He encountered very little traffic, and for two hours made good time without admitting to himself that eventually he would be forced to make a stop in order to buy gasoline. It was nearly midnight, and the needle of the gauge was hovering close to the empty mark before he would face the necessity. Then, as irrational in this as in everything else, he became terrified lest the tank run dry before reaching a service station. When he next saw the glimmer of lights ahead of him this fear had become, for the moment, so much greater than any other, that he drove up to the pumps they had signalled without the slightest hesitation.
It was a girl who came out to serve him; a stocky, dark-haired girl wearing a blue smock with ‘Pete’s Place’ emblazoned on one sleeve.
“Fill her up,” he said briefly.
“You want the oil checked?”
“No.”
Beyond the pumps he could see a brilliantly lit lunch counter with windows open to the warm night, and he realized that he wanted a cup of coffee as much as he had ever wanted anything in his life. Running his tongue over dry lips, he wondered if he dared go in. The place was empty; he could sit at the counter and watch the car at the same time; and the fact that a girl was looking after the pumps seemed proof that she and another smocked figure he could see inside were the only people around.
“That’ll be four sixty-five.”
He watched her narrowly while she counted out change for the five-dollar bill he handed her. She did not appear to take the slightest interest in him.
He waited until she had gone back inside before making up his mind. Then, getting out of the car, and locking it, he followed her up a shallow flight of steps and through a screen door which he failed to shut properly.
It was not until a cup of coffee had been set down in front of him that he noticed the radio, which he realized had been on ever since, and probably before, he came into the place. The sweat breaking out on his forehead, he heard the opening sentences of a midnight newscast.
Swinging around, he addressed the two waitresses who were idly talking to one another at the further end of the counter. “Turn that thing off, will you. It gets on my nerves.”
The dark girl replied. “The boss don’t like——”
“Turn the bloody thing off!”
The girl shrugged, did as he asked, and, deliberately turning her back on him, resumed her conversation.
Radios, telephones, police—soon, if not already, they would all be his mortal enemies. He took a scalding mouthful of coffee, and spat it back into the cup. The radio silenced, the girls’ voices were perfectly audible to him. He was tempted to tell them to shut up. They made it difficult for him to listen for approaching cars, and he was not going to risk staying if another car drew up outside.
“—don’t think he could have really meant it.”
“Oh, he meant it right enough. It’s just the way he is.”
“Well, if you ask me—say, did you hear that?”
“What?”
“Listen! I could’ve sworn I heard a kid crying.”
The man’s stool crashed backwards to the floor, and coffee poured across the marble counter from an overturned cup, as he leaped for the door.
Fumbling frantically with his car keys, he could hear that the child was not only crying, but also beating small fists in wild desperation against the walls of her black prison.
His foot pressing the accelerator to the floor boards, he swung the car violently away from the pumps and sent it hurtling into the darkness ahead. Again he had escaped; but there was no escaping from the sobbing of the child whom he took with him.
“Shut up—shut up—shut up!” he muttered savagely. “Do you hear me, you bloody little bastard—shut up!”
The clock at the foot of the circular stairway struck three in a house normally, at that hour, quiet and dark, tonight blazing with lights.
Sharon heard it, and thought: “She has been gone eight hours now.” First it was one hour, then two, then three—now the black gulf stretching between her and her baby was eight hours wide. How much wider was it going to get? “Oh, God—God, in Your mercy, bring her back to us! Christ—help me to bear the unbearable!”
Dwight, standing behind Sharon’s chair, bleak grey eyes fixed on the ashes of a fire that had died unattended nearly eight hours earlier, heard the clock, and thought: “She can’t go on much longer like this. God, show me how best I can help her.”
The police inspector, sitting across the room from them, heard it, knew he should have been in bed long ago, and wondered what it was about these people that had brought him back to this house for the third time that night, when he could have delegated this last visit to a junior officer.
He ran his finger down the side of his long, deeply creased face, while he wished he had more and better news to give them.
Clearing his throat, the sound loud in a house too quiet since the tread of many feet had ceased soon after midnight, he told them that the kidnapper had been identified one hundred and forty miles north of the city. Speaking quickly and concisely, he gave them an account of the long-distance call received from a dark-haired waitress who had seen more than she had appeared to see, and whose photographic memory had produced a description even more exact than that on the nation-wide broadcast which she had picked up at two o’clock.
Dwight’s voice was steady. “Someone will see this girl personally?”
“A special detective is already on his way.”
“You’re setting up road blocks?”
The inspector nodded. “By seven o’clock this morning every car moving on a main road within four hundred miles of that lunch counter will be stopped and searched.”
“It can’t be done any faster?”
The inspector did not resent the question. He had asked it himself, and with more heat, at headquarters. “It’s a big country, sir, and when you look at it where we’re looking, a very empty one. We’re moving men in as fast as we can.”
Sharon saw an army of blue-coated men marching down into a gulf now nearly nine hours wide, and knew that she must go with them, down, down into the darkness——. With a whisper as meaningless as the soft whisper of her silk dress, she crumpled forward on to the floor.
