“Was she hard to control in other ways, Mrs. Farris?”
“No sir, she was neat and good and pretty and quiet, and she had the good marks. It was just about Joe Lee Cuddard she turned mulish. I think I would have let LeRoy whale that out of her if it hadn’t been for her trouble.
“You’re easier on a young one when there’s no way of knowing how long she could be with you. Doc Mathis, he had us taking her over to the Miami clinic. Sometimes they kept her and sometimes they didn’t, and she’d get behind in her school and then catch up fast. Many times we taken her over there. She’s got the sick blood and it takes her poorly. She should be right here, where’s help to care for her in the bad spells. It was October last year, we were over to the church bingo, LeRoy and me, and Clarissa May been resting up in her bed a few days, and that wild boy come in and taking her off in that snorty car, the little ones couldn’t stop him. When I think of her out there... poorly and all...”
At a little after nine we were in position. I was with Sergeant Lazeer at the west end of that eighteen-mile stretch of State Road 21. The patrol car was backed into a narrow dirt road, lights out. Gaiders and McCollum were similarly situated at the east end of the trap. We were smeared with insect repellent, and we had used spray on the backs of each other’s shirts where the mosquitoes were biting through the thin fabric.
Lazeer had repeated his instructions over the radio, and we composed ourselves to wait. “Not much travel on this road this time of year,” Lazeer said. “But some tourists come through at the wrong time, they could mess this up. We just got to hope that don’t happen.”
“Can you block the road with just one car at each end?”
“If he comes through from the other end, I move up quick and put it crosswise where he can’t get past, and Frank has a place like that at the other end. Crosswise with the lights and the dome blinker on, but we both are going to stand clear because maybe he can stop it and maybe he can’t. But whichever way he comes, we got to have the free car run close herd so he can’t get time to turn around when he sees he’s bottled.”
Lazeer turned out to be a lot more talkative than I had anticipated. He had been in law enforcement for twenty years and had some violent stories. I sensed he was feeding them to me, waiting for me to suggest I write a book about him. From time to time we would get out of the car and move around a little.
“Sergeant, you’re pretty sure you’ve picked the right time and place?” “He runs on the nights the moon is big. Three or four nights out of the month. He doesn’t run the main highways, just these back-country roads — the long straight paved stretches where he can really wind that thing up. Lord God, he goes through towns like a rocket. From reports we got, he runs the whole night through, and this is one way he comes, one way or the other, maybe two, three times before moonset. We got to get him. He’s got folks laughing at us.”
I sat in the car half-listening to Lazeer tell a tale of blood and horror. I could hear choruses of swamp toads mingling with the whine of insects close to my ears, looking for a biting place. A couple of times I had heard the bass throb of a ’gator.
Suddenly Lazeer stopped and I sensed his tenseness. He leaned forward, head cocked. And then, mingled with the wet country shrilling, and then overriding it, I heard the oncoming high-pitched snarl of high combustion.
“Hear it once and you don’t forget it,” Lazeer said, and unhooked the mike from the dash and got through to McCollum and Gaiders. “He’s coming through this end, boys. Get yourself set.”
He hung up and in the next instant the C.M. Special went by. It was a resonant howl that stirred echoes inside the inner ear. It was a tearing, bursting rush of wind that rattled fronds and turned leaves over. It was a dark shape in moonlight, slamming by, the howl diminishing as the wind of passage died.
Lazeer plunged the patrol car out onto the road in a screeching turn, and as we straightened out, gathering speed, he yelled to me, “Damn fool runs without lights when the moon is bright enough.”
As had been planned, we ran without lights, too, to keep Joe Lee from smelling the trap until it was too late. I tightened my seat belt and peered at the moonlit road. Lazeer had estimated we could make it to the far end in ten minutes or a little less. The world was like a photographic negative — white world and black trees and brush, and no shades of grey. As we came quickly up to speed, the heavy sedan began to feel strangely light. It toe-danced, tender and capricious, the wind roar louder than the engine sound. I kept wondering what would happen if Joe Lee stopped dead up there in darkness. I kept staring ahead for the murderous bulk of his vehicle.
Soon I could see the distant red wink of the other sedan, and then the bright cone where the headlights shone off the shoulder into the heavy brush. When my eyes adjusted to that brightness, I could no longer see the road. We came down on them with dreadful speed. Lazeer suddenly snapped our lights on, touched the siren. We were going to see Joe Lee trying to back and turn around on the narrow paved road, and we were going to block him and end the night games.
We saw nothing. Lazeer pumped the brakes. He cursed. We came to a stop ten feet from the side of the other patrol car. McCollum and Gaiders came out of the shadows. Lazeer and I undid our seat belts and got out of the car.
“We didn’t see nothing and we didn’t hear a thing,” Frank Gaiders said.
Lazeer summed it up. “OK, then. I was running without lights, too. Maybe the first glimpse he got of your flasher, he cramps it over onto the left shoulder, tucks it over as far as he dares. I could go by without seeing him. He backs around and goes back the way he came, laughing hisself sick. There’s the second chance he tried that and took it too far, and he’s wedged in a ditch. Then there’s the third chance he lost it. He could have dropped a wheel off onto the shoulder and tripped hisself and gone flying three hundred feet into the swamp. So what we do, we go back there slow. I’ll go first and keep my spotlight on the right, and you keep yours on the left. Look for that car and for places where he could have busted through.”
At the speed Lazeer drove, it took over a half hour to traverse the eighteen-mile stretch. He pulled off at the road where we had waited. He seemed very depressed, yet at the same time amused.
They talked, then he drove me to the courthouse where my car was parked. He said, “We’ll work out something tighter and I’ll give you a call. You might as well be in at the end.”
I drove sedately back to Lauderdale.
Several days later, just before noon on a bright Sunday, Lazeer phoned me at my apartment and said, “You want to be in on the finish of this thing, you better do some hustling and leave right now.”
“You’ve got him?”
“In a manner of speaking.” He sounded sad and wry. “He dumped that machine into a canal off Route 27 about twelve miles south of Okeelanta. The wrecker’ll be winching it out anytime now. The diver says he and the gal are still in it. It’s been on the radio news. Diver read the tag, and it’s his. Last year’s. He didn’t trouble hisself getting a new one.”
I wasted no time driving to the scene. I certainly had no trouble identifying it. There were at least a hundred cars pulled off on both sides of the highway. A traffic-control officer tried to wave me on by, but when I showed him my press card and told him Lazeer had phoned me, he had me turn in and park beside a patrol car near the center of activity.