A Touch of Death (Hard Case Crime Book 17)

  I watched her, thinking swiftly. We were both in one hell of a jam, but I was beginning to get the glimmerings of an idea. It all depended on whether she had the money or not, and I still believed she had it. There was no use even trying to guess whether she had killed Butler, or whether that man but there had, or both of them; but I was beginning to respect the cool and deadly intelligence behind that lovely face, and I was growing more convinced of one thing all the time: that no matter who had killed him, unless that guy out there was a lot smarter than I thought he was, she was the one that had the money. It figured that way.

  “You’re the Homecoming Queen,” I said. “Everybody wants you.”

  “I really don’t see what you’re waiting around for,” she said. “You have pointed out that there is no possibility of escape. I agree with you. Any further discussion of it is superfluous; and you should realize, if it’s entertainment you’re after, that taunting me with it is futile.”

  I leaned back in the chair and blew a smoke ring. “I was going to make you an offer.”

  “What kind of offer?”

  “It doesn’t matter. If you haven’t got that money, I’d just be wasting my breath.”

  She smiled. “You know,” she said, “there is a touching sort of simplicity about you I almost admire. Anyone with a less comprehensive stupidity might get sidetracked once in a while and wander off the main objective, but you never do. You started out to get that money, and by God, you’re going to get it. I almost regret that you won’t.”

  “Well, if you haven’t got it, what’s the use talking about it?”

  She shook her head. “It isn’t a question of whether I have it or not. The real point—as anyone but a thick-headed mastodon would have figured out hours ago—is that if I did have it I’d willingly go to hell before I’d see Diana James get a nickel of it.”

  I put down the cigarette and stared at her. So that was what had been holding up the negotiations. You never knew. They didn’t make sense; they never did, not even the smart ones. Not even to save her own skin …

  “Look,” I said. “The hell with Diana James. Haven’t you heard? She’s been scratched.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that. She double-crossed me before we even started. She told me you were in Sanport, to get me to come up here and shake down the house. What did she care if I got caught?”

  “And that isn’t quite all,” she said. “Think again.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You still haven’t seen the full beauty of it. Suppose I had surprised you and you’d got rattled and killed me? Wouldn’t that have been tragic?”

  I thought about it. The fact that I wouldn’t have been stupid enough to do a crazy thing like that was beside the point. Diana James could easily have been counting on the possibility.

  “Well,” I said. “That’s how it is with you friend Miss James. She’s been dropped from the rolls.”

  “I see,” she said coolly. “And now you’re ready to transfer your greathearted devotion?”

  I walked over and took a good look out the window. The meadow was empty of life. I came back and sat down.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I’m flattered.”

  “Never mind you’re flattered. Have you got the money?”

  “I might have,” she said.

  “Where is it?”

  “I said I might have.”

  “It’ll take more than that, honey,” I said. “Let’s get it on the line.”

  “Why?”

  “You haven’t got a chance. You’re cold meat. As soon as it’s dark and I can get out of here, I’m going to shove. I can get away. And you’ll be a dead woman with a hundred and twenty thousand dollars as soon as your friend out there moves in on you.”

  She stared thoughtfully. “And what is this proposition of yours?”

  “The geetus, baby.”

  “I have it.”

  “You know about not trying to kid me, don’t you?”

  Her eyes were cold. “I said I had it.”

  I took another drag on the cigarette and looked at her a long time. There was no hurry. Keep the pressure on her. “Let’s put it this way,” I said at last. “You’re dead. We both know that. You’re dead twice. If that character out there doesn’t clobber you with his rifle, you’ll be caught by the police and go on trial for murder. With your looks and a good sob story you might beat the chair and get off with life, but it’s a sad outlook either way.

  “Alone, you haven’t got a prayer. No car, no clothes, no place to hide. You’re naked, with the light shining on you. With me helping, you might have a chance. A slim one. Say one in a thousand.

  “My deal is the same one Diana James and your husband cooked up. I’ll try to get you out of here, hide you until some of the pressure is off and we can redecorate you as a blonde or redhead, and deliver you to the West Coast or somewhere. I don’t say I can do it. You can see the odds yourself. But I’ll try.”

  She nodded slowly. “I see. And for how much?”

  “Make it a round number. Say a hundred and twenty thousand dollars.”

  She continued to stare at me. “You know, when you said I was hard, I didn’t realize what an authority I was listening to.”

  “You didn’t think I was going to do it for nothing? Look at the risk. The minute I start to help you, I’m committing a crime myself. And when I lose my amateur standing it’s going to be for big money.”

  “So you’d just take all of it?”

  “That’s right. Of course, if you get a better offer in the next hour or so …”

  “And what would I live on if I did get to the Coast?”

  “What does anybody live on? Go to work.”

  “At what? I never did any work in my life.”

  “How do I know what? I’m not an employment counselor. Is it a deal, or isn’t it?”

  She thought about it for a minute. Then she shrugged. “All right. But suppose you get the money? What guarantee do I have that you’ll carry out your end of it? Just your innate sense of honor?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Enchanting prospect, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Now, where’s the money?”

