A Touch of Death by Charles Williams Read Free Book Online

shoulder like a sack of oats, and walk through town with her? I cursed under my breath. I was right back where I’d started. But wait. She had a car, didn’t she? She must have come back from Sanport in it.
    I’d have to leave her while I went out to the garage to look. But that joker probably wouldn’t try to ease back until he was sure I was gone. I went out and down the stairs, hurrying. I unlocked the kitchen door leading onto the back porch, cut the light, and went out. It was a few seconds before I could see anything in the dark. It’d be a nice time, I thought, for the gruesome bastard to try to clobber me with an ax.
    When I could make out the squat shadow of the garage off beyond the corner of the house, I groped my way over to it. The big overhead door was locked. I went around to the side. There was a small door there. I tried the knob. It was unlocked. I went in and closed it. When I switched on the flashlight I was standing beside a ‘53 Cadillac. I poked the beam in on the dash. The keys weren’t in it. All I had to do now was find them. In a house of about twenty rooms. I looked at my watch. It was four-twenty. Maybe I couldn’t make it now, even if I already had the keys.
    I’d never pretended to be able to think like a woman, but I knew a little about drunks. It paid off. I covered the area between the front door, where she would come in, and the kitchen, where the bottle would be, and I found the purse on a table by the dining room door. Her key case was in it.
    I left it where it was and went back upstairs. I had picked her up and started out of the room when ] thought of something else. Putting her down on the divan, I flashed the light around on the floor, looking for the bottle. It had been knocked over during the fight, but it was corked and none of it had spilled. It was a fifth, a little over half full. I shoved it in my coat pocket and picked her up again. She was still out like a hung jury, and I knew she would be for hours. As I went out through the kitchen I grabbed up the purse.
    I put her on the back seat of the car and switched on the flashlight long enough to take a look at the keys. I sorted out a couple that looked promising, cut the light, and went back outside, feeling for the lock of the overhead door. The first key did the trick. I boosted the door up slowly and got back in the car. Picking out the ignition key by feel, I started the Caddy and backed it out onto the driveway. The drive was white gravel and I could see it all right, all the way out to the big gates in front. I swung out onto the street and felt my way very slowly for another hundred yards. Then I switched on the headlights and goosed the two hundred horses.
    Housebreaking, I thought. Auto theft. Abduction. What was next? Blackmail? Extortion? But I had it all figured now, I was still within jumping distance of solid ground in every direction, and I wasn’t in much danger if I played it right. Somebody was going to come home first in that $120,000 sweepstakes, and as of now I looked like the favorite.
    We were headed south, on the highway we’d come in on. I rolled it up to seventy and tried to remember where the turnoff was. It should be somewhere around ten miles beyond that next town. I’d just have to watch for it, because I wasn’t too sure, approaching it from this direction. I’d been there plenty of times, but had always come up from the south.
    The headlights of a car behind us hit the rear-view mirror. I watched them for a minute. It probably didn’t mean anything; there were always a few cars on the road, even at four-thirty in the morning. They continued to hang in about the same place, not gaining or falling back.
    Maybe the joker’d had a car there and was trying to find out where we went. We were dipping down toward that long piece of tangent across the river bottom now. We’ll see, chum, I thought. I flipped the lights on high beam and gunned it.
    I flattened it out at ninety-five and the