The old man’s eyes were open and almost absently he seemed to stare. A single hole in the middle of his forehead, the skin puffed up and a line of blood running down the side of his nose. His hands were in his lap as if he had been resigned to whatever was to befall.
Holstering his gun, Quarrie went back to the door and studied that print once more: the same boot, US Army-issue with a steel shank in the sole, and yet he hadn’t passed the car. There had been no sign of it out front of the hospital building and he had not seen it anywhere on the road. There were plenty of other dirt tracks back this way though, and it could be just about anywhere by now.
Walking back to his car he lifted the radio transmitter from the dashboard and tried to call. He got no response however, the interference was too severe. Slipping behind the wheel he was about to close the door when lightning ignited the sky. Looking up, he saw a figure at a window on the second floor.
He cut for the main entrance at a run. With every step he was waiting for a shot to ring out but it did not come. Another bolt of lightning and he looked again but the window was bare. For a second or so he hovered on the steps then moved inside the ruin where shadows rippled with running water and the staircase climbed one wall.
He could feel adrenalin pumping as he made his way up the stairs. At the top he paused. Fire doors left and right, it was very dark up there and he could just about pick them out. Overhead thunder rolled and another streak of lightning hit. Pushing open the doors on his right he could see the length of the corridor. Slowly he paced, the sound of rain from above and the wind threatening to tear down what was left of the walls. He could feel the way his flesh had started to creep as if his skin had a life of its own. He came to the first room and it was empty. The next two were also empty. The fourth was empty, and when he got to the fifth he paused.
He stood there, gun in hand, as another sheet of lightning washed across the building and his gaze fastened on the walls. Children, images of stick children, hundreds of them scribbled from ceiling to floor. There was nobody there. Nobody at the window and he wondered if he had not been mistaken and it was only the drawings he saw. But then he heard the sound of an engine and he was at the bars of the broken window as a set of headlights sliced through the darkness below.
He took the stairs three at a time. Spilling out of the empty doors he ran back to the gate in the wall. At his car he was behind the wheel, fumbling for the keys in his jacket pocket; he had them in the ignition and the engine roared into life. Foot flat on the accelerator he spun the car around in an arc with standing water lifting in a curtained plume.
Moments later he was through the gates and giving chase. Back along the causeway to where it came to the wider road, the wind howling, wipers clicking back and forth, he was on that patch of dirt with the trees crowding him and the car skewing so badly he almost left the road. Spinning the wheel under his palm, he righted the car then fed power to the motor once more.
He drove as fast as he could without running off the road but could pick up no hint of a car. The road was a switchback that carried the trees and there was no sign of any tail lights, not so much as a reddened glow.
When finally he got to the asphalt he stopped. The nose of the Ford poking onto the highway, he looked both ways but there was no sign of any vehicle. He sat there trying to work out which way the Chevy might’ve gone. Making a right he drove half a mile to where lights flickered from an Esso station, gas at twenty-three cents a gallon with a cup of coffee to go.
The middle-aged man at the cash desk told him the phone was out because of the storm and Quarrie went back to his car. He drove as far as Joaquin where the supper club was open and their phone was working OK. He called Austin and asked them to beef up the ‘all points’ they already had out on the car. He asked them to contact the Louisiana State Police because the border was just a few miles further east. After that he called the Panola County sheriff’s department and told them about the caretaker still in his chair.
A Louisiana state trooper found the Chevy abandoned by the railroad tracks just across the state line. Quarrie was asleep when a call came in on the radio the following morning. Parked out back of the supper club in Joaquin he had spent the night in his car. The rain had stopped and the sun was up and the wind had died to little more than a murmur now. Hanging up the radio, he drove thirty miles to a railroad siding where an old gray Chevrolet was parked. The driver’s door was hanging open and it was a short hop from there to a bend in the rails where the pace of the trains would be slow.
The trooper was waiting for him, wearing a blue shirt and knee-high boots that were polished to a shine. In his twenties, he was sitting in his cruiser, a single red light on the roof and an outline of the state painted on the door. Climbing from the Ford, Quarrie felt a little weathered about the eyes. Taking a package of cigarettes from his pocket he peeled one out and stuck it in the corner of his mouth.
‘Morning to you,’ the trooper acknowledged him, with a smile. ‘Got me a Thermos of coffee going and you look like you could use a cup.’
They sat in the cruiser; the trooper’s flat-brimmed hat on the back seat, he had the Thermos on the dashboard and he poured out another cup. The coffee steamed and Quarrie blew on it, the trooper sitting next to him hunched against the window.
‘So how long you been chasing this guy?’
‘Coming up on a week.’
‘Cop killer, huh?’
Quarrie nodded. ‘Kicked off with a woman in Marion County and that’s where he killed the cop. Stole him a cruiser and drowned another guy in the trunk. Since then it’s been a colored girl from a mission cottage and an old caretaker as well.’ He looked sideways at the trooper. ‘Almost caught up with him last night down there in the Piney Woods but either he knows the roads better than I do or he just got lucky.’
The trooper whistled softly. ‘I’m counting five there, Sergeant. That’s quite a party. You got a motive for any of it yet?’
Quarrie made a face. ‘He’s looking for something. I just don’t know what it is.’
Sinking the last of the coffee he handed the cup back to the trooper and they both got out. Fixing his hat, Quarrie crossed to the abandoned Chevy; the door wide open he considered the interior but there was nothing to tell him anything, at least not with the naked eye. He turned his attention to the dirt on the siding, looking for footmarks, and he spotted the same print as before.
‘He’s wearing a pair of jungle boots with a nick in the heel.’ He indicated. ‘You can see how it is right there.’
Dropping to his haunches the trooper took a good look at the handful of prints scattered next to the car. Then he followed as Quarrie picked out the trail to where the dirt gave out and the rocks around the rail ties began.
‘I’d like to be able to tell you how those boots are pretty distinctive,’ Quarrie said, ‘but with what with the draft and all they’re a dime a dozen right now.’