whatever her name was, or why she changed her name.”
“Well, that’s good,” she said.
“Shut up till I finish. There’s just one thing I care about, and you’d better be telling the truth about that. If there’s not any hundred and twenty thousand in those three boxes, or you try to run out with it, hell will never hold you.”
“Don’t worry. It’s there.”
“Baby,” I said, “it had better be.”
Twelve
We tried the radio.
It crooned, and gave away thousands of dollars, and told jokes cleaned up with kissing, and groaned as private eyes were hit on the head, and poured sirup on us, and after a long time there was some news. Big Three, it said, and investigation, and tax cut, and budget, and Senator Frammis in a statement this morning, but nothing about Butler.
It was too soon.
We were pounding over a rough road in a vacuum of dead silence and blackness while all around us the sirens were screaming and teletypes were chattering and police cars were taking stations on highways intersecting a circle they had drawn on the map like a proposition in plane geometry, but it was too soon for anybody to know about it except the hunters and the hunted.
I cursed and turned the radio off.
She lit a cigarette and leaned back in the seat. “Don’t be so intense, Mr. Scarborough,” she said with amusement. “We’ll get through. Cyclops is feeling only the backs of the sheep.”
“What?”
“Never mind. I guess they haven’t made a comic book of it yet.”
“Go choke yourself,” I said.
“A month. One whole, enchanting month.”
“Don’t worry. If I can stand it for a hundred and twenty grand, you should be able to put up with it to stay out of the electric chair.”
“It would seem so, wouldn’t it?”
I shrugged her off and concentrated on driving. We came out at last on the intersecting east-west road and turned right, watching for the one that crossed going south. I looked at the time. It was nearly eleven. The few farmhouses we passed were dark. I began to watch the gasoline gauge. It was dropping faster than I had expected. It must be nearly thirty miles to that small town on the map. And if we got there too late, everything might be closed.
It was a race between the gas gauge and the clock. When we saw the lights of the little town ahead it was ten minutes till midnight and the gauge had been on empty for two miles.
“Get down out of sight while we go through,” I said.
“Aren’t we going to get gasoline?” she asked.
“Not with you in the car.”
She got down, squatting on the floor with her head and shoulders on the seat. I drove through without stopping, looking for an open gas station and knowing that if we didn’t find one we were sunk. It was a one-street town two blocks long, with half a dozen cars parked in the puddle of light in front of the lone cafe. There was a garage at the end of the street, on a corner.
It was open.
The attendant in white coveralls stood in the empty drive between the pumps and watched us go past. I’d been afraid of that. But it couldn’t be helped. Anything moving at all in a town like this would be seen.
I drove on, past the scattered dark houses at the edge of town, hoping there would be enough left in the tank to get back. We went around a curve and the lights were gone, swallowed up in the night behind us. I slowed. We crossed a wooden bridge where willows grew out over the roadside ditch. I slid to a stop.
“Wait right here,” I said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. And don’t show yourself on the road until you’re sure it’s me. I’ll flip the lights up and down before I stop.”
“All right,” she said. She got out of the car.
There were no cars in sight. I made a fast U turn and headed back.
I stopped in the pool of light in the driveway. The attendant came over. He was a big black-headed kid with a grin. “Fill ‘er up?” he asked, looking at me with faint curiosity. He knew it was the same car he’d just seen going past headed south.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s empty. Just lucky I noticed it before I got clear out of town.”
He shoved the nozzle in the tank. It was the automatic type that shuts itself off. He went around in front and checked