The desperate hours, a novel (27 page)

The quivering mass of animal-being crumpled in the comer before him sickened Dan Hilhard. He turned away slightly, looking out the window.

"Get out," he said softly. He felt dirty all over, as though some of the slime had wiped off on him somehow, "Get out of my house," he said, but still quietly.

Then, staring out of the window, seeing in the distance a man on a ladder against the roof of the Wallings' house, he heard the scrabbling behind him, as Glenn Griffin, whimpering, clawed his way across the bed, staggered toward the hall; Dan heard the quick drum of steps on the stairway and the opening of the front door. Dan tossed the automatic to the floor. He had almost murdered a man; he had almost become one of them.

He threw open the window. "Webb!" he shouted, and a blade seemed to turn over in his throat. "Webb! Get a doctor and ambulance, fast!"

Then he whirled about and strode swiftly toward his daughter's bedroom where Chuck Wright still lay crumpled and unconscious. Dan was bending down, kneeling in the blood, when he heard two shots outside. They seemed to come from a distance, with a whine in them.

Jesse Webb lowered the rifle.

In his mind that slender, dancerlike figure of a young man was still spinning down there on the Hilliard lawn; but he knew, of course, that the figure lay quite still now, quite lifeless. Two minutes before, he had received the report on Robish: the big man had smashed up the blue sedan in the chase and the police had pulled him from the wreckage, badly injured, but alive. Alive for a while, anyway, Jesse thought grimly. Until after the trial.

It's all over, Jesse thought then, and rubbed the back of his very tired neck. 241

But he was remembering, as he climbed slowly down the ladder, his legs aching and stiff, the way he had Hfted the rifle when he saw that figure emerge from the front door of the Hilliard house. Griffin had been running at full tilt, arms raised, hands working convulsively, the mouth shouting indistinguishable words. Had those words been a plea for mercy? Across the tops of the sun-tinted trees, Jesse Webb could not hear them. Did he remember then that other time when, after using a gun himself, Griffin had thrown it to the pavement and demanded the privilege of giving himself up? Or was Jesse Webb concentrating only on fixing the head dead center in the crossbars of the rifle sight? He had fired, feeling only the recoil of the rifle, seeing the figure stop, twist, sink to one knee on the grass, remain balanced there until the second bullet reached him. It spun him about and he wobbled upright a moment, but only a moment, and then plunged forward, arms and legs outstretched, face down in the grass.

Jesse was on the Wallings' lawn now, leaning the rifle against the ladder, feeling the heat that remained in the barrel. After violence, he had learned to expect a certain secret shame, an appalling sense of failure that amounted almost to nausea. If matters had to be settled so, someone had failed. He didn't know who, or what. But he wished there was some way to keep that feeling from creeping through him.

He made his way into the Wallings' house, hearing the siren wails in the distance, picturing the confused scene on the Hilliard lawn. He sank into a deep chair alongside the telephone table. He could already hear the soft note of relief in Kathleen's voice, even though she'd try to cover it. And he could imagine, too, the grim, curt satisfaction in Uncle Frank's voice when he phoned him later.

But Jesse Webb did not share the satisfaction. That other feeling, almost disgust, was in him, and strong. Not because he'd killed a man; he no longer looked upon Glenn Griffin as a man in that sense. The feeling was in him because life should

not be so. And then, as he picked up the phone, he was glad for the feeling. It set him apart from men like Griffin and Robish, who also killed. He still clung to a hope that someday it would not be necessary to settle matters in this manner. Until then, he had a job, and he had done one part of it in the last two days. Except for some unpleasant but necessary details, that part of the job was over. Somehow, along the way, he'd lost the idea of personal revenge. That, too, was good, wasn't it? Maybe getting over an idea like that, as Lieutenant Fredericks had suggested, made you a better cop in the end.

Jesse Webb didn't know, for sure, and when he heard Kathleen's voice, he forgot it all, completely, until he had replaced the phone two minutes later.

Everyone, including Eleanor, had insisted that Dan stay home. Cindy was at the hospital with Chuck, and there was certainly nothing more Dan could do now. He needed his rest, and his swollen jaw looked terrible. But here he was, sitting stubbornly in the white and sterile waiting room, and Eleanor was beside him, quiet, on the wicker couch. Their hands did not touch, but both were aware of the closeness, a closeness that was not new, really, but newly recognized.

Dan saw the deputy sheriff—the tall, lanky one named Webb—approaching along the silent, tile-floored corridor with a trim nurse trotting soundlessly at his elbow, trying to keep up with the long strides. Jesse Webb removed his hat then, in the waiting room, and he stood there, a trifle awkward, a little shy, with his lean head shot forward.

"Miss Standish here," he drawled, "will give you the details. The kid'll be out of here in two weeks. I reckon that's enough for me. Your daughter's in the room with him, Mr. Hilliard. 243

She just apologized to me about something. It seemed to bother her a lot, that business about earning the money to Flick. Not that Flick can do much about it, where we got him. Or that she could have done anything different, then. I guess that's all. Now will you go home?"

Dan stood up. "If the boy's conscious, I'd like to see him."

"Room 402," the nurse said, "but "

Jesse Webb touched her arm and she stopped. A little crookedly Jesse was grinning down at Dan Hilhard. "I want to say something."

"Yes?"

"Now it's gone. Well, no matter. Something about—you ever want a job, sir, just look me up." It was not what he'd intended to say. It didn't even come close, being utterly foolish and meaningless, but it was the best Jesse Webb could manage.

