Authors: Max Allan Collins
A few seconds later they heard the sound of a motor starting up inside the barn, then tires spun gravel and they knew Grossman had gone.
Jon began moving forward and Nolan grabbed his arm. “Hold it,” he said, “give him time to get out of sight.” Twenty long seconds passed and Nolan said, “Now.”
They ran around to the front and inside the barn they found the Chevy II and the Country Squire still there, the back compartment of the station wagon open.
“Took his own,” Jon said. “Figures.”
“Stupid,” Nolan said. “Not enough room for the bags in
the Mustang trunk. He’ll have to have one, maybe both in the backseat. Out in the open. Stupid.”
“What do we do?”
“Got your keys?”
“Sure.”
“Give me four minutes to catch him. I’ll take the wagon, then after the four minutes are gone, you come pick me up in your Chevy.”
“How will I find you?”
“Same way I find him: follow the dust. Gravel roads, remember?”
“Oh. Okay.”
Nolan climbed behind the wheel of the Country Squire, got out the keys. “While you’re waiting, go in and get my bag. Bring it when you come for me.”
“Okay.”
“But after that come back out here and wait in your car. I don’t want you in the house moping over that side of beef in there.”
The boy swallowed and said, “Don’t worry.”
Nolan turned the key in the ignition.
Nothing.
“Dead?” Jon said.
“Damn,” Nolan said, getting out and throwing open the hood. “Forgot the bastard knew engines.”
“What’d he do to it?”
Nolan smiled. “Just lifted off one of the battery cables,” he said, bending over and putting the connector back in place. “He’s not as smart as I thought, and I’m not as stupid as he thought.”
This time the engine jumped to life and Nolan glided out of the barn.
“Watch yourself, Nolan!”
“Four minutes, kid.”
He held it to twenty going around the cinder court, then climbed to forty-five going out the narrow gravel road leading away from the farmhouse lot. If he went too fast he’d
raise so much of his own dust he wouldn’t be able to follow Grossman’s. The ditches on each side of the road were deep, at least six feet, and if he made a sloppy turn and ended up in one of those, he might as well pitch a tent and call that ditch home.
He came to the first crossroad half a mile from the farmhouse. Grossman’s dust was to the left and Nolan followed it, building a little more speed. The road widened slightly, but the ditches were just as deep, and when he came to the next crossroad a quarter mile later, Grossman’s dust rising on the right, Nolan almost missed the turn as the wagon wheeled around the corner at the steady fifty-m.p.h. pace he’d set.
The next crossroad Grossman’s dust trail went to the left again, and the next to the right, and still Nolan hadn’t caught sight of the little yellow Mustang. Grossman was traveling fast, he thought, too fast for a narrow road like this one, much too fast for such conditions, even for as good a driver as Grossman.
The four-minute time limit he’d given himself was nearly up, and Nolan began to get a cold sensation of sinking futility. When the next crossroad came moments later, the feeling clawed at his gut: dust was freshly risen on
both
the left and right turns.
He came to a gravel-scattering halt in the center of the intersection.
Had Grossman purposely doubled back to confuse him?
Or did the dust belong to some other driver?
If that driver, should he happen to exist, got run off the road by the Mustang, or even just noticed how fast it was going and followed or reported it, things could really get tense.
He was just about ready to flip a mental coin to decide right or left when he heard the sound, a sound coming from his right, the sound of collision, of crackup. Jolting, crunching, glass-shattering, metal-tearing impact, the sound of machine eating machine.
Nolan spun the wheel, pressed the pedal to the floor, and careened around in a U and headed toward the sound’s source. He had to cut his speed immediately because the dust was so thick, cut it to ten and held it there, leaning his head out the window to see better, flicking on the lights in a try at penetrating the heavy fog of dust.
Then he saw it.
The Mustang.
The front of its yellow body was twisted around the tail of a big tractor, whose two huge wheels were bent to either side of the Mustang’s mutilated prow, forming a cockeyed vee. Car and tractor were melded together, one gnarled piece of obscene sculpture teetering on the edge of the deep roadside ditch.
Nolan pulled over to the opposite side and got out, leaving the motor running, went over to the Mustang, and looked in.
