Cornered! (5 page)

She did not answer, so he went on.

“You’re not going to let the word out so this fellow can come and do what he’s after, are you? Not by a long shot! So it won’t be you telling. And that leaves matters pretty much in the hands of Bob Saywell, doesn’t it, Mrs. Burley?”

She blinked, in one sense disbelieving, but in another realizing with frightening clarity the extent of his viciousness.

“You’re threatening me,” she whispered. “In God’s name, why?”

“You ask me why. Now I’m getting to that. Because this community doesn’t deserve this kind of blight you’ve brought into it. This community stands for something—it stands for the word of the Bible, the Good Word. And it doesn’t deserve any of the dirtiness like you’re mixed up in—”

“You filthy—!”

“Oh, no! Don’t you talk to me that way! The devil calling the angel evil, is that it? No, that’s no good, and you know it.
You’re
the evil here, and hereabouts we live by the Good Word, do you hear that? I take pride in this little community of ours. I take pride in doing what I can to lead this little community of ours over the rough rocks and see that nobody gets hurt too bad. Some of us were picked by the Lord to see their fellow man gets a straight chance at things. No, sir. I take pride and care with this community. I got a responsibility to it, I’ll tell you!”

Almost subconsciously, Ann realized that Saywell’s left hand had drifted up, touching her arm now, fingers opening, closing again, around her bare flesh, lightly, like the test of a python. It was a detached realization because her mind was still confused by this blather of words flowing at her, like the parody of some outlandish sermon performed by a revivalist fanatic.

And Bob Saywell, having rationalized his position sufficiently, revealed the single motive behind his entire strategy.

“Don’t you see?” he whispered, eyes blazing. “I can protect you! I can keep you safe! I won’t tell. No, sir! You can count on that!”

Ann, now with his hand on her, knew exactly what he wanted. There was no mistaking it in his eyes, the quiver of his face. “And why won’t you tell?” she asked, her voice going cold, despite the rising fear she felt of him.

“Why?” he breathed. “Because I’ll be nice to you and not tell. You see? And the reason I’ll be nice to you, is because you’ll be nice to me—”

Both hands now were on her, squeezing tighter—the fat, blubberlike face coming closer to hers.

“Oh, yes,” he whispered, “you will, won’t you? You’ll be just as cozy as a bug in a rug with old Bob Saywell! That fellow will never find you. No, sir. Not as long as you’re nice to old Bob Saywell. And you will be, won’t you!”

She twisted from his grip and brought the flat of her right hand sharply across his fat and quivering face with all her strength. The sound of the slap cracked like a small rifle report.

Bob Saywell’s face flushed. His eyes squeezed smaller, and he took a step back, still quivering.

“You’ll be sorry for that!” he whispered hoarsely.

“Get out of here,” she said, the anger sweeping through her. “Get out of here!”

Her anger seemed to frighten him, but he stood locked for a moment more, head pulled closer to his fat narrow shoulders. “I’m going to give you a little more chance, is what I’m going to do! And you’d better be smart enough to see that Bob Saywell is nobody to fool around with. Now you get over your snottiness with me, do you hear? You think twice before you ever do again what you just done. A little more chance, and that’s all. And then—”

He put his lips together, wheeled and walked out. The door slammed shut behind him. Ann, staring at the door, shook her head unbelievingly. She was in deadly danger, and what had this man just tried to do? She simply could not yet believe in the man’s utter hypocrisy, his utter blackness.

There was, then, the sound of a pickup truck coming into the barnyard.

As Ted Burley pushed his large-framed figure from his truck, his eyes caught the figure of Bob Saywell emerging from the farmhouse. He stared at Saywell with thin eyes.

Bob Saywell suddenly smiled. The rosy tint of rage remained in his face, but it seemed merely the effect of the winter wind.

He yelled immediately, “Hello, there, Ted! Glad to see you!”

Ted Burley nodded curtly.

“Just come back, Ted?” Bob Saywell said, hurrying up.

“Yes.” A frown cut between his heavy eyebrows. “Looking for me?”

Bob Saywell instantly saw the suspicion written into Ted’s face. And Bob Saywell rarely lost an opportunity.

