“I’ll show ’em,” Al muttered. “I’ll make ’em pay for it. Squatting in a dump like this freezing my ass, kicked around like a dog, and all because I want my own wife—”
He stamped out through the back door, slamming it behind him.
Carolyn left her blanket and scrambled toward the suitcase.
She had forgotten the boards. They made a loud noise. She didn’t stop. She grabbed at the suitcase and got it open. There was a lot of stuff inside, dirty musty-smelling shirts and underwear and socks. She pawed through them frantically, hearing the door open behind her and thinking, I’ll find it, it must be here, and I’ll turn around and kill him.
But there was nothing in the suitcase, and when she turned around he was standing watching her and he was holding the gun in his hand. He must have had it on him all the time, in the big deep pocket of his jacket.
She sat down on the floor and let her hands fall.
He laughed. “It makes me feel good,” he said, “the way you people that think you’re so smart can act so dumb. Now put all that stuff back just the way you found it.”
She looked up at him through the lank down-fallen locks of her hair. “You go to hell,” she said. “And I don’t give a good God damn whether you shoot me or not.”
She stood up and walked back to her blanket. She sat down on it and did not look at him.
He only laughed again and put the gun away. “There’s no rush,” he said. “Tonight’s time enough. It ain’t far off.”
He started to open another beer.
And there was a sound of hoofbeats, and distant voices.
Al tensed and dropped the beer can. Carolyn jumped up. She started to shout and he swung around and clamped his big hand over her face. She fought him with the frenzy of desperation, hearing hope come closer and closer down the road.
The horses were galloping. There were at least three. The voices were boys’ voices. Farm kids out for a ride on their ponies after school. Perhaps they came this way often. There were no cars and the grass-grown road was fine for the ponies to run on.
If she could only make them hear.
She screamed, and all the noise of it was trapped in her mouth and throat by Al’s hand. She tried to kick and thump with her feet against the wall. He pulled her away from it and wrestled her down and held her with one powerful leg clamped over hers. She tried to bite his hand and it was pressed so cruelly into her mouth that she only cut her own lips.
The swift-running hoofs slowed and stopped outside.
She could hear the ponies blowing and shaking their bridles. The boys apparently dismounted. She could hear them talking and laughing. Their voices were clear but the words were obscured by the walls and Al’s muffling arm and the harsh tight sound of his breathing. What are they doing out there? she thought in an agony of hope. Maybe they’ll come in, maybe they play here all the time. But she knew better than that. Al had had to break in through the back door. She heard their voices outside, now near the walls, now farther away. Suddenly there was a sharp noise overhead. One of the boys had thrown a rock at the cupola and it hit and fell bouncing down over the slates of the roof. There was another one, and then more, bumping and clattering on the roof. And in the dark shuttered room Al held her still and there was nothing she could do.
After a while the boys returned to their ponies and rode away and everything was quiet again.
Al waited until the last sound of their going had died away. Then he threw Carolyn on her blanket. She cried bitterly until he shoved a gag in her mouth and stopped her. He tied her hands and feet. Then he went and got the can of beer he had dropped and opened it and drank. His hands shook and the red color was gone from his face.
The wind dropped and the light got fainter and fainter. Presently it was dark. Al had a flashlight. He shaded it under his jacket, turning it on every few minutes to look at his wrist watch. He was talking again, so low and indistinct that she could not hear what he said.
Her own watch had stopped days ago, and she couldn’t see it anyway. But she could hear her heartbeats, light and sharp like the sound of a pendulum, ticking away the minutes. She kept moving her head, trying not to hear them, but she couldn’t escape them.
She thought of Ben.
Al switched the flashlight on again, and now he had the gun in his hands, making sure it was loaded.
He put it in his pocket and got up and turned the beam of the flashlight full on her. He bent and untied her feet.
“Get up,” he said. “It’s time.”
It was twenty minutes to nine on Thursday evening, the seventeenth of November.
The house was quiet. It was full of people but there was no laughter and very little talk. They were all waiting.
Ben Forbes moved restlessly from the living room to the hall and back again. If he sat down he was up again in a few seconds, moving, always moving.