  She smiled. “That’s the only thing I have in my favor. You’ll have to go through with at least part of your bargain before you even get it.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s in three safe-deposit boxes in Sanport.”

  “Safe-deposit boxes!” I stared at her. “Well, how in the name of God are you going to get at it? With every cop in the state looking for you!”

  “Well, naturally, they’re not rented under my right name.”

  “Oh,” I said. “And where are the keys?”

  “At home.”

  “In your house?”

  She nodded, her eyes a little mocking.

  “But that means that even if we can find some way to get out of here, we’ve still got to go right back in the lion’s mouth.”

  “Umh-humh,” she said. “It isn’t easy, is it? But that’s the reason I engaged such high-priced talent. It’s no job for the inept. Let me know when you think of something.”

  The sun climbed higher. It was hot in the cabin. I tried to make myself sit still and think, but then I’d be up and pacing the floor again. I watched the window constantly.

  There was a way out of it. There had to be. All I had to do was find it. We had to have a car. We couldn’t use her Caddy, but there was another car down there somewhere. He had one. But he also had a rifle, and he knew how to use it.

  “Do you suppose he’s gone?” she asked. She was still sitting at the table, finishing another drink.

  “Of course not,” I said. “He’s just waiting. We have to move sometime, and when we move he lets us have it.”

  “How does he know we haven’t sneaked out the back door and left on foot?”

  “Because,” I explained curtly, “he knows how you’re dressed. H
e knows you’re not going anywhere without a car. And we can’t use the Cadillac, even if he wasn’t watching it with a gun.”

  She poured another drink. The bottle was nearly empty. She held up the glass and looked at it. “Well, you’re the high-priced expert.”

  She was chromium-plated and solid ice both ways from the middle. From her attitude you’d think she was merely a spectator at all this. It was something she was watching from the first row balcony and finding a little tiresome.

  The air was clammy with heat. My shirt stuck to me. I looked at her and the bottle with irritation. “Look. You can lay off that sauce.”

  She glanced briefly up at me. “And you can mind your own business.”

  I sat down across from her. I caught the front of her pajamas and pulled her up straight in the chair. “Let’s get this straight. Right now. If we get out of here, for about the next two months I’m going to have the job of trying to hide you from the police. It’s going to be rough, believe me. And if you get caught I’m in the bucket too. So I don’t intend to make the job any harder by having to watch out for a blabber-mouthed lush wandering around in a fog. You’ll stay sober.”

  There was only faint interest in her face, as if she were just waiting for me to crawl back under a rock. “If you’re certain you’ve finished,” she said, “you might take your hands off my clothing.”

  “Yes, Empress,” I said. I shoved her back in the chair. “But keep it in mind.”

  “Do you intend doing anything about getting us out of here?”

  “I’m working on it, Your Highness. But we can’t go anywhere until after dark, anyway. So keep your pants on.”

  “Barbarian.”

  “Who is that guy out there?”

  “How would I know? He hasn’t sent in his card.”

  “Cut it out. Who is he?”

  “I fail to see where it concerns you. You’re being paid to neutralize him, not identify him.”

  “Boyfriend?”

  “As you wish,” she said boredly.

  “Who killed Butler? Both of you?”

  She made no answer. She merely stared at the empty space where I would have been sitting if I hadn’t already crawled back under the rock.

  Even if we got out of here, I thought …

  Living with her for two months was going to be fun. Which one of us would start to come unglued first?

  Chapter Eight

  I STOOD WITH MY BACK against the rear window and stared out the front. As nearly as I could, I lined up the broken panes front and rear, and sighted. He’d be right in there somewhere. There was no reason for him to move, if he could see everything from where he was. He could watch the house there, and he could cover the road.

  There was nothing to mark his spot, however. One area in the timber was just like any other. I looked farther up the hill. On the skyline and a little to the right I saw a tall tree that had apparently been struck by lightning. That would serve as a reference point.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Getting ready to call a cab,” I said.

  I took off the white shirt. It could be seen too easily in the timber. I found an old blue one in the storeroom and put it on, and shoved the gun back in my belt.

  She was still watching me. I went over to the table, picked up the bottle of whisky, and poured what was left on the floor.

  “You’re going to have to be at least partly sober for this,” I said. “Now. The only reason he hasn’t walked in here and shot you is that he knows I’m here and that I’ve got a gun. It’s his gun. You still following me?”

  She nodded, saying nothing.

  “Well, I’m going out there. I’m going to try to get behind him. I hope I can get out the back without being seen. But the gimmick is that he might not shoot if he did see me. It’s you he wants. So he may pretend he doesn’t see me, and let me go. And when I’m out there on the wide part of the swing he may come in for you.

  “The front door is locked. After I go out, bolt the back one. Sit in the storeroom, because it hasn’t got any windows. And if you hear him on the porch or if he starts to kick in one of these other windows, scream. And keep screaming. Close the door to the storeroom and pile everything in there against it. And if you smell smoke, scream twice as loud.”

  “Smoke?”

