Beware the Young Stranger (13 page)

“I was searching the place when I heard your car,” Howard Conway said.

“As he must have heard Ivy's,” Vallancourt said, taking himself in hand. “We can guess his choice of direction. Away from the lake road. An incoming car would present a threat.”

“He must have left fast,” Conway said, “before he found out that it was a lone woman driving the car.”

Hibbs looked around at the hemming hills. “He may be in shouting distance this minute.”

“Not necessarily. He's got several thousand acres to hide in. It's my opinion he's long gone. If he'd stuck close, he'd have made a try for Ivy's car.”

“But he likes cover,” Vallancourt said. He had been deep in thought. “A cottage. A motel room. An attic.” He started from the porch. Conway glanced inside the house, then fell in beside him.

“Ivy will be out for a long time,” Conway said. “She isn't going anywhere, and I'm needed here like a boil on my secretary's fanny. You staying, Ralph?”

Hibbs shrugged. “I've been with it this far, Howard. I'll keep going.”

Vallancourt stopped at the top of the porch steps. “Let's keep one thing in mind. If Keith's taken shelter in an unoccupied cottage, we want him to know we're coming. We have to move openly. Otherwise he may panic and do something foolish.”

Both men nodded.

“Think he'll bargain?” Conway asked. “I don't know. But I want him to have the chance to warn us off. I want talking room. As long as there's talk, hotheads don't fight.”

“Isn't it stretching the law,” Hibbs asked, “giving him a chance to get away?”

“Nancy's welfare is my law at the moment,” Vallancourt said.

“We need luck,” Conway said. “The motel man wasn't very lucky.”

“He was luckier than he knows,” Vallancourt said grimly. “Keith didn't lay a finger on the man until he became a threat … Keith might have killed him, but he didn't. His overriding thought is to hide, to get away. No doubt he's felt a sense of nemesis, a lack of choice in everything that's been forced on him.”

“You sound as if you're defending him!”

“We need to understand him, Howard, if we're to keep from triggering him. He has a need to rationalize a rightness into everything he does. I want to direct the process until Nancy is safe.”

“He's been under pressure quite a while now,” Ralph Hibbs said. “What if he's slipped over the line?”

16.

In the living room of the log cottage, Keith stripped a muslin dust cover from a big chair. He glanced at Nancy. In the gloom created by the shutters and the drawn blinds, her face and hair gave a blurred impression of loveliness with details obscured. He could look at her without enduring the sight of the changes in her.

“Might as well cradle it,” he said. “The chair's for free.”

She came to the chair and sat down. He watched her, yearning.

“You don't have to do it like a robot,” he said savagely.

“You offered me the chair, Keith.”

“And you're so damn obedient!”

He turned away. His eyes stung; he was going to jelly inside, he thought. Time had grown teeth, grinding him to shreds. He wouldn't break suddenly; nothing in him would snap He was just being picked to pieces, taken apart. Like a worm being cut into sections.

He looked over his shoulder at Nancy. She sat gripping the arms of the chair, head turned, staring at the floor.

Why in hell did I ever meet you? Keith thought. Then there would have been none of this almost-having, nearly-winning, having it end up slipping through my fingers.

“Big devil cat got your tongue?” he sneered.

She shook her head, bit her lip.

“Okay,” he said, making a flat gesture with his hand. “Okay, oh-oh-kay!”

He walked across the room and sat down on the floor, back against the wall.

“Anything special you'd like to hear? Want me to tell you what a hot-looking dish you are, doll?”

She looked at him then.

“Maybe you'd rather hear about me,” he said. “Cops all over the state looking for me. I've crowded the politicians out of the headlines today. They're spending thousands of dollars this minute trying to find me. Cool, hey? My old man always said I'd make the grade. ‘You bastard,' he'd say, ‘you'll end up on the business end of a police bullet one of these days.' Damn dutiful making your old man's predictions come true. Don't you think so, chick?”

“You're convinced you have to go that way,” Nancy said.

