The Desperate Hours

by Joeseph Hays

  3

  As Dan Hilliard reached his decision, it never occurred to him that he was taking advantage not of the evil of these men but of the one decent impulse he had glimpsed in any of them. But if he had thought of this, he would not have hesitated. He could afford no fine moral distinctions.

  He uttered a small breath of surprise as Cindy fell, as was expected of him, and stooping over her, he watched Hank Griffin out of the corner of his eye. The boy looked bewildered, as Dan had hoped, the dark eyes flashing after his brother; on his own, even with the gun in hand, he seemed uncertain, poised for action or flight.

  “Give me a hand, Griffin,” Dan said, attempting to lift his daughter.

  Still the boy hesitated, straining to hear whatever sounds Glenn and Robish might be making outside the house.

  “Dammit,” Dan said, “can’t you see this child is sick?”

  Hank made up his mind then, and seeing this, Dan was forced toward still another decision: he couldn’t kill the boy. The others, yes, but not this child who was no older than Cindy.

  Hank, with the gun in one hand, came forward, bent down, placed his other arm under Cindy’s shoulders.

  The gun was directed toward the front door, It was the second Dan had hoped for, anticipated. He struck out, fast and smoothly, his fist catching the boy’s wrist. The automatic clattered to the floor. Dan made a dive for it.

  The metal felt moist and warm in his hand. Behind him he heard a small cry of astonishment and pain and turned to see Cindy sitting up now, her mouth clamped over the boy’s wrist, biting hard. Hank’s face writhed in pain, and over it fell the awful sense of betrayal that even then sent no shame through Dan.

  “Get out,” Dan said curtly. “Cindy, lock the other doors and get upstairs. Ellie! Ellie, get on the phone up there, fast, and keep Ralphie with you, away from the windows.”

  Cindy was already up and moving, flipping off the dining room light. Dan heard the click of the side door lock and watched Hank, dazed, his face mean and ugly now, stepping toward the front door.

  “Hurry it up,” Dan said to young Griffin.

  Hank opened the front door. Dan reached and shoved him, wondering in the instant whether this might not be a mistake; perhaps he should have shot the boy at once. Dan locked the front door and he was turning toward the stairs when he heard, from above, Eleanor’s scream. He bounded up the stairs as Eleanor appeared from Ralphie’s room, still screaming, with her hand over her mouth.

  “Ralphie … Dan … Ralphie’s gone!”

  Cindy came up the stairs behind him, flipped off the hall light, plunging them into blank total darkness. They seemed frozen there then, the three of them—not the four as Dan had seen it happening—mute figures, caught, trapped.

  “Maybe he got away,” Cindy said at last. “Maybe he-”

  But Glenn’s voice, caught in the low whine of wind outside, reached them then.

  “We ain’t going, Hilliard. Open up the back door and throw that gun out.”

  Dan automatically dropped down, out of window range in case Glenn should decide to shoot anyway. Cindy pulled her mother into the bedroom and they crouched low.

  “Should I phone the police now?” Eleanor asked.

  “Hilliard,” Glenn cried outside, and there was a note of cruel desperation behind the call. “Hilliard, listen!”

  Dan tensed, listening. At first he couldn’t believe the voice that reached him. But Eleanor recognized it and uttered a faint cry of defeat that worked its way into Dan’s bones, sending a coldness through him. Cindy stood in the bedroom door.

  “Dad?” The one word. It came from outside. There was no bravado in it, no outrage, no childish valor; the word was high with terror. “Dad.”

  “If we go, Hilliard,” Glenn Griffin’s voice said, “we’re taking the kid. Open up and we’ll forget the whole business.”

  Dan glanced at Cindy’s dim figure in the bedroom door; it had gone slack and limp against the door frame. Dan’s hand closed convulsively over the handle of the automatic. He could shoot; a shot would bring help. He could telephone. He could keep the three out of the house.

  But Ralphie was also outside the house.

  Dan flicked the safety latch on the gun and stood up. “Don’t yell out there,” he warned Glenn Griffin. “I’m coming down to the back door.”

  It was not a shout that reached him then from the darkness in the rear of the house, but a laugh, a thin and arrogant gust of triumph.

