parked as close to the back of the house as he could. Digging some rags out of the trunk, he also found a pair of leather gloves and went back into the house with all of it.
He started with the loose stuff in the kitchen, worked his way through the ground floor room by room, and then went upstairs and through the rooms up there. Then he started back down, polishing the banisters, doorframes, light switches, doorknobs, and even the panels of doors, in case they had pressed his hands against those, too.
Wilder wasn’t sure any of this business was going to do any good. Maybe you had to scrub a lot harder than he was doing to get fingerprints off things, but since he had to wait for the snatchers to arrive with their kidnap victim, he figured he might as well keep busy. Although, the easiest way would be to just burn the house down.
For a moment he gave that some thought but decided against it, at least for the time being. After he squared things away with the three jokers and their frisky little head crusher, he might have to try that way. First, he had to wait for them to show.
He kept on scrubbing at invisible fingerprints in the dark house. Once he paused in his work thinking he heard a car approaching. He crouched beside one of the front windows for a minute or two, saw nothing, decided he had imagined it, and got back to his housework.
Finishing the ground floor, he went over it again for places he might have missed. Wilder wiped the cellar door, the cellar light switch, and then climbed out onto the back porch and went over the parts of the door he was likely to have touched when he had broken in. He noticed the scatter of glass he had knocked and pulled out of the top half of the door after kicking it in, cursed, and began wiping the pieces which had straight edges that had fallen upon the floor. After that was finally done, he thought for a moment, went around the outside of the house to the side porch and up onto it, where he wiped the front entrance free of his prints, too.
He was standing on the porch looking northward down the slope at the Old Iron Bridge and the lights of the city across the river when the headlights of a car appeared in the west. It was coming along the dirt road from the highway.
Wilder went to the back end of the porch and jumped the rail. Crawling into the kitchen again, he heard the car motor out front get briefly louder, as it was given enough gas to make the steep stretch up the driveway. When it reached the level area the motor quieted.
Wilder picked up the shovel and stayed close to the kitchen door. If they had already killed whomever they’d kidnapped, they would be bringing the body around to the back and close to the cellar stairs in the kitchen. Wilder didn’t think they’d do any killing before they arrived here, but with kidnappers you never know. They were all a little cracked for even pulling a snatch.
Then his hand tightened on the shovel. If they drove around to the back of the house, they’d see his car! He should never have left his own car so close to this place. All the sapping his skull had taken earlier must have scrambled his brains. “What brains?” he muttered disgustedly.
He listened. Their car wasn’t going along the side of the house. They were stopping beside the house. Wilder breathed a sigh of relief. He knew he was in luck. He glided silently toward the front of the house, hearing car doors opening and the sound of voices.
Peering through one of the living room windows, he saw a man pushing a young woman up the side porch’s steps. Another man was down by their car leaning into the open window talking to the one at the wheel for a moment before turning and following the first one and the woman up onto the porch. Wilder went over and stood beside the door with the shovel handy in case his mitts weren’t enough.
A key entered the door lock. The door swung open. The woman was gasping, “Please, I have money. I’ll pay you more than . . .” The man laughed and shoved her ahead of him through the doorway. She stumbled over a piece of furniture and fell to the floor. The man followed her inside.
The one coming up the porch steps cautioned, “Don’t turn on any lights. We can finish her in the cellar.” The man in the doorway grunted a reply just before Wilder hit him. He used his left fist, keeping the shovel ready for the other one if he needed it.
The one on the porch heard some of the noise. “What’s the matter?”
Wilder was busy trying to grab the one he’d clipped, to keep him from hitting the floor. “Tripped,” Wilder growled. “This damn furniture . . .”
“Alright,” the second man said. “Cut the noise.” He came inside just as Wilder was easing the unconscious man to the floor. Stopping, he peered into the dark room. “What the hell are you doing?” he whispered impatiently. “I told you to wait. We’ll kill her downstairs . . .”
The woman on the floor turned and screamed. The man in the doorway swung his head, saw her, looked at Wilder in the dark and at the shape on the floor near him and jerked a gun out. By then, Wilder was already swinging the shovel. Its edge slashed into the man’s side, bending him over. The gun clattered to the floor. Releasing the shovel handle, Wilder moved in on the man. This was the one who had let the other two do all the hauling, but who had done most of the sap work on Wilder’s head. Wilder drove knuckles into the man’s face. The first sock would have quieted him, and the second one put him out, but Wilder drove a third and a fourth in, fast, before the man could fall.
The woman on the floor was silent, staring up at Wilder. He went over to her. She was crying, crawling away from him backward across the floor. “Who . . . who are you?” she whimpered, crawling away faster. “Leave me alone . . . leave me alone.”
Her voice rose; she sounded hysterical. Her breathing was hoarse, desperate. Wilder decided not to bother trying to calm her. Leaning over, he clipped her once, not too hard, just enough to put her out and stop her noise.
She fell loosely onto her side. Her head hit the floor harder than he would have liked, but he shrugged and went back to the doorway to hunt for the gun. It turned out to be a small automatic and Wilder had a hard time picking it up from the floor with the leather gloves on his hands. He couldn’t make out what caliber it was but he had no time to care. The one in the car was calling out something.
