“Just like that?” A cruel grin lit his face.
“Just like that.”
“You’ll kill ’em all? You get all three, that’d give me some breathin’ space.”
“I’ll kill them all.” Guinness took the Tootsie Roll from his pocket and held it out to Healy, who tore off the first two sections. Sure enough, they were going to do a deal; you didn’t eat a man’s Tootsie Roll if you weren’t ready to buy his deal. “I’ll even throw in a bonus and let you keep Duelle—why the hell should I care how many secrets he pulls out of the files for you?”
Healy’s eyebrows shot up into his hair.
“He smells that bad?”
“He smells that bad.” Guinness took his feet down and leaned forward confidently, touching the side of his nose with a thumb. “You can catch the aroma from the next room.”
But that was the bad news. He threw himself back into the chair, braced his elbows on the armrests, and placed the tips of his fingers together. His face was expressionless, as if the topic under discussion were of no importance to him.
“But he’ll hold for a while—long enough to keep your employer at bay for the moment, and we’ll work something out about him when I’ve taken care of the other matter. Have Duelle with my compliments. My interest in this is purely personal. I’m no patriot—all I want is the kid back.”
“And you can do it?” Healy moved over and sat down behind his desk, his hands flat on the blotter, still wanting to be convinced.
“I can do it.”
“’At boy,” he went on, almost as if Guinness had never spoken, almost as if to himself, “’at boy, his mother frets over him somethin’ awful. It’d be th’ death o’ her if—”
Guinness broke in sharply. “Will you shut up and relax? I can do it. You just tell me where you’ve stashed the Duelle girl, and your son and heir will be safe at home in time for ‘Charlie’s Angels.’ Just tell me what I have to know.”
So Healy had told him. Everything. About the CB radio they had in their trailer, and how they’d patch through the call to Duelle at six o’clock. The men, how they were armed. The whole package. Now all Guinness had to do was prove he was the hard nose he claimed to be, and pry loose one small girl while taking care of the three cowboys who were guarding her. Termination with extreme prejudice—whatever you called it, it was easier said than done.
The ground cover was all soft clay and the terrain hilly; you couldn’t ask for anything more. If they expected trouble, which wouldn’t be very likely, they would expect it from the direction of the road—a couple of squad cars of police, for instance. The great thing was to make one’s approach obliquely, from behind and from the north. They knew that fork in the road was there as well as he did, so he had to circle around until he wouldn’t seem to come from anywhere.
The problem being, of course, that that sort of thing took time.
He checked his watch again: 4:45, even a little later. In less than an hour and fifteen minutes, Healy would radio the trailer and then put in his call to Duelle. If he got through, if anybody answered, he would know the thing was a bust, that Guinness was dead, that his kid would be, that his own time was limited—it wouldn’t take a genius to figure out how the guy they had killed after he’d stumbled over a fallen log had gotten his information—and he would take appropriate action. But that wouldn’t help Rocky any.
One hour and fifteen minutes. Even less.
There was a little wind. Not much, just a little. Just enough to provide a nice covering noise—if it weren’t blowing from the wrong direction, from the lake, from behind him. Did sound carryon the wind? How the hell should he know? He wasn’t exactly Daniel Boone.
It was with a certain nostalgia that he remembered what seemed to him the enormous technical advantages of working this kind of a game in the city. The narrow alleys, the second story window ledges that make such perfect gun rests that, for short range on a still day, you can even use a pistol. An apartment on the top floor, now there was something you could come at from about thirty different directions. If they’d been holding Rocky in some dingy little cold water walk up, like self respecting kidnappers, he’d have had her sprung an hour ago, and the two of them would be sitting in a 31 Flavors somewhere, eating ice cream sundaes and swapping lies about how horrible it had all been.
But no, it had to be the boondocks. It had to be trees and flowers and pine needles and red mud.
At any rate, it was better to think about how he was ruining his shoes than about how his daughter might be faring at that moment.
