Stronghold

by Stanley Ellin

  He looks along the line and focuses unsteadily on Anna. “Scared, Anna?”

  “Yes. But I am not afraid of thee, James Flood. I am afraid for thee.”

  “Oh? Anna baby, did anyone in this bunch ever tell you what a miserable old bitch you are? They didn’t, did they? Well, now you know.”

  Game-playing. Thank God, Anna is wise enough not to rise to this provocation.

  Flood turns to me. “The money, Marcus? Where are you keeping it? In your pocket?”

  “That’s why I’m here, Flood. To settle with you about the money.”

  He makes that sweeping motion with the gun again, back and forth. “And what are they here for?”

  “They only want to show you no harm is intended. You know them, Flood. You know that’s the truth.”

  “No harm? You son of a bitch, what do you call your kind of double-cross? Stall that stupid little Jimmy Flood. Screw around until the cops are lined up, ready to go.”

  “No. Listen to me, Flood. There are no police around here. They don’t even know about all this.”

  “And those roadblocks? And that patrol car checking them out?”

  “I don’t know about any patrol car. I put those roadblocks there.”

  “You’re a liar, Marcus. A fucking greedy liar.” Drunk, no question about it. The words are garbled. The bearded lips writhe in the effort to get them out. “So what about the money? What’s there to settle? You pay, I collect. That’s how we settle, right?”

  “Yes. But there are some conditions—”

  “Conditions? Who the hell are you to set conditions?”

  “Flood, be reasonable. Let the women go, and keep me here. They can arrange everything.”

  “Yeah?” At least he is thinking it over. Bloodshot eyes slitted, at least he is thinking it over. “Arrange everything,” he finally says. “How long is that supposed to take?”

  “The vault is set for eight tomorrow morning. If you allow a couple of hours after that—”

  “No. Tonight.”

  “But the vault is set automatically. It’s impossible to—”

  “That’s your problem. Blast the goddam thing open if you have to. Because this is the real thing, baby. So far, it looks like you don’t believe a word I say to you, but I am going to make you a believer, baby. Because these are the conditions. You are going, and everybody else stays right here. And you’ve got three hours to get to town and clean out that bank for me. And take care of those flight arrangements too.”

  “Flood, it can’t be done that way!”

  “You mean Duffy won’t let you do it that way, now it’s getting on night? Because that’s when he takes over?”

  “No. I give you my word he doesn’t know anything about this!”

  I seem to be getting drunk myself on the bursting tension in me. The words pouring out of me sound in my ears as hoarse and slurred as Flood’s. It doesn’t matter. They mean nothing to him anyhow.

  “I am going to make you a believer, Marcus,” he says. “Here and now.” Again that sweeping motion with the gun. “Turn around. Not you, Marcus. Everybody else.”

  I stand rigidly in position. Hesitating, moving uncertainly, the others, one by one, turn and face the road.

  “A believer,” Flood says thickly. “Right here and now.” He moves toward Anna, stops a few paces behind her. He motions at her. “Nobody’ll miss this one, Marcus. She’s overdue. So she gets it now. And every three hours from now until you get back with the goods, another one of these clowns gets it. No more talk, Marcus. Action.” He aims the gun at the back of Anna’s head. “Watch it happen, Marcus.”

  “Flood!”

  He won’t really do it. He can’t do it. But that is the click of the pistol being cocked. And that grimace. Sheer pleasure in what is coming. He will do it.

  My eyes are fixed on that widening grimace as I set myself to spring at him, and suddenly there is no grimace. An explosion above my head, a look of agony—staring eyes, gaping mouth—where there had been a grimace, and now Flood is toppling forward, going down on his hands and knees, releasing the gun as he strains to force himself upright again. No use. Arms and legs give way, and he goes down flat on his face. There is a small red stain on his shirt at the shoulder. It steadily grows larger, strings of it worming their way outward.

  Women screaming. I look up at the widow’s walk. Emily and Deborah. Les, the rifle still at his shoulder. Harve.