  “Lock the bedroom door, Cindy. If you hear a shot downstairs, make the call anyway. If you don’t, keep Eleanor up here. No matter what else you hear, don’t call.”

  Cindy didn’t move at first, but as Dan descended the uncarpeted back stairs, he heard the bedroom door close and the lock turn. He walked blindly through the tiny pantry at the foot of the stairs, paused only a second, listening to the sound of the wind; then he threw open the door.

  “Toss the gun first, Hilliard,” Glenn Griffin advised.

  Dan tossed the gun. Again he had no choice. He was a man without a choice, over and over. He stood waiting numbly for whatever was coming: a bullet, a blow, the men, or his son.

  Glenn appeared first out of the darkness. Then Ralphie. Dan felt the boy’s hand on his arm, heard the stifled sob as the boy leaned against him.

  “Go upstairs, son,” Dan said.

  The boy obeyed quickly, running on bare feet up the back stairs. A door opened above, and Dan heard Ralphie taken in with the others.

  Now Glenn was standing before him, tall and angular, a dim, shimmering shadow. Behind Glenn, Hank Griffin appeared from the darkness, stiff and small-looking.

  “We got Robish, too,” Glenn Griffin said, pushing Dan backwards out of the door into the pantry. “I had to put him on ice for a while, Hilliard. So he’d learn who was boss around here.” The young man spoke coolly, without passion.

  It may have been this calm lack of emotion that caused Dan to relax slightly before the blow struck. It was a vicious swipe and it came at him from above, the barrel of the revolver catching him on the forehead just below the hairline.

  He went down. That was the first blow.

  He had no idea how much later it was that he awakened on his own bed in his own bedroom in the darkness. He stirred with a groan and heard the sound with some distant surprise. Then he felt Eleanor’s hand on his face, over his mouth, gentle and cool and incredibly soft. He struggled to sit up but she held him.

  “Dan,” she whispered, “Dan, don’t talk, don’t move, darling. Dan, you hear me?”

  His head nodded under her hand. The darkness threatened to close in again, not the darkness of the room with the windows outlined in some pale outside light, but the darkness in which he had been lying for some time, without awareness, without pain.

  “Dan, I gave you some pills to make you sleep. It’s almost morning. If you can hear me, listen to me.”

  “Ralphie?”

  “He’s all right, Dan. Sleeping.”

  “And … them?”

  “They’re still here. Cindy’s with Ralphie and one of them’s in her bedroom up here. The other two are downstairs. Listen, Dan. I’ve been thinking all night. You did a foolish and terrible and wonderful thing, and I love you. No, that isn’t what I want to say. Can you hear me, darling? I want to say that you must never do anything like that again. You cannot try ever again to do what you did. You might have been killed, Dan. They would have killed you last night if they didn’t need you. Hear me, Dan. This is important. You can’t save us if you die. We aren’t saved if you die, do you understand! You must understand that, Dan, please you must, because if you don’t, something terrible is going to happen. Nobody knows anything about what’s happening here, nobody in the world. It’s only us. Dan, I’m pleading with you. Promise me. Promise me, Dan, darling, promise me. Never again.”

  “I promise,” he whispered, dully, not knowing completely, from her words, what she had meant to convey, but forced by her tone to nod his head. “Yes,
darling. I see that.”

  “Don’t be brave, darling,” his wife said, lying beside him now. “We don’t want you to be brave. We want you well and alive and with us.”

  There were things that Dan knew vaguely at this moment, but he couldn’t arrange them in his mind and he couldn’t explain them. “Didn’t the woman come?”

  “Telephoned,” Eleanor said softly. “A collect call to a Mr. James, after midnight some time. She’s not coming, Dan. I don’t know what it means. I was so busy, I couldn’t ask. She’s not coming but they’re staying. Now try to sleep again. It’s not a serious cut on your head, dear, but you’ll need your rest. Please.”

  He felt then her lips closing over his, soft and full and a trifle moist, and he felt his love for her stirring deeply, more deeply perhaps than ever before. He could hear her breathing close to him and her hand lay against his face. He slept.

  It began to rain at 5:30 in the morning, just before dawn. Jesse Webb had been dozing, his head down on his arms, when Carson, the FBI man, came briskly into his office, smiled a little, stirred the young Sheriff with a nudge.

