Death Benefits: A Novel

by Thomas Perry

  “They don’t have the bridge blocked,” said Mary.

  “Looks a bit too inviting, doesn’t it?” said Stillman. “If we wanted to drive out, that would be the way. If we wanted to go on foot, we’d still have to cross the river.”

  They watched for several minutes, but the sight did not change. The lights of the Old Mill Restaurant looked bright and warm and welcoming from up here.

  Walker moved to the north side, where he could look down below the front of the church onto Main Street. The row of people had reached Oak Street now, and he could sight along the wavering line as it passed. To his right, all the houses glowed with light. Every window was illuminated, every outdoor flood was shining down to cast a circle of white on an area of pavement or turn a lawn day-green.

  The lights on the streets to his left began to go on, one by one. “What I’m wondering is what happens when they get to the city limits and haven’t found us,” Walker said.

  “We’ll see,” said Stillman. “I’m hoping they’ll figure we got out on foot, and send everybody home to bed.” He had not moved from the west side. His eyes were still on the river.

  “Could that happen?” asked Walker.

  “I don’t know why not. We reported seeing two murder suspects in town, and the police made a huge effort to organize a manhunt. If we’ve got a complaint, it’s our word against everybody else’s. Our interpretation of events would sound a bit eccentric, to say the least.”

  Stillman suddenly bobbed up on his toes to peer out above a higher louver, then settled for a lower one. “Come here,” he said. The others moved in beside him to look to the west. The cars that had been prowling the streets a block in advance of the line of citizens had reached Washington Avenue. The cars all turned onto Washington, and now they were pulling over to park by the curb.

  In the riverbed, there seemed to be sudden activity. Flashlights were going on at intervals of fifty feet all along the river, as though a signal was being passed. After a moment, men began to step up the banks to join the ones getting out of cars on Washington.

  “That answers my question,” said Stillman. “That’s what the beaters were trying to herd us into. They wanted us to try to cross the river.”

  The line of townspeople reached the last row of houses on the near side of Washington Street. The lights in the windows went on. Porch lights threw a glow over the stream of people moving through the yards between the houses and spilling in from Main Street, Constitution, Coulter, Federal, and New Hampshire. They all came together to mill about in Washington Street and along the banks of the river. The long line had now dissolved, and the people looked like the crowd at a carnival.

  A police car turned its flashing red and blue lights on and drove slowly along Washington. Walker could hear a faint, echoing amplified voice from a bullhorn, but he could not pick up a word. Men and women who had been in small knots talking turned and stepped aside to let the patrol car pass. Others stepped back onto the sidewalks on either side of the street. The car’s progress was extremely slow, but at last it emerged from the crowd and reached Main. It turned to head away from the river.

  Behind the police car, the crowd closed, already beginning to move after it. In a moment, the fast walkers were turning to follow the police car up Main. They streamed up from the direction of the river, some on the sidewalks, others in the middle of Main Street. They walked in pairs or small groups, talking as they went.

  Walker put his arm around Mary and watched the people coming up the street. He waited, hoping that some of them would go into houses on Washington and turn off the lights. He held his breath as the central mass of people moved beyond Adams, Jefferson, Franklin. The compact crowd was now stretched out into a long stream, but Walker could tell that nobody was going home.

  Mary said quietly, “Not so tight,” and Walker realized that his arm had become tense. He pulled it away from her.

  Far below them, there was the creak of a heavy door opening, and then voices. At first Walker tried to convince himself that the sounds were coming from Main Street, but then there was an unmistakable echo, the voices bouncing off the bare walls of an enclosed space. The people were gathering in the church.

  40

  Without having made a decision or spoken a word, they found themselves crouching, listening as the townspeople began to crowd into the church below them. The three were absolutely still, barely breathing, but huddled close as though that provided some measure of safety. After a long time, Walker slowly, cautiously, raised himself a bit and peered out onto Main Street, then turned and looked to the west. He eased himself back down with Stillman and Mary.

  “The streets are empty,” he whispered. “There are just the four police cars on the other side of the river by the restaurant, and a couple more cruising up and down. Everybody seems to be here.”

  Stillman said, “It feels to me as though it might be time to make a move.”

  Mary’s eyes widened. “You mean go down there?”

  “I don’t see how that does us any good,” said Walker.

  Stillman said, “Remember when we were in Scully’s house? I took his keys.” He took them out of his pocket and held them up where they caught a bit of the filtered glow from the sky. “There’s a car key.” He looked at them thoughtfully. “None of the rest of them drove to Florida. They flew down, and rented cars to come back. No reason to think he and Bowles did any different.”

  Mary said, “Wait. Didn’t you say the cops were going to put men in Scully’s house, just like they did in Bowles’s house?”

  Stillman said, “Sure, but I don’t know any reason to believe what the cops told us, do you?”

  Walker said, “We were up here watching all afternoon, and I tried to see if I could spot policemen at Scully’s house, but I couldn’t.”

  Stillman said, “They’ve just walked through and turned on every light bulb in town, including the ones at Scully’s. There may have been cops there, and there may still be. But our chances of seeing them with the lights on are pretty fair, and we haven’t. The whole town seems to be in the church under our feet right now, so if we could get past them, we’d have a chance.”

