It wasn’t cold at all. In the last few moments the temperature had gone high in the front seat of that fancy convertible, and there was no button to press that would cool it off. Anger, surprise, and something else livened Crystal’s face; something like excitement. Her package had been delivered C.O.D., but she wasn’t ready to let the delivery man go.
“Wait! Not here!” she commanded. “Don’t get out yet!”
Tony drew back from the door. “I get it,” he said. “The station man — you’re known here.”
“Yes, I am.”
“And you wouldn’t want a shabby bum to be seen getting out of your car under all these lights any more than you wanted him calling at your dressing room. A parking lot is darker.”
She didn’t answer. All this time the automatic pump had been whining out gallonage; now it stopped and she leaned across to open the glove compartment. She could have reached without rubbing so close to him, but this was her routine and she played it her way. He got the treatment again as she drew back with the coupon book.
“Nice try,” Tony murmured, “but I’m not aroused—”
Not by the routine, maybe, but by something else. He never finished his speech because suddenly he was too interested in what he saw inside that lighted glove compartment. It was a gun, — a small, snub-nosed revolver...
“That’ll be four-ninety, lady,” the station jockey said at the window.
Crystal scratched her pen across the coupon and handed it to the man. “Here, you finish filling it out,” she said. “I can never remember the license number.”
... A small, snub-nosed revolver. When she looked around it was resting in Tony’s hand.
“Go ahead, take it,” she said. “It’s yours.”
“You’ve kept it all these years,” he murmured.
“They’re difficult things to get rid of.”
“You bet they are — especially if you happen to be an ex-con! No thanks, baby, I don’t want this gift either.”
He started to put the gun back in the glove compartment, but Crystal intercepted the attempt. She seemed to feel better when it was tucked just inside the open handbag in her lap. She sighed as if something had been too tight and now it was loosened.
“Here’s your book, lady,” the station man said at the window again.
“Did you get the number?” she asked.
“I sure did, lady.”
She was relaxed now. Not cold, not marble at all. “I wonder if Sunset’s open all the way out?” she asked. “They were working on it last week.”
“Working on it?” echoed the station jockey. The bright overhead light made his face look as white as his uniform. “Oh, sure. It’s okay now, lady.”
“Fine. Then I’ll just stay on Sunset.”
She was smiling, actually smiling, The convertible cleared its throat and swung back onto the boulevard. Within a few seconds the bright white glow of the all night station had been swallowed up in a blackness punctuated only by an occasional street lamp marking the curving sweep of a road that climbed and dipped on its way to find the sea.
“It’s always nice to know where to find a station open at this hour,” Crystal murmured. “I usually have the chauffeur get the tank filled every morning, but this morning I didn’t. It’s easy to get careless, isn’t it, Tony?”
There was such a thing as being too relaxed. Some people shouldn’t be friendly.
“You must have been really scared,” Tony said, eyeing her face in the glow of the instrument lights. “How come you set up this intimate little rendezvous if you thought I wanted to kill you? Did you think I’d be sucker enough to try something at that station?”
“As you say, Tony, there’s always a piece left somewhere.”
“A piece?”
“A record, a proof of our marriage. Fortunately, you’re the only person on this earth who would ever think to look for it.”
“Fortunately—?” Tony didn’t laugh any more; he didn’t even smile. “Look, I told you,” he said, “I want no part of you, and I wouldn’t dream of ruining your ‘career.’ The chump who marries Crystal Coe deserves all the grief he gets, even if it isn’t legal... You can let me off at the next bus stop.”
“You’ll never get a bus at this hour.”
“Then I’ll walk!”
“You don’t have to walk, Tony. I’ll take you where you’re going.”
She meant what she was saying, whatever it was. The accelerator moved closer to the floorboards and the convertible took the hills as if they were gulleys.
“What’s the pitch?” Tony demanded. “Is your pride wounded? Do you still think you can stir up the embers at that beach house?”
“Maybe that’s it, Tony.”
“And maybe it isn’t?... What the hell’s that?”
One minute there was nothing on the face of the earth but that big white convertible gouging a tunnel through the blackness, and then they had company. A pair of bright headlights were bouncing in the rear view mirror, and a red spot was flashing a signal that meant trouble in anybody’s neighborhood... especially to an ex-con who suddenly felt a little conspicuous among all the gilt.
“The police!” he gasped. “Damn you, what is this? What are you trying to do?”
It was such a jolly ride. The man had his laugh at the service station, and the woman had hers as she bore down on that foot pedal. “I’m trying to shake them, Tony,” she said, “trying to out-distance them, like the man told me.”
“Man?” he yelled. “What man?”
She laughed again. “Why, the man who’s holding the gun on me, of course! The man who crawled into my car back at that parking lot and was too busy enjoying his big joke to worry about why I wanted his fingerprints on his own gun... or to notice what I wrote on a gas coupon. Do you want to know what I wrote, Tony? I wrote — ‘this man is going to kill me... call the police!’... Don’t you get it, Tony? Don’t you understand?”
Understanding always took a little time, a few seconds, maybe, a fraction of a second. Time enough for the convertible to make a sudden turn off the boulevard, barely miss a row of brooding pepper trees, and go roaring down a dark side street that stretched like an empty corridor to nowhere. Time enough for a passenger, without a steering wheel to use as a brace, to pick himself off the instrument panel and make a lunge for that gun in the open handbag... and come in second.
“Too late,” Crystal said, without laughter. “You should have killed me back at the station when you had the chance... but I knew you wouldn’t. You never had that kind of nerve, and it takes nerve, Tony, to get what you want... and keep it!”
“You’re crazy!” he yelled. “I told you I was clearing out!”
“If I believed that I would be crazy! Nobody walks away from a sure thing! If I let you live, you’d bleed me white—”
“But I don’t need your money—! You don’t understand—”
Shout at the stars... shout at the wind trying to pull loose from the nodding pepper trees... shout at death, it was all the same now. Those headlights were in the rear view mirror again and the lights of the convertible had picked up a row of red buttons on the dead-end barrier ahead. It was time to hit the power brakes and brace against that steering wheel once more, because every ride had to end sometime...
The man plunged forward. He was clawing at the door as he came up, but it was much too late. The snub nosed revolver had been in the woman’s hand ever since the turnoff, and she wasn’t going to let him go without a farewell present.