One Endless Hour

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.

It was pulled off to the side as I had pulled James's car off. I eased up to it silently. No one was in it. I couldn't make out its color, but I could see the domed silhouette of the flasher on its roof. The car was a police cruiser. I was going to have unwelcome company at Bunny's cabin.

I placed my hand on the car's radiator. It was warm, almost hot. The metallic plinking sounds I'd heard had been the metal of the radiator cooling and contracting. I opened the cruiser's door boldly, knowing that interior lights don't come on in a police car. I was hoping to find a spare handgun, but the only thing in the front seat was a riot gun locked into its boot. Even if I could have worked it free, it was no improvement over the shotgun I already had. A dark blur on the left side of the back seat turned out to be a trooper's uniform on a wire hanger. It was enclosed in a thin plastic bag. On the back seat lay a wide-brimmed trooper's campaign hat.

I started up the road again, leaving the car door open. Two hundred yards ahead there was a break in the trees, and I knew I was at the cabin. I started to take off my shoes, then stopped. All I needed was to put my foot down on a cottonmouth. I edged in from the roadside a careful step at a time. A chill dawn breeze rustled the bushes on either side of me, reminding me that time was running out. I wanted to move faster, but I held myself down.

The blacker outline of the cabin came into view. I studied it for a moment before moving in. At my first step there was the sound of a slap from inside the cabin, "Damn mosquitoes!" a hoarse voice muttered.

"Shut up!" Blaze Franklin's voice replied instantly.

"Don't get narky," the first speaker replied in an injured tone. "We'll see his headlights comin'. How 'bout a cigarette, Blaze?"

"I told you no cigarettes, Moody! This bastard is smart and dangerous!"

"At least you could tell me who this dangerous bastard is," Moody returned sulkily. "An' why you dragged me out here to wait for him at this God-forsaken place."

"Because a friend put through a telephone call," Franklin replied. "You just stick with me an' you'll wear diamonds."

"Like yours?" Moody said. His voice turned sly, "The boys been wonderin' where you're gettin' your money since you resigned from the force."

"We should be listenin' instead of talkin', Moody."

Moody grunted but subsided. I moved stealthily away from the cabin. I didn't like what I'd overheard. If Franklin were living high as a nonworking civilian, it almost had to be on the Phoenix money. He'd had plenty of time to look for it. The thought that he might find it had somehow never occurred to me.

I looked up at the star-dotted sky and moved straight north from the cabin's front door exactly as I had that other night that seemed so long ago. Even in the dark I noticed that there was a lack of brush. Someone had cleaned it out. The ground was soft and shifting underfoot. Someone had patiently dug up the area foot by foot. Franklin had dug up the area. Franklin had found the money.

Dry paper rustled under my feet as I turned around and looked toward the cabin. I bent down and reached for as much of it as I could find without moving my feet. It felt like newspaper. I twisted it into a tight spill, put it under my arm, and crept back to the cabin. Franklin was going to tell me where the money was.

When I was a few yards away from the front door, I could hear them talking again. I couldn't make out what they were saying because this time the solid cabin wall was between me and them instead of the side containing an open window. Had Franklin bolted the front door? If the door was bolted, we were in for a prolonged shootout. If it wasn't, and I could burst inside with the element of surprise in my favor…

I moved within a yard of the door. I took the tightly rolled newspapers, found my matches, and lighted the paper. When I was sure it was going well, I positioned myself, shotgun in left hand, burning newspaper in right. I took a step backward, then slammed my heel into the cabin door with all the force in my leg muscles.

The door flew open. I tossed the flaming newspaper ahead of me into the center of the room. Startled exclamations greeted me as I darted inside and knelt down, out of line with the door. The newspaper sputtered, almost went out, then flared brightly. I recognized Blaze Franklin in a turtleneck sweater and slacks. Alongside him stood a trooper in uniform. Both were rigid in grotesque attitudes of surprise.

