Стюарт Стерлинг - Collection of Stories

“I’ll help you put your chains on, if you want.”

“No thanks!” Was he imagining it, or was there a sudden panic in her voice? “They make such a horrible racket when the highway is clear of snow.”

“Yeah. Car skidding into a telegraph pole doesn’t sound very sweet, either.” He guessed he’d been wrong. He was looking for trouble and expected to find it even where there wasn’t any.

He grinned and it made his homely, wide-mouthed face attractive in a weather-reddened fashion. She smiled back at him, amiably. He closed the rear door, vaguely uneasy about something — annoyed with himself that he couldn’t put a name to it.

What was there about this dame and her shiny new bus that bothered him?! “They’ll have chains at Hoffman’s Garage at Westport, if you change your mind.”

“I might.” She blinked long lashes provocatively. “I do, sometimes. Play it safe, that’s my motto.”

“Good motto. Good night.” He waved her on, watched the Buick’s purplish tail lights dwindle into the darkness up US 9, slow momentarily at the curve an eighth of a mile ahead, disappear. He splashed back to his machine with a disturbed feeling that all was not according to Hoyle in that setup.

“I’m getting gidgety as an ole woman, Minnie. Just because the Cap bawls me out.” Suppose he’d made that girl get out and unlock the trunk compartment for inspection. She’d have had a right to raise a smell that would really get him a bawling— Wait!

Smell! That was it! He’d caught a good, strong whiff of garlic when he’d opened that rear door.

And the girl had been wearing perfume, so it couldn’t have come from her or he’d never have noticed the garlic.

Garlic. Italian cooking. Medini. The Demon wondered. Of course a lot of people besides Italians did like garlic. To be sure the odor of those powerful little cloves could hang around clothing or, say a blanket, for quite a while. And the Demon had no certain knowledge that they ever cooked with the onion’s little brother down at the Comstock penitentiary.

“Urgent! All patrols!... Urgent, Urgent!! All patrols!!” Minnie was sputtering a warning. He tuned up her one-way. “Special to Units Seven, Fourteen and Twenty-two...!” The Demon’s heart hammered. Twenty-two was Trooper Damon Ames!! “Special to Units Seven, Fourteen, Twenty-two. Fatal shooting on US 9 two miles south Crown Point at Wistor’s Grocery about fifteen minutes ago. Proprietor killed. No details except murderer escaped in car.”

Brad Wistor, the Demon muttered. The roly-poly little guy who would never take a nickel from a trooper for sodas or an apple. A harmless ole Humpty Dumpty with a heart as big as his fat stomach. Chopped down in cold blood.

“No identification of attacker. Halt all cars moving away from area, bring to Crown Point for questioning.”

He kicked up the rest-stand, slewed out in the highway. He’d stop the one car that was moving away from the area past his block, or bust a few of Minnie’s spokes.

Fifteen minutes ago? He was four miles north of Crown Point. Four and two made six miles. Just about right for a Buick traveling thirty-five.

She didn’t look like a kid who might have gunned out a friendly ole geek like Brad. But she might not have been alone in that car. There might have been someone hidden in that trunk compartment. Someone who liked garlic.

It was only the merest breath of suspicion, but it was all he had to go on.

He gave Minnie the spurs, got up to seventy on the straightaway. Then he saw the swinging red light at the grade crossing.

A wild wail of approaching danger shrilled from the locomotive — another.

He twisted Minnie’s tail into fourth speed; the pickup nearly left him sitting flat in the slush. His Indian baby could do a hundred and ten on dry ground. He kept his eyes off the speedometer as he roared into the crossing.

It was one of those long freights clattering toward Schenectady and the west. He could beat it to the grade crossing.

Fifty feet from the oscillating red glare he saw the headlight coming from the opposite direction. The Montreal express coming like a bat.

He could slide Minnie through a lot of tight places where a car wouldn’t be able to squeeze by — but he couldn’t ride the cinders between two trains. He wrenched the handlebars blindly, rocketed off the road onto the side of the railroad embankment.

For one heart-stopping moment Minnie’s momentum carried them sliding and slipping right up the grade into the white beam of the express train’s headlight. There was a bedlam of frantic whistles, the scream of steel brakes biting into steel, the hiss of escaping steam.

Then he was bouncing and jouncing along beside the cab. An instantaneous glimpse of the peak-capped engineer. The orange flash of the firebox. A cloud of blinding vapor. He jerked on the chromium reins again. Minnie plunged down the embankment, hit the gully, threw him.

He spraddled her again, hobbled through a briar thicket into a dump of tin cans and rusty wire, circled back to the road.

“Hate to dish it out to you so raw, Minnie. But you got to expect a few scratches at roundup time.”

He might be held up another couple of minutes by the freight; with the time he’d already lost, the chick in the Buick might have a two or three-mile lead. It wouldn’t make any difference until she got to some cross-road where she could switch off and leave him guessing which way she’d gone. But that would only be ten miles away at Port Henry.

Now that he’d had a few seconds to mull it over, he was pretty sure he wasn’t up against any dumb Dora. Except for that spasmodic indication of panic when he’d suggested getting chains out of the trunk compartment, she’d played the part of a typical traveler made grouchy by villainous driving conditions.

The more he chewed on it, the less certain he was that there had been anyone in that luggage compartment of her car. He remembered — now that it was too late — the momentary slowing a few hundred yards before she got to his roadblock. That could have given a man like Medini plenty of opportunity to open one of the rear doors and drop out into the darkness. She’d have closed the door before she came on to answer the Demon’s beckoning “Come ahead.”

Then she’d slowed again, up the road, thirty seconds or so after he waved her through. The time he’d spent questioning her would give an active man enough leeway to circle around in the blackness and cut back to the road so she could pick him up on the north side of the road-block. That would explain the stench of garlic!

The one bloodshot eye of the caboose loomed into view. Minnie hurdled the tracks close enough for the Demon to have grabbed the brakeman’s lantern off the rear end. He bent low behind the windshield, slurring over on the curves, his blinker light winking furiously as he tore along the deserted road.

If that blond bambina was Medini’s gal, there’d be a shortwave in the dash of that Buick. She’d know the news of Bud Wistor’s shooting was being broadcast over the countryside. She’d not be loafing along at thirty-five now, glare ice or not. With any luck, she’d tear into Port Henry ahead of him. There wouldn’t be anyone there to stop her; no troopers, no deputies — and the lone cop wouldn’t be on the job this time of night.

It was even steven she’d get through the sleepy little burg without anyone knowing which of the two possible routes she’d chosen north from the fork at the village green. There wouldn’t be any tire marks to show the Demon which way she’d gone, either. Even if he’d taken pains to notice what kind of treads she had on her 6.50 x 16s, the Port Henry streets were black asphalt. They held the sun’s heat longer than the white concrete of US 9 — and the sleet would melt soon as it hit them.