Wilder peered through the open front doorway at the idling car. He could make out the pale blur of the driver’s face leaning toward the open window, out of the dark interior.
“Hey, you guys!” he was calling softly. “Keep that bitch from hollering. I can hear her out here.”
Wilder jacked the action of the automatic to make sure there was something in the chamber in case he had to shoot the one in the car to keep him from driving away. A round popped out of the gun and fell onto the floor. Wilder left it there, went out across the porch, down the steps, and along the dirt path to the car.
The man inside asked, “What’s going on in there?”
Pulling open the door, Wilder leaned in as the overhead light came on and pointed the gun at the driver’s face. “Come inside,” Wilder told him. “We’ll find out what’s going on.” The man stared a moment before he recognized Wilder. Then he started to cry.
Wilder reached in and grabbed him, hauled him out, kicked the car door shut to kill the inside light, and checked the man for hardware. He found a revolver, stuck it under his belt, and prodded the crying man up the path and the porch steps, and into the house.
“Sit on the floor,” Wilder told him. “Over by the window, where I can see you.”
The man was starting to hiccup as he went over and sat in the moonlight shining down through one of the windows. He let up a little on the crying but the hiccupping was getting louder.
Wilder checked the other two men and found them still out. He used their shoelaces to tie their wrists, went over to the woman, found her still unconscious, and went back to the hiccupping man. Squatting beside him, he watched his scared eyes and listened to the hiccups for awhile.
“Where’d you get her?” Wilder asked.
The driver tried to answer but the hiccups slowed things. Wilder slapped him and repeated his question.
“C
ountry club,” the man finally gasped. “When her escort drove out the gate, we tailed them, cut them off, took her, and brought her here.”
“What happened to the escort?”
“Jake tied him up and drove his car to where the guy lives. We followed along behind. Jake parked in front of his house, got in with us, and we came up here.”
“No,” Wilder said, “he’d be spotted too soon, left in his car like that.”
“It’s a convertible,” the man blurted, forgetting his hiccups. “We put him in back, down on the floor. Nobody can see him back there with the top up.”
Wilder thought about it and shrugged. “Okay. When were you collecting the ransom? Tonight?”
“I . . . I don’t know . . .”
“Don’t bother lying,” Wilder growled. He stared at him a moment, then shrugged. “It doesn’t make any difference to me. Not now. I’m in the clear. Your little frame is out. You can’t nail me for this snatch. I’ve made sure there hasn’t been a snatch. And don’t worry about me turning any of you jerks over to the law. You’ll be up-ended one of these days. You can’t help but be. You’re dumb enough to see to that, without any help from me. So answer what I ask you. Was the ransom pickup tonight?”
After hesitating a second, the man shook his head.
“No. Tomorrow noon.”
Wilder nodded. “That sounds right, when the banks are open. Who’s in this thing, besides you and those two?”
“I don’t know. Jake handled all the . . .”
“It won’t wash,” Wilder said. “You must know.”
“Mister, I swear I don’t know. Jake told us, be careful he said. All through it, be careful. No fingerprints. Wear gloves, always. Get a fall guy. Fix it so the Feds can hang it on somebody, so they won’t keep looking for anyone else, even if they suspect more than one handled it.” He squinted up at Wilder, his eyes gleaming in the moonlight. “I swear, mister, that’s the way Jake set it up. He kept it that way, too. He’s the only one knows if anyone else is in the deal. The split’s three ways, so there can’t be.”
“Maybe the split’s three ways on the part you see,” Wilder pointed out.
The man shook his head. “That’s the funny part. We pick up the ransom money ourselves, all three of us. There’s no middleman.”
Wilder was beginning to lose interest but he asked, “Who makes the call? Or delivers the ransom note?”
“We do,” the man replied. “Or anyway, Jake does. We . . . stash the broad here, leave, and don’t come back. Then we make the money touch. Jake makes it.”
Wilder chuckled. “All right. I’d better start talking to Jake.” Reaching out, he probed the side of the driver’s head roughly with his fingertips. The man winced away. Wilder grinned. “Smarts, huh? Is that where I clipped you when the three of you picked me up at the square?” The man nodded, his eyes scared, peering up at Wilder.
“Then I owe you for a little sap work you put in on my head.” The man tried to slide away along the wall, but before he could, Wilder snapped a short one into his jaw. His head clunked against the wall, bounced off it, fell forward, and hung down his chest.
Wilder went over to the one he took to be Jake, the one he had clipped four times. He tried to wake him but couldn’t. He stopped trying, listened to the way Jake was breathing, and decided Jake wouldn’t be waking up except in a hospital, or maybe a morgue. Wilder shook his head. He shouldn’t have piled in those two extra punches. It never paid to be vicious.
He carried the woman out and then around behind the house to his car. He laid her on her side on the front seat with her legs and feet stuck forward under the dashboard, and her head near the middle of the seat where he could get a hand over her mouth