JOHNNY KENDELL WAS FIRST out of the squad car, first into the alley with his gun already drawn. The snow had drifted here, and it was easy to follow the prints of the running feet. He knew the neighborhood, knew that the alley dead-ended at a ten-foot board fence. The man he sought would be trapped there.
“This is the police,” he shouted. “Come out with your hands up!”
There was no answer except the whistle of wind through the alley, and something which might have been the desperate breathing of a trapped man. Behind him, Kendell could hear Sergeant Racin following, and knew that he too would have his gun drawn. The man they sought had broken the window of a liquor store down the street and had made off with an armload of gin bottles. Now he’d escaped to nowhere and had left a trail in the snow that couldn’t be missed, long running steps.
Overhead, as suddenly as the flick of a light switch, the full moon passed from behind a cloud and bathed the alley in a blue-white glow. Twenty feet ahead of him, Johnny Kendell saw the man he tracked, saw the quick glisten of something in his upraised hand. Johnny squeezed the trigger of his police revolver.
Even after the targeted quarry had staggered backward, dying, into the fence that blocked the alley’s end, Kendell kept firing. He didn’t stop until Sergeant Racin, aghast, knocked the gun from his hand, kicked it out of reach.
Kendell didn’t wait for the departmental investigation. Within forty-eight hours he had resigned from the force and was headed west with a girl named Sandy Brown whom he’d been planning to marry in a month. And it was not until the little car had burned up close to three hundred miles that he felt like talking about it, even to someone as close as Sandy.
“He was a bum, an old guy who just couldn’t wait for the next drink. After he broke the window and stole that gin, he just went down the alley to drink it in peace. He was lifting a bottle to his lips when I saw him, and I don’t know what I thought it was—a gun, maybe, or a knife. As soon as I fired the first shot I knew it was just a bottle, and I guess maybe in my rage at myself, or at the world, I kept pulling the trigger.” He lit a cigarette with shaking hands. “If he hadn’t been just a bum I’d probably be up before the grand jury!”
Sandy was a quiet girl who asked little from the man she loved. She was tall and angular, with a boyish cut to her dark brown hair, and a way of laughing that made men want to sell their souls. That laugh, and the subdued twinkle deep within her pale blue eyes, told anyone who cared that Sandy Brown was not always quiet, not really boyish.
Now, sitting beside Johnny Kendell, she said, “He was as good as dead anyway, Johnny. If he’d passed out in that alley they wouldn’t have found him until he was frozen stiff.”
He swerved the car a bit to avoid a stretch of highway where the snow had drifted over. “But I put three bullets in him, just to make sure. He stole some gin, and I killed him for it.”
“You thought he had a weapon.”
“I didn’t think. I just didn’t think about anything. Sergeant Racin had been talking about a cop he knew who was crippled by a holdup man’s bullet, and I suppose if I was thinking about anything it was about that.”
“I still wish you had stayed until after the hearing.”
“So they could fire me nice and official? No thanks!”
Johnny drove and smoked in silence for a time, opening the side window a bit to let the cold air whisper through his blond hair. He was handsome, not yet thirty, and until now there’d always been a ring of certainty about his every action. “I guess I just wasn’t cut out to be a cop,” he said finally.
“What are you cut out for, Johnny? Just running across the country like this? Running when nobody’s chasing you?”
“We’ll find a place to stop and I’ll get a job and then we’ll get married. You’ll see.”
“What can you do besides run?”
He stared out through the windshield at the passing banks of soot-stained snow. “I can kill a man,” he answered. But deep in his heart he wondered if even this was true any longer.
The town was called Wagon Lake, a name which fitted its past better than its present. The obvious signs of that past were everywhere to be seen, the old cottages that lined the frozen lake front, and the deeply rutted dirt roads which here and there ran parallel to the modern highways. But Wagon Lake, once so far removed from everywhere, had reckoned without the coming of the automobile and the postwar boom which would convert it into a fashionable suburb less than an hour’s drive from the largest city in the state.
