“It’s getting warm, all right,” the plump man said. “Could we give you a lift into Palestine? It’s over ten miles, and you look like you’ve walked a piece already.”
“I’d appreciate it,” Blackburn said. “I drove my car out from Palestine this morning, but I was starting to think I’d be going back in a box.”
The plump man started to open his door. “You’re lucky we came along. This road doesn’t get much use.”
The driver made a noise in his throat. “Uh, Doctor, what if we find Morton?”
The plump man paused with his door open a few inches. He looked down at the asphalt and frowned. “Good point,” he said. He looked back up at Blackburn. “We’re searching for a patient who wandered off Monday evening. The sheriff and DPS are checking the main highways, but we thought we’d improve our chances and look along some of the back roads ourselves. If we were to run across him before dropping you off, you might be…”
“In the way?” Blackburn asked.
“Frankly, yes,” the plump man said. “And there might be a question of liability if anything should happen.”
“Morton’s a handful,” the driver said. His voice was flat.
“So perhaps what we should do instead of giving you a lift,” the plump man said, “is to call a tow truck for you when we reach Palestine. Would that be all right?”
Blackburn tried to look politely dissatisfied. “I’m afraid my car’s so far down that road, and stuck so badly, that a tow truck won’t be any use until things dry out. So, well…” He hesitated, hoping to imply that he really hated to impose. “If you’ll let me ride with you, I promise I’ll get out if you find this Morton. That would still get me closer to town than I am now.”
The plump man glanced at the driver. The driver shrugged, looking disgusted, and the plump man pushed his door open. “That sounds reasonable,” he said. “And the odds are that we won’t come across Morton anyway. But we have to try.”
Blackburn squeezed past the plump man and sat on the bench seat behind him. The cool air inside the van was wonderful. “I’ll be happy to pay for your gas,” Blackburn said. “I’m on vacation this week, so I’m getting paid for nothing. And right now I’d rather buy a ride to town than anything else.”
“No need,” the plump man said, shutting his door and rolling up his window as the van started moving again. “We’re going as far as Palestine anyway, and then we’ll drive back to Rusk on another path less taken.”
“Waste of time,” the driver muttered.
The plump man looked back at Blackburn. “I hope you don’t mind if we aren’t too talkative. We need to keep our eyes peeled.”
“I don’t mind at all,” Blackburn said. It was the truth. Not having to talk would mean that he wouldn’t need to elaborate on his story about being a Northerner transplanted to Palestine.
“And if you should happen to see someone wearing a white hospital gown,” the plump man said, “be sure to holler.”
“Where should I be looking?” Blackburn asked.
The plump man gestured at the forest alongside the road. “In there. Morton likes to play in the woods.” He stuck his right hand back at Blackburn. “By the way, I’m Dr. Joe Norris.”
Blackburn shook his hand. “Bruce Rayburn,” he said. “Just down from Iowa City.”
The driver looked at him in the rearview mirror and grimaced.
“How’d you get the shiner, Bruce?” Dr. Norris asked.
Blackburn touched his right cheekbone, where the DPS trooper had hit him with the Python. It was tender. His nose was sore from the trooper’s forearm, too.
“I was carrying a chair into my new house and ran into a doorjamb,” he said.
Dr. Norris nodded. “That’s why I always hire movers.” He turned away and peered out at the trees.
The driver whispered “Dumbass Yankee” just loud enough for Blackburn to hear.
The van proceeded west at forty miles per hour. Blackburn wiped his shoes on the floor mat and watched the woods for a glimpse of a man in a white gown. If he saw him, he would keep his mouth shut.
* * *
As the van approached a state highway loop on the outskirts of Palestine, Blackburn spotted a shopping center with an H.E.B. supermarket. He asked Dr. Norris to let him off there. He would call his wife at work, he said, and she would pick him up. Norris’s driver muttered something about not having been hired as a chauffeur, but he pulled the van into the H.E.B. parking lot.