  Harve is aiming a finger at me. “Don’t move!” he shouts. “Nobody move!”

  There is still no escape.

  It is Emily who provides the materials, it is Harve who applies the first aid, stripping away the bloody shirt, pouring raw alcohol into the small hole in back of the shoulder, the larger wound above the nipple where the bullet had made its exit, packing bits of cloth into the wounds, padding them over, binding the pads with adhesive tape. It is a crude and painful treatment, and unconscious though he seems to be, Flood, his face ashen, writhes and moans under it, his eyelids fluttering now and then, his lips curling back spasmodically to show clenched teeth.

  Les is stricken by this. He leans over Flood. “I didn’t mean it, Jimmy. I swear to God I went for the gun. That’s all I was aiming at. You know that, don’t you?”

  Harve, hard at work, says sharply, “He’s out cold, so how can he know anything right now? Stop talking foolish, and just get these people locked up in that cellar.” He nods toward me. “Except him.”

  Les is glad to be of service. He has exchanged the rifle for a submachine gun. He motions with it. “All right, everybody, you heard the man. Let’s move.”

  Except me.

  I am left here on my driveway with Harve and James Flood. So poisonous is Flood’s effect that while Harve is buttoning him into one of my shirts which Emily was ordered to fetch for the purpose, and moves Flood’s arm so that it almost brushes my shoe, I involuntarily step back from it as if it would sting me.

  Harve gets to his feet. He looks down at Flood reflectively, then says to me, “Crazy bastard was all of a sudden strung out on knocking off old ladies. Like that Sarah. He gave it to her for good, you know that? Wiped out the nigger too. All of a sudden kill-crazy, you know what I mean?”

  “Yes.” So Digby is dead. It hadn’t been imagination when we thought we heard gunfire from here.

  “Your fault,” Harve says.

  “Mine?”

  “Sure. The way you screwed up everything was what got to working on him. Now you’re going to unscrew them.”

  “Whatever I can do to keep anyone else from being hurt—”

  “Fuck the speeches. Just you answer what I ask. Got that?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, now why’d you bring those people up here?”

  “They wanted to come. They wanted to show you that you weren’t being threatened in any way. All of you.”

  “Yeah, that’s what your wife said. And you know what? You’re all a gang of freaks. How’d you keep the cops away?”

  “I didn’t let them know about this. That’s the truth. You have to believe it.”

  “Shit, you don’t have to sell me. If there was cops in on this, you think they’d let you and those loonies come waltzing up here like you did? But with those roadblocks and the phone out and all, they’ll catch on sooner or later, won’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “So the jackpot question is when. Tonight maybe?”

  “I don’t know. It could be tonight.”

  “And how about your friends down in the cellar? Sure as hell, somebody’ll start wondering about them pretty soon, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now listen close.” The face is no longer so vacuous. There is a sharpness in the eyes. “When you told Flood that bank vault was set for eight o’clock, was that on the level?”

  “Yes. Set automatically.”

  “So we pull out of here right now. You, me, Les, and Jimmy. We hit the road in a car and just kill time out there until eight o’clock.
Then you get us the money, and that’s all there is to it. No fuss, nobody gets hurt. You stay with us until we have the money and some kind of head start.”

  “But you can’t get past those roadblocks in a car.” His face turns sullen. I must talk fast, talk with conviction. “Anyhow, there’s a way down to the highway from the back of the house, and a car waiting there. A pickup truck.”

  “Waiting there? For what?”

  “My son-in-law—you saw him this morning—well, he and I thought Flood might move out that way. We wanted to know about it, if he did.”

  Harve ponders this, gnawing at a fingernail. “How much of a trip down to that truck?”

  “Fifteen or twenty minutes, if we move fast. But we’ll have to start now while there’s still some light.”

  Anything to get them away from here. And no matter how much I want to, I can’t do it alone. David must be part of it.

  It is our turn to be the hostages.

