Ричард Деминг - Hit and Run

Then she said, “I don’t think I understand.”

“Probably an unnecessary precaution,” he said. “I’m sure repair garages this far from Buffalo won’t be watching for a green Buick. But here a New York plate stands out more than an Ohio one. Now when I take this thing in to be fixed, it’ll be just another local car. And on the off chance that there’s ever a check to find out who it belonged to, the license won’t lead anywhere except to a car-rental outfit and a nonexistent guy named Henry Draves of Detroit.”

Her lip corners quirked ever so slightly. “As I’ve mentioned before, you think of everything, don’t you, Barney?”

“I try to,” he told her. “I’ll drive the Buick now, and you follow me in the Dodge. Next stop is a repair garage.”

She remained where she was. In her husky but slightly flat voice she said, “Let’s get settled in cabins first. I want a bath and a change of clothes.”

“It won’t take an hour to locate a garage and make arrangements,” he argued.

She shook her head. “We’ve been here over three hours now. I wanted a cabin at six, but I waited while you fed yourself, wasted an hour over coffee, got a shave, rented a car, and changed plates. I’m not waiting another minute.” She looked at him serenely and added, “Besides, they take your license number at tourist courts. We’ll have to drive in with the Buick.”

She was right, Calhoun realized. They should have signed in somewhere before he changed the plates. He didn’t want the New York plates now on the Dodge listed on even a tourist court’s records. Disconsolately he considered changing the plates back again, then decided it wasn’t necessary. There wasn’t much danger in some motel proprietor’s seeing the damaged Buick so long as it didn’t have its own plates on it.

“You win,” he said. “Follow me.”

Helena shook her head again. “You follow me this time. I saw just the court I want when we came in on Twenty. Maybe you’re smart on some things, but I prefer to trust my own judgment on a place to sleep.”

Shrugging, Calhoun climbed back in the Dodge and waited for her to start the procession.

Helena drove nearly ten miles east, back out of town, on Route Twenty, passing a half dozen motels that looked adequate to Calhoun before pulling off to the side of the road suddenly and parking.

“Lock it up,” she called back to him.

He wound the windows shut, got out, and locked the Dodge. When he slid into the Buick next to her, he said, “You must like to live dangerously. I’ve been expecting you to run out of gas for the last five miles.”

She glanced at the fuel gauge. “There’s probably still a gallon or two left. Enough to get us back into town.” She pointed through the windshield toward a large tourist court about a hundred yards ahead on the opposite side of the road. “That’s the one. Isn’t it nice?”

It didn’t look any different to Calhoun from the half dozen others they had passed, except that this one had open-front stalls for automobiles.

“It’s lovely,” he growled. “Let’s get it over with.”

The place was called the Starview Motor Court and advertised hot baths and steam heat. Since the temperature hovered around eighty, neither seemed like much of an inducement to Calhoun.

Though it was probably an unnecessary precaution this far from Buffalo, Calhoun had Helena swing the car so that the left side was toward the office.

With dozens of automobiles driving in and out of the court daily, it wasn’t likely the proprietor would notice that the green Buick convertible had changed to a green Dodge coupe a few hours after they checked in. But Calhoun saw no point in calling attention to their smashed fender. Just possibly it might catch the proprietor’s attention enough to make it register on him.

The proprietor was a sad-faced man in his fifties who had an equally sad-faced wife. They occupied quarters behind the small office. Both of them went along to show the cabins.

They were nice modern cabins, clean and airy and walled with knotty pine. The bathrooms were large, instead of the usual tiny affairs you find at most tourist courts, and contained bathtubs with showers.

“We’ll take two,” Calhoun told the proprietor. “We’ll be here a week, so I’ll pay the full week now. How much?”

The man said the normal rate was nine dollars a day, but as a weekly rate he would settle for fifty-six dollars each. “With another fifty cents a day knocked off if you do your own cleaning instead of having maid service,” he added.

Helena surprised Calhoun by saying she preferred to do the cleaning herself. The proprietor’s wife gave her a pleased smile. Apparently the wife constituted the maid service.

Helena stayed outside when Calhoun went back to the office to register. He signed as Howard Bliss and sister, Columbus, Ohio, and listed the Ohio license number registered to the Dodge. Then he paid the proprietor a hundred and five dollars.

The cabins were Numbers Six and Seven. When Calhoun got outside again, he discovered Helena had backed the Buick into the carport between their cabins while he was registering.

“You could have left it in front of the cabins,” he said to her. “We aren’t going to be here long.”

“We’ll be here at least a half hour. I told you I’m going to take a bath.”

“Several times,” he said wearily. “Which cabin do you want?”

She looked at both speculatively. The one on the right went with the carport they were using; a door near the rear wall of the port led into the cabin.

Helena said, “I’ll take the right one.”

He got her bag from the car, carried it into the righthand cabin via the carport door, and set it on the bed. Then he got his own bag from the car and went into his own cabin.

Inasmuch as he was going to have to kill a half hour anyway, Calhoun decided to take a cold shower. He took his time under the water, letting its coldness knock some of the tiredness out of his muscles and wash some of the sleepiness from his eyes. Twenty-five minutes later, refreshed and in clean clothes, he knocked at the next cabin door.

“Just a minute,” Helena called. “I’m still dressing.”

It was closer to ten minutes before she appeared, and meantime he stood out in the sun letting the heat wilt his collar and undo all the good a cold shower had done him. When Helena finally appeared, she was dressed in a white sun dress, low-heeled sandals that exposed bare, red-tipped toes, and no hat. Her long hair was pulled up in a pony tail.

Carefully she locked her cabin door behind her and dropped the key into a straw purse.

This time Calhoun drove the Buick. When they pulled up alongside the parked Dodge, he handed her the keys to it.

“Instead of my following you, suppose we arrange to meet somewhere?” Helena suggested. “I’d like to do a little shopping.”

“You know Cleveland?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Then we’ll make it somewhere simple.” He looked at his watch, noting it was nearly ten A.M. “The Statler cocktail lounge at two P.M.?”

“All right.”

“Be careful you don’t get picked up for anything,” he cautioned. “Even a parking ticket would put us in the soup with that New York plate on the Dodge.”

“I’ll be careful.”

He drove off while she was unlocking the coupe door.

He was halfway back to town before it occurred to him that it would have been wiser for her to follow him in case the Buick finally ran out of gas. The gauge registered just below half full. If her estimate was correct that five gallons caused the gauge to show just under three-quarters full, fuel was running dangerously low. And even with the new plates on the car, he didn’t want to chance stopping for gas. The fewer people who noticed the damage to the car, the better.