Scott O’Hara - Five-Star Fugitive [= Border Town Girl]

He spun with the tumbler in his hand, his right arm coming up and over. He threw it at the side of Christy’s head. It hit with a solid and sickening thud. The tumbler fell to the rug, bounced and rolled away. Christy stood, his eyes filled with an inward bemused expression. Lane reached him in two steps. Christy was shaking his head slowly.

Lane hit him in the jaw with all his strength. Christy rocked but he didn’t go down. He reached his hands slowly toward Lane. As Lane moved to the side to avoid them, he saw the girl standing off to the side, her hands clenched.

He hit Christy again and again. The only sound in the room was the thick, dead impact of bone on flesh. The little blue eyes were glazed and the glasses were jolted off so that they hung by one bow from the left ear. The big hands worked and there was something almost like a smile on Christy’s face. He could no longer lift his arms.

Lane swung, and the glasses bounced away and broke on the floor. A vast pain ran up his right arm from his knuckles. He had the horrifying feeling that Christy was slowly recovering from the blow from the tumbler. Lane grunted with the effort as he swung. Christy’s mouth was losing shape.

Suddenly he dropped to his knees, one hand on the bed to hold himself erect. Lane, knowing that he was too arm-weary to punch the man again, swung the side of his shoe up against the point of Christy’s chin. The big head tilted back sharply. He was poised for a moment in that position. Then, with a sigh, he went over onto his side, tugging the spread from the bed in his left hand so that it fell across his short stocky legs.

Lane stood, trembling with weakness. “Good Lord!” he gasped. “I was beginning... to think... he couldn’t be knocked... out.”

The girl was walking toward Christy with short steps. He called her, and she turned into his arms, laughing and crying and trembling from head to foot.

He slapped her twice. Bright color appeared in her cheeks and the sounds stopped as though a switch had been pulled.

“We’ll have to tie him. With something strong, I imagine. Coat hangers ought to do it. The wire kind.”

She brought a handful of hangers. Lane rolled the man onto his face and wired the wrists together behind him, and then the ankles. He used three hangers on the wrists and three on the ankles, twisting the ends of each tight. Then he soaked a hand towel, jammed most of it into Christy’s mouth, and tied it in place with one of Diana’s nylons.

Only then did they sit down, utterly exhausted from the physical and emotional strain. As Lane sat in the stupor that comes after violent action, Diana went and knelt beside Christy. Numbly he watched her take a fat sheaf of large bills from an inside pocket. From another pocket she took a tight roll of bills wrapped in oilcloth and fastened with a rubber band. She sat very still with a curious expression on her face.

“What’s the matter?”

“I’m busy adding two and two.”

“From here that looks like a lot of money.”

“It is.”

“Is that the money to pay for whatever is hidden in my car?”

“Yes.”

“Would it be too much trouble to brief me? Or would you rather not?”

She smiled at him. “Maybe some day I’ll be able to tell you how much I owe you.” She laughed. “I don’t even know your name.”

“Sanson. Lane Sanson.”

“I’ve got a phone call to make, Lane. I don’t want you to hear what I say.”

“That’s blunt enough.” He stood up. “I’ll wait outside.”

“Wait until I get my party. It may take some time.”

It had happened so quickly, so finally, leaving the big man grotesquely on the floor, that Sanson had a strong sense of unreality, a feeling that his violence had no relationship to actuality — indeed, that this had not happened. Now that it had happened, he knew at once that it was a commitment he did not care to make.

Once an act is performed there is no handy way to sidestep the immutable flow of events that stem from that act. With this act, a strong flow of events had been initiated. He did not know where they would carry him. But he did know, and there was fright in his realization, that through his act he had ceased to function in any way as a free agent. Thus he would be carried along with the events, a reluctant passenger.

He heard the murmur of Diana’s voice as she placed the phone call and it seemed to come from a great distance.

She hung the phone up and turned to smile almost shyly at him. She was one of those women about whom hung an indescribable muskiness, not something which could be scented, but rather felt.

“Sorry?” she asked.

“I don’t know how to answer that. I am and I’m not. I never did anything like this before. Lord, I could have killed him with that glass!”

“I would have been glad!”

“That’s nice. You could have sent cookies to my cell.”

She came to him and put her palms flat against his cheeks. When she kissed him, her lips had a faint sting, like candle wax that drops on the back of a hand.

“Thank you again, Lane,” she said.

He smiled very wryly. “Oh, it was nothing, really.” She stood so close to him that he could see the dark roots of her hair where it was growing out.

She turned away. “You’re a strange one, Lane Sanson.”

“Do you know chess?”

“No.”

“There’s something called a forcing mate. Your opponent makes a series of moves and you only have one possible response to each move. After the series of moves, you’re cooked. The first move was when a little gal came up to me in a bar in Piedras Chicas. Nothing I’ve done since then has been on my own.”

She looked at Christy. “Baby’s awake.”

The small blue eyes were open. He looked up at the two of them without expression. Diana sat on her heels in front of Christy’s face. She bounced the oilskin package up and down in her hand and her voice had a hard teasing note.

“This is going to make George happy, isn’t it?”

Christy didn’t answer. He was curiously immobile. Lane suddenly realized that the man was straining against the twisted wire. He bent over the wrists. The hands looked bloodless. As he watched, the wire cut into the flesh of the left wrist and the blood began to flow. The wire was taut, but it did not slip.

Diana laughed. The phone rang. She motioned to Lane and he went outside, closing the door.

Patton and Ricardo were on duty. It was a small basement room near the boilers, furnished with a chair, a table, a cot, one lamp, a phone, a washstand and a jumble of recording equipment. Ricardo snored on the couch.

Patton smiled tightly, lowered a cutting arm onto a fresh record, went over and shook Ricardo awake.

“This one you should hear, I hope, Rick,” Patton said.

Ricardo sat up groggily. He shook himself awake. Patton stood up and turned up the volume on the amplifier.

“Live like a coupla moles for half your life and—” Ricardo began.

“Shh!” Patton said.

“Here is your party,” the operator said.

“George! This is Diana.”

“How many times do I have to tell you not to—”

“Shut up, George, please!”

“Aren’t you getting a little bold, Sis?”

“I’ve got your present, George.”

“By heaven, you should have it! I gave Christy the money.”

“Christy, my love, happens to be tied up at the moment. With wire. Know what he had in his pocket? That little item that was stolen from me. Now I’ve got enough to buy it twice. Doesn’t that make you think, George?”

There was a long silence. The record revolved under the cutting arm, recording the hum on the phone wire.

“Kid,” George said, “maybe I jumped a little too fast. Maybe I got sore a little too easy.”