The Truth of the Matter (19 page)

“We’re law-abiding folks,” Iris said, “but nobody’d expect me to send a boy over a mile through the dark woods to get to a phone.”

“An’ nobody’d expect a boy to go,” Claude said with a grin.

Ellie got into the truck and sat behind the wheel.

“Got the key on?” Roebuck called.

Through the back window he saw her blonde head nod.

“Okay, son, let’s go.”

Roebuck and Claude leaned into the truck together, rocking it at first, then rolling it faster and faster down the slight grade toward the road.

“Now!” Roebuck yelled.

Ellie popped the clutch and the engine sputtered to life, then died.

“It’s okay,” Roebuck said. “It’ll start.”

They pushed again.

This time the engine sputtered and broke into an uneven roar.

“You’ll get your truck back!” Roebuck yelled as Ellie scooted over and he climbed into the cab behind the wheel. “I promise!”

Claude raised one hand in a slow wave and Iris stood watching, the setting sun turning the sky blood-red behind them.

The gears meshed with a loud grinding sound.

Roebuck felt like Robin Hood as he and Ellie sped away down the narrow dirt road in the wildly bucking truck, a magnificent plume of dust hanging behind them in the still summer air.

They had gone almost a mile in the rattling truck, driving as fast as they thought safe, afraid that at any moment something would fly apart on the ancient pickup. The bumpy road was a series of sharp curves, and there was so much play in the steering wheel that it took all of Roebuck’s concentration and energy just to keep the truck from veering and hitting a tree.

“Watch out!”

As they lurched around a bend Ellie’s scream rang in Roebuck’s ear. He twisted the wheel a full turn and a half, sideswiping the car that had been coming from the opposite direction.

He couldn’t believe it as he looked out the truck’s rear window at the car they had just run off the road. Sitting at an angle in the high weeds at the edge of the road was Sheriff Boadeen’s vaunted cruiser, a nasty red scrape down the two tone paint of its shining side, through the ornate gold badge on its door.

Even as Roebuck watched the sheriff was turned and gaping at him, his blue uniform cap crooked on his head, his lips moving in a surprised shout to his deputy who was also twisted in his seat and staring at the truck. The cruiser roared backward across the road as Boadeen attempted to turn it around.

“It’s Boadeen!” Roebuck yelled, and he slammed his foot down on the accelerator. Ellie turned in the seat and looked out the rear window as the ancient truck gradually gained speed. They half-slid, half-tilted around the bends in the rutted road, bucking and shimmying violently.

“They’re after us!” Ellie yelled as she caught a glimpse of the cruiser’s smiling grill through the haze of dust just as they rocked around a corner.

They were rolling now. Roebuck mashed down with all his strength on the accelerator, feeling the mad vibrations of the rattling truck’s racing engine run up his leg and through his body. His teeth were clacking together and the seat of his pants was slapping up and down against the hard upholstery as he barely kept the roaring, bucking pickup on the road.

“They’re g-g-going to c-c-catch us!” Ellie shouted, bouncing up and down beside him.

“They’re n-n-not!” Roebuck screamed back.

They heard a popping sound behind them and Ellie grabbed Roebuck’s shirt.

“They’re sh-sh-shooting at us!” she screamed.

“G-G-Goddamn them!”

They smashed over a rut so deep that the truck was momentarily airborne, bouncing down with such a jolt that Roebuck actually struck his head on the cab roof. He tried to steer with one hand as he drew his pistol from his belt, but he fumbled the gun and it dropped to the floor and began clattering around between his feet. In the back of his mind he realized that Boadeen’s gunfire would be ineffectual anyway, for the bumpy road wound so tightly that the two racing vehicles were seldom within sight of each other long enough for a clear shot.

Wham!

The truck was suddenly all over the road, then off the road and rocketing through the woods, barely passing between trees as Roebuck braced himself and struggled frantically with the suddenly alive wheel that was writhing in his hands like a coiled snake. They spun sideways as the bed of the pickup ricocheted off a tree, and the truck tilted partway over, paused, then bounced back to sit upright on all four wheels with the engine dead and the radio suddenly blaring. Roebuck rubbed his eyes and turned to see the cruiser flash past with screaming siren.