The child’s frenzied, piteous crying was a steady assault on the man’s nerves for more than an hour and a half. Cursing himself for the crazy impulse which had moved him to throw away chloroform he would willingly have employed any number of times, he raved and shouted at her in a hoarse voice which occasionally rose to a scream. His black eyes, fixed on the narrow band of light always just in front of the car, were scarcely sane, and, at about the time when she finally became silent, he was very close to quieting her for good with a spanner that lay on the floor beside his feet. The ransom was all that had prevented him from doing so earlier. Money was his only remaining reality in a nightmare in which life and death had become equally inconsequential, in which there had never been a day, never anything but darkness and fear and an empty road that curved and twisted and straightened, only to curve and twist and straighten again.
At first he had been relieved when he noticed how infrequent the towns were becoming, and how insignificant, no sooner approached than lost in the chasms of the night behind him. And trees, interspersed less and less often by clearings, had seemed to provide cover for a flight which would evade all pursuit. But now. the quiet black palisades of forest, pressing in on him from both sides, unbroken for miles by any sign of human habitation, became a menace in themselves. Born and bred in the noisy, never-sleeping heart of a great city, this vast silence appeared as inimical to him as the dark, unexplored silence of outer space.
If he had been told then that a full-scale man-hunt had already been launched against him, that the hunters were at that moment setting up their traps ahead of him, and that only by a miracle had he escaped those even now in place behind him, he would not have believed it.
Mesmerized by the steady hum of the car engine, so unvarying a rhythm
it scarcely qualified as sound any more, his brain fogged by lack of sleep, he was unaware that his speed was decreasing, and that his driving was becoming more and more erratic, the old car wandering from one side of the road to the other like a drunk unlikely to reach home safely.
As the stars began to fade, and darkness was diluted by a thin promise of dawn, the trees fell back to give way to what at first appeared to be rolling pastureland; pastureland that grew, with sudden, appalling lack of forewarning, into squat, unnaturally smooth mountains rearing up in stark silhouette against the dying night.
The mines, the man thought dully.
The hydro pole into which he crashed two miles further on seemed to come to meet the car, rather than the car going toward it. He was aware of a sickening jar and a sharp agony in his left side, while his ears rang with the harsh discord of splintering wood, tortured metal, and shattered glass.
The rippling echoes of a disturbance too slight to affect the grim slag hills that had borne witness to it, had long since dissipated before he was able, or even dared, to move.
Dragging himself out of this trap of his own devising, a wounded animal concerned now with nothing beyond its own immediate safety, he took stock of a situation which, bad though it was, could have been considerably worse. Once on his feet, he found that he had sustained, apart from cracked ribs, nothing more than minor bruises. His hand pressed to his side to ease the pain there, his pallid mouth funneling a steady stream of obscenities, he examined the car.
In a grey light, belonging neither to night nor to day, he saw that it had fared, if anything, better than he had himself. One headlight was smashed, the grill was buckled, and the front bumper, embedded in the shredded side of the wooden pole, had been torn loose, but there was no really serious damage visible. If the wheel alignment was still true, it could be driven with safety.
Hope flaring up in him again, he struggled into his seat, started the motor, and, in reverse gear, roared the engine. The chassis vibrated noisily, and the wheels spun, but the car did not move. Flinging open the door, he got out to discover what was the matter.
On first sight of the front wheel overhanging the edge of the ditch, he thought it would be comparatively easy to push the car free of both ditch and pole. Five minutes later, blind with sweat, his side a torment he wished he could tear out with his bare hands, he knew he was beaten: even uninjured he could not have done it. Wildly he looked up at the lightening sky, desperately searched with bloodshot eyes a landscape devoid of life or movement of any kind, a world in which nothing grew and no birds sang. Shivering with cold and fear, his breath coming in short laboured gasps, he knew he must run, and made an enormous effort to pull himself together sufficiently to think of what must be done before he started running.
The license plates—he must get them off. With the spanner he did this as fast as he could, and then, bending and hammering them, reduced them to a size he could stuff into his pockets.
Taking out a comb, he ran it through lifeless dark hair, combed too often and washed too little, while he wondered confusedly if there was anything else he could do to remove any possible connection between himself and this wreck he should leave behind him as quickly as possible. The black bag—he dared neither leave it nor open it. Eventually, his connection with the car would be established: to abandon the black bag would be madness. Yet— the fear which he had been forcing into the farthest recesses of his mind leapt gibbering into the light—if the child were dead he did not want to know it, and what but death could have kept her silent so long? Why had she not cried out when the car struck? Why was she not crying now?
He took two steps away from the car, and then stood still. He could not, must not leave that glaring clue. And what if the brat was dead? He hadn’t killed her—they couldn’t say he had killed her. He could open the bag without looking at her, could dumpher on to the floor without even touching her. If they ever caughthim he could say she was alive when he left her—they would haveto believe him, because it would be true—it would be true—itwould be true
Mumbling incoherently, he opened the rear door of the car, pulled the black bag up on to the seat, unfastened the catches, hesitated an instant, and then, his eyes screwed shut, turned it upside down above the gap between front and back seats. There was a slithering sound, a soft thud, and silence. A horrid, wordless noise escaped from his slack mouth, and he sprang backwards as though from a pestilence, slamming the door with such force that the windows rattled and fresh fragments of glass from the broken headlight fell to the ground with a cold, musical tinkle.
