The desperate hours, a novel (23 page)

Me descended the ladder and walked into the side door of the Wallings' house with the man Merck, nodding as he listened. In the side hail he tore off the coverall and reached for his trench coat, aware of Lieutenant Fredericks' eyes upon him from the dining room where three troopers and Carson sat in a huddle. But what Jesse Webb was considering was not the information just received—although the money angle explained why the two men were staying in the house—but of a movement he had seen behind the Milliard garage while he stood on that ladder. Me hadn't dared use the binoculars then, but he had his own idea as to what that movement was. And he was not sure there was anything he should, or safely could, do about it.

Shortly after 8: 30 Chuck Wright had become aware of the activity atop the Walling house—long before Glenn Griffin, inside, had noticed it. Chuck, behind the Milliard garage, had hoped then that this did not mean that the police had found

out and were setting up a way to attack. But he knew, below the hope, that this was very hkely. It wouldn't take that Webb long, he admitted grudgingly.

Now, at six minutes after lo, stiff with the waiting, he was bristling with impatience. He had been hoping that if one of the two men in the house spotted the activity on that roof beyond the trees, the man who was at the rear window, in Mr. Hilliard's den, would go to the front of the house to investigate. This had not happened. Chuck Wright decided that he would have to find a way to create the diversion that would leave the rear of the house free for the very brief space of time it would take him to let himself into the back hall.

He was prodded, too, by the certainty, mounting in him with the minutes, that Cindy would return to the house. Perhaps that's what they were waiting for in there. If so, and if those police were planning to close in. Chuck intended to be inside, with his gun. As a matter of fact, it occurred to him that the one way now in which no member of the house would be killed or injured was for the police to keep those two inside occupied in an attack from without; their guns then would be turned on the police, the family forgotten, and if he was inside at that point, he gave himself a chance, a slim one, but well worth taking when you considered all the odds. He left behind all hesitation and doubt.

But where was Cindy now? Did she intend to return to the house? When? And what was she doing?

It was a long, narrow room with a bar along one side, booths along the other. There was a raw whisky smell about it and an atmosphere that added to Cindy's sickening apprehension. Behind the bar a man wearing a plaid vest over a once white shirt looked her over, and she turned abruptly away and crossed to sit in the first booth, to sit very straight there with her hands on the table, her eyes fixed. Presently a waitress appeared at her elbow, a spindly girlish-looking woman with fuzzy dyed hair and tired, defensive eyes. Cindy ordered an old-fashioned, the thought of it stirring the nausea in her. With the glass before her on the nicked table-surface, she looked at her wrist watch. 10:29.

Chuck had never come into the office this late. Mr. Hepburn had asked about him several times, but neither Cindy nor Constance Allen could tell Mr. Hepburn why he had not appeared. And Cindy did not know what his absence meant. She didn't dare let herself conjecture.

She could only think of the man who was to meet her here in one minute, at 10:30, in this shabby and deserted bar on a dead-end side street alongside the stage door of a motion-picture theater. She knew what the man wanted, why she was meeting him; in a sense, she was committing a murder. Certainly she was aiding in the crime. But these accusations had attacked her before, and there was one answer, itself a question: What else could she do?

The anger was still in Cindy Hilliard, and it rose chokingly as she watched the little man who entered now, glanced carelessly around, his dim and very pale eyes sliding over her. The waitress had disappeared, and the man in the vest behind the bar had his back turned. Cindy sensed all this, her eyes meeting those of the newcomer; she knew that she could not control the contempt and disgust in her glare, but the little man who approached frightened her. She couldn't say how; perhaps it was only her knowledge of his mission, of what he was going to do for the money she was about to give him.

"Mind if I sit a spell, miss?" he asked.

Cindy felt her head shaking, inviting him to do what he did next: sHde into the space opposite her, across the table.

"You know my name, miss?" he asked.

