The desperate hours, a novel (11 page)

Then he said, "How can I do that, EUie? The money should be here in less than an hour now. It's almost 2 o'clock."

He listened again, this time gripping the phone until a spasm of pain shot up the clenched muscles of his arm and reached his neck. He swore without realizing that he had spoken. He couldn't beheve what his wife told him; the incredibility of what she said smashed into the tension of his mind that had been straining toward 2: 45 for endless hours now.

"You will do it, won't you?" his wife said, with urgency.

"I'll pick up Cindy right away," Dan replied.

When he replaced the instrument and stood up, Dan Hilliard did not know what had happened, or why he was being instructed by Glenn Griffin, through Eleanor, to do what he was now going to do. None of it made any sense at all, but what brought the sour choking rage up in him now was the realization that he had been tricked. The money wasn't coming today. Griffin had known all along. The money had not been mailed until after Griffin had talked to that woman on the phone last night. It could not arrive and be delivered until tomorrow.

Glenn Griffin had lied in order to get him out of the house today, in order to make it appear a normal day, without incident.

Now, however, there was an incident of some sort, and Dan refused to think what it might be. In half an hour he and Cindy were to be parked in an area in front of the stores that formed a shopping center on the far east of the city. That was all he knew. Why they were to be there, for whom they were to wait, what would happen—Glenn Griffin had not told him. And very likely Eleanor didn't know or had been commanded not to say on the phone.

In the employees' elevator Dan pushed a button and rested his burning forehead against the cool metal grating and felt a scalding behind his eyes. You can only push a man so far, he warned Glenn Griffin in his mind. A man can only take so much. Any man. Any man in the world. He was approaching the edge of something and he knew it, without being fully aware of what it was; but he did know, as he tugged at his hat brim and squared his shoulders before leaving the privacy of the elevator, that he could not step over that edge, or precipice. If he took that step, everything he had already done, all that the others had been through, would be wasted effort. By playing their game—whatever it was now—he had a chance, however slight.

It's as simple as that, he told himself savagely. Remember it! He stepped out of the elevator.

Robish was unable, at that same moment, to step from the cubicle that held him. The panting was over now, the wild animal terror was behind him. Back there a bit, crashing through the woods after he realized the truck wouldn't start

and he would have to go on foot, he had been scared. Sure, scared. And sore. Mostly sore at that old guy with his wise ideas. Thinking he could pull a fast one on Robish. Remembering the old guy sent a warm pleasant flush down his massive soaked body in the woods: the way the old guy'd tried to run, stifflike, and then the way he stopped, kicking up the gravel with one foot, those skinny little arms going up, and then the way he sprawled while Robish pounded the other two bullets into the jerking body. That memory had caused Robish to grin. They'd all get it just that way, wise bastards.

Glenn thought he was dumb. Oh, Robish knew what Griffin thought. But was he? Hadn't he come out of the edge of the woods, picked the shopping center, found the telephone in the service station, made his call? Wasn't he waiting here now, cozy and tight in the men's room, until the little redhead's car came for him?

From the window he could watch the parking area. His clothes were soggy, his body wet; his breath was getting back to normal; and all he had to do was watch the women climbing in and out of their cars, skittering across puddles, clutching their kids and their groceries. He liked the secret feeling it gave him —the small hot room, the still damp coldness outside, the thought of three bullets left in the gun. He had those bullets earmarked. One for Hilliard, the guy who had slugged him; one for the kid, that brat that caused it. Let Hilliard watch the kid get it first. That'd pay him off. And if GrifRn objected— that damn young fool risking their necks just so he could get at some copper who'd busted his good-looking jaw—well, there was a third bullet, wasn't there? He was going to hold the gun from now on. That third bullet could just as easy be for Glenn Griffin.

Robish was feeling great.

Glenn had said a half-hour. Robish had no way to estimate time, but he figured maybe ten minutes had passed since he talked to Griffin, maybe twenty. 97

Then, in the distance, he heard, very faintly, the wail of a siren. A long way off. It made him grin.

