Meeting Evil (15 page)

He shouted to her again, and now Swanson approached him in a hostile manner, holding the gun in an attitude that would suggest a pistol-whipping was imminent. But at that point Richie, who had used the policeman’s focus on John to sidle ever closer, forcefully struck Swanson in the temple with the rock he had been concealing in his reversed hand, probably ever since he got up after the search of his prone person.

Swanson fell to his knees. Richie tore the pistol from him and was raising it surely to deliver the coup de grace, but John hurled himself forward and shouted.

“Don’t do it! Christ sake, he’s a cop!”

Richie shrugged, lowered the pistol, and kicked the officer in the face. Swanson feebly covered his eyes, and Richie slugged him in the back of the head with the gun butt. Perhaps the blow had been hard enough to kill him, but John could not have done much to stop it. At least he had blocked the shot; he had not simply stood there and let events take their course.

Richie took the keys from the fallen officer and freed John from the handcuffs. “Hell,” he said, “it’s good luck he came back!” He seized the officer’s cap and popped it on John’s head. “You look a lot like him. Take his coat.”

“What?”

The pistol dancing in his hand, Richie said, “We’ve now got the way out I was looking for.” He ran and fetched the shotgun from where Swanson had made him drop it, then returned to the fallen officer, squatted, and took extra cartridges from Swanson’s belt. He proceeded roughly to strip the policeman of the jacket, Swanson’s unconscious head lolling on a limp neck.

Richie handed the garment to John. “Get into this. We’re getting out of here in this car.”

John did not oppose the plan, for the simple reason that he was certain Richie would kill the officer if he did so. Also, fleeing from this place would remove the menace from Tim and Sharon.

He received explicit instructions. “Put the jacket on and straighten the cap. You drive. You’ll look enough like him to get us through the roadblock.”

As John took the driver’s seat, the radio began to squawk. The dispatcher wanted more directions for the state troopers.

Richie had seated himself alongside, the shotgun between his knees. He seized the mike and addressed it in a garbled
voice, covering and uncovering it in rapid succession with his palm.
“Can’t copy,”
said the dispatcher.
“Got a loose connection, or what? Check it out.”
Richie hung up and turned down the volume as the dispatcher kept asking.

John backed the police car out to the driveway and swung onto the road. He hoped that Sharon and Tim were watching from places of concealment and would come out when he had gone, tend to Swanson, and realize that what he, John, was doing was done only under duress.

He asked Richie, “You don’t really think we can fool Swanson’s partners at the roadblock?”

“The block we’ll come to first is the state cops—they’re the ones who don’t know how to find the way up here!” Richie deftly elevated himself, turned, and slithered over the headrest into the rear, taking the shotgun with him. He spoke from the floor. “Goes to show you how dumb they are. Don’t slow down when you get there. Step on the gas. Turn on the siren and flasher.” He leaned over the seat and pointed. “There.”

The siren began to wail, with a different note from that one heard outside and at a distance from a police car. Perhaps the difference was a matter of relative power, though by now John’s own role had grown too complex to assess. With the current imposture it might have been farcical were not Richie quite capable of producing wholesale carnage: he now had two lethal weapons at his disposal.

“Drive faster, John!”

“Okay,” John said, “but this hill winds a lot. You wouldn’t want to go off the road.”

“
You’re
the only one worries about that.”

He was right. That was what made Richie so difficult to deal with. By his own implication, he had nothing to lose. John was not a stunt driver who could presumably control a
car crash so that, say, only the rear half of the vehicle would be smashed. He hoped he survived the day and could get home to explain to Joanie everything he had done or not done and so understand it all himself. This was ultimately more important to him than what the authorities might make of it.

He accelerated, and braked squealingly on the curves, but was sufficiently prudent to reach the bottom without even a close call. Woods lined the road on either side all the way down the hill, but on the level ground there was a development of high ranches that would have been within the price ranges in which he was wont to work. But not a living soul was in evidence, on this temperate afternoon, as he went speeding past with the siren and whirling red light. At such a distance he must look authentic, but it was unreasonable to believe the car could clear the roadblock with impunity. He wore a police jacket over his old work shirt, the collar of which protruded. Anyone glancing into the vehicle from close by could see Richie on the floor in back. It was likely that a gun battle would ensue, with Richie getting in the first shots and perhaps dropping more than one officer. John would be in the line of fire from the others.

