The Copper Frame (13 page)

It wasn't until they crossed the Route Seventy-five turn-off to Hamburg that he began to get an inkling of what Simmons had in mind.

The man said, “'Bout five miles on there's a bridge across a ravine. Pull over on the shoulder this side of it.”

Saxon knew the ravine he referred to, which was only about four miles out of Iroquois. Steep-sided, it was about thirty feet deep. The road was straight there, so there were no guard rails at the approach to the bridge. And except for the ravine, the ground was flat. A car fitted with snow tires, such as Saxon's, with an unconscious man behind the wheel and the throttle wedged to the floor, could be aimed to go off the road just before the bridge, and would have no trouble plowing its way across the few yards of snow-covered ground before it nosed over the thirty-foot drop.

The reason for the trailing car ceased to puzzle Saxon. It was necessary for his captors' transportation back to Buffalo, because his wouldn't be in condition to drive. They planned to leave the Plymouth, with him in it, crushed out of shape at the bottom of the ravine.

Saxon's mind began to race. Once he pulled over on the shoulder and stopped, he knew it would be all over. Probably the man in the back seat would knock him unconscious the moment he set the hand brake. His only hope of escape was to attempt to catch his would-be murderers off balance while the car was still in motion.

With a gun leveled directly at him, this would have been equally hopeless, except for the fact that Hardnose John Simmons was feeling his liquor. Each time the man spoke, his tongue got a little thicker. By all physical laws, the man's rate of reaction in emergency should slow in direct proportion to his increasing difficulty with speech.

The snowfall, which had been light when they started, had steadily thickened. Also, here in relatively open country where there were no buildings to block the wind, gusts periodically tugged at the car in attempts to wrest it off the road. Because of the Thru-way, which paralleled it, Route Twenty was never heavily traveled along here, and tonight it was virtually deserted. They had met but one car going in the opposite direction since they had left Buffalo.

To suit driving conditions, Saxon had adjusted his speed from the legal limit of fifty to only about thirty, which gave him extra time to plan a course of action.

He had made up his mind before they were within a mile of the bridge. Having made it up, he concentrated on driving until the near end of the bridge's stone railing hove into sight through the screen of falling snow.

“Pull over here,” Simmons ordered thickly.

Saxon took his foot from the accelerator. As the car started to slow, his right hand suddenly left the wheel and slashed sideways, palm down. The hard edge of his gloved hand caught John Simmons squarely above the bridge of the nose.

Saxon's stomach convulsed against the expected blow of a bullet. Instead, there was a thump as Simmons's gun hit the floor. The man slumped forward to crack his head against the windshield.

Saxon pushed the throttle to the floor and aimed the car at a point just to the right of the stone bridge railing.

Behind him in the rear seat he imagined that Farmer Benton was frantically clawing beneath his arm for his gun, but he didn't have time to worry about that danger. By the time his front wheel hit the narrow, two-foot-high ridge of piled-up snow at the edge of the shoulder, the car was traveling at fifty miles an hour. It plowed right through, although the impact considerably slowed it, then surged forward again as the snow tires bit into the shallower snow covering the ground beyond the ridge.

It was only about fifteen yards from where the Plymouth left the road to the edge of the ravine. Saxon's left hand hit the door handle and his shoulder simultaneously bucked open the door. He left the car in a headlong dive just before it ran over the lip of the ravine.

As he slid along on his face in a foot of soft snow, he heard the agonized shriek of bending and tearing metal from the bottom of the ravine. Inconsequentially he wondered if he had remembered to pay his insurance.

When he climbed shakily to his feet, the car that had been trailing them was parked on the shoulder with its headlights murkily illuminating the scene through the heavily falling snow. And ten yards away, between Saxon and the car, Farmer Benton was scrambling erect. Saxon hadn't even been conscious of the man's jumping from the rear of the Plymouth.

Benton spotted Saxon at the same moment. Jerking off his right glove, he shot his hand inside the front of his overcoat. The headlights of the parked car glinted on the barrel of the forty-five automatic as it came out.

