I called to Ritchie. He crawled over in a hurry and I left him there to watch the woman. I went back through the grass, circled east, and stood up when I was behind the half collapsed house, the place preselected as a command post. Brint, Rice and Wheeler were behind a four-foot field-stone wall. Rice sat solidly on his heels, nibbling a grass stem. Brint sat on a derelict kitchen chair, a broken leg braced on a flat stone. He looked tired. Wheeler sat on a pile of rocks with the horn between his knees. He could watch the house through a cleft in the wall.
Larry looked at me and said, “It isn’t the way we hoped, boy.”
“It looked better for a little while,” I said. I moved over to Wheeler in a crouch, went down onto one knee, looked at him inquisitively.
“I want you here to listen to any deals,” Wheeler said. He raised the horn to his lips. “Hillyer is right here.”
“I want to hear his voice.”
Wheeler handed me the horn. “Press the trigger. Speak in a normal tone.”
“I’m here, Dwight.”
“You know we got your wife in here, buddy boy.”
I hesitated, offered the horn to Wheeler. “Go ahead,” he said.
“We know she’s in there. She’s your sister, Dwight,” I called.
“My loving sister? Sure enough? Listen to her.”
There was a woman’s yell of pain which turned my heart over like a heavy stone. And then she yelled thinly, “Come kill all these filthy—” The sound was abruptly stopped, as though somebody had clapped a hand over her mouth, or hit her again.
“A strong woman,” Rice said gently.
“Fenn!” McAran yelled. “She’s our green stamps. She’s what we trade with. But she’s not all we’ve got in here.”
Wheeler took the horn. “One thing you’ve got is no surprises for us. We know you’ve got the Perkins girl in there, and how you picked her up and why. We know you killed Kermer, and how you got through the roadblock, and we know one of you strangled Kelly, and why. We know your time has run out.”
“Five minutes!” Miller yelled. “Five minutes you’ve got to clear the way for us. In five minutes either you tell us it’s clear, or we throw an ear off this cop’s wife out into the yard. One minute later we throw out the other ear. And then we start on the fingers. And if you throw any tear gas in here, or try anything cute, I swear I’ll slit the throat of both of them. We got nothing to lose by it. Nothing at all.”
I put my face in my hands and bit down hard on my lip.
“So what if we play it your way?” Wheeler asked.
“We’ll come out with the woman. We’ll leave the girl here. She’s sick. When we’re in the clear, we’ll let the woman go.”
“We’ll need more than five minutes to alert our roadblocks to let you through, Miller,” Wheeler called.
“How much time?”
“How about twelve minutes? It’s now twelve minutes to eight.”
There was a silence while they apparently held a conference. “When we come out,” Miller yelled in his increasingly hoarse voice, “we’ll have a gun against the woman’s spine. We’ll go in the wagon, and we want that Plymouth shoved out of the way, and the log out of the way.”
“We’ve got no radio setup, Miller. I’m going to have to send a man down there on foot to the first block we’ve got set up, right where that Plymouth is parked.”
“So sent him! Get it all set. Let us know.”
Wheeler put the horn down and sighed and turned to one of his men and said, “Get Danielson here on the double.” The man hurried away. Wheeler took out a handkerchief and mopped his face. “We can’t let them move out. I guess you know that well enough, Hillyer. They should know it too. Those people never do. We’ll have to play along, hope for the chance.”
“But how will you—”
“Easy, son,” Larry said. “Ride with it.”
Danielson appeared, slightly winded. He was a smallish, tidy, sandy man with huge hands and wrists. He held, with an obvious tenderness, an old ’03 Springfield with a bulky Zeiss scope mounted on it.
“You heard it all, Willy?” Wheeler asked.
“Yes sir, I did, Sheriff.”
“You’ll get one damn chance when they come out with the woman. You set for it?”
Danielson frowned in a troubled way. “Honest to God, I don’t know. I was careful, but maybe I thumped it enough coming through the woods, that first mile or so, to be off. I got to have a chance to test fire one time anyhow, Sheriff. She could be off too much.”
“You fire it, they aren’t going to like that,” Wheeler said.
