The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries

Last Run of the Night

Originally appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, January 1967.

The thin, hump-shouldered old man got off the bus at Trivet Street, and Marika was the sole remaining passenger.

The rear door closed with a hiss as the old man’s shadow dissolved in the late-night darkness. The Diesel engine eased from an idling whisper to a sullen growl. An awkward sluggard, the bus lumbered from the curb-side stop.

As the lonely, deserted street crawled beneath the bus, the soft rattle of the empty seats jabbed at Marika. The night was warm, with a summer mist transforming the pale street lights into ornaments of silver; but a shudder built inside Marika and snaked through her.

“Anything wrong?” The driver’s voice had the rough edges of an untutored man; but it was a strong baritone, a human sound intruding into the emptiness.

The bus was sighing past freight yards, a trailer park, the lights of a small manufacturing plant, and rumbling toward desolate tracts of undeveloped suburban land. Marika pulled her gaze from the forlorn scenery. The driver was looking at her reflection in the curved mirror that gave him full visual scope of his bus.

A small breath gusted from Marika. “No, I’m all right.”

“You look mighty pale to me.” The driver hesitated. He was a big powerful man, his beef competent to handle the bus as if it were a toy. He turned his head to flick a glance at her. She was sitting on the right, three seats from the front of the bus.

“If you’re sick, lady, I can stop this heap for a minute.” He had a reddish-golden coloration, a face that had been hacked from hard rock maple with a dull ax. “I got no real schedule to make. Last run of the night. To the end of the line, then on to the bus garage. Won’t matter if I’m a couple of minutes late.”

“Thanks, but I’m feeling better.” Marika opened her large handbag, took out a wisp of handkerchief, touched it to her face. “For a minute there — being alone at this hour — I got a little jumpy, I guess.”

The driver had again centered his attention on the suburban parkway, Sherman Boulevard. The creases in the back of his neck yawned as he dipped his head in a nod. “Yeah, after what’s happened, I guess some jumpiness is natural.”

Marika studied his reflection in the windshield. It was erased by the flowing shadows of a stretch of tall trees. Marika gave a little laugh.

“I’m such a ninny sometimes.”

“Ninny, my eye.” A plaque over the windshield announced the driver’s name: Your Operator, G. G. Harbison. “When a couple of girls get murdered out here, it’s time for a — a beautiful young woman to let a ninny streak show.”

His voice had softened when it fumbled for the descriptive adjective.

Marika slid her eyes from him. Beautiful? The word wasn’t often used to describe her. She was of sturdy Slavic stock, and she was intelligent enough to know herself for what she was. Her figure wasn’t bad, if judged by a big-woman standard. Neither was her face, its broad planes and high cheekbones softened by her mass of gleaming black hair. Attractive? Yes, definitely attractive. Young, healthy, robust, attractive. But hardly beautiful.

Outside, nothing bearing a light was any longer visible. Even traffic on Sherman Boulevard had disappeared. The indistinct shadows of a few shacks, a tumbledown garage, slipped past.

The soft hissing of the tires became the sibilant whisper of a creature lurking in the darkness. The Diesel, settling into a steady rhythm, began to chant. Dead — dead — dead — dead—

“Have you—” Marika started at the sound of her own voice — “been on this run long?”

“Couple of months,” Harbison said.

“Do you like it?”

The shoulders that bulged the gray uniform jacket went up, down. “It’s okay. It pays a buck. I guess I like it better than the company does. They lose money, running a city transit bus all the way out to the new shopping center and housing development. But they got to do it. Something about their franchise — I dunno the details. Anyhow, they should bellyache, the way they got the city bus business locked up.”

The headlights of a short string of cars suddenly danced by.

Harbison glanced into the interior-view mirror. “You live in one of the new homes in Sherman Forest?”

“No,” Marika said, “but I’m going all the way — to the end of the line.”

For a full minute Harbison divided his attention between the road and mirror. Marika knew he was trying to figure her. She didn’t live out there. She didn’t have a suitcase, so she wasn’t going for a visit. A visit—

Harbison lifted a muscle-corded hand from the steering wheel and raked it across his lips. A visit. Her nervousness. Maybe some jerk in a fancy Sherman Forest home had a wife who wasn’t home, had cozy music on the stereo and a bottle of if champagne waiting on ice—

Marika slipped a small rat-tail comb from her handbag, touched it to the ends of her hair.

