It was a nowhere place. A dirty, out-of-the-way small town named Wexler, Arizona: a place Richard Kimble had thought he might be safe, for a day or two. He would have been, if not for the overzealous deputy sheriff who'd recognized him, somehow recalling a warrant photo that was already two years old.

He'd barely escaped the roadside motel ahead of them.

Gasping and out of breath, Kimble made his way on foot through the rough terrain of the desert chaparral, feeling the heat of the morning sun already beginning to burn him. He could hear them. Somewhere back there, beyond the scant yards of cactus and scrub brush he had covered, they were coming. Tracking him.

He had to move faster. Had to lose them somehow. But there was little cover here. No place to hide.

He skidded down the shallow bank of an arroyo, changed direction at the bottom and followed it west, pleased to find it growing deeper as he ran. Its walls were inadequate protection, but they were better than nothing.

He wondered if they'd called Gerard. Was the police lieutenant from Indiana already on his way here, to Nowhere Arizona, expecting to take Richard Kimble back into custody after twenty-one long months of chase?

With a series of sharp pinging sounds, something spat into the rocks near his feet. Startled, he ran faster, stumbling, falling, scrambling up to run again.

Bullets... The pinging sounds had been bullets. They were firing at him...

He tried to change directions again, and found that he could not. The walls of the arroyo were too high to climb now. He was trapped, like a rat in a maze, and in their line of fire.

Like the answer to a prayer, the culvert took a sharp turn, and then...

Kimble stopped, brought up short for the briefest of moments by sudden indecision. In front of him, the arroyo had divided into three separate forks. Choosing the left one, he ran again. The ground under his pounding feet was rock -- granite and sandstone. Hard to track anyone over that. Still, maybe he should have started down one fork, left a false trail and doubled back to take another route. Too late now. Too little time.

The walls were not as high here. Maybe...

A miniature avalanche of loose rock and sand tumbled downward when Kimble ran, hand and foot, up the incline. Sharp stones cut his hands. He paid no attention. All that mattered now was reaching the top, getting away...

He came out of the arroyo, stopped again and stared at the second manifestation of a miracle in one day. It was a highway. And on it, a convoy of flatbed farm trucks, all of them empty, all of them moving down the sun-baked blacktop at a speed just slow enough that a man running might make it to the last one in the train. He might.

Kimble ran.

His lungs burned as though he'd tried to inhale hot lava, and the muscles in his legs were knots of agony. But he kept on running.

The highway and the last truck loomed nearer.

And then the cracking report of the rifle came again. More bullets thudded into the sand at his feet.

He ran on.

They were aiming low on purpose, he was certain. Not trying to hit him; only to stop him. Probably on orders from Gerard. Gerard would want him alive. The lieutenant would never deliver anything less than a healthy Richard Kimble to the state of Indiana -- deliver him to die as the law had decreed that he must, in an electric chair in the state penitentiary.

The truck was in front of him now. Almost within reach. He drew in a tortured breath and lunged for it.

A sharp pain lanced through his right ankle. He cried out, fell. The truck began to draw away, its driver oblivious to his efforts.

Kimble forced himself up. He couldn't stop now; couldn't let the truck get away from him. He told his mind to ignore the pain; demanded that for a few more critical seconds, the agony would not exist.

It didn't work, but somehow he ran in spite of it. He caught the bouncing tailgate of the truck, hoisted himself up, rolled into the dusky-smelling straw that littered the flatbed.

Down the road behind him, he saw figures run out onto the highway. With the obvious disgust of defeat, one of them threw his now-useless hunting rifle onto the blacktop.

Richard Kimble did not begin to breathe normally until the truck had traveled several miles. It was also not until then that he realized the pain in his ankle was still there, and that the cuff of his trousers, the sock and shoe of his right foot were all stained red with his blood.

One of the bullets must have struck him after all

He pulled the cuff and sock away to examine the wound, relieved to find that at least the bullet had passed through cleanly. No severed tendons.

That, his mind teased, is what all those TV westerns keep calling "merely a flesh wound."

He wished he could laugh at the ancient joke, but somehow it seemed less funny now. Exhaustion was beginning to overcome him, and he didn't dare sleep. Not here. Not now. Struggling out of his light-weight jacket, he ripped off one of its sleeves, bound the injured ankle as tightly as he could, and lay down in the matted straw. He hadn't intended to sleep, but the warmth of the sun and the droning rhythm of the truck's movement were lulling...

"All right, Mister. Let's move it."

Kimble started awake; found himself staring into a dirty, beard-stubbled face.

"I don't take riders, fella. You got this far me not knowin' it; you'll hafta hitch some other ride from here. Out."

