The desperate hours, a novel (24 page)

It was his chance. He had to take it, knowing, as he ran, in long silent glides, that a bullet might stop him now that he was upright and in full view. He reached the porch, crouching now, not yet breathing hard.

He slipped the key into the lock. In the distance, deep in the house, he heard two men's voices, then a woman's. He edged the door open. There was one small but rather sharp crack of sound. He closed it behind him, made sure it was locked again.

The back hall was dim, very small. He paused, still listening. He was beginning to breathe heavily now, as he heard footsteps lumbering through the house, coming to the rear. Chuck, moving ver\' slowly in the semi-darkness of the basement stairs, crept down one step at a time. The damp odor of the Hilliards' basement struck at the hunger in him. He glanced hastily around in the comparative brightness.

Above, from the direction of Mr. Hilliard's den, the thunderous steps halted and a deep voice said, "All clear here. Griffin."

Farther away, a lighter one—a strangely high-pitched voice —called, "Okay. We take the woman's word for it. This time."

"Who's jumpy?" the first voice shouted, and a mean, ugly laugh was mixed into the words.

Chuck took up his position directly under the stairs so that he could cover anyone coming down the steps. He rested against the musty-smelling wall, trying to quiet his breathing. The Japanese automatic had already begun to feel natural in his right hand.

It didn't take Dan Hilliard long, perhaps five minutes, to give Jesse Webb the facts, some of which the deputy gestured aside, indicating he was aware of them, some of which he leaned forward to hear with particular intentness. He interrupted only once, to question Dan Hilliard closely about his daughter, Cynthia, and exactly where she had gone, and what the idea behind that could be.

At the end of his explanation, Dan said, "This man FHck is going to kill you, Deputy. He's going to do it for the $3,000 my daughter's giving him now."

"So that's the way of it," Jesse Webb said, rubbing a hand over his shadowed, unshaven face and glancing around Dan Hilliard's office for no reason at all. "So that's the way he was doing it."

"We had no choice, Webb."

"Who said you did?" The deputy sounded angry. "We'll take care of Flick, Mr. Hilliard. There're ways of handling scum like that." He brushed it all aside then, a short downward handstroke of impatience, but he heard what Dan Hilhard was saying.

"I wrote this letter a while ago, Deputy. Another anonymous one, but you would ha\e known who wrote it in time,

after " That he didn't finish, but pushed the letter across

the desk.

Jesse Webb read it quickly, then let his eyes drift to Dan Hil-liard's worn and haggard face. "Thanks, Mr. Hilliard. With those two names—mine and Flick's—I reckon we could ha\e prevented it. Nice thinking. Even now, huh?" Then he twisted the sheet of paper in his hand. "Even at a time like this, huh?"

It was Dan Hilhard's turn for impatience. "W hat else could I do? Let that killer shoot you in the back some night? Plant a bomb in your car?"

The anger in Dan Hilliard's voice made Jesse Webb smile, but only a little and a trifle wanly. "If your daughter went to Flick," he said, "he'll be picked up. There's a city detective following Miss Cvnthia Hilliard right now."

At this Dan stood up, his knees caving slightly. "You fool," he cried. "You damned idiot!"

"AH right, all right, let off steam now, Hilliard. Take a swing at me. I've been wanting to sock someone for two days myself. How did I know? I was tr\ing to protect your girl. How did I know what they'd send her into?"

Dan Hilliard subsided, but he did not sit down. He looked ashamed now, behind the new sharp intentness springing into his face—ashamed of the violence. "I've been waiting for her, that's all. It's late. Those fellows are going to get anxious, Webb. You might not know what that means. I do." He was climbing into his coat. "I have to get back up there now. Without her, I suppose." He pulled his hat down low and hard.

"She'll be all right, Hilliard. Don't worry about her. I swear she'll "

"Swear," Dan said in a low ironic whisper. "What can you swear to? That they won't somehow get word of this, those two, that their man Flick has been picked up? That they won't jump to the idea that I caused that? Or Cindy? Can you swear they

won't shoot my wife or my son, thinking I double-crossed them? Swear! What can you swear to?"

"To this, Milliard. That if there's one less Hilliard in that house of yours, there's one less innocent person might be killed in the next hour!"

Dan picked up the brief case and moved to the door, turned. "Thanks, Webb. I'm sorry I blew up."

"Why be sorry? Look, Hilliard"—and he took two long strides toward him—"look, nobody blames you. Not for anything. Get that, hear? Nobody in his right mind can raise a voice against what you've done. I'U see to it. I'll see to it!"