“There it is,” Richie said, peeping over the seat-back near John’s shoulder. It took another few seconds for John to recognize that the vehicles up ahead were not blocking the road so much as constricting it to half a lane. He had expected a complete obstruction and therefore was relieved yet disheartened all the same.

“Floor it!” Richie cried gleefully, lowering himself again. He produced metallic sounds that signified he was readying his arsenal for war.

But what could he do if, just before reaching the roadblock, John stood on the brakes, skidded wildly to a stop
,
hurled the door open, and rolled out?
Unfortunately there was an all-too-reasonable answer: he was not skillful enough at the wheel to effect a maneuver of that kind, in a car he had not known for long. He might succeed only in killing himself. It was the habitual bad idea.

John accelerated. The police cars grew larger in his vision. Then, simultaneously, both vehicles pulled to the respective shoulders so that he would have no impediment! He felt he had no power to do otherwise than continue at high speed, and as he passed his supposed colleagues in law enforcement, he did not dare glance at them, let alone signal.

Richie eventually spoke from the rear. “We must have made it by now.”

“Three-quarters of a mile back.”

Richie rose to his knees. “Slow down and kill the siren and flasher as soon as we get past this next bend.”

Going ninety-five with some pedal still left to go, John had become intoxicated by the speed at his command. The cruiser had a more powerful engine than any car he had ever owned, and it was ironically true that under current conditions he was not limited by traffic ordinance. He might have disregarded Richie’s instructions—for what authority could a mere passenger have, even one armed with deadly weapons?—had he not been forced by a law of nature to diminish speed as he entered the bend, which was demanding enough to hurl them against a granite embankment if the tires lost adhesion.

“Where to now?”

“I’m thinking,” said Richie. “Don’t ever worry about that. My mind is always working. I know you have your doubts about me, but at least give me that much credit.”

Now that he did not need both hands for the steering wheel, John used one to adjust the police cap. The sweatband
felt clammy, reminding him of the cold water he had exuded while approaching and running the roadblock, though consciously he was more frightened now than he had been then.

He addressed Richie in the rearview mirror. “Why don’t I just pull over and give you the car and say goodbye? I’ll be on foot, so I can’t do you any damage.”

Richie shook his head. “You’re
still
trying to dissociate yourself from me? After all we’ve been through? I don’t want to rub your nose in it, but legally you’re an accessory, you know. You’re a fugitive.”

John nodded. “And impersonating a police officer, wearing his stolen uniform and driving his stolen police car. So what?”

Richie sniffed. “They’ll throw the book at you.”

“Let me worry about that,” said John. “Just let me go.”

“When have I ever tried to hold you?” Richie asked. “The fact is, you might not want to think about it, high and mighty as you consider yourself, but we’ve got a lot in common, you and me, underneath it all. It just might be I’m more honest with myself than you are. I admit I wish I was more like you. I envy your way of life, wife and kids and home and all. But so do you envy me, if you would admit it. Else why did you continue to hang on with me all this while? You had plenty of chances to dispense with my company. Didn’t I tell you to go on and leave if you wanted?”

John pulled the car onto a sandy shoulder. He really saw no purpose in trying to make a rational point with the man. “Be that as it may,” he said, struggling out of Officer Swanson’s jacket, “I’m accepting your kind offer here and now.” He left the garment on the front seat and stepped out of the car. They were on a three-lane blacktop road, flanked on either side by undeveloped land. In the distance he could see what looked like a collection of structures, perhaps the beginning
of a village. He had no idea where he was now, but judging from the sun, he assumed he faced east. Home was presumably in that direction.