But he did think about his daughter, almost constantly.
People who can kill children can do almost anything. They might be amusing themselves in all kinds of unspeakable ways while they waited for the word that they were free to blow her brains out. The world was filled with animals.
Yeah. He laughed soundlessly, remembering Healy’s kid, pondering what a lovable fellow that made Raymond M. Guinness. Because if anything happened to Rocky, and if by some dreadful freak he should live to do it, then the Healy boy was cold meat. If he died, Firbank would have to make up his own mind—there was no saying how strong that stomach was—but he hadn’t been kidding when he’d told the father what he was prepared to do. You don’t joke about a thing like that, not if you have any plans for getting away with it; people know when you’re bluffing.
So maybe that made him a monster—if so, that was okay with him. Being a monster was nothing new, and it wasn’t going to be Jack Armstrong, the All American Boy who would save his daughter’s neck, provided that it could be saved. For that kind of work you needed a monster.
He was almost down to the lake’s edge before he started working his way north, crossing the left fork perhaps half a mile below where the trailer was supposed to be located, and staying well within the shadow of the trees as he made the slow circle back. The road was to his left now, and he kept far enough away that he really couldn’t see it except as a kind of hiatus in the gradual rising swell of the land.
It was 5:25 before he saw the trailer.
It wasn’t even a trailer, really, but one of those self contained gizmos with a shower stall and a stove and sleeping accommodations for half a dozen people, a live in bus of the kind that, he believed, were referred to as recreational vehicles, RVs.
A very tony setup, really. Wonderfully adapted to the needs of the modern kidnapper. He could stay in touch with his CB radio, and he could move his victim around from place to place without the least suspicion. Hell, in places like this, when the weather was warm, these rolling motel rooms were probably as common as sand fleas.
They had positioned their guard right where you would have expected them to, about a hundred yards up and twenty feet off the road. He was sitting with his back against the base of a pine tree, with a newspaper under his butt, or what from this distance looked like a newspaper, to keep out the ground dampness. He was smoking a cigarette and seemed to be looking up at some object, a bird perhaps, in a tree some distance in front of him. Perhaps he was a nature lover. Perhaps he was just bored.
He didn’t give any evidence of being armed, but from the back that only meant he wasn’t carrying a rifle—a rifle might arouse suspicion, and probably a forest ranger or somebody might be expected to put in an appearance once in a while. There was probably a pistol in the pocket of the tan windbreaker he had on; in this heat, where the humidity from the lake was almost visible, like fog, there couldn’t be much other reason for wearing a jacket.
It was a tricky thing. If anybody happened to look out the camper window, and took the trouble to strain a little, our friend under the tree was perfectly visible—no doubt that was the whole idea. So, even after Guinness had killed him, he would have to stay right where he was; and he would have to die in full view, so there couldn’t be any noise to attract anyone’s attention.
The other two didn’t seem to be anywhere in sight, and it didn’t seem reasonable to think they’d go wandering very far afield,
so presumably they were both inside the camper. Maybe they were playing gin rummy; in the movies the bad guys always played gin rummy while waiting around with the helpless victim. Guinness hoped it was a good close Hollywood game to 250 points, and that it would keep them occupied.
He stayed within the tree line for as long as he could.
Once past the camper, he could see there was no one in the cab, which was a good thing. If he was going to come up behind the guard, he would have to put himself right out in front, at least for twenty or thirty yards, between the guard and the camper, and the cover there was pretty thin. It made you feel naked.
When the time came, Guinness put the Colt a little further back in his waistband—the thing made him feel a trifle lopsided somehow—and carefully made his way in until he was about twenty-five yards directly behind his man.
It was slow going. Twenty yards, fifteen—one step at a time, lifting first the heel, then the sole, then stepping down again with the sole first. Then ten yards, then twenty feet.