The place was midwestern to its very roots, and perhaps there was something about the air that convinced Johnny Kendell. That, or perhaps he was only tired of running. “This is the place,” he told Sandy while they were stopped at a gas station. “Let’s stay awhile.”
“The lake’s all frozen over,” she retorted, looking dubious.
“We’re not going swimming.”
“No, but summer places like this always seem so cold in the winter, colder than regular cities.”
But they could both see that the subdivisions had come to Wagon Lake along with the superhighways, and it was no longer just a summer place. They would stay.
For the time being they settled in adjoining rooms at a nearby motel, because Sandy refused to share an apartment with him until they were married. In the morning, Kendell left her the task of starting the apartment hunt while he went off in search of work. At the third place he tried, the man shook his head sadly. “Nobody around here hires in the winter,” he told Kendell, “except maybe the sheriff. You’re a husky fellow. Why don’t you try him?”
“Thanks. Maybe I will,” Johnny Kendell said, but he tried two more local businesses before he found himself at the courthouse and the sheriff’s office.
The sheriff’s name was Quintin Dade, and he spoke from around a cheap cigar that never left the corner of his mouth. He was a politician but a smart one. Despite the cigar, it was obvious that the newly arrived wealth of Wagon Lake had elected him.
“Sure,” he said, settling down behind a desk scattered casually with letters, reports and wanted circulars. “I’m looking for a man. We always hire somebody in the winter, to patrol the lake road and keep an eye on the cottages. People leave some expensive stuff in those old places during the winter months. They expect it to be protected.”
“You don’t have a man yet?” Kendell asked.
“We had one, up until last week.” Sheriff Dade offered no more. Instead, he asked, “Any experience in police work?”
“I was on the force for better than a year back east.”
“Why’d you leave?”
“I wanted to travel.”
“Married?”
“I will be, as soon as I land a job.”
“This one just pays seventy-five a week, and it’s nights. If you work out, though, I’ll keep you on come summer.”
“What do I have to do?”
“Drive a patrol car around the lake every hour, check cottages, make sure the kids aren’t busting them up—that sort of thing.”
“Have you had much trouble?”
“Oh, nothing serious,” the sheriff answered, looking quickly away. “Nothing you couldn’t handle, a big guy like you.”
“Would I have to carry a gun?”
“Well, sure!”
Johnny Kendell thought about it. “All right,” he said finally. “I’ll give it a try.”
“Good. Here are some applications to fill out. I’ll be checking with the people back east, but that needn’t delay your starting. I’ve got a gun here for you. I can show you the car and you can begin tonight.”
Kendell accepted the .38 revolver with reluctance. It was a different make from the one he’d carried back east, but they were too similar. The very feel and weight and coldness of it against his palm brought back the memory of that night in the alley.
Later, when he went back to the motel and told Sandy about the job, she only sat cross-legged on her bed staring up at him. “It wasn’t even a week ago, Johnny. How can you take another gun in your hand so soon?”
“I won’t have it in my hand. I promise you I won’t even draw it.”
“What if you see some kids breaking into a cottage?”
“Sandy, Sandy, it’s a job! It’s the only thing I know how to do. On seventy-five a week we can get married.”
“We can get married anyway. I found a job for myself down at the supermarket.”
Kendell stared out the window at a distant hill dotted here and there with snowy spots. “I told him I’d take the job, Sandy. I thought you were on my side.”
“I am. I always have been. But you killed a man, Johnny. I don’t want it to happen again, for any reason.”
“It won’t happen again.”
He went over to the bed and kissed her, their lips barely brushing. Outside, somewhere, the passing of a nearby train broke the silence of the chill afternoon.
That night Sheriff Dade took him out on the first run around the lake, pausing at a number of deserted cottages while instructing him in the art of checking for intruders. The evening was cold, but there was a moon which reflected brightly off the surface of the frozen lake. Kendell wore his own suit and topcoat, with only the badge and gun to show that he belonged in the sheriff’s car. He knew at once that he would like the job, even the boredom of it, and he listened carefully to the sheriff’s orders.
