The girl’s mother and stepfather had disapproved strongly of her working at the Speedy-Q because of the late hours and the vulnerability of such places, and it was to a high-school friend since moved to Denver that Ellie had confided by letter certain drawbacks to her new job. The Denver papers had carried the story of her abduction in capsule form, because it was possible that she had been transported over a state line, and the friend, Joanne Faber, had seen it on her return from a skiing vacation and telephoned the Albuquerque police.
What she had to report wasn’t much, but it was sinister. Early in December Ellie had written to say that she had an admirer who gave her the creeps by cruising up in a van, usually at about ten or ten-thirty, and simply parking there and staring into the store. He was always alone. In a following letter he had come inside, not to buy anything but to ask her for a date.
Here, where there should have been physical details, there were none, but Ellie Peale could not have known how important they would be. Joanne Faber still had the letter, and read from it: “ ‘He’s really weird. He reminds me of George Anderson, remember him?’ ”
Again, what sounded promising was not. Joanne Faber explained that the only memorable feature of this boy had been his preoccupied way of crossing the high-school campus, so that when he tripped or bumped into other students he never looked down or back to see what had caused the impediment to his progress.
Singleminded, indrawn, taking no heed of obstacles in his path. It brought back memories of a case, a dozen years ago but vivid in its unpleasantness, in which a quiet, bespectacled sophomore, after admiring a classmate from afar for most of a semester, had waylaid the girl a half mile from her home, made unsuccessful advances, beaten her to death with a brick and buried her body. The psychiatric report had said, “Inability to cope with real or imagined rejection,” which to the people who had to deal with the results seemed something of an understatement.
They were dealing here with weeks instead of months, but also with a man instead of a boy. In view of the unbalanced nature of the act, and the time elapsed, the prospects for Ellie Peale did not look bright.
On the other hand, the police now had hold of a slender thread. The convenience store would have its regular customers, people living nearby who depended on it for cigarettes or a loaf of bread, and someone must have been curious about the frequently parked van with its single occupant. It was true that no one had come forward in spite of the extensive television and newspaper coverage of the case and the appealing quality of the girl herself, but the number of people who said defensively, “Well, I Wasn’t sure,” or “I might be getting an innocent person in trouble” or even, “Nobody asked me,” was astonishing.
In the morning, concentrate on that.
“There must be something here, goddamn it!” Claude had convinced himself that there would be penicillin or an equivalent in the refrigerator; finding none, he spun and hurled ajar of mustard shatteringly against the far living room wall. The shelf from which he had taken it looked as though it had been pawed by a foraging bear. The terrified Afghan bounded up on the couch to seek protection from the small child who, unnerved by the explosion of glass and not at all sure of the large dog’s intentions, began to cry.
“Get it clean for now,” said Sweet economically. He had filled the steel sink with scaldingly hot water while the other man used the electric shaver he had brought, and produced a cake of soap from the cabinet beneath. “There’ll be an all-night drugstore on the way. Hurry up, Claude. This guy won’t wait.”
His half brother, startlingly transformed by the neat, deep-blond wig concealing the dark hair he had had trimmed for Ellie Peale’s benefit, turned a face suffused with rage and pain but plunged his hand wincingly into the sink. Sweet, his jaw feeling naked, walked down into the living room and confronted the wailing child on the couch. “You shut up,” he said with ferocity.
Rosie, who had never before been spoken to with real menace, understood at once and subsided into jerky, wide-spaced gasps. Sweet was uneasy with children at the best of times, and this specimen, with her tiny monkey face and big dark eyes, made him more nervous than most. He presented his back to her while he cut the telephone cord, then gave his attention to Mrs. Balsam’s navy blue handbag on top of a bookcase. Her car keys were in it; he pocketed them.
Was it possible that she was dead? Claude swore that he hadn’t touched her, hadn’t even seen her, and he was obviously telling the truth. But heart attacks could come on without Warning, and it was those nimble types w ho suddenly dropped in their tracks while the ones with whole lists of ailments tottered on forever.