Briefly, he stood frozen where he was, his teeth chattering audibly in a silence now unbroken by any other sound. Then, the empty black bag bumping against his legs, he turned and ran down the road pursued by devils which would never again be far behind him.
3 THE HOBOES
THEY came along the deserted road that wound through the slag, just as the first yellow streaks of dawn were staining the eastern sky. There were two of them, and they employed a shambling walk that covered the ground with a minimum of effort while producing a very fair rate of progress. They were on their way south to a “jungle” in a city ravine, and an autumn conference of their kind in which it pleased them to play a yearly part. Like migrating birds, they had habits. Following the sun, propelled not only by their own whims but by a constabulary that wasted neither sympathy nor affection on them, they steered a seasonal course that varied amazingly little from year to year. This time it had taken them longer than usual to beat their way across the continent, and they were in a hurry lest they be late for their conference and the always interesting debacle that ensued when the police, spurred by an irate citizenry, moved in to break it up. Normally they rode the rods, but a small incident involving a brakeman now suffering from a sore head had made it advisable to desert the railroad in favour of the highway.
Approximately the same height, dressed in much the same mélange of cast-off clothing, they were scarcely distinguishable one from the other. They were neither of them young, but their faces, weathered and not unamiable, had an ageless quality common to men who carry no responsibilities heavier than the light packs on their backs.
They both saw the car at the same moment, and without need for verbal communication became host to the same speculations. Anything was grist to their mill, and a deserted and partially wrecked car promised, to the enterprising, a number of small items that could later be negotiated for beer, cigarettes, or even cash.
Glancing casually over their shoulders, they quickened their pace, and approached the car. Sharp eyes alert, they noted its age and make, the dust that lay thick over it, the extent of its damage, and, most particularly, the absence of license plates.
“The heap’s hot.”
“I reckon.”
There was evident satisfaction in both their voices. A stolen car was anybody’s prize, to be looted as thoroughly as was humanly possible.
Before touching anything, they prowled around it like stray dogs around an intriguing garbage can, while a possibility, so glorious they were at first afraid to entertain it, began to dawn on them. When they saw the keys, an open invitation, in the ignition, they wasted no time on making an inventory of the car’s contents.
“Think we can shove her out?”
“Nothin’toit.”
“Enough juice to get her there?”
Distrusting the gauge, a rusty nail was attached to a piece of string, lowered into the gas tank, drawn out and examined. “More’n enough.”
They had said all that was necessary. Less than sixty miles further south was a wrecker who had the good taste not to ask questions, and whose establishment could be reached via rural roads unprofaned by police patrols. Laying down their packs, they put their shoulders to the fenders, and a minute later the car rolled backwards on to the highway.
Smiling broadly, they recovered their packs, and climbed in.
“Damned if I ain’t forgot to renew my drivin’ license,”
remarked the man who had elected to drive. Stepping on the starter and rewarded by an engine that turned over at once, he settled back with an air that royalty in a Rolls Royce might have attempted in vain. He was on the verge of throwing in the clutch when his eye was caught by the dislodged bumper lying at the foot of the mutilated hydro pole. He looked up at the sky. It was nearly morning, and he knew that it was tempting an already too beneficent fate not to get the hell out in a hurry, but it was not in his nature to leave anything behind that could be turned into profit. He pointed to the bumper, and his shabby companion, in agreement with him on this, as on most other matters, immediately got out and retrieved it.
“Shall I throw it in back?”
“Good enough.”
“There’s some right nice blankets in—Christ Almighty, there’s a kid in here!”
In an instant the driver had eased his bulk out from behind the wheel and opened the rear door on the far side of the car, to find himself looking down at a small, tear-stained white face, and fair curls not thick enough to cover the ugly swelling on one side of a small head. A slow, hot wrath suffusing his blunt features with red, he said heavily, “Afore God, I’d like to kill the bugger that done it.”
“She’s out cold, but she’s breathin’ all right.”
“Let’s git her up off the floor.”
With horny hands, clumsy but amazingly gentle, they lifted the unconscious child on to the back seat. “You reckon she was left for dead?”
“I reckon.”
“You remember what I done to Alf when he kilt that little dog?”
It was a memory the other man had no wish to resurrect. “Forget it,” he said abruptly. “It’s the kid we got to think about. She ain’t hurt real bad. What are we goin’ to do with her, though?”
Their two faces a study in disturbed perplexity, they stared at the child whom they both assumed had been wantonly abandoned by its own kin. Theirs was a world that acknowledged no ties of any kind, but it bordered at times on a more domesticated existence where such a thing was a not uncommon occurrence. They were angry and upset, but they were not surprised. Man’s inhumanity to man was not the least of the causes that had driven them away from society. They were unquestionably shiftless, immeasurably lazy, and could not, by the wildest stretch of imagination, have been called honest men, yet they never for an instant thought of leaving this little creature in the ditch for someone else to find—or not, as the case might be.
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