He stopped dead when the man pitched his cigarette away and immediately began lighting another. He was close enough to hear the little steel wheel rasping against the flint. It seemed a miracle the poor clod hadn’t heard him yet.
Fifteen feet, then ten. Finally he was directly behind him, and still the man hadn’t heard him. How could he help but hear him?—Guinness’s heart was pounding like a hammer.
At the very last, he dropped down on his knees directly behind the tree and reached around to the front before grabbing his own wrist from the other side and pulling sharply towards himself.
It was over very quickly. Aside from a few choked, clicking noises, the guy never made a sound. His feet kicked out wildly in front of him and he tried to pull Guinness’s forearm away from his throat, tried desperately hard for a few seconds, but with the tree between them, shielding Guinness and providing him with a brace, there never was any chance.
They said that with that kind of straight arm stranglehold, it only took about forty or fifty seconds to kill a man—he’d be out cold after fifteen or so, but he should be stone cold dead inside of a minute. Guinness gave it a minute and a half, just for safety.
When the thing was done, he stepped around to the front for a look at the man’s face. It wasn’t very pretty, but you had to look. If you couldn’t look at them afterward, you didn’t have any business killing them in the first place.
The mouth was wide open, as if he were screaming, and the eyes almost popping out of their sockets. There was a little trickle of blood coming down from the left ear and running into the end of a rather shaggy, dark brown moustache.
Was it an old face? Had he been young? It was impossible to say. The skin was darkish and rather weathered looking, but that might simply have resulted from the way he died.
While Guinness watched, the body slid over and collapsed on its right side.
Well, that would never do. Guinness hunted around until he found a nice, stout branch and broke off one end, making a stick about two feet in length. Jammed up under the man’s armpit, like a short crutch, it made a perfect support. From the rear, at least, he would look just fine.
There was an ugly little Walther P-38K in the pocket of his windbreaker. It was a 9 mm, and the barrel was so short you probably couldn’t have hit something across the room with it—you wondered sometimes about what these clowns thought handguns were for—but Guinness decided he would hang onto it anyway. He pulled back the slide to make sure there was a cartridge in the chamber, and then dropped it in his jacket pocket.
By the time he was in position, hidden behind a low rock on the other side of the road from the camper, about forty feet away and just about equidistant from both the front and rear doors, it was 5:40.
From here on it was simply a question of whether or not someone would come outside. It might not be absolutely necessary; Guinness supposed he could wait until they brought Rocky outside to kill her—that wasn’t the sort of work you wanted to do in an enclosed space, not if you had any thought of ever using the premises again. He could nail one of them, and probably the other one as well, before they were five feet from the door. It would be messy, since you couldn’t really take the kind of time you needed for precisely targeted shooting, at least not with the second man, and the chances were pretty good that Rocky might pick up a slug or two. But people really didn’t die very often from random gunshot wounds, and anyway, her odds would be better than if he did nothing. At least he would be using the .45-with the low muzzle velocity it had a lot of shocking power, and when somebody got knocked down they stayed down. You didn’t necessarily have to kill people in order to be sure they were out of play.
But the idea of it. . . Oh, God, the idea of putting a bullet nearly half an inch wide into that small body; it sent a thrill of horror through him from one end to the other, like a tiny liquid shot of electricity. If it came to that, if it did come to it, he wasn’t at all sure he would be able to pull the trigger.
No, there had to be some other way, some way to pare down the odds. He had to be sure that when the moment came, and if his daughter should happen to be in the line of fire, there would only be one other person standing there with her.
So. Somebody had to be persuaded of the wisdom of stepping outside for a breath of fresh air.
Once, in another incarnation, during the period of seven years he had spent in California trying to convince himself he was a professor of English literature, he and his second wife, the late Louise Harrison Guinness, had owned a small house on the San Francisco Peninsula, where they had somehow contrived to be reasonably happy until the day when the present had collided with the past. A sad story, that—but beside the point.