“My God!” he said. “It talks! You see any alternatives?”

She turned her face away again. He snapped his fingers, hard, rapidly.

“Come on, doll, you can do better than that. You're a sexy piece who happens to have brain to go with the equipment. Why don't you give me a bookful of alternatives? Let me pick and choose.”

“Maybe there aren't any, Keith. Not for you.”

“So I should be somebody else. Everybody else has alternatives.”

“Let me go, Keith,” she said like a little girl.

“Cut out? You? You're the babe what came on the joyride of her own free will. I didn't hold a gun to your head.”

“Let me go, Keith!”

“But I've got a gun now,” he said. “Full of bullets. Bang, bang, bang! They make holes in people and the blood runs out and they fall down dead.”

She raised herself from the chair. He watched her almost sleepily.

Nancy was reminded of a big black and white cat she had once had. It would crouch over a bug for endless minutes, only its tail twitching. The day the cat had killed a bird, she had asked her father to give it away. That night she had cried herself to sleep over her lost, loved, hated cat.

She took a step from the chair, then another. She was halfway across the room.

Magically, he was standing before her, blocking her way.

“What's the rush, doll? The party's just starting. In another couple of days it'll really jazz. We're bound to snag a crate by then. We'll go crashing out.”

“You'll go alone, Keith.”

“The hell I will. I like this togetherness kick. I find it the greatest. How could I dream of doing a solo?”

“You won't make it, Keith,” she said. A great sadness was in her voice.

The sadness reached out and touched him. Almost he let it go through. But then he forced himself to laugh. “Why not? Other cats have made it.”

“But not you, Keith. Even if you were within reach of it, you wouldn't let yourself stretch that last inch.”

“So what's the diff, a hundred years from now?”

“No difference a hundred years from now. But we don't have a hundred years. The difference is today and tomorrow.”

She was so right that a sense of doom overwhelmed him. It had lain buried in him all his life. He recognized it now. He had glimpsed it before, many times, in a dream, or in his father's eyes. At last he was face to face with it, and the face of doom was no stranger.

“Let me go, Keith,” she saying again. “Let me take what I have left with me. Don't destroy it all.”

“They'll know where you came from.”

“No. I won't tell, Keith.”

“What's to stop you?”

“Don't you know?”

“They'll make you tell.”

“They can't.”

“They've got ways. They'd work on you. I know. It happened to me for sixty hours in Port Palmetto, Florida.”

“My father wouldn't let them.”

“
He'd
get it out of you.”

“No more than they would.” She put her hands on his shoulders. “Can't I make you see? Don't you understand at all?”

Close to her, he could not avoid the details of her face, that precious, lovely, hated face. His brain pulsed and pumped in his skull.

Why couldn't she see through his talk? he wondered. See the desolation inside him? Understand that he couldn't stand the thought of being alone at the end? He'd been alone most of his life, knowing that he was different, that there was something strange about him. Why wouldn't she stay to the end?

Without warning a man's voice cut through the log and mortar walls.

Keith moved first, flinging his arm about Nancy's waist and clapping the palm of his other hand against her mouth.

The voice outside was joined by another. Two … no, three of them at least.

They were making no pretense of stealth. He was instantly suspicious. They were looking for him—there could be no other reason for their appearance—and yet they were tipping him off, giving him a chance to get set.

Her father's voice … and Uncle Howard's … yes, and Ralph Hibbs's. The big, soft man's sermonizing tones were unmistakable.

Nancy struggled briefly, and Keith's hand tightened on her face. He could feel the bones of her cheek and jaw and teeth under his fingers. She rolled her eyes with pain.

The brittle time-suspension snapped into place. His mind raced. Had they all come in the car he'd heard? If others were outside or on their way … John Vallancourt had outguessed him.

They were here. They had seen the signs of disturbance in the Ferguson lodge and Vallancourt had pegged his compass point of flight.