The living room was a sort of gruesome mockery of a party. Ernie and Bill Drumm sat on chairs, Bill physically relaxed but with very alert eyes, Ernie almost as wire-drawn as Ben. They would go with Ben in his car, if the meeting was arranged with Guthrie, Ernie in the back seat and Bill in the deck. Packer and Harbacher were there too. They had an arrangement with the Sheriff’s Office in case the meeting point was outside their jurisdiction. Packer and some other men would follow Ben according to the circumstances, joining forces with the Sheriff’s cars in the same way.
Ben looked at the clock and moved nearer to the phone. His heart began to knock against his ribs and his body went hot and cold by turns.
Lorene Guthrie watched him. She was sitting beside Kratich. Her eyes were very big and surrounded by dark circles. She kept worrying her lips, biting them. All the lipstick was chewed off, leaving her face pale as paper.
Policewoman Dalby sat quietly in a corner of the room, looking as much like Lorene Guthrie as a wig and make-up could accomplish. She was dressed in Lorene’s clothes and she carried one of Lorene’s handbags with everything taken out of it to make room for a Police Positive. She did not really look enough like Lorene, Ben thought, to fool anybody very long, unless it was damned dark indeed. Ernie had made a good try, but it was not going to work. Ben held to that thought. All day he had had to fight against resurgent glimmers of hope. It was better not to have any.
Quarter to nine.
Packer looked at his watch. “I think you’d better stand by the phone, Mr. Forbes.”
Ben went into the hall and sat down beside the stand.
Lorene straightened up in her chair as though she had come to some desperate decision. “Please—”
Everybody looked at her and she stopped.
Kratich said quite gently, “What is it?”
“I wondered—could I have a drink?” She looked pleadingly at Harbacher. “Just a little one. I’m so nervous—”
Her voice became shrill and unsteady. She shut her jaw tight, and Kratich put out his hand and laid it on her arm.
“There’s nothing to be nervous about. He can’t hurt you over the telephone.”
“I know. But I’d like a drink so much.”
Harbacher said, “All right. It might be what she needs.”
“In the kitchen cupboard,” Ben said. Harbacher came back in a minute and shoved a small glass into Lorene’s hand. He sat down again. Ernie looked over at Ben through the hall arch and gave the particular kind of a nod with which a man wishes a friend good luck.
Lorene drank from the glass, sucking big mouthfuls like a child taking medicine. Suddenly her eyes widened. She put the glass aside and sat forward in her chair, her mouth slightly open, her face getting whiter and whiter.
Kratich said sharply, “What is it?”
She didn’t answer. Instead she got up and ran out of the room.
Policewoman Dalby, looking alarmed, sprang up and went after her. They disappeared together into the bathroom like some grotesque sister act. The door slammed.
Kratich stood up, his face dark and stern.
Harbacher looked at Packer, who shook his head. He went and opened the bathroom door. “God damn it,” he said. Lorene was sprawled out on the floor inside. Virginia Dalby said tensely, “She’s passed out. Wait, I’ll get some ice.”
“Never mind,” Kratich said. He pushed in past Packer. “Let me get at her.”
He bent over and hauled her up to a sitting position. Her arms flopped and her head hung down.
“I’m sick,” she murmured. “I’m so sick.”
“I don’t care if you’re dying,” Kratich said. “Get on your feet.”
He braced his knees and heaved Lorene up and held her against the wall.
The phone rang.
Packer spun around in the doorway. “Hold it,” he said to Ben.
Ben stood with his hand on the phone. It rang a second time. He said almost inaudibly, “I can’t wait long.”
Kratich smacked Lorene’s face, two calculated stinging blows, one on each white cheek. The color sprang back into them along the lines of his fingers. She caught her breath in a sobbing gasp and tried to pull away from him.
The phone rang a third time.
Ben said, “For God’s sake.”
Packer shook his head. Ernie and Bill were on their feet and so was Harbacher. Kratich said fiercely to Lorene:
“Just think of one thing. Yourself. Think what Al will do to you if these men don’t catch him.”
He yanked her away from the wall and pushed her out the door.
Lorene put her hands to her cheeks and tottered down the hall toward Ben.
Packer nodded.
Ben picked up the phone.
“Yes,” he said. And then, “She’s right here.”
