You Live Once Part 23

I thought about my darling. Globe of firm breast, and the flexing satin of haunch. Furnace mouth and cool shoulders. All alive in the whispering darkness, all alive and for me and forever.

And I thought of other women. They seemed poor things in retrospect-flaky skin and sour hair, raddled thigh and suet breast. Not like my darling. Not firm and proud and tall In her skin, like my darling.

He came at three-seventeen. I heard his voice in the hall, suave and easy.

"I know this is unusual, Mrs. Timberland, but it's work she brought home from the office and we need it today. She said it would be all right if you'd unlock the door and watch me to make certain I don't steal anything." He laughed and the woman laughed.

A key nibbled metallically at the lock and she said, "I can't seem to get the key in."

"Let me try, will you?"

The key I had left in the door was forced out of the lock. It fell noiselessly to the rug. I came out of my stupor too late to take refuge in the closet. The door swung open and Paul France smiled politely at me. The landlady, a worn woman with a muzzle like a boxer dog, stared at me in shock which turned quickly to outrage.

"What are you doing in my house?" she demanded.

France touched her shoulder gently.

"Now, now, Mrs. Timberland. I'll take care of this. I'll see that he's out of your house in five minutes. We can't have this sort of thing, can we?"

He bobbed his head and smiled at her and came into the room and pulled the door shut. She stood out there for a few moments and then went down the hall walking with a very heavy tread.

Still smiling, he said, "A six-state alarm and you hole up two houses away. My goodness." He made a clucking sound with his tongue.

"How did you find me?"

"Your Mr. Wills cooperated with Mr. Pryor and gave me the run of the plant. Including your office. When I began to paw through your desk, the highly decorative young lady became very incensed, too incensed. So I began to look at her more closely. Shall we say she had a fresh high bloom about her? A dewiness? That sort of Joan-of Arc look young ladies get when they perform a great sacrifice? Once I got her address from your personnel section, I was almost positive. The key on the inside of the door was the clincher, Sewell."

"What do we do now?"

"The fearless investigator takes you in, thus earning his fee."

"Do you think I did it?"

"They think you did."

I moved a little closer to him. I hoped I was being inconspicuous about it. He backed off a little, stopped smiling.

"Please don't try anything, Sewell. I can guarantee failure."

I guess he could have guaranteed failure if his luck hadn't been bad and mine hadn't been very good. He made me stand in the doorway, my back to the room. I heard a faint creak and rustle and guessed that he was bending over to pick up the key. I swung my leg back hard. I did it with no antic.i.p.ation of success, in the mood of a child kicking the wall when he's been stood in a corner. There was a slight shock against my heel and a truly theatrical sound of falling. It was the same sound they use on radio after the ringing shot. I turned around. France lay on his face, his gla.s.ses a few feet from his head. Even as I looked at him, he grunted and moved his right arm. I picked up the key, went out in the hall, closed the door and locked it.

Mrs. Timberland was standing down in the hall, her arms folded, chin out.

"Tell your friend she has to be out of my house tonight."

I did not answer her. As I went out into the suns.h.i.+ne, I heard France begin to bang on the bedroom door. A grey sedan was parked in front of the house. I threw the room key into the shrubbery.

The world looked different to me. The new and special relations.h.i.+p with Toni had given me a great deal of optimism. False optimism. Up there in the room, with memory so bright and so recent, I had begun to feel that there was good will in the world, that Kruslov would listen, that all could be explained.

But I had left my confidence up in that room. Running down the stairs, I had planned to go turn myself in. That plan evaporated in the sunlight. A woman stared at me from her front porch, then turned and went into her house.

I lengthened my stride. If I turned myself in, they would have all they needed. Every bit of it. The joy of a newfound love had affected my judgment. Toni had been brighter about it when she spoke of trying to get me away.

I knew that I had to get myself away. I had about twenty dollars on me, a stubble of beard, and the clothes I walked in.

I decided that I would get out of town, somehow. I could contact Tory and he could mail cash to a general delivery address somewhere. I felt as I had in the side lot that night after Yeagger had been knocked out. All the houses had eyes and all the eyes watched me.

I would go far away from them, and later I could get in touch with Toni and she could come to me. I was in panic.

My hands were sweaty. I walked as fast as I dared, turning corners not quite at random, heading southeast, knowing that I would hit a main route at the southeast corner of the city. I went through meager neighborhoods, pa.s.sed candy stores thronged with school children. I

turned my face away from traffic, and the impulse to keep glancing behind me was almost ungovernable.

