One Monday We Killed Them All (26 page)

“Can I at least untie her, now that she can’t sneak off in the dark? She wants to come outside and—”

“Nobody moves an inch away from this house, you, Herm, Meg, nobody. Not until I say it’s okay. Get your guns.”

“Hell, you
are
jumpy! Can I untie her?”

“Yes, but she doesn’t leave the house.”

“Okay, okay, okay.”

A few minutes after McAran had gone inside, Miller wheeled suddenly and went in. I could hear their voices, but I couldn’t distinguish the words.

Perhaps three minutes later, I heard a shattering of glass and a splintering of wood. It sounded to me as though it came from the other side of the house. I waited for a sound of shots, but none came. I found out later that the noise had been caused by Morgan Miller as he kicked a window out, a dormer window in the small attic, opening out onto the west slant of the roof. He climbed out, clambered up the slope of asphalt shingles, and stood cautiously erect, astride the rooftree. I caught a glimpse of movement and looked up with great care and saw him walk to the north peak of the roof and stand, looking out across the pastureland. It seemed to me he would be able to look down and see over the wagon, see the bright blue of the Frankel woman’s sweater. He turned slowly and carefully and walked out of sight. I let my breath out.

He walked to the other end of the rooftree, I learned, and looked carefully around. Two of Wheeler’s men were behind the stone foundation of the church. One was crouched close against the wall. The other was prone. Miller spotted his legs. He swung the carbine to his shoulder, aimed with more care than any of us would have expected, and smashed a knee to junk and ruin. The instant he released the shot, Miller was running recklessly down the slant of the roof toward the dormer window. The injured deputy gave a high whistling scream of shock and pain. Several men took snap shots at the moving target, but Miller made it back into the attic.

“Hold your fire!” a huge voice ordered. I knew that voice. It was the emotionless voice of D. D. Wheeler, vastly amplified by the battery-operated bull horn his people had
packed in. “Hold your fire!” The voice echoed and rumbled off the hills.

“Morgan Miller! Morgan Miller! Answer me.”

“Bastards!” Miller yelled from inside the house. Compared to the bull horn, his voice sounded thin and hysterical. “Dirty cop bastards!” He yelled curses and obscenities until his fury was spent and his voice had begun to grow hoarse.

“Miller, you’re surrounded by State, County and City Police. Every possible exit from that house is covered. You’re not going to get another shot at anybody. We got all the tools we need to pry you out, you and Kostinak and McAran and Deitwaller. So do it the hard way or do it the easy way, it comes out the same any way you play it. We got all summer at full pay. By tonight, if that’s the way you want to play, we’ll have generators trucked in here, and light you up like an operating room. So come on out now. You’ll live longer.”

There was no excitement in that voice. It was cold, final, almost bored.

There was a long silence from the house.

“Talk it over and walk out with your hands tall,” the big voice ordered.

When the echoes ceased, McAran yelled, “Fenn? You out there, Fenn?”

I had no authority to answer him. The Frankel woman suddenly lurched over onto her back. She stared steadily at me, with leopard-cage eyes, with a hatred nothing could diminish.

“Hillyer, report here,” the big horn brayed.

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.