Again she shook her head. She did not know it, or want to know it. She wanted to get away from him, to get back to her father's office, to get into the taxi with him and to return to the house, as they had been told to do. She couldn't quite believe, though, that this innocuous-looking man—small, with a smooth, rather rounded face atop a short, thin body—could be a murderer. A paid killer. He looked and spoke, too, more like a salesman, a bill collector, a clerk in the store where her father worked,

"Turning cold," the man commented, and his pale eyes, which she saw were blue, remained on her face as he straightened his rather flashy tie and pointed to the glass on the table. "You're not going to drink that?"

"No."

"Thanks, miss."

He drank dehcately, almost smiling, but those depthless pale eyes remained on her. She did not know what she was to do now. She was not sure, suddenly, that this was the man; perhaps he was only a traveling salesman trying to pick her up.

"I'm a messenger," the man said then, finally. "You have something for me to deliver?"

When he said that—perhaps because it appeared so transparently true—she knew that he was lying, that he was the man, that those same hands now resting flatly and without nerves on the table would pull the trigger, killing another man whose name she did not know, either.

She opened her purse, drew out the white envelope. The man took it, nodding, placed it in his pocket without so much as glancing into it. She watched him and the actions of her own hands like a person viewing a motion picture when the sound apparatus has broken down. This dreamlike quality seemed a part of her whole life now.

Then, without warning, an enormous shadow fell across the table, and she looked up. She saw the man across from her glance up, saw those unnaturally faded eyes meet those of the 207

big man standing there, saw them half close in disinterest.

"What you got in your pocket, Flick?" the big man asked, and his voice was hoarse and ugly but somehow gentle. "What'd the lady give you?"

"A letter. Sergeant," the one named Flick replied.

Cindy noticed that the big man, who was evidently a detective, had not removed his hands from the pockets of his coat. And in the back of her mind a voice whispered, This can't be, this isn't happening.

"Come along to the station," the detective said. "And you can hand over the envelope, Flick."

The astonishment in her broke then, the rage took over, the blank rebellion. This can't be. They can't do this! They're ruining everything now! She stood up.

"You can't " she began.

The big man only looked at her out of very dark but not unfriendly eyes. "Fm only following orders, miss. They didn't say anything about bringing you in, but Fm doing it to play safe, understand. If you've done nothing, they won't hold you long."

"No," she said, trying to slip past his hulk of body.

"Fm sorry, miss," the big man said, and the anger gave way to hopelessness in Cindy Hilliard then.

"Am I under arrest?"

"Not yet. Not technically. Unless you refuse to come to the station like a nice girl." He looked down on Flick, who was finishing the drink. "I hope they don't judge you by the company you keep, miss."

Tears came to Cindy Hilliard, tears for the first time since it had begun. Tears of rage and frustration and despair. It was over now, all of it; in the Httle she had been asked to do, she had somehow failed. What would happen if she didn't return to the house before 11: 30, as Glenn Griffin had insisted? What would happen then to the others?

By now Dan Hilliard was back in his office. He was waiting for Cindy. He, too, was recalling Glenn Griffin's insistence that Cindy return to the house with Dan. Griffin made clear that his reason for this was that he wanted to be sure, when he left, that his man—the one Dan knew was named Flick—had already been paid for the job he was to do. But Dan mistrusted this explanation as he mistrusted every word that came from those lips. He had about decided that Griffin would attempt to take Cindy and Eleanor with him, on the theory that two women with two men in a car that was not known would be the safest way to get out of town; Dan was aware also that Griffin possessed no better tool with which to tie Dan's hands. In that way. Griffin and Robish would have all the time they needed. And Dan was inclined to think—in that deadened cool way he had now—that with that setup the four of them could probably get by those patrol cars that he had seen in the neighborhood last night. And then what?

It was not going to be that way. Dan was going to see to it. At that point, the value of living dropped into nothing. He realized now, sitting behind his desk, that there is an ultimate juncture at which the question of living or dying loses its meaning and importance. At that juncture, you still fight to live— that's probably automatic—but your success is measured then not by whether you survive but by what greater catastrophe you prevent.

And there you have it. That's where all of it had carried him, down their criminal depths and then up the steep ascent toward the only conclusion that a decent human being could reach. Now he had only to wait, and without impatience, although the sound of his own watch ticking cut into his flesh, through nerves, into the marrow of his bones.

