Chapter 10
In the morning bright sunlight streamed into the room and woke them up early. They got out of bed and yawned and got dressed. They had not unpacked the night before so they could leave in a hurry. He loaded their bags back into the car and got in and drove into Chester for breakfast. He had bacon and eggs and grits and three cups of coffee. She had a hard roll and a glass of orange juice.
"You have to eat more than that," he said.
"I want to keep my girlish figure;
"You'll be starving later."
"No, I never eat a big breakfast."
They were on the road by eight o'clock and the Buick rolled on impressively, covering a lot of ground in damned good time. He had not driven a car since he had come to New York, had not been behind a wheel since he dumped his old Chevy after the runaway ride from Ohio to the city. That had only been a short time ago in terms of subjective time. He had come a long way since then. He had killed a lot of people, had had a lot of love, had pulled a lot of jobs. And he had lived, it seemed to him, about four hundred years between the rape of Sally in Ohio to the marriage to Jan in Maryland. Four hundred years at the very least.
Good years.
He kept the radio tuned to one of those hot-shot stations that gives you news flashes every half hour. They made the eleven-thirty news-someone in Maryland had seen their photo in the paper and had called the FBI, and the FBI knew about Maryland and found out about the marriage bit. But the car dealer hadn't spouted off so no one knew about that, at least not yet.
They raced through West Virginia and up into Ohio, but Ohio didn't seem like a good stopping place because that was where it had all started. He pushed the Buick mercilessly and they made it across into Indiana and laid up there for the night at a motel on the outskirts of Rush-ville. This time she went out for the food because his picture was all over the place. She brought back a bag of ham sandwiches and a bottle of liquor.
"They don't know where we are," she said. "I think we threw them."
"Just for the time being."
"They don't know the car. Not yet, anyway."
"They won't know it unless somebody spots us. The guy who sold it to us probably wishes he was dead right now. He's probably having visions of the cops nailing us and finding out where we got the car, tracing it back to him and locking him up for sixty years. He won't open his mouth."
"Then we're clear."
"Clear?" He had to laugh. "They'll plaster our picture all over the country. It won't be long before someone sees us and recognizes us and we can start running faster than ever. Clear is something we'll never be, honey."
"Then we might as well do whatever we want."
"We're not passing anything up," he said. "Any time you get a little hungry for blood, you let me know. I'm in the mood whenever the right thing comes along."
The right thing came along the next day, just after dark. They had slept late that morning, had slept once again in each other's arms, cozily and lovelessly, and that gave them a late start on the road. He took it easy in the car, and at seven that night they were on their way out of southern Illinois when she touched his arm, her hand already warmer than usual. She pointed and he looked over at the side of the road and saw what she was pointing at. His foot bore down firmly on the brake pedal and the car slowed and rolled to a stop.
There were a pair of kids at the side of the road, a boy and a girl in their late teens. They were hitchhiking. He wore blue jeans and she wore a skirt. He was a red-necked kid with a million freckles. The girl was a cornfed blonde with big teeth. The car stopped twenty yards ahead of them and the boy ran up to the Buick with the girl a few yards behind and hurrying after him.
Fallon slipped the revolver from his pocket and handed it to Jan. She held it in her lap. The boy reached the car and opened the door. He started to ask them how far they were going but he only got one syllable out before Jan had cocked the gun and shot him deliberately in the throat. He fell backward and he died.
The girl was still hurrying toward the car when the gun sounded. She stopped short and backed up and yelled and caught her breath and turned to run. Fallon got out on his side of the car and started after her. The girl ran like a frightened rabbit. Jan squeezed off a snap shot at her, aiming for her legs, but the shot went wide. The girl ran and Fallon raced after her, his long legs covering the hard-packed ground at a good speed. She ran almost fifty yard before he ran her down like a beagle running down a rabbit. He caught her with a tackle around the legs and smashed her down to the ground.