  “If they went to bed, we’d have a better chance,” Mary said skeptically.

  Stillman said, “Any minute now, the decision could get made for us.” He paused. “So what’s it going to be?”

  “I don’t think we’ll get a better chance at a car,” said Walker.

  Mary took a deep breath, but she didn’t let it out. “Okay,” she said. The breath still seemed trapped in her chest.

  Walker looked out the four panels again. He picked out Scully’s house. “I still don’t see anybody at Scully’s. There’s nobody on Birch Street at all.”

  Stillman said, “We’d better get started.” He crawled to the opening that led down into the darker second level. “One last thing. These people aren’t just going to let us out of town. If they get their hands on us, they’ll kill us.”

  Mary said, “Do you think you’re making it easier to climb down there?”

  “I’m just telling you that we have to think differently tonight,” said Stillman. “If somebody points a gun at you, putting your hands in the air won’t keep him from pulling the trigger.”

  “I figured that out a while ago,” she said.

  Stillman descended until he was lost in the gloom. Walker listened, but he heard no footfall. Then Mary sat on the floor, put her legs into the opening, found an unseen rung of the ladder with her foot, and began to descend too. Walker took one final look out between the louvers in the belfry, but he could see nothing that had changed. He moved to the ladder.

  When Walker reached the lower level, he eased his foot down slowly to avoid making a noise. He had become so used to the almost imperceptible sounds of the others’ breathing and movements, the heights and shapes of their bodies, that he had developed a sensitivity to where they were in the dark. He lowered himself to his knees and felt for the hatch cover. Still
man knelt beside him as he lifted the hatch a quarter inch and peered down at the cloak room below.

  The light seemed impossibly, frighteningly bright in the first seconds, but after a moment his pupils had contracted enough to let him judge that the cloak room was dimmer than the foyer. The light that had seemed so bright was coming from the hanging fixture there. He could see that the hardwood floor below him was bare. He moved to the left, lifted the hatch cover a bit more, lay on his belly, and looked again. He could not see the whole foyer from this height, but the part that he could see was clear.

  He lifted the cover off and began to descend into the cloak room. He could hear somebody speaking in the church. It was a man’s voice. Walker kept going, trying to keep his footsteps silent.

  “Sure it’s trouble,” said the voice. “It’s not anything we can’t handle if we all pay attention to what we’re doing. It just takes patience.”

  A higher-register voice—a woman—replaced the male voice. Walker could tell she must be sitting in a pew facing the front of the sanctuary, because her voice was muffled. She reached the end of her brief statement, and there were other voices, making what sounded to Walker like murmurs of assent.

  Walker had reached the floor now. He moved to the wall beside the doorway, cautiously tilting his head to search the foyer for people. Then he looked up to see that Mary was halfway down.

  As the murmurs subsided, the man’s voice rose above them. “You have to understand,” said the voice, and Walker realized it was familiar. “These two aren’t exactly the FBI SWAT commandos from hell.” A wave of laughter washed over Walker, and as it did the voice paused, then continued. “They’re bureaucrats—investigators from an insurance company. They make their living finding people’s lost silverware, and taking videos of disability cases on the golf course.” This time, Walker recognized the voice: Chief Raines.

  Walker felt a hand touch his shoulder, and he whirled to see Mary behind him. He looked above her and saw that Stillman had cleared the ceiling and was using the sound of the laughter to cover the noise of pulling the lid over the hatch. Stillman began to climb down quickly. When the laughter turned ragged and people were beginning to quiet down again, he slowed his pace.

  Chief Raines said, “I think all that happened was that they found a hiding place we missed. What I’d like to suggest is that when we’re through here, we all go back to our own houses—nobody alone, but in groups of four at least—and search. Look in every closet, every corner of the basement, every inch of the attic. If you see anything, there will be cars patrolling every street, and help is as close as that. When you’re positive the house is clear, lock it up tight. Keep all the outdoor lights on, but turn off the inside ones. Put at least one person downstairs and one upstairs, looking out the windows all the time.”

  The chief was interrupted by another voice from the floor that Walker couldn’t understand. The chief answered, “Now that everybody’s back from Florida, we’ve got more than enough people, and we’ll be raiding places we haven’t hit. Even if we don’t corner them, they’ll be on the move. They don’t want to stay here, they want to get out of town. If everybody is looking, somebody will see them.”

  Walker felt Mary tugging on his arm. He turned and saw that the cloak-room window was open and Stillman was just easing himself out to the ground. Walker lifted Mary up into the space, and she slithered through and out. Walker climbed out after her, turned at the sill, and dropped to the grass, then carefully pulled the sash down.

  When he turned around, Stillman and Mary had already moved off toward Constitution. Stillman seemed to be carrying something. At the corner, they began to run, and he sprinted to catch up. They kept up their desperate pace until they reached Birch Street, then turned onto it and moved toward Main.

  Stillman stopped. He handed Walker and Mary light summer jackets. “I borrowed these from the cloak room,” he said. “Maybe they’ll help us get across the street.” Walker slipped his on, watched Mary put hers on, then moved forward, but Stillman held his arm.