“Unless,” Larry said, “they knew it for a signal.”
Wheeler snapped his fingers and picked the horn up. “Miller, I’m sending a man on down to lift that roadblock, and he’s going to signal back the all clear with two spaced shots. We’ll give the same answer to show we heard it, so don’t get nervous.”
“Just you don’t send them shots this way,” Miller yelled.
Wheeler borrowed one of Rice’s troopers and sent him off on the run, circling wide but in plain sight of the house, with orders to go to the entrance to the logging road and fire the two shots.
“What’ll the distance be, Sheriff?” Danielson asked.
D. D. Wheeler scowled. “Shortest way to the cars is out the back door, so we’ll gamble on that. Agree, Larry? Paul?” Rice and Larry Brint nodded. “So they’ll have to go through that narrow place into the shed single file. Take a look through here, Willy. See the place?”
“I can go around the other side of this here barn for a good angle, Sheriff. Hundred feet. No fuss, if this damn girl is dead on.” He looked around. “That shed back there is close enough.” He went into the prone position, bracing his left arm in the leather sling, aiming through the scope at the tilted side of the shed. “Couple little knot holes show up good.”
“Take two slow ones after we hear that trooper sound off, Willy.”
“Sure, Sheriff.”
I moved closer to Danielson. “What power is that?”
“Six.”
“A lot to hand hold.”
“From prone it’s like in concrete. I’m steady. I got hand loads in here, with the lead checked on a jeweler scale and the powder right to the grain.”
I wanted to talk. I wanted to keep saying things so I wouldn’t have to think. But I had no more words.
Suddenly we heard the first shot, a distant thwack which seemed to initiate echoes louder than the first sound. As the echoes began to die we heard the second one. “Okay, Willy,” Sheriff Wheeler said softly.
I saw him take the breath and let some of it out. The big hand squeezed tenderly. The crack of the rifle merged with the smack of lead against dry wood. He shifted slightly, fired again. He turned and grinned at Wheeler. “Dead on, sir. Punched both them little knots clean on through, about the size of dimes.”
“Go for the gun, Willy.”
Danielson looked disappointed. “I was figuring a spine shot would—”
“And you’d drop him every time. We know that, Willy, but one time out of ten maybe his finger gives a little twitch, and we can’t take that chance.”
“It could ricochet into her, Sheriff.”
“I like that chance better. She can be hurt but not dead.”
“He was on the roof with a carbine. What if that’s what he’s got on her?”
Wheeler thought for a moment. “Then you take the base of the skull, Willy, and you damn well place it right, and you blow those nerves to hell before any message gets down to that trigger finger.”
“He’ll never hear my girl speak to him.”
“What’s the big fat delay out there?” Miller yelled. “You working up to something cute?”
Wheeler lifted the horn. “We want your promise to release Mrs. Hillyer unharmed, Miller, or there’s no point in our co-operating with you.”
“When we’re in the clear, we’ll let her go.”
“Right out a car door at seventy
miles an hour,” Rice murmured.
“All you men hear this!” the amplified voice brayed. “Those men are coming out with the woman. We’re letting them through. It’s eight o’clock, Miller. You’re free to leave any time. But you’ll be picked up, sooner or later.”
Danielson had drifted away. I moved quickly, hoping to get back to the good place by the ruined wagon before they came out. I heard Larry call me, but I kept moving.
I reached my previous spot. I could see a little way into the kitchen. The Frankel woman was still there, glaring at me. I saw movement inside the kitchen. And then they forced Meg through the door into the sunlight. Her coppery hair was tousled. There was a purple bruise on her left cheek. Her face was flushed, set, and angry. They came out behind her, closely grouped, the four of them, their heads moving back and forth almost in unison as they looked vainly for any sign of life. To my relief, Miller was off a little to one side, the carbine in both hands, aimed almost straight up. Deitwaller was the man directly behind her, lean, hunched, his chin almost on her shoulder. McAran was behind Deitwaller.
I saw that Deitwaller had hold of her wrist.
“And nothing cute from you either, Miz Meg,” Miller said. “Herm can snap your wrist and it won’t change a thing.”
“I’m scared to death,” she snapped.
