Keith was reaching for his collar when Nancy flew against him. “Stop it, Keith! You’ll kill him!”
He struggled to pull away from her as Newt blindly burrowed his way into the thickets.
Nancy seemed to have eight arms. “Let him go, Keith — for your own sake...”
Keith suddenly grew quiet. He stood without docility or penitence, spent. Nancy clung to him; almost gently he disengaged her arms.
He walked to the car, examined it. He squatted near the right front wheel, picked up a bit of dirt, flicked it at the car.
“Spindle’s broken,” he said. “When this crate moves again, a wrecker will be towing it.”
“Keith, a moment ago...”
He rose; his face was remote. “I don’t want to talk about that creep. If you’re ready to cut out on me, Nancy, go ahead.”
“Is that what you want?”
“You know I don’t. But I was wishing instead of thinking. I was fool enough to think you would stick. It’s the same old story. But don’t let it worry you, Nancy. I’m used to going it alone.”
Twin lights appeared in the darkness. Would the oncoming car stop? Sooner or later some curious motorist or a highway patrolman would see the wrecked jalopy and apply the brakes.
Keith dog-trotted across the highway, glancing down the road as he crossed the shoulder. The shadows of the trees closed over him. A dim trail of sorts pointed toward emptiness and silence.
Behind him on the highway the car swished past. His tension lifted. That one hadn’t been stopped by the sight of the junker. Nor by a girl standing alone.
Keith stopped and turned. Nancy was no more than a dozen yards away, closing the gap between them.
13
Vallancourt sensed Ralph Hibbs’s growing discouragement. He was not strongly affected by it. By training, tradition, and experience, he and Hibbs were very different. The attempt to anticipate their quarry’s moves, to track down a course of action as if a mistake would not have terrifying consequences — these were factors in a milieu strange to Hibbs. Vallancourt was the hunter.
With Hibbs standing disconsolately beside the door, Vallancourt tapped the bell on the motel desk and waited.
Although their search had so far proved fruitless, Vallancourt was not discouraged. Against big game there were no rewards for impatience or discouragement. You followed the trail and your hunches. He had never felt more vitally alive.
A woman came through the doorway beyond the desk. She had a spare frame, a dry-skinned face. Her mouth was plotted in lines of strain, her eyes snappish.
Vallancourt felt himself tighten.
She looked surprised at Ralph Hibbs’s prosperous portliness and the well-cut excellence that was Vallancourt.
“What can I do for you?” She seemed to take it for granted that such men would not have chosen her place for lodging.
“We’re looking for a young couple,” Vallancourt said with absolute assurance, “who registered here this evening.”
“We only had one young couple. Don’t get much calls here nowadays. Folks have gone soft on fancies — swimming pools, air conditioning.”
“One couple is all we’re after,” Vallancourt smiled. “The boy is husky, with black hair in a widow’s peak — good-looking youngster, twenty-two years old. The girl is tall, blonde, with a golden tan.” He added, “Pretty.”
The woman’s eyes flickered. “My husband registered them. What have they done?”
“Which unit are they in?”
“They took two cabins. Registered as brother and sister.”
Bless you, Nancy, Vallancourt thought. And bless you, woman, for telling me.
“They said they wasn’t from the college,” the woman said. “We’re careful here, we don’t break no laws. They told my husband they was on the way downstate to see a sick relative and their car had broke down.”
“They gave you a plausible story,” Vallancourt said. “But they’re runaways.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Of course not.”
The drab, pale pink of her lips curled inward until it disappeared. “If they’re what you say, I want them out of here.”
“They’re what I say. Where are they?”
“You the girl’s father?”
“Yes.”
The woman sniffed like a wolverine. “Probably give her a nice home, car of her own, all the advantages. Kids nowadays are going to hell in a basket.”
Vallancourt held himself in. It would do no good to rush her. A glimpse of his inner suffering would probably cause her to keep him dangling.
“You might as well sit down over there and wait,” she said. “They ain’t back yet.”
“They checked in and went out?”
“Practically right away. I just had time to do a little shopping and come back. They was ready to leave when I drove in.”
“Did you notice the car they were driving?”
“It was Newt’s and my car. Newt’s my husband. They came here in a taxi.”
Dumped Nancy’s car, he thought.
“May I speak with him?”
“Newt went with them. I let him talk me out of the keys. Should have knowed better.” Her lips curled. “They didn’t make even a show of going to the car-rental agency, like they said. Instead, they turned right on the state road. If you ask me, they’re over in Tuscawana by this time, lapping away in some gin mill. With Newt sitting next to your girl so’s he can let his leg bump hers now and then. When that old lech gets back...”
“Will you describe your car?”
“An old one. Packard, about the last that was made. Black and gray; the gray part is on top.”
“Now if you’ll give me the license number, please.”
“I don’t want nothing to happen to my car.”
“Shall I call the police?” Vallancourt asked pleasantly.
“BD-4418,” she said quickly.
“Thank you.” Vallancourt jotted the number down. “Come on, Ralph.”
“I just don’t like trouble,” she said. And when Vallancourt reached the door, she called, “Better watch out for Newt. He’s got a mean streak a mile long, ’specially when he’s been drinking.”
“We’ll be careful.”
“I didn’t know, remember,” she said. “You can’t law me. Newt was the one registered them.”
“You have nothing to worry about.”
“Mister, with Newt you always got something to worry about.”
They went outside. When they were in Vallancourt’s car, Hibbs said, “A rented car, John? I mean, after he ditches the Packard?”
“I think we can rule that out, Ralph. He’d have to identify himself, show his driver’s license.” Vallancourt studied the highway briefly. “He means to make his try tonight, in that jalopy with the other man driving.”
“Newt sounds like an unwholesome character,” Hibbs said. “Keith might have bribed him. He was pretty well heeled with the money from Dorcas’s cashbox.”
“The primary question is direction,” Vallancourt said. “The right turn on the highway might have been a deception play. But we’ll have to play the odds. He was under pressure and in a hurry, conditions that don’t make for complicated thinking.”
A block from the motel Vallancourt turned into a filling station. While the Continental was being gassed, he used the station telephone and called police headquarters.
A desk sergeant had to say hello three times before Vallancourt could bring himself to answer. Let him go through, he was thinking. Hang up and don’t throw Nancy into the danger of what might happen at a roadblock.
But let him through, and you make him drunk with triumph. It might be catching.
Stop him?
Surely by this time Nancy has begun to think, to be her old self. Whatever her feelings for him, she must know now that this route is inexorably downward. At this very moment she may be praying that you’ll do the best thing for both of them.