red mountain of flame.

Eleven

We shot out the gate and across the pavement. As we plunged into the path by the power line I heard a siren behind us, somewhere in town. Somebody had reported the shots.

I could hear her laboring for breath, trying to keep up. She stumbled in the dark and I yanked her up savagely by her arm. I wished she were dead. I wished she’d never been born, or that I had never heard of her. She had wrecked it all. I didn’t even know any more why I was dragging her with me. Maybe it was pure reflex.

I had the keys out of my pocket before we reached the dense shadow under the trees where we’d left the car. I threw the bag in and began to punch the starter while she was running around to the other side and climbing in. The ceiling light flicked on and then off again as both doors closed, and in that short instant of time and in all the madness some part of my mind was still clear enough to grasp the awful thing I hadn’t noticed until now, until it was too late.

She didn’t have her purse.

Her hands were empty. She had left the purse back there in the house. Tires screamed as we shot ahead down the hill. I ground on the throttle, peering ahead into the lights for the turn that would come flying back at us. She didn’t have the purse. I saw the turn just in time. We slammed into it and threw gravel over into the field as we skidded around, and then we were straightened out again.

The highway was coming up now. No cars were in sight. We hurtled onto it, headed south. I was raging.

She’d killed Diana James and brought the cops down on us. All the roads would be blocked inside of an hour. And the big, final, most horrible joke of all was that the thing I had been after all the time, the thing that had got me into this, was gone. I thought of those three keys fire-blackened and lost forever in the ashes of the house. Even the thousand dollars in cash was gone. We had nothing. We were wanted by all the police in the country, and didn’t have enough money to hide ourselves for a week.

She took a cigarette out of the breast pocket of the robe and lit it, and leaned back in the seat. “You appear to be unhappy about something,” she said.

“You little fool!”

“Didn’t you appreciate the funeral pyre for your charming friend?” she asked calmly. “I thought it rather a nice touch. Something Wagnerian about it.”

“You stupid—”

I choked. It was no use. It was beyond me. I could only watch the highway flying back at us in the night. And watch the rear-view mirror for cars behind us. Where would they try to block us? Beyond that next town? Or before?

“You are provoked, aren’t you?”

I found the words at last. “Don’t you realize yet what you’ve done?” I raged at her. “You might as well have called them on the phone and told ‘em where we were. We’ve got about a chance in a million of getting away. And on top of that, you went off and left the thing we came back for.”

“Oh,” she said easily. “I see now what’s bothering you. You mean the keys?”

“Where did you leave the purse? Not that it matters now.”

“I didn’t leave it,” she said. “It’s in that bag.”

I felt suddenly weak. Then I remembered that the only reason I had picked the bag up back there in the basement in all that confusion had been the fact that I’d stumbled over it. I felt even weaker. It was nearly a minute before I could even talk.

“All right. But look. By this time your whole lawn is full of cops. They’ve got radio cars. And there are only four highways out of Mount Temple. They’re all going to be plugged. We may not get past the next town.”

“Quite right,” she said. “We don’t even go to the next town. About six miles ahead, just before you go down into that river bottom, a dirt road turns off to the right. It runs west about ten miles and crosses another country road going south.”

“How far south can we get on it?”

“I’m not sure. But there are a number of them, and by switching back and forth we should be able to go over a