They moved down into the yard in the same tight formation. Somebody accidentally kicked Angie’s toothbrush off the edge of the stoop into the dirt. Kostinak carried a big blue forty-five caliber automatic pistol, and moved it aimlessly back and forth, so that I felt as if I looked straight into the barrel each time it swept by. McAran carried a short-barreled revolver. It looked like a standard police weapon. He held it aimed at the sky, his right elbow sharply bent. His face was quite blank. He kept licking his lips and seemed to be trying to walk on tiptoe.
Miller paused and yelled, “We’re taking the station wagon. We got to have time to unload some stuff off it. Okay?”
“Okay,” the big voice said.
“Nobody is going to get careless,” McAran yelled, but I heard a slight tremor in his voice.
Wheeler did not answer. They had moved far enough to my left so that I could see the gun in Deitwaller’s lean gray hand. It was another automatic, smaller than Kostinak’s. He held it firmly against the base of her spine. Her favorite blouse was rumpled, and her paler blue skirt looked soiled.
As they neared the shed they began to move a little faster, too fast, I was certain, for Willy Danielson to put that single slug where he wanted it. But as they reached the narrow entrance, Kostinak had moved up parallel to Meg, and they paused in momentary confusion. Kostinak stepped into the shed. I was holding my breath. Suddenly there was the flat familiar bark of the Springfield, and a ricochet song. Herman Deitwaller went into a crazy, stomping dance, turning around and around, whinnying thinly, holding the unbearable agony of his right hand tightly against his belly. The trooper in the shed came quickly around the back end of the station wagon and blew Kostinak’s head into a sickening shapeless paste. Meg was suddenly running directly away from the house and shed, running out toward the tall grass, lifting her knees into the big strides, her hair flying. She could not know it, but she ran directly toward the guns of the men who could have cut the others down immediately. I saw Miller wheel and swing the carbine toward her. I was standing without any memory of getting to my feet. The heavy revolver bucked three times in my hand, taking him squarely in the chest each time, so that it rammed him back against the shed, his arms swinging up, throwing the carbine into the air. He rebounded from the shed, took a single drunken step and sprawled forward, hitting on his shoulder, tumbling over onto his back. Deitwaller fumbled for the carbine with his left hand, his face squinched with pain, but the trooper who had been in the shed had stepped over what had been Kostinak, and moved swiftly, and clubbed Deitwaller across the back of the neck, stepping on the carbine as he did so.
I knew somebody was running, running back toward me. I wanted to look at him. I knew it was McAran. But I couldn’t take my eyes from my wife. She seemed to be running with an unbearable slowness. I glanced at McAran just as he took the quick shot at her, and out of the corner of my eye I saw the long and horrid limpness of the way she fell, and as I swung the muzzle of the revolver toward McAran, something hit me high on the left shoulder, a quick, sharp, stinging blow as though I had been hit by a tack hammer. It turned me off balance, and seemed to daze me for a moment, and he went by me, fifteen feet away, running hard, weaving in an illusive way. People were yelling my name. It made no sense. I found out later they wanted me to drop so they could knock him down. But I went running after him. They were still yelling at me. I was still in the way. I ran in a straight line. He weaved and dodged. We made about the same speed. A few were at a good angle to try for him. They missed.
He ran beyond the house, and he swerved and headed for a barn. The big door had been off the rails for a long time. It lay rotting on the ground. He ran into the gloom, and I ran after him without breaking my stride. There were holes in the floor. There was a ghost smell of hay, of animals. He he ran by empty stalls, through patches of light from the holes in the roof, he tripped, caught his balance, turned, came up hard against the far wall, faced me as I, too, came to a stop fifteen feet from him, both breathing hard, both aiming hand guns at each other as in some ridiculous western standoff.
“Had to get cute,” he gasped.
“I’m going to kill you. I have to tell you first, so you’ll know.” I heard voices outside, heard footsteps inside the barn, coming toward us.
He looked beyond me. Suddenly I saw that familiar rocky grin. He flipped his gun aside. It thumped and skidded across the old worn planking. He put up his hands. “What could I do? Those guys moved in on me. They took over. They borrowed my car. What could I do? I guess you’ll try me for something, but I don’t know as it’ll be something real important.”
