The Copper Frame

Chapter 15

At a quarter of six Simmons picked up his empty glass and rose to his feet.

“You can put on your things,” he said to Saxon, enunciating his words with great care. He moved toward the central hall in an unwavering line, but a little too rapidly, just brushing one side of the doorway as he passed.

Saxon reached for his overshoes and put them on while still seated. When he got up from the sofa, Farmer Benton lifted the gun from his lap and covered him as he shrugged into his coat.

Simmons returned overcoated, hatted, and wearing a pair of rubbers. He was carrying a second coat, hat, and pair of galoshes. Dropping the galoshes on the floor, he tossed the coat and hat onto the chair where he had been seated. Then he produced his gun and held it on Saxon while his partner put his away and got dressed for outdoors.

When Farmer Benton was ready, Simmons took off his hat and dropped it over his gun hand. Again carefully enunciating, he said to Saxon, “I will be right behind you on the way out. If we meet anyone, it will look like I’m carrying my hat, and I would hate to blow a hole in it. Get the idea?”

“Yeah,” Saxon growled. “You mean if I try anything, you’ll shoot me in the back.”

“You understand perfectly,” Simmons said with a smile. “You can run interference, Farmer. Go ahead.”

Benton frowned at him. “You’re pretty gassed, Hard-nose. Better let me trail.”

“Just get going,” Simmons snapped at him.

Benton gave his partner an irritated look, but he didn’t argue. Striding over to the door, he opened it and peered into the hall.

“All clear,” he announced in a sullen voice.

He stepped out into the hall and Simmons gestured Saxon toward the door, falling into line a step behind him. Simmons paused at the door long enough to click off the light switch next to it and set the spring lock before stepping outside and pulling the door shut behind him. Farmer Benton had already reached the stairway and had stopped there, and Saxon was halfway to him.

“Hold it!” Simmons ordered.

Saxon halted. The man up ahead peered down the stairwell, then signaled them to come on.

By the time Saxon reached the stair landing, with Simmons right behind him, Benton was at the bottom of the stairs. After glancing both ways along the lower hall, Benton again gave the all-clear signal. Then he moved on to the front door.

No one except Benton was in sight when Saxon stepped into the outdoor cold with Simmons still only a step behind. At this time of year sunset came at about four-thirty, so it was quite dark by now. A light snow dimmed the light cast by a nearly full moon. The temperature seemed to have fallen since 2 P.M. Saxon judged it at about zero.

Farmer Benton waited on the front sidewalk for them to join him. When they reached him, Simmons glanced up and down the street. Aside from Saxon’s Plymouth, parked directly in front of the building, there were only two cars parked on the block. One was across the street, the other on this side about a quarter of a block back. The windshield wipers of the second were working, indicating someone was in it, though it had no lights on.

It seemed that for whatever reason Spider Wertz had been waiting, it wasn’t to furnish them transportation, for after one glance that way, Simmons looked at the Plymouth.

“This your car?” he asked Saxon.

It seemed useless to deny it, for of the only other two cars in sight, one was their friend’s and the other, across the street, must have been the one Benton and Simmons had arrived in. Saxon merely nodded.

“Get in from this side and slide over under the wheel.”

Taking his keys from his pocket, Saxon unlocked the car door, opened it, and worked his way across the seat to the driver’s side. Simmons slid in next to him, lifted the hat concealing his gun, and put it on his head. Without taking his eyes from Saxon, he reached behind the seat with his left hand to unlock the rear door.

Climbing in back, Farmer Benton settled himself in the seat before asking, “What’s with Spider back there?”

“He saw us come out,” Simmons said. “He’ll trail.”

“Trail where?” the man in the back seat asked fretfully. “It’d be nice if you’d let me know what the hell the plans are.”

“You’ll find out when we get there,” Simmons said. “All right, Saxon. Head straight east until you hit Route Twenty.”

Saxon glanced sideways at the gun. Simmons sat with his back against the door, the gun butt steadied on his thigh and the muzzle pointed unwaveringly at Saxon’s midriff. If it happened to go off, he would die rather messily, Saxon realized. He decided not to make any sudden moves that might inspire it to go off, at least until he discovered how lethal the plans for him were. Starting the engine, he switched on his wipers and his lights and pulled away from the curb. After a moment he leaned forward to turn the heater and defroster both to high. In the rear-view mirror he saw the other car’s lights go on. The car pulled out to follow.

Despite the cold, by the time they were within a block of Route Twenty, the car’s heater had made the interior of the car quite comfortable. Simmons unbuttoned his overcoat.

“Which way on Twenty?” Saxon asked.

“Southwest. You’re going home.”

This time Simmons’s enunciation was not so precise. There was a definite slur in his voice. Saxon wondered if the car heater was having an effect.