“No, sir. Not this time, Ted. You didn’t hear about the missus fainting there in my store?”

“Fainting? No! Been gone all day.”

“Sure enough she did, Ted. Kind of gave me a worry there. So I went over to Graintown on business and coming back, passed your house. I thought I’d look in and see how she was. She appears to be fine now.”

“Don’t know what would make her faint.”

“Don’t think it was anything at all,” Bob Saywell said. “You know how women are. No, sir. She looks fit as a fiddle now. Just something a woman does now and again.”

Ted Burley nodded, still examining Bob Saywell intently.

“Tell you, though,” Bob Saywell continued, “you’d better talk to Dr. Hugh Stewart about it. He was the one who saw to her there in the store.”

Ted Burley’s frown deepened. “Saw to her?”

“He was in the store at the time. Did for her there on a table.” Bob Saywell grinned faintly. “Then he took her home.”

Ted Burley shook his head, anger and confusion obvious in his face. “He had to bring her home?”

“Well, I don’t know that he had to do that, but that’s what he done. Just to make sure, I suspect. I imagine he knows what he’s about, don’t you, Ted?”

Ted Burley nodded slowly. “I reckon he does.”

“Well, it’s good to have a doc around close. Course, you and me, Ted, we always went over there to Graintown and Doc Orwell. You can’t be too sure about your doc, I always say. I mean, that’s one man you always want to be sure about. Right, Ted?”

“You’re pretty right, I’d say.” Ted Burley blinked, trying to get his thoughts straight. Bob Saywell pressed his advantage.

“Well, I don’t want to talk on about Doc Stewart. Just that somehow he always—well, I don’t know. Just impressed me as kind of out of place here in our little community. He’s got big-city ways or something. Oh, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with someone who’s from a city. Now I guess I know your missus came from Omaha. And your missus is certainly all right! Maybe I’m just small-town all the way through or something, Ted. Maybe it’s just me. Don’t doubt your missus can understand Doc Stewart a good bit better than I can. She seemed to be real pleased to see him there, when she woke up. Wouldn’t doubt they’ve got a whole lot in common. Probably accounts for that long visit they had.”

“Long visit?” Ted Burley asked, face darkening now.

“Well, Doc Stewart took her home there in late morning. When I went by in the afternoon, why, there was Doc Stewart’s car still parked in your yard. Don’t doubt they get along real fine, Ted. Well, I got to get going. You take it easy now, Ted.”

Bob Saywell waved a cheery hand, ducked his head once again into the fatty folds of his neck and hiked off to his car. Ted Burley immediately strode toward the back door of the house, a habit taught to him by his mother, so he could kick the snow from his boots at the stoop and not track the front-room rug.

Ann came into the kitchen as he was stripping off his mackinaw.

“Ted,” Ann said. “I’m glad you’ve come home.” She was, in fact, quite glad he’d come—there was a familiarity in his presence that, at this moment, belied the true feeling she had for him. In comparison to the recent presence of Bob Saywell, he seemed an almost refreshing sight.

Ted Burley did not answer. He washed his large hands silently in the kitchen sink.

“Ted—”

“What was Doc Stewart doing bringing you home?”

“Ted, I fainted in the store!”

He turned, his face twisted into an unbelievable fury of jealously.

“How long did he stay?”

“I don’t know, Ted. I didn’t time how long he was here.”

“What happened while he was here?”

Ann shook her head. “Ted, listen to me—”

“Don’t have to!” he said, churlishly. “Just want to know what happened!”

His face made it plain that he was creating the blackest pictures available to his invention.

“I
told
you!” he whispered hoarsely.

“Ted,
please!”

“Right in this house!”
he said, his voice suddenly lifting in power, nearly screaming.

His hand came from nowhere. It struck her solidly across the cheekbone, sending her pitching across the kitchen floor. Half sprawling, she shook her head, amazed at the blow, yet understanding that somehow he’d perceived something
had
happened between her and Hugh Stewart.