  “That’s right. It’s one way.”

  She got it, but it didn’t scare her much. “All right,” she said. “And thank you for your solicitude. It’s touching.”

  “Isn’t it,” I said.

  I opened the back door and stepped out. Nothing happened.

  I dropped off the porch and ran bent over toward the bushes at the edge of the water, the muscles bunched up and icy in the middle of my back. Guessing where he was and what he’d do was fine on paper, but out here in the open I could feel the cross hairs of a telescope sight crawling all over me like long-legged spiders. It was the dead silence all around and not ever knowing that made it bad.

  I hit the bushes and dropped into them. A mosquito buzzed around my face and got in my nose. I stifled the impulse to sneeze, and searched the timber along the lake shore in both directions, turning my head very slowly. Nothing moved. I looked behind me, out across the lake, just for the sheer relief of seeing one place he couldn’t be. It was glassy under the sun. Out in the middle a mud hen swam, jerking its head, and left a V-shaped ripple on the surface. The trees were dark green along the other shore. It looked like the picture on a sporting-goods calendar.

  I started crawling to the right, between the screen of bushes and the water’s edge. I had to slide under the little dock where the two skiffs were tied up. I was behind the shed now. A down log blocked my way. I crawled over it. A limb broke, snapping loudly in the hush. I fell to the ground and waited. Nothing happened. Three minutes went by. Four. I started again.

  Mud sucked at my hands and knees. Sweat ran down my face. I kept watching for snakes. I looked back. The house and shed were lost in the trees, but I could see the dock. I had come over a hundred yards. A little more would do it. Wherever he was, he’d still be near enough to the edge of the timber to see the whole meadow.

  I had to be behind him now. I stood up, wiped some of the mud off my hands, and began slipping through the timber, circling and heading away from the lake. Here in the low ground, underbrush was heavy, but ahead I could see it thinning out as I approached the foot of the hill. I stopped in a minute and held my breath to listen. If he had seen me leave, he’d be closing in now. I’d have to get there fast if she screamed. It was silent except for a squirrel chattering up on the hillside.

  The grade began to pitch upward into the pines and stunted post oak. The soil was sandy here and matted in places with pine needles. My feet made no sound at all. I could see the meadow now and then through the trees, two or three hundred yards off to my left and a little below. I went straight up toward the crest of the ridge. In a few minutes I came out on level ground, turned sharp left, and began searching for the tall pine with the dead top. After another hundred yards I found it and faced down toward the lake for a glimpse of the house to orient myself. Through a small opening in the trees I could see part of the roof. I turned ninety degrees and went straight ahead for a hundred and fifty steps, going very slowly now and taking advantage of all the cover I could.

  I stopped and squatted down at the foot of a pine. I should be directly above him. Somewhere in the trees below he was lying with his rifle beside him, watching the house. Moving nothing but my eyes, I began covering it foot by foot, every tree trunk, log, bush, every patch of mottled sunlight and shadow. As my eyes probed, I rubbed my hands in the sand and then together, to get the rest of the mud off. I checked the gun in my belt, to be sure it would come free when I needed it.

  I could see nothing. No movement, no bit of color that could be clothing. He was farther down. I picked out a clump of bushes ten yards ahead and crept toward it, moving noiselessly on the sand. Crawling up beside it, I lay flat on my s
tomach and studied the hillside below me for five minutes. There was no sign of him.

  I moved again. I could see the edge of the meadow in places below me now and knew this was as far as I could go. If I missed him and got in front of him I was dead. I stopped, lay still, and searched the hillside on both sides and ahead. My eyes made the slow, complete swing from right to left, stopped, and went back again.

  I saw him.

  I saw a shoe. It grew into a leg and then into two legs half screened by the low-hanging branches of a dogwood twenty yards straight down the hill from where I was. The underbrush was heavier here than it had been on top of the hill, but by moving a little to the right I could see him clearly.

  I took a deep breath, feeling tight across the chest. One of us might be dead in the next minute or two. I could try to bluff him with the gun, but suppose he didn’t bluff? He was desperate; he had nothing to lose.

  I could still go back.

  I thought of those three safe-deposit boxes in Sanport and knew there was never any going back now. I started crawling down the hill.

  I watched his legs. There was no movement. I could see his whole body now. The rifle, with its telescope sight, lay across a small log in front of him while he watched the clearing and the house. I searched the ground ahead for any leaf or twig that would make the slightest sound if I stepped on it.

  Ten feet behind him I straightened up on my knees, pulled the gun out of my belt, leveled it at the back of his head, and said, “All right, Mac. Turn around. Without the gun.”

  His face jerked around. He started to lift the rifle.

  “You’ll never make it,” I said.

  His eyes were a little crazy, but he knew I was right. He didn’t have a chance, lying down that way and facing in the other direction.

  “Slide the bolt out,” I said. “All the way. And throw it—”

  I was careless. I’d been intent on him to the exclusion of everything else. It was almost too late when I heard the sound behind me. I started to turn, and the club missed my head just far enough to land on my arm, numbing it out to the fingertips.