A Night for Screaming Page 14

  Then I stopped. He hadn’t had much time. If he’d had to search for that money, he would never have gotten it. But he had known where I put it.

  How?

  “Hey Walker.”

  I sat up slowly, troubled, sick. I turned on the cot.

  “What you want?”

  “You got a visitor. You want to see him?”

  It was Fred Palmer.

  Palmer sat down on the kitchen chair without its back prop. Cotton locked the cell door and walked away.

  “I got permission from Sheriff Mason to see you,” Palmer said. “I’m leaving in little over an hour. I’m taking the train back.”

  “Palmer, I need help.”

  “That’s putting it mildly. I’m sorry, I’m washing my hands of you, Walker. Tell you the truth, all the time I was hunting you down for murdering Wendy, I couldn’t make myself believe you had done it. But it looks like Howell threatened to expose you and—”

  “But I wasn’t guilty.”

  “You didn’t know that Mitch. You see, Howell was killed in the morning. They had some trouble pinning down the exact hour because the freezer had changed the condition of his stomach contents, as well as lividity, body changes. But they figured from the time he was last seen alive. He was put in the freezer after the noon crew left the messhall. You were back on the farm then. Everybody knows that.”

  “Fred, listen to me.”

  He smiled. “Oh, now I’m a friend of yours? Now when you got your neck in a noose, I’m not Palmer the killer-cop any more. I’m good old Fred.”

  I stood up. “The hell with you. I might have known you wouldn’t listen.”

  “Oh, I’ll listen. Only I’ve heard most of it from the sheriff, and it doesn’t make much of a case for you. If you had been involved in the robbery, and had produced that money, it might have cleared you of the murder charge. Maybe—”

  “I was sitting across that street when you walked around the corner with Cassel this morning.”

  “And you just went on sitting there, knowing I was looking for you?”

  “Didn’t you see the jeep?”

  “I see everything, Mitch. But I don’t buy it that you would sit quietly with me across the street from you.”

  “Still I know you were there. I was afraid if I started up the car, tried to leave, it would attract your attention. So I sat quiet. Then after I took that money, I stared right at you when I drove the jeep past you on Main Street. You were standing on the curb.”

  “You make a convincing picture, Mitch. I noticed the jeep. I even thought it looked like you in that jeep. But when I got out to the farm, you were there. And if you robbed Cassel, where is the money?”

  “I don’t know. If Cassel saw me bury it, he could have dug it up, hidden it again, then gone back to the sheriff.”

  “He could have. But how could he have seen you out in that flat country, treeless and open, and you not see him or his station wagon? You were in the creek, and he would have had to be in the open. I can’t believe you would have hidden that money, if you ever had it, without checking to see that nobody was watching you. If he could have seen you, you could have seen him.”

  I felt my heart slug faster.

  I stared at Palmer, walking back and forth. I was doing what he always had done, thinking like a criminal. For the first time I was trying to think what Cassel would have done.

  “I know how he did it.” My voice rose with the excitement in it “I know how it had to be. He came out of it after I slugged him. He knew where I was going, and he drove out there. He knows that country better than I do. He knew how to watch me without my seeing him.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Binoculars. Field glasses. I remember he checked on his whole farm one day through those powerful field glasses. I was with him. He could bring almost any spot right up close.”

  “So he got the money back and framed you for murder?” Palmer shook his head.

  “Hell yes. I was the sucker he was waiting for. A man on the run. When I came over to the station wagon, after you had told him I was cleared of killing Wendy Parker, he didn’t even mention it. He had me where he wanted me. He knew his wife was having an affair with Evans Howell. He wanted to get rid of Howell, and he wanted to frame me for that murder so he could keep all that money for himself. He had my knife. That would be easy enough for him to get. He told me in front of all the workers to stay on the farm, setting it up in their minds that I would be there. I thought it was because he was giving me an alibi for the robbery, but it was so I would have no alibi at all when Howell’s body was found—with my knife in it. Hell, maybe he didn’t even need that money. It might just be gravy. He had to throw me off so he could set me up in a frame for killing Evans.”

  That’s a pretty wild story, Walker.”

  “It’s the truth!”

  He shrugged. “I hope you have success with it. I don’t see how you can make a jury believe it. I’m a friend of yours, whether you believe it or not, and I can’t buy that story. You couldn’t ever prove any of it”

  “But maybe I could. If you would help me.”

  “Me?”

  “You chased me out here, Palmer. I might as well tell you the truth. I was afraid of your torture chamber. I knew I was innocent, but I didn’t know if I could stand up under your torture. That’s why I ran. It’s the only reason I ran. I was innocent and I couldn’t prove it. I was scared to face you. I’d seen too many other men do it. But I know you can do a good job of investigation. Maybe the very best. And I’m desperate. I need you. Looks like you owe me this chance to prove I’m innocent.”

  He lifted his left arm, pushed his cuff back and glanced at his watch. I saw the wan light glint on something under his coat and I held my breath, my heart began to pound fast. He shook his head. “I’m leaving. On the train. In just a little while, Walker. I’m sorry. I’d help you if I believed you. But I don’t believe you. It’s that simple.”