The man -- the truck driver, Kimble realized groggily -- was motioning for him to move, to get out of the truck. He tried to comply, and narrowly averted crying out when the pain in his ankle came suddenly awake.

The driver, who had not noticed that his unwelcome passenger was hurt, continued waving him out.

"Come on, come on! I got a schedule to keep!"

Kimble made it to the ground, putting all his weight on his left foot. The truck was stopped in front of a roadside diner, and the others in the convoy were no longer in evidence. "Bums," the driver grumbled, and disappeared back toward the cab of the truck. "All the bums gotta pick my truck to sleep in."

The cab door slammed. The truck's engine rumbled back to life. Kimble moved hesitantly away as it roared off, spraying him with sand and gravel.

Wincing, Kimble sat down on a concrete block in the diner's parking lot and began to unwind his makeshift bandage. The ankle was badly swollen, the wound in need of cleaning and disinfecting. Perhaps, if there were a drugstore...

He looked around him. The diner, the highway, a run-down gas station and half-a-dozen squatty, nondescript buildings. They were all that dotted an otherwise endless expanse of desert. No drugstore here.

Maybe the diner would have a first aid kit.

He started to get up, thought better of the idea, and sat heavily down again. There were people inside the diner. Three cars and two truck rigs sat in the blistering sun of the parking lot. Too many people. Too many questions he wouldn't be able to answer. Perhaps he'd try flagging down a passing car...

* * *

Inside the diner, Ingrid Morris paid the cashier for her coffee and donut and walked out into the hot October afternoon. She'd opened the door of her aging 59 Chevy and was about to slide in behind the wheel when she saw the hitchhiker standing on the highway shoulder. He looked like...

She shook her head, dismissing the thought. Odd that she should think of Richard Kimble now. She hadn't seen him in sixteen years, since the day he'd broken their four-month-old engagement. He'd married Helen four years after that. And then, just two years ago... The papers had been full of it, all over the country. Helen Kimble's murder, Richard's trial and conviction. His death sentence. And escape.

She got into the car, started it, pulled out onto the road -- and stopped a few yards from the man who stood on the shoulder.

She saw the crude bandage binding one of his feet. It was bloodstained. Squinting, she stared at the man who limped toward the car.

It was Richard Kimble.

She reached over, unlatched the passenger door. He pulled it open and peered inside. "Hi," he said, his voice strained. "Would you have a first aid-?"

He stopped as the startled look of recognition crossed his face. Disbelief replaced it, then guarded uncertainty.

"Get in," she said to him, "I can help."

He was apprehensive now. She could almost read his thought. Ingrid, after all these years, turning up in the middle of nowhere.

"I don't think--" he started to say.

She cut him off. "Oh for God's sake, Dick. Get in the car."

He glanced nervously back at the diner. Then, with a final, decisive shrug, he slid into the passenger seat and closed the door. Ingrid pulled away.

"There's a first aid kit in the glove compartment," she said.

Nodding, he opened the compartment, removed the small metal box with the red cross on its top. She watched him examine the contents with the expertise of a physician. Cotton, gauze, iodine. All materials suited for the treatment of a scratch.

"There's a small town an hour or so up ahead," Ingrid told him. "They may have a clinic. A doctor.

"No. No, just drop me anywhere where there's clean water, soap. I'll take care of it."

"Dick, are you sure you-"

"Please, Ingrid. Just do as I ask?"

She nodded, driving on in silence while he made what use he could of the first aid kit.

Some time later, he reached over to turn on the radio, tuning past the Beatles chorusing "She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah" to a news report. The announcer droned on about President Johnson's latest press conference, a planned Soviet space launch, a series of murders in Ithaca, New York. Then he segued into local weather and farm reports. No mention of the near-capture of convicted murderer Richard Kimble near Wexler, Arizona.

He turned the radio off again.

"We're only a few hours from Phoenix," Ingrid said. "My daughter Anna's staying with friends there. I was on my way to see her when I..." She let the sentence trail off.

He looked at her, a nervous glance that was quickly diverted out the window at the passing desert scenery. The sun was setting.

"It's better if you don't get involved," he said . "If we're stopped... if we're caught, together, you could he arrested as an accessory."

Ingrid's foot depressed the Chevy's accelerator ever-so-slightly. The speedometer hovered at 65, the legal speed limit on Arizona's barren highways.

"I'm already involved, Dick," she said. "I got involved 16 years ago, and I've never stopped... I was in love with you once. Remember?"

He wouldn't look at her. "That was a long time ago," he said. "You got married, you had children. You did better for yourself than you ever could have done with me."

She started to tell him that wasn't necessarily true. She loved her family, but if things had been different all those years ago... Instead, she flicked on the headlights in the gathering dark, pointed ahead and said, "There's the town. The service station has a clean restroom. There should be soap, water."

