I heard applause and twisted my head to stare at Beverly Makis. The sexy blonde laughed, clapping some more. "Nice going, Norm. You're a real athlete," she quipped, switching to perform a mock arm-lift that sent those majestic mounds leaping against the checkered flannel shirt, her loins rolling forward in a seductive thrust.
CHAPTER ONE
To look at the sprawling, nicely landscaped set of red brick buildings and storage sheds, with stake trucks, semi rigs, and pickup trucks parked in stalls beneath the overhanging roof of the more recently-built concrete block garage, even a stranger could see that it was the Merit Canning Co. that kept the small north central Wisconsin town of Merit alive.
What a stranger wouldn't know was that just a week ago, on another pleasant, cool Friday afternoon, death had driven into town. Had visited the canning factory offiice, grabbed the monthly payroll, and left four bullet-shredded bodies in exchange.
I parked the Rambler at the curb near the main entrance gate and stared at the uniformed, middle-aged man who was preparing to close up the plant for the day. He'd already stepped out of the small brick cubicle that passed as his office. He was jingling a metal ring loaded with keys, trying to locate the tool with which to lock his gate office door, when I left the car and walked toward the driveway.
"Sorry, Mister-the plant is closed for today," began the guard, then he took a closer look at me. "Oh, hello, Mr. Kent. I still don't know what all these damn keys are for," he said, a reserved touch of friendliness seeping into his voice as he grinned apologetically.
I didn't know his name. I knew that he was the man hired to replace Paul Jensen, the burly, grey-haired guard who'd died on the job only seven days before.
"Looks as if everyone has pulled out," I said, gazing through the steel wire fence surrounding the factory premises at the parking lot. There was a Lincoln parked in the shade beside the long, single story brick office building. "Do you want to call Mr. Hincs and tell him I'm here?"
The guard considered that for a moment, then nodded and opened the door to his assigned station. I lit a cigarette while I waited for him to check with Arthur Hines. From the outside, you'd never know there had been a robbery, or that for a few violent minutes, murder had shattered windows, scarred walls, and left the main office building littered with corpses.
My sister Janet, had died instantly. One .38 slug had shattered her spine. The other bullet tore clear through the back of her neck. It still seemed unbelievable to me. How could two small chunks of lead transform a sweet, beautiful blonde girl into a lifeless, waxen, almost unrecognizable cadaver?
It wasn't cold. It was a mild, sunny afternoon in middle October, with the leaves just beginning to turn color and the level expanse of lawn bordering the canning factory office building still attractively green, but I shuddered, thinking of what I'd seen at the county morgue.
They'd phoned me at work. Up until last Friday, I'd been assistant personnel manager for a medium-sized Chicago manufacturing company. The call came in while I'd been interviewing a milling machine job candidate. Someone else had finished the interview. With shock-numbed nerves, I'd climbed into the Rambler and headed north. All the time I'd driven, I kept telling myself that my only sister couldn't be dead. Janet was all the family I had left. She was lovely and vivacious and just 23 years old. How could anyone with so much life, anyone radiating zest for living and bright-eyed happiness with the world the way Janet did be dead?
"Mr. Hines says for you to go right up to the office, Mr. Kent," announced the guard, emerging from his cubicle. "Say, I sure am sorry about-well, about what happened to your sister," he said awkwardly. "I didn't know her very good; up to three days ago, I worked in the labeling department, but whenever Miss Kent came through the factory, she always had a smile and a friendly wave for all of us." He fidgeted with the keys again, looking quickly away from me.
I knew that if the expression on my face matched the emotions still churning my insides, I wasn't pleasant to look at. I clapped him on the shoulder as I walked past him. "Thanks," I said. It came out hoarse and difficult; admitting Janet was dead and buried beside our parents. Now there was no one who really gave a damn about a guy named Norman Kent, was something my mind fought against.
As I walked along the concrete driveway, angled over to follow the stretch of sidewalk to the office building. I heard the heavy wire gate clang shut behind me. There were tangles of green ivy climbing the brick walls and a pair of noisy sparrows were busily bickering as the fluttered around among the leaves. I opened the door and stepped inside.
