Collision
by Al Nussbaum
Copyright
1974
I
do a lot of traveling by car. In fact, since the airlines began searching
passengers and their luggage, that’s the only way I travel. I have
secrets and I want to keep them.
I probably see the remains of one or two wrecked cars every day I’m
on the road, and I sometimes arrive at an accident scene before the mess
has been cleaned up. I had thought I was hardened to the sight of crash
victims, but one evening on the Pennsylvania Turnpike I discovered I was
wrong. I had slowed to pass a parked ambulance and a pair of state police
cruisers, and I saw, framed in searchlights, a sight I wouldn’t be
able to forget in a hurry.
She
had been young, no more than sixteen or seventeen, and she was never going
to get any older. She wore high heels, jeans and a legalize-marijuana
T-shirt, a typically incongruous, youthful combination. Her hair was long,
blond and straight. She had on flame-red lipstick and blue-lensed sunglasses
dangled from one ear.
No,
she wasn’t lying peacefully alongside the roadway–she dangled
crookedly ten feet above it, impaled on the steel rung of a telephone
pole that had pierced her back and burst through her chest. While two
white-garbed medical technicians worked to free the body and lower it
to the ground, the state police stared at the passing traffic or their
shoes.
The
scene was easy to read. There was a beat-up little car parked on the shoulder
of the road with a flat tire. A pale-faced boy sat in the front seat,
tears making shiny tracks down his cheeks. Before the police arrived with
their flares and spotlights, this had been an exceptionally dark stretch
of road. The young couple had pulled onto the shoulder to fix the flat,
and a passing car had hit the girl with enough force to send her body
soaring. There was no other civilian car near the cluster of official
vehicles, so the other driver had hit and run.
A
couple of hundred yards past the accident scene, several drivers had pulled
off the road to be sick. I had a sour taste in my mouth. I lowered my
window, cleared my throat and spit onto the roadway. It didn’t help.
I
always drive carefully, never exceeding the posted speed limit. Now, because
of the hit-and-run, I reduced my speed to ten miles per hour below the
maximum. The police would be out in force, and I didn’t want to take
any chance of being stopped. I figured I could survive police scrutiny
provided it wasn’t too thorough, but I didn’t want my faith
put to a test if I could avoid it.
I
drove for another thirty or forty miles before deciding to stop for food
and fuel at a service area. It was two in the morning and Philadelphia,
my destination, was still a long way off. I had an attendant top my tank,
then pulled around and parked beside the restaurant. I got out and carefully
locked the car. There’s no use placing temptation in anyone’s
path.
I
was at the counter, drinking my second cup of coffee and thinking about
the score I had planned in Philadelphia, when I got the feeling I was
being watched. I swung around on the stool. The only one behind me was
a well-dressed man with graying temples, sitting in a booth. Through the
window beside him I could see my sedan with its Utah license plate.
The
man didn’t seem to be interested in me, and he was far too well dressed
to be a cop. His suit, cuff links, watch and diamond ring gave him a net
worth of over $5,000 right where he sat. My face isn’t the one I
was born with. He could not have recognized me from some old picture,
so I put him out of my mind. I turned back to my coffee.
When
I got up to leave, I noticed that he followed me out. I turned right and
he went left. I paused, pretending to look at something in the gift shop
window, and watched him walk to an expensive-looking foreign sports car
that was parked by itself at the rear of the lot. The bright red finish
of its rear deck looked like about twenty coats of hand-rubbed lacquer.
He
wasn’t behind me on the ramp leading back to the turnpike, and I
watched my rear-view mirror for following headlights. There were none.
I settled down to a comfortable forty mph, but continued to glance in
the rear-view mirror from time to time. Something about that guy back
at the service area was bugging me.
Then,
after I had gone about two or three miles, I noticed a dark shape rapidly
overtaking me. It was a car, traveling without lights, and it had to be
going at least eighty mph. Instead of pulling out to pass, it seemed to
be using my taillights as a target. When a collision seemed certain, I
jammed my accelerator to the floor and leaned back against the headrest
to minimize the shock of impact.
It
probably didn’t help much, but I managed to keep from snapping my
neck. I lost control of my car and it was literally catapulted off the
road and into a nearby drainage ditch. The car came to rest, leaning precariously
with its right-hand wheels in the ditch and the others on the road shoulder.
The other vehicle continued along for another couple of hundred yards,
spraying the road with water, oil and pieces of its engine, before skidding
to a halt.
The
driver climbed out and came strolling back to me with a flashlight in
his hand as casually as an old lady out for a morning walk. Predictably,
it was the well-dressed man from the restaurant.
I
unfastened my seat belt and shoulder harness and pulled myself out of
the wreck. The rear end of my car had been caved in at least a foot. The
gas tank had been ruptured and raw fuel was leaking into the ditch and
forming a puddle under the car. The gasoline fumes were strong.
"Are
you all right?" he asked.
I
ignored him. I was too angry to talk. I made a mental vow to cut his heart
out with a rusty tire iron if my car burned before I could get everything
out of it. That seemed fair.
By
the time the state police arrived, I had retrieved my suitcases from the
trunk, and my sample case and clothing bag from the back seat. I was seated
comfortably on the sample case and no one would have suspected I was thinking
of murder.
As
soon as the cruiser came to a stop, the well-dressed man ran up to it.
"Officers! Officers!" he shouted. "Arrest that man. He
cut me off and deliberately wrecked my car."
I
glanced up to find him pointing an accusing finger at me. There was a
defiant gleam in his eyes, as though he were challenging me to contradict
him.
"Calm
down, Mr. Anderson. We’ll take care of him," one of the troopers
said.