"Freeze!" I demanded, leveling the shotgun halfway between them. Moody reacted first-and fast. His right hand dipped toward the gun on his hip. I shifted my aim slightly and touched off the forward trigger. In the confined space the shotgun's roar shook the cabin. Moody was still upright while half his head and all his brains were plastered on the wall behind him. Then he spun in a half turn and fell forward on what was left of his face.

"Hold it!" I ordered Franklin, swinging the sawed-off toward him. I wanted him alive, but his gun was already halfway out of his shoulder holster. There was no time for further conversation. I squeezed the second trigger and gut-shot him. He went backward in a stutter step until he smashed into the stove, rebounded, doubled up, and hit the deck. The blast had almost cut him in two, but he was still alive. He crawled in circles on the floor like a huge wingless beetle.

He was still alive, but the first look was indication enough he was never going to tell me where the money was. I crossed the cabin and put a foot on him to stop the crawling. I went through his clothes rapidly. I took his wallet, keys, and.38, wiped the blood off my hands on his trouser legs, then backed toward the door. The crawling started up again, but more slowly.

Outside, I thought of putting a match to the cabin. It didn't seem necessary. If Moody didn't know why they were there, Franklin hadn't told anyone. It would be a long time before they were found, if ever. I still had one chance left at recovering the money and no time to waste.

I walked rapidly from the cabin to the road.

Dawn was painting the eastern sky flame-red when I reached the police cruiser. I stripped off the clothing that Spider Kern had provided, took Moody's uniform from its hanger in the back of the cruiser, and tried it on. It was too big, but that was much better than having it too small. I took reefs and tucks in it to make it look as presentable as I could. The trooper's hat was far too large. I padded its sweat band with the necktie that was also on the hanger. That helped considerably.

There was less than half an hour until full sunrise. I wadded up the discarded clothing and placed it on the front seat beside me as I got under the wheel. I backed the cruiser out onto the road and headed away from town. It was the wrong direction for what I eventually had in mind, but first I had to get back to Rafe James's car.

I parked the cruiser and scrambled through the brush to James's car. I started up the engine, backed out to the road to get traction and a short run, then rammed it straight ahead with the accelerator floored. Metal scraped and brush crashed. The front end reared up as the axle scaled a low stump. For a moment I thought that was it. Then the car slithered off the obstruction and lurched ahead again. The rear end bucked as the same stump caught the housing. That did it. The rear wheels whined as they spun without traction. I got out and made my way back to the road.

I looked back toward the car from the roadway. I couldn't see anything. I threw the keys into the woods on the other side of the road. It would take the combination of an accident for someone to find it and a major effort on the part of the finder if that automobile were ever returned to civilization.

I climbed into the cruiser again. There was a flashlight in the glove compartment, and by its light I read the address on Franklin's license. Three twenty-seven Riverside, Hudson, Florida. It was the same boarding house where he had lived when he and Lucille Grimes had been shaping nooses for my neck. I rolled the cruiser down the road until I found a spot where I could turn around without dropping a wheel into the ditch, then headed toward town.

The powerful motor made the cruiser feel as though it had wings compared to James's car. I switched on the police radio when I swung onto U.S. 19 and turned toward downtown Hudson. If the cruiser were labeled missing, I needed to know it. I didn't think it would be, though. Everything overheard at the cabin indicated that Franklin had enlisted Moody during the deputy's off-duty time. Since it was a fact of life in Hudson that deputies drove home in their cruisers, this one shouldn't be missed for a while.

I drove to Franklin's address and parked in front of his boarding house. Both boarders and neighbors were used to seeing cruisers parked there. I took Franklin's keys and his flashlight and ran up the front steps. The streetlights were still on, but a dirty gray daylight was infiltrating the area.

The front door had a Yale lock. That made it easy; there was only one Yale key on Franklin's key ring. Inside, I put the flash on the mailboxes in the hallway. The beam picked up the card with its faded typing in the name slot: Franklin, 2-C. I climbed the stairs, making no effort to move quietly. The boarders were used to all-hours comings and goings.