Turning right on Twenty, Saxon said, “Why are you accompanying me home? I know the way.”

“Wanna make sure you get there. Car following will bring us back.”

If it hadn’t been for the trailing car, the lights of which he could see only a few yards behind in the rear-view mirror, Saxon would have been sure this was a death ride. But if the men intended to shoot him and dump his body somewhere, there was no point in the second car. They could drive his back to Buffalo after committing the murder and simply abandon it somewhere. Saxon could imagine no purpose for the trailing car other than transportation back to Buffalo for Simmons and Benton. Which was reassuring, even though it was also puzzling.

It wasn’t until they crossed the Route Seventy-five turn-off to Hamburg that he began to get an inkling of what Simmons had in mind.

The man said, “’Bout five miles on there’s a bridge across a ravine. Pull over on the shoulder this side of it.”

Saxon knew the ravine he referred to, which was only about four miles out of Iroquois. Steep-sided, it was about thirty feet deep. The road was straight there, so there were no guard rails at the approach to the bridge. And except for the ravine, the ground was flat. A car fitted with snow tires, such as Saxon’s, with an unconscious man behind the wheel and the throttle wedged to the floor, could be aimed to go off the road just before the bridge, and would have no trouble plowing its way across the few yards of snow-covered ground before it nosed over the thirty-foot drop.

The reason for the trailing car ceased to puzzle Saxon. It was necessary for his captors’ transportation back to Buffalo, because his wouldn’t be in condition to drive. They planned to leave the Plymouth, with him in it, crushed out of shape at the bottom of the ravine.

Saxon’s mind began to race. Once he pulled over on the shoulder and stopped, he knew it would be all over. Probably the man in the back seat would knock him unconscious the moment he set the hand brake. His only hope of escape was to attempt to catch his would-be murderers off balance while the car was still in motion.

With a gun leveled directly at him, this would have been equally hopeless, except for the fact that Hardnose John Simmons was feeling his liquor. Each time the man spoke, his tongue got a little thicker. By all physical laws, the man’s rate of reaction in emergency should slow in direct proportion to his increasing difficulty with speech.

The snowfall, which had been light when they started, had steadily thickened. Also, here in relatively open country where there were no buildings to block the wind, gusts periodically tugged at the car in attempts to wrest it off the road. Because of the Thru-way, which paralleled it, Route Twenty was never heavily traveled along here, and tonight it was virtually deserted. They had met but one car going in the opposite direction since they had left Buffalo.

To suit driving conditions, Saxon had adjusted his speed from the legal limit of fifty to only about thirty, which gave him extra time to plan a course of action.

He had made up his mind before they were within a mile of the bridge. Having made it up, he concentrated on driving until the near end of the bridge’s stone railing hove into sight through the screen of falling snow.

“Pull over here,” Simmons ordered thickly.

Saxon took his foot from the accelerator. As the car started to slow, his right hand suddenly left the wheel and slashed sideways, palm down. The hard edge of his gloved hand caught John Simmons squarely above the bridge of the nose.

Saxon’s stomach convulsed against the expected blow of a bullet. Instead, there was a thump as Simmons’s gun hit the floor. The man slumped forward to crack his head against the windshield.

Saxon pushed the throttle to the floor and aimed the car at a point just to the right of the stone bridge railing.

Behind him in the rear seat he imagined that Farmer Benton was frantically clawing beneath his arm for his gun, but he didn’t have time to worry about that danger. By the time his front wheel hit the narrow, two-foot-high ridge of piled-up snow at the edge of the shoulder, the car was traveling at fifty miles an hour. It plowed right through, although the impact considerably slowed it, then surged forward again as the snow tires bit into the shallower snow covering the ground beyond the ridge.

It was only about fifteen yards from where the Plymouth left the road to the edge of the ravine. Saxon’s left hand hit the door handle and his shoulder simultaneously bucked open the door. He left the car in a headlong dive just before it ran over the lip of the ravine.

As he slid along on his face in a foot of soft snow, he heard the agonized shriek of bending and tearing metal from the bottom of the ravine. Inconsequentially he wondered if he had remembered to pay his insurance.

When he climbed shakily to his feet, the car that had been trailing them was parked on the shoulder with its headlights murkily illuminating the scene through the heavily falling snow. And ten yards away, between Saxon and the car, Farmer Benton was scrambling erect. Saxon hadn’t even been conscious of the man’s jumping from the rear of the Plymouth.

Benton spotted Saxon at the same moment. Jerking off his right glove, he shot his hand inside the front of his overcoat. The headlights of the parked car glinted on the barrel of the forty-five automatic as it came out.

Saxon took three running steps and slid down the steep bank of the ravine on the seat of his pants. Snow made it a frictionless ride. He sailed down as smoothly as if riding a child’s playground slide, landing on his feet at the bottom.