The point now was that the small house had had a small backyard, near one of the rear corners of which stood a telephone pole, the focus for a tangle of wires that went in every conceivable direction. And in the telephone pole—or somewhere nearby, since he was almost always to be seen either clinging to the pole or balancing precariously on one or another of the wires—there lived a squirrel.
Louise, who was the soft hearted type and liked any kind of animal, had taken rather a fancy to this squirrel and used to buy chopped walnuts by the bagful to leave around in the backyard, where it could eat them without being molested by dogs. From his study window, if he happened to be sitting at his desk, Guinness could watch the squirrel, which wasn’t much bigger than a fair sized mouse, tearing up the back lawn as it buried the nuts.
One day, Louise came into his study while the squirrel was out there.
She stood by the window for a while, watching, and then suddenly she began tapping on the glass with the tip of her middle finger. You wouldn’t have thought that the squirrel would even have been able to hear it, but he was. He stood up on his hind legs, stock still, and watched her as she watched him, perhaps not entirely sure where the sound had come from. Then Louise tapped on the glass again, and the squirrel saw what it was and went back to tearing up the lawn.
Curiosity, it was the fatal weakness of all creation. Guinness felt around on the ground where he lay for a suitable sized stone, but they were all too large. Finally he took the P-38K from his pocket, prized loose the clip, and took out two cartridges. God knew they weren’t likely to be good for anything else.
It’s hard to throw anything any distance when you’re lying on your belly, but he could hardly stand up. Using the other hand to lift his chest a little way clear of the muddy clay, he threw both cartridges as hard as he could manage.
One of them fell short, but the other landed very solidly against the camper’s rear door. That would have to do; he knew he’d never be able to hit it twice.
Thirty seconds. That was how long it took before the door opened—they must have spent the time arguing about who would go outside for a look. The man who stepped down to the ground already had his gun out, a Smith & Wesson .41 magnum from the look of it, a mean weapon; but he didn’t give the impression of being
seriously worried. The gun was just for form’s sake; he might have been going out to pick up his mail.
He was an intensely ordinary looking man, about thirty with darkish blond hair and the Fu Manchu moustache without which no crook in the state of South Carolina seemed to feel he was decently dressed. He had on jeans and a jeans jacket, and the flowered shirt underneath was unbuttoned down to his breastbone. These bucolic gangsters, they sure all yearned to look the part.
Guinness wanted him to get a little away from the camper—he didn’t know where inside Rocky was located, and a .45 slug would tear through that tin siding like it was tissue paper. So he waited. Jeans Jacket seemed to be having a little difficulty about what he should be searching for; his eyes played over the area, and he looked right at Guinness without, apparently, seeing him.
Finally he got the idea to survey the ground, and it wasn’t very long before he found the cartridge, which had bounced off to one side, well away. He reached over to pick it up, and Guinness waited.
And he stood there looking at it, turning it over in his hand, and before he could remember that objects like 9 mm cartridges didn’t generally come flying at your camper door of their own volition, Guinness lined up the .45, took a deep breath, let the air out a little way, held it, and fired.
He didn’t seem to hear the noise; he only saw the man’s head come apart, in uneven pieces, like a jack-o-lantern pushed off a window ledge.
23
The next move was obvious. Guinness shot out the two tires on the side facing him and then emptied his last three rounds into the engine compartment; it seemed reasonable to assume that one of them would do enough damage to keep anybody from going anywhere.
So the extra clip would come in handy after all. He slipped it into place and pulled back the slide and settled down to wait.
The man inside had only two ways he could come out, and, since they were both on the same side, they would both put him right in harm’s way. He would have no notion of how many armed hostiles might be hidden in the rocks outside, he would know that all somebody had to do was to put a slug in the gas tank to send the camper up like a bonfire, and he would know that keeping his hostage alive, perhaps effecting some kind of a trade, was his one chance.
Old Acquaintance (Ray Guinness novels Book 2) Page 27