Dan Hilliard met the tall young deputy's gaze. There was a brief moment of silence, during which the two men understood each other and found that understanding a warmth between them. Both felt they had known each other for a long time, and it was a strange but not disturbing sensation, coming at such a time—oddly satisfying.

"There's more to it than that, though, isn't there?" Dan Hilliard asked, glancing at his watch, which read seven minutes after 11.

The other nodded. "There's this. That story about the young Griffin kid shouldn't have broken in the paper this morning. I tried to stop it, but somebody had a job to do. They did that job. I've got a job, too, Mr. Hilliard, same as you have. Only mine's a little different, hear? It's to keep those two from getting away, killing whatever hostages they take along and then go on to kill others some place else."

Dan looked at his watch again. "You're saying you've got them now and you're going to see they don't get away, no matter what."

"I'm saying," Jesse Webb went on in that dry, cracked voice of his, "that I don't want to see anyone killed any more than you do, but we're both going to have to decide the odds when the time comes. There's no way to predict, that's all." 219

Dan Hilliard's shoulders slumped, but only slightly, and he said, "I'm not blaming you, either, Webb."

Then Jesse Webb cleared his throat. "If there's any way to

get them to come out alone, of course, on the run " But he

broke off. "You want a lift?" he asked briskly.

"I'm supposed to take a taxi."

"Oh." Then: "How about a gun?"

Dan hefted the brief case and gave his head a negative twist.

"They search you when you come in?"

This time Dan Hilliard nodded, but in the middle of the movement, while his hand reached to the doorknob, he went very still and quiet all through.

"Good luck, Mr. Hilliard," Jesse Webb said.

"I've changed my mind. About the gun."

"You want one?"—a touch of surprise there, an edge of caution.

"Yes."

"So they can have another one in there? You said they had only one now. Listen, HilHard—if there's any shooting, we're coming in."

Heavily then, a decision made: "May I have it?"

Jesse Webb reached into his coat and handed over the .38 from his shoulder holster. The gun was heavy in Dan Hilliard's tired grasp, heavy and unwieldly and unnatural. He fumbled with it a moment, but only a moment, shifting the brief case under his arm, finally breaking the gun; he shook the steel-jacketed bullets into his big palm. He crossed to the desk again.

"Are you crazy, Hilliard?" Jesse Webb demanded.

"Possibly. Only a crazy man'd go into that house with an empty gun, wouldn't he? Griffin doesn't think I'm crazy, deputy. That's a very, very long shot, but I don't have any short ones in sight. Do you?"

Jesse Webb shook his head, and as Dan Hilliard crossed to the door again, the deputy said, "One more thing." It was too late then to stop, but a sense of fairness drove him on an)'way:

"There's one more card I haven't mentioned. It's face down but this is it. A young fellow named Wright. Charles K. Wright "

"Yes?"

"I can't be sure. I don't know. But there's a strong chance that he's hiding near your house somewhere."

"Good God," Dan Hilliard breathed, stunned, surprised too that anything was capable of adding to the solid weight of shock and anguish and fear in him now.

"As I say, I don't know. I just thought maybe you ought to have the whole picture."

"Thanks, Deputy," Dan Hilliard said, turning to the door, with all the weight showing in his heavy sloping shoulders and plodding gait as he disappeared.

"The poor sonofabitch," Jesse Webb muttered, but with a kind of sad and strange reverence that shone in his own tired eyes.

Under the basement stairs, Chuck Wright was trying to make his own decision. When do you go upstairs. Chuck? How long do you stick down here listening? His watch read 11: 30 now, and above his head this particular time seemed to have, for the two men, a certain importance. The disadvantage of his position, Chuck had decided, was that he could not hear all the conversation that occurred up above, even though most of it was in loud snarled whispers between the dining room and den; and it was hard for him to make any accurate judgments on the basis of what snatches he could decipher.

By 11:30, he gathered, the young-voiced man toward the front of the house—that would be Glenn Griflin—had expected to receive a telephone call from a man whom he seemed 221

careful not to name. Perhaps he named the man, but Chuck didn't hear it. At any rate, his voice was shaking now in a way that Chuck didn't like at all.

"Didn't that gal give him the dough? What's happening? Robish, what you figure's happening? Why don't he call and say it's fixed like he promised?"

"I don't know the guy," Robish replied from the den. "Wouldn't catch me paying that kind of dough for a job I could do myself. I'd a-done it for you. Griffin. Give me a gun."

