Walk a Black Wind by Michael Collins Page A

packed my old pistol and some clothes in a bag, and went out to rent a car.

8.
    Dresden is a grimy city of a quarter million on the banks of the broad, shallow North Fork River some miles above its junction with the Delaware. Founded before the Revolution, its red-brick factories on the river date from the industrial boom before the Civil War, and were left behind by areas of better facilities and cheaper labor. Now highways and truck transportation have boomed Dresden again, but the cleaner light industry of today is spread around the city, no longer tied to the river.
    The old factories, and the downtown residential areas, have been left to the poor, the old, and the black. The new skilled workers live out in the hills surrounding the city, and the managers live near the tops of the best hills. Where once it huddled around narrow streets near the river, the city now sprawled into what was farm and forest not long ago.
    It was 9:30 P.M. when I turned off the Thruway. Golf courses, drive-in movies, roadhouses. and shopping centers ringed the city along the county highway, and just inside the city line it curved around a large, dark lake. A wide, blacktop road led in toward the lake. I turned down it.
    It ended at a fenced hunting lodge on the swampy south shore of the lake. Across the swamp I saw the high shadow of an earth dike between the swamp and the deep water of the lake proper, and near the lodge a mammoth pumping station was at work draining the swamp. A sign identified the station as property of The Dept. of Public Works, City of Dresden, 9 th Drainage District.
    I lit a cigarette, and sat there for a moment before I drove back to the highway. There was nothing at all anywhere in the swamp but the single lodge.
    Mayor Crawford’s house was at the crest of one of the higher hills of the city. Vast green lawns surrounded large brick and stone houses distant behind iron gates and gravel drives to coachhouse garages. The Crawford house was one of the largest, in reserved Tudor style, set closer to the street than most because there were two cottages behind it. It had the dignity and quiet of long power, an old family.
    The gates across the driveway were open, and I drove in. I parked in front of the house—and saw the green Cadillac. It was in front of the garage. I was sure it was the same Caddy my tail, had driven in New York, and I stared at it. Someone was very careless, or very confident. I got out, and saw the woman inside a lighted, glassed-in side porch.
    She looked out at the night like a lighthouse-keeper’s daughter searching the sea for a lost lover. Her face turned, and I saw that it was Mrs. Katje Crawford. She acted as if she didn’t really see me, or if she did I had no meaning for her. Her face was drawn and distant, like the face of a starving woman. Only it wasn’t hunger, it was a kind of inner pain. I was seeing her private face, and it wasn’t pretty. Her daughter was dead at twenty.
    The front door opened as I walked toward it. A man came out—small, stocky, in a camel’s hair topcoat but with no hat. Swarthy, he had sharp dark eyes and white teeth, and he was the man I’d “ambushed” tailing me in New York. I was certain. He had arrogant shoulders, walked with a confident strut, and the thin smile of his white teeth wasn’t in his eyes. I doubted that his eyes ever smiled. A man with no time to waste on smiling for anything but show.
    â€œYou want something, Fortune?” he said.
    I said, “You’re one up on me. Should I guess?”
    â€œAnthony Sasser,” he said. “You must have done your homework in the hospital.”
    â€œAfter you put me there, Sasser?”
    His dark face was full of contempt. “You want a confession? I didn’t see who shot you any more than you did. Loused me up, too. I wanted to go on tailing you, but after you got hit, I had to get out. Don’t like being around a