The man got onto the running board, still holding the stave in his right hand. "Move the truck!" he shouted, turning his head but keeping his eyes on Chase. "He's got a gun on me, better do as he says. I reckon he means it."
"I mean it all right. Drop the weapon."
The man tossed the stave aside and it clattered onto the black asphalt. The two men with the shotguns hadn't budged an inch, and it occurred to Chase that once the jeep started to move, with his attention occupied with driving, they had only to raise their shotguns and pick him off. He was trying to figure out a way around this dilemma when Ruth neatly resolved it by thrusting the barrel of the hunting rifle into the man's stomach. Her voice was low and flat. "I mean it too, you bastard." She pulled the bolt back and curled her finger around the trigger. "As you just pointed out, this is the law and I happen to be holding it."
There was a billowing of blue smoke as the truck roared into life, followed by a hideous grating of gears. It backed off the road, rear wheels sinking into the dry red soil, tailboard pushing through the brush.
Chase laid the Browning on the seat between his legs, revved the engine, and pulled sharply away, the man grabbing hold of the metal frame of the windshield for support. The end of the rifle made an indentation in his dungarees, right between the slanting doublestitched pockets.
Any second now, Chase thought. If a shot was going to come, it was going to come now. He steered for the gap and had a blurred impression of a round fat shiny face in the cab of the truck, fleshy lips puckered up beneath a flattened nose in an expression of pure venomous hate. No shot came. In the rearview mirror he glimpsed the fat man climbing down from the cab and the others running forward to cluster around him. Chase kept his eye on this receding image, distorted by the shimmering waves of heat rising from the blacktop, which soon vanished as a bend cut it off from view.
Chase drove steadily and carefully so that Ruth could keep the rifle pressed home. What next? While they held the man hostage they were safe, but they couldn't hold him forever. In their favor was the fact that his friends wouldn't know when he'd been released. What they'd probably do would be to follow at a safe distance, ready to pick him up, and then come after the jeep with the killer instinct fanned to white heat.
They could kill the man and dump his body off the road. Could they? No, he couldn't commit such an act in cold blood and he doubted whether Ruth, for all her pent-up fury, was capable of it. There was also a strictly practical reason why not: The others would hear the shot and know at once what it signified. Then there'd be no stopping them.
"What are we going to do with him?" Ruth said, preoccupied with the same problem. "The minute we get rid of him--"
"1 know," Chase snapped, "I know," irked by the knowledge that they had escaped and yet were still trapped.
The man knew they wouldn't kill him. Despite the rifle barrel in his belly he seemed unconcerned. His lips spread in a grin across his gums. "I guess you're 'tween the devil and the deep blue sea--you got me but they've got you. How d'ya like that?"
The grin thinned only slightly when Ruth rammed the barrel deeper. "Don't tempt me," she said acidly. "I've seen decent people die, so it wouldn't bother me one bit to get rid of scum like you."
"Maybe so, lady doctor. But if I go your lives sure as damnation ain't worth bird spit, and you both know it."
They were now winding upward toward Hickison Summit. On their left the rock face rose vertically, sheared away in broad swathes like orange-yellow cheese sliced by an uneven hand. On their right, beyond a narrow fringe of grass, the valley dropped steeply away, strewn with large fractured boulders and fragments of rock, remnants of the road's construction. Chase looked to the left and then to the right. He stopped the jeep, applied the hand brake but left the engine running, tucked the gun in his pocket, and swung himself out.
"If he so much as moves an eyelid, shoot him."
"1 might do it anyway," Ruth said.
The road, being impassable on either side, had given Chase the idea. He hoisted one of the jerry cans from its rack on the back of the jeep and sloshed a pale amber stream across the road, right to the edges, shaking out every drop, then dropped the empty can into its cradle. Gasoline fumes drifted in a throat-catching mist off the hot blacktop. Pray to God it wouldn't all evaporate before it had a chance to ignite.
Crouching down, he tossed a lighted match and there was a gentle boom as a wall of flames sprang up. He retreated a few paces, watching anxiously in case the fire should burn itself out too quickly. He smiled, catching a whiff of a gorgeous rich aroma: the tar itself was alight, bubbling and frothing and giving off a blanket of dense black smoke that rose sluggishly to form an impenetrable smoke screen.
