The Desperate Hours

by Joeseph Hays

  “Griffin—” This time it was Robish’s voice, and he was pushing himself into the room from the hall. “Griffin, they pick up this guy, he’ll start talking. Let the car alone.”

  “Is that right, Hilliard? Would you start talking?”

  Dan Hilliard shook his head slowly, no expression on his broad face.

  In the den Hank, who had writhed and blistered for years under the stinging mockery of his brother’s tongue, felt that thin wash of pity in him again. He hated it. He clenched his fists to kill it: what the hell did he care about these people anyway? Hilliard—just another sucker living a sucker’s life, going to work every day, getting old fast, for peanuts! Dumb bastard.

  “See, Robish? Hilliard’s too wise to start talking even if he is caught. Me, I trust Hilliard. He’d pull a fast one if he figured he had a chance, but he knows now he hasn’t got a chance, so he’s going to play ball. I got him where the hair’s short, that’s why I trust him. You listening, Hank? That’s the only time you ever take a chance trusting anybody.”

  Lesson noted, Hank thought bitterly, a constriction in his chest. Same lesson. He had it. He had to admit the truth of it, too. Glenn was reminding him that the last time he’d pleaded with his brother to go, Glenn had warned him that Hilliard couldn’t be trusted once they didn’t have one of the family right alongside. This was why Glenn planned to take the wife and the girl along when they did leave. Hank had balked; not the girl. But Glenn’s smile had withered his rebellion; the taunting, knowing look had stomped it down, even as Glenn had agreed with a shrug: Hell, we’ll take the kid then, it make you feel any better, Hank. Only don’t go soft on me, see. You go soft, you’re licked.

  Hank wasn’t going soft. Not now. This time they’d really let him have it; this time he was a murderer. He hadn’t killed, but that ape Robish had, and that meant the chair for all three of them. Life, anyway. If he was caught. He wasn’t going to be caught. But if Glenn kept running these damn-fool risks, they’d all be shooting it out, or feeling the ’cuffs hard and cold over their wrists. Only not him. Before that, he’d get out on his own. He didn’t like the idea of Robish’s gun at his back anyway— after what happened last night.

  But he was still glad he let Robish have it; without knowing it until then, he’d been wanting to do that for a long time. And he knew he could. He could use his fists. If Robish got close enough to pull him down, to get that weight working—well, maybe then he couldn’t handle the big man. But with his arms free, hell, he could rip the man apart without Robish’s even seeing what was happening. It was the one thing he could do well. The one thing. He realized it. He had always thought it was something, quite a lot. Now-

  His eyes drifted again to the girl. She was watching her father. Hank remembered the way, last night, she’d said, Thank you, Mr. Griffin. That memory and the expression of pity on her beautiful face now caught Hank like a double blow to the stomach ; he felt the breath leave him.

  As Dan Hilliard said, “I’ll dump the car in the river for you, Griffin, I know just the place,” Hank felt the sick hollowness return. He was aching with it, empty. And he couldn’t take his eyes from the girl’s lovely face even though that was the source of all his pain. It was almost, he realized, as if he wanted to suffer; it was almost as if he had never had a chance to suffer in just this way before, about a girl, and he needed it. That need was part of the hunger.

  “You play square with me, Pop,” Glenn was saying, “and I’ll play square with you, see.”

  Square? Square! When you plan to take his wife with you, to use his child as a shield! Not for the first time but for the first time in this cold and single-minded way, Hank hated his brother. Glenn was the only person in the world who had ever shown him any real kindness or had taught him anything about the world. Glenn had protected him from his mother’s drunken disdain, from his father’s brutal violence. Yet Hank hated him now; under all the twisted trust and love, he hated him. Facing that fact made Hank Griffin forget everything else, even the eternal prodding fear that perhaps the police were, by some combination of circumstances beyond his imagining, moving closer even now …

  Working with the city directory and several maps, Jesse had, by 5 o’clock, located the exact sites of the houses that Mr. Floyd Patterson had visited, or probably visited, that morning. At least he had now the locations of the homes of those people who had written checks to Mr. Patterson in payment for trash removal. It was safe to assume that those who paid by cash were nearby. He had drawn a red-ink marking around the neighborhood, consisting of approximately ten square city blocks—perhaps two hundred homes, three stores, several vacant lots.