The houses began to thin out. Weeds grew high in vacant lots. Junked cars rusted behind small service garages. Finally I came to the end of a dead end street.

The pavement was heaved and cracked. People had dumped rubbish at the end of the street.

I looked south and saw fast truck traffic a quarter mile away and knew that was the highway I was looking for. I cut across lots where the ground was marshy. At one place I had to jump from hummock to hummock. I slipped and went into black mud well over my shoes. I wiped my feet on the gra.s.s. Halfway to the highway I came across a young girl and a boy who had made a nest for themselves on a blanket in the tall gra.s.ses. After the first glance I did not look toward them. They did not move or make a sound.

At the highway I stopped behind a billboard and tried to regain some confidence. I wanted to crawl into the thick gra.s.s and hide there. It was far too easy to think of how they would kill me, quite legally, if they caught me. I walked across the highway, stood on the shoulder and began to thumb the eastbound traffic.

Cars went by at high speed, swirling heated winds around me. Sun glinted off the chrome. Trucks snored by.

In between the clumps of traffic, I walked east, keeping my head well down so that traffic headed into the city could not see my face.

I pa.s.sed a drive-in. Fear had destroyed hunger. Yet even had I been hungry, I could not risk wasting that much time. I kept remembering what France had said about a six-state alarm.

A half mile beyond the drive-in, as I walked, I heard a car coming behind me. I turned with upraised thumb and false smile. It was a highway patrol car. I whirled around, realizing as I did it that my quickness in itself would be cause of suspicion. The car sped by and just as I began to feel better about it, brakes screamed the tires on dry pavement. I saw that it was going to make a U turn as soon as traffic permitted. I turned and leaped the ditch, vaulted a low fence and ran across a cultivated field. As I reached a fringe of woods I looked back. The patrol car was stopped on the shoulder. A man stood by the fence, another near the car. The man by the fence was very still. Something whizzed near my head. A cut leaf circled slowly down. I heard a thin distant cracking sound, and then another.

I dived into the shelter of the woods and ran in terror. I tripped and fell and rolled to my feet and kept running.

Branches stung my cheeks. I lost all sense of direction. I knew only that people who wanted to kill me were after me. When I fell the second time it knocked the wind out of me. I lay where I had fallen and listened. I could hear traffic sounds far away. I heard a bird near by, a bird with a fluid intricate call. A jet went over, too high to see, rumbling faintly.

After that I went on more slowly. The woods ended.

There was a wide field, a dirt road beyond it. I squatted and watched the road for a time. Nothing came along. I started across the field toward the road. Ten steps from the shelter of the woods, I heard a car coming. I scrambled back. The car stopped a hundred yards down the road and let a man in uniform out. The man stared toward the woods. I knew he couldn't see me, but he seemed to be looking directly at me. I saw him sit on a fence and light a cigarette, still watching the woods.

I moved back until I could no longer see him. I traveled in a line parallel to the road. Soon I came upon another man who waited as patiently as the first. I turned back the way I had come. The woods had seemed vast at first. Now it was a skimpy patch of brush, affording no good place of concealment. It did not take long to find they were on all sides of me. The sun was nearly gone. I knew I could run no longer.

I remembered Toni and I realized I had been in an unthinking panic. France would report where I had hidden.

Toni might be in custody already, charged with aiding me. This was a man hunt, and anyone who had a.s.sisted me would suffer.

I came out of the woods at dusk, back by the main highway, my hands held high. Three patrol cars and two Warren police vehicles were there. I was nearly sick with exhaustion. Kruslov was there. They searched me and put me in a car.

Back at police headquarters I was booked, photographed, searched again. They took everything from my pockets, plus my belt and shoelaces and necktie, and put me in a dingy cell. A half hour later I was taken out of the cell and upstairs to a small bare room with barred windows, a spavined conference table, six chairs, a spittoon, a wall clock and another girlie calendar. It was the same set of impossibly lush thighs, but this time a wind, rather than barbed wire, had lifted her skirt.

A young sandy-haired, lantern-jawed patrolman guarded me. He sat on the table and chewed gum and watched me out of colorless eyes. When I asked him for a cigarette, he said he didn't smoke. There was a phone on the corner of the table. A piece of the earpiece had been chipped off.