He put a knee in the pit of her stomach and leaned all his weight on her while he ripped the clothing from her body. He was already raping when Jan got there. The girl was clawing at Fallon's back with frightened fingers, and Jan grabbed her hands and stood on them, a foot on each hand, while Fallon finished with his brutal rape.
Then he held her while Jan took her, and Jan lay down upon the girl and put the muzzle of the gun between the girl's chunky breasts and kissed each nipple and cocked the gun and kissed the girl on the lips and dug the gun into her flesh and kissed the girl and squeezed the trigger and shot the girl in the heart.
By nightfall the police and the FBI had a make on the car and knew where they were. It was getting close now, it was going down to the wire. It was worth it.
"As many as he can," Jan said.
"Yes."
"As many as we can. Every one we kill, that's one more between us and the grave. I love to watch them die."
"We're sick people."
"We're awful people. We deserve to die."
"The sooner they catch us," he said, "the better it is."
"But I don't want them to catch us."
"No," she said. "Neither do I."
A motel was out of the question. The car was hot and so were they, and a motel was impossible. They could have pulled off the road and slept in the car but Jan didn't want to and she had another suggestion. It was a good one and he went along with it.
They found a farmhouse in Missouri, an isolated place in the middle of the Corn Belt. Fallon drove up the drive and parked the car in the garage alongside of the farmer's Plymouth. They got out and walked to the door and buzzed the buzzer. The farmer was an older man, worn by work and weather. He answered the door and asked what he could do for them, and Fallon shot him dead.
There were four others in the family, the wife and two boys and a girl. The wife ran out to see what had happened and Fallon shot her three times in the stomach and once in the head. One of the boys was halfway down the staircase when he saw the gun in Fallon's hand. Jan yelled to Fallon and he spun around and shot at the kid but the gun was empty and the hammer clicked. The kid turned and raced up the stairs.
Fallon put six bullets in the gun and went after him. He was at the head of the stairs when the boy came out of a room carrying a rifle. The boy was about fifteen. He fired one shot that missed Fallon, and then Fallon shot him twice in the chest and the kid pitched over and died.
The other boy and the girl were locked in a bedroom. The girl was crying. Fallon shot the lock off the door and went inside. The boy and the girl were huddled in the corner. The boy was about twelve and the girl was a year or two older. Fallon went to shoot the boy but Jan grabbed his arm.
He gave her the gun. She pulled the boy away from his sister and shot him in the groin and he shrieked. He fell on the floor and she put the muzzle of the pistol to the back of his head and blew his brains out.
Jan grabbed the girl. They dragged her into the master bedroom and tore her clothes off. She kept crying hysterically and Fallon thought that she might be insane. She was skinny and had hardly any breasts at all. She kept crying all the time no matter what they did.
They slept in the bed. They passed the girl back and forth all night long, taking turns with her. They made her do everything they could think of, and sometimes they made love to her simultaneously. Twice they dragged her downstairs and made her look at the bodies of her parents. Each time she got absolutely hysterical and they took turns with her again.
They slept in the farmhouse. It was a lot safer than a motel. The big bed was comfortable and the girl was always there, crying, whenever they wanted her.
In the morning Fallon found a long piece of electrical wire in a cabinet. He brought it upstairs and looped it over an exposed rafter. They made the girl stand on a chair and they fastened one end of the wire to the bedpost and looped the other end tautly around her neck, Jan pulled the chair out of the way and the girl fell a foot and the wire dug into her neck.
They had thought it would snap her neck instantly but it wasn't a long enough fall. She dangled in the air kicking and screaming. When she finally died they went out and transferred their bags to the farmer's Plymouth. They closed the garage door and locked up the house, leaving the Buick out of sight in the garage and leaving the bodies out of sight in the farmhouse. They drove away in the Plymouth. They had a rifle along now, a rifle from the farmer's house, the one the older boy had used. They had shells for it. Fallon drove like hell and headed south, pushing the Plymouth at its top speed. But it was hopeless and they both knew it.
In Kansas, Fallon switched off the car radio. Jan passed him a half-finished cigarette. He took three quick drags on it and tossed it out the open window.
He said: "It's over now."
