never going to get the fuck by with it. They’ll trace you down, and they’ll get you. They’ll get you, and they’ll do you in. So I’ll goddamn follow you, if I have to.” He reached and grabbed his own GI overcoat. “You crazy son of a bitch, I’ll follow you and camp right outside your fucking doorstep, until you come back.”
By this time it had all become a big joke to just about everybody in the suite, except Strange and Landers.
“You can’t do it. You’ll never get away with it,” Strange half shouted. “You’re ruining your fucking life. I’m not going to let you.”
Several people tried to shout him down. In the end Landers had practically to tear himself out of Strange’s arms, to get out of the door. It was only through the ministrations of Annie, plus some help from Frances Highsmith, that Strange was kept from following.
“I’m only taking him to my place, Johnny. I promise I’ll call you from there. I swear I promise.”
“Where is this place that’s your place?” Strange demanded, shouting. “Nobody knows where the fuck you are. I’d never find him.”
“No. And not just anybody’s going to know, where my place is. Either,” Annie said. “A girl’s got to have some privacy. In her life. Around this stinking mess.”
It was only on the strength of the promise to call that they were finally able to get outside.
And they did call him, after Annie had talked to Charlie Waterfield in Barleyville. Strange insisted on talking to Landers. Landers talked to him for five minutes, but was unable to convince him he was only taking a small AWOL vacation. He could only get off the line by promising faithfully that he would call tomorrow.
“I hate to lie to him,” he said heavily, when he finally hung up.
“Come on,” Annie said. “If you don’t hurry, we’ll miss your bus.”
At the bus station he waved to her in the sea of faces until the bus turned out from the stall, and her face swung away with the others into invisibility. Then he was off on his single-handed, one-man adventure, alone. As soon as she was out of sight, it was curiously as if she had never existed. And deep down, he felt very righteous and very Christian, if a little sick.
But he couldn’t help wondering what kind of a looking guy Charlie Waterfield must be.
CHAPTER 27
IT WAS THREE in the morning, when the Greyhound pulled up for Landers in Barleyville. Landers hadn’t the least idea of what to expect. And didn’t much care. The windswept little town square was empty, nothing was open. The driver had some bundles of newspapers to deliver, depositing them against the closed storefront of the newsstand. Then the big door closed, and the hissing of the big bus’s air brakes whispered, fading across the square.
Almost at once, a tall figure in a sheepskin coat and a semi-Western-style hat stepped leisurely out from the shelter of a storefront, into the cold wind.
“Marion Landers?”
Landers said he was. “Charlie Waterfield. Annie’s dad,” the other said. He was a lean man, but even in the heavy sheepskin you could see he had the paunch of a heavy drinker.
“Might as well go somewhere where there’s lights and people,” he said.
There was an official sheriff’s car parked across the street against the courthouse square. The courthouse was a red brick and white clapboard affair. It had a Sheriff’s Office sign on it, and Landers realized Waterfield could have waited for the bus there, in his own office, where it was warm. Instead of standing alone out in the cold and wind, in a darkened storefront.
Waterfield was squinting up at the courthouse, through the bare branches of the big trees, from beside the driver’s door of the car. “Damn grackles. Roosting in the eaves again. Do it every winter.” He got in and slammed his door.
By the time Landers was in, he had a pint bottle of whiskey out. “Want a snort?” Landers accepted gratefully. Waterfield took one, then slipped it under the driver’s seat.
But then he didn’t start. Instead, he sat with his ungloved hands on the wheel, staring out across the country square. Landers got the impression of an immensely inarticulate man, tongue-tied not so much by dumbness, as by the terrible complexity of saying anything at all. After a minute, without a word, he turned the ignition key and jerked at the gear lever.
Somewhere in the outskirts of the town he pulled up to what up