She didn’t argue or defend, only saw the pace of his large boots toward her. She scrambled to her feet, grabbed a coat from the hallway, and ran from him. She ran outside to the snow and the bitter wind, and she kept running. She thought he was following her. Her flight became panic, stumbling through the ever-increasing snow, the wind stinging her cheeks. She ran.

Ted Burley stood in the doorway and looked after her disappearing figure. He did not follow. Instead, panting with rage, he allowed his wild imaginings to increase in tempo. The lust rose in him, not to strike her again, but to avenge her in the same way he was sure she had cheated him. It was a wild moment of anger and physical desire, both at high peak. Standing there, large body tense, rough-hewn, face strained and lined with fury, Ted Burley looked every bit the man. But inside, the child raged in an infantile tantrum.

“The dirty whore,” he whispered. “The dirty whore…”

The 4:07 train going east out of Graintown
was, because of the storm, thirty-two minutes late that afternoon. But before its arrival and departure, Sheriff-elect Jenkins had sent a detail of volunteer assistants to check the railroad area. The detail was to have been headed by Deputy Wade Miles, but Miles had been asked to check the west roadblock before he joined the group. The group of volunteers was not about to investigate the area until given the immediate leadership and moral support of Wade Miles. Thus, while Miles made his check at the roadblock set up by the State Police, the volunteer searchers at the railway depot stamped around the tiny waiting room and talked in angry terms of what they were going to do when they found Billy Quirter as they smoked and spit.

At 4:39 the train pulled in from the west. But by that time Deputy Miles had been diverted by a report that a local housewife had seen a man behind her garage on the north side of town. A quick personal check, accompanied by State patrolmen, convinced Wade Miles that the housewife was having hallucinations. When Wade Miles reached the Graintown depot, the 4:39 had pulled out as the volunteer searchers stood determinedly in the protection of the depot’s waiting room, watching the arrival and departure of the train like vigilante statues.

“Hell, Wade,” one of them said to the deputy, “he couldn’t of got on that train or we would of seen him.”

“Well, damn it,” Wade Miles said, “if you couldn’t search that train, let’s still search the area anyway. Let’s go! Joe, call Arrow Junction and have the train searched there.”

So the 4:39 was now on its way in the direction of Arrow Junction. And Billy Quirter was on it.

Thirty seconds after the train had started moving, Billy started running toward it, keeping the cars between himself and the depot up the tracks. At the last second, he’d vaulted up to an empty freight car, kicking like a monkey, and shoved himself through a partially opened door. He’d made it, minutes before Deputy Wade Miles arrived to mobilize the fear-frozen volunteers into belated action.

But as the train got underway, Billy realized he still had a problem. The map had told him the tracks ran through Arrow Junction, but he had no way of knowing whether or not the train stopped there. It was a chance he had to take.

Reasonably, Billy struck a match and looked at the map again. The distance by highway from Graintown to Arrow Junction was exactly ten miles. But it was hard for Billy to estimate how long it would take that train to make those ten miles.

It took, in fact, a little over eleven minutes. The train, in fact, stopped at Arrow Junction at approximately 4:50.

But Billy, at the end of nine minutes, began to worry, thinking that the train would not stop at Arrow Junction. He pushed himself close to the space created by the partly opened door and looked at the heavy snow whipping by in the ever-increasing gloom.

He thought, one minute outside of Arrow Junction, that the train had gone beyond the town.

He slid his legs through the doorway, squirmed around so that he was facing the direction the train was moving, then jumped.

He missed a switch handle by inches, a collision that would have performed a sudden and complete castration. He hit a heavy drift of snow, which softened his fall and slowed the momentum of his roll. But an unpracticed jumper like Billy was bound to land awkwardly. Billy did, with crushing impact. He was bruised. His knees hammered through the snow clear to the underlying cinders. But it was his left arm that, in the shock, took the real punishment.

Dr. Stewart would have diagnosed the result as a simple fracture of the left radius at the point of the nutrient foramen.

Billy only knew that he had broken his damned arm.