"Yes."
"They've got. us pinpointed. They know the car. They must have roadblocks on every big road in the state. It's a miracle we haven't hit one yet."
"How much longer have we got?"
"I don't know. They'll use spotter planes. They'll send planes back and forth, and any minute now one of them is going to come by and catch sight of us. Then they can close in with a dragnet. Dum-da-dum-dum. I just want the facts, ma'am. Just the facts. Just routine questioning, ma'am."
She lit a fresh cigarette. "How many were there, Lee? How many did we get?"
"We may get more. When they nail us, we ought to take a few with us."
"But how many so far?"
He thought about it. There was Shirley, the first one. There were the two kids in Central Park. There was the tramp in Harlem. There were the seven men at the poker game. There was Karen, the Lesbian. There were the two hitchhikers in Illinois. There was the farmer and his wife and his three kids.
"Nineteen."
"Nineteen when I was with you?"
"No, there were four before then. Fifteen with you along. That's a lot,"
"A lot," she said.
"I'll tell you something. Right now I wish it was over already. I really do."
"Are you afraid?"
"I don't know. I suppose so. but I don't know exactly why. Not because it'll hurt. I'm not afraid of the pain."
"It can't hurt that much."
"Well, it doesn't matter how much it hurts. If I'm afraid, I don't know what it is that I'm afraid of. You?"
"I don't know either. I think I am. I should have met you years ago. I love you, Lee."
"Yes."
"What that drunk minister said. Until death do us part. Will it part us?"
"No. We go together."
"Until death do us part. It has a nice sound to it. There's a plane overhead, Lee."
He started to brake the car, then realized that would only call attention to them. He drove at a steady speed and hoped the plane wouldn't spot them, but he saw it circling and knew they had been seen. He braked the car after all and grabbed the rifle from the back seat and put a shell in it.
He got out of the car and raised the gun.
"You can't htt them from here," she said. "Can you?"
"I can try."
"But then they'll know who we are-"
"They know already," he said. He aimed the rifle and fired at the plane. He missed. He loaded again and fired again and missed again and the plane flew off, far out of range. He got back into the car and threw the rifle in back again and started the engine. The car sped onward.
"Lee-"
"What?"
"What happens now?"
"Well, they've got us spotted," he said calmly. He was amazed, suddenly, at how very calm he had become. "They'll move the roadblocks in," he said, "and they'll make sure that they've got everything blocked off. That means everything, which means we can't try to get away by heading down the little dirt roads, either, because they'll have them covered too."
"And?"
"And they'll send squad cars moving in toward us. Troopers or FBI agents. They'll cut all our escape routes and move in on us, and that's about it."
"So why drive?"
He looked at her.
"We might as well make a stand here as anywhere else. You don't want to try running a road block."
"No. That would be suicide."
The humor of that line hit them both at once. They laughed, and then it occurred to them at once that they had relatively little to laugh about, and they stopped laughing.
"I think you should pull off the road," she said. "Drive into a field. They'll find us, but they'll have to come to us and we'll be stationary. We can use the car as a fortress. It's hardly impregnable, I know, but its better than nothing."
He slowed the car.
"We have a rifle and a revolver," she said. "We can knock off some of them."
"They'll have machine guns."
"Yes. You know, I thought of something. You remember the little girl?"
"Yes, I remember her."
"We should have taken her along."
"What for?"
"A hostage. They couldn't shoot at us if we had her in the car. It might give us a little more time."
She was right. That would have been the smart move, certainly. With a hostage they would have a little more of a chance. But even so they would wind up the same way. Crooks took hostages all the time, but sooner or later something gave out and they wound up caught anyway.
Still, it would have been worth a try.
"You're right," he said. "We should have taken her."
"This is a fine time to think of it, though."
"Well-"
"But it was so much fun hanging her. Maybe we're better off this way, Lee. I just want you with me when I die, that's all. Nothing else matters, does it?"
"No."
"Just being together, that's all."