“About once an hour you take a swing around the lake. That takes you twenty minutes, plus stops. But don’t fall into a pattern with your trips, so someone can predict when you’ll be passing any given cottage. Vary it, and, of course, check these bars along here too. Especially on weekends we get a lot of underage drinkers. And they’re the ones who usually get loaded and decide to break into a cottage.”
“They even come here in the winter?”
“This isn’t a summer town any more. But sometimes I have a time convincing the cottagers of that.”
They rode in silence for a time, and the weight of the gun was heavy on Johnny Kendell’s hip. Finally he decided what had to be done. “Sheriff,” he began, “there’s something I want to tell you.”
“What’s that?”
“You’ll find out anyway when you check on me back east. I killed a man while I was on duty. Just last week. He was a bum who broke into a liquor store and I thought he had a gun so I shot him. I resigned from the force because they were making a fuss about it.”
Sheriff Dade scratched his balding head. “Well, I don’t hold that against you. Glad you mentioned it, though. Just remember, out here the most dangerous thing you’ll probably face will be a couple of beered-up teenagers. And they don’t call for guns.”
“I know.”
“Right. Drop me back at the courthouse and you’re on your own. Good luck.”
An hour later, Kendell started his first solo swing around the lake, concentrating on the line of shuttered cottages which stood like sentinels against some invader from the frozen lake. Once he stopped the car to investigate four figures moving on the ice, but they were only children gingerly testing skates on the glossy surface.
On the far side of the lake he checked a couple of cottages at random. Then he pulled in and parked beside a bar called the Blue Zebra. It had more cars than the others, and there was a certain Friday night gaiety about the place even from outside. He went in, letting his topcoat hang loosely over the badge pinned to his suit lapel. The bar was crowded and all the tables were occupied, but he couldn’t pinpoint any under-age group. They were the usual representatives of the new suburbia—white-shirted young men self-consciously trying to please their dates, beer-drinking groups of men fresh from their weekly bowling, and even the occasional women nearing middle age that one always found sitting alone on bar stools.
Kendell chatted a few moments with the owner and then went back outside. There was nothing for him here. He’d turned down the inevitable offer of a drink because it was too early in the evening, and too soon on the job to be relaxing.
As he was climbing into his car, a voice called to him from the doorway of the Blue Zebra. “Hey, Deputy!”
“What’s the trouble?”
The man was slim and tall, and not much older than Kendell. He came down the steps of the bar slowly, not speaking again until he was standing only inches away. “I just wanted to get a look at you, that’s all. I had that job until last week.”
“Oh?” Kendell said, because there was nothing else to say.
“Didn’t old Dade tell you he fired me?”
“No.”
“Well, he did. Ask him why sometime. Ask him why he fired Milt Woodman.” He laughed and turned away, heading back to the bar.
Kendell shrugged and got into the car. It didn’t really matter to him that a man named Milt Woodman was bitter about losing his job. His thoughts were on the future, and on Sandy, waiting for him back at the motel.
She was sleeping when he returned to their rooms. He went in quietly and sat on the edge of the bed, waiting until she awakened. Presently her blue eyes opened and she saw him. “Hi, there, handsome. How’d it go?”
“Fine. I think I’m going to like it. Get up and watch the sunrise with me.”
“I have to go to work at the supermarket.”
“Nuts to that! I’m never going to see you if we’re both working.”
“We need the money, Johnny. We can’t afford this motel, or these two rooms, much longer.”
“Let’s talk about it, later, huh?” He suddenly realized that he hadn’t heard her laugh in days, and the thought of it made him sad. Sandy’s laughter had always been a part of her, and he missed it. He wondered when she would laugh again.
