big car as it pulled out of the zone. Keeping well closed up, he followed her through the downtown traffic, and when they were on the open highway he fell back about a quarter mile, allowing two or three cars to get between them. The sun was setting now, and shadows were thickening in the moss-hung labyrinths of the live oaks on both sides of the road. Farmhouses were farther apart as they wound on into the bayou country.
As he watched the cars ahead he wondered suddenly and angrily if all this had anything to do with Vickie. Maybe he was just wasting time. But why, in the name of heaven, would a man who was trying to disappear announce where he was going, write a letter every day until he got there, and leave his car on the street to be picked up by the police?
He shook his head impatiently. The whole thing was crazy. What about the trailer hitch? If it hadn’t been a trailer Conway was pulling when he got here, it had to be a boat. But why? Was he going fishing? That was stupid; there were hundreds of places all over this bayou country that rented boats to fishermen. Not even an idiot would spend from three to five hundred dollars for a boat-and-trailer rig and go dragging it across the continent for a couple of days’ fishing when he could rent one.
And, he thought angrily, as he kept his distance behind the big car ahead, whoever had killed Mac had been no idiot. He had covered himself too beautifully; and Mac was nobody’s pushover, to begin with. He slowed abruptly. Up ahead in the gathering dusk the Cadillac had swung off the highway onto a shell-surfaced road leading south through the trees. Then he noticed with surprise that one of the cars between them was turning also. Was somebody else following her? Probably just a coincidence, he thought; if he was tailing her too, he’d be back here jockeying for third place with me.
He remembered, from his study of the road map, that the ship channel should be somewhere ahead in the direction they were going now. The highway roughly paralleled it, on the north side. Suddenly they were upon it. He came around a turn in the road and found the other two cars stopped at the approach to a big steel bridge showing ghostly in the twilight. The span was lifting, and a deep-laden tanker was easing slowly down the channel, its running lights glowing brightly against the dark walls of timber.
He stopped, grateful for the car between them. The tanker passed, a muted rumble of Diesels coming up through the ventilators, and the span started swinging down. About a mile farther along the middle car turned off onto a dirt road. And then she switched on her lights. It was going to be difficult from here on. In another few minutes at most he’d have to turn on his own, and she couldn’t help knowing there was a car behind her.
The country was changing now. They were running out of the timber into a flat marshland covered with cattails and high grass and crisscrossed with canals. He saw her lights swing sharply in a right-angled turn, and they were running directly into the fading afterglow of the sunset. It was a forbidding landscape. The dark plain swept away toward the horizon to the south and west as far as the eye could reach, the monotonous marsh growth shadowy and inhospitable in the gathering night. No habitation was visible anywhere, nothing but the road running ahead.
The warning began to sound suddenly in his mind. If this was actually where her caller had told her to come, it was beginning to smell.
He thought swiftly. He could speed up and pass her, force her to stop. Maybe he could talk her out of it. But, hell, he thought angrily, that would ruin everything. He’s down here somewhere, and if I make her turn back I may never find him or get another chance. I’m not her mother; she’s old enough to know what she’s doing.
It was ho good, and he knew it. He couldn’t let her do it. He cursed, flipped on the headlights, and hit the throttle. Then he saw the lights ahead of him swing sharp left as the road turned south again, deeper into the vast solitude.
The walls of grass flew back toward him and disappeared into the darkness behind. Wooden