The other set of car keys that mattered were in the handbag he had yanked off the niece’s wrist. Not replying to the hammering on the bedroom door, or the cried If you’ve hurt that child— She isn’t well, can’t you see that?” Sweet walked silently to the patio door, picked up the bag, returned with it to the living room. Under Rosie’s terrified stare, ignoring the timid advances of the dog who had had a kick aimed at her by Claude, he went rapidly through its contents.
The keys weren’t there; the girl must have them in a pocket, as he had tested both cars on his arrival and found them locked. Was it important? Sweet didn’t think so. There were other ways of preventing her from getting to a telephone too soon.
Claude appeared, jacket-cuff refastened, forearm held away from his body in a gingerly curve. Sweet scooped all the coins out of the niece’s change purse, shook the bag for any betraying clink of metal from the bottom, and said briefly, “Get in the truck.”
Claude gazed uneasily at the couch. “What about the kid?”
“She goes in the bedroom. As asked. Will you for Christ’s sake—”
Claude went out the front door fast, closing it behind him. Sweet walked to the couch and picked up the flinching, recoiling, corduroy-clad little figure. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, because he did not want the niece flying at him in response to panicked screams; he had involved himself in trouble enough.
The encounter under the patio light had been unavoidable, with time running out, but Sweet thought he could survive it easily. It was conceivable that he had been taken note of while working on Mrs. Balsam’s corral, but the blazer and slacks which Teresa had nagged him into buying, plus the raincoat, created a very different effect. With his beard shaved off he looked younger and more diffident. The niece could describe him to police as Anglo, average height, with brown hair and blue eyes, but how many men in the surrounding area, let alone the city, must that image cover?
And within a little more than two hours, Claude safely delivered to Patch and on his way out of the state, he and Teresa would be in Ojo Caliente with a swarm of her relatives who would swear if questioned that he had been there all evening.
He said evenly to the bedroom door, “I’m going to put the kid in there, so don’t give me any trouble and don’t come out for fifteen minutes.”
He turned the key in the lock, opened the door just wide enough to thrust the child through, closed it again and, covered by the girl’s frantically relieved, “Rosie. Don’t worry, everything’s all right,” relocked the door soundlessly. He knew where almost everything was in this house, and before he followed Claude out into the dark he collected a wooden-handled knife with a sharp three-inch blade.
“He frew a thing,” said Rosie, gathered up into safe arms, and Amanda, immeasurably grateful for this slight, warm weight, said, “But lie’s gone, and he won’t come back.”
Had she heard the very faint echo of the heavy front door a minute or two earlier, the departure of what she somehow was sure was the object-thrower, the black shape from the cellar? She waited tensely, and had to strain for the second exit: The man in the raincoat was quieter.
The car keys seemed to burn in her pocket, but victims of bank robberies usually obeyed their staying injunctions. Still listening to the night, Amanda put on Rosie’s socks, neglected before in her wild haste; the car would be bitterly cold
at first, with every square inch of clothing a help. She was presently rewarded by the purring vibration of an engine, dimming, vanishing.
Only nine minutes had gone by, but she went at once to the bedroom door. It remained firmly locked.
Briefly and nonsensically—as if she could ever have trusted him in the first place,—Amanda’s eyes filled with tears at the perfidy of this. He was away in his car; he must have a continuing plan for his fugitive friend; he would undoubtedly have done something to the telephone, so why . . . ? Was he, in spite of her assurance to Rosie, intending to come back?
The Afghan, who did not like being alone when she knew there was company to be had, whimpered throatily at the door. Amanda said distractedly, “No, Apple,” and turned and looked around her.
Two hours ago—was it only that?—she had found this room tranquil and attractive. Now, seen through a fast blur which had to be blinked away, it might have adopted that appearance for purposes of entrapment. The two rectangular windows facing the road and set high in the wall on either side of the bed could not possibly be gotten through. The picture window opposite was flanked with narrow ones which levered out, but because of the contour of the land there was a drop. Amanda could maneuver herself through, but not holding Rosie; the child would have to jump.