“You got somebody to meet you?” Harbison asked.

She shook her head.

“You be careful,” he said, a rough note in his voice. “If you got far to walk from the end of the line, you be careful.”

“I will,” she promised.

“It’s late, and you ought to have somebody to meet you.”

“I’ll be okay.”

The Sherman Forest development formed a lazy curve around a large lake. Moonlight lay in a bank of silver to the farther shore.

“Did you know them?” Marika asked.

“Who?”

“The two girls.”

“Oh, no,” he said. “They rode my bus now and then — both of them worked out here. One was a maid, the other a nurse to an old invalid lady. I’d nod and say hello, but I didn’t know their names or anything until I read about them in the papers.”

“The papers sure made the most of it,” Marika remarked.

“They always do.”

She shivered. “They said that the man — before he strangled them — assaulted them.”

“The dumb bulls will never catch the guy, either.”

“Why do you say that?”

He met her glance briefly in the mirror. “Do they ever?”

“Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes they do. If they get suspicious, they have ways, I’ve heard.”

The negative shake of the square-hewn reddish face was emphatic. “But not this time. This guy is too slick for them. He could be anybody. Right on this bus — if we had another passenger.”

Marika folded her arms and hugged herself. Framed in the bus window, a palatial country estate swam in the moonlight, a Colonial-style mansion remote and austere.

“Do you—” Marika’s teeth chattered. “Do you think the man is still around?”

“Who knows? Maybe he’s a rich young guy sleeping peaceful in a Sherman Forest home right at this minute. Maybe he’s a fiddle-footed character five states away. Maybe—”

The tires keened in the silence. A gleeful note crept into the insidious chanting of the Diesel.

“Yes?” Marika prompted.

“Forget it.”

“But you—”

“Forget it, I said!”

“Well, okay! If you want to be that way about it, okay!”

His eyes sought hers in the mirror. “So if you insist,” he said, a tight, thin laugh behind his voice. “The guy may be somebody who likes to find a dark corner and wait for the bus to arrive. Wait to see what’s getting off the Route 109, Sherman Forest bus.”

“I’ve made you angry,” she said.

“Why should I be angry?”

“But you are.”

“No,” he barked. “I’m not sore. You’re old enough to know what you’re doing. You want to go around asking for it, that’s your business!”

“I’m not asking for it. I have to go to Sherman Forest, that’s all.”

“At this hour?”

“Why not?”

“Nothing’s open there at this hour, unless it’s a house where somebody is expecting you.”

Marika tossed her head in a flash of contrived haughtiness. “I’ll admit I wanted some conversation, but you’ve got no right to pry into my personal affairs.”

He looked at her in the mirror. His teeth snapped together. His voice dropped to such a low pitch that it was almost lost in the shrilling of the tires. “Like I told the dumb bulls, I haven’t seen a thing. No suspicious guys riding my bus, none hanging around the shopping center stop. Like I’m telling you. The guy is too slick to get caught. And you’re too dumb not to.”

“Now look here! You’ve got a real nerve—”

“Dumb and no good.”

“I won’t listen to any further—”

“And just like the others,” he said. “Husky just like them. And dark. Know what the cops said? Said maybe the guy had a thing about husky, dark women. Maybe his mother had been a dark, husky woman and she’d hated him and he’d hated her, or maybe there was a dark, husky woman later in his life who gave him the business real good.”

Marika’s eyes were fixed on him.

The thin, cold laugh scratched its way past his throat. His foot suddenly hit the brake. Marika was thrown forward. He wrestled the wheel. The bus tilted, swayed, then lurched onto a side road.

He killed the lights before the bus had stopped moving, and the vehicle was swallowed in the shadows flung by a canopy of trees.

Marika crouched in the far corner of the seat. Bits of leaf-filtered moonlight outlined his heavy silhouette. He was getting out of the driver’s seat. Moving slowly. Taking his time. Savoring his madness, relishing this suspended moment.

Nearer and nearer the huge bulk of him came. His laugh was a rumble far more grim than the Diesel chanting had been.

“Go ahead, number three, and scream,” he said. “Let me hear you scream one time. There’s nobody but me to hear you — not a soul. Scream, I say!”

But Marika did not scream. Instead, her hand slid into her large handbag. The pin on her policewoman’s badge pricked her knuckle slightly as her fingers slid past to curl around the butt of her service revolver.