But the grin twisted and left his face sagging. A lot could happen in haK an hour. Maybe those cops'd try to surround the woods, figuring that was the way he'd run. He had no idea how long he'd spent plowing through them. Maybe in a half-hour the cops'd work their way through them, out onto the street.

Where was that redhead, Goddammit!

"Cindy'll be back in a minute or two, Mr. Hilliard," Chuck Wright said. "Why don't you wait in my office?"

"Where is she?"

Chuck stood back as Dan Hilliard entered his office. He hadn't missed the sharp note of demand in the normally easygoing voice. Nor had he missed the sleepwalking aspects of the man's appearance and manner.

"She's taking dictation from Mr. Hepburn right now," Chuck replied easily and offered cigarettes.

Dan Hilliard either did not want one or did not see them. "How much longer?"

Chuck felt a twitch of annoyance at the man who still stood, hat on head, eyes staring hollowly from under the dripping brim. "I couldn't say," he said, the irritation roughing his words. But he felt it ebb. Why? He could not have said. But the stolid way the other man stood, the slope of those heavy shoulders, and the lined, tired face with the freckles clear on the pale skin, all sent an odd start of alarm through him. "You

look " He started, then stopped himself. "Won't you sit

down, sir?" he said.

The sir had slipped out, surprising him. He never addressed anyone, even Mr. Hepburn, or his own father, as sir. Point of

honor. Pride. Whatever it was, there it was, that was Chuck Wright, take it or leave it.

"Could you interrupt her, Chuck?" Dan HilUard asked. "It's —important."

"Mr. Hilliard." Chuck took a deep breath. "Is something wrong?"

"Why do you ask that?" The words licked like lashes of a whip.

"I mean—with Cindy. Or you? Someone." Chuck shook his head in a bewildered way and leaned against his desk crossed one ankle over the other. "I don't mean to pry. Perhaps it's none of my business. At first I thought maybe Cindy was just giving me the brush. Some other fellow. Something like that. Now "

"Now what?"

"I'm damned if I know."

And there it rested. It stayed there because all Dan Hilliard would say was what Cindy had said earlier in the afternoon, after she'd come wandering in ten minutes late after the lunch hour, looking haggard and very tired: "You're imagining things. Chuck." Her father used the same words now.

"It started last night," Chuck said stubbornly, his teeth in it now and very little to bite them into. Then, while Dan Hilliard stood, dripping and unmoving, a raincoated statue in the office, Chuck Wright went over it all for him, what little he had to go over—the way she'd leaped out at him from the house, the way she'd insisted on being taken home after sitting in silence all evening, the abrupt and disturbing tears in the car, and the question about a gun. He watched closely, narrowing his gaze, when he mentioned the gun.

"It doesn't figure, sir. That's all."

"It's not your business. Chuck."

"Maybe not, but "

"No maybes about it. This is not your affair. Stay out of it."

Chuck had not been spoken to in this manner, or with that 99

much force behind the order, since his days in the Marines. He hadn't liked it then, but it had been part of a pattern that he had to accept. He didn't have to take it now.

"It's my business if it concerns Cindy, Mr. HiUiard."

Then the hat tilted sidewise slightly; the blue eyes snapped to immediate attention, and some of the dazed hardness left them. "So. So it's like that, is it. Chuck?"

"It's like that," Chuck said evenly, "whether you Uke it or not."

"I don't. I haven't, that is. But I've no time to talk about it now. Or to think about it." The earlier urgency returned to the man; he stepped to the door. "Where's Hepburn's office?"

"I'll get her," Chuck said, moving around the blocky figure, angry and confused but a new kind of suspicion troubling him, a feeling, as he tapped on Mr. Hepburn's door, that whatever this thing was, it was bigger than any feeling Mr. Hilliard might bear toward him. It was, somehow, beyond that, more urgent and vital and desperate.

He spoke a few brief words, saw Cindy rise without so much as turning to Mr. Hepburn, and watched her as she ran out the door. He followed. He saw Cindy join her father; there were a few muttered words between them. Cindy reached for her coat. Dan Hilliard was moving toward the corridor and Cindy, with only one intense but hazy glance over her shoulder, her eyes very much Uke her father's, followed.

Chuck stood staring at the closed door. All right. Now he'd have to find out on his own.