“They didn’t see us!” Ellie yelled over the blare of the radio. “What happened?”

“Blowout! Come on!”

They were out of the truck, running unsteadily through the woods.

“Wait a minute!” Roebuck whispered hoarsely as they crashed through the woods. “I don’t hear the siren anymore.”

They stood still, listening vainly, then they went forward more quietly.

After moving carefully through the woods for a short distance they both stopped, both hearing the same faint rustling sound at the same time.

“Over here,” Roebuck whispered, and he guided Ellie by the arm to some thick underbrush behind two trees that grew close together. They crouched, waiting.

Ellie squeezed Roebuck’s hand and pointed. About a hundred feet from them a blue uniform cap with a gold badge was moving slowly just above the brush on the edge of a slight depression. As they watched, the cap disappeared behind some higher brush, then reappeared a few feet away. For a second they glimpsed a slowly moving figure through the trees, bent forward, gun drawn, staring intently ahead. Sheriff Boadeen moving in for the kill, unknowingly stalking past his quarry.

Roebuck knew that the deputy was somewhere near, probably creeping through the woods on the other side of the road. The sheriff must have seen almost immediately that there was no raised dust ahead of him and realized that the pickup had run off the road. Now he and his deputy were backtracking, and Roebuck suddenly realized that they were closing in on the barely audible, static-filled sound of the blaring truck radio.

“Let’s go,” Roebuck whispered when Sheriff Boadeen was well past them. He took Ellie’s arm and they moved through the woods as fast as they could with reasonable silence, parallel to the winding road.

Then they too heard a sound, a low and rhythmic rumble.

“What the hell is that?” Roebuck asked in a whisper, sweat pouring down his face.

“Sounds like a car engine.” Ellie bent over, her hands on her knees, trying to catch her breath.

Roebuck felt a sudden elation course through him. “By God, it is! It is a car engine!” Ellie followed him as he began trudging in the direction of the low, steady sound.

They stopped at the edge of the woods and looked all around them. The cruiser sat in the middle of the road facing away from them, shimmers of hot exhaust fumes rising from its tailpipe with every throb of the engine.

We’ve got to chance it!
Roebuck thought, breathing in unconscious rhythm to the quick beat of the idling motor.

He and Ellie exchanged glances, and it was Ellie who stepped out onto the road first, pulling Roebuck after her by the shirt sleeve.

The road was empty for the short distance they could see in each direction.

They climbed quickly into the powerful cruiser, careful not to slam the doors and alert Boadeen or his deputy. Roebuck put the car in gear and with a trembling foot applied just the slightest pressure to the accelerator.

The cruiser moved forward slowly and quietly, around the bend in the road, up a hill and through another curve. Then he gave it more gas and they picked up speed smoothly as the big car took the winding road with ease. They opened both doors and slammed them shut all the way.

Roebuck let out a long sigh, like a sharp wind through the trees.

“That’s going to be one surprised sheriff!” he said loudly, and he began to giggle.

Before Ellie knew it, she was giggling with him.

They pulled the cruiser off the highway, into a grove of trees just outside Ironton, and walked the last half mile through the darkness of mid-evening. Now they sat on a hill overlooking the strip of lights along either side of the highway and the dotted white lights of residences beyond.

“Where we going to get a car?” Ellie asked.

“I don’t know yet, but it’s a cinch we wouldn’t have gotten much farther in a stolen police car.”

“You think we better hurry?”

“We’ve got time.” Roebuck fingered the .38 police special Ellie had found in the cruiser’s glove compartment. “Boadeen will never get that pickup running again, and even if he did they couldn’t drive very fast on that flat tire.”

“Just the same,” Ellie said, “I’ll be glad when we get out of Clark County.”

An unexpected shiver of dread ran through Roebuck. If only Gipp would stop his deadly pursuit at an imaginary line, to turn around and go back according to the rules. But no line, imaginary or otherwise, could stop Gipp, and no rules applied to him.

A long shrill whistle drifted up to Roebuck and Ellie from the town below. It came from a low complex of factories or plants of some sort, with tall smokestacks in bunches of threes stretching up toward the night sky. In a few minutes they saw below them a string of automobile lights leading from a parking lot behind one of the buildings.

