Фредерик Браун - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 37, No. 6. Whole No. 211, June 1961

There is also a scrap of paper a considerable distance away which they must have tossed behind them. I snatch it up as I dash for the garage where Fay’s own car is bedded.

The driver is knee-deep in a crap game, but luckily it is going on right inside the tonneau itself, so I just leap in at the wheel and bring the whole works out with me in reverse. He hangs on, but his three partners fall out; also one of the garage doors comes off its hinges, and almost all the paint gets shaved off that side the car.

Once out it would take too much time to turn it all the way around, so I just make a dive through the casino flower beds and the wheels send up a spray of rose petals and whatnot.

The casino steps are seething with people and I yell back, “Notify the border! They may try to double back and get across with her—” but I don’t know whether they hear me or not.

As for notifying the Mex police, what could they do, chase the kidnap car on donkeys?

“Snatched!” I tell the driver. “Right out of the doorway in front of everybody! I’ll never be able to look anyone in the eye again if we don’t head them off before this gets out. Reach over and grab the wheel.”

He’s been tequila-ing, but at least he knows what he’s doing. He leans across my shoulders, I duck out of the way, and he hauls his freight over into the front seat. I give it the lights, and night turns into day ahead of us.

“Got gas?”

“Thank Gawd!” he says. “I filled her up when we checked in, to get it off my mind.”

We finally get out of the grounds, and he tries to take the road to Tiajuana and the border.

“Left!” I tell him. “Left! They went the other way — I saw them turn.”

“But there’s not even a road that way — nothing, just desert — not a gas station from here to Mexicali! We’ll get stalled sure as—”

“Never mind the geography lesson,” I tell him. “Don’t forget, they’re not running on maple syrup either.”

The asphalt doesn’t go an inch beyond the resort limits in that direction, and as he says, there isn’t even what you could call a road, just a few burro-cart tracks in the soft powdery dust. But one good thing about it, the tire treads of their heavy machine are as easy to pick up as if they’d driven over snow.

As if I had to be told this late what the whole idea is, I take time off to look at the piece of paper I picked up outside the casino.

“Fifty thousand,” it says in pencil, “gets her back. Notify Timothy in L. A. that the joke is on him — he’ll know what we mean. We’ll cure her of gambling, also of breathing, if he don’t come across.”

It is all printed out; evidently it was prepared before they drove up to the casino.

“Americans,” I remark to the driver. “You can tell by the way it’s worded. It’s our fault if we lose ’em — they’ll stand out like a sore thumb if they stay on this side of the line.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, “like a sore thumb with wings; they’re making pretty good headway so far!”

That crack in the note about curing her of gambling makes the whole thing look twice as bad to me, because reading between the lines I get this out of it: Timothy must have engineered the snatch as a practical joke to begin with, to throw a scare into her and break her of the habit of running down to Agua and throwing away her money.

But now his hired kidnapers have double-crossed him and turned it into the real thing, seeing a chance to get ten times the stage money he paid them. And if there is anything worse than a snatch, it is a snatch with a double-cross in it.

He knows who they are, and they know he knows; it’s sink or swim with them and they won’t stop at anything. Poor Fay is liable to come back to her public in little pieces, even after the ransom is paid.

We haven’t once caught sight of them so far, even though they can’t possibly make it any quicker than we can over a roadbed that consists entirely of bumps, ridges, hillocks, gullies, with scrub growing all over the place. And yet the treads of their tires are always there ahead of us in the glare of the headlights, big as life, so I know we’re not wrong. The visibility is swell too, everything stands out under the moon, and the ground is white as cornstarch.

It’s not the seeing, it’s the going that is terrible. One minute the two left wheels are at a forty-five degree angle taking some mound, the next minute it’s the two right wheels, and the springs keep going under us the whole time like concertinas.

“Go on,” I keep telling him, “get some speed into it. If they can do it, we can! She paid twelve grand for this boat.”

“But it’s supposed to be used for a c-c-car,” he chatters, “not a Rocky Mountain goat. That tequila don’t go good with all this seesawing, either!”

I take the wheel back from him for a while and give him a chance to pull himself together.

A minute later as we ride a swell that’s a little higher than most of the others, I see a red dot no bigger than a pinpoint way off in the distance. In another instant it’s gone again as we take a long downgrade, then it shows up just once more, then it goes for good.

“That’s them!” I tell him. “They don’t even know we’re coming after ’em, or they wouldn’t leave their lights on like that!”

“They wouldn’t dare drive over this muck without any,” he groans, holding his stomach with both hands.

“Watch me close in,” I mutter, and I shove my foot halfway through the floor.

Immediately there’s a bang like a firecracker, and a sharp jagged rock or maybe a dead cactus branch for all I know, has got a front tire. We skiver all over before I can get it under control again.

“That’s been coming to us for the past forty minutes,” he says, jumping out. He reaches for the spare and I pull his hand away.

“That would only go too. Let’s strip them all off and ride the bare rims; the ground’s getting harder all the time.”

We get rid of them and we’re under way again in something like five minutes’ time. But that puts the others five minutes farther ahead of us, and the going before was like floating on lilies compared to what we now experience. The expression having the daylights jolted out of you is putting it mild. We don’t dare talk for fear of biting our tongues in two.

A peculiar little gleam like a puddle of water shows up a little while later and when I see what it is I stop for a minute to haul it in. It’s that gold dress of hers lying there on the ground.

“Good night!” he says in a scared voice. “They haven’t—”

“Naw, not this soon. Not until they make a stab at the fifty grand,” I say grimly. “They probably made her change clothes, that’s all, to keep her visibility down once it gets light.”

And away we go ;him at the wheel once more.

The sky gets blue, morning checks in, and we can cut the lights now. There’s still gas, but it’s rapidly dwindling.

“All I ask,” I jabber, keeping my tongue away from my teeth, “is that theirs goes first. It should, because our tank started from scratch at the casino, they must have used up some of theirs getting to it from across the line. They also got eight cylinders to feed.”

A little after six we pass through a Mexican village, their treads showing down its main lane. Also, there is a dead rooster stretched out, with all the neighbors standing around offering sympathy to its owner.

“They left their card here,” I say. “Let’s ask.” We put on the brakes and I make signals to them, using the two Spanish words I know.

“How many were in the car that ran over that hen’s husband?” I signal.

They all hold up four fingers.

“Hombres or women?” I want to know.