  He exhaled and moved to stand up. I glanced along the cellblock. Cotton was not down there.

  I set myself and brought the side of my hand down across Palmer’s neck in a judo chop. I put everything I had into it all the fear, all the terror, all my strength.

  Palmer didn’t make a sound, there was no outcry. He didn’t even grunt. There was the sharp exhalation of his breath and then he plunged forward on his face near the cot.

  I knelt beside him, feeling the panic making my hands tremble. I fought his small Police Positive from his belt holster. I’d seen it glint when his coat moved. I was thankful Fort MacKeeney was a small town and that Cotton Powell was a stupid guard. Almost anywhere else they would have searched a visitor to a jail cell and removed his gun.

  I shoved the gun in my pocket. Palmer was out cold. I lifted him with my hands under his shoulders.

  I set him back on the backless chair. But he sagged and would have fallen off again. I shoved the chair around so I could lean him against the side of the cot. It left him propped in an awkward position, but all I needed with Cotton Powell was a little time.

  I stepped away from Palmer, left him in almost a crouching position on the chair, tilted toward the cot I moved to the bars, standing between the light and Palmer.

  “Cotton!”

  The guard came around the comer at the end of the cell block. I held the gun behind my leg, and stood waiting until he was just outside the barred door.

  “Yeah, killer? What you want?”

  He was standing just beyond the bars. He hadn’t seen Palmer yet.

  I brought the gun up, held it where he could see it. His face showed his sickness.

  “Open the door. Move fast or I’ll shoot you.”

  I let him look at Palmer to convince him I was not joking. He began to nod. He found the key, and with his hand shaking, unlocked the cell door.

  I stepped through it took his gun from him.

  “Get inside the cell,” I told him.

  “You’re not going to get away with this, jerk,�
� Cotton said as he stepped past me.

  Something in his voice reminded me that I hated him, and I didn’t even stop to think about it. I brought the butt of his own gun down across his skull, and then I stood there just long enough to see him crumple slowly to his knees and topple forward against Palmer. He knocked Palmer off the stool and both of them fell to the floor like toppling dominoes.

  I turned then and ran toward the back door of the cellblock.

  15

  I was doing seventy in the sheriff’s cruiser when I approached the Wild Horse turn-off on the county road. I was pushing the light car so hard that it swayed on the narrow, empty road. All I could think was that I was insane to be back out here. If they caught me now they wouldn’t even try to take me back to a cell. It would be easier just to shoot me on sight.

  I found that turn-off onto Cassel’s land as if I were on radar. It was crazy to get back in that maze. Before I’d been a killer in the sheriff’s eyes, now I was a fugitive killer who’d slugged a guard and stolen a cruiser.

  I slowed enough to make the turn and that was when I saw those headlights bouncing out on those flat fields, lunging in wild yellow shafts upward in the darkness.

  In a reflex action I turned off my own lights. I didn’t even stop to think why. All I knew was that I didn’t want any cars out in those fields to see me make a turn off the county road onto Cassel land.

  I let the car slow, keeping my foot off the brake. I didn’t want even a red glow to attract the attention of the people out there.

  I did not hesitate in making the turn, though. I went off the highway, found the ruts like a mole going hell-bent through its burrow.

  I let the car continue to slow down, watching those crazy careening lights out on the fields.

  Finally, I was barely moving, just giving the cruiser enough gas to keep it rolling.

  Those two cars out there were moving as though driven by two hopped-up jalopy jockeys. They seemed to be racing. The first car was moving slowly, as if its driver were feeling his way along in unfamiliar terrain.

  But nothing was slowing the second car. I couldn’t guess what kind of speed it was making across the grass fields, but it was bouncing and never slowing.

  It would come near the first car and then the first car would abandon that cautious movement and race forward. It was as if the first car were far more powerful, faster than the second, and there would have been no contest if the driver in the first car had known the land out here as well as the second driver.

  The second car overtook the first, the headlights raking along the side of it so that I recognized it as a convertible. Eve Cassel’s Cadillac convertible.

  The reflected light showed me that the other car was Bart Cassel’s station wagon.

  He brought the station wagon hard against the Caddy. The Cad was jerked hard away, but he maneuvered quickly, turning with it so the big car was forced around in a circle.

  They had almost completed the circle when the station wagon moved faster and cut in harder.

  The Cad was jerked around so suddenly that it skidded along for a moment and almost went over on its side. The station wagon stalked it, cutting sharper, sharper, like a trained cowpony herding a bunch-quitter.

  Suddenly the Cad was given a burst of gas and it leaped past the front of the station wagon. The bumper on the wagon raked a long line along the Caddy, and then the Cad was caught on the wagon’s bumper and I saw it going upward and then spilling out on its side.

  At the very last instant before the wagon was caught in the overturning metal and whirling wheels, it was cut hard away and leaped free as the bigger car struck on its side, its headlights cutting strange wild paths in the darkness.

  I was near them now, but the station wagon driver never saw me. He was too intent on that Cadillac.

  He whipped the wagon around in a wide circle and fixed the lights on the overturned Cad, the dust boiling up gray around it in the night.