“You shot her.”
“A lot of people were shooting, Fenn. A lot of people. Why should I shoot my loving sister? Anyhow, even if you thought so, you wouldn’t shoot me. You’re a cop, fella. I got my hands up. You follow the rules. Take me in.”
The footsteps had stopped not far behind me. I looked at McAran, my brother-in-law. I knew he read it on my face. His mouth and eyes went wide.
“No!” he said. “Hey! Fenn!”
The gun nudged back against the heel of my hand and the barrel kicked up as it always does. The hole appeared in his right cheek, close to the nostril. He took a step back. His eyes were out of focus. He sat down with a surprising care, with but the smallest of thumps, made a shallow coughing sound, bowed his head down toward his knees, then spilled over easily onto his left side, flattening against the floor, making a last sound that was like somebody trying not to cough in church.
“Get back!” Larry Brint yelled. “Get back, all of you!” I turned. I saw them in the wide doorway, in silhouette against the daylight. They moved out of the way, and the doorway was empty. I don’t know how he had moved so fast, or who he had bluffed out of his way.
He trudged forward, holding the Magnum he treasures. “Too bad you missed him that time, boy,” he said. He put the revolver McAran had dropped back in the slack hand, aimed it toward the wall, fired it twice. He straightened up, put his heel against the body and shoved it over onto its back.
“Then he missed you.”
He took aim. The Magnum made it’s heavy-throated, authoritative bark, and he put one slug into the facial hole where mine had entered. He put a second into the belly. Each one bounced the body off the floor an inch or so, and raised small clouds of ancient dust.
“But then I got him, Lieutenant,” he said. He came toward me and looked at me in a puzzled way. He reached toward my shoulder and pulled his hand back and nodded. “He hit you one time. That’s good.” He gave me a slightly vacant smile, and then he made a giggling sound, totally out of character for him.
“He had his hands up, Larry, and I
—”
“No, he didn’t. He didn’t give up. I killed him. She wouldn’t want to know you killed him, boy, no matter how it was done. She raised him. She’d think about that. It’s better she’d know I did it.”
“But he shot her, Larry.”
“If she’s dead too, son, then it doesn’t matter, does it? But we don’t know that for sure.”
“But you saw me do it. He’d thrown his gun away—”
“Shut up, Lieutenant. You beat me by a tenth of a second.”
They came in and they looked silently at the dead animal on the floor, a splendid animal, muscled like the dreams of boyhood. I noticed the revolver in my hand when I turned away. I lowered the hammer, holstered it, clicked the flap down, hitched it back out of the way and walked slowly to the big doorway and blinked out at the sun. There was traffic on the road. Keepsafe was busier than it had been in years, perhaps busier than it had ever been before.
I walked slowly across the field toward the dooryard of the house. I had never felt so tired. I saw Rice with his walkie-talkie trooper—the communications link he’d told Miller he didn’t have—and I knew he’d cleared the logging road and called the standby ambulance in. I saw it on the road, following a state car, heading for the house, and I lengthened my stride.
She was where she had fallen, nested in the grass, a blanket over her. Her face was slack and bloodless, and her lips looked blue. I knelt beside her. Somebody behind me said, “It’s a head wound. She’s still breathing.”
There was an ugly tear in her right cheek, bleeding slowly. I stood up as they moved her with professional care. A young man in a white jacket appeared in front of me and said, accusingly, “You’re hurt.”
I looked stupidly at my left shoulder, at the oily gleam of the soaked fabric. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I guess so.”
D.D. Wheeler’s face appeared. It materialized the way faces do when you are very sick or very drunk. He looked angry. “Exposed yourself! You and the damn fool with the smashed knee. I didn’t want anybody hurt in this thing!”
Somebody turned me away from him and guided me, holding my right arm, leading me toward a car. I wanted to stretch out somewhere and go to sleep. I wanted to make a nest in the spring grass, and sleep the summer through. I wanted to be so sound asleep, so deeply asleep, there would be no dreams at all.
One Monday We Killed Them All Page 21