Turning Nancy around, he walked her toward the back door. With Nancy as his shield, the hunters' position would not be so good. He'd warn them to stand clear. He'd take her with him into the timber. When he had sufficient cover, he could make a break for the hills. Good thing he hadn't yielded to sentiment and let her walk out. He really needed her now.

Push back the end minute by minute, second by second, Keith. Damn them all!

Then he stopped. He stood still, with Nancy's back against him.

Don't give in to the first impulse, he told himself. You've really got to cool it this time.

Man, they want you to step outside. It's the thing they're after. They're betting you'll react to pressure and do half their work for them. That's exactly why they've come with the yak-yak, the lack of caution.

Cross Vallancourt up, Keith thought. A rabbit doesn't get hit until he's flushed.

His iron clasp kept Nancy immobile. She heard her father's voice, calm, reasonable, unhurried: “Keith, we know you're in there.”

The hell with you! Keith thought.

“Howard Conway and Ralph Hibbs are with me, Keith. But no police. No arms. No threats. We know you have a gun. We'll keep our distance. It can't hurt you to talk to us. How about it, Keith?”

Sweat crept down his face. He was more certain than ever that they didn't
know
he was inside. They were stabbing in the dark. Well, he wouldn't fall for it. Let John Vallancourt deliver his sweet little speech outside every cottage around the lake. By that time, Keith thought, I'll be over the hill.

The voices informed him that they were splitting up. Howard Conway was drifting up the hill around the cottage. Ralph Hibbs called to Vallancourt from below.

Keith stopped breathing as footsteps scuffed on the porch. Then they were going away again. Keith half closed his eyes; dizziness swept over him.

He waited. Nothing was moving outside now. No sounds came to him. The need to know what was happening became urgent.

“Not a sound,” he whispered in Nancy's ear.

He eased his grip on her just a little. Pulling her with him, he moved to a front window. Slowly he removed his hand from her mouth and inched a slat in the venetian blind.

Through the narrow line of vision, he saw them on the road below. They were all there. As he watched, they turned away from the cottage and went on down the road.

When they were out of sight around a bend, Keith let the blind slat fall. He leaned against the wall, releasing Nancy. His muscles were suddenly flaccid, his stomach stirred sluggishly. But he was buoyed by the thought that he had beaten them. Give them time to work their way far down the lake, he thought. Then out the back, across the hills.

It was then that Nancy made her move. She was a flicker, like a bird, in the near darkness. He plunged after her.

She reached the dining room. Without looking back she grabbed one of the cane-bottomed chairs at the rustic table. He saw the chair and heard its clatter, but he was too close to avoid it. The chair fell in front of him and he pitched forward, lunging for the end of the table to break his fall. The house shook under his weight as he struck the floor. He heard the back door open and slam.

Keith scrambled to his feet. Pain sheared through his right knee. He ignored it, trying to reach the door. But the door echoed the slap of metal as she threw the flange over the heavy staple.

He struck the door with his shoulder, grunting. Again the house shook. But the door refused to yield. He bounced back, holding his shoulder.

He stood there gasping. How good it would be to tear the door apart with his bare hands. She had slipped the broken padlock back in the staple, he knew, securing the hasp. The lock was as effective against him as if it had not been broken at all.

He wasn't beaten yet.

He wheeled about, returned to the dining room, grabbed a chair.

With the chair drawn back at full cock, he approached the nearest window.

17.

“The next house is almost a mile,” Howard Conway said. “The one up on the Point.”

“I think we've drawn a blank, John,” Hibbs said. “We've tried three cottages now without luck. I don't think he'd have gone all the way to the Point.”

“We'll try it.” Vallancourt walked doggedly along the dusty road, studying the stone house set on the jut of land far up the lake. “If we miss there, we'll go back for a car. On second thought, Ralph, maybe you should return for a car now. Bring my Lincoln.”

He pitched Hibbs the car keys, and Hibbs started walking hurriedly back around the lake.

Vallancourt and Conway trudged on. They had gone a few yards when Hibbs's voice stopped them.