The Getaway (Read a Great Movie) Read Free Page B

cheese gets here about a quarter of, and he don't knock. Just rattles the door latch and says, 'Wingate, Wingate!'"
    Rudy glanced at the clock, gestured. They took up positions on opposite sides of the door, Rudy drew his gun, and there was a knock-knock-knock , and a knock- knock .
    The kid hesitated, freezing for a split second. Then as Rudy nodded to him, gravely encouraging, his nerve returned and he opened the door.

3
    Four months before, when it was certain that Doc was getting a pardon on his second and last jolt, his wife, Carol, had quarreled violently with him while visiting the prison. She announced that she was suing him for divorce, and had actually started proceedings against him; leaving them in abeyance, ostensibly, until she could acquire the money to carry them through. Soon afterward, with the announced intention of changing her name and making a new start in life, she boarded a train for New York-coach-class, unreserved seat- and that seemed to be that.
    Except that she did not go to New York, did not and had never meant to get a divorce, and had in fact never for a moment entertained the slightest desire for any life other than the one she had.
    Back in the beginning, perhaps, she had had some conscience-impelled notion of reforming Doc. But she could not think of that now without a downward quirk of her small mouth, a wince born more of bewilderment than embarrassment at the preposterousness of her one- time viewpoint.
    Reform? Change? Why, and to what? The terms were meaningless. Doc had opened a door for her, and she had entered into, adopted and been adopted by, a new world. And it was difficult to believe now that any other had ever existed. Doc's amoral outlook had become hers. In a sense, she had become more like Doc than Doc himself. More engagingly persuasive when she chose to be. Harder when hardness seemed necessary.
    Doc had teased her about this a time or two until he saw that it annoyed her. "A little more of that , "he would say, "and we'll send you back to the bookstacks." And Carol wasn't angered by his funning-it was almost impossible to be angry with Doc-neither did she appreciate it. It gave her a vague feeling of indecency, of being unfairly exposed. She had felt much the same way when her parents persisted in exhibiting one of her baby pictures; a trite display of infant nudity sprawled on a woolly white rug.
    It was her picture, all right, and yet it really wasn't her. So why not forget it? Forget also that more than two decades after the picture was taken, she was just about as dishwater-dull, dumb and generally undesirable as a young woman could be.
    She had been working as a librarian then; living with her stodgy, middle-aged parents and daily settling deeper into the pattern of spinsterhood. She had no life but the lifeless one of her job and home. She was fine-featured, her small body beautifully full. But people saw only the dowdy "sensible" clothes and the primness of manner, and thought of her as plain and even homely.
    Then Doc had come along-still on parole, he was already doing research on another job-and he had instantly seen the woman that she really was; and with his easy smile, his amiable persuasiveness, his inoffensive persistence, he had pulled that woman right out of her shell. Oh, it hadn't been a matter of minutes, of course. Or even days. She had been pretty skittish, as a matter of fact. Snubbing and glaring at him; putting him in what she thought of as "his place" But somehow you just couldn't do things like that with Doc. Somehow they seemed to hurt you worse than they did him. So she had relented-just a little-and the next minute, seemingly, she was through that marvelous door. And kicking it firmly shut behind her.
    Her parents had washed their hands of her. Some parents! she thought comtemptuously. She had lost her friends, her position in the community. Some friends, some position! She had acquired a police record.
    Carol (Ainslee) McCoy. No alias.