Red Highway (16 page)

Virgil was the only one with a comfortable amount of ammunition left. Alex and Boyd had come out with only their fifty-round drums and no extras, and these were getting low. Alex had taken to firing less than six bullets at a time, and Boyd, who was getting farther and farther away in his search for a suitable escape vehicle, wasn't firing at all at the moment. Only Virgil, the leader, was daring to rip away at the police with sustained bursts from his machine pistol. He came closer to exhausting his supply with each passing second. Save for Boyd, who had downed the motorcycle cop with his first hail of lead, nobody had hit anyone.

Then, from up the street, the answer came rolling smack into the middle of the action. A battered old Essex appeared at the top of the slight rise above the bank, its driver cheerfully oblivious to the inferno that had been going on for over twenty minutes. It bounced and jostled and shuddered right into the crossfire. Only when the big square windshield was shot away did the man in the driver's seat realize what was going on. He piled out, a white-haired old man in a cloth cap and worn tweed suit, and sprawled across the gutter, holding his hat and head down as the bullets whistled close over his head. The Essex, its motor still running, went on rolling down the street, in spite of the projectiles smacking into and through its doors, seats, wheels, windows, heading inexorably in the direction its absent driver had chosen.

Alex and Virgil spotted the abandoned vehicle at the same time and made a dash for it, firing all the way. Virgil ducked through the open door on the driver's side and grabbed the wheel while Alex, running alongside the moving car, clawed open the rear door on the passenger's side and threw himself headlong across the back seat. He scrambled to his knees and smashed the butt of his machine gun through the riddled back window, then switched ends and began firing through the hole in long, sweeping bursts.

Virgil, who had quit shooting long enough to yank the car into control, caught sight of Boyd Harriman in the rear-view mirror and shouted “Boyd! Come on!”

Thirty yards up the street, Boyd looked up from the parked car he was investigating and saw the bullet-scarred Essex rocking away down the street. Alex Kern leaning out the back window, machine gun blazing. Hugging his own weapon, he left the curb and hot-footed it down the middle of the thoroughfare in the direction of the escaping vehicle.

Alex spotted the youngster and redirected his fire so that he wouldn't hit him, hammering more bullets into the hissing vehicles parked by the curb. Out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed the unmistakable blue of a policeman's uniform pop into the open on the other side of the street. A clear shot, if he were free to make a clean sweeping blast in the cop's direction, which he wasn't. In order to avoid cutting down Boyd, he was forced to chop off his fire and slide the gun in an arc toward the cop, then resume shooting at the uniform. The maneuver took too much time.

Boyd was running at top speed, his long slicker flowing out behind him, the weight of his bulletproof vest pulling him forward into a crouch. He was holding his machine gun out in front, flinging short bursts at the main body of lawmen on the side of the street opposite the bank. He didn't notice the cop bearing down on him from the other direction.

The cop, a foot patrolman who had just arrived on the scene, had his revolver out and, spotting the man in the bulletproof vest running toward him, snapped off three quick shots in his direction. Two of them struck Boyd in the vest, knocking him off balance and putting holes in the fabric through which the shiny steel showed. The third grazed his shoulder. He was just in the act of dodging around the rear end of a poorly parked car when they hit, leaning at a precarious angle, one foot in the air. He scrabbled to regain his balance, his foot slipped on the slick pavement, the weight of the damaged vest pulled him over. A volley of shots came at him from the other side while he was in midair. Alex watched as the bullets struck Boyd from all sides, making his body dance in the air, smashing him in the legs, arms, face, jaw, and neck. A bullet crashed into the frame of his eyeglasses at the nose and they parted, falling in two sections from his head. He went down on his side and his machine gun leaped from his hands and bounced and rolled down the gutter. It came to a rest against the tires of a demolished police car. Alex's shoulders sank. “Step on it,” he told Virgil half-heartedly.

Virgil, who had seen most of the action in the rear-view mirror, banged the shifting lever into third and punched the accelerator. The engine answered readily enough and the car lurched into a roar, speeding through the withering police crossfire. “I told him that damn vest was no damn good,” he grumbled.