That night passed much as the previous one, with patrols around the lake and frequent checks at the crowded bars. He saw Milt Woodman again, watching him through the haze of cigarette smoke at the Blue Zebra, but this time the man did not speak. The following day, though, Kendell remembered to ask Sheriff Dade about him.
“I ran into somebody Friday night—fellow named Milt Woodman,” he said.
Dade frowned and looked down at his hands. “He try to give you any trouble?”
“No, not really. He just said to ask you sometime why you fired him.”
“Are you asking me?”
“No. It doesn’t matter to me in the least.”
Dade nodded. “You’re right, it doesn’t. But let me know if he bothers you any more.”
“Why should he?” Kendell asked, troubled by the remark.
“No reason. Just keep on your toes.”
The following night, Monday, he didn’t have to work. He decided to celebrate with Sandy by taking her to a nearby drive-in where the management kept open all winter with the aid of little heaters supplied to each car. The movie was something about young love. They necked in the front seat all during the second feature, like a couple of high school kids.
Tuesday night, just after midnight, Kendell pulled into the parking lot at the Blue Zebra. The neoned juke box was playing something plaintive and the bar was almost empty. The owner offered him a drink again, and he decided he could risk it. The night was cold and damp, even in the heated car.
“Hello, Deputy,” a voice said at his shoulder. He knew before he turned that it was Milt Woodman.
“The name’s Johnny Kendell,” he said, keeping it friendly.
“Nice name. You know mine.” He chuckled a little. “That’s a good-looking wife you’ve got. Saw you together at the movie last night.”
“Oh?” Kendell moved instinctively away. He didn’t like the man. He didn’t like anything about him.
Milt Woodman kept on smiling. “Did Dade ever tell you why he fired me?”
“I didn’t ask him.”
The chuckle became a laugh. “Good boy! Keep your nose clean. Protect that seventy-five a week.” He turned and went toward the door. “See you around.”
Kendell finished his drink and followed him out. There was a hint of snow in the air and tonight no moon could be seen. Ahead, on the road, the twin tail lights of Woodman’s car glowed for a moment until they disappeared around a curve. Kendell gunned his car ahead with a sudden urge to follow the man, but when he’d reached the curve himself the road ahead was clear. Woodman had turned off somewhere.
The rest of the week was quiet, but on Friday he had a shock. It had always been difficult for him to sleep days, and he often awakened around noon after only four or five hours’ slumber. This day he decided to meet Sandy at her job for lunch, and as he arrived at the supermarket he saw her chatting with someone at the checkout counter. It was Milt Woodman and they were laughing together like old friends.
Kendell walked around the block, trying to tell himself that there was nothing to be concerned about. When he returned to the store, Woodman was gone and Sandy was ready for lunch.
“Who was your friend?” he asked casually.
“What friend?”
“I passed a few minutes ago and you were talking to some guy. Seemed to be having a great time.”
“Oh, I don’t know, a customer. He comes in a lot, loafs around.”
Kendell didn’t mention it again. But it struck him over the weekend that Sandy no longer harped on the need for a quick marriage. In fact, she no longer mentioned marriage at all.
And she no longer laughed.
On Monday evening, Kendell’s night off, Sheriff Dade invited them for dinner at his house. It was a friendly gesture, and Sandy was eager to accept at once. Mrs. Dade proved to be a handsome blonde woman still in her mid-thirties, and she handled the house and the dinner with the casual air of someone who knew all about living the good life in Wagon Lake.
After dinner, while the women discussed furniture, Kendell followed Dade to his basement workshop. “Just a place to putter around in,” the sheriff told him. He picked up a power saw and handled it fondly. “Don’t get as much time down here as I’d like.”
“You’re kept pretty busy at work.”
Dade nodded. “Too busy. But I like the job you’re doing, Johnny. I really do.”
“Thanks.” Kendell lit a cigarette and leaned against the workbench. “Sheriff, there’s something I want to ask you. I didn’t ask it before.”
“What’s that?”
“Why did you fire Milt Woodman?”
“He been giving you trouble?”