In the dark second-floor hallway I shone the light on doors until I found 2-C. I had to try three keys before the door opened. I went right to work inside. There was no point in being subtle. I opened drawers and dumped their contents. I stripped the bed and dragged the mattress onto the floor. I opened the closet and threw the clothing item by item into the center of the room. I checked the baseboards, the pictures on the walls, the lighting fixtures, the radiant heat unit. I checked every possible place where Franklin might have hidden the money.

I found ten fifty-dollar bills lying openly in a bureau drawer, and that was all. Franklin had cached the bulk of the money elsewhere, and he was never going to tell me where. I hadn't realized how much I had geared all my planning to recovery of the Phoenix loot. Counting the money in Franklin's wallet and what I'd found in the room with what I'd brought with me, I had less than four thousand dollars. Hiding out was expensive, and four thousand dollars wouldn't last long enough for me to lay low until my appearance became more normal. I would have to drive on to Colorado to dig up the other jar, or pull a job a lot sooner than I would have liked.

The sun was above the horizon when I closed the boarding house front door and walked down the steps to the cruiser. I headed north on U.S. 19. The cruiser was the least likely car on the road to attract official attention as long as it wasn't reported missing. The fact that I wore a uniform wouldn't hurt either.

I passed out of range of the Hudson sheriff department's radio after forty minutes. New voices took up the routine police calls on the same wave band. I knew that all law enforcement agencies except the state police and the largest cities used a common wavelength. Nothing appeared to be disrupting the even tenor of police routine that morning. I put plenty of highway behind me for four hours at ten mph above the speed limit, then turned west at Capps on Route 90-A.

I stopped at a large carwash on the outskirts of Talahassee and got a sandwich from a vending machine, then set out again. When I came to the city limits of DeFuniak Springs, I slowed down and took the river road. A few miles along it I saw what I was looking for, a freshly painted sign that said, tom walker's cabins. I was happy to see the fresh paint because it meant that Walker, a blind Negro, was still operating his seedy cabin camp as an underworld underground railway.

I drove past the sign and stopped at a roadside stand down the road. I bought two washable sport shirts and two pairs of washable slacks from an elderly colored woman. She eyed my trooper's uniform but didn't say anything. The second turn beyond her stand I found a dirt road and turned into it. Within a few yards semitropical foliage hemmed in the cruiser on both sides. I parked in deep shade where the car was almost engulfed in big trees.

The sound of the engine died out to be replaced by the sound of insects. I relaxed my hands on the steering wheel and drew a deep breath. It was still only eleven thirty A.M. I had reached this point with a minimum of difficulty, and if I connected with Blind Tom as I was sure I could, I had it made.

I stripped off the uniform, climbed into the back of the cruiser, and Went to sleep. When I woke, the car was in even deeper shadow. It was nearly sundown. I was in a lather of perspiration from the buildup of heat in the car, but rather than expose my new skin to mosquitoes I kept the windows closed. I knew what I had to do, but I needed darkness to do it.

When the thick blackness of the Florida night suddenly enveloped the area, I wriggled into sport shirt and slacks. With the aid of backup lights I inched my way out to the highway. I headed toward Tom Walker's Cabins, but a quarter mile away I turned into a sandy lane.

There was no road. The headlights picked out a baseball diamond, a horseshoe court, and a tennis backstop in the nighttime-quiet of the county park. I drove on dead pine needles through widely spaced trees to the riverbank. I stopped on a slight downgrade, cut the headlights, pulled up the emergency, and got out of the car, leaving the motor running.

I checked everything twice. Cash in my pocket and extra slacks and sport shirt on my arm. Everything else in the cruiser including the trooper's uniform, Franklin's keys, the sawed-off shotgun, and the clothing Spider Kern had supplied, which I'd brought with me in case I needed to get out of the uniform suddenly. It was too dark to see the swift-running current below me but I could hear it. I leaned through the front window, put the cruiser in gear, then released the emergency brake.

The car crept toward the bank. The front wheels went over, and then it hung. I thought I was going to have to push, but the bank crumpled under its weight and the cruiser lunged forward. It dropped off into the darkness with a splash I could hardly hear. I knew the river was deep enough at that point so it was unlikely the cruiser would ever be found.