“What kind of place is that?” Roebuck asked.

Ellie shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know.”

“It looks like the afternoon shift getting off.” Roebuck broke off a. tiny blade of grass and began chewing on it. “There should be a night shift. Maybe we can get a car off that lot.”

“That’s a good idea,” Ellie said, “and it might not be missed for eight hours. But how we going to get it started?”

“I don’t know,” Roebuck said. “I’ll hot wire it or something.” He had no idea how to hot wire a car. Actually he had been counting on someone leaving their keys in their car, as many people do in public parking lots. But Ellie had a point. The odds were against his finding a car ready to go on a lot like this.

On the other hand, how hard could it be to change the wires on a car? He would use a dime for a screwdriver and switch a few connections around until he got the right combination. At this point a man had to kind of play things by ear.

“There is a night shift,” Ellie said.

Roebuck looked down to see three or four cars going into the lot where the outgoing string of headlights had been. Soon more sets of headlights showed up, driving the same curving pattern around the building to what looked like a well-lighted parking area. Roebuck counted forty-two cars before he and Ellie began walking down the long grassy hill.

They walked quickly but relaxed, their heels digging into the soft, slanted earth. Below them the lights of Ironton, above them the detached tranquillity of the stars. The shrill, wavering whistle sounded again, louder now as they were nearing the parking lot.

“I hope to hell there’s not a guard or something,” Roebuck said.

“It doesn’t look like there would be,” Ellie said. “This looks like a pretty small town.”

“Yeah, but who knows what this place makes? Maybe they manufacture parts for the hydrogen bomb.”

They could see now that the low building was bigger than it had appeared from atop the hill. The only windows on the long walls were slit-like affairs near the roof, and every one of them had light streaming from it.

“There’s no fence or anything around it,” Ellie said in a breathless voice, though there was obviously no point in whispering.

“We’ll go around to the side where the parking lot is,” Roebuck said firmly.

There was no one in sight on the lot, only the cars in neat rows between freshly painted yellow lines. The lot was discouragingly well-lighted.

“This place is a steel mill,” Roebuck said, as he and Ellie stood in darkness just off the parking lot. There was a weightless, nervous feeling in his stomach.

“Do you want me to go with you?” Ellie asked.

Roebuck shook his head. That was a hell of a question for her to ask.

“You wait here,” he said, and he stepped out into the light and began walking down a row of cars, trying to appear casual, as if he belonged there.

He felt the panic grow in him as car after car had an empty ignition keyhole. Slipping his hand in his pants pocket, he found a dime and rolled it between sweat damp fingers. He was not so sure now that he could get one of the cars started, and he felt terribly exposed on the wide lot, like an outfielder in a night baseball game. He bet that he could have been a ball player if he’d tried, marveling for just an instant that his frightened mind could harbor such an irrelevant thought at a time like this.

The whistle shattered the air with a scream.

Roebuck jumped, unable to hear his own frightened shout. Then he realized what was happening and made himself appear unaffected as the shrill blast reached a crescendo and died away. He turned up another row of cars and began walking toward a sleek late model Pontiac, making up his mind that if he didn’t spot an ignition key by the time he reached it he would get into it and lie down on the front seat to experiment with the wires beneath the dash. If that didn’t work they would just have to steal a car somewhere else.

“Hey!”

Roebuck leaped and whirled toward the voice.

It was a young man, about twenty-five, his tall, lean body dressed in tight pants and a faded blue workshirt. He was about twenty yards from Roebuck and walking swiftly toward him.

Roebuck wanted to run but he was paralyzed with surprise and fright’.

“You mean me?” His voice was much too high and not loud enough, as if he were speaking in a drape-lined room.

“Yeah, what are you doin’ on this lot? I seen you lookin’ in all the cars.”

“No, you’re crazy. I was just cutting through….”

The man stopped about ten feet from Roebuck, looking narrowly at him over the hood of the car that separated them. “It didn’t look that way to me.”

“Well, you’re wrong.” As if the conversation was ended, Roebuck turned and began walking off the lot.