perhaps he did. What made him jump was the sudden change in speed as the truck slowed down, crawling along the road with gears whining. Catell knew what it was without looking.
Roadblock.
Struggling as if in a morass, he came erect, the box with the gold under his arm. There were lights ahead, and without any thought but to get away, Catell jumped. Dragged down by the weight of the gold, he hit the pavement with a bad jolt, rolling sideways and into the ditch. He lay there feeling nothing but pain and terrible exhaustion. When he looked up, he could see five cars, all in a line, and the checkpoint. He could have yelled at them and they would probably have heard.
With the last twitching of his muscles he clawed himself slowly up the side of the ditch into the meager bushes that marked the end of another field. More lettuce, he thought, and then a thick unconsciousness dropped on him like a weight.
When the sharp sun hit his face he bolted up with a panic that knew no degrees. There was the road, here the field, his hand was on the battered box heavy on the ground. The road was empty and even the checkpoint looked deserted in the sun. The barricades were farther than he had thought. And there was no one in sight.
Hefting his box, Catell got up and turned toward the field.
“Hey!”
They were there, two of them, by the barricade. “Hey, you!”
Catell turned the other way, down the highway.
They were there.
As in a bad dream, they had popped from nowhere, coming toward him. Catell started to run across the field.
“Hey, Mack, stop!”
For a second the old anger rose in him, giving strength to his flight, but then there wasn’t enough. All he could do was run, the box dragging on his arms. The box? My gold, he thought. This is my gold.
With a sullen stubbornness he made his feet thump along the narrow rut. They were behind him, yelling sometimes, but he didn’t have the strength to turn. Even the fear had left him. In front of Catell the lettuce field stretched to the horizon. The long vanishing lines of the field converged as in a nightmare, gathering him forward as if in a rush of speed, but never changing, never making the horizon come. The sky was wide and naked, the field lay in a shadowless sprawl, there was nothing but the nightmare lines leading nowhere.
Catell’s legs pounded the sod with monotony. He didn’t know whether they were coming; he didn’t consider whether they were coming. Trapped in an expanse of nothingness he went forward, forward, and when the horizon changed it was like a sudden shock to him.
Sloping down the field, he hit a row of trees and bushes that grew along the edge of a creek. On the other side was another thicket and beyond that a field. But Catell didn’t look that far. When he plunged into the narrow underbrush they came across the rise behind him, but Catell didn’t think about that, either. Gasping painfully, he stumbled on, looking only for the densest, darkest place in the nightmare of his flight.
Where the low creek had broken the soft bank, Catell crawled under an overhang of roots and earth. Dragging the heavy box along the ground, he squeezed and burrowed into the recessed space, like a night animal seeking the shelter of the dark. Then he just lay still. He listened to the roaring in his ears, the hard beat of his straining heart, and he could also hear the soft sifting of the earth that ran down from above, gently. He fingered the box absently while his dull eyes looked along the creek. A little farther down he could see the battered form of an old house, black in the brash sun, and on the side of the house a large old water wheel that had not turned in a long time.
The little stream, the sun filtering through the leaves, the old wheel of the mill in the light—it was a romantic scene that lay before Catell.
Then his ears caught the voices and the rustling. They were here. Catell heard it but didn’t move, except to push his heels into the earth to lean closer into the damp, close hole he had found. Catell was tired. He lay there looking, and he never thought that they might get him. When the voices had passed above him he moved once, to shift his weight. After a while his idling fingers touched the box at his side. Turning his eyes to see his gold, Catell undid the latch. The box toppled, lid open.
He looked for his gold but saw nothing. There was no strength in him to turn the box and shake it out. Catell leaned forward, looking, and the sun brought out a quick white gleam deep in the box. It crossed his mind that the gleam should be yellow, a warm gold yellow, but his thought was without interest and he let it pass. Then he pushed the box out of the way to rest himself more closely against the covering earth.
He did not look at the gold again. It sat inside, in the dark hole where it had lived out its rottenness, with only a lost speck of mercury to show what had happened. It was clean gold again.
Once more Catell moved. It was then that the new ache spread through his chest, and he had to raise his head to get breath. It suddenly gripped his chest with a hellish pain, ripping at his heart and freezing the motion of his chest.
That too passed, and Catell sat quietly a while longer.
When they found him the sun was in his open eyes and they were staring at the wheel that had stopped turning a long time ago.
Acclaím for the Work of Peter Rabe!
“As cold and clean as a knife…terrific.”
—Donald E. Westlake
“Hard, fast and memorable.”
—New York Herald Tribune
“A dry, wry approach to the novel of violence.”
—Anthony Boucher, New York Times
“One of the most gifted writers of paperback originals, writing some of the best crime fiction to come out of the 1950s.”
—George Tuttle
“Tooth-grinding tension in a classic noir milieu. It’s a crime that Rabe isn’t better known.”
—Booklist
“He had few peers among noir writers of the 50s and 60s; he has few peers today.”
—Bill Pronzini
“When he was rolling, crime fiction just didn’t get any better.”
—Ed Gorman, Mystery Scene
Some Other Hard Case Crime Books You Will Enjoy:
DEAD STREET by Mickey Spillane
DEADLY BELOVED by Max Allan Collins
A DIET OF TREACLE by Lawrence Block
MONEY SHOT by Christa Faust
ZERO COOL by John Lange
SHOOTING STAR/SPIDERWEB by Robert Bloch
THE MURDERER VINE by Shepard Rifkin
SOMEBODY OWES ME MONEY
by Donald E. Westlake
NO HOUSE LIMIT by Steve Fisher
BABY MOLL by John Farris
THE MAX by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr
THE FIRST QUARRY by Max Allan Collins
GUN WORK by David J. Schow
FIFTY-TO-ONE by Charles Ardai
KILLING CASTRO by Lawrence Block
THE DEAD MAN’S BROTHER by Roger Zelazny
THE CUTIE by Donald E. Westlake
HOUSE DICK by E. Howard Hunt
CASINO MOON by Peter Blauner
FAKE I.D. by Jason Starr
PASSPORT TO PERIL by Robert B. Parker
Copyright
A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK
(HCC-058)
August 2009
Published by
Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.
200 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10016
in collaboration with Winterfall LLC
Copyright © 1955 by Peter Rabe
Cover painting copyright © 2009 by Robert McGinnis
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
E-ISBN: 978-1-4285-0722-7
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by Cooley Design Lab
Typeset by Swordsmith Productions
The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.
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