They pulled into the drive of a fairly new gas station. Still holding the first aid kit, Kimble opened the door, started to ease his injured foot out of the car. The short whoop of a police siren came suddenly from out of nowhere, and an Arizona state patrol car pulled in beside the Chevy. Kimble froze. The officer was out of his car, walking toward Ingrid's open window with a pair of dark sunglasses and a citation book in his hand. "Evening, Ma'am," he started to say.

Ingrid jumped at the sound of the passenger door slamming. She looked, saw Richard Kimble trying to bolt for the open door of a car left running near the gas pumps. He wasn't going to make it. The ankle would hold him back.

"Hey!" The patrolman went after him, overtook him easily. Ingrid watched them come back toward the Chevy with some of the terror she knew Dick was feeling pounding in her chest.

"Lady," the officer said after leaning a panting Kimble against the patrol car. "I stopped you to tell you your left rear tail light is out. You got some kind of trouble with this fella here? An accident maybe? That how he got hurt?"

Ingrid stared at the man, aware her mouth was open but helpless to fill it with words. Panic knotted the pit of her stomach. She had wild thoughts of ramming the police car, driving madly away.

The patrolman had leaned into the window, about to ask for her license. He'd taken his eye off the injured man behind him, and that was a mistake that would cost him. Kimble brought the tnetal first aid box down on the patrolman's head with as much force as his two hands could wield. The cop stiffened, then crumpled to the pavement, unconscious.

Ingrid found her voice, prodded the hesitant Kimble, who incongruously, had knelt to check the officer's vital signs.

"Dick, let's get out of here!"

A man came out of the gas station's office. He walked toward the running car, not even glancing their direction. But his presence seemed to spur Kimble. He got back into the car as Ingrid floored the accelerator, and they sped away.

Behind them, Ingrid saw the man at the gas pumps run toward the fallen officer. Kimble, looking back, saw it too.

"Drop me on the first interchange we reach," he said tightly. "I'll get a ride going the other way. When they stop you, say I took you hostage, forced you to drive me."

"I can't say that."

"You have to. Otherwise they'll charge you with accessory to an assault." He caught his breath, went on again. "You don't have to tell them we knew each other. Don't volunteer anything you don't have to."

Ingrid looked at her own hands, knuckles white and rigid on the steering wheel. She'd never been so frightened.

"I'm sorry," she heard Kimble say beside her. "I tried to tell you it was dangerous to get involved."

"I can't just leave you on the highway," she protested. "You're hurt. You need a doctor."

"I _am_ a doctor, remember?"

"That's not what I--"

"--Leave it, Ingrid. Drop me off right now. Forget you ever saw me."

Calming, Inger drew in a breath. "No," she said.

He looked at her, puzzled by the sudden decisive tone.

"We're only an hour from Phoenix. The cabin Anna's staying in is well secluded. You'd be safe there."

He shook his bead. "The highway patrolman has your license number and a description of the car. When he comes to, they'll--"

"--Then we'll get rid of the car," she interrupted. "There's a dealership not far from here. I never liked this old crate anyway."

He started to object, but she cut him off.

''Don't argue, she said. ''I want to do this.''

After a long moment, he said, "Why? You haven't seen me in 16 years. For all you know, I could be planning to kill you, take the car."

"Not you."

"Why not?"

"Because I knew you better than that. I knew you were capable of a lot of things, but murder wasn't one of them. I never thought you killed Helen. I still don't."

He stared out the window again, suddenly pensive. "Everyone said I did. The police, the lawyers. Even the neighbors. Everyone believed I killed her."

Ingrid looked straight ahead at the fleeing white lines of the highway. ''Not everyone,'' she said.

They traded the Chevy in for a 3-year-old white compact Falcon at a used car lot near the freeway junction. The dealer was so pleased at Ingrid's instant, credit card purchase that he never noticed the companion who stayed in the shadow of the nearby garage and limped badly when he got into the car.

Less than an hour later, the Falcon pulled up to an isolated cabin in the desert hills above Phoenix. It had only three neighbors on the hillside. There were no lights in its windows.

"Doesn't look like they're here," Ingrid said, shutting off the engine and lights. "I have a key to the back door."

She helped him out of the car and through a back way into a wood-paneled bedroom. Kimble folded into an overstuffed chair while Ingrid found and lit a storm lamp. "The power's off," she said, but Kimble hadn't heard her. He was already asleep in the chair. Ingrid went for clean bandages and a bottle of antiseptic, cleaned and treated Kimble's injured ankle as best she could, then went into the cabin's front room, where she lit a fire and sat down to wait for Anna.