Saxon took three running steps and slid down the steep bank of the ravine on the seat of his pants. Snow made it a frictionless ride. He sailed down as smoothly as if riding a child's playground slide, landing on his feet at the bottom.

chapter 16

The Plymouth had hit nose down and rolled over on its back. Both doors on the left side had been torn off and the other two had popped open. The headlights had been smashed, but both taillights still burned and the dome light, which was controlled automatically by the doors, was burning. These threw enough light to show that the snow was littered with shattered glass and bits of metal.

Saxon didn't pause for a careful study of the scene, but he did give it one quick glance. Inside the front of the car he could see the huddled figure of Hardnose John Simmons.

He moved past the car through the foot-deep snow at a lumbering trot, heading away from the road. Despite the falling snow, there was enough moonlight to see where he was going.

Unfortunately there was also enough for him to be seen, too. He was perhaps ten yards beyond the wrecked car when a shot sounded from the top of the bank and a bullet swished past his ear. An instant later he rounded a curve in the ravine which hid him from the sniper.

Apparently there had been no water in the ravine at winter's onset, for beneath the snow there wasn't the smoothness of ice. The ground was rocky and uneven, making progress difficult. Twice as he hurried along, he stumbled over snags concealed by the snow and nearly fell.

Travel along the top of the bank would be easier, he realized. With this thought, Saxon started to look for a way up the opposite side. He spotted it almost instantly. Just ahead a section of the left side of the bank had fallen away some time in the past, leaving a gash which angled upward far less steeply than the original bank. It was an old landslide, for the bare branches of bushes which had grown there since thrust up through the snow.

Using the bushes as handholds. Saxon laboriously started to work his way up the bank. Halfway to the top he heard the blast of Benton's forty-five and a geyser of snow leaped up three feet to one side.

He didn't even pause to glance over his shoulder at the opposite bank. There was nowhere to go but up, and no way to make himself less a target. All he could do was continue to climb and pray.

Fortunately the opposite bank was about seventy-five feet away, about the limit of accurate range for the cumbersome forty-five automatic under ideal conditions. In the dark, with falling snow further obstructing vision and erratic gusts of wind trying to shove the gunman off balance, firing conditions were far from ideal for Benton.

Pulling himself upward from one frozen bush to the next, it seemed to Saxon that it would take him hours to reach the top of the bank. Another shot boomed and he heard the bullet plunk into the snow a foot to his right. When seconds elapsed before the next shot, he realized the gunman was taking careful aim and squeezing the trigger with target-range slowness. This time the bullet plucked at the skirt of his overcoat.

A sudden, minute-long howl of wind swept down the ravine and raised a blinding fog of snow from the ground to mix with the falling flakes already in the air; that reduced visibility to zero. Under cover of the swirling mass, Saxon managed to climb the rest of the way to the top and swing himself behind the thick bole of an elm.

He had hardly settled to one knee, panting from the exertion of his climb, when the wind died as suddenly as it had started. Cautiously he peered around the tree trunk at the opposite bank.

Dimly he could make out the silhouette of Farmer Benton standing there. As he watched, a figure joined him. The man Simmons had mentioned as Spider Wertz had joined the hunt.

Saxon lost the advantage the pursued has over the pursuer at night: the advantage of darkness. Wertz had brought a light from his car. It wasn't an ordinary flashlight. It had a square lens probably four to five inches across and a wide, powerful beam.

The beam probed the bank below Saxon, slowly working its way to the top. When it touched the elm behind which he was hiding, he drew his head out of sight.

The beam lowered again and he took another peep. It was directed downward to illuminate the side of the opposite bank. As he watched, Farmer Benton stepped over the edge of the bank and slid downward on the snow in the same manner that Saxon had previously. Landing on his feet, he plodded across the ravine and started to climb the bank on Saxon's side.

