All I’d accomplished in this thing so far was to get shoved around. I’d been played for a sucker by a smooth operator who’d told me about 10 percent of the whole story, but now the program was going to change.
We were all looking for that money. And the only person that really knew whether or not it was in this house was Mrs. Butler. She was the key to the whole thing. I didn’t believe now that it was here, but she knew where it was, or where it was last seen. So what I wanted was Mrs. Butler. If I left her here she’d be killed, but if I took her with me I’d have the exact thing I needed: information.
And I knew just where to take her where we wouldn’t be interrupted. I could sober her up, and maybe if I kept asking the right questions long enough, I might find out a little about this. Of course, if she didn’t have anything to do with killing Butler, I was laying myself wide open to arrest for kidnapping, but I could see the way out of that. I tried to visualize the road map in my mind. It couldn’t be much over fifty miles…
It collapsed on me then. Take her? How? I didn’t have my car. Load her on my shoulder like a sack of oats, and walk through town with her? I cursed under my breath. I was right back where I’d started. But wait. She had a car, didn’t she? She must have come back from Sanport in it.
I’d have to leave her while I went out to the garage to look. But that joker probably wouldn’t try to ease back until he was sure I was gone. I went out and down the stairs, hurrying. I unlocked the kitchen door leading onto the back porch, cut the light, and went out. It was a few seconds before I could see anything in the dark. It’d be a nice time, I thought, for the gruesome bastard to try to clobber me with an ax.
When I could make out the squat shadow of the garage off beyond the corner of the house, I groped my way over to it. The big overhead door was locked. I went around to the side. There was a small door there. I tried the knob. It was unlocked. I went in and closed it. When I switched on the flashlight I was standing beside a ‘53 Cadillac. I poked the beam in on the dash. The keys weren’t in it. All I had to do now was find them. In a house of about twenty rooms. I looked at my watch. It was four-twenty. Maybe I couldn’t make it now, even if I already had the keys.
I’d never pretended to be able to think like a woman, but I knew a little about drunks. It paid off. I covered the area between the front door, where she would come in, and the kitchen, where the bottle would be, and I found the purse on a table by the dining room door. Her key case was in it.
I left it where it was and went back upstairs. I had picked her up and started out of the room when ] thought of something else. Putting her down on the divan, I flashed the light around on the floor, looking for the bottle. It had been knocked over during the fight, but it was corked and none of it had spilled. It was a fifth, a little over half full. I shoved it in my coat pocket and picked her up again. She was still out like a hung jury, and I knew she would be for hours. As I went out through the kitchen I grabbed up the purse.
I put her on the back seat of the car and switched on the flashlight long enough to take a look at the keys. I sorted out a couple that looked promising, cut the light, and went back outside, feeling for the lock of the overhead door. The first key did the trick. I boosted the door up slowly and got back in the car. Picking out the ignition key by feel, I started the Caddy and backed it out onto the driveway. The drive was white gravel and I could see it all right, all the way out to the big gates in front. I swung out onto the street and felt my way very slowly for another hundred yards. Then I switched on the headlights and goosed the two hundred horses.
Housebreaking, I thought. Auto theft. Abduction. What was next? Blackmail? Extortion? But I had it all figured now, I was still within jumping distance of solid ground in every direction, and I wasn’t in much danger if I played it right. Somebody was going to come home first in that $120,000 sweepstakes, and as of now I looked like the favorite.
We were headed south, on the highway we’d come in on. I rolled it up to seventy and tried to remember where the turnoff was. It should be somewhere around ten miles beyond that next town. I’d just have to watch for it, because I wasn’t too sure, approaching it from this direction. I’d been there plenty of times, but had always come up from the south.
The headlights of a car behind us hit the rear-view mirror. I watched them for a minute. It probably didn’t mean anything; there were always a few cars on the road, even at four-thirty in the morning. They continued to hang in about the same place, not gaining or falling back.
Maybe the joker’d had a car there and was trying to find out where we went. We were dipping down toward that long piece of tangent across the river bottom now. We’ll see, chum, I thought. I flipped the lights on high beam and gunned it.
I flattened it out at ninety-five and the swamp and timber flashed past and disappeared behind us in the night with just the long sucking sound of the wind. I couldn’t watch him now because I couldn’t take my eyes off the road, but when we came out onto the winding grade at the other end I eased it down and looked. He’d dropped back, but only a little.
That was dumb, I thought. Suppose it was a highway cop pacing us? But it wasn’t; he made no attempt to haul us down. He was just hanging there. I was still worrying about the turnoff. There was still only a slight chance he was following us, but I didn’t want him to see where we left the highway.
We blasted through the little town and I began counting off the miles on the speedometer. The road was winding now, and he was out of sight most of the time. But I had to ease it, looking for the place. We’d come nine miles. Ten. Eleven. Had I passed it?
Then we careened around a long curve and I saw the huddled dark buildings of the country store and filling station. I rode it down and made the turn, throwing gravel as we left the pavement. The county road ran straight ahead through dark walls of pine. I stepped on the brakes again and snapped off the lights as we slid to a stop. In a minute I saw his lights as he went rocketing past on the highway. I sighed with relief. It was probably some guy named Joe, in the wholesale grocery business.
I cut the lights back on and before we started up I looked at my watch. It was a little after five. We still had about twenty miles to go, and I wanted to get past the last houses on the way before daybreak. We could make it if we kept moving.
Two miles ahead I turned right and followed a county road going south through scrub pine. I knew the way all right now. I’d been up here a dozen times or more with Bill Livingston, and sometimes alone, or with a girl. It was his camp I was headed for.
We’d been friends in college. His family had left him a lot of money and five or ten thousand acres of land back in here, including the lake where the camp was and a bunch of sloughs and river bottom. He was in Europe for the summer, but I knew where he left the key to the place.
I slowed, watching for the wire gate on the left side of the road. We came to it in a few minutes, went through, and I closed it again. It was eight miles of rough private road now, up over a series of sand hills and then dropping down toward the lake. The last time I’d been in they were cutting timber back in here somewhere and logging trucks were using the first three or four miles of the road. I could see the tread marks of their big tires in the ruts now. There was no way to tell whether any other cars had been in or not.
I pushed it hard. In about ten minutes we came to the fork where the logging trucks swung off to the right. I went left. As soon as we were around the next bend I stopped and got out and looked at the ruts in the headlights. There hadn’t been a car through since the last time it had rained, probably weeks ago. We had it all to ourselves.