Lawrence Block - Candy

We slept for a long time. We checked out of the motel and gobbled fried eggs and black coffee at a diner on the road and off we went.

There was a radio in the car but it made both of us nervous. I’ve never liked music or chatter while I drive and Candy felt the same way about it. I turned the radio on a couple times to try to catch a news flash and once I managed to catch the tail end of one. It informed us brusquely that the police were hot on the trail of one Jeff Flanders, the rapist-killer of Caroline Christie. They piled on a few nasty adjectives, uncomplimentary things that sat not at all well with me, and then the announcer began to extol the merits of Bangaway Mattresses and I switched off the noisebox.

“They’re after us,” I mumbled. Candy didn’t catch it and I had to repeat what I’d said.

She nodded. “I knew they would be.”

“I wonder if they know where we’re headed.”

“I don’t think so.”

I shrugged. “They’ll figure it out,” I told her. “They’re supposed to be very efficient. Some joker at the terminal will remember selling us a ticket or something and that’ll be the end of it.”

“By that time,” she said, “we’ll be in Mexico.”

“I hope so.”

She lapsed into a sterile silence and I pushed the car on southward.

The next day another problem occurred to me. The cops had our names—by now the border patrolmen would also have our names and it would be relatively impossible to get across the line into Mexico. You don’t need a passport for Mexico but I remembered vaguely that you do need a tourist card and a vaccination certificate and sundry nonsense. You could get the tourist card automatically by showing identification, but where in hell were we going to get identification. The auto registration would hardly do it.

I outlined the problem for Candy but she was right on hand with a solution.

“There’s a place in Galveston,” she explained.

She left it like that and I asked her what she was talking about. It turned out that this place in Galveston of which she had heard tell was a place where you could get anything forged from a draft card to a passport, for anywhere from twenty to five hundred dollars.

The Galveston guy would fix us up with whatever we needed, and there was obviously no chance of a guy in his position reporting us to the police. He wasn’t exactly aboveboard himself, needless to say.

So when we hit Galveston we would become Mr. and Mrs. David Trevor for keeps. It was just as well that we’d bought the car under a phony name; in addition to keeping the name off the car dealer’s books it eliminated the necessity of forging that as well.

We drove days and stayed nights at motels. We ate pretty lousy food but we made pretty good love and the latter made up for the former. I thought about running for the rest of my life and this more or less bothered me; then I thought about sleeping with Candy for the rest of my life and this more or less compensated for the running.

The Buick burned a lot of gas. But it was a pleasure to drive and there was always a nice ribbon of road stretched out in front of us. It was a good thing. If we had stayed cooped up in one place hiding out I would have cracked. This way I had something to do and the monotonous routine of driving and driving and driving helped preserve whatever vestige of sanity I had left. It wasn’t much but it was a hell of a lot better than schizophrenia.

It was a hot and beautiful morning when we crossed the Texas-Oklahoma border and gunned off in the general direction of Galveston. Texas looked big even though I couldn’t see too much of it from the road. It stretched out every which way and I felt lost. When we pulled up at a Gulf station for a tankful I noticed that Texans look just the way they’re supposed to look. So help me, in this case the stereotype fits. Every last one of the bastards is six and a half feet tall with broad shoulders and bronzed skin. I don’t doubt that there are five-foot Texans with running noses somewhere in the vastness of the state, but I personally have never set eyes on one.

Driving in Texas is, because of the length and breadth of the state, an ungodly bore. We were in Galveston before too long but it seemed as though we’d been driving through Texas and more Texas for the greater part of our lives. I wondered if there was no end to Texas. I wondered if there was a single solitary hill in the whole damned state. I even wondered if it ever rained there and I decided that it didn’t dare to rain. It would be afraid to—awed by the awful and awesome sureness of Texas. Because Texas was incredibly sure of itself.

You know what they say.

There’s nothing as sure as death and Texas.

The passport forger, happily, was from out of state. He was short and dumpy and his skin looked as though it had been kept in a storage shed for the past five years. His eyes blinked and watered and his nose ran and he wore a look of perpetual fear.

He had the steadiest hand I had ever seen in my life.

He wasn’t a crook. He was an artist, a full-fledged artist who could do magnificent tricks with a pen and a printing-press. We told him what we wanted and Candy told him the name of somebody who had put her on his tail and he got right to work on our doctored documents. He never asked us who we were or what we were running from—he knew better than to ask. He was an artist and a professional in his trade and he did it up brown. We gave him carte blanche and he more than lived up to his reputation.

In bygone times the runt would have made a fine living forging Rembrandts. Now he was doing our driver’s licenses and birth certificates and all the rest. Even an expert would have had the devil’s own time telling his products from the real thing.

Candy, who had known enough to bargain with the used-car dealer, also knew enough not to bargain with the runt. He asked a lot—twelve hundred bucks for the works—and it was easily worth it. When we walked out of there we were Mr. and Mrs. David Trevor and no one in the world could have said otherwise.

Or proved otherwise. Neither of us had our prints on file any place. We were Mr. and Mrs. David Trevor. Period. End of report.

We took a hotel room, which was nice after the run of motels. We baptised the bed properly with a hot love-match and we sacked out. The bed was comfortable and the pillows were soft and we slept thoroughly.

She was still sleeping when I woke up and I didn’t have the heart to wake her. I got dressed, shaved, and headed downstairs for breakfast. I was hungrier than I’d been in a long while and the hotel’s coffee shop had good wheat cakes. I had a stack of them drenched in real maple syrup, the kind you can’t hardly get no more.

Over coffee and a cigarette I browsed through the Galveston morning blat. The world news was a run-of-the-mill roundup of H-bomb tests and South American revolutions, neither of which met with my approval, and the local news was glutted with reports of local corruption, which if nothing else proved that New York and Galveston weren’t as different as you might suspect at first.

It was awhile before it occurred to me that I was reading a newspaper, the first newspaper since the murder, and that it might not be a bad idea to hunt through the paper for a story on the killing. It was a pretty exciting killing, all things considered, and Mrs. Caroline Lipton Christie was a big enough name in the Social Register so that she rated nationwide coverage of her untimely demise.

I found what I was looking for on page eleven. It was halfway down the page, a little one-column thing with a staid eighteen-point head, and it went like so:

HUNT THINS FOR

CHRISTIE SLAYER

NEW YORK (AP)—Police were baffled today as clues failed to turn up concerning the whereabouts of Jeffrey Flanders, prime suspect in the murder of Mrs. Caroline Lipton Christie.