He had pulled the car off the road. He drove as far as he could into, the field until the car stopped and stalled. He got out the rifle from the back seat and loaded it, and he checked the revolver to make sure that all six chambers were loaded. With the butt of the gun he knocked the glass from every window in the Plymouth. He wanted to be able to shoot in any direction without interference, and he didn't want any wild shots sending shards of glass their way. He knocked all the windows out and crouched in the back seat and made her get down in front.
Then he started to hear the sirens.
Time is odd. It may fly or it may crawl, it may be nothing or it may be everything. When you sleep, an hour in the middle of the night is nothing but a wasted void, and it is over and done with without your ever being aware of its passage. A climax, in contrast, is virtually instantaneous, yet it looms up as a huge and great moment and seems to occupy far more time than it really does.
Clocks and calendars are not a true measure of time. They measure time in the real world, the objective world, and this is all very well. But human beings do not live in objective worlds. They live in subjective worlds, one to a person, each person living in his own little world with its own time scheme. An hour with a pretty girl passes more quickly than an hour on a hot stove, unless you are a mashochistic pervert, in which case quite the reverse is true. Time is a personal quantity, and any other approach to it is invalid.
Fallon had lived more than thirty years that had gone by like nothing at all. They raced by, not because they were pleasurable, not because they were spent asleep, but because nothing that had happened during their span had been of any great importance to him. They had come and they had gone and he had endured while they passed. There had been good times during those years, and there had also been bad times. There had been women and there had been stretches without women. There had been time in jail, which seemed then to crawl slowly by, but which now, in retrospect, just seemed as vast stretches of nothingness which he could scarcely remember. There had been times when he had worked and there had been occasions of petty crime. There had been liquor.
But there had been damned little in the way of vitality, damned little that gave him a sense of being vibrantly and desperately alive. And so the time went quickly and left no imprint upon the man that was Lee Fallon.
All this had changed now.
The crime had changed it. The rape had changed it. The murder had changed it.
And Jan Lawler, now Jan Lawler Fallon, had changed it more than anything else on earth.
Now, as the end came closer and closer, even the seconds were hours. When time is running out it seems to be running away too quickly, but it also takes a long while to pass. This is no paradox. It makes sense, if you think about it a little.
Fallon wasn't thinking about it. The sirens were getting louder and the police were coming closer, and he was thinking, really, about nothing at all. He was too deeply involved in what was happening to waste any time on thought. Thinking was for more restful times. He was preparing for action.
"I'll say it now," Jan said. "Because I might not get another chance, not in this world. I don't regret a thing."
"Neither do I."
"And I love you."
"That goes both ways, Jan."
"Tell me."
"I love you," he said.
And the first earful of cops came into view.
He had the pistol. He was a better shot, and it's a hell of a lot tougher to be accurate with a handgun than with a rifle, so he had let her use the rifle. He saw her now, resting the barrel over the side window and taking aim.
"Hold your fire," he said. "Until I see the whites of their eyes?"
"Until I shoot," he said. "Then make every shot count. We won't get too many."
The cop car had pulled off the road. There were lour men in it, two in front and one in back. One of them took a megaphone and held it to his face. He rolled down the window.
"Louse," Fallon said.
"Fallon," the cop roared. "You're surrounded. Yon haven't got a chance. Throw your guns out and come out with your hands up and you'll get an even break."
Fallon spat.
"You don't have a chance this way," the cop yelled again. "We'll come in after you if we have to. You'll get a fair trial, Fallon. What more do you want?"
What did he want? A good gun battle and a fast clean death, that was what he wanted. And that was one thing they couldn't take away from him no matter how hard they tried. They could and would take his life, and he knew it, but they couldn't pick the manner in which it would go. That was up to him and he had made his choice. He and Jan would go together, and quickly.
Another car drew up. Four more cops spilled out, and another car was coming-he could hear the siren.
"This is your last chance, Fallon."
