On the Run Read Online Free PDF Page A

have any other do you?”
    He looked out the window. Burns was bringing the customer toward the shack. She said, “There’s a lot I want to tell you. And maybe a lot you would like to ask. I’m staying at a motel. The Houston House, just off the Gulf Freeway near the airport. I’m in number ninety-two. Come out there after work, why don’t you? And … please don’t run. It would mean I did it wrong.”
    He pushed the box toward her. “Take it along.”
    “It’s yours,” she said. “He gave it to you a long time ago. But you left it behind, under your pillow. He never thought you meant to leave it.”
    “A very long time ago,” he said. She gave him a brief and uncertain smile.
    “I’ll wait for you,” she said, and went out as Burns and the customer came in. Burns had made a deal. Sid approved it. They left to arrange about plates. Scobie came in and picked up the jade box.
    “What’s the animal on here, Sid?”
    “It’s just an animal. I don’t know.”
    “She was selling this junk?”
    “Put it down, Scobie.”
    “Sure. Sure. What are you getting so hot about?”
    “Mind the store,” Sid said, going to the door.
    “You be back?”
    “I don’t know.”
    He got into his wagon and drove an aimless mile and found a beer joint he had never been in before. The air was frigid and the juke was noisy. He sat at a table in the back, chair tilted against the wall, hat tilted forwardover his brows, thumb hooked onto his belt. The two thousand dollars was there, nested and comforting. Walk-away money. Sid Wells could be laid to rest. Then there would be no need to try to figure anything out, no need to try to judge the woman.
    It all seemed too tricky and intricate to be anything except exactly what the woman claimed. It wouldn’t be Wain’s style. The incident in Atlanta had demonstrated Wain’s style. The finger, the confirmation, stealth in the night, and then a sudden dirty violence. Atlanta had proved it was suicide to relax.
    And even if she was exactly what she claimed, what did he owe that old man?
    But one thing bothered him. How had that old man managed to have him found? How had that old man accomplished what Wain had failed to do? Obviously, he had left some sort of a trail. And if he did not find out what it was, he could not stop himself from leaving it again. She could tell him how it was done. Yet if he went to see her, he might be walking right into a setup.
    He decided to see her. Once he had decided, he felt glad. She had good hips and good eyes. She moved well. Woman hips and woman eyes, but the forearm and wrist clearly childish in his memory, a little neatness of pale hair against honeyed skin, and a fragility of bone, and warmth under his grasp when he had touched her, when she had dipped her hand into the purse and the warning bells had rung.
    But he would see her with guile and preparation. And no matter what happened, this was the end of Houston. The lair had been violated.
    In the late afternoon he went back to the Gateway Courts. Once it had been a transient motel. After a rerouting of a highway, it had been remodeled into small efficiency apartments priced to rent to locals. He parked some distance away and approached in a careful way, a way he had thought out long ago, to a place where he could look, listen, enter quickly and quietly. No one was there. No one had been there. He called the Houston House. Yes, they had a Miss Lettinger registered. Unit ninety-two. She had arrived the previous evening. He phoned Bimmer and said he was quitting. Sorry. Family emergency. He wouldn’t be back. Vern Burns could handlethe lot. Bimmer was upset about it. He had some money coming. Not very much. Sid told him to mail the check to General Delivery, New Orleans. Small fee for a false trail. He showered, changed to a tropical weight suit, packed his big cheap suitcase and put it in the back of the wagon. He had a few hundred dollars in a bureau drawer, under the newspaper lining. He put