to appear. Something bulky rested on James's lap.

  I took a step closer, reached inside the window with my left hand, and jabbed the steel pin of the caster into the back of James's neck, hard. "Don't move!" I barked. "Or I'll shoot!"

  He stiffened, then froze.

  I reached down with my hand and took the bulky object from his lap. It was a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun. The stock had been cut down, too. It wasn't any longer and not much heavier than an old-time dueling pistol, but probably fifty times as lethal. "Out of the car," I ordered James. He complied numbly. He was in a state of shock. I handed him the keys to Spider Kern's automobile. He looked down at them blankly. "Get into Kern's car," I said.

  He led the way to it. It was parked four cars away. If Kern and I had entered it and started through the hospital grounds, Rafe James would have been right behind us, shotgun at the ready. When I handed over the supposed five thousand to Kern for aiding my escape, my life would have run it's useful course as far as the two attendants were concerned. James would have stepped in with
the shotgun.

  I had the shotgun now. I held if on James while he got under the wheel of Kern's car, then slid into the passenger's seat myself. "Drive to the farthest corner of the dark side of the lot and park it again," I said. "Then we'll walk back to your car." James did as he was told. There was a sheen of perspiration on his face. Walking back to his car, he held his arms stiffly at his sides as though he didn't know what to do with them. "Now out to the highway," I directed.

  I knew that it was a mile to the highway. "Stop here," I said when I judged we were halfway. The headlights showed thick bushes on either side of the road and a ditch on the left. "Get out," I said when James hit the brakes. He started to whimper. "Out," I repeated.

  I nudged him with the shotgun. He started out slowly, then bolted and started to run. His lank frame zigzagged as he picked up speed. "Stop running!" I yelled at him. I had intended to knock him out, tie him up, and leave him in the ditch. I scrambled out after him. I couldn't wait. I didn't know the load in the shotgun. At twenty yards I touched off the front trigger. Ker-blamm-m-m! Whatever the charge was, it picked up Rafe James's running figure bodily and rolled him down into the ditch.

  I looked up and down the road for advancing headlights. There were none. I climbed down into the ditch to check on James. From the look of him, the shotgun had to be loaded with buckshot. Even with the unchoked, sawed-off barrel, he must have caught half the charge. Rafe James was no longer a part of the problem.

  I left Spider Kern's hospital keys and car keys beside the body. It might help to confuse the issue when James was found. I thought I knew how Kern would think when he regained consciousness. He would look first for his keys, then for his car. When he couldn't find either, and couldn't find James, Kern would assume I'd somehow got the drop on James and forced him to drive me away in Kern's car. Spider's self-preserving account of the situation should have the police looking for two men, one with head bandages, in Kern's car.

  Instead, I'd be alone, without head bandages, in Rafe James's car. Kern's car wouldn't be noticed until daylight disclosed it in the morning. It gave me a few hours incognito. I rolled away from there.

  When the gateway leading out to the highway loomed up in the headlights, I pulled off onto the shoulder of the road again. I removed my bandages and took one of the tubes of facial makeup, squeezed some onto my palm, and worked it into my scalp and face. In the hospital I had seen in the case of Willie Turnbull how the makeup dulled the pink gloss of new skin,

  I put the hat back on. Without the bandages, it fitted more loosely. I opened the glove compartment when I was ready to take off. There were half a dozen loose shotgun shells in it. I examined one in the dash light. All were number 0 buckshot Each pellet was the equivalent in size of a.32-caliber bullet. No wonder a single barrel had cut James down. At twenty yards a quarter of the load must have gone right through him.

  It was ironic that the attendant I would have preferred to see dead, Kern, I had had to leave alive, while the one I didn't care about either way, James, had copped it because he expected me to blast him as he had intended to blast me.

  With luck, by the time Kern's car was noticed in the morning and a corrected all-points went out on the police radio, I'd be close to where I wanted to be. Bunny's cabin where the Phoenix loot was buried.

  I started up the car again, turned on the radio, and moved out onto the highway.

  4

  Rafe James's car wasn't much automobile.

  In the first mile I noticed a shimmy in the front wheels; in the second, a lack of acceleration indicating fouled plugs or pistons. I hadn't looked at the tires, but there wasn't much point in stopping to inspect them now. They were all the tires I had. I hoped they'd hold up. A lot of things depended upon my reaching Hudson before daylight.

  I found that the turn signals didn't work when I turned off the main highway at the first intersection. Staying on the heavily traveled main route was a risk I couldn't afford. Secondary roads were a risk in a different way. The gas tank was only half full, and I had only a slim chance of finding an all-night filling station open on a byroad. Getting off the central highway would probably stretch my driving time to five hours or more too, but it was still a lot safer.

  The car radio squawked country music and drawled an occasional weather bulletin. My head began to feel hot under the plantation-style straw hat. It didn't seem as though I was perspiring. It seemed more as if the new flesh were drawing. The makeup on my face had dried rapidly but now began to feel moist again.