That was. Chuck Wright decided then, the second time the man referred to a gun in that way. Did it mean that he didn't have one? That there was only one gun up there between the two of them?

No rushing it now. Chuck reminded himself. No mistakes now. Take it easy. You can handle them both, and easy too, if they have only one gun. But you can't be sure what would happen to Mrs. Milliard or the little boy if you tried it. So take it easy and stay where you are for a while.

But the sound of the younger man's high-pitched voice continued to work on Chuck's nerves. It reminded him of something or someone, but he couldn't remember what or whom.

If you could flush them out, both of them, from behind, while Mrs. Hilliard and the boy were still upstairs

He began to think of this, Hstening to the steady pacing in the front of the house now. Those steps were not swift; they reminded Chuck Wright, in their slow, steady rhythm, of wild animals he had seen in cages. And with the memory came the picture of those sad, bewildered but steadily ferocious eyes.

All at once then, when he heard Glenn Griffin again— "Where's Hilliard? Why ain't he back here?" —Chuck realized what the blurred vehemence of that voice recalled to him. The thought struck him with a smashing impact and he felt a renewed urgency tighten through his body. He remembered then, not a wild animal, but a man who resembled one, a certain Sergeant Thomas, one of the toughest, hardest men he had

known; he remembered Sergeant Thomas's hardened sunbaked hulk of body writhing on the jungle floor and those glassy eyes, without recognition in them, and the lifted carbine that seemed a part of the berserk man's arm. Chuck Wright remembered all this, and the report that had drifted back after Sergeant Thomas was shipped, unknowing and marble-eyed, to a stateside hospital: the sergeant's condition was improving but he had bashed in the head of a guard in the mental hospital. It was the only time Chuck Wright had witnessed the crack-up of a human being, but he recognized now in that trembling voice upstairs the same tremor, the same uncertain inward terror.

The thought left Chuck Wright a little faint, his mouth dry, his palms moist. It left him knowing, though, that he had to get upstairs, all the way up to Mrs. Hilliard and the boy. And he could wait no longer.

The basement steps were solid, and he could see clearly now. In the back hall, he heard, beyond the door leading into the den, the older man moving about. Chuck kept his gun on that door, twisting to back slowly up the rear stairway, one step at a time, not tense, his muscles responding automatically to his desire that he should be alert, ready, but not stiff with tension. In this way he moved until he felt safe to turn fully and continue up.

The upstairs portion of the Hilliard house was not familiar to him. He crept down the hall, keeping his back close to the wall. A floorboard squeaked occasionally, but he disciplined himself not to stop on this account. He came to the open door of the front bedroom, the one on the southeast corner of the house, across the hall and stairwell from the one in which he judged Mrs. Hilliard was staying with the boy.

He backed into the bedroom, recognizing it as Cindy's, having no time for the surprise to reach him. With the gun held in front of him, he used his other arm to search behind. There was silence downstairs now and that quiet took on a sinister meaning in his mind. His hand found a door, then a knob. He 223

edged the door open very slowly until he judged that he could step back and inside the closet. All the while his eyes remained on the bedroom door leading into the hall. Even when he was in the closet, concealed between the dresses with the faint perfume scent that was familiar to him, he kept his eyes and the gun on the hall door.

He had not been there, silent, listening, for more than ten minutes when he heard that frightening voice from below, this time rising and falHng in a savage sort of relief and glee and banked-down anger: "Here they come, Robish. There's a taxi stopping out front."

From the top of the Wallings' house, Jesse Webb had seen the taxi approaching from some distance. He wore again the yellow coverall and he had to keep busy, tightening the guy wires, stepping back to survey his work, returning to it. But he was conscious, with his stomach twisting, of the men deployed on the edge of the woods below, of the patrol cars down the street in both directions, of Carson across the roof surface from him, the studious young face watching him; he was aware, too, of Lieutenant Fredericks down below, eaten with that impatience of his, striding up and down the side lawn. When he spotted the taxi, Jesse glanced to make sure that the rifle was within reach on the far side of the pitch of roof. He called down the three prearranged words, and he could feel the alertness come into the others. Lieutenant Fredericks stopped walking, peered up at him. He was not scowUng now. He even smiled once and lifted his hand in a sort of salute to Jesse Webb, a gesture that said, silently but crisply, I'm with you now, son. The decision's made. Let's hope it's the right one. We're in it together. Let's get at it.