Nothing In Her Way by Charles Williams Page B

would never end. I sat on the suitcases in a dusty boxcar that rattled through cold darkness and then jolted and screeched to interminable stops every thirty or forty miles. When I couldn’t stand the cold any longer I’d get up and walk back and forth, swinging my arms and blowing on my hands. I ran out of cigarettes. I tried to keep the worry about Cathy from driving me crazy. The terrible part of it was that maybe I’d never know what happened. I had to run, and I couldn’t look back or wait.
    I thought of Bolton. And I thought of Charlie.
    Maybe it was the anger that kept me from freezing.
    Just at dawn we slowed for the yards at El Paso. I tossed the two bags out and jumped. After I’d picked them up I hurried out of the yards. Nobody saw me. There was an all-night cafe open on the second street. I went in, ordered some coffee, and bought a package of cigarettes. I called a cab.
    “Bus station,” I said when it came. The sun was coming up now. Maybe the bus and railroad stations were being watched, but I had to take a chance on it. There was no other way. I’d already thrown away the steel-rimmed glasses, which helped a little, and I was dressed differently than I had been in Wyecross. There weren’t many people around this early in the morning. I shot a quick glance around, ready to ease out, but there wasn’t anybody who looked like a plain-clothes cop. I checked the bags and went into the washroom to clean up a little and beat some of the dust out of my topcoat. I counted the money I had left. It was less than two hundred dollars. I had to get to Reno. Manners would give me a job, dealing dice. And Reno would be far enough away.
    There would be a westbound bus leaving in an hour and ten minutes. I’d better not hang around the bus station, though, in case they were shaking it down now and then. I went out in the street and thought of Bolton and Charlie again and felt the rage take hold of me. There wouldn’t be a chance they’d still be here, but I went into a drugstore telephone booth and started calling the hotels.
    After I’d called three I gave up. Even if they were here they wouldn’t be registered under their own names. The thing to do was forget them until I got out of this jam. I tried to. It wasn’t much good.
    It was too early to get a shave. I went into a hotel coffee shop to try to eat a little breakfast before bus time. I’ve got to quit looking behind me, I thought. The way I was acting was enough to make a cop suspicious even if he’d never heard of me.
    The waitress at this end of the counter was slow getting to me because she was working on an order a bellboy was waiting for. I started to get up to go out to the newsstand for a paper while I was waiting. Maybe there’d be something about it in the papers. Then I looked back at the waitress for some reason I couldn’t figure out. What was it? I saw it then. It was the order. It was the two halves of a Persian melon and a big silver pot of coffee.
    What if the odds were a thousand to one against it? I didn’t even stop to think. I followed the boy across the lobby and into the elevator. When he got out on the fourth floor I went in the other direction, pretending to be looking for a number, until he was halfway down the corridor. I turned then and watched him. He knocked at a door and in a minute it opened and he went in. I walked past it and looked at the number, and went on around the corner. When I heard him come out and get into the elevator again I went back.
    It was dangerous. It was a stupid thing to do. We were all wanted by the police now, and the surest way in the world to bring them down on us was to start a brawl. But there wasn’t room in my mind for thought. I knocked on the door.
    “Who is it?” someone asked.
    “Room Service,” I said. “I forgot...” I let it trail off.
    The door opened a crack. I saw the baby-blue eyes and the pink jowls, and I shoved, hard. Charlie was still off balance when I got in through