“Probably,” his partner agreed. He flicked the car’s searchlight around among the trees, missing me by inches. Then he pointed it at the shoreline. “Lonely sort of place, though.” He was a bit impatient with his partner. “Well, go ahead. Bang on the door. Wake ’em up and ask ’em if anyone screamed.”
His partner banged the screen door. “State Police.”
When no one answered, he opened the screen and walked in, sweeping a path before him with his flashlight. A moment later I heard him whistle. Then the lights in the bedroom came on and he shouted to his partner:
“Hey. Come in here, Jim. That fisherman who called the barracks wasn’t whoofing. Some dame was screaming all right. But she isn’t screaming now. She’s dead.”
So much was clear. The man who had killed Zo had waited as long as he could, hoping her body would be discovered. When it wasn’t, he’d called the State Patrol. He really wanted to pin this thing on me and he didn’t want me to get too far away before the law stepped in.
I hoped the trooper would leave his keys in the car. He didn’t. Sliding out from behind the wheel, he clipped his keys on his belt before drawing his gun and striding into the cabin.
I inched over toward the jeepster. A few minutes before I’d been considering calling the State Patrol and turning myself in. Now I was damned if I would. I didn’t want to go back to Raiford. I didn’t want to die. At least not without seeing Beth and telling her I was sorry.
The ignition key was still in the jeep. Keeping it between me and the cabin, I walked the length of the patrol car, raised the hood as quietly as I could and yanked out a handful of wires. Then I walked back and climbed in the jeepster, crossed my fingers and kicked it over. Over the roar of the motor, I heard one of the troopers say:
“What the hell?”
Then I’d spun the jeepster in a sharp U-turn that threw up a screen of sand and was bouncing down the rutted road with both troopers shouting after me and spraying the back of the car and the windshield with lead.
I made the highway without being hit and into a little town on the north bank of a river. I had, at the most, a five- or ten-minute start. I’d put the patrol car temporarily out of action, but their two-way radio was still working. It would only be a matter of minutes before roadblocks would be set up and every law-enforcement officer in Dixie, Bronson, Alachua, Marion and Citrus counties would be alerted for a killer driving a new yellow jeepster.
A tired-looking tourist driving a mud-splattered ’48 with Iowa license plates was just pulling out of the town’s only filling station as I passed it. I drove on to the edge of town and the bridge across the river. There was a small gap between the black-and-white guard rail and the bridge.
Pointing the jeepster at the gap, I rammed down the gas and hopped out. It hit the gap dead-center and disappeared with a splintering of wood and a screech of metal. A moment later there was a great splash. The ’48 behind me braked to a stop and the tourist stuck his head out the window.
“Holy smoke,” he said. “What happened, fellow? Did your car go out of control?”
“No,” I told him. “I did.” I opened the door on the far side, climbed in beside him, and rammed the nose of the gun that had killed Zo in his ribs. “Look,” I said, “I have a date with a roadblock where this road joins US 19. That is, unless I get there first. How fast will this crate go?”
He looked at the gun in his ribs and swallowed hard. “Well,” he admitted, “I’ve had it up to ninety. And my foot wasn’t all the way to the floor.”
I said, “Then put it there. As of now.”
3. Close Call
It could be the law would figure out I was in Palmetto City. If it did, it wasn’t my fault. I’d left a trail only a snake with Saint Vitus dance could follow. I hadn’t doubled back once but I’d done a lot of twisting and changing of means of transportation. I’d kissed the Iowa tourist goodbye at Inglis after giving him the impression I had a boat waiting for me in Withlacoochee Bay. From there I’d picked up a ride on a fruit truck as far as Dunnellon and US 41. I’d taken a bus from there to Tampa and spent most of the day buying new clothes piecemeal.
When I’d finished buying slacks and a sport coat and a loud gabardine shirt and washing the blood from the back of my head, I looked a lot more like a northern tourist than I did a local boy who’d spent most of his life on the water.
The Tampa papers were filled with the thing. The headline on the evening paper read:
EX-CONVICT MURDERS SWEETHEART
The story was about as I expected. The way the law figured it, Zo and I had staged a drunken party to celebrate my release. During it, we had quarreled and I killed her. I was, variously reported, seen north near Tallahassee, boarding a forty-foot sloop in Withlacoochee Bay, and hopping a south-bound freight at Dunnellon.
But the law was merely confused, not stupid. Once they sifted out the false reports, the net would begin to tighten. And Beth was in Palmetto City. The chances were there was a stake-out right now on the house in which she was living.
I’d taken a plane from Tampa to Palmetto City. But I didn’t dare take a cab from the airport to the return address she had given on her letter. I had been born in the town. I’d lived there most of my life. I knew all the cab drivers. All of them knew me. I also knew the law. Ken Gilly, a kid with whom I had gone to school, was now a lieutenant in charge of the detective bureau.
Getting out of the airport as fast as I could without attracting attention, I strolled past the dark ball park and out to the mole in the bay where, night or day, there were always a dozen or so northern tourists fishing. It was dark on the mole and as good a place to kill time as any.
My plans were all tentative. I wanted to talk to Beth. I wanted to tell her I was sorry things turned out as they had for us. Then I wanted to talk to one or two of the boys who still berthed their fishing cruisers at Bill’s Boat Basin. One of them, Matt Heely, owed me plenty. And I was willing to call it square for a free trip to Shrimp Cay.
It was too late for me to turn honest now. Once there I’d attempt to contact Señor Peso through channels and see what he had in mind when he had sent Zo to re-establish contact with me. If he decided I was too hot to be of any use to him, there was still the thirty-six grand in my Havana bank account. And a man had to be pretty stupid if he couldn’t have one hell of a time drinking himself to death on thirty-six thousand dollars anywhere south of the Tropic of Cancer.
The tide was in. The moon was right. You could have caught fish with dough-balls and a bent pin. At one o’clock I interrupted the excited shoe clerk from Chicago who was pulling in pig-fish, about the size of the ones I usually used as bait for snook, and who was teaching me how to fish, telling him that while it all was very interesting I thought I would turn in.
The return address on Beth’s letter was less than a mile from the mole. It proved to be a small white frame garage apartment on a palm tree- and bougainvillea-tangled alley on the south-east side of town, not far from the store in which she was clerking. It was a hell of a place for the wife of a man who’d made the money I’d made to live in. Shame heated the collar of my sport shirt. Swede had been right about the bloody tide, too. I must have been out of my mind to treat Beth the way I had.
Of course she could be living in the big old house on the island across the deep water channel from the mainland. But she couldn’t live there and work in town. The only way it could be reached was by boat. Unless she had rented the old place to bring in a little additional income, the chances were that nothing but snakes and raccoons and rabbits and field mice had lived on the island for three years.