He didn't mean to answer them. He hadn't wanted to give them the satisfaction of an answer. But the cop was getting on his nerves and he was sick of it. He wanted things to get moving and fast, and he was tired of all this horsing around. No matter how much the cop coaxed him, he wasn't surrendering. There was nothing on earth that could make him surrender. He was a mad dog at bay and he was going to fight it out to its inevitable end and that was all there was to it, and the sooner the cop realized that the sooner they could get the show on the road.
So he cupped his hands and yelled at the cop. He veiled three little words, and the suggestion he gave the cop was biologically impossible, even for a cop.
"Surrender," the cop yelled back.
"You got to kill me," he called. And that was all he said. They didn't ask him to surrender again. They had finally realized what they should have known all along-that he was not giving up. They would have to kill him.
The third car pulled up. Three cops got out. They were plainclothes men with machine guns and he guessed that they were Feds. FBI men in on the chase. He hoped he would get one of them, at least one of them.
"Go for the ones with the tommy-guns," he told Jan. "Aim at the one on the far left. He's out of range now, but he'll get closer. Take him the minute I fire."
He waited.
The cops came closer. He gave them enough time, and he didn't shoot until they did.
They opened fire at once. Two uniformed cops with scopes on their rifles and the three FBI men with the machine guns all opened up at once, and bullets burrowed into the steel skin of the Plymouth. He cocked the revolver and fired, and Jan squeezed the trigger of the rifle. His shot went wide but she dropped her man.
The cops dropped to the ground and kept coming in. A bullet came damned close to him but missed. He shot one cop in the shoulder and another one missed him by inches. The machine gun riddled the car with bullets.
More.
More.
And then they hit the gas tank. He cursed angrily, wishing he had thought to siphon the tank dry or pierce it and drain the gas from it. But they hit the tank and it went, and the car bust into flames. He didn't want to go that way. He kicked open the back door and hopped out, opened Jan's door and hauled her out after him.
"There goes our fortress," she said.
"It was a try."
"Sure. Everything's a try. We don't have much long-ar, honey. Not much longer at all."
"I'm not afraid."
They were lying on their stomachs with the burning car between them and the cops. But the cops were flank-ling the car and they knew it, and as soon as the cops had crawled into position it was over.
All over.
Forever.
"Jan."
"What?"
"Surrender."
"Are you crazy?"
"We're both crazy," he said. "That's got nothing to do with it. You surrender and let me get killed here. They'll be glad to have you alive."
"And they'll give me the chair."
"No. Listen to me, don't interrupt me. Fill them j full of a good story. Tell them I kidnapped you, I made you do everything. Tell them I had a gun on you all the time and you could never get away from me."
"They wouldn't believe that."
"They might."
"Never. And I wouldn't care if they did. I don't want to live without you, Lee. Not for a minute."
He started to say something but he didn't get the chance. A gun sounded and a bullet whined inches over their heads. They flattened out on the ground and he snapped off a shot in the direction of the gunfire. He didn't even know what he was shooting at but it no longer mattered.
"I love you," she said. "Don't forget that."
And, as she finished the sentence, a cop's bullet killed her.
It was that simple. He was looking at her out of the corner of his eyes and he was listening to her and there was a shot which he never even heard and a slug tore through her head, entering at her temple and blasting out through the ear on the opposite side, and she was dead.
Dead.
Jan was dead.
The rush of horror was too great for him to believe it. He felt as though a part of his own self had been cut off-or ripped off-and thrown away. That was what it was, she was part of him, and she was gone now, and he was a man possessed.
He stood up, ran around the car and charged the large mass of cops like Teddy Roosevelt racing up San Juan Hill. He ran at top speed and he did not even bother to dodge bullets. He raced straight at them and they shot at him and he fired his gun at them, missing wildly, and they kept shooting.
He did not even feel the bullets. Jan was dead, Jan was dead, they had killed her, and bullets tore into his body but he did not feel them and they did not stop him. He shot at a cop but the gun was empty and he threw the gun at a cop and more bullets tore into him and one slug picked him up and tossed him off his feet and into the air.
More bullets tore through him on the way down, but the cops were wasting their time.
Lee Fallon was dead.