As if through a fog, I saw Cromwell shoved into the rear seat of the Charger. The door was slammed behind him, and I saw the face of the man who’d been shoving him. My mind struggled with the perception that it was Stevkovsky, my double.
“Von Koerner tried to pull a fast one,” I heard him say to Hortense as he ran around to the driver's side of the car. “He’ll be after us, so let's go. I'll drive.”
“Hey, wait a-—” I tried to shout as the car pulled away. It came out a weak whisper.
I got up and saw the knife sticking out of Von Koerner’s back. It shocked me back into awareness. My mind raced with the import of what had happened. Stevkovsky must have been tailing us. He’d probably parked his car down the dirt road and sneaked up to the cabin on foot. It was dark out, and he’d probably moved fast, so Hortense hadn’t seen him. Now she thought that he was me again. I couldn’t guess what Cromwell might be thinking. He’d been pretty dazed himself. Chances are that with everything happening so quickly, he probably thought Stevkovsky was me, too.
I relieved the corpse of the packet of money. I was recovered now and I started moving fast. I’d probably waited too long, but still I had to try to catch the Charger. I darted down the dirt road until I spotted the car Stevkovsky had left there. It was a Porsche roadster with a convertible top. I was still holding the knife I’d taken out of Von Koerner’s back. I slashed the top of the Porsche, reached inside, and opened it. It was the work of less than a minute to cross the wires under the ignition and start it up.
I bounced down the rutty dirt road with all the speed I could milk out of the Porsche. Where it met the highway I stopped and found the tire tracks of the Charger veering left just before they vanished on the pavement. Stevkovsky was heading away from Washington.
I turned left, shifted the gears fast, went into overdrive, and did my best to push the pedal through the floorboard. Luck was with me. Five minutes later I saw lanterns marking a construction detour coming up in the distance. Just as I saw them, the Charger came around a bend heading in the opposite direction.
Stevkovsky had goofed. He didn’t know the area. He’d made a wrong guess when he turned. Now he was retracing his route.
The Porsche tires skidded as I made a high-speed U turn and took off after him. He must have spotted me in the rear-view mirror. He really poured on the gas, and the Charger leaped ahead. I was pushing the Porsche as fast as it would go again, but it wasn’t fast enough. It was all I could do to keep the tail-lights of the Charger in sight as it whipped around the curves.
Fortunately, the Charger ran into traffic as it pulled onto one of the main roads leading back from Maryland into Washington. It weaved in and out, sure as a mountain goat, but I managed to keep it in sight. Then we were out of the traffic again, heading up into the hills on the north side of Rock Creek Park.
The Charger took the hairpin turns as if it was on rails. I followed in the Porsche, my tires squealing under me, glad of its sure balance, but wishing it had a little more oomph. If we hit a straightaway, the Charger could lose me easily.
But it wasn’t a straightaway that undid me. It was a sudden steep grade. A mountain—or maybe only a large hill—rising up on my right, the sharp drop of a ravine on my left, I milked the downhill stretch for all the speed I could get in an effort to close the distance with the Charger. At the bottom of the grade, it made a sharp right turn and vanished from sight.
As I hit the bottom, I too swung into a right-hand turn. Too late, I saw that the road immediately cut back left again. I oversteered. There was the sound of crunching wood as the Porsche hit the fence separating the road from the ravine head-on. The little sports car soared into the air, and then plunged downwards toward the black pit yawning below.
chapter ELEVEN
THE PORSCHE landed on an outcropping of rocks and burst into flames. I landed on my rear end and kept going at a high speed that ripped the seat of my pants completely away. Fortunately, the car and I had parted company before either of us landed.
At the moment that the Porsche hit the railing, I had hit the door and jumped free. I was no longer in it as it soared toward the abyss. I’d slid to a halt and was grabbing to see if my rump was still there by the time the resulting fire lit up the sky. I was still gingerly trying to investigate the damage to my fundament when I spotted headlights coming back up the road from the direction in which I’d been headed. Just on a hunch, I got behind some bushes at the side of the road.
It was a good thing I did. It was the Charger, all right. I guests Stevkovsky was checking to see if he was finally rid of me. It slowed as it passed me, without completely stopping.
“He must have been killed,” I heard Hortense say.
“Poor Dr. Von Koerner.”
“He tried to kill me,” Stevkovsky reminded her, lying. “But I guess he’s dead, all right.” From the smug tone of his voice, I knew that I was the one he thought had perished in the Porsche.
The Charger picked up speed and purred away. I came out from behind the bushes and started walking. There was nothing else to do.
It must have been two hours before I found my way out of the Rock Creek area. I spotted a bar on a side street and went into it to use the telephone. As I walked the length of the place to the back where the phone booths were, a drunk swiveled around on his barstool and eyed my protruding posterior.
“Jush wha’ kinda joint is this?” He demanded of the bartender. “I thought ya din serve queers.”
“He didn’t ask to be served.” The bartender shrugged it off.
“Ain’t it kinna breezhy goin’ aroun’ like that?” the drunk called after me.
“Kiss my ass!” I told him.
“Shee!” he exclaimed to the bartender. “I gotta six sense. I alwaysh know a fairy when I see one!” He got off his stool and followed me to the back.
He reached the phone booth just as I was dialing Putnam's number. He made a “shame-shame” gesture and shook his head at me. I stuck my tongue out at him, and he turned even redder than he was.
“Hello?” Putnam answered the phone.
“Steve Victor here,” I identified myself.
“Again? What do you want now? I just got off the phone with you.”
“If you got off the phone with somebody, it wasn’t me.”
“Didn’t you just get through telling me how Von Koerner outwitted you and almost escaped with the money and with Cromwell. Didn’t you just tell me how Von Koerner and Cromwell and the money all went up in flames when the car they were in crashed?”
“I didn’t call you,” I said firmly. “That must have been Stevkovsky.”
“Wait a minute! How do I know you’re not Stevkovsky?”
“American original.”
“Okay. Okay, Steve. Now you’d better tell me exactly what did happen.”
I told him. Just as I was finishing, the drunk tapped on the glass of the phone booth. I opened the door a crack. “Come on out and fight, ya dirty queer!” He held up a fist threateningly.
“I’m a lover, not a fighter,” I informed him.
“What? What did you say?” Putnam was confused.
“Never mind. What do you suppose Stevkovsky’s next move will be?”
“As I see it, he figures you’re dead and intends to go on impersonating you for a while. He’s staying at your room. And he’s evidently planning to go ahead and marry your fiancee. He asked me not to give him any more assignments for a while so they could go on their honeymoon.”
“I’ll be damned! What do you suppose his angle is?”
“I just don’t know,” Putnam admitted.
“What about Hortense? And Cromwell? What did he do with them? ”
“I don’t know that, either. But I’ll put some men on it. You’d better get back to me later, Steve. After I see what we can find out.”