When the door opened, he stood at once, knowing it was his daughter, that it could be no one else. But the man who entered was very tall, with a narrow head under a battered, water-stained hat, with bloodshot eyes and a slow but definite manner 209

as he crossed to stand in front of Dan Hilliard with his hands jammed down into the pockets of his trench coat. The man looked at Dan Hilhard for a long moment, and Dan's blood chilled. The man flipped back his coat and Dan caught a quick glimpse of badge, of leather holster, of gun butt.

Very slowly then, Dan sank back.

"Morning, Mr. Hilhard," the man said. "My name's Webb. Deputy Sheriff, Marion County. I received your letter, Mr. Hilhard."

Dan threw back his head, feeling the remnants of pain all through his body, and thinking, stunned: This is the thing you've worked against, Ued against, fought against. It can't go Hke this now, now with the money in your pocket. "I don't know what you're talking about. Deputy."

It appeared then that Jesse Webb lost his temper. He pulled his hands out of his pockets and rested on them, with the palms flat against the top of Dan Hilliard's desk, the lean body hunched forward. "Look," he said in a hoarse, cracked voice. "Look, Mr. Hilhard, I wouldn't be here if I didn't have it, hear? It's taken a long time, I started from scratch, but I'm here, and we don't have time to waste, do we, Mr. Hilliard? So let's have the rest of it now, straight, from the beginning. Then we can decide what we're going to do about it. Goddammit, start talking, Hilliard!"

Whatever he saw on Dan Hilliard's face then stopped him; he straightened, taking a deep breath, and looked past Dan Hilliard, out the windows. "Sorry," he mumbled. And then in a much softer, gentler tone: "But what are we going to do about it? That's the question now. What do we do, Mr. Hilliard?"

It was going on 11 o'clock! You can't wait all day for something to happen, Chuck. He was crouched now behind the shrubbery at the corner of the garage, concentrating on the head that appeared, was gone, then inevitably reappeared behind the transparent curtains in Mr. Milliard's den. The feeling persisted in him, for some reason that he couldn't explain, that if he waited too long for an accident or impulse to draw that man out of that room, he might never make it inside in time. He no longer considered the danger; if he used his training and was cautious, he might be able to help. If it came to endangering any of them, he wouldn't act at all. But that decision could only be made when he was inside the house and knew what was going on, what was being planned.

You've got to create your own diversion, he told himself with savage calm.

He had selected and then rejected various possible methods. Whatever he chose must serve its purpose by alarming them sHghtly, alerting them even, but not to the point of action against Mrs. Hilliard or the boy, not to the point of panic. He finally hit upon a way that could be explained, perhaps by Mrs. Hilliard inside, as a perfectly natural occurrence, especially after the wind of the last two days. Whether the two men would respond to the sound itself or, later, to a logical explanation of it—well, that was one of the risks, but comparatively a small one.

He placed the gun carefully in his hip pocket. Then he took the small key into his left hand and picked up the two-foot length of dead bough that he had been studying for some time. The wood was rotten and crumbling; perhaps it would not make sufficient noise. And it was not as heavy as he would have liked; it might not travel all the way over the pitched roof and strike against the top of the front porch or in that general area where it would have to fall to draw the man from the rear of the house. But if it did, it would certainly be easy to explain. Branches often dropped onto the roof from the large but dying 211

oak to the west of the house. Chuck remembered one night in the living room when this had happened, startling him so that Cindy laughed for minutes. With the sound of that laughter still in his mind, he planted his legs, drew back, and let go.

The branch twirled and looped far up over the roof, cleared the top of the inverted V by inches and dropped out of sight. Then Chuck fell flat and waited, Ustening. The sound came— first a thud, then a scudding as the broken bough tumbled and bounced down the far pitch of roof. Chuck's eyes were on the window. The thin but transparent curtains flew back; but he couldn't move. He saw a square block of unshaven face appear, the eyes darting about. Then the curtain swished down and the head disappeared completely.