The desperate hours, a novel (14 page)

He knew no one personally who drove a long locomotive-type convertible like that. Then it could not have been simply a friend who had recognized him. That didn't make sense, anyway. No one has the slightest idea of the situation you're in, he reminded himself. You imagine everyone suspects, just as you become suspicious of every car that approaches or passes, simply because they have brought you to this criminal state of mind where the most normal things take on menace. It's a world they live in all the time. Now it's your world. In that sense, you're one of them.

He was searching now for a place where he would turn off the road. He had only the vaguest impression of the area. As a boy he had swum in the river along here, but then, at the top of the bluff, there had been only a narrow dirt road, rarely used. Now, after the curve of park drive had become narrow country road, everything looked different again, not the way he remembered it at all. He had swum and picked berries and even now he could taste the sun-heated juice of them as they burst in his mouth. The city lay far south of him now, several miles away. His own house, if he could cut straight across the river instead of backtracking to the bridge, was not too far, perhaps four miles, perhaps five. As yet, though, he had not faced the future hours or that return home. He had warned Griffin that this would take time if he was to do it properly, if the car was not to be found at all; he had even told a little of his plan. Griffin had whistled, in awe. "You got a walk in front of you, Hilliard." No, it was Dan's idea that Cindy would follow in her car and pick him up. When Griffin had only moved his head in a slow negative and said, "Not a chance: the more Hilliards there are around here tonight, the better," Dan had caught, in young Hank Griffin's face, a surly rebellion—that may or may not have been directed at his brother.

No time for all that now, Dan told himself harshly; no time now for all those unlooked-for cross-currents that in themselves might prove more treacherous than anything the police or the family could do. He decided to turn around: he had passed the deep part, the hollowed-out pool that he had known as a boy. But when he stopped, nosed into a clump of trees and underbrush that lay between the road and the river's high edge, he saw that there were car ruts penetrating the thicket. Did they lead to the edge of the bluff?

After he had satisfied himself that he could maneuver the car through the wet and black-shadowed grove, Dan climbed back into the scat and sat for a split second behind the wheel. He was breaking the law. He, Dan Hilliard, was guilty of committing a crime. The thought had no meaning to him, and he was not even surprised. He edged the sedan into the trees, the branches scraping and crying against the metal. At the edge of the bluff, he set the brake and clambered out again, stood listening in the silence, with the headlight beams stabbing the darkness over the water. Down below the river was almost soundless. Far downstream he caught the occasional glitter of other headlights striking across the water's surface from the highway he had just traveled. He studied the grassy and bush-

tangled shelf; there were no obstacles. Then his eyes came upon a wiry-looking sapling that jutted out angularly just below the drop-off. He cursed himself for not anticipating this; he should have brought along a saw from the garage. Clinging with one hand to the roots of a bush outjutting from the black earth, he climbed down the muddy bank a few feet and tested the tension of the small tree. Would the sapling deflect the car's downward plunge? And in what way?

But he was helpless without a tool of some sort; the thin tree was securely rooted.

The car had to go all the way down. It had to reach the water. The crash would be loud and there was the chance that it would attract attention. But Dan Milliard, at this point, had grown accustomed to calculating risks; he knew that a certain recklessness, backed by careful consideration of the odds, was necessary. This recklessness seemed to have become a part of his life. He even wondered, pulling himself up onto the level ground and standing upright again, whether this recklessness had been a part of his nature forever.

When had the men come? Only last night? Impossible! The intervening time had taken on an endless quality. Sliding into the seat, his body wet and his shoes clogged with mud, Dan wasn't able to look ahead to tomorrow morning, to the 9: 30 mail tomorrow morning. The past and future did not exist now. He threw the gears into reverse, backing into trees and stumps three times before he felt that he was far enough away from the edge of the cliff to gain the necessary momentum on the wet grass to shoot the car out and over the sapling.

