Man On The Run Read Free

was looking right at it. There on the counter by the sink. I’d carried it inside without realizing it.
    “Well, we’re wasting time here. We know he’s around somewhere, so he’s probably broke into one of the others. And we got to search all them shrimp boats.”
    Roy climbed out the window, and I heard them drive away. I felt limp as I walked slowly into the living room and collapsed on the couch. When I crushed out what was left of the cigarette I saw it had burned blisters on my fingers.

Two
    In about twenty minutes they came back. There was a little comfort in knowing I had anticipated them on that one. They walked around the house trying the windows they had forgotten the first time. I could hear their footsteps and the murmur of their voices, but I couldn’t make out anything they said. They drove away.
    I smoked another cigarette and tried to think. I didn’t have a chance. The whole area would be saturated with police now that they knew they had me pinned down in this small town. But maybe I could stay in here and out-wait them. I had food and a warm place to sleep. If I could remain hidden long enough to convince them I must have got out of the area, they might relax. But then what? Where was I going, and what was I going to do? There was no answer, and thinking about it made my head hurt.
    The blanket was a nuisance; it kept flapping open. I found a pair of kitchen shears, cut a hole in the middle of it for my head, and put it on like a poncho. In one of the drawers in the kitchen I found some heavy cotton cord to gather it about me at the waist. It wasn’t so bad that way, but I had to start trying to get my clothes dry. I lighted the gas heater and brought in some more of the cord for a clothes line. When I had it strung up in the corner above the heater, I wrung out the clothes in the bathtub and draped them over it. The shoes I put nearby on the floor. My wallet was a soggy ruin. I took the money out and spread it across the top of the desk to dry. It came to one hundred and seventy dollars.
    Remembering the radio then, I went over and turned up the gain just enough to hear the station with my ear against the loudspeaker. It was playing some Dixieland jazz. When the record stopped, the disk jockey spieled a commercial and then gave the time. It was nine forty-five. I wound my watch and set it. The music began again. I tried some of the other stations, but there was no news program. Maybe there’d be one at ten o’clock. I switched it off.
    The bookshelves were just to the left of the radio. I stood looking at them, and then noticed with surprise that all the books in the top two rows were by the same writer, someone named Suzy Patton. There were at least a hundred of them. They were novels, apparently, in colorful dust jackets. They seemed to be new and untouched, as if they were on the shelves in a bookstore. I started taking them down at random and glancing at them, and I saw they were the same six novels translated into a great many different languages. I could recognize Spanish, French, and Italian, and what I thought was Swedish or Norwegian, but there were some I’d never seen before. They all had the same type of dust jacket, running largely to luscious girls with a great deal of cleavage, bustle, and hoop skirt, and dashing types of men in Confederate uniforms. Patton? Suzy Patton? The name was familiar, but I didn’t recall having ever read one of the books; I didn’t care much for historical novels. But this must be her cottage. I couldn’t think of any other reason why all these foreign editions would be stored here.
    It was almost ten. I switched on the radio again and hunkered down with my ear against the speaker grill. This time I found a news program. The first half of it was all Washington and Cape Canaveral, and another blizzard in the East. The stock market had opened irregularly lower. “And now for the local news,” the announcer continued. Two people were killed in a