  “I don’t want those cars up there prowling around, Tom. Hear?” He shifted the map about on his desk. “I don’t say they’re in there. I don’t even reckon it’s reasonable to think they are. It’s a nice high-toned sort of neighborhood. And if they knocked off Mr. Patterson, they’d be damn fools to stay. One thing Griffin ain’t is a damn fool. But three human beings can’t disappear into thin air. It don’t stand to reason.”

  “What about that bank job up near Peru?” Tom Winston inquired mildly.

  “Yeah, that’s good. I just got a final report on that one. Two guys stick up a bank in a one-horse town named Denver nobody ever heard of. Two people, including a cashier who ought to know better, swear it’s the Griffin boys. They were willing to swear on their family Bibles they recognized them both—till three hours later a scared young farm boy moseys into the police station in Peru and confesses. His conscience hurts. Meanwhile, half the country lets go with a sigh of relief, thinking we’re finally on those boys’ tail. Don’t tell me that’s the way it always goes, either. I know that. But it doesn’t help.”

  “Take it easy, Jess,” Tom Winston advised, studying the map.

  “And don’t tell me to take it easy.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Tom Winston said then, “let’s you and me go outside and fight. That won’t help locate Griffin, but it’d let off steam, maybe.”

  Jesse laughed then; he liked the sound. He liked the way it made him feel, all down his long frame. He returned to the map. “We got four cars up there, right? Tell ’em to park. Put one here, another here, and here and here. That covers the main roads out. My hunch is they won’t have any particular hankering to go through the city to get away.” He straightened and took a breath. “Where’s Kathleen?”

  “She went to a mode. She said we keep the offices too hot in the daytime, too cold at night.”

  Jesse laughed again.

  “Sorry to intrude, gentlemen,” a voice said from the doorway, and young Carson entered. “The city police for some reason that I don’t get—maybe out of resentment at you, Webb —have been sitting on this since noon.” He handed Jesse a sheet of white paper with a few words written on it in ink. Carson took off his glasses and rubbed the steam from them. “It came in at the station some time during the noon hour. A bellhop from one of the hotels brought it, and he gave four different descriptions of the man who paid him a five-dollar tip to deliver it. I was privileged to get the fifth and sixth descriptions just now.”

  As Jesse read, the laughter died out of him. Then he passed it over into Tom Winston’s fat fingers. Reading, Winston softly whistled, a cool note in the lone sound.

  After that, the three men stood looking at each other in silence.

  “Now we know,” Tom Winston said, at last.

  “The idiot,” Jesse Webb muttered.

  “The man’s on a spot, friends,” Carson said.

  “But he ought to know! God, doesn’t he know?” Jesse asked no one in particular. “Can’t he guess that he can’t play ball with savages like that?”

  “Easy now,” Tom Winston said.

  “Don’t keep up with that, Winston! I’m taking it easy!

  Think of that poor guy, trapped in his own house probably with those-”

  “Let’s find out where he is, Jess. That’s more important than-”

  �
��Lay off! Let me do this my way. Whole damn FBI on the case, city police sitting on evidence, letting us sweat-” He stopped when he saw Winston’s mouth open; then he rushed on: “You tell me to go easy once more, Tom, and I will take you outside!”

  “Speaking of evidence,” young Carson put in swiftly, “what’s this?” He picked up the map.

  “That’s not evidence,” Jesse Webb said, slumping into his chair. “That’s guesswork. Plain and not-so-fancy guesswork by Deputy Sheriff Webb. Look, Carson, isn’t there some way to get word to that guy, whoever he is, that he can’t play their game with them?”

  “How?” Carson asked.