He didn't hesitate now. He plunged into the moment heedlessly, his mind working in that automatic way again: he threw the car into forward gear, tapped the accelerator experimentally, racing the motor, his left foot holding down the clutch. He felt with his left elbow to make sure the door was open and warned himself that his left hand must let go that door handle at the same instant that his right hand tore itself away from the steering wheel. He bore down on the gas, released the clutch, held the wheel steady, saw the black void rushing toward him and in it Eleanor's face floating toward him. His ears filled with the crackling of the tree limbs and roar of motor and the angry grind of tires in soggy earth.

Then he plunged sideways, throwing himself violently as the void reached for him, feeling a thorny prickling against his face and the jolt of hard earth under his body. Then the whole world filled to bursting with the thundering descent of the car. Dan lay curled in the underbrush as that sound echoed and reverberated, gnashing, crushing and ugly. He knew that the car had rolled, and it seemed now never to stop rolling. The splash was abrupt—first, the soHd slap-sounding smack, then a series of gurgles and gasps, as though some living monster were battling for life below the edge of the bluff. Finally the bubbhng slackened into utter stillness.

Dan rolled onto his back, breathing shallowly.

Had it gone under? He crawled to the precipice. The sapling quivered with a faint rusty crackle of leaves. Below, there was nothing. Sheer dark.

Dan stood up unsteadily, shaking. He couldn't know whether the car had gone under. He couldn't tell what daylight—and perhaps some hunter in the surrounding woods—would discover.

He was faced now with the hours-long walk back to the house. The trick now, he knew without thought, was to keep from thinking, from wondering. The trick now was to get away from this spot as fast as possible and to make one leaden foot follow the other over those miles, all the while forcing his mind ahead, all the while peering forward to that inevitable moment tomorrow when they would leave. What was he going to do then? How was he going to prevent their taking anyone along in the car?

Perhaps, before he arrived home, he would have the answer to that.

"Supposin' you're right then," Lieutenant Fredericks of the State Police was saying to Jesse Webb. "Supposin' this guy's in the fix you think he is. I agree with that much. But why then are they stickin' around? And when they're ready to take off, is he going to be any better off? He says it right here in his letter, doesn't he? If those sonsabitches take his wife along, f'instance, how's he going to be any better off'n if we start searching all those houses right now? And stop shaking your head that way. You're givin' me the fidgets."

Jesse hadn't known that he was shaking his head, but he made a conscious effort to stop it. This Lieutenant Fredericks had already given him the fidgets, if that's what you called them. He didn't like being called into a man's office, in the first place; Fredericks had no authority over him and he was taking a lot on himself to question him about his procedure. Co-operation was one thing; this superior-speaking-to-underlmg was something else again. Jesse had to admit that, on the face of it, it didn't look as if he was accomplishing much. He'd answered the questions civilly enough, sitting hunched forward in the State House office, trying to explain, over and over, to the short, crisp elderly man in uniform just why he was not trying to close in, that as yet he had no house to close in on.

"Maybe he's not going to be any better off," Jesse drawled. "But that's a decision I reckon the man's got a right to make on his own now."

"The hell he has! This is poHce work, son. Nobody wants to see innocent people hurt. But we can't sit on our cans forever waiting for them to make the move. You got the list of that trashman's customers "

"Mr. Patterson," Jesse suggested.

"Sure, the old garbage collector. Hell, son, it was your deduction that the old boy had seen the car, not mine. But you got to follow through. The garbageman's dead "

"Mr. Patterson," Jesse corrected again.

"What's the chip on your shoulder, Webb? It ain't becoming, son. We got to work together on this. So you got cars planted up there around the neighborhood. You know how easy it'd be for that gray sedan to slip out of that? I'll tell you. Any man with reasonable intelligence could do it if he never had any experience, that's how. For all we know they've done it already. Up and gone. Your telephone hunch played itself out, didn't it? Maybe this one will, too. But son, we'll never know unless we try. Let's get men moving up there. Knock on a few doors, ring those bells, ask about the car—about this Mr. Patterson. Innocent questions. What can we lose?"

"We can force their hand," Jesse said with slow patience running thin.

"Now you're talking!"

"And they can jump to the idea that this guy, whoever wrote this letter, tipped us off. They can plug him, or his wife, or his kid or kids."

"You can't put off a showdown, son."