Alex kept up a steady return fire out the back window until the ammunition in his drum was exhausted. Then he dropped the machine gun bouncing on the seat beside him and drew his .45 automatic from his shoulder holster, with which he began snapping wild shots here and there at the rapidly receding police cars. The air was whooshing in cold through the empty windshield frame. The car hit a slick spot, throwing Alex hard against the doorpost as Virgil fought the steering wheel and brought the Essex skidding sideways around the corner. Then he accelerated again and the chaotic street fire was left behind. Alex slumped down in the back seat and put away his pistol. “I wonder what happened to Roscoe?”

“I don't know,” said Virgil veering into the side street they had chosen earlier and heading north. “But I sure as hell know what's
going
to happen to him.” He forced the gas pedal down to the floorboards.

Long seconds after the shooting had stopped, the old man who had abandoned his car to the fugitives lay facedown in the gutter where he had fallen, hands clamped over his head. Then, slowly, as the strange new silence gave way to shouts and the sound of running feet, he raised his head, looked around, and pushed himself painfully up off the street, brushing dirt, water, and bits of glass from his soiled suit. Uniformed police officers were running all about him, some, like himself, showing signs of having spent a long time off their feet, the knees of their blue trousers dirty and worn. They all had guns in their hands.

The street in front of the bank was a shambles. Automobiles were parked everywhere; on the sidewalks, along the curb, straddling the center lane, their doors and windows and headlights shot full of holes, leaning at crazy angles on their blown tires, gasoline leaking from their pierced tanks, steam gushing from their smashed radiators. A few of the officers were seated behind the wheels of their damaged patrol cars, grinding away at the starters in fruitless attempts to get their cracked engines running. A motorcycle patrolman cursed and strained as he tried to push his overturned vehicle back onto its two wheels.

The old man stopped to look down at the body lying in a contorted position at his feet. Like the policeman who lay sprawled at the foot of the bank steps a few yards away, the dead man's face had been shot to pieces. Bits of flesh and bone splinters were stuck to the blood-splattered bulletproof vest just beneath his chin. His cap had slid down so that most of his torn features were mercifully concealed, and the old man didn't care to pick it up and see any more. He looked so young.

The foot patrolman whose revolver shots had thrown the bank robbers off balance and into the path of his comrades' fire in the first place came over to see the body. He glanced down at the half-hidden face, looked over in the direction of the slain motorcycle cop, and spat on the bulletproof vest. Then he turned and was sick all over his shoes.

Chapter Fifteen

“The largest manhunt in the history of Missouri is under way today for Virgil Ballard, the infamous Tri-State Terror, who, with six members of his gang, robbed the First National Bank of Kansas City yesterday afternoon, slaying Officer Malcolm Jackson and escaping with an undetermined amount of cash. The pitched battle raged for twenty-seven minutes, during which—”

Virgil snapped off the radio of the freshly stolen Auburn and pulled out to pass a slow-moving Model T produce truck. He left it behind in a swirl of dust from the pavement. “Undetermined amount of cash! You hear that? They can't count a lousy twelve thousand.” He steered back into the right lane, just missing a head-on collision with a big Franklin going in the other direction. The angry driver gave him a blast with his air horn.

“Yeah,” agreed Alex, after his heart had started beating again. “They got the number of the gang wrong too.”

“They didn't even mention Boyd.”

“You didn't give them a chance.”

Virgil stared at the road for a minute. Then he looked at Alex. “You figure they killed him?”

“Yeah.”

They came in view of a bicyclist pedaling down the edge of the road in the same direction they were going. He was wearing an argyle jersy and knickers, and wore a cap at a cockeyed angle that left the bill low over his left eye. He turned his head, saw them, and wheeled closer to the edge. Virgil accelerated and shot past him, so close that the cyclist panicked, twisting the handlebars too quickly, and tipped over. Alex craned his neck around to watch him through the rear window. The rider and the vehicle were tangled together, the two upturned wheels spinning away at the empty air.

“Now what did you go and do that for?” Alex wanted to know.

“Don't like two-wheelers,” Virgil answered.

“Look, Virge, why don'cha pull off to the side so we can take a nap?”