“No. Not really. I guess I’m just curious.”
“All right. There’s no real reason for not telling you, I suppose. He used to get down at the far end of the lake, beyond the Blue Zebra, and park his car in the bushes. Then he’d take some girl into one of the cottages and spend half the night there with her. I couldn’t have that sort of thing going on. The fool was supposed to be guarding the cottages, not using them for his private parties.”
“He’s quite a man with the girls, huh?”
Dade nodded sourly. “He always was. He’s just a no-good bum. I should never have hired him in the first place.”
They went upstairs to join the ladies. Nothing more was said about Woodman’s activities, but the next night while on patrol Kendell spotted him once again in the Blue Zebra. He waited down the road until Woodman emerged, then followed him around the curve to the point where he’d vanished the week before. Yes, he’d turned off into one of the steep driveways that led down to the cottages at the water’s edge. There was a driveway between each pair of cottages, so Kendell had the spot pretty much narrowed down to one of two places, both big rambling houses built back when Wagon Lake was a summer retreat for the very rich.
He smoked a cigarette and tried to decide what to do. It was his duty to keep people away from the cottages, yet for some reason he wasn’t quite ready to challenge Milt Woodman. Perhaps he knew that the man would never submit meekly to his orders. Perhaps he knew he might once again have to use the gun on his hip.
So he did nothing that night about Milt Woodman.
The following day Sheriff Dade handed him a mimeographed list. “I made up a new directory of names and addresses around town. All the houses are listed, along with the phone numbers of the bars and some of the other places you check. Might want to leave it with your wife, in case she has to reach you during the night.” Dade always referred to Sandy as Kendell’s wife, though he must have known better. “You’re still at that motel, aren’t you?”
“For a little while longer,” Kendell answered vaguely. “It’s the off season and their rates are fairly low.”
Dade grunted. “Seen Woodman around?”
“Caught a glimpse of him last night. Didn’t talk to him.”
The sheriff nodded and said no more.
The following evening, when Johnny was getting ready to go on duty, Sandy seemed more distant than ever. Even her kisses had a sort of automatic reflex action about them, and when he gave her the sheriff’s list she stuffed it in her purse without looking at it. “What’s the matter?” he asked finally.
“Oh, just a hard day at the store, I guess. All the weekend shopping starts on Thursday.”
“Has that guy been in again? The one I saw you talking to?”
“I told you he comes in a lot. What of it?”
“Sandy, Sandy—what’s happening to us?” He went to her, but she turned away.
“It’s not what’s happening to us, Johnny. It’s what’s already happened to you. You’re different, changed. Ever since you killed that man you’ve been like a stranger. I thought you were really sorry about it, but now you’ve taken this job so you can carry a gun again.”
“I haven’t had it out of the holster.”
“Not yet.”
“All right,” he said finally. “I’m sorry you feel that way. I’ll see you in the morning.” He went out, conscious of the revolver’s weight against his hip, conscious that the day might come when he’d have to choose between that gun and Sandy.
The night was cold, with a hint of snow again in the air. He drove faster than usual, making one circuit of the lake in fifteen minutes, and barely glanced at the crowded parking lots along the route. The words with Sandy had bothered him, more than he cared to admit. On the second trip around the lake, he tried to pick out Woodman’s car, but it was nowhere to be seen. Or was his car hidden off the road down at one of those cottages?
He thought about Sandy some more.
Near midnight, with the moon playing through the clouds and reflecting off the frozen lake, Johnny drove into town between his inspection trips. There wasn’t much time, so he went directly to the motel. Sandy’s room was empty, the bed smooth and undisturbed.
He drove back to the lake, this time seeking lights in the cottages he knew Woodman used. But all seemed dark and deserted. There were no familiar faces at the Blue Zebra, either. He accepted a drink from the manager and stood by the bar sipping it. His mood grew gradually worse, and when a college boy tried to buy a drink for his girl Kendell chased them out for being under age. It was something he had never done before.