Swearing viciously, he held the wrist of that arm and lay in the snow like a rifle-shot jackrabbit. The wind blew, whistling over the back acreage of Ben Swanson’s farm on the opposite side of the highway from Ted Burley’s place. At that moment Billy was just exactly one half mile from the intended target of his gun, who was then making her way into Arrow Junction proper. But Billy didn’t know that. He did not know, in truth, where the hell he was.

Blinded by wind and snow and pain, he finally staggered off, away from the tracks, until he ran into the barbed wire fence Ben Swanson had replaced only that previous spring. Billy caught that in the face and back of his right hand. A barb ripped a neat cut across his right cheek and another stabbed his hand. But both wounds were superficial, the cold clotting the blood quickly. Billy, undaunted, moved through the strands, swearing a blue streak, and staggered on across Ben Swanson’s field, until he shoved into Ben Swanson’s barn.

This was what Billy wanted. He wanted protection from the infuriating wind and snow and cold. He found it here, and letting the broken arm hang, climbed with one hand and numb feet to the loft of Ben Swanson’s barn. There, in the hay, he squirmed into relative warmth, teeth set tight against the pain of that broken bone.

He was, in effect, a wounded animal now—lying small and insignificant in the dark of the great barn. Tony Fearon had a peculiar momentary loss of confidence at that moment in his California cell, wondering if, finally, the one dream he clung to in the face of death would go smash—and Billy would not, finally, make it.

But if Tony had seen his younger brother at that moment, his confidence would have returned full force. Billy was merely temporarily postponing his moving. Wind, snow and cold, broken bone, barbed wire and torn skin had not stopped Billy. Billy was only waiting for the morning now, to move on. He had a good view toward the entrance of that barn; anyone opening that door during the night would have gotten the entire new clip of bullets in Billy’s waiting gun. But fortunately nobody did.

As Billy waited in the barn, Dr. Hugh Stewart helped Ann Burley to a chair in his office.

“What happened?” he asked her softly.

She started to speak, then shook her head. He carefully wiped the blood from a corner of her mouth. She tried again. “It was Ted.”

He felt a quick flare of anger. Ted Burley was her husband, but that was no matter now. No man should ever have hit her. He tried to keep calm. “Why?”

Again she shook her head. “Not now, Hugh.”

He nodded. “All right.” He looked at her, head bent, sitting in that chair. He looked at the unconscious grace of her posture, the fine mold of her hands clenched over her knees, the shape of calf and ankle.

“You’d better take that coat off,” he said.

She looked up, and her beauty, even bruised, caught him by surprise, as it did every time he looked at her. She stood up, and he put his hands around her to take the coat as she slid one arm free, then the other. He held the coat, and they stood inches apart.

“Ann—” he said very softly.

“You’re too close to me, Hugh,” she said.

“All right,” he said, but he didn’t move away. Instead he brought his hand in, touching her arm.

“I don’t want you this close.”

He put his hands on both her arms. “That’s not true, is it?”

“I don’t care if it’s not true,” she said. “It can’t be this way.”

“You’re here, aren’t you?”

“I couldn’t help coming.”

“Why not?”

“Please, Hugh—”

“You can tell me and mean it, I won’t touch you.”

“I won’t tell you,” she breathed.

His arms were around her now. He held her gently at first. Then, as she tipped her head back, eyes closed, he lifted her carefully. There seemed no effort in the action, only the absolute movement. He saw her face, pale against the dark leather of the office couch. He saw her lips, soft-looking, soft-red against the paleness of the bruised face. He moved his own face down, his hand touching a button below her throat, loosening it. She did not resist…

Much later he offered her a cigarette. She shook her head. He lit his own, looking at her.

“Are you sorry?” he asked.

Her voice was soft, her eyes and mouth were soft. “No.”

Moments passed. He smoked his cigarette. She raised her chin finally. “But I’d better explain everything,” she said.

“Some things don’t need explaining.”

“Not some things. Other things do. I’ve got to tell you everything, Hugh.”

He nodded. “All right.”

Slowly, carefully, she told him.

He remained silent for several moments when she had finished; he was controlled now, despite hearing of the childish meanness of Ted Burley, of the blackmailing effort by Bob Saywell. He looked down and saw that his knuckles were white from his grip on the desk. He released his grip carefully. “Billy Quirter—Tony Fearon’s brother. You’ve got to tell the sheriff in Graintown.”