“What for? I'm not sleepy.”

“I am.”

“So sleep. Who's stopping you?”

“I'm afraid I might not wake up again. Look, why the hurry?”

Virgil shot the car straight past the upcoming curve and onto a narrow gravel road, kicking up a cloud of yellow dust. “I got my eye on a bank in Oklahoma. I wanna hit it before noon.”

“Another one?” Alex's eyes opened wide. “After what just happened?”

“So we hit some hard luck. That don't mean we should give up robbing altogether, does it?”

“On the level. Why another one so soon after the last one? We got enough to live on for a while.”

“I want to get together enough so we can lay up for a long stretch.”

“Then what?”

Virgil clenched his teeth. “Then I'm gonna come back to Missouri and kill Roscoe Hunter.” He rumbled on down the road, trailing a ribbon of brown dust and gravel.

Roscoe Hunter trotted down the steps of the building where he kept his apartment in Kansas City, tossed his heavy brown suitcase into the back seat of the DeSoto, got into the driver's seat, and drove off. The radio, which he had left on when he parked the car, warmed up and the announcer's doomsday voice thundered from the round speaker: “… pitched battled raged for twenty-seven minutes, during which gang member James Boyd Harriman lost his life to the merciless justice of the Kansas City Police. Virgil Ballard and the rest of his gang escaped in a stolen vehicle belonging to Ralph Budge, 76, of Independence. More news following this message of interest from Bristol-Meyers, makers of—”

Roscoe fumbled the knob to the “off” position with shaking fingers. There was nothing new in the message, only additional means for panic. He'd known about Virgil's escape ever since late yesterday afternoon, after he'd gotten home and received the evening edition of the newspaper. That's when he'd begun packing.

He'd have been gone hours earlier if it had not been for the police. The streets near his apartment house had been alive with patrol cars all evening, their sirens piercing the night air, their side-mounted spotlights sweeping the darkened windows of every building on the block. Roscoe, not realizing that the motorcycle patrolman who had seen him speeding away from the bank was the one who'd been slain, was afraid that the police would have his licence number and that they'd converge upon him the moment he struck out with the DeSoto. This morning, however, after a sleepless night, he'd decided to chance it. There was no predicting what that crazy Ballard would do once he found out that his wheel man had panicked and left him in the lurch.

Now, as he drew farther and farther from his apartment house and nothing of consequence occurred, he relaxed a little. With the remission of fear came logic. He began to make plans, to formulate a destination for what had started out as a headlong flight from danger. He'd head north to Illinois, or maybe farther, all the way to Michigan. There, he could set himself up in business as an auto mechanic or something of the sort, change his name, start a new life. Small chance of the “Tri-State Terror” venturing that far from the safety of his native region for purposes of mere vengeance. Yes, things were looking up.

Then he heard the sirens.

A police car came squealing around the corner just as Alex and Virgil were leaving the bank in Claremore, Oklahoma. Virgil socked the sack full of cash into the back seat and followed it in, while Alex, nearest the driver's side, slid beneath the wheel, starting the engine, and tore off from a standing start.

Close behind, the officer on the passenger's side leaned out the window and snapped off a few shots that whistled past the Auburn, one of them clipping the left-hand mirror and knocking it crooked. Virgil crunched the butt of a submachine gun through the back window, jammed the barrel through the ragged hole, and began firing long sweeping bursts at windshield level. He shot high and took out a line of store windows along the right side of the street.

The main street intersection was coming up. Alex accelerated and ran the red light. A car coming from the right squealed its brakes and skidded around, narrowly missing a double-parked bus parked near the corner. The shaken driver leaned angrily on his horn. Behind them, the police car, siren wailing, shot between two other cars going in opposite directions across the intersection and sent them slewing around sideways to a symphony of tortured tires. Virgil raked a withering blast with his machine gun across the pursuers' radiator and missed. They zigzagged and fishtailed wildly across both lanes in an attempt to dodge bullets coming at them from the exposed policeman's gun, at the same time throwing off Virgil's aim so that he wasted ammunition on the empty air. “Quit screwing up and steer straight, damn you,” he commanded.