Dan Hilliard was smiUng, too, and his eyes made Jesse forget the lopsided shape of the face before him, with the jaw ridged and puffed along one side. The eyes were blue now, just like the daughter's, not black as he had imagined in the time he'd known Dan Hilliard. But there was a warmth in them, a knowingness, that it might take the girl a lifetime to acquire. Embarrassed then, Jesse turned to Mrs. Hilliard: she still wore the housedress, her hair was light, her face small and oval. Mrs. Hilliard's eyes were soft and they seemed to look into him, and he thought of Kathleen.

"The same to you," Dan Hilliard said, and he offered the deputy his hand. "You're steahng my thunder, though. That's my work—handing out jobs. Pretty dull, compared to yours, but " He shrugged.

"Room 402, sir," Jesse Webb said, releasing Dan Hilliard's thick-muscled hand. "Then listen. You get some sleep, hear?" He said that last a little louder, a trifle more gruffly, than he'd intended. But he grew uncomfortable under Mrs. Hilliard's eyes, wondering whether she could read his thoughts.

He watched Dan Hilliard moving down the corridor, step-

ping lightly and briskly now, his body upright and confident. And the nurse began to explain to Mrs. Hilliard, in some detail, just what had taken place in the surgery.

It's a funny thing, Jesse Webb was thinking, how you never get said what you feel or think. He rubbed the back of his neck, blinking back the sleep that threatened to catch up with him now. You never seem to say what's in you. He was thinking of a word, and even the word itself sounded odd in his mind. Magnificence. That was the word. You'd never think of applying it to Dan Hilliard, or people like Dan Hilliard and his wife. But it applied. Maybe you didn't think of it normally because the chips weren't down; but when the chips were down

He saw Dan Hilliard turn into a room far down the hall.

What Dan found in that room was a young, full-bodied man stretched out flat on a bed with a very white sheet drawn up to his blunt-looking chin, his head turned away from the door. Beyond the man, framed in the early afternoon sunlight spilling through the high windows, was a slim, red-haired girl whose shoulders were set at an angry cant.

The young man's head turned slowly as Dan entered, and the gray eyes opened wider.

Dan stepped to the bed.

"You tell him, Dad," Cindy said. "I've been trying to make him see. Wasn't he foolish, Dad? I was nearly crazy in that police station, suspecting he was up to something, thinking he might be in there, too. Tell the man. Dad, so he'll learn not to be such a reckless fool."

Her anger might have fooled Chuck Wright, although Dan doubted even that as he fought down a smile. He noticed the bright spots of color high on his daughter's cheeks.

"You were a reckless fool. Chuck," Dan said. "It came in handy."

Chuck Wright looked very pale, not much like himself at all, but some of the grayness had gone from his face. "I couldn't do anything else, I guess." His voice was weak. 245

Dan cleared his throat. "Yes," he said brusquely. "Yes, I know the feeling." He turned to the door. "Don't let her rag you, son. Make her invite you to Thanksgiving dinner. I understand you'll be out of here by then."

Dan Milliard closed the door behind him and paused a moment in the hall, struck again by the radiance that he had caught in his daughter's face. His body was tired, but his mind was not. He started down the hall. Had he said what he came all this way to say to Chuck Wright? Probably not. There were things you didn't say, that's all. But there were things you knew, without saying. And there were changes that took place in you without your ever being aware of them.

He reached his wife; she was alone now. She stood up and took his arm. "You," she said, in that same bullying way of her daughter back there, "you're going to bed now. You're going to sleep for three solid days. I mean it, Dan. I mean it, too."

They went down in the tiny elevator and then through the stone-and-marble entrance hall of the hospital.

In the sunlight that poured down on the wide steps outside, Ralph Hilliard was surrounded by three men who looked suspiciously like newspaper reporters to Dan. One carried a camera. Ralph stopped talking when he saw his parents, and he waited for them, very still, very grave, very adult for his ten years. Then he said, out of the corner of his mouth, to the three men: "Only if you tell him I said so, I'll sue you for libel."

Dan didn't inquire what his son had told the reporters. Eleanor, too, said nothing. After the picture had been taken and they were in the taxi, she turned her face to Dan Hilliard and kissed him full on the lips and held him like that, but without any desperation, for a long time. Ralph Hilhard, embarrassed, stared out the window.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Although Joseph Hayes has been writing on a full-time basis since ig4$, The Desperate Hours is his first novel. Born in Indianapolis in igi8, he spent two years in a monastery and eighteen hitchhiking through the South, and at all sorts of odd jobs, such as pushing wheel chairs at the Dallas Fair, managing a small icehouse, farm work and warehouse work. At twenty he was married to Marrijane Johnston, and together they worked their way through three more years at a Midwestern university by editing a drama magazine, typing and editing doctorate theses for correct English usage, directing amateur theatricals and radio acting. The Hayeses moved to New York in ig4i and for the next two years Mr. Hayes was employed in the editorial department of a play-publishing house — until he decided that he, too, could write plays. As soon as the first, co-authored with his wife, was published, he gave up employment promptly, and for the last ten years he has been free-lancing successfully. His work has appeared on many television screens and in the national magazines. A play. Leaf and Bough, was produced on Broadway in 1949. He now lives in Brookfeld Center, Connecticut, with Marrijane and their two sons, Gregory and Jason — with frequent jaunts in as many directions as possible. He is now at work on another novel and has completed a new play for Broadway.