  “Tell me,” Jesse challenged. “You take a stab in the dark this time, Federal man. They’ll tear that poor guy to ribbons before they’re done. Inside and out. You can’t co-operate with scum like that.”

  “No?” Carson lit a cigarette. “What would you do, Webb? Put yourself in his place. I think he was smart to write this thing, the way he did. It might keep some itchy-fingered young cop from shooting a woman or a child.”

  “Itchy-fingered like me, Carson?” Jesse asked testily.

  “You got more sense. That’s all that’s eating you, friend. You know what a spot the man’s on. What would you do, Webb, under the circumstances?”

  “He’d play ball,” Tom Winston told Carson, touching Jesse Webb’s shoulder with his balled fist, then pushing at him again, fondly.

  “Yeah,” said Jesse slowly, the probing fingers of hatred moving in him, opening scars. “I’d do just that, Tom. Or I’d try.”

  Dan Hilliard was trying. The steel-hard shaft of frustration and helplessness was driven deep in him now, so deep that ordinary thoughts, even the fears that had once been sharp in his mind, were shadowy, distant things. What was important was the immediate, the exact moment now and the one to follow. He was aware that he drove a car that was wanted by the police; the license plates from Cindy’s coupe might throw off a questioning policeman, if, by some evil chance, a state patrol car should notice him. Also, his own appearance behind the wheel —although he had good reason to believe that this was far from normal—would perhaps mislead them. He had already disposed of the license plates that were on the gray sedan. I’ll leave that up to you, Hilliard, Glenn Griffin had said before he left the house. You won’t take any chances. Hell, it’s as important to you as it is to me.

  More important, Dan told himself grimly. Much more.

  He had tossed the plates into a thicket along the side of a small street on which there were no houses; the street ran only two city blocks and was intended for a subdivision development, with the realtor’s sign on the corner. He had then turned around and flooded the thicket with headlights: there was not so much as a glint of metal. He felt reasonably sure that he had not been seen.

  Now he was driving, careful to use the small, narrow residential streets, to the west, avoiding all major intersections, crossing principal thoroughfares by way of obscure side streets. With nightfall a gusty wind had leaped up again, and the penetrating cold left the streets more deserted than usual at this hour. He was within the city limits, his mind informing him that in this manner he could work his way more inconspicuously toward the river. His eyes shifted back and forth from the wet pavement ahead, scanning the sidewalks and cross streets automatically for any sign of danger, to the rear-view mirror.

  He was within three blocks of the river bridge, in sight of the ghostly-looking frames of the Riverside Amusement Park, which was dark and shuttered, when he realized that a pair of headlights had been following him around two seemingly directionless turns. This was not the first time that he had experienced this suspicion in the five or six miles he had come, but it brought his aching muscles to taut attention again. He made a sharp left turn down a shabby street, then a right. He slowed then, carefully.

  The twin lights swung into view in the mirror.

  Dan felt no panic; even fear seemed a useless and rather pointless emotion; he had passed beyond all that now. His job was to lose those following lights. Yet he couldn’t speed. And any other out-of-the-ordinary action on the part of the car might call attention. There were only the two beams of light, still fairly far behind; as yet no red gleam of a third, although he fully expected this now and had no idea how he would behave if or when it appeared. The thought that he, Dan Hilliard, was afraid of the police flickered ironically in a far corner of his brain. He was in a neighborhood that he did not know at all: squat and ugly, weathered old frame houses. A few lights glimmered behind misty windows.

  Only by the gusts of steam bursting from between his own lips was he made aware that he was breathing too fast. He made another turn, into a narrow street with no overhanging street lamp. The shadows of trees fell dark and flat across his path.

  Then it came to him: he knew exactly what he would do, and how he would do it. And now, now before his pursuer turned the corner! He chose a driveway that ran close alongside a dark house; he judged the turn carefully, then flipped off his headlights, whipped the wheel, cut the motor, and let the gray sedan glide to a quiet stop hugging the side of the house and under the deeper shadow of a small frame garage.