And if she were too frightened to jump, Amanda would have to fumble her way through the dark to the corral for bales of alfalfa on which to stand.
She could hear her own unnatural breathing—gasp, hold, exhale. She longed for one of her increasingly rare cigarettes, but there wasn’t time even if any had been at hand. She threw back the bed coverlet, stripped off the top blanket, folded it, crossed to one of the flanking windows. And discovered that the screens were still in place.
“Oh, God!” she said fiercely aloud, and that was a mistake; it made an instant hole in her precarious self-possession.
The top wing nut holding the screen turned easily. The bottom one would not. At the other window the screen seemed destined to stay in place until the end of time, without tools. Amanda ran to the bureau, searched its top in vain for manicure scissors or tweezers or any other implement, and wrenched open the middle drawer. Perhaps among the jewelry in the leather case?
Fingers shaking because the hands on the bedside clock seemed to be picking up speed, she snatched out a pair of Zuni bracelets with tapering silver ends. The coral one was too thick to fit into the bottom nut’s narrow slot; the turquoise worked.
Amanda removed the screen, cranked the window open, pulled the tufted hassock into place, and stood Rosie on it. She said intensely, “We have to go home, Rosie, and the door doesn’t work so we have to use this window. I’ll go out first, and then you sit here—like this —and let go when I tell you and I’ll catch you. I won’t drop you, I promise.” She searched the small face with its remains of tears, not liking to use this particular prod, knowing that she had to. “Will you do that? We don’t like those men.”
Rosie nodded transfixedly. Amanda edged the hassock a little to one side, dropped the blanket out, and found that her coat was hindering. She unbuttoned it and flung it after the blanket, got one leg out and then the other, after some difficult pivoting, and dropped into the dark, only guessing where the ground was.
Her right ankle received a bolt of fire, and she had to steady herself against the house, head down, before she could bend awkwardly for her coat and put it on. She thought at first that the pain had dizzied her, but the night was actually in motion. The snow predicted for midnight had arrived ahead of schedule.
Although the window sill wasn’t more than six inches above her upreached arms, she was sharply worried about this unavoidable separation from the small creature inside the house. She called, “Rosie?” with a quickening of alarm, and the child appeared almost at once, one arm adorned with the Zuni bracelets. She was gazing down with solemn interest, her fear apparently forgotten in bemusement at these strange goings-on.
“Hold on tight, and sit down where I showed you,” instructed Amanda.
Slowly, doubtfully, Rosie obeyed. Amanda positioned herself, already braced for the shock to her throbbing ankle. “Now let go, Rosie.” She took an encouraging grip on the corduroyed legs. “Let yourself fall out.” To her disbelief, Rosie wagged her head. Even with the light behind her it was possible to see her confiding smile, her conviction that this was their private joke, that no adult would really expect her to do the kind of thing she had always been expressly forbidden.
Was the man who had snatched her from Amanda heading for the driveway right now? It would be far too dangerous to give a sudden yank at the dangling and bird-like legs. Amanda said in her steeliest voice, “Let go, Rosie. I’m not going to tell you again.”
Either because this was the Lopezes’ ultimate threat, or because she was taken off balance by the stern unfriendliness of someone she trusted, Rosie came plummeting in such a wildly neck-clasping fall that Amanda staggered briefly. Her ankle roared with pain. She gathered up the blanket, wrapped it envelopingly around her charge, and went past the end of the house at a limping run.
No night with snow on the ground was completely black, even to eyes dazzled by fierce concentration on a lighted window. Here was the driveway, clearly delineated, and there was her car, parked behind Mrs. Balsam’s. The very fact of escape so near seemed to tempt a sudden rocketing of headlights with someone dangerous behind them, and Amanda, terrified of dropping the keys, had trouble locating the lock.
