In Cold Pursuit
the fir-lined drive of some state building a pure gift when he saw the car falter to a stop on the shoulder.They would be walking back, and they would be looking into the sun—or if by any chance she had sent her minion to a gas station and remained in the car by herself, that would be even better. But no: there was a distant flicker of color and motion between chinks in the firs.
Here they came, Mary Vaughan fortuitously on the outside. He said her name to himself often now; that barrier was not only down but trampled upon. If he had spoken it aloud, it would have had a crooning inflection.
He mustn’t let them get too close, as he would have to gather a killing speed. He glanced to his left: nothing coming. He reminded himself about impact—he had once hit a large dog and the resulting jar had been considerable—and put the car in motion.
Blare.
Out of nowhere, light gray against the light gray highway, came a Volkswagen van, slowing, stopping with only one possible purpose—and when Mary Vaughan had been close enough for her voice to have been audible if it hadn’t been for the wind. He struck the rim of the steering-wheel bruisingly hard with his fist.
The Volkswagen’s engine revved noisily and then receded, leaving the roadside empty. His head had cleared enough for a mordant thought. Mary Vaughan had all the earmarks of an attractive young woman, and angels of mercy did not always turn out to be that. Wouldn’t it be funny if. . . ? No, it wouldn’t be funny. She belonged to him alone; in a way she was as much his possession as his wife had been.
He waited five minutes, ten, got out of the car and peered around the edge of the firs. Even at that distance the clear air showed him when the driver of the van came into view, the transfer of gas evidently complete, and climbed into it and drove off.
Mary Vaughan would almost certainly go into Belen, the nearest town, for a fill-up—and she turned off at the first exit. He didn’t follow her, in case any of the paintwork had shown when he started out of the drive, and he was confident that the cooler indicated a destination beyond that. Again he waited, and she reemerged onto the highway in about twenty minutes. He settled down to what he suspected would be a long drive, quite glad now of the Volkswagen’s intervention. She wouldn’t have known what struck her, literally, and that was scarcely fair. She must be allowed time to know what was about to happen to her, and to plead.
Her pull-off at the rest area worried him briefly, but he reasoned that she was consulting a map or simply taking a break from driving, because the time to turn back—knowing herself to be a murderess, suddenly aware of being followed, deciding to go to the police for protection—would have been at Belen. He drove on for a few miles before he stopped, raised the hood of the car, ate the sandwich he had bought at the diner where he had had breakfast, with the knowledge that this day might take a peculiar shape, drank the accompanying carton of cold black coffee.
With the coffee, because one of the headaches that had so disturbed his wife was beginning to clamp around the base of his skull, he took a tranquilizer.
When his rear-view mirror showed him a dot in the heat-shimmer he pulled on his flashers, got out of the car, prepared to lean invisibly in over the engine. His quarry drove past him, but so, by the time he had thumped the hood down and gotten back behind the wheel, did a huge semi, rocking him in its wake as it roared by, flanked in the other lane by a camper.
After all those empty miles it was like having a cliff rear up ahead. The camper hung just behind the truck’s left rear wheel, not allowing an opening, and when he moved over behind it and sounded his horn the driver extended his arm in a severe, palm-down waggle.
He saw the Las Cruces exits go by, but each time the gray bulk obscured the ramps. Presently the semi commenced to slow, but as it was still travelling over the speed limit the camper stayed in position. They proceeded in a locked-in trio almost as far as the truck weighing station, and when the distance was visible again he was almost furious enough to try to drive the camper off the road as he shot by it.
She had vanished.
Was she tooling around some unfindable side street in Las Cruces right now, bound for the home of a friend or relative? The stale sandwich bunched in his stomach at the thought, the coffee echoed in his throat. It had become clear to him—when?—that Mary Vaughan had to be dead by the time his wife was buried. That, and that alone, would carry him through the funeral.
On a frontage road, a gas station came into view, the first in well over a hundred miles. Was there a chance—? He needed gas, whatever he decided to do. He swung onto the apron in front of a row of pumps, asked a boy with a greasy pompadour to fill the tank but skip the oil and battery, said when the boy came back from a measuring look at his front tires, “I gave a lady a hand about ten miles back, she was having trouble with her butterfly valve and said she was going to stop at the first place she saw. I wonder if she came through here?”
He described the car and, out of indelible memory, the green-and-white dress. “There was a young girl with her, skin and bone, with long dark hair.” He triggered a response he couldn’t have hoped for.
“Yeah, but all she wanted was gas and the key.” He jerked his head backward at the sign indicating