If
I had been planning to argue, that’s all I would have needed to change
my mind. The police know him. He was "Mr. Anderson" to
them. His word was automatically better than mine.
"Don’t
believe a thing he tells you," Anderson said. "He’s probably
drunk and certainly a lunatic."
I
remained where I was until the troopers approached. Then I stood up and
presented my Utah driver’s license and the registration for the car.
They were impressive documents. I didn’t know what a genuine Utah
driver’s license or registration looked like, but I was sure they
couldn’t look any more authentic than the ones my printer had designed.
It wasn’t necessary for the papers to be duplicates of the real thing
because few people in the East would know what they were supposed to look
like anyhow.
The
driver’s license was printed in royal blue on gold paper, and carried
both my thumb print and an embossed photo of me in full color. The registration
was also printed in blue, but on a lighter weight gold paper, and it carried
a serial number that matched the license plates on my wrecked car. The
metal tags would have to be removed and examined carefully before anyone
could tell they were actually several years old and had been altered and
repainted.
The
trooper looked at the papers and put them in his pocket. "You heard
Mr. Anderson. What d’ya have to say for yourself?"
I
shrugged and held my hands out, palms up, in a gesture of helplessness.
"Not much I can say, Officer. I guess that’s the way it looked
to Mr. Anderson. I may have cut in a little too closely when I passed
him, but that isn’t what caused the accident. Without thinking, I
slammed on my brakes to keep from hitting a deer, forcing Mr. Anderson
to ram into me. That’s how it happened."
Anderson’s
head jerked in surprise and in the light from the police cruiser’s
headlights I could see his eyes narrow.
"Does
that seem plausible to you, Mr. Anderson?" one of the troopers asked.
"Yes...yes,
I suppose so," Anderson conceded.
I
don’t know what was going through Anderson’s head, but I was
hoping they wouldn’t go back up the road, looking for skid marks,
because they wouldn’t find any.
Right
then the wrecker from an enterprising salvage yard pulled up. The driver
must have been monitoring the police frequency and overheard the troopers
call in our position when they first spotted us.
I
got the guy to pull my car out of the fuel-filled ditch, but told him
I preferred to leave it where it was until after I had notified my insurance
company. He tried to give me a sales pitch about it costing me more if
he had to make a special trip, but I stood firm. I didn’t want my
car locked in some salvage yard where I couldn’t get to it. Anderson
hired him to drag the sports car off the turnpike, and that seemed to
satisfy him. He could handle only one car at a time anyhow.
So,
as the wrecker pulled away, towing the red sports car, Anderson and I
climbed into the back seat of the cruiser and were taken to the state
police barracks to fill out an accident report.
I
asked the trooper to return my papers so I could have the information
they contained for the report. He handed them over without hesitation.
He had swallowed my version of the collision.
Anderson,
on the other hand, kept giving me sidelong glances as we stood at a long
counter filling out the reports. He couldn’t figure out why I had
lied, and the puzzle had him worried. I handed out a few sidelong looks
myself, but only to get his address from the form he was filling out.
I didn’t speak to him. There would be time for that later, and there
had to be a better place.
When
the state police were finished with me, I went to the nearest town and
rented a car. I returned to the turnpike and my wrecked car. I removed
the license plates, then took the panel off the inside of the door on
the passenger side. In the space where the window mechanism should have
been, I had a submachine gun with a folding stock, a silenced .22 caliber
automatic, a set of emergency identification papers, and enough hundred
dollar bills to buy a good lawyer or rent a bad judge.
I
stopped a mile down the road just long enough to bury the Utah license
plates. I tore up the phony driver’s license and registration and
dropped them into the hole, too. In this age of computers, the collision
made it certain they would be exposed; however, if the authorities didn’t
actually have the plates and documents, they’d have no way of knowing
how authentic they were, or of trying to trace them to their source.
I
made Anderson’s address my next stop. He didn’t have a home–he
had an estate. His rambling, ranch-style house was set in the middle of
thirty acres of imaginative landscaping. I followed a winding driveway
and pulled up in front of the house just as a pink dawn was breaking.
Anderson
opened the door without waiting for me to ring. "I’ve been waiting
for you," he said.
"Of
course," I replied, causing the satisfied smirk to slide from his
lips.
There
was an awkward pause, then Anderson invited me in by stepping backward
a few paces. "Come to my den," he said. "We can talk there.
My wife and the servants are asleep."
Once
the door to the den was firmly closed behind us, I took out my silenced
pistol and pointed it at his head. "You have cost me a lot of money,"
I said. "How much cash do you have in the house? I don’t want
to kill you over money."
"You
know, don’t you?"
"Of
course I know. If you didn’t want to be found out you should at least
have picked a car that was headed in the other direction."
He frowned.
"I didn’t think of that."
"You
should have. No one smashes up his car the way you did without good reason.
It only took a few seconds to realize you did it to hide damage sustained
earlier. You’re the one who hit the young girl and kept going. You
were probably drunk, but sobered up in a hurry. Then, knowing they’d
be watching for the damaged car at all the exits, you decided to get some
damage you could explain."
"Why
didn’t you tell the police?"
I
ignored his question and asked one of my own: "Are you going to make
me kill you over money?"
He
seemed to take notice of the pistol for the first time. "I thought
you’d want money. I have all my ready cash in that box on the desk."
He gestured to it. "If that’s not enough I can sell some stock
certificates and have more for you in a week or two."
I
didn’t bother to look into the box. "That’ll be enough,"
I said. Then I killed him with two shots in his heart.
I
didn’t kill him over money. I was thinking of the young girl hanging
from the telephone pole. That seemed like reason enough.
###
Oringinally Published in Alfred Hitchcock Magazine