Blackburn got out, and as the van drove off, he looked up and down the highway loop and saw a sign for a Best Western motel about a mile to the north. That motel would be his next stop, but first things first. He tucked his rolled-up jacket under his arm and went into the supermarket.
He bought bread and cheese, a couple of apples, a Texas highway map, a disposable razor, and a meat-tenderizing mallet. Then he went outside and bought a copy of the Dallas Morning News from a machine. He sat down on a bench beside the machine, made a cheese sandwich, and found Palestine on the map. His zigzagging during the night had taken him back farther to the west than he had realized; Palestine was a hundred and fifty miles straight north of the western edge of Houston. He was no closer to Louisiana than he had been before his escape.
On the other hand, the DPS would be keeping an eye on the Louisiana border, and they wouldn’t be looking for him here. Plus, Palestine had a population of sixteen thousand, which was big enough for him not to be noticed as a stranger. It was also big enough for him to find a car. As long as he wasn’t spotted by a city cop, sheriff’s deputy, or DPS trooper, he could rest here until after dark, then acquire a vehicle and head for Oklahoma. He didn’t think the DPS would be expecting him to try for Oklahoma.
He folded the map and then looked at the newspaper while eating his sandwich. His escape had made the front page, but the article was at the bottom right corner, and there was no photograph of him. The article did mention the brown wool suit he was wearing, but nothing else that would identify him. Its lead paragraph claimed that he had escaped during a “gun battle” with police and DPS troopers. Blackburn thought it was stretching the truth to call one shot a “battle.”
He finished his sandwich and was about to leave the newspaper on the bench when another article on the front page caught his eye. It said that a Texas prison inmate named Jay Pinkerton was to be executed by lethal injection at Huntsville that night. He would be the third man to be executed in Texas so far in 1986. He had been seventeen years old when he had committed rape and murder, and had now been on Death Row for four years. He had been taken to the execution chamber once before and had received a stay only minutes before the intravenous solution was to have been administered. Now his time had run out again. The article suggested that there would not be another stay.
Blackburn’s sandwich lay in his stomach like concrete. He too had killed at seventeen. He too was accused of rape and murder. If they had convicted him and sent him to Huntsville, would they have made him wait four years before giving him the needle?
The thought was sickening. If you had to kill someone, it was better to do it quickly. If you had a choice. And surely the State of Texas had a choice.
Blackburn felt sorry for Jay Pinkerton. Not that Pinkerton didn’t deserve to die; the article made it clear that he did. He had raped and killed a woman, which put him in the same class as Roy-Boy. But Blackburn would not have made even Roy-Boy wait on his death for four years. That would have been sadism on the order of Roy-Boy’s own.
He pulled the front page from the newspaper, crumpled it, and tossed it into a garbage can beside the bench. He folded the rest of the paper and laid it on the bench for someone else to read, then took his rolled-up jacket and his plastic grocery bag and walked down the shopping center’s sidewalk to a sporting goods store. There he bought black shorts, a white T-shirt with ADIDAS stenciled on the chest in red, an athletic supporter, white socks, and the cheapest pair of running shoes he could find. That still left him with almost
a hundred dollars of his attorney’s money. His jacket, with the Python, fit inside the sporting-goods-store bag with his new clothes.
He walked to the Best Western and rented a room from the dazed old woman in the office. She didn’t even glance at the phony name and auto-license number he wrote on the check-in form. Nor did she seem to notice that he was sweating and carrying two plastic bags instead of luggage. Blackburn was pleased.
His room was on the second floor on the north side of the building. Once inside, he turned the air conditioner on HIGH, stripped, and lay on the bed in the cold breeze. When his skin was dry, he sat up and ate another cheese sandwich and both apples. Then he lay back down for a nap.
He was exhausted, but he had trouble falling asleep. He should have passed over the Dallas Morning News and picked up a comic book instead.