  Harve worries the fingernail with his teeth. His eyes are remote, his brow furrowed in heavy thought. “All right,” he says. “That’s how we do it. I guess I don’t have to tell you what happens if there’s any kind of double-cross.”

  “No,” I say. “You don’t.”

  Inside the house, we must wait for Les, who seems to be making a project of locking up his captives in the cellar.

  Maddening.

  Flood, laid out on a couch, stirs fitfully now and then. The color is returning to his face. And I must get them away from here, I am in a fever to get them away from here, before Flood is himself again. Comatose as he is, his presence is unnerving. The image of him fully conscious again is terrifying.

  Finally Les appears in the doorway, and Harve says, “Took you long enough.”

  “Yeah. There’s stairs out to the yard from that cellar, and drop doors. Wired them up good just to make sure.”

  “All right then, let’s roll.”

  Thank God.

  We leave by way of the kitchen. I lead the way, Harve close behind me, the submachine gun nudging my spine. Les brings up the rear, the inert Flood over his shoulder. Passing Sarah Frisch’s room, I see the door is closed. She was too old for her duties, poor soul, but I could never bring myself to pension her off. It would have been better if I had.

  The slant of the outside cellar doors under the kitchen window, fresh wire showing through their hasps. The cellar is windowless, but sooner or later Kenneth will work either these doors or the hallway doors open. Then they will come out to the dead, Sarah Frisch and Digby.

  And to the missing.

  Myself. And David. If he is there in the truck. If he is not, what happens? That way, at least, it will come down to me alone, the intended victim, the proper victim.

  Even if I survive whatever is coming, this house will never again be the same for me.

  No more sun, but a crimson glare along the far hills as if the woodland on them were aflame just below the horizon. We cross the lawn, enter the trail single file, Harve poking me with the gun every few steps. He is not urging me to move faster, because we are moving at a good pace as it is; he is simply reminding me that the gun is there. Always there.

  The going is not hard at first. But after we pass the small waterfall marking where the trail becomes the dry bed of a rivulet winding down to a culvert under the highway, it becomes much harder. There is water in the rivulet during spring thaws; it has shaped the channel into a narrow V, washed jagged rocks into every twist and turn, exposed tree roots at the base of the V. It is a test of good sight and good balance to move quickly along this obstacle course, and the failing light makes it a more and more impossible test. I skid, slide, trip over shadowy obstacles, but never slacken my pace. Behind me, Harve and Les, grumbling and cursing, somehow keep the pace.

  Point of no return.

  We must get so far from the house before complete darkness that there will be no return to it for them. Never any return.

  Then, at a sharp bend, lights show below. Headlights moving in both directions along the highway. “Hold it,” Les says behind us, and Harve catches my arm in a paralyzing grip, pulling me to a standstill. We turn. Flood is on his feet, swaying a little, clutching at his shoulder. Les reaches out a hand to steady him, and Flood angrily thrusts away the hand.

  The silence around us is so deep that I can hear the breath rasping in Flood’s throat as he looks from one to the other of us. He fixes on Harve. “No cops,” he says scathingly. “That’s all you’ve got in that thick head is there’s no cops. Then you go to sleep and let them take us right out.”

  “Jimmy, it wasn’t cops,” Les says. “It was me. But I swear I was going for your gun. I didn’t figure to hit you. I don’t know how it happened. I swear to God.”

  “You?” Flood says.

  “Him,” Harve says. “You were out of your skull, man, looking to knock off that old lady. And where the hell would it get us?”

  Flood tries to digest this. He points at Les and says to Harve, “You let him blast me?”

  “Man, you think if we wanted to really blast you, you’d be here right now? And it’s working fine this way. We got the man here, there’s a car waiting down there, tomorrow we collect all the money he’s got to give. And we keep him along with us as long as we have to.”

  “Where’d you get that brainstorm?” Flood says. Now he points at me. “From him?”

  “It’s a good deal, Jimmy. Man, you don’t like it, you can just park your ass on that rock there and say goodbye right now.”