He held the phone out to Lorene.
She took it. She put it to her ear and said, “Yes, Al. Yes, it’s me.”
Ben stood rigid in the utter silence, watching Lorene’s face. He thought he could hear the distant sound of Al Guthrie’s voice. Several times Lorene said, “Yes, Al.” Her color was coming back and she seemed steadier. She looked around at Ben and Kratich and the policemen, and gradually Ben saw a new expression creep into her eyes. It was as though for the first time she understood the immense importance of her position.
Everything depended on her. The kidnaping had been done because of her, because Al was crazy about her and wanted her back. The whole situation was about her. And now she was actually talking to Al on the phone and he couldn’t hurt her, but she had the power to destroy him. Ben Forbes and the whole police force were waiting for her to do it.
“Sure, Al,” she said, as though she had never been afraid in her life. “I’ve been thinking it over. I’ll give you another chance. But you’ve got to promise not to be mean to me like you were.”
Ben’s mouth was dry. Don’t overdo it, he thought. Please for Christ’s sake don’t get smart.
Kratich watched her from beside the bathroom door with an unwinking stare.
“You really mean it this time?” Lorene said. “All right, I’ll believe you. I’ll believe this time it’s true.”
For just one furtive moment she smiled the proud smug smile of a triumphant child.
“Yes, Al,” she said. “I’ll see you. Yes, sure. Right away.”
She handed the phone back to Ben.
Guthrie spoke in his ear, hoarse and wild. “All right, Forbes, I’ll tell you what to do. But I’m warning you. If you try—”
“You heard Lorene. What could I try?”
“I don’t trust you, see? That’s all. Now you listen and be goddamned sure you get it right.”
He talked and Ben wrote on a pad by the telephone. He had trouble forming the letters. He kept saying, “Yes, I’ve got it.”
“Okay,” said Guthrie finally. “If you start now you can be there in half, three quarters of an hour. I’ll be waiting, only you won’t know where, and I’ll have your wife. You know what I mean, Forbes? She won’t live through another one like you pulled in South Flat.”
He hung up.
Ben put the phone down and stood trembling.
Packer picked up the pad and continued on with it to the bedroom, where Harbacher had been listening in on the line. Ernie and Bill and Virginia Dalby went after him, moving fast.
They listened to the playback. Ben joined them, listening again to Guthrie’s voice. A week, ten days ago, this had seemed like a walking nightmare. Now it was the accepted norm. Carolyn, Guthrie, Lorene, himself. It was difficult for him to realize that within an hour it would all be over.
Lorene walked back down the hall to where Kratich was standing. She smiled and shook back her hair the way a bird will spread its feathers out and preen.
“Well,” she said, “I did it. Aren’t you proud of me?”
“Yes,” said Kratich. “Real proud.”
“Well, what’s the matter? I did what you wanted me to do, didn’t I?”
“Yes,” said Kratich. “Sure.”
Lorene burst into tears of rage and honest bewilderment. “I don’t understand you at all, Vern. I did just what you told me and now you’re mad anyway.”
Kratich said, “I didn’t tell you to enjoy it.” He took her arm and steered her back to the living room. “Oh well, never mind it now. Just quiet down.”
In the bedroom the playback was finished. Harbacher shook his head. “Christ,” he said. “The way he’s got it planned, Forbes and Dalby will be like targets in a shooting gallery.”
“I don’t care,” Ben said. “I’m going.”
He pulled on his coat and started for the door. He did not care who came with him.
Al Guthrie stood in the dark beside the telephone.
Lorene. Lorene.
He could still hear her voice inside his head. “I’ve been thinking it over, I’ll give you another chance.” Still snotty as hell. Another chance. Promise me this, promise me that. Just like he’d run out on her instead of the other way around.
Okay, Lorene, he thought. Okay!
He could almost see her in the dark. All that white skin and red hair, all that soft body big in the right places. A hot flush went over him. Give me another chance, he thought. You do that. And I’ll show you who’s the man of the family.
His face was dripping with sweat. He wiped it with his sleeve.
She’s coming back. She said so. In an hour I’ll have her. Promise this, promise that. Hell. Sure. There’s lots of time.