Jesse stood up. "Look. Nobody wants a showdown any more'n I do. Not you or every trooper in Indiana. But by all the rules, with my superior out of town now, I reckon this comes under my jurisdiction—unless the FBI has other ideas. Carson doesn't—because we've talked about it. It'd take us all night and part of tomorrow to work our way through that whole damn neighborhood, ringing doorbells. No thanks. I want 'em flushed. Lieutenant, but not if they're going to shoot up somebody's family just because I can't wait."

"While you're waiting," the lieutenant said testily, "an old man gets three in the back. Nothing I can see's going to stop that happening again."

Jesse stopped in the office doorway; he was shaking his head again. "We weren't waiting when that happened, Lieutenant —I mention that just for the record. We didn't have anything then, remember?"

"Webb, let me tell you something. Let me give you a little advice. How long since you've had any sleep?" And as Jesse

waved a hand, he nodded. "Okay. It might be a dead-end guess and it might pay off. I'll get you as many men as you want on this, Webb. Put 'em all over the streets, anywhere. But I tell you, Webb, this slob that wrote this don't have the chance of a snowball in hell and I, for one, thinks he needs help, and plenty of it. Don't take it personal, what I just said. Deputy. I'm a sour old man and I hate to see you young punks make fools of yourselves. If they are up there and they slip away, you'll be looking for work, son."

"I'll take that chance," Jesse Webb said, feeling raw all through. "But I could use some men. Thanks."

Lieutenant Fredericks stood staring after the young lanky deputy. He spat into a brass cuspidor alongside his desk. Raring to go all day, he thought, and now he's stopped dead in his tracks. Hell, he was ringing doorbells himself this morning!

Jesse emerged on the high State House steps. It was a dull night, with a few ugly clouds drifting pale gray against the bitter dark sky. He felt a little faint. Not enough food and too much coffee and too many blind alleys, he thought; and the thought brought to mind Kathleen. She was in another movie now, her third today; then one of the deputies was to take her to Jesse's mother's house on the south side for the night. Remembering his own curled fear about Kathleen, Jesse was reminded again of the unidentified man's pitiful, pleading letter. For a moment, as he paused there staring into the city streets where only a few people moved, secure and unafraid and not even conscious of the Griffin brothers and a man named Robish, Jesse Webb thought, with envy of them, that maybe it would be a good idea to get another job, anyway. But by the time he was in his car again and cruising northward to the area that had become the neighborhood in his mind, an area defined on the surface of his brain by the same red mark he had drawn on that city map in his office this afternoon, he felt a slow return of the banked-down excitement.

Griffin was in town. Jesse's hunch on that had been right, he'd swear to that much. Then this other guess, that they were hiding in the neighborhood, might not be too far-fetched. It was amazing, when you came to think of it, how big a part plain hunches played in police work. Oh sure, you have hints and clues—the license number scribbled in an old man's blocky writing before he was shot, a carefully worded anonymous letter from a worried husband and father. But you put the two together and the connection was slight, really. Damned slight. Yet it was all you had, and on the basis of it, you lost another good night's sleep.

The sour taste that had been in Jesse Webb's mouth since the telephone number list had played itself out on him was now a poison all through him. He was tired, but it didn't matter. All that mattered was that he had a slim chance, but a chance, to reach Glenn Griffin before morning. Somehow. The hatred he had felt all along, remembering the shapeless hang of Uncle Frank's arm, had swollen in him each time he recalled the look of death on the face of harmless little Mr. Patterson; now, with the desperate unsigned letter in his pocket, he felt the hatred expand, choking him, till he could hardly breathe.

Nothing mattered but finding Glenn Griffin, his brother and another man named Robish, and wiping the earth clean of their slime. That and nothing less.

That same need, more aching hunger than savage rage in him now, kept recurring to Dan Hilliard as he walked; it clogged his mind, averting his thoughts from the one decision he had to make before morning—how to tie Griffin's hands if the young hoodlum attempted to carry anyone along in his escape. Dan was crossing the river bridge, returning on foot by the same route he had traveled an hour ago in the gray sedan. He had