Oh, my God, I’ve killed her! he thought, an agonized grimace briefly masking his loose features. I’ve killed the girl. I never, oh I never would have wanted to do that. No one would believe me — if I told them I’d lost my head. They all say that, I imagine. Oh, good Lord, this is terrible! She’s lying there in the middle of my floor, and I’m just sitting here, looking at her. I’ll “have to do something,” he finished, aloud.
But what could he do? Ormond swung idly back and around in the swivel chair, as though seeking some direction that led out. When the big wall clock, donated by Prester’s Jewelry Store at the office’s opening, struck three o’clock, Hervey Ormond was no farther than before.
It had been different, a different thing when the State Investigating Committee had come. They had gone over his books, found them satisfactory and been quite pleasant about everything.
The roads had buckled and warped, fallen apart at the shoulders and split at the points of most wear, but as Ormond had told Senator Frankenson and the other distinguished visitors, “There’s been some pretty heavy and unusual weather in this state recently, gentlemen. You might not be aware of that in Washington, and it’s certainly no slur against you or your attentiveness to the local situation — your place is at the seat of our great government, naturally — but it’s something we’re all too aware of, around here.
“With an that, and these new fuels they’re using that eat into the very molecular structure of roadbeds these days, well …”
He had left it hanging as his hands hung outstretched. A man who had done his job despite the vagaries of Man and Environment.
The committee had left.
There had been a substantial amount deposited to Senator Frankenson’s personal account — under the listing “campaign fund donations” — that next week.
Hervey Ormond always paid his bill promptly.
And this bill, too, had been paid. After six years it had been stamped, sealed and spindled — as Eleanor Lombarda lay silently on the floor of his office.
The clock had passed the 4:15 position, and suddenly, abruptly, as though the idea had been perching there on his knee, sucking ruminatively at his consciousness, Ormond knew how he would get rid of his ex-secretary.
It was the work of ten minutes to get the cement mixings from the shed behind the building, mix the gloppy mess and lay Eleanor in it.
He stood by, leaning against a tree, watching her harden into the mass. When it was sufficiently dry, he would take her out, dump her on the grass — he imagined it would be quite heavy so he stripped off his jacket, hanging it on a low branch — and let her finish hardening completely.
Then he would put her in the trunk of the car, cover her with a brick tarpaulin, and drive up to Round Schooner Lake.
He would tell everyone that Eleanor had been forced to visit sick relatives in Omaha. She had no one close here in town, and it was obvious a girl of her exceeding unattractiveness could not have a lover, so the ruse could very easily succeed.
With a little patience and a great deal of reserve, he was certain this bill would stay paid — and, happily, no rebates would be forthcoming.
He smiled, and listened to the crickets welcoming their baritone accompanists.
The drive to Round Schooner was quiet and pleasant.
The state troopers were, also; and they looked alike, of course. They were faceless and looked alike. Had one been two-headed with purple warty skin and wearing tie and tails, and the other a six-armed and gelatinous mass of mold, they would have looked alike to Hervey Ormond.
They were whipcord, impartial, disinterested Furies. They had come for him, and they meant to take him away. His State prescribed the electric chair; and though he had a great and abiding fear of personal extinction, he had an even greater fear of closed-in places. His State had its appeal for reinstatement of the death penalty in the courts. At the moment, his State prescribed nothing but years in closed-in places.
“All right, Mr. Ormond, get your hat. Let’s go.”
They walked him down the steps of the building, while the entire office staff watched. They hustled him heavily into the patrol car, and tooled it out the winding drive, onto the highway.
They sped toward the state police station five miles away, and beside Ormond in the back seat, the faceless police officer had decided to be clever.
“She came to the surface this morning … spotted by some kids fishing, Ormond.”
The fat little man clung to the car strap, silently watching the lines of houses and fir nurseries flit by.
And I’ve always been so good about paying my bills on time.
“Your big mistake.” the trooper said, with a grin, “was using your own cement. You should know that much sand don’t hold together.”
Fifteen: The Man on the Juice Wagon
He took the hairpin curve at sixty-five, and the big truck-and-cab reeled drunkenly toward the edge of the road, toward the dark lip that pouted above nothingness. He pumped the air brakes and the rig squealed like a whale with a harpoon in its blowhole. Two baby-fat tires left the road and pawed air for a moment, then fell back, and the dynamite truck was around the bend. On the left, the rock wall of a nameless North Carolina hill rose up to an invisible peak, lost in darkness. To the right, unfenced, unprotected, the road fell off in a sheer drop, three hundred and eighty feet to the valley below; to tarpaper shacks huddled in cold and poverty. And on that thin strip of tarmac, room for two cars to pass ever so carefully (and one truck to pray no one was coming up, while it was coming down), Harry Fischer hunched over the big steering wheel, eyes squinting into the night, half-smoked butt wedged in a corner of his mouth, sweat chilling his neck and back …
Behind him in the truck section, the cases of nitro were murmuring in their gelatin straitjackets, and a harsh word would convince them they should forget their manners.
Beside him in the cab, the half-naked girl huddled against the other door, her gold-flecked eyes wide with terror, the whip scars still welling blood across her back, and her mouth open, dragging in air raggedly.
Back of him, and closing fast on the treacherous, twisting mountain road, was a caravan of four cars, holding a small army of pistoleros stinking of hate who didn’t give a damn how he went down the hole: in flames, over the edge of the road, like a shooting star … or from a shotgun blast that would turn him into one hundred and eighty pounds of dogmeat. It was all the same to them.
“Look out!” the girl shrieked, and Harry realized his eyes had been locked in road hypnosis, that the tarmac was twirling off to the left again. He walked the wheel between his hands, fast, and the truck careened around the bend, punched holes in the darkness with the beams of its two big heads, and roared away down a short slope. He flicked his eyes up without moving his head, and caught sight of the four pairs of lights behind him, in the rear-view; two single sets, and two sets of doubles, brights; bounding around the bend and down the slope in charge pursuit; they were gaining on him.
“Oh, yeahhh …” He drew the words out in whispered undertones, ruefully. “Are you ready for them!” He stomped the accelerator and the big rig cleared its throat, dug in at the tarmac and pulled away. He felt pain at his lips, and ripped the roach of the cigarette out of his mouth. He dropped it and ground it against the rubber floormat.
“We’ll die! We’re never going to make it!” The girl was babbling. Harry didn’t even look over. If he’d been where she was, with some crazy asshole driving the way he was, he’d have been puking already.