  In the glare of the wagon’s lights I saw a head appear at the upper door of the Cad.

  It was Eve Cassel.

  She stared around wildly in the light of the station wagon. She pulled herself upward through the window and toppled along the side of the car toward the ground.

  As she slid along the side of the car, the station wagon raced in toward her.

  When Eve let herself down over the side of the car so her feet were reaching for the ground, the station wagon came right at her, its headlights pinning her against the underside of the upset car.

  For a moment she stood in paralyzed terror staring at the onracing station wagon and then she ran around the front of the car.

  The station wagon skidded to a stop only inches from the car. If she had not moved, he would have crushed her against it.

  The station wagon was reversed in a screaming of gears and then it leaped to the right, going after her around the front of the car, trying to drive her away from it, out into the open.

  I wanted to yell at her to stay where she was. As long as she could keep moving at all, that overturned car was going to offer her the only protection she’d find on this field.

  But she was too full of terror. She ran around the car again and when the station wagon raced after her, she stood for a moment undecided and then ran away from the car into the darkness. She was running into the open and by now I knew that Bart Cassel was at the wheel of the station wagon and that he would run her down in this open field. Great sport.

  I didn’t know what had happened between them, but I knew that Bart at least was completely insane by now. I could not even figure how he could hope to kill his own wife out here on the fields and get away with it And then I knew that was because I was not Barton M. Cassel, accustomed forever to doing whatever he wanted to do, and getting away with it.

  As I stepped down on the gas, driving toward his station wagon, the cruiser lights still killed, I began to see that he would replace her battered body in the overturned Caddy ... And he was driving right now, racing toward her without ever doubting for a moment that he would get away with this next murder; that he was going to come up like roses.

  I saw Eve stop running suddenly and stand in the headlights. She brought up something in her hand, and I saw it was a gun. She fired toward the onrushing wagon as though it were a rhino and she were going to bring it down before it could crush her.

  Her gun cracked, showing a blast of orange fire in the darkness. Her bullet smashed into the windshield of the wagon so it ebbed out in a thousand lines and cracks directly in front of the driver.

  At the last moment she leaped wildly out of the path of the wagon and it roared past her.

  Cassel was already slamming on his brakes. He was headed directly at me, and I stepped hard on the gas, reaching out at the same moment and turned on the cruiser lights, stepping on the bright-button. For a moment those lights would blind him. They might even scare him so badly for an instant that he would be off balance.

  It happened that way.

  It was all so fast it was hard to say how it did happen. I had my gas pedal pressed against the floor.

  He was trying to brake down for a quick left turn and another run at Eve when my lights blinded him. He jerked the wheels hard, stepped down on the brakes with all his power, bucking to a crazy stop.

  The cruiser plowed into the wagon. The sound was deafening, the impact of the two cars, the scream of metal. The wagon was thrust hard around and the cruiser plowed deeply into it before it stopped.

  My headlights were smashed, one twisted so that it sent a beam directly upward. The other was fixed across the wagon and upon Eve who had stopped running in the field. She was staring at us as if a miracle out of heaven had suddenly spared her life.

  The door on the driver’s side was thrown open by the impact of the crash. In the moment after the cars stopped, Bart Cassel was already moving out of the car.

  He landed on his feet and wavered there a moment. Maybe he was only barely conscious. He staggered as tho
ugh he didn’t even know where he was. But conscious or dazed, he made a fatal mistake. He lunged toward Eve, stumbling in wild drunken steps.

  She brought up the gun and shot him.

  She stood there and pressed the trigger. The sound of that gun was louder even than the crash of the cars had been. For a moment I did not move.

  I saw Bart Cassel straighten and then go backwards under the force of the bullet, and then he caught his balance, lost it again and fell forward on his face.

  I jumped out of the car, ran around it. Eve did not move. By the time I got to Bart Cassel he was dead.

  I knelt beside Cassel’s body a moment, then I heard Eve moving in the grass behind me.

  I straightened slowly, standing up. When I had knelt over Bart’s body, Eve had stood as if in a catatonic trance. Now she turned and ran toward the Caddy.

  “Eve!” I yelled.

  She didn’t stop running. She didn’t even slow down. My voice was loud in this flat open plain, and it was as if the sound of it made her run faster.

  “Eve.”

  I ran after her, yelling her name.

  Just before she reached the overturned car, she stopped running abruptly and heeled around to face me.

  I slowed, staring at her stark, rigid face. Her eyes were distended in the light from the cars behind me. Her face muscles were stiff. Her eyes were as vacant as the deepest reaches of this black night,

  “Eve.”

  She brought the gun up, and I yelled at her again.

  Abruptly the lights behind me were like floodlights, many lights, all of them reflected in her black vacant eyes.

  I stopped, legs apart, and turned staring over my shoulder.

  There were four cars in a semicircle around the smashed cruiser and the station wagon. I didn’t have to see who was in them. I knew that the sheriff and his deputies had followed me, and they had come out on this field in darkness just as I had, and I hadn’t seen them because I hadn’t taken my eyes off Bart and Eve.