  Jesse blinked up at the young man, recognizing him only vaguely: a studious-looking fellow in a double-breasted brown suit, wearing dark-rimmed glasses, carrying a brief case. Carson removed his raincoat, sat down straddling the back of Tom Winston’s chair and offered Jesse a cigarette.

  “Looks like we’re about the only people in town awake,” he said.

  “What is it?” Jesse demanded, alert now, recalling the disappointment of the long, dull night, but pushing it behind him.

  “It’s a telephone call,” Carson said. “It’s not much but it has its promising aspects. Sit back, friend. Take it easy. Nothing we can do now, not for some time, so just listen to my little story and maybe it’ll get light outside. Lord, don’t they heat this place? It’s almost winter.”

  “A telephone call?”

  Carson related the story, as it had come to him through the Columbus office. He spoke easily but carefully, his trained mind not missing any detail; Jesse Webb listened without interrupting because Carson filled in the whole picture.

  Three plain-clothes men and two uniformed policemen had closed in on an apartment in Columbus; this was at about i o’clock. They had reason to believe that Helen Lamar was there. She was not. They found another woman, though, name unimportant, who, after about an hour of intensive police questioning, admitted that Helen Lamar had been with her. The woman claimed, of course, that she had no idea Helen Lamar was in any trouble, but if she was there was no cause for the woman to get involved. She would be co-operative, she said. Helen Lamar had left the apartment at least an hour before the police arrived. She had to make a telephone call, she said. Also, she had to buy a car. The woman swore that she had no idea whether or where Helen Lamar had done either. It was the last she saw of her.

  This information set in motion a vast, swift but complicated series of investigations in the Columbus area, but Carson himself was inclined to think that only one of these would prove fruitful: that telephone call. She would have to contact Griffin, wouldn’t she? She was too smart to place the call from a friend’s apartment. What then?

  “Pay station,” Jesse Webb said.

  “We’ll soon know. God knows how many long-distance calls are placed at that time of night in Columbus, but there’s a record of all of them.”

  “The Indianapolis calls-”

  Carson grinned, blowing smoke. “You’ll get them, Sheriff.”

  Jesse was thinking of the myriad number of reasons a person in one city picks up a phone and places a midnight call to a person in a city 175 miles away. Working his way through that list would, he realized with a slight lifting of his spirits, occupy a great deal of time; it would be action, of a sort. But— and his legs ached, his neck was stiff—in that time, in all this time that had passed and was passing, what was Glenn Griffin doing?

  Carson read the thought in the tall man’s eyes. “It’s none of my business, Webb, and stop me if I’m out of line. You’ve got something personal at stake in this, haven’t you? It’s not just a job for you.”

  Jesse managed a smile. He could lie to himself: there was a way of twisting the truth, as he had twisted it for Kathleen’s benefit, in order to justify his motives. But neither his personal reasons nor his job explained the way he felt, one exclusive of the other. “It’s pretty complicated,” he said. And then he added, for Carson and for himself, still another element: “I’ve got a hunch, though, that Griffin’s after me just as much as I’m after him. It’s just a hunch. I broke his jaw once. He probably could have forgiven me if I’d shot him, wounded him. But there’s a crazy sort of quirk in a mind like Griffin’s. I guess we all have our own twists more or less, but guys like him have more of them and they’re stronger. He’s a handsome boy, you know. I reckon maybe kind of vain, too. Gave a real show at his trial. You can bet, wherever he is now, he’s putting on quite an act.”

  Carson nodded, relaxing into the conversation that might help kill the time till another report came through from Columbus or from the telephone company. “There’s a quirk, as you call it, in all of them. The criminal mind’s not like other minds. Odd you should be interested in that angle. The show-off type’s fairly predictable, I think, once you get the hang of him. He’s shrewd but no imagination, really. Always acting, as you say, but the pattern’s pretty old stuff. He’s tough enough, but he likes to look and talk even tougher …”

  Glenn Griffin was at the head of the table, tilted back in his chair, one of Dan’s hats pushed back from his face. A cigarette dangled between his lips. This morning he didn’t bother to make the gun evident. It was there. And Hank’s was back in his possession, too, but concealed. Hank stood in the corner of the room, his young face showing none of the resentment that Dan guessed he must feel after last night. Dan studied his own large freckled hands as they lay on the whisky-ringed table top. Beside him, Eleanor pressed her leg against his; Dan couldn’t bear to look at her. It was as though, in a period of thirteen hours or so, her soft oval of face had hardened, aged. Cindy was across from Dan, her eyes no longer contemptuous or angry, the blue darkened until they looked black. Black and hard and determined. Beside her, Ralphie was alert, his gaze soft and bewildered as he stared at the gash on his father’s forehead.

