with her? What kind of woman is she for you? Don’t you know that she confessed tonight, after they got her back to Harrisville?”
Suddenly she let go my shirt and became deadly calm.
“We’re too wild to use our heads. We’ve got to stop it. I don’t think you understand, and I want you to be perfectly quiet while I tell you. I love you. And I can take you out of here. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And if you try to take her out of that jail in Harrisville they’ll kill you. And even if you got her out, you know what would happen, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said again. Somehow, in all the mad urgency of it, there was enough sense left in me to know that she was right.
“They’ll have every road blocked. They’ve got radio cars all around that lake, and they’d be swinging out and onto every road in this end of the state in a matter of minutes. You’d be trapped. Now, will you listen to me?”
We were both silent for a minute, staring at each other. Somehow I was as calm as she was now and I understood everything she had said, and I knew that none of it made any difference at all. “Where are the keys, Dinah?”
She dropped her head and turned away from me. “They’re in my purse. In the bedroom.” She walked over and sat down in a big armchair, not looking at me any more or saying anything.
I ran out and across the hall to the bedroom and found the purse on a dresser. I took out the keys and the roll of wet bills that had been in my suit. Catching a glimpse of my face again in the mirror, I suddenly remembered I should have shaven, but there wasn’t time for it now. I pawed hurriedly through Buford’s bag, however, and found the razor and some shaving soap, and stuck them in my pocket. One of his big hats was lying on a chest, and I snatched it up and put it on. It would hide the ugly cut.
I came back across the hall and she hadn’t moved. “I’m sorry about the car, Dinah,” I said.
“Yes. Isn’t it too bad about the car?” She turned away and put her head down on her arms.
I went down the stairs and backed the Lincoln out of the garage.
* * *
Time was a burning fuse. It was twenty-eight miles to Harrisville and I made it in twenty-five minutes by the clock on the dash. There were no patrol cars on the road, and I knew they were all back there covering the roads on both sides of the lake. Raines and all his deputies would be down there. In the wilderness of the irresistible compulsion that had hold of me now there was some part of my mind still calm and thinking about it. There shouldn’t be anybody there except the jailer himself.
I stopped the car right in front of the entrance and got out. It was still dark, and the glaring pool of light from a street lamp was shiny against the leaves of the trees along the street. In one of the windows of the jail a Negro was singing, an insane dirge with something about the Lawd over and over.
I went up and knocked on the door. It opened a little and I shoved my way in. He was alone in the office, a lank, sandy-haired man of about forty-five with a lean, sour face, and tough eyes with a little yellow in them like a goat’s. He was wearing wide police-type suspenders to hold up his seersucker pants, but had taken off his shirt on account of the heat.
“I want Mrs. Shevlin,” I said. “Open it up.” I prodded toward the steel-barred door in the back of the office.
He looked at me, and I could see he knew who I was. “Go to hell,” he said.
I saw the ring of keys on his desk, next to the detective magazine he had been reading, “Open it up,” I said. “What cell is she in?”
“You can go to hell,” he said again. He had been sidling a little toward the desk, and suddenly he lunged for the open drawer. I hit him over the eye with the flat of the gun barrel and he doubled up on the desk. Yanking him erect, I shook him, and then threw him back against the wall. “Get smart,” I said.