I walked out to the highway and on to Blind Tom's. All the known artifacts of Chet Arnold had disappeared with the cruiser. If I could stay out of sight for a while, the break would be clean. The big advantage I had now was that no one knew what the ex-Chet Arnold looked like in his new incarnation.

I turned in from the highway at the cabin-camp entrance. The same crazily tilted, hand-lettered sign I remembered hung on the wall of the building that served as a gatehouse. The sign said OFFIS. The gate was chained, barring traffic unapproved by the "offis." Tom paid off to avoid surveillance. It was this factor that brought him steady customers.

The only light in the gatehouse came from the dial of a desktop radio. I knocked once and entered. A white-haired, elderly Negro sat at the shabby desk. "Hello, Tom," I said. "Can you take care of me for a while?"

His blind walleyes stared in my direction while his wrinkled features screwed up in concentration. Blind Tom

Walker had a fantastic memory for voices. "Mought be," he said cautiously at last. "Dependin'."

"I'd like to have the riverbank cabin with the full-size bed on the north branch of the Y, Tom."

"Flood got that one three-four years ago," he observed. "But I rebuilt." He was silent again, evaluating.

I remembered something. "How's Cordelia, Tom?" Cordelia was a five-foot female alligator Tom kept penned at the river's edge.

"Cordelia in love," Tom informed me solemnly.

"In love? Who with?"

"With love." Tom chuckled unexpectedly, a high-pitched cackle. "You take that cabin on the Y, the bulls courtin' Cordelia every night gonna keep you awake with their roarin'." He leaned back in his chair. "Drake," he said. "That's who you be. Drake. You fixed a thirty-two for me."

Seven years ago I had passed as Earl Drake, itinerant gunsmith, during my stay with Tom. Earl Drake had never been in trouble with police anywhere. It was as good a name as any. "That's right, Tom. Earl Drake. And this time I'd like to buy a thirty-two from you."

"They come high," he cautioned me.

"Like the cabin?"

He grinned toothlessly. "Hundred a week."

"Only if you fix me a mess of catfish Sunday evenings." He cackled again, then sobered. "Fixin' to stay awhile?"

"Yes."

"Then mought be we could shave a mite off the rate."

"What about the thirty-two?"

He fished a key from a ragged pocket of his tattered white pants and unlocked a drawer in the desk. "How 'bout this one?" he inquired, pulling out an automatic and handing it to me.

It was a German-made Sauer, the 1930 model with three-inch barrel and duralumin slide and receiver, which reduced its weight to fifteen ounces. I turned the knurled block at the rear of the slide and eased slide and assembly forward from the barrel. It was reasonably clean. The standard thumb safety was on the left side of the receiver and the magazine release catch was in the butt. Magazine capacity was seven cartridges, and it was fully loaded. Although hardly a modern gun, the Sauer was a well-made weapon.

"You've sold a thirty-two, Tom," I told him. "How much?"

He rose to his feet. "We'll settle up t'morra," he said. "C'mon."

He led the way from the office and struck out surefootedly in the darkness along a dim path. No flashlight was ever necessary for Blind Tom. I stayed close behind the sheen of his once-white pants. We took the north fork of the branch of the Y in the path that I remembered, and I could hear the river again. Tom was unlocking the door of a cabin high on the riverbank before I could even see it in the blackness. He handed me the key. "If Cordelia's beaus get noisy, throw a saucepan down," he advised me.

"I'll do that," I promised.

He went back down the path. I opened the cabin door, went in, and turned on the light. The flood that had taken the old cabin had been a blessing in disguise, I decided. Tom had rebuilt it completely and the furnishings, while not new, looked much more comfortable.

I made a quick, approving tour of the facilities, then started shedding clothes. My day had begun at eleven P.M. the previous night when Spider Kern had given me the all-clear signal to go into the hospital washroom and change into my escape clothing.

By any standards, it had been a full day.

I slid into bed and relaxed fully for the first time in nearly twenty-four hours.

Not Cordelia's beaus nor anything else woke me until morning sunlight streaming in the cabin window hit me in the face.