A sound woke her some time later. She hurried back to the bedroom to find Anna shakily holding a revolver on Richard Kimble, who stood against the wall, behind the chair.

"Anna, no!"

The young girl with the pistol held it in both hands. "It's him," she said. "The man in those newspaper clippings you kept. The doctor who... who murdered his wife."

"Anna--" Ingrid walked boldly up to her, took the pistol out of her hands. "Who taught you to point loaded guns at people?" she snapped. "Are you crazy?"

"But he's-"

"This man's name is Carter," Ingrid said. "Robert Carter. We were traveling together and there was an accident." She put the gun back into the drawer Anna had taken it from.

Anna's eyes narrowed suspiciously. "But he looks like..."

"Never mind your overactive imagination, shall we? Your mother doesn't keep company with murderers."

Anna looked from Ingrid to Kimble, frowning. "Sorry," she said weakly. "I thought you were..."

"It's all right," Kimble told her. "You uh, gave me quite a start there for a minute." He tried to smile, but the result was something more of a grimace.

"Your ankle needs redressing," Ingrid told him, her voice still nervous. "Anna, bring me some clean towels from the linen cupboard, will you?"

The girl hesitated, then reluctantly obeyed.

Kimble glanced out the window, surprised to see daylight beginning to appear outside. "She knows," he said to Ingrid. "She said she remembered the newspaper clippings."

"You don't have to worry about Anna," Ingrid said. The words were barely out when the subject in question came back into the room.

"Where are Sue and Charlene?" Ingrid asked her, taking the towels. "Why weren't the three of you here last night?"

"We stayed at Sue's neighbor's cabin down the hill. There's no TV set here and we wanted to watch 'The Man From U.N.C.L.E.'  Then the power went off, so we..."

"All right," Ingrid interrupted. "Didn't Sue and Char come back with you?"

The girl shook her head. "I only came up to get Char's hair dryer. And I saw the strange car outside and found him in here."

"Fine." Ingrid ignored the edge of suspicion that still edged her daughter's voice. "Help me with this, will you?"

Kimble settled uneasily back into the chair, allowing them to unroll the bandage and redress the ankle. But he did not fail to note Anna Morris's continuing stare.

"What kind of an accident did you say he had?" the girl asked suddenly.

Inger wrapped a clean bandage around Kimble's ankle, tying it off before she replied. "Just a fall. Nothing serious."

It was the wrong answer. And Anna's eyes told Kimble that she knew it.

"Why are you lying for him? Did he make you come here?"

"Anna--"

The girl had backed away, making for the door.

Kimble rose from the chair, reaching toward Ingrid. "Stop her," he said.

Ingrid turned, but started after her daughter a second too late. The door slammed. Footsteps clattered down the wooden steps outside. Ingrid opened the door and followed, catching up to Anna several yards down the sloping hillside road.

"Will you listen to me!" she shouted, grabbing the girl by the arm. "No one's forcing me to do anything. And that man up there has never murdered anyone!"

"I saw the pictures," Anna insisted. "His hair is different, but he's the one. I know he is."

She struggled to pull free, but Ingrid did not let go. "Listen to me," she said again, "Laws and courts and judges -- none of them are perfect, Anna. They make mistakes. They made a mistake in Indiana two years ago."

"Why are you with him?" Anna cried, finally breaking free of Ingrid's grasp. "What's he done to you?"

She turned on her mother and ran, tearing down the hill faster than Ingrid could hope to follow.

"Anna!"

It was useless to try and stop her now. She would reach the neighbor's cabin, and the telephone, and...

Ingrid turned, hurrying back up the incline only to find Richard Kimble standing on the wooden steps outside the back door. He had seen Anna run. And now he would have to run again too. She could see that decision already in his eyes.

"Take the car," she said, and dug the keys from her jacket pocket, pressing them into his hand.

"Ingrid, I don't--"

"Take it. And go now, before she has time to get a police unit up here. I couldn't stop her. I'm sorry, but I couldn't."

He nodded. "Okay. I'll leave the car along the freeway outside of town," he said. "I'll catch a ride from there."

''Fine."

"What about you?" he asked. "What are you going to say when the police start asking questions?"

"I don't know. Just what you told me to say, I guess. Please, just go before they get here."

He still held her hand in his, the set of car keys between them. He pulled her close to him, holding her in a brief farewell embrace that once, many years ago, might have become a kiss.

But in the here and now, Richard Kimble only said, "Good-bye, Ingrid," and got into the newly-purchased Falcon, revving its small engine only twice before steering it out of the gravel drive.

Inger followed the little white car with her eyes as it wound down the hillside road to the desert floor; followed it until it finally disappeared over the horizon. Then she went inside to wait for Anna and the police, and the questions she would somehow have to answer...
 

The End