  “Not yet,” he said. “It’s not enough.”

  “We’re not going?”

  “No,” said Stillman. “We’ve got to wait.”

  “But they could be out here any second.”

  “That’s the idea. Look around. We’re the only ones out on foot. It’s like everybody died. When that meeting is over, the streets are going to be full of people. None of them will be as far east as Birch Street, but we’ll still look as though we came from the meeting.”

  Mary turned her eyes to Stillman but said nothing.

  Walker said reluctantly, “All right.”

  “Give me a minute,” said Stillman. “I’ll get as close to the corner of Main as I can. The second the doors open up, I’ll move. The two of you walk across together. Hold hands or something, and walk at the same speed as everybody else. I’ll cross alone from here, and we’ll meet on the other side.”

  He stepped off alone. Mary and Walker stood on the sidewalk and waited. She said quietly, “Did you hear what that man was saying in there?”

  He nodded. “That man was the chief of police.”

  “But the whole town was in there listening, agreeing. It’s not just one or two cops fooling people. It’s everybody. They’re all in on it.”

  “Let’s just hope everybody came to the meeting,” said Walker. Then he froze. “Kids. When we were here before, we saw kids. There must be people in some of the houses watching them.”

  “We should warn Stillman.”

  They saw Stillman wave his arm and set off across Main Street. “Too late,” said Walker. He put his arm around her waist, tightened it once in a quick squeeze, then let it rest there. “We’ve got to go. Just keep your face turned away from the windows.”

  They walked to the corner and stepped into the street. Walker looked past Mary toward the church. The doors had opened and people were walking down the steps, across the sidewalk, and into Main Street. He adjusted his pace to theirs. Before he and Mary had stepped across the double line in the center of the pavement, he could see that the street to the west was already clogged.

  Some of the townspeople were moving along the sidewalks on Main Street away from the church, and others came east and then crossed the street as Walker and Mary were doing. Walker kept his steps even and unhurried, expecting at any second to hear running footsteps behind them.

  Then they were stepping up over the curb, and after a few more steps they were on Birch, moving away from Main. Birch Street was still much brighter than it had been when Walker and Stillman had been to Scully’s house the first time. Walker had to force himself to keep from running to get to the house before the first of the residents returned to see them. When he and Mary were almost there, he could see Stillman waiting at the corner of the house.

  “The garage is wide open, and his car is inside,” said Stillman. “It’s a Chevy Blazer.”

  Walker said, “Want to try for the gun in the bedroom?”

  Stillman shook his head. “No. Nothing has changed. If we shoot off a gun, there will be eighty people on us in a second. If we don’t need to fire it, what’s it for?” To foreclose the argument, he moved up the driveway and into the garage.

  When they were all inside, Stillman handed Mary the keys. “You drive. You’re the only one they haven’t seen.”

  Stillman climbed into the back seat, while Walker got into the front. Stillman tapped him. “Duck down.”

  Mary started the engine, and backed down the driveway into the street. Walker crouched on the floor and felt the vehicle lurch forward. She announced, “We’re still ahead of the crowd. I’m going to turn left and go down the next street toward the river.” She made the turn.

  “I see lights ahead,” she said. “It looks like a cop car.”

  “It doesn’t matter whose car it is, he’s nobody we want to get close to,” said Stillman. “Can you turn anywhere without looking as though you’re avoiding him?”

  “I�
�ll make the next turn and go toward Main again.” She made the turn slowly, then sighed. “There are people in the street. I can get through them, but if they know the car, they can hardly imagine I’m James Scully.”

  “See if you can turn at the next corner and get near the river that way,” said Stillman.

  They felt the car’s speed decrease, and then felt it coast. “There are two more cars on that street with their headlights pointed this way.” She accelerated again. “I’m going on to Main Street.”

  She reached Main, then stopped. “This is not good,” she said. “I can see more cars up ahead before the bridge. Two of them are cop cars.”

  Stillman said, “Turn toward them so your headlights are what they see.”

  She turned the car, then turned again at the first corner. “They’re not following,” she said. “It looks like they’re just waiting for us to go toward the bridge. Maybe I can come up Washington behind them.”

  “Then turn right again at the next corner,” he said.

  “Okay.” Walker felt the car tilt as she turned.

  “What’s ahead of you?”

  “Not much. There’s a driveway at the end of the street. A big building. The sign says New Mill Systems.”

  “Good,” said Stillman. “Drive until you’re almost there, and pull over.”

  In a moment, the car stopped at the curb. “I’m parked. What do you recommend now?”

  “Can anybody see us if we sit up?”

  “Nobody’s back in these houses yet, but I just saw a couple pass the corner on Main, so it won’t be long.”

  Stillman and Walker sat up. On either side, the street was brightly lighted from the windows of the houses and the floodlights on eaves and above porches. Directly ahead was the dim parking lot of New Mill Systems. Walker could see the usual thirty or forty cars in the lot, and beside the lot, the boxlike brick building with its small, high windows lit like all the others.

  Stillman said, “Pull into the lot.”