on super thievery, and on whom nobody could pin anything.
And a bunch of his mugs were tailing us.
And my Browning was packed away in my grip which, in turn, was locked away in the trunk.
I said nothing for a long time, I just concentrated on putting distance between the sedan and my own car. But the black overcoats and fedora hats were no slouches when it came to getting life out of a car. The sedan stuck to us too close for comfort.
“How the blazes did you fall foul of Shelmerdine?” I asked Joanne Kilvert.
She was crouching low in her seat, tensed and frightened.
“It’s a long story,” she said. She never took her wide eyes from the driving mirror, in which the pursuing sedan was reflected, as she spoke. “It’s a long story, but have you heard of Arthur Kilvert?”
I watched the highway racing up out of the night with one eye and with the other watched the gleaming headlights of the car behind us in the driving mirror.
I remembered the name Arthur Kilvert and went riffling through a mental card-index for the connection. Over the years I’ve developed a faculty for stowing away data inside my skull. It becomes almost second nature after a while, like the photographic eye some cops develop so they can spot a face or a way of walking, or even the special way a guy lights a cigarette or flips back his hat, though a number of years have passed since they first noted the mannerism.
The Arthur Kilvert connection was not a matter of years away, only months. I jockeyed the coupe, watched that black beast of a sedan roaring along behind us, and the story came seeping to the surface.
“Yes, I remember,” I told the girl. “Arthur Kilvert was an official in a trade union in Chicago. Seemed to be a right guy and resented the racketeers who began to shove their noses in, trying to pull the strings of his union as they did in so many others. Kilvert didn’t care for the new style of protection racket, and said so loud and clear and wrote so in black and white. He began crusading and got to be a regular bug in the hair with the racket-boys.…”
I tailed off and got to thinking about the rest of the Arthur Kilvert story. It was ugly.
I only knew the case from newspaper reports, black words on pulp paper telling of a man who tried to play it square and what became of him. Telling of a car screeching to a stop close to the front lawn of a house in a Chicago suburb where a man, his wife, and child romped in the warmth of a summer afternoon—Sunday afternoon.
Sunday afternoon shattered by the screech of brakes, rent by the hard stutter of a sub-machine gun with the snort and growl of a hastily started car as an anti-climax.
That had been the way of it. Arthur Kilvert paid off for being a straight citizen, paid off prohibition-day fashion. Only this was Chicago in the nineteen-fifties, not the twenties.
“You’re Kilvert’s widow?” I asked.
I was concentrating on keeping an even distance between the coupe and Shelmerdine’s hoods and, so far, I was doing fine. I was watching the highway, but I could see the girl’s features reflected in the windshield. A hardness had taken possession of them now, the kind of hardness you see in a woman’s face after all the tears have been cried away.
“No, not his wife, his sister. My sister-in-law survived the shooting, but she’s worse off than Arthur. She walks on crutches now because she doesn’t have a left leg any more, but they injured her mind worse than her body. She saw Arthur shot down before her eyes, and the baby was killed in her arms. She’s twenty-four-years old.”
Nothing about crookdom surprises or disgusts me anymore; I know it from the soles of its stinking feet to the roots of its lousy hair. There was a time when a thing like the shooting at the Kilvert home would have made me spit—or maybe vomit. But I know the ways of the big-time thieves too well now. A man, his wife, his baby are as nothing to them in their climb towards dirty riches. Nothing at all, not even the ashes and dust the Book says they are.
There was no more time or opportunity for philosophy. Joanne Kilvert was turned about in her seat again, she suddenly clutched my arm in alarmed urgency.
“They’re going to shoot!” she cried. “Get down!”
The little world of the car was an enclosed box, thrumming to the pulse of the engine, rocking to the whirr of the wheels. Outside, the growl of the pursuing sedan was sounding loud. I saw the car in the mirror, pulling out into the centre of the highway, positioning itself with one of the overcoats and fedoras leaning from a window with something in his hand.
Joanne Kilvert crouched down to the floor, close to the grip that seemed so important to her. I pressed the accelerator down to the floor boards, and the outside world was a liquid blur of racing shadows.
The mobster with the gun seemed to wait a hell of a time before opening up. But he did eventually.
Three shots bellowed out, and I put the coupe into a zigzag. One slug spanged into the bodywork of the car somewhere at the back, one ripped the fabric of the hood, and the third must have been a complete miss. Maybe the Shelmerdine hoods were just trying to scare us into stopping, maybe they were trying to hit our tyres.
I was cursing loudly because my Browning was packed up with my T-shirts in the trunk.
“These mugs must want you awful bad,” I told Joanne Kilvert.
Then I doused all the lights and drove blind. I wondered, with a detached and cynical part of my mind, why a police highway patrol was never around when you needed one. Right now, a couple of motorcycle cops would be useful, even if I was overreaching the speed limit and driving without lights.
Another couple of shots sounded from behind, and the slugs went zipping past the coupe.
Then I saw the twist in the road, only just in time. Travelling at the rate the coupe was hitting and without lights, that bend came at me out of the blackness. I whirled the wheel to the right quickly, heard the huddled girl squeal as the car lurched and saw a big billboard go flashing past the window on her side of the coupe. We must have been within inches of hitting that wooden billboard.
I didn’t wait to give my heart a chance to settle down after turning the bend, but kept my foot hard on the gas and burned up the highway.
Maybe the girl and I had been extra good during the immediate past; we must have done something, one or the other of us, to deserve the break we were given at that moment.
In the blackness at our backs, something ear-splitting happened. An edgy keening of brakes merged into a splintering crash. Then a silence more frightening than the noise.
Joanne Kilvert and I turned about to look out of the rear window.
“They crashed,” she whispered. “They hit the bill-board on the turning.”
A vivid little cameo was dwindling away into the darkness behind us. The sedan piled up against the billboard, a flicker of flames starting into life at its hood. Figures were scuttling out of the wrecked car. The headlamps were still on, and their light, combined with the erratic glow of the flames, showed the mocking face of the ten-times-larger-than-life wench who grinned from the billboard to advertise somebody’s toothpaste.
Like a little world of people drifting away into the depths of space, Athelstan Shelmerdine’s torpedo-men and their burning car floated off into the night as I kept my foot down and zoomed up the highway like a high school kid determined to kill himself or somebody else with his first hot-rod.
We didn’t speak for a good five minutes. Then I put the headlights on again, and Joanne Kilvert said: “That’s Plymouth ahead.”
She was pointing to a string of lights on the horizon. The observation came in a matter-of-fact and deadpan way on the heels of what had just happened. She spoke like a guide pointing out the scenery rather than in the way of a woman who had lately been shot at.
I told myself that this slight, rain-bedraggled kid had guts. At that time I didn’t know the half of it.
“That