chapter one
The lead car of the sheriff’s caravan was speeding its way sixty miles beyond Colorado, just below the south border of the sheriff’s home state.
The sheriff, with his entourage, had picked up Jack Kelty at Fort Morgan where Kelty had seriously wounded a deputy sheriff. But because Kelty had done his other killings in Ashford County, the Colorado authorities had been willing to hand him over to the Ashford County Sheriff.
Now they were taking Kelty home. In the front of the lead caravan car were two of the sheriff’s officers, in the back seat Kelty sat with wrists handcuffed to Sheriff Fred Whitehall and an Ashford police detective, Al Duggan.
"Real treatment, huh?" Kelty said. "Latched on to the sheriff on one side and Inspector Duggan on the other. No lousy patrolmen but the hierarchy itself!"
"Shut up, Kelty," Sheriff Whitehall said.
The sheriff looked at Jack Kelty as the prisoner smiled and tipped his head back against the seat. The midafternoon light was sunless, gray and murky. It cast its illumination so that Kelty’s face was unshadowed and seemed unlined and extremely youthful. Kelty had neat blond hair, almost crew cut. His face had the clean-lined look of a college junior, though he’d quit school in the tenth grade and was now twenty-eight years old. He wore a neat blue Paisley sport shirt and gray slacks over a compact six-foot, one-hundred-and-eighty-pound frame.
Sheriff Whitehall, slim and white-haired, tried to figure it out. Somehow Kelty should not have wound up this way. Maybe that was why he had appealed to the public. He’d had some tough breaks, but not many. Perhaps a lot of people could project and think that this, but for the a twist of fate, might have happened to them. It might be that, along with the effective work of the Ashford Times and its expert feature writer, Martin Hillary, who had defended Kelty from the beginning, which made Kelty a hero to some.
The sheriff turned his head, looking out at the gently rolling countryside. They were perhaps fifteen miles south of the raging Soshone River that ran along the south border of the sheriff’s home state. But you could continually see signs of the flood that was tearing up the countryside.
They sped over a concrete viaduct that crossed a tributary creek swollen to the size of a small river. Water sprayed away on either side as the tires hissed through the spill over. The water of the stream flowed swiftly between newly created banks, the grass soaked and driven flat at the edges. The flow was muddy from topsoil torn away with the force of the current, a miniature version of what the Soshone, bloated with melted mountain snow and days of heavy rain, must look like now.
In a way, the sheriff thought, there must be some parallel between a river like the Soshone and a man like Jack Kelty. You could know a river to be dependable, trustworthy – then it suddenly became a killer. Kelty, the sheriff didn’t doubt, had once been as innocent as a quietly flowing stream.
But how could you know what went on behind the college-junior façade, the bravado manner? Jack Kelty had started his bloodbath by killing a warehouse guard just outside Ashford during an attempted smallscale robbery. Before that he’d been just an average product of a tough city neighborhood with a few minor trouble skirmishes to his credit.
What had made his finger squeeze the trigger and release that first killing bullet? Fear? No doubt. And there had begun the history of a killer.
But the savageness had come with the desperate attempt to escape from an angry, tough Ashford police force, one of whose members had fallen before Kelty’s gun. No doubt it was the reputation given to the Ashford force that had contributed heavily to the unusual public sympathy for Kelty.
For a long time now, the Ashford Times, represented well by the sharp pen of Martin Hillary, had been working on the brutalities, the corruptions, the heartlessness of the Ashford police force. That the history of the Ashford force contained defects was, no doubt, a fact. Human foibles were as common among law officers as other human beings. The valid possibility that there might be less fault in the Ashford force than in a great number of other big-city departments went unnoticed by a statewide Ashford Times readership. The Times’s circulation-loving publisher knew that circulation was not increased by proclaiming virtues.
Somehow, then, Jack Kelty had become an underdog, glamorous in his role because of his soft manner and collegiate good looks. And though not one soul who might have been subconsciously rooting for his successful escape would willingly have wanted to find himself in Kelty’s path, there still had been a strange and strong public sympathy for one frightened young man in a life-or-death conflict with a dangerous Ashford police force.
The sheriff turned his eyes from the soaked countryside and looked at a tired and nervous Inspector Al Duggan. The public was wrong, of course, and a good hard cop like Duggan was right. Eventually it made no difference how a man had come to be a killer; all that mattered was that he had become one. Al Duggan, a cop clear through, knew you didn’t risk anything when that had happened.
"How about a cigarette?" Kelty asked.
This time Al Duggan said it: "Shut up, Kelty."
Sheriff Whitehall watched Al Duggan roll his window down to relieve the muggy interior of the car. Duggan was fourteen years Kelty’s senior and twenty pounds heavier. The murky light was not so kind to his heavy features as to Kelty’s. He looked older than forty-two and, the sheriff knew, he felt older. It had taken five days to flush Kelty into flight out of Ashford, another five days before he was captured in Colorado. The sheriff knew that Al Duggan had not relaxed in those ten days; he knew that Al Duggan would not relax until Kelty was locked behind bars in Ashford.
"I’ve got rights," Kelty said.
Al Duggan brought his eyes from their abstract study of the countryside. "When did dead men have rights?"
"You think I’m dead, Inspector?"
"I know it."
"You may be surprised."
"You’re dead, Kelty."
"Maybe I am at that. Maybe this is heaven, huh?"
"Maybe this is hell. You’ll think so pretty soon anyway. You’re going to scream before this is over."
Kelty laughed softly. "How can a dead man scream?"
"In time, Kelty. In time."
The sky remained a gloomy steel-gray. They crossed another creek swollen over its banks so that once more the tires whirred through a thin stream of water pouring across the highway. Kelty leaned his head back again. Al Duggan resumed his staring at the countryside. The caravan rolled swiftly on.