But the door was finally open and Rosie in her cocoon of blanket deposited on the passenger seat. With the door closed and the button pushed down, a kind of trembling reaction, almost a lassitude, set in; for a few moments Amanda simply sat. Then, foot placed high on the accelerator, hoping to take most of the strain with her heel, she started the car, switched on her lights, set the wipers moving on the furred windshield. The snow fell straight and thick, a soundless white downpour.
Back in a fast arc; in fact, speed all the way home: The sooner she saw a policeman the better. She was not going to accomplish either. The car, pleasantly responsive since its major tune-up a month ago, bumped sluggishly in reverse like something waked out of a profound sleep in a junkyard.
For the second time in less than twenty minutes, Amanda came close to tears. She had never gotten around to buying a flashlight for the glove compartment because she seldom drove at night, but there were matches there. She got out of the car and circled it. All the tires had been slashed; they were not only flat but puddled.
Set out for that distant glimmer of light on foot, in the snow, carrying Rosie in the slipping blanket, with her ankle biting her at every step? As if by way of firm advice, the light blinked off. Even in its damaged state, even if there might be steering problems, the car would be transport for at least a while, and shelter and a measure of protection as well. Once she was past this lonely stretch of road there would be a chance of meeting other cars, although it was getting late, and if she drove with her emergency flashers on and sounded her horn—
Not long ago, in a horrifying newspaper story, a man whose wife was in the throes of a heart attack on the seat beside him had done just that, finally and desperately driving on the wrong side of a divided highway, and nobody had paid any attention at all. Amanda forced that out of her mind, got back into the car, and, with difficulty, clanked and ground out of the driveway and onto the road.
Chapter 9
The rendezvous with Patch was set for an extensive and usually crowded parking lot which had been chosen because it was a midway point and not the natural habitat of any of the people concerned. Nor was it, by the same token, routine police territory.
The restaurant to which the lot belonged had once been a hacienda. Curved fireplaces in its interconnecting dining rooms, warmly white-walled, burned pinon wood from October to May. A guitar player occasionally prowled through. A reasonably wretched dinner could be had for ten dollars and a good one for fourteen, and such was the atmosphere that most diners, q
ueried by one of the New York-bred owners as to the satisfactoriness of their meal, replied cravenly that the lukewarm, oversauced, and undernourished cannelloni was fine; delicious, really.
The prices served a double purpose in convincing relatives, out-of-town guests, and business connections that they were being treated handsomely and at the same time excluding any unwanted element. This was not a place for beer-chased whiskey or arguments which were settled with knives, and the two bartenders had never been called upon to do anything but produce drinks.
Sweet had driven as though he carried high explosives, in spite of his half brother’s altered appearance, but it was still only three minutes after the appointed hour when he swung the pickup into the parking lot and cruised slowly through in apparent search of a convenient space. A light blue 1975 Camaro, Patch had said, but although the yellow arc light tended to distort colors it was clearly not there.
Patch, a careful, uncommunicative man with pressing reasons of his own for departing the state tonight, would have allowed for it but it was still a delaying factor. Sweet pulled up into the shadow of a giant spruce, said, “He’ll be along any minute,” to himself as well as to Claude, and took bills from his wallet and handed them across. “You’ve got Eddie Garcia’s address. This ought to keep you until . . .”
He was forced to let that drop. Claude, taking the money without acknowledgment and folding it awkwardly into the front pocket of his jeans, was a capable enough auto mechanic—but not with a badly infected right hand. The way he held the hand away from him suggested fear and loathing as well as a guard against any jarring contact. He had always been something of a hypochondriac, and now he was crouched like an animal in shock.
A group of people emerged from the restaurant, the women giving little shrieks at the sight of the snow and proceeding to pick their way on tiptoe. Another three minutes had passed, and Sweet was suddenly and furiously sure of what had happened. Patch, never enthusiastic about this plan, had come early, waited until the hands on his watch stood in exact position, sped away. Still—
The Menace Within Page 7
