Stop This Man! (17 page)

Authors: Peter Rabe

Tags: #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Fiction, #Thriller

In the middle of the night, two trucks loaded with produce came barreling down the road. They piled up on top of each other, spraying fruit and leaves, because the lead truck had hit the discarded wheel. From the time that the state troopers checked the scene to the time when they knew that Catell was nearby, only a few hours had passed. They checked the odd-sized tire; they wondered about the wheel; then they took a routine rundown of cars wanted, and they found that a man who had slipped them in Los Angeles was driving a car like the one that had lost the wheel.

“Did you hear that?” Rosen said, turning down the shortwave.

“No, I didn’t hear that. I was musing to the soft hum of the tires on the shiny road. I have no other interests in mind, so I don’t listen to the radio.”

“Now, Jackie, don’t act like it was my fault. Didn’t we do everything there was to be done?”

“Obviously, no.”

“Well, it beats me how he got out. We had every crossing sealed up, the planes—”

“Yeah. And now I’ll tell you how he did it. He left the road and went straight across the prairie, as big as life and as long as he pleased.”

“But the planes—”

“At night, my friend, they couldn’t tell one shadow from another, even if they had been flying. And all Catell needed to get around was a little moonlight. Now, where I come from we got ditches next to the highway. You couldn’t just barrel off the road and into the prairie, even if we had prairie.”

“Don’t think we won’t keep that in mind from now on. Besides, there’s no prairie in the Imperial Valley. We got him bottled up but good this time. Just let him try hiding in a lettuce field. There’s only one way out for him now, Jackie, and that’s straight up. Or straight down, maybe.”

And Catell began to notice it.

He began to notice how the cars were bunching up in front of him. They were coming fast and at even intervals from the other direction, but his side of the road had become slow and glutted with cars.

Roadblock.

He couldn’t see it yet, but that didn’t mean a thing; there were twists in the road. Creeping more slowly all the time, Catell edged forward, hoping for a side road before the roadblock came in sight. There weren’t any, just fields and fields with plants standing low and in straight rows as far as the horizon. His hands started to sweat. Closer, slowly closer.

He had almost passed it before he saw the dirt lane that angled off through the fields. It was a wide, rutted road, used only by the trucks that picked up the produce from the fields.

With a sharp swing Catell jerked the car out of his line, across the highway, and into the field. Everybody could see him, but he didn’t worry about it. In a cloud of dust he raced along the planted rows, which seemed to come at him like a spreading net.

There were no turns, no dips. When the end of the field came in sight, Catell noticed that the next highway was empty. He turned onto the pavement, letting the car leap forward on the smooth cement. A curve, and there they were again. Two cars across the road, two guys putting
up a striped wood barrier, a third one hitching at his pants, just looking. When they saw the black car tearing around the bend they straightened up and looked. The one who had been hitching his pants up started to wave at Catell in a halfhearted way before he jumped. The other two men were already in the ditch. When the barriers flew up in splinters and Catell watched his left front fender crumple like a piece of paper, a couple of shots cracked out from behind. They didn’t hit a thing, because when the car was clear of the roadblock Catell pushed the gas pedal to the floor and shot off like a rocket.

But now he wasn’t just driving anymore. Part of his sharpness had returned, tingling through his body like a charge of electricity. Long before he heard the sirens howling after him he was looking for a way to leave the highway, to ditch the car, even to make a lone stand, no matter what.

Because nobody was going to get Tony Catell.

When the clump of woods showed up on the left, Catell slowed down enough to take a screeching turn off the road. He kept the car on the narrow lane that wound through the trees, but his attention was wandering. Sirens wailed, sometimes loud, sometimes barely audible. He was trying to figure their position, their direction, but the wooded road, winding to avoid a tree, a rock, kept throwing off his judgment. When the sirens got louder Catell had to slow down. The powerful motor was barely growling and the car dipped and swung, edging ahead, nodding its hood.

Catell started to jump at movements in the trees, started to jerk the wheel too hard. His slippery hands itched, and that faint trembling began to shake him again.

Then the sirens stopped.

They must be off the highway. Where were they? The unbearable tension ripped loose in Catell and he jammed his foot down against the floorboard. The car shot ahead with a howl, barely missing a tree. For a few seconds the straining car found its way, and then, just as Catell could see the trees thinning out in the distance, the tons of roaring power shot off the road into the crunching underbrush. For one strangling second the car kept edging along, wheels whining; then the motor choked.

Catell didn’t get out right away. He sat limp, smelling the strong odor of gasoline, breathing with a shallow movement. When he got up it was with the same dull automatism that had wrapped him for most of the trip. He got out of the car, listened, and reached into the back for the cartridge case. The weight of the thing made the handle slip out of his fingers and he had to lift it with both hands. Carrying the box in his arms, he started to jog toward the thinning trees.

The light was almost gone. The cloying night air smelled of earth and rotting matter, but Catell didn’t notice. The short distance through the woods had drained him of all strength and he could barely get his breath. Through his swimming vision he saw a light in the distance. It was steady and small, looking like all the distant lights that call to children lost in the woods.