  He twisted about in the seat, every muscle protesting with stabs of anguish, his head heavy and bursting; he waited, trying to hold his breath, looking out the rear window. Down the street—he had no idea how far away—a door banged shut, a man’s voice rose, died. In the house at his side, so close he could reach out a window and touch the rough clapboard, there was no stirring.

  Then light flooded the street as the car that had been following picked up speed; the motor roar reverberated through the neighborhood. After the car had passed, Dan could hear the motor slowing into a purr, pausing, hesitating. In that moment that it passed, he could see nothing but its shape: it was a huge convertible, the outline of the soft top fairly clear in the reflection of its own headlight beams.

  Without stopping now to puzzle this out, feeling only a sharp relief that it was not a police car, Dan turned on the motor but not the lights, eased the gray sedan backward; when the convertible made a turn—Dan was tensed, hearing only the sound of that distant motor—he backed into the narrow street, careful not to give the carburetor too much gas, and nosed away, in the direction from which he had come.

  Only when he was crossing the river bridge, confident now that no lights followed, did Dan Hilliard begin to wonder again about the identity of the huge convertible and its driver. Here was a whole new unlooked-for element, and his mind could not quite bring it fully into the picture. It was his conviction that no policeman, at least while on duty, would drive a car like that; also, not many police officers, if any, could afford to own one like that, either. But if it was not a policeman who had recognized the gray sedan, who could it be?

  Dismissing the conjecture, again concentrating on the immediate moment at hand, he turned north on the far side of the river, following a wide road that hugged the low river-cliff. The whole area here had a park atmosphere; soon he was under high trees with the dark gleam of water on his right. The river along here was, he knew, deep enough. But it was too close to the city proper, perhaps even within the city’s limits. And there were people.

  Cars approached occasionally, their headlights lowering when he automatically flipped his own; only once in a while did a set of lights appear in the rear-view mirror. Dan had, each time, to make the decision: should I let this one pass or should I try to outdistance it? Is this the convertible? Or perhaps a patrol car? And each time he decided to hold to his original plan: appear inconspicuous. Each time they whipped around him, usually filled with young people on dates.

  But as Dan approached the place that he had in mind—a high cliff perhaps a hundred yards beyond the point where the smooth wide pavement curved left and became only an ordinary country road—he couldn’t rid himself of the questions about that convertible back there. An ordinary citizen who recognized the gray sedan from the police descriptions on the radio? Someone wh
o only wanted to get close enough to catch the license number, perhaps?

  He knew no one personally who drove a long locomotive-type convertible like that. Then it could not have been simply a friend who had recognized him. That didn’t make sense, anyway. No one has the slightest idea of the situation you’re in, he reminded himself. You imagine everyone suspects, just as you become suspicious of every car that approaches or passes, simply because they have brought you to this criminal state of mind where the most normal things take on menace. It’s a world they live in all the time. Now it’s your world. In that sense, you’re one of them.

  He was searching now for a place where he would turn off the road. He had only the vaguest impression of the area. As a boy he had swum in the river along here, but then, at the top of the bluff, there had been only a narrow dirt road, rarely used. Now, after the curve of park drive had become narrow country road, everything looked different again, not the way he remembered it at all. He had swum and picked berries and even now he could taste the sun-heated juice of them as they burst in his mouth. The city lay far south of him now, several miles away. His own house, if he could cut straight across the river instead of backtracking to the bridge, was not too far, perhaps four miles, perhaps five. As yet, though, he had not faced the future hours or that return home. He had warned Griffin that this would take time if he was to do it properly, if the car was not to be found at all; he had even told a little of his plan. Griffin had whistled, in awe. “You got a walk in front of you, Hilliard.” No, it was Dan’s idea that Cindy would follow in her car and pick him up. When Griffin had only moved his head in a slow negative and said, “Not a chance: the more Hilliards there are around here tonight, the better,” Dan had caught, in young Hank Griffin’s face, a surly rebellion—that may or may not have been directed at his brother.