Grossman was leaned over the wheel, his head bloody from where it had cracked apart the windshield, his empty eyes open and staring. The bags of money and Nolan’s briefcase were in the back seat.
The way the metal had twisted, it took several yanks for Nolan to get the door open, but he finally did, and the force of the action flopped Grossman over toward him, hanging out into the road. Nolan heaved him back in, noticing from the tilt of his neck that it was broken. He didn’t bother checking for a pulse. He pushed forward the seat with the limp body in it and got out the two laundry bags and the briefcase from the backseat. He closed the door again, briefcase under his arm, and hauled the bags over to the wagon. He put everything into the compartment in back, in case somebody came along and he had to play innocent bystander for a while.
He returned to the coupled machines and looked up at the vacant tractor seat. In the opposite ditch, where he’d been thrown a good thirty feet away from the wreck, was the driver. He was a short man in bib overalls, around Nolan’s
age, with butched white hair. Nolan leaned over the unconscious figure. Pulse normal enough. Nothing important broken, few ribs maybe. Concussion very likely. The man wouldn’t be waking up for a while, but he would eventually.
Nolan went back to the station wagon and shifted into drive. He pulled into a dirt inway down the road that bridged the ditch and led into a field, then backed the wagon out, turned around and began retracing his route. When he reached the nearest of the crossroads he saw another car up ahead moving through the dust, and when he was trying to decide how to handle the situation, he recognized the car as Jon’s Chevy II.
He honked and pulled over and Jon drove up alongside him, looked out the window. “What’s happened?” Jon asked. “Is that an accident down there?”
“Never mind,” Nolan said, “just get out and open your trunk.”
Jon did as told and helped Nolan transfer the two bags of money from the wagon into the trunk of the Chevy. Nolan slammed the trunk lid shut, tossed his briefcase in the front seat, and said, “Wait for me here. Don’t kill your motor.”
“What’s going on?”
“Keep your eyes open. When I come back, I’ll be on foot.”
“What are you going to do?”
Nolan rolled up his window and shut the boy off. He pulled into another dirt drive and turned around again, headed back toward the crackup.
Nolan unlatched the door, clutched the handle with his left hand and steered with his right. He accelerated as he approached the mangle of car and tractor, got to thirty-five and aimed the nose of the station wagon at the teetering hulk of maimed machine. A quarter second before the Country Squire smashed into its sister machines and joined with them, Nolan pushed open the door and jumped, rolling across the gravel and down into the ditch opposite. The wagon shoved the car and tractor over into the other ditch
and when the three hit bottom, one of the gas tanks (Nolan wondered idly which) exploded, with the other two right behind. A big tongue of flame lashed out of the ditch and licked the air.
If the sound of the explosion didn’t attract somebody, the fire would, so Nolan got himself up, brushed off as much white gravel dust as he could, crawled up out of the ditch, and started running. He’d been lucky when he dived out of the car, hadn’t hurt himself at all, just the bruises and scratches on his hands and face he’d expected to get anyway. And his side was starting to burn again, as he ran, but not nearly so bad as it might’ve.
Jon saw him coming and started to drive down after him, but Nolan waved at him to stay put. He didn’t want the boy to have to turn around again needlessly. Time would be too valuable now even for something that small. He ran up to the Chevy II, pulled open the door on the passenger side and leaped in.
“What happened to you?” Jon said. “What was the explosion all about?”
“Where are we, in relation to the route to the Cities you memorized?”
“Two turns’ll get us back on.”
“Good. Get going, then.”
Several minutes later they were on their way, and Nolan had his breath back. He lit a cigarette and leaned back and smoked it.
Jon glanced over at him. “What happened to you?” he repeated.
“Keep your eyes on the road,” Nolan said. “I jumped out of the wagon when I ran it into the accident.”
“You mean you wrecked it? On purpose? What accident? That thing down the road? What was the explosion, and the flames?”
“The explosion was when I ran the wagon into the accident Grossman had.”
“But . . . why’d you do that?”
“Somebody’ll find the wreck soon. And the farmhouse, too. Maybe while they’re trying to sort it all out they’ll forget about us a little.”
Another minute went by and Jon, his eyes never wavering from the road, asked, “What about Grossman? You kill him?”
“No,” Nolan said. “Some farmer saved me the trouble.”
