Free On the Run by John D. MacDonald Page B

terribly impressive and important. But in public places, you blur somehow. I saw it in the airport. Yousort of fade into the scenery. It’s quite a trick. And I don’t want you to be like that.”
    “After I worked so hard learning how? I studied the kind of people you never really see. They move slowly. They speak just loud enough to be heard. They never change expression. They never look at people. They act as if they are tired all the time. I worked at it a long time. Now it’s habit. If you overdo it, you look furtive and people notice you. The easiest way is to pretend you’re exhausted and you have a headache. I won’t have to work so hard at it while I’m with you. They’ll look at you. They won’t remember me. I could walk in on my hands. They wouldn’t see me.”
    “Idiot. I’m really quite a plain woman.”
    “You don’t realize how that rubber mattress has changed you.”
    “I knew
something
was different. I was whistled at. Back at the station. A very small dirty little man. And a very small dirty little whistle. But I’ve been bursting with morale ever since.” Her expression changed suddenly. “It’s so strange and so unreal, floating through the night past all the towns and the people on that mattress. Nobody knows where we are or who we are. Like a little dark boat in the middle of a dark ocean. I never had such a feeling of anonymity.”
    “That’s the feeling of running.”
    “Are we running? That’s strange. Now I’ll be looking over my shoulder.”
    “Not while we’re running. After you stop, then you get back the habit of looking behind you. When you stop, they can catch up.”
    “You’ve traveled like this before?”
    “Yes.”
    “With a woman?”
    “A very rough woman. A very dangerous woman. Miss Dexedrine. She can keep you going for forty hours before you fold.”
    “But she wasn’t much for conversation.”
    “She had me talking to myself.”
    They ate and went back out to the car. He explained the route. He got into the back, took his shoes off and stretched out under the blanket. The car held at cruising speed. The pillow had caught a slight fragrance ofher hair. He looked up out of the window at the motionless stars. He heard little songs and rhythms in the drone of tires and engines. When he closed his eyes he could see her face very vividly and distinctly, looking at him across the restaurant table.

six
    The executioner stood at the bar of a roadhouse on Route 5 between Albany and Schenectady, nursing a bottle of ale. He was a stocky, sturdy man in his forties, with light brown hair, pale eyes, and a broad, ordinary, unremarkable face. He wore a grey summer-weight suit which needed pressing, a blue shirt, a maroon tie with a soiled knot. He wore a cocoa straw hat pushed back off his forehead.
    He stood and wondered how far away this one would be, and how long it would take. He wondered if this would be the one that turned out to be one too many.
    At exactly nine o’clock he picked up his change and walked out into the dark parking lot beside the building. His small dark car was parked at the far end of the lot, away from the others. He unlocked it, got in, reached deep under the dash and pulled the small handgun free of its retaining spring. He put it in his lap and made certain the bulky silencer had not worked loose. He rolled the window down and blinked his lights on and off again, briefly, and sat and waited. Soon a man came walking across to the car. He came up to the window. He looked young and nervous. The man behind the wheel did not like them young and he did not like them nervous. “Jones?” the young man asked.
    In the cover of darkness the man held the weapon aimed at the middle of the pale blob of face. “What’s the name of Lanti’s wife?”
    “Huh? Oh, her name is Bernajean.”
    “Come around the back of the car and get in beside me.” As the young man went around the car, the man behind the wheel tucked the gun under his left thigh. As