Later, around two, while he was checking another couple parked down a side road, he saw Woodman’s familiar car shoot past. There was a girl in the front seat with him, a concealing scarf wrapped around her hair. Kendell let out his breath slowly. If it was Sandy, he thought that he would kill her.
“Where were you last night?” he asked her in the morning, trying to keep the question casual. “I stopped by around midnight.”
“I went to a late movie.”
“How come?”
She lit a cigarette, turning half away from him before she answered. “I just get tired of sitting around here alone every night. Can’t you understand that?”
“I understand it all right,” he said.
Late that afternoon, when the winter darkness had already descended over the town and the lake, he left his room early and drove out to the big old cottages beyond the Blue Zebra. He parked off the road, in the hidden spot he knew Woodman used, and made his way to the nearer of the houses. There seemed nothing unusual about it, no signs of illegal entry, and he turned his attention to the cottage on the other side of the driveway. There, facing the lake, he found an unlatched window and climbed in.
The place was furnished like a country estate house, and great white sheets had been draped over the furniture to protect it from a winter’s dust. He’d never seen so elaborate a summer home, but he hadn’t come to look at furniture. In the bedroom upstairs he found what he sought. There had been some attempt to collect the beer bottles into a neat pile, but they hadn’t bothered to smooth out the sheets.
He looked in the ash tray at the lipsticked butts and saw they were Sandy’s brand. All right, he tried to tell himself, that didn’t prove it. Not for sure. Then he saw a crumpled ball of paper on the floor, which she’d used to blot her lipstick. He smoothed it out, fearing but already knowing. It was the mimeographed list Sheriff Dade had given him just two days before, the one Sandy had stuffed into her purse.
All right. Now he knew.
He left it all as he’d found it and went back out the window. Even Woodman would not have dared leave such a mess for any length of time. He was planning to come back, and soon—perhaps that night. And he wouldn’t dare bring another girl, when he hadn’t yet cleaned up the evidence of the last one. No, it would be Sandy again.
Kendell drove to the Blue Zebra and had two quick drinks before starting his tour of duty. Then, as he drove around the lake, he tried to keep a special eye out for Woodman’s car. At midnight, back at the bar, he asked the manager, “Seen Milt around tonight?”
“Woodman? Yeah, he stopped for a pack of cigarettes and some beer. Had a girl out in the car, I think.”
“Thanks.”
Kendell stepped into the phone booth and called the motel. Sandy was not in her room. He left the bar and drove down the road, past the cottage. There were no lights, but he caught a glimpse of Woodman’s car in the usual spot. They were there, all right.
He parked further down the road, and for a long time just sat in the car, smoking. Presently he took the .38 revolver from his holster and checked to see that it was loaded. Then he drove back to the Blue Zebra for two more drinks.
When he returned to the cottage, Woodman’s car was still there. Kendell made his way around to the front and silently worked the window open. He heard their muffled, whispering voices as he started up the stairs, and he drew the gun once more. It was easy after the first time. No one could deny that.
The bedroom door was open and he stood for a moment in the hallway, letting his eyes grow accustomed to the dark. They hadn’t yet heard his approach.
“Woodman,” he said, not too loudly, just enough to be audible.
The man started at the sound of his name, rising from the bed with a curse. “What the hell!”
Kendell fired once at the voice, heard the girl’s scream of terror and fired again. He squeezed the trigger and kept squeezing it, because this time there was no Sergeant Racin to knock the pistol from his hand. This time there was nothing to stop him until all six shots had been blasted into the figures on the bed.
Then, letting the pistol fall to the floor, he walked over and struck a match. Milt Woodman was sprawled on the floor, his head in a gathering pool of blood. The girl’s body was still under the sheet, and he lifted it carefully to look at her.
It wasn’t Sandy.
It was Mrs. Dade, the sheriff’s wife.
This time he knew they wouldn’t be far behind him. This time he knew there’d be no next town, no new life.
But he had to keep going. Running.