Catell started toward the light. He stumbled and lurched across the ruts of a field, his eyes on the light and nothing else. It seemed as if hours had passed when he saw what it was. There was a farmyard and a truck, and two men were standing by the motor, their heads under the hood. Every so often the motor roared, and then they jiggled something under the hood.

Catell crept forward, the box a heavy weight in his arms.
No one saw him, heard him. Not many farms in the Imperial Valley have animals. When Catell got to the back of the truck he smelled the load. Stacked high over the panels, lay a soggy mess of wilting lettuce leaves and rotting stalks.

First Catell threw his box up, then he climbed after it. When the truck pulled out of the farmyard, Catell was buried in the soft mush of decaying stuff. It was warm, soft, and vibrating quietly with the motion of the truck. Catell almost went to sleep. Or perhaps he did. What made him jump was the sudden change in speed as the truck slowed down, crawling along the road with gears whining. Catell knew what it was without looking.

Roadblock.

Struggling as if in a morass, he came erect, the box with the gold under his arm. There were lights ahead, and without any thought but to get away, Catell jumped. Dragged down by the weight of the gold, he hit the pavement with a bad jolt, rolling sideways and into the ditch. He lay there feeling nothing but pain and terrible exhaustion. When he looked up, he could see five cars, all in a line, and the checkpoint. He could have yelled at them and they would probably have heard.

With the last twitching of his muscles he clawed himself slowly up the side of the ditch into the meager bushes that marked the end of another field. More lettuce, he thought, and then a thick unconsciousness dropped on him like a weight.

When the sharp sun hit his face he bolted up with a panic that knew no degrees. There was the road, here the field, his hand was on the battered box heavy on the ground. The road was empty and even the checkpoint looked deserted
in the sun. The barricades were farther than he had thought. And there was no one in sight.

Hefting his box, Catell got up and turned toward the field.

“Hey!”

They were there, two of them, by the barricade. “Hey, you!”

Catell turned the other way, down the highway.

They were there.

As in a bad dream, they had popped from nowhere, coming toward him. Catell started to run across the field.

“Hey, Mack, stop!”

For a second the old anger rose in him, giving strength to his flight, but then there wasn’t enough. All he could do was run, the box dragging on his arms. The box? My gold, he thought. This is my gold.

With a sullen stubbornness he made his feet thump along the narrow rut. They were behind him, yelling sometimes, but he didn’t have the strength to turn. Even the fear had left him. In front of Catell the lettuce field stretched to the horizon. The long vanishing lines of the field converged as in a nightmare, gathering him forward as if in a rush of speed, but never changing, never making the horizon come. The sky was wide and naked, the field lay in a shadowless sprawl, there was nothing but the nightmare lines leading nowhere.

Catell’s legs pounded the sod with monotony. He didn’t know whether they were coming; he didn’t consider whether they were coming. Trapped in an expanse of nothingness he went forward, forward, and when the horizon changed it was like a sudden shock to him.

Sloping down the field, he hit a row of trees and bushes that grew along the edge of a creek. On the other side was
another thicket and beyond that a field. But Catell didn’t look that far. When he plunged into the narrow underbrush they came across the rise behind him, but Catell didn’t think about that, either. Gasping painfully, he stumbled on, looking only for the densest, darkest place in the nightmare of his flight.

Where the low creek had broken the soft bank, Catell crawled under an overhang of roots and earth. Dragging the heavy box along the ground, he squeezed and burrowed into the recessed space, like a night animal seeking the shelter of the dark. Then he just lay still. He listened to the roaring in his ears, the hard beat of his straining heart, and he could also hear the soft sifting of the earth that ran down from above, gently. He fingered the box absently while his dull eyes looked along the creek. A little farther down he could see the battered form of an old house, black in the brash sun, and on the side of the house a large old water wheel that had not turned in a long time.

The little stream, the sun filtering through the leaves, the old wheel of the mill in the light—it was a romantic scene that lay before Catell.

Then his ears caught the voices and the rustling. They were here. Catell heard it but didn’t move, except to push his heels into the earth to lean closer into the damp, close hole he had found. Catell was tired. He lay there looking, and he never thought that they might get him. When the voices had passed above him he moved once, to shift his weight. After a while his idling fingers touched the box at his side. Turning his eyes to see his gold, Catell undid the latch. The box toppled, lid open.

He looked for his gold but saw nothing. There was no strength in him to turn the box and shake it out. Catell
leaned forward, looking, and the sun brought out a quick white gleam deep in the box. It crossed his mind that the gleam should be yellow, a warm gold yellow, but his thought was without interest and he let it pass. Then he pushed the box out of the way to rest himself more closely against the covering earth.

He did not look at the gold again. It sat inside, in the dark hole where it had lived out its rottenness, with only a lost speck of mercury to show what had happened. It was clean gold again.

Once more Catell moved. It was then that the new ache spread through his chest, and he had to raise his head to get breath. It suddenly gripped his chest with a hellish pain, ripping at his heart and freezing the motion of his chest.

That too passed, and Catell sat quietly a while longer.

When they found him the sun was in his open eyes and they were staring at the wheel that had stopped turning a long time ago.