It's my business if it concerns Cindy. His own words echoed back at him. There you have it. Chuck. You said it yourself. There go all your firm intentions. You're in.

That's the way it came to him. He loved Cynthia Hilliard, and where that left him, he didn't know. But he had to find out.

He grabbed his own raincoat and, without a hat as usual, he strode from the office without a backward glance.

In the street, after he had seen the figures of Dan Hilliard and his daughter, Cindy—the man stiff-legged, solid, grim; the girl swift and graceful at his side—turn into the parking lot where Cindy kept her car during the day, Chuck Wright had a quick moment of panic. Would he lose them before he could get, unseen, to his own car, the low-slung sports job in the same downtown lot, and onto the street behind them? Cindy, he saw, did the driving, and she was not wasting time; the mystery of her urgency worked like a soreness through him. She didn't pause in the thin mid-afternoon traffic, but swung right, north, and shot out of sight before Chuck could ease his way out of the parking lot.

In the midtown area no turns were permitted between noon and 6, and it was this accident of timing that allowed him to pick up speed and narrow the distance until he saw, two blocks ahead, the black coupe make a right turn, bearing east. He followed. It was not difficult to stay behind Cindy's car, but he was careful to keep a fair distance and, as much as possible, to stay out of line of her rear-view mirror.

She was not going home. Chuck tried not to conjecture as to what business she and her father might have at this time of day on the east side of town.

A siren was such an ordinary and expected sound on a city thoroughfare that, at first, Chuck feh no surprise when the Sheriff's car whizzed past. But when others followed—three, perhaps four, and an ambulance—he began to think of an accident east of the city. Had Mr. Hilliard heard of it? Then he had come and picked up Cindy, refusing to talk, brushing aside everything else, and they were now on their way to the scene. But, of course, that didn't explain last night, or the strange silent morning, or the long intense phone call Cindy had made; above all, it didn't explain her starthng tears and the question about the gun.

When, not twenty minutes later, Cindy's black coupe edged itself into a parking space in the paved area before a block of stores, one of those new shopping centers that had sprung up on the edges of the city, the siren wails were distant, well beyond the woods to the northeast. Chuck dismissed his questions about these and drew to a halt behind the sleek white service station on the comer; he waved the attendant away and worked with the air hose at his rear wheels while he watched.

Almost at once, a man emerged from the service station itself—a ponderous bulk of man in a rain-soaked gray suit, sloshing through the puddles—and at first Chuck made no connection between his direction and the coupe. Still, Mr. Hilliard and Cindy remained seated behind the steady swish-swish of windshield wipers. It was not raining. It had not been raining since they left the downtown office building. But apparently Cindy had not even noticed.

Before Chuck could let the surprise of this observation reach him fully, he found himself clutching the air hose and staring. The man approached Cindy's car, spoke through the suddenly lowered window to Mr. Hilliard, waited while Mr. Hilliard climbed out of the car; then the man in the gray suit slid his great body into the seat beside Cindy. Mr. Hilliard, still without speaking, with not so much as a nod of recognition, stepped back in and closed the door. The car backed up, shot forward, returned to the street, splashing and shooting water like a jet spray from the angrily spinning rear tires.

Chuck didn't wait. He was behind them then, well behind but with the coupe in clear vision on the north-south highwaylike street that skirted the city on the east. The square mass of the strange man's head was between the other two, and well concealed from both sides. Chuck considered passing the coupe, twisting to get a full look at the man, but the little sports car was conspicuous, and Cindy would recognize him at once. He didn't want her to know he was doing this. At least not yet. But something more than this held him back: the memory of the shambling walk, the furtiveness of the big man as he shot a quick suspicious glance around him back there before he climbed into the seat. And now the way he sat safely between them, low in the seat, only the top of his head visible from behind. The man wore no hat. This in itself was worth noting, Chuck decided; he wore none himself, but most men of middle age, especially on rainy days, would not think of going out without a hat. And the man wore no topcoat, either.

Who was he? What could a man like that have to do with the Hilliards? The black-sheep uncle? The family drunkard, threatening social disgrace? He'd probably find the explanation that innocuous and simple in the end.