Richie made a serpentine transfer of himself from back to front seat. He saluted John with two fingers to his hairline. “If that’s your pleasure,” he said. He clapped Swanson’s hat onto his head. Why it seemed to fit was a mystery: his skull obviously could not match the circumference of the cop’s or of John’s own. “Okay, John,” he said out the window as the vehicle started rolling. “I’ll be waiting at your house.” Then he violently kicked the accelerator, and the car sped away.

John felt terror as a physical effect. He was breathing not air but an inflammable gas: his head was afire. He wanted to pursue Richie, imploring him with cries and gestures, but the police car seemed almost instantly to be so far away that its blue and white had already become the gray monochrome of distance, and he was unable to move his brittle legs at a faster pace.

He tried to restrain his mind from attempting a rough calculation of how long it would take Richie to complete the trip compared with his own travel time in reaching the buildings ahead, among which would surely be a phone he could use to alert Joanie, but he was obsessed with the matter. Soon those elements of the state police that were searching for the farm would
have
to find it. A general alert would be sent out regarding the stolen police car. If Richie stayed in it, he would be apprehended long before he could drive all the way back to John’s house.

Unless he ditched the car and stole a civilian vehicle.

With an intensity of effort he had hitherto exerted only in bad dreams, John managed to pick up the pace to a kind of hobble, and stimulated his morale with indignation against the public: for no apparent reason, all motorists were boycotting
this perfectly good road. Had one come along, he was ready to deploy his body so that the car would either have stopped or run him down. But nobody appeared during the endless march, the later phases of which were made even more unhappy by his eventual identification of the buildings as a pair of sheds in decay.

He stumbled onward in the conviction that outbuildings were not normally placed so far from any main structure. Reason did rule, though we might not always be able immediately to understand given examples of reality. But the fact was that these sheds stood by themselves, purposelessly, monuments to the prevailing nonsense of a world in which Richie roamed with impunity.

But then, plodding on, he saw that the road took a sweeping right-hand turn and a short descent, and that not a hundred yards distant was a gas station, and another on the opposite side, and a third within an eighth of a mile. Also two motels and an array of fast-food places. The rational was back in command. A six-lane limited-access motorway roared nearby. He was offered a choice of public telephones. But Richie had been presented with a means of high-speed travel.

John limped as rapidly as he could to the nearest gas station. He was no longer alone in the universe, for all the good that any of these people could do him, but there they were. In this full-service facility, every lane was occupied by a car, and two attendants were on the pumps or cleaning windshields. Inside the open garage a mechanic examined the underparts of a vehicle high on a lift, as its probable owner paced gravely behind him.

John found a phone in its outdoor clamshell and quickly did what was required for a collect call, but as quickly heard the busy signal.

“Operator,” he said, “this is a serious emergency. Please break in!”

But that functionary, a male voice, had already left the line. John was forced to repeat the earlier procedure. Now the number rang again and again, until a new and female operator informed him needlessly that it was not being answered.

“How is that possible when a few seconds ago it was busy?”

“They went out,” said the operator. “Or to the bathroom. Or it’s a wrong number, or was when it was supposedly busy. Want me to try again?”

She was a decent person. “Please,” said he.

She did it, and the line was busy once again.

“Please cut in,” he said. “This is a terrible emergency. This is not a hoax. Lives are in danger. Get your supervisor, but hurry. Let me give you my name.…” He could not stop talking, terrified as he was by the possibility that this sensible woman might doubt his credentials—even while realizing that she had gone away.

After a moment she was back. “No one’s speaking on that line, sir. The telephone seems to be off the hook.”

For God’s sake, Melanie was up to her newfound trick: picking up one of the extensions and dropping it elsewhere than in its cradle. He had begged Joan to be on the constant lookout for such behavior, but no one could be so attentive at all times—hence the childproof caps on medicaments and toxic cleaning materials, annoyances to those without small kids but godsends to the harried contemporary parent, and even so, not perfect: had not a toddler on the next block from the Feltons somehow worried off the fastener of one container and swallowed something or oth— Come on, John, you’ll have to do better than babbling! He stared desperately
at the pumpside cars. Could he get one of the drivers to believe his story and rush him home? With a gun he might have commandeered a vehicle. There were situations in which force was not only justified but the only means to an end.