Saxon crawled ten feet back from the bank, rose to his feet and doubled back toward the highway as rapidly as he could. This wasn't very fast, for the best gait he could muster through the steadily deepening snow was a plodding, high-stepping trot.

The taillights and dome light of the Plymouth were still burning when he passed it. He came out on the road on the opposite side of the bridge and started across it toward Spider Wertz's parked car, his hope being that Wertz had left his key in the ignition. Only the parking lights of the car were now burning.

Halfway across he realized he had fallen into a trap. His hunters had anticipated his doubling back, and Benton's descent into the ravine must have been designed to flush him this way. The car's highway lights suddenly switched on, pinning him in their glare.

Turning, he ran back the other way, expecting a bullet in the back at any moment. The only reason he could think of for Spider Wertz's not firing was fear that Farmer Benton might have reached the other end of the bridge by now and might be hit by one of the bullets.

He was nearly to the end of the bridge when the figure of Benton loomed through the curtain of falling snow. The man was plodding along the edge of the ravine toward the road, not more than twenty feet away. Spotting Saxon, he raised his gun.

Making a left wheel, Saxon raced for the opposite side of the road. Four rapid shots rolled out, so closely spaced that they sounded like one long-drawn-out explosion. Saxon's hat lifted from his head and tumbled to the ground before him. Ignoring it, he hurdled the low bank of snow piled up at the edge of the road by snowplows and kept running.

There were no more shots. Altogether he had counted eight from Benton's gun, which would account for one full clip plus one extra in the chamber. Saxon hoped that the bitter cold had numbed the man's hands enough to make reloading difficult.

He continued to flounder across country until he reached the protection of a clump of trees, then stopped to listen. A wind abruptly rose again, filling the air with eddies of fine snow and cutting vision to a matter of feet. He could hear nothing but the roar of the wind and the panting of his own breath.

When the gust died and he could see through the falling snow again clear to the dim outline of the bridge, he could make out the figure of Farmer Benton moving across it toward the lights of the car. Apparently the man had given up trying to locate him in this blinding near-blizzard.

As he watched, Benton reached the car and crossed in front of the headlights to the side away from the road. The highway lights blinked off and the parking lights came on again. Then the square-lensed hand lamp switched on and moved toward the point where the Plymouth had gone over the bank. Belatedly, Farmer Benton and Spider Wertz were going to check on the man who had ridden Saxon's car into the ravine.

Saxon grew conscious of a growing numbness in his ears. Pulling his scarf from around his neck, he shook the snow from his hair, draped the scarf across the top of his head, and tied it beneath his chin.

Then, sticking as much as possible to the protection of trees, he started to walk toward Iroquois, staying back from the road a good fifty feet. The area along here clear to the edge of town was open country, with numerous wooded sections. A good portion of it was state-owned and was reserved for an eventual state park. Nearer town, one side of the road was owned by the Iroquois Country Club, the other by the local conservation club. There wasn't a single private home along the whole four-mile stretch.

The going was difficult because of the foot-deep snow, but he couldn't risk taking the road. If Benton and Wertz came along and spotted him, the chase would start all over again. Back from the road he would have time to run for the protection of some tree if headlights appeared or, if in an open area, simply to fall flat and wait until the lights passed.

Once headlights did appear from the northeast and he froze to immobility behind a tree. They went past slowly—which meant nothing, considering driving conditions. It might have been his hunters or it might not have been.

Fifteen minutes later lights swept by at a higher speed from the opposite direction. This time he was in the open and had to drop flat. He didn't care to chance the first car's having been Wertz's and these lights being from the same car returning.

Periodically the wind rose and surrounded him with a cloud of fine snow, sometimes blowing with such intensity that he struggled to the nearest tree and set himself to leeward of it until the gust died again. The bitter cold seeped through his overcoat and gloves, numbing his body and hands more with each yard of progress. The exercise of having to lift his feet high because of the depth of the snow at least kept his body from freezing. And ever so often he beat his gloved hands together to retain circulation in them. He plodded on at the rate of about two miles an hour.