“No,” she said.

“Listen, Ann. You’ve taken a lot of punishment. Why go on?”

“There’s nothing else to do until Tony Fearon’s dead, and even then—”

“That’s right. Even then his brother’s alive. You’ve got to stop running, Ann. You can’t run forever.”

“I can try,” she said.

“But why? Why not tell the sheriff what you’ve told me, and—”

“No. Because what good would that do? Will it stop Quirter?”

Hugh Stewart took a breath. “You’ve been running so long you don’t know what’s valid and what isn’t any more. From the start, from Ted Burley on, you’ve been running. Searching for protection. Ted Burley’s farm, a little shelter in the middle of a state like this. It’s the middle of nowhere to Tony Fearon—you were sure of that. That’s why you married Ted Burley, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know why I’ve done anything,” she said.

“You don’t love him. You couldn’t. Otherwise what just happened between us—”

“Maybe I’m cheap.”

“Ann, shut up. That isn’t true, and you know it.”

“Hugh, I’ve tried so very hard with Ted. I didn’t want to—”

“How can you deal with a child? For God’s sake, Ann, don’t let the warps of some of these people in this town get into your mind. That’s no good that way. Listen to me. You can’t live a lie any more. It doesn’t breed good. It only breeds bad—like the honorable Mr. Saywell. That’s all you’ll get out of it. Don’t you see that?”

She shook her head. “If I thought the only reason I married Ted was simply to—”

“Damn it, Ann,” he exploded, “is he worth this kind of consideration? To hell with him. I say that to you straight, and I don’t give a damn about the morals or the propriety of my saying it. He’s a child, and that’s not your fault, is it?”

“I married him, Hugh.”

“You married him for protection.”

“Was that remotely honest?”

“It was human, wasn’t it? Is it impossible for you to admit that you’re human like the rest of us? That you can get scared like every other man, woman and child in the world? What’s so indecent about that?”

She shook her head, and he knew she wanted to give in now; but he knew the habit had grown deep-rooted. He stood up, moving toward her. “Ann—”

“No,” she said. “Don’t touch me again, Hugh. I can’t think when you do. I’ve got to think.”

“All right,” he said at last. “But remember one thing—you can’t keep on running. You’ve got to stop sometime. Your life’s in danger. Your marriage to Ted Burley is a sham. And it’s a sham primarily because of the fact that if you told him what you’ve told me about who you really are, the marriage would come apart on that and that alone. That’s no real marriage, Ann. If you’re going to think, please think about that. I’m selfish. I’ll admit that. I want you. Do you understand that?”

She looked up at him. Then she said, “Please. Not now, Hugh.”

He nodded. “I’ll leave you alone—you’d better stay here tonight. Lock the door when I leave, and don’t open it to anyone but me. We’ll talk in the morning.”

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you, Hugh—”

He opened and closed a hand. “I love you, Ann,” he said simply. Then he was gone.

From the window of the office just darkened, she watched him make his way to his car parked at the curb below. The wide main street of Arrow Junction was now simply a straight white mark between store buildings, like a wide strip of adhesive tape.

Hugh Stewart’s car coughed, spurting gray exhaust clouds into the snowy wind. Then it moved slowly down the street and turned left at the near intersection. She watched the car disappear from the shifting circle of light created by the swinging street lamp hung in the very center of the intersection. Then she watched his lone car lights moving along the small off-street. The lights disappeared then, shut out by the invisible but real framework of cottonwoods and elms clustered thickly at the next intersection.

Still, Ann continued to look out, beyond the wind-swaying street lamp, hung like a metal dish above the intersection, beyond the dark shaft of the small street and the invisible leaf-stripped cottonwoods and elms, beyond to the black of the night and the snow and the wind and the deepening cold. It was, now, an unseeing look—while her thoughts turned slowly. But if that look had been properly focused, capable of X-ray vision and telescopic power, it would have, at that moment, stared straight into the black cold eyes of Billy Quirter as he lay, gun tucked against belly, in that silent barn.