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forward with the broken steering wheel in his chest, and when he placed a hand on his throat there was no pulse at all and the head slewed sideways with an ugly limpness that made him take the hand away.
    He hunkered down beside Harve and began searching for the key again. Rain sluiced down and the clothes were soaked and it was difficult getting his hand into the wet pockets. Ankle-deep mud sucked at shoes, and when he turned Harve over to get at the his pockets they were full of mud too. He found some loose change and a wallet, and he opened the wallet up, feeling in it for the picture he was sure was in it and not even remembering about the money until hours afterward when it was too late. His fingers located the slick surface of it and drew it out, and he threw the wallet into the mud. It was too dark to see whether it was the right picture, but he was sure it was, and he slipped if into the breast pocket of his coat, grinning coldly in the darkness and all the sick feeling gone. Maybe I’ll live long enough to give it back to the lousy bitch, he thought.
    There,was a pocketknife and, at last, a key ring with four keys on it. He began trying to fit them one at time into the slot on the face of the handcuffs, feeling the slot with his forefinger to locate it and orient the key and then bringing the key against it and turning gently in an effort to insert it. When each one proved to be too large he slid it carefully around the ring clockwise, counting, and tried the next one. After he had gone around twice he knew they were all too large and were car keys and door keys and he threw them into the mud, cursing. Harve did not have it.
    He stood up and put his head and arm into the front window again. George had to have it now, but reaching into and searching all his pockets was going to be slow and laborious, if not almost impossible, having to do it from this window, with one hand, and with the heavy weight of Harve pulling on him. He knew it I would be absolutely impossible to get George out of the car, with the doors jammed shut and only one hand to work with, and he could not reach the body at all from the other window. But he had to have the key. He was beginning to react to the urgency of it, aware of just how many more hours he had until daylight and knowing he had to be far from here by the time the wreck was discovered. A man less tough would have been going to pieces with panic by now. .
    He began with the pockets of the coat, not really expecting to find the key in any of them, but because he had to eliminate them in order to narrow the search and because they were easy to reach and the logical place to start. The shirt pocket was next, but there was nothing there except a package of cigarettes.
    It took a long time to get into the right-hand trousers pocket, reaching across and bending his wrist and working into it a little at a time. He pulled the pocket lining out, feeling everything very carefully as it dropped onto the seat. There was some change and a knife, but nothing else.
    He was wondering how he was going to get into the left-hand pocket, with George leaning against the door because of the way the car was tilted, when he remembered the watch pocket. He hurriedly slipped two fingers into it and then felt a wild burst of elation as the fingertips brushed against a small sliver of steel at the bottom. He hooked it with the fingers and drew it out and knew by the shape and feel that it was the key and that in a minute he would be free of the hated weight of Harve and could run. He withdrew his head from the window and started to bring out his arm with the key held between the fingers, but he forgot the jagged splinters of glass still remaining in the doorframe. One of them sliced into his forearm, cutting through the coat sleeve and raking deeply into the flesh, and he jumped.
    There was a tiny, musical tinkle as the key bounced once on the doorframe, and then there was an age-long void of waiting with only