  “Things’ve kind of changed, folks,” Glenn was saying. “My friend who was coming can’t make it like she thought. It seems some coppers tried to pick her off.”

  Outside, the rain hissed and gurgled in the drains and, caught in the gusts of wind, hammered against the windows, against the sides of the house. It seemed, somehow, to soak through the walls and into the aching crevices of Dan’s body.

  “Now we don’t want to stick here any more’n you want us to, see. But I got things to do before I can go. We’re going to be your guests just a little longer.”

  “How much longer?” Dan heard his own voice, without recognizing it.

  “Now Pop, is that any way to start talking? Just because you got a wild idea last night and had to take your medicine. Hell, you don’t have any worse a headache than Robish. I had to put him out for a while, too. And he’s got a hangover to boot.”

  “How much longer?”

  “Until I get a certain envelope in the mail, Hilliard, that’s how much longer.”

  “When will that be?”

  “It might get here today. It ought to.”

  “Meanwhile-?”

  “Pop, I like you this morning. You act real interested in cooperating.”

  “Meanwhile—?”

  “Meanwhile, Hilliard, everything goes on around here just like normal. I guess you know how important that is. You and the redhead go to work, just like usual. Only Junior here’s too smart a boy. He stays home. He’s sick today. Junior hates my guts, so he’s going to miss a day at school. That won’t hurt him. I missed a few myself. And look at me.” He laughed. It was the only sound in the room above the rain.

 
“I’m sorry, Griffin,” Dan said then, slowly. “I’m not going to work today. I’m sick, too.”

  Glenn’s laugh died. “You could be a lot sicker, Hilliard.”

  “I can call my office. There are a lot of colds around. No one will think anything of it.”

  “Then how’m I going to get the envelope, Pop? With the dough in it.” He was grinning faintly. “That envelope’s addressed to you at your office, see. We wouldn’t want any coppers following it right in here, would we?”

  Dan considered this, feeling the pressure increase along Eleanor’s leg; he considered it in that emotionless way that he was thinking this morning. Then he shook his head. “I can’t leave my wife in the house with that drunken friend of yours, Griffin. Not after what happened last night.”

  “You don’t have much to say about it, do you?”

  “I think I do,” Dan said. “Yesterday it looked as though you held all the cards, Griffin. Today I know better. Every minute you have to stay here, you’re taking that much more of a chance. You can kill me, yes, or beat me into unconsciousness again. But you’ll have to do it quietly. There are people awake now. I’ll force you to make some noise about it this morning. I’ll make you shoot me, Griffin. Then where’ll you be?”

  Dan recalled his promise to Eleanor, but he was not breaking it; he was judging Griffin and working on that judgment.

  Glenn stood up, strolled to the curtain, placed his eye against the slit he had cut there. A poisonous silence hung over the room.

  Without turning, Glenn said, “Mrs. Hilliard can stay upstairs all day. I’ll keep Robish down here.”

  “I can’t take that chance. After last night.”

  “Goddammit. Hilliard, I said I’m making a promise! Don’t push, Hilliard. Don’t push too far, Pop.” Glenn was facing them again, his chest heaving. “I took orders all my life from smart-eyed bastards like you. Now. You’re going to that office of yours, Hilliard, and as soon as that dough comes, you open the envelope, take it to your bank or some place and get it changed into small bills, nothing over twenty, and then you call me and tell me you’re on your way home. Just that, Hilliard. Only listen and listen better this time: I been in touch with a pal of mine, see. And this guy’s going to do a little job for me, something I can’t do myself. Before you come home, I’ll think of some way for you to pay him off for me. You think you want to try something different, we won’t bother to open that cut on your head next time. The kid and the wife’ll be here.” He stopped and threw his shoulders up and began to grin. “Pop, you’re a tough old guy and I give you credit, but you be careful, see.”