* * *
Blackburn awoke to red and blue flashing lights and sat up gasping. He had been dreaming of drowning, and had seen the lights filtered through the water. Now he saw them filtered through the curtains over his motel room window. Except for them, the room was dark.
He slid out of bed and crept on all fours toward the window. The carpet was stiff and grungy. Beneath the window, the air conditioner was still blasting. He gulped a lungful of iced air and shivered.
At the window he peeked between the curtains and saw that it was night. Down in the parking lot, a police car sat with its lights whirling as two cops shoved a shirtless man into the back seat. Several yards from the car, a young woman in a short nightgown was standing barefoot, hugging herself and crying. Other people stood nearby, watching. Something violent had happened at the motel in the past hour, but Blackburn had heard none of it. The air conditioner had drowned it out. There must have been a siren too, but Blackburn had not heard that either. He switched off the air conditioner, and it stopped with a loud, shuddering chunk. The people in the parking lot looked up.
Blackburn ducked and held his breath. After several seconds he risked another look. Everyone was watching the police car again. The cops shut the shirtless man into the back seat and got into the front seat. The red and blue lights stopped flashing, and the car moved off toward the highway loop. Blackburn let out his breath and stood. The police car hadn’t come for him, but sooner or later one would. He took his disposable razor from the grocery bag and went into the bathroom, where he turned on a light and looked at his watch. It was after eleven; time to get on to Oklahoma and beyond. Maybe he would give Canada a try. It was cold, but there was national health insurance.
He took a shower, then went to the sink and worked the remaining sliver of motel soap into a lather. He spread the foam on his cheeks and throat and got too much around his mouth, so he made a mad-dog face in the mirror. Then he shaved. The State of Texas would be thinking of him as a desperate, dirty animal on the run. Maybe he was, but he could try not to look like one.
After shaving, he toweled off and returned to the bedroom. The room was steamy from his shower, but he didn’t turn the air conditioner back on. He put on the clothes and shoes he had bought that afternoon, then stuffed his other clothes and shoes into the sporting-goods bag. He had to hang on to them until he could dump them where they wouldn’t be found. The jacket, still wrapped around the Python, went on top. Obtaining more ammunition would be a priority as soon as he was out of the state. His five remaining cartridges would be adequate for now, but they wouldn’t last forever.
He picked up his plastic bags and was about to leave, but heard a knock at the door of the room next to his. He heard the door open and then voices on the balcony. He set down his bags, went to the window, and peeked between the curtains again, looking sideways. He saw the two cops who had been in the parking lot, and the old woman from the motel office. The cops were talking to a man in the next room, asking whether he had seen or heard anything unusual that evening. They were looking for witnesses against the man they had arrested.
One of the cops said, “If you think of anything, give us a call.” The door closed, and the cops and the old woman started toward Blackburn’s room. Blackburn backed away from the window, then stood still as they knocked on his door. He breathed in short, shallow puffs.
“Excuse me,” one of the cops said in a loud voice. “We’re police officers, and we need to ask a few questions.”
Blackburn squatted and reached into the sporting-goods bag. He put his hand into his rolled-up jacket, but his palm came up against the Python’s muzzle. He pulled his hand out again.
“I know this room’s occupied,” the old woman said. “Maybe he’s gone out.” Blackburn heard the rattle of keys. “We’ll just take a look.”
Blackburn picked up his bags and went into the bathroom. “Just a minute!” he yelled. “I’m on the pot!” He put the bags into the bathtub and pulled the shower curtain across to hide them. Then he took some deep breaths. There was nothing to worry about. These cops weren’t here for him. They wouldn’t be thinking about him. He wasn’t wearing the same clothes as yesterday. He could leave the bathroom light on, and that would draw their eyes away from his face. Even if they did look at his face, his hair was wet and looked darker than it really was. He flushed the toilet and went to answer the door.
As the door opened, Blackburn saw that the cops were young, in their early twenties. They looked grim. “Sorry to bother you at such a late hour, sir,” the closest one said. He didn’t sound sorry. “But we had a disturbance downstairs, and we were wondering if you might have seen or heard anything that could help us with our investigation.”