  Les says pleadingly, “I near broke my back getting you down here this far, Jimmy. Now what kind of way is that to be going on?”

  “It’s still phase two, remember?”

  “More like two and a half,” Harve says.

  Flood’s breathing rasps in his throat. He puts his hand to his shirt at the waist, leaves it poised there. “I don’t have a gun.”

  Harve says, “You can’t handle one anyhow, what with that hole in you. That’s another thing. We’re stuck in that house, we can’t get you any doctoring. Out on the road we can.”

  “I can do fine without any doctor. But not without a gun.” Flood plucks at his shirt front as if to demonstrate the emptiness behind it. “Not like any fucking pigeon.”

  “Look—” Harve says.

  “A gun,” Flood says. “Or do you figure on cashing me in if somebody moves in on us?”

  “God damn, you know better than that.”

  “Then show me.”

  Harve hesitates, then draws the pistol from his belt and holds it out butt-first. I observe that as he does this, the barrel of the submachine gun under his arm swings away from me and is leveled at Flood. Flood observes it too. He takes the pistol awkwardly in his left hand and shoves aside the menacing barrel with it. “Don’t be stupid,” he says coldly to Harve. “We started this together, we finish it together.”

  “That is the truth,” Les says eagerly.

  James Flood is in command again.

  He says to me, “Where’s that car?”

  “On the highway near the trail. It’s a pickup truck. My son-in-law is with it.”

  “All right, let’s see. And keep it slowed down. We don’t walk out there wide open, understand?”

  I keep it slowed down. Another sharp bend, and another, the last one. The channel of the dried-up rivulet becomes deeper and narrower approaching the mouth of the culvert, so we must leave it and walk its narrow margin. The embankment is not steep, but it is a trial for Flood. He strains and struggles, alternately planting one foot, dragging the other, but when Les again offers a helping hand, it is thrust away once more. On the embankment he lurches along half doubled over, making it, I think, on animal courage alone, one arm dangling uselessly, the other hand with a death grip on that gun.

  The highway. The northbound lane. Scattered traffic, the headlights flashing in our faces as cars move north to Ticonderoga, Lake Champlain, Canada.

  Flood motions with the gun. “Is that the truck?”
/>
  It is conspicuous in its cream-colored body, its hood yawning open, its dimmers aimed at us. It is twenty or thirty yards away, parked on the shoulder of the road. Someone squatting there beside the open hood suddenly stands. David. “Yes,” I say. “That’s it.”

  Now David takes notice of us, but in this gloom can he recognize me as one of the party? There are four of us here, but there should be four without me. He slams down the truck’s hood, starts moving toward the driver’s seat.

  “Yell,” Flood says to me. “Yell your fucking head off. Otherwise, he’s the one who gets it right now.”

  As loud as I can, I yell, “David!” I wave my arms wildly and call the name again. He stops in his tracks, stands staring in my direction.

  “Move,” Flood says to me.

  I move. We come up to the truck, and David says to me in bewilderment, “What happened? What’s going on? Where’s Digby?”

  “Dead,” I answer, and Flood says angrily, “Shut up, both of you, and just listen …”

  He is going to say more, but he doesn’t. He is looking—we are all looking—at the car slowing down beside the truck, a flasher blinking on its roof.

  The highway patrol.

  Dear God, now of all times.

  The car stops. The trooper beside the driver thrusts a sharp-featured face out of the window. “What is this?” he demands of David. “Couple of hours ago you told me it was just a quickie repair job. You figure on putting up here for the night?”

  “No. It’s okay now. It’s all fixed.”

  “Is it?” Sharp features and sharp eyes. They examine us one by one. Flood has moved up close behind me; his gun is concealed between us. Harve holds the submachine gun behind him. The trooper turns to David again. “Where’d these people come from? They weren’t around last time.”

  Silence. Too long a silence. Then Flood’s gun is prodded demandingly into my back. I point at the ridge towering above us. “I live up there, Officer. We came down here when we saw the truck was in trouble.”