“Gre’ stuff!” had been Jack’s enthusiastic comment.
The wheel of his new speedster in his hands, there automatically came on Jack an exhilarating sense that here was another lark. It was just like so many other parties of months and years before that had started out hilariously from Broadway for a meteor-like rush through the dark to distant road-houses—just one more party, but with a thrill and excitement that topped all others.
Even when drunk—that is, short of insensibility—Jack was a good driver. His hands seemed to have a peculiar brain of their own—albeit a reckless brain. Ten minutes after leaving Le Bain’s house they were across the bridge, and five minutes later they were in the stretches of the boulevard; and Jack, pointing with his toe to a lighted dial, was chuckling to Nina:—
“Nice li’l’ piece junk—eh, Nina? Doin’ her li’l’ ole sixty an hour, an’ ain’t half tryin’.”
“But slow down at the turns, Jack. Please be careful!”
“’M always careful. Never had an accident.” He laughed mischievously. “Goin’ to show you nice li’l’ breeze when we get out li’l’ farther—goin’ touch her up to ninety.”
In the meanwhile, behind them, little Loveman was planning, planning—and acting. He drew out a thin morocco wallet, from it took a stamped envelope, and on this with a pencil he scrawled an address—the address of a New York bank where he had a personal account which was so private that there was not a scrap among his papers to indicate that such an account existed. Into this envelope he slipped the three checks Nina had given him, sealed it, placed it between the two halves of his wallet and replaced the wallet in his coat. That letter he would drop into a mail-box in Greenport.
Once on board the yacht they would make for the ocean—he knew the vessel to be large and stanch enough to withstand any storm likely to arise in summer seas—and he knew the government patrol boats guarding the coast were not interfering with the course of American pleasure craft. For two days—longer if it suited the exigencies of his plan as it worked out, and perhaps to the end of the cruise—he would keep Jack at sea; then he would get rid of him at some convenient port. In the meantime Jack’s checks would have gone through Jack’s bank. No one suspected the truth about those checks—so he believed—and it would be a long time before the truth came out in the routine of business. Before that he would have managed to draw the funds out of this secret account—just how he did not yet see—but somehow he would manage it. And all the while they would be cruising southward along the coast, slipping into port when necessary to take on oil. And finally they would make Mexico, where Hilton would find sanctuary—and there or in some other Latin-American State he would start his career anew—his and Nina’s. And evading extradition—for what charge could be formed against him with sufficient evidence to cause a foreign State to give it serious heed?—they would become great people, people of brilliant position, he and Nina.
For all the time that he had seemingly been amused at her limitations and pretensions, and all the time that he had been quite willing to fit her into his dubious transactions, all this while Loveman had had one ruling thought concerning Nina—that in the end she should be his. There had been many women in Peter Loveman’s life, but Nina Cordova, all of whose flaws he knew and at whom he was ever laughing, Nina was the only woman he had ever loved.
Thus, as the car spun noiselessly through the heavy night, the shrewd, tireless brain schemed on and on—as that brain would scheme on and on, brilliantly, fascinated by its schemes and their working out, until death should bring its blankness....