“I’m afraid not,” Blackburn said. “I had the air conditioner on, and I didn’t even wake up until you were putting the guy into your car. I did see that.”
“You slept through the disturbance, sir?” the cop asked.
“I guess so.”
The other cop pointed at Blackburn’s feet. “Do you sleep in your shoes, sir?”
Blackburn looked down at his new running shoes. “No,” he said. “But I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I thought I’d go for a jog to tire myself out.”
“Jogging at night isn’t advisable, sir,” the first cop said. “You might be hit by a motorist.”
“Oh,” Blackburn said. “I won’t do it, then.”
“Maybe you could watch TV instead,” the cop suggested.
“I’ll do that.”
“And if you happen to remember anything that might help us, please call the Palestine Police Department. Or tell the front desk here at the motel.”
The old woman rattled her keys. “I’m sorry about the ruckus,” she said. “I hope you can get back to sleep.”
“Not your fault,” Blackburn said.
The cops and the old woman moved on toward the next room. As Blackburn closed the door, he saw the second cop look back at him and scowl. But there was no recognition in the look, only the normal aggressive distrust of a young male.
Blackburn turned on the television so the cops would hear that he had taken their advice. He couldn’t leave until he was sure they were gone anyway. As he sat down on the bed, the television screen brightened into an artist’s rendering of Jay Pinkerton lying strapped to a gurney. According to the voiceover, the execution was taking place at that moment.
Blackburn got up and turned off the television. He went into the bathroom, took his plastic bags from the tub, and returned to the bed. He pulled the Python from his jacket and cocked it. Then he sat with his back against the headboard and waited.
Several minutes later he heard the cops’ voices in the parking lot, and then a car starting and driving away. He waited ten more minutes before uncocking the Python and replacing it in his jacket in the sporting-goods bag. Then he picked up both bags and left the room. The sky was covered with clouds again.
Blackburn walked behind the motel and out to a tree-canopied side street. There was no traffic. He headed east, away from the highway loop, until he came to a small apartment house with a ripe parking lot. There he wrapped his polyester courtroom
shirt around his meat-tenderizing mallet and broke the driver’s-side wing window from an old Dodge Coronet sedan. He reached in and unlocked the door, then opened it and tossed his bags inside. He glanced at the apartment house to be sure no lights were coming on, then squirmed under the car’s dashboard.
When the engine started, Blackburn came out from under the dashboard and looked at the apartment house again. There were still no lights. He settled into the driver’s seat, pulled out of the lot, and drove back toward the highway loop. The Coronet’s engine stumbled, but he thought it would get him to Oklahoma.
As he turned north onto the highway loop beside the Best Western, he saw that the police car was back again, parked in front of the motel. The two cops were coming out of the office. One of them seemed to stare at Blackburn as he drove past.
Blackburn watched his rearview mirror and saw the police car pull onto the loop and also head north. But it was half a mile behind him, and its flashing lights weren’t coming on. Blackburn turned west at a stoplight, and although the police car turned west there too, it dropped back even farther. By the time Blackburn was out of the city, accelerating northwest on U.S. 287, there were no headlights in his mirror. It had been thirty-six hours since he had escaped from the courthouse in Houston, and he was still alive and free.
That put him two up on a lot of people. Including, by now, Jay Pinkerton.
* * *
The Coronet died soon after he turned off U.S. 287 onto Texas 19, before he could find one of the back roads that he preferred. There was a grinding noise, and then the engine quit. Blackburn let the car coast into the ditch and stopped it under an overhanging tree. God was still trying to get him to believe in Him, and had decided that he should wander on foot for a while longer.
Blackburn didn’t think that would have to be for long. After turning onto Texas 19, he had passed a gravel road with a sign beside it that said PALESTINE COMMUNITY FOREST, and he had seen red taillights wink off among the trees. At least one car was parked in there.
Blackburn Page 25