  I encountered only two other cars in the first twenty miles away from the main highway. With the front-wheel shimmy, I had to concentrate on my driving. I passed two blacked-out gas stations at darkened crossroads. When I came up on a station with lighted pumps, I was afraid to pass it by. I pulled in.

  For a moment nothing happened. I thought the owner might have gone home, forgetting to turn off his lights. Then a shaggy-haired, sleepy-eyed kid stumbled out the door of the shacky-looking building and approached the car. "Fill it up," I told him.

  The kid went to the pump with the regular gas and lifted down its hose. I leaned out the window to tell him to put in premium gas, then closed my mouth. James's car had probably never run on anything but regular gas. Premium might give it mechanical dyspepsia.

  The zombie-like teenager reappeared beside the front window. "Three forty," he yawned.

  I gave him four one-dollar bills. "Bring me a state road map with the change."

  When he did, I lost no time moving out. In the rearview mirror I could see the kid already shuffling his way back to the shack. There shouldn't have been anything memorable about our encounter that would cause him to remember me. Even without the shadowing hat, the feeble light from the gas pumps had hardly turned the service area into Times Square on New Year's Eve.

  Forty-five minutes down the road, the singing voice of Eddy Arnold was cut off in mid-bar. "We interrupt this program for a special bulletin," the radio said. "A prison-ward patient from the state hospital has escaped and is presumed to be heading north in a stolen automobile. The car is a late model, green and white Dodge sedan with Florida plates two four four dash three five six. The occupant is considered armed and dangerous. Do not attempt to apprehend this fugitive. Any person seeing an automobile filling this description please notify the nearest State Highway Patrol post immediately."

  There followed an accurate description of the clothes I was wearing, and then the entire bulletin was repeated. There was no description of me as an individual. It amused me to think of the dispatcher's frustration. "Where's the guy's description? What the hell do you mean you don't know what he looks like?"

  The police had probably had the flash thirty minutes before it went out over the commercial station. Spider Kern's car was a late model green and white Dodge with Florida plates 244-356. I was in fairly good shape as long as the police kept looking for that car I had to get out of the clothes Kern had provided, though. Just as soon as I had my hands on the sack with the Phoenix loot buried in the ground near Bunny's cabin, getting rid of that clothing assumed top priority.

  I pulled over to the side of the road, opened up the map, and studied it in the light from the dash. I saw that if I back-tracked five miles I could get off the black-topped secondary road I was on and complete the remainder of my drive to Hudson on little-traveled dirt roads. It would add to my driving time, but country roads were less likely to have troopers in prowl cars on the lookout for me. I dropped the map to the floorboards, covering up the sawed-off shotgun, and started up again.

  I swung around and headed back along the macadamed road toward the dirt road turnoff I'd seen on the map. When I swung onto it, I almost chickened out in the first hundred yards. It was narrow, no more than eighteen feet wide, with a high crown and a deep drainage ditch on either side. The road was covered with a fine powdery layer of reddish dust. In the rearview mirror I could see it streaming behind in the taillights like a granular fog.

  The map had
showed it as a usable road, though, and the weather had been dry for days, so I kept on. The headlights bored a bright path in the darkness through a green tunnel of huge trees meeting over the road. I saw the trunks of jackpine, cypress, chinaberry, and shagbark hickory fringing the edges of the ditches.

  I had no watch, so I could only estimate the time. I knew that sunrise came about six-thirty at this time of the year. I hunched over the wheel, apprehensive about the sideways drift of the rear wheels in the loose dust every few hundred yards. My doubts increased with each passing moment. If someone took the notion, one man alone could roadblock an army on a road like this.

  But the miles fell away behind me with no sign of life except an occasional rabbit darting through the headlight beams, kicking up puffs of dust from the road. I changed course twice as I had plotted it from the map when intersecting dirt roads loomed up in the headlights. Sooner than I would have believed possible, I found myself approaching the outskirts of Hudson.

  I had planned my approach so there was no need for me to drive through the town. If anyone had the cabin staked out, they should be looking for me to drive in from U.S. 19. Instead, I took a seven-mile detour around three sides of a square. When I ended up on the road that led past Bunny's cabin, I was moving in on it from the side away from town.

  I drove until I estimated I was within a mile of the cabin, and then I pulled Rafe James's car as far off the road as I could manage. The brush was so thick I couldn't penetrate it deeply, but at least the car wasn't out in plain sight. I picked up the shotgun and started down the road on foot. The air was clammy, moisture-laden from the nearby swamps. Wisps of fog were beginning to curl up from the damp ground. My head felt hot and uncomfortable.

  I had only an occasional glimpse of the stars through the thick foliage of trees meeting far above my head. It was so dark I was beginning to wonder if I'd passed the cabin without seeing it when I heard a metallic ping from somewhere ahead of me. I stopped and listened. The faint ping was repeated. I moved over to the side of the road and advanced a cautious step at a time. Even at that, I almost ran into the automobile before I saw it.