Nolan worked the key in the lock, opened the door to the hotel room, and said, “I appreciate you sitting this out with me, kid.”
Jon shrugged. “It’s okay,” he said, stepping in, Nolan closing the door behind them. “I don’t feel like letting go of you just yet, anyway, Nolan, to tell you the truth.”
Nolan glanced around the room and saw it to be a near carbon of the smaller of the two rooms he’d had last time he had been to the Concort. Only this time two single beds had been jammed in instead of one. He looked over at Jon, who was sitting on the bed closest to the window, and said, “Hungry?”
“Don’t mention food.”
“You haven’t eaten all day, you must be hungry.”
“After what’s happened today? Are you kidding?” Jon puffed out his cheeks and covered his mouth with his hand.
Nolan sat on the other bed and reached over to the night-stand. He lifted the receiver off the hook. “I’ll call room service anyway. You need something in your stomach.”
The ride to the Quad Cities had been all but silent. Nolan stayed on watch for police cars (a state cop car passed going the other way, but its red tophat was off, as was the siren), and he didn’t want any talk getting Jon’s attention off the memorized route. After awhile Nolan did
turn on the radio, found a station giving news on the quarter hour and heard of the “daring daylight holdup” (a phrase which caused Jon to laugh, a needed tension release) that had taken place at Port City Savings and Trust, involving a large, undisclosed amount of money. They also heard that the FBI had rushed into the case, since the “bandits,” who posed as bank examiners, had kidnapped Elaine Simmons, 20, of Port City, a teller at the bank. Then the newscaster went on to his next story and Nolan switched off the radio. When the Chevy II had crossed the Centennial bridge over into Davenport, Nolan spoke for the first time in thirty minutes.
“Kid,” he said, “I got some time to kill before my meeting. You want to stick with me till then, or take off?”
“Just as soon stick with you, Nolan. That okay?”
“Well, it won’t matter either way for you as far as the cops go. I mean, the odds won’t change better or worse if you head for Iowa City now or wait a few hours.”
“Wouldn’t it be better for you and me to go on to Iowa City now, though? We could stash the money with Planner and you could let things cool for a few days, and then have your meeting.”
“No, it’s better to take care of all of it at once. It’d be more dangerous hanging around the area for a period of days. This way, when tonight’s over, I’ll have my affairs settled and can clear out for good.”
“Well, then, I’ll keep you company, Nolan, if you’ll put up with me.”
“There could be some trouble.”
“Why’s that? You just said it didn’t matter with the cops.”
“It doesn’t. It’s the meeting I’m thinking of. If the meeting goes wrong somehow, it’d be nice to have you around. To wait outside with your car, in case I have to get out quick. In case it sours.”
“Well, sure, of course, if I wasn’t there you’d be without a car.”
“Wouldn’t that be sweet.” Nolan lit up the last cigarette
off his last pack, breathed the smoke in deep, then said, “I’m sorry about this, kid.”
“It’s perfectly okay.”
“When I called Werner yesterday, he said he needed time to set it up, two this morning was the quickest we could do it. Said it had to be that way.”
“Two in the morning? It’s hardly five now.”
“I know. Nine hours. Still with me?”
“Sure. I just wonder what we’re going to do with all that time.”
“There’s a hotel we can go to, real close to where I’m supposed to go for the meeting. Werner runs it.”
They’d left the money in the trunk, putting the briefcase under the seat in front and locking the car, which they left parked in the Concort lot. Inside the hotel Nolan was pleased to find the clerk who’d been on duty last time behind the check-in desk again. He remembered Nolan, after struggling past the lack of mustache and the changed hairstyle, and when Nolan asked for a room overlooking the parking lot, the clerk went into his “anything for a friend of Mr. Werner” routine and gave them the room.
Nolan was on the bed stretched out when the knock at the door got him up. Instinctively he yanked his .38 from his belt, then when he heard, “Room service,” stuffed it back in and put his coat on over it. He cracked the door to confirm the claim, saw it was true and let the man come in and set up his trays of food. When he was done Nolan paid him and showed him out.
Nolan lifted the little steel caps off the plates and smiled. “Prime rib,” he said, “big juicy slices. Sure you won’t change your mind?”