The main office was a large rectangle with windows on both sides. There were a dozen desks besides the reception desk at the mahogany counter in front. The office was empty, typewriters were covered, and only the fading afternoon sunlight coming in through the west wall windows broke through the shadows already invading the quiet building.
There was a wide corridor leading to the rear exit There were three doors in that hall; two on the wall to my left were restrooms. The door to the right was the conference room. The conference room was also used as the meeting chambers for the employee's credit union. I remembered Mr. Arthur Hines telling me, when I'd accompanied police authorities and a FBI man named Carl Richards to the factory.
There was another door leading into the conference room from the main office, the door on the far wall beyond that was open. A slim, dark-haired man in a good-looking dark brown suit, came out of the doorway leading to his private office, while I was walking around the reception counter.
Arthur Hines may have been in his mid-forties or could have been younger. He took good care of himself; his cheeks were clean-shaven and nicely-tanned. His dark brown moustache was neatly-trimmed. He walked with a brisk, confident stride, carrying his wiry shoulders high and his head erect. We met near the center of the main office and exchanged handshakes.
"Please come in and sit down, Mr. Kent," he said cordially, guiding me toward the president's office. "It has been a rugged week for you, I know. You look very tired."
"One reason I wanted to stop by is to thank you for the floral tributes," I said, dropping into a deep leather chair in front of a large, immaculate limed oak desk. "Both the wreath from the company and the special bask-ket from you and your wife were very nice, Mr. Hines."
"Let's dispense with last names, Norman. My wife is a great believer in formality but I prefer being called Arthur," he said, perching, on the edge of the desk and twisting to procure a cigarette from the copper-toned case. He picked up the matching fighter and at his touch a flame appeared which he applied, then the flame was snuffed out by the hood as he replaced the lighter on the desk.
"I was noticing that you have things pretty well patched up again," I said, extinguishing my smoke in the copper-toned ashtray next to the chair.
"There are some things that will never be patched up," Arthur Hines said, his dark blue eyes gazing past me into the dusky main office. "Your sister wasn't only a valuable and efficient secretary-she was a beautiful, warm considerate young woman. There isn't a person in this town Janet didn't know."
There was someone she shouldn't have known. Some guy who took advantage of her and got her to fall in love with him," I said, choking on the words as I glared at the light grey carpet. "Some worthless, lying bum who wasn't even man enough to marry her."
"I, uh, I'm afraid I don't quite understand," Arthur Hines said as I raised my head to look at him. His right hand was trembling. He brushed at the scatterings of ashes from the cigarette that had fallen on his lap.
"Janet was four months pregnant, according to the county medical examiner," I said tersely. "I'm telling you this in strict confidence, Mr. Hines; the real reason I came here this afternoon is to ask you if you have any idea who my sister was having an affair with. I want to face that dirty crud! I want him as bad as I want Willy Makis and those two bastards who got away after the robbery!"
It was as if I'd just seared him with a red-hot poker; the color drained from his face and his eyes snapped wide open. He had difficulty swallowing. He'd slid off the corner of the desk and he was staring at me in dazed uncertainty.
"W-why, I-well, I don't have to tell you how stunned I am to learn of this," he said. He scowled at the cigarette and crushed it into the ashtray beside me.
I stood up, too. "You weren't any more stunned than I was when the coroner showed me his report," I growled, feeling my hands ball into tight fists at my sides. "So you see, it wasn't just Janet who died last week. That gives me just one more reason to hate that trio of butchers who shot her. It also gives me another job. To find out the name of the cowardly hound who welched when it came to marrying her!"
Instead of replying, the slim, wiry owner of the canning company turned away from and walked slowly toward the windows behind his desk. His shoulders were no longer set at a jaunty angle, and the confidence had gone from his stride.
"I quit my job," I said to his back. "All I have left is time. The police can't seem to turn up any trace of the three murdering, robbing animals who got away. They have other fish to fry, other lawbreakers to chase after. Me, all I've got is time and three names. No, four names now Janet's lover. This is the jumping-off place for me; the beginning of the hunt."
Arthur Hines turned away from the windows. "I don't blame you for your bitterness and intense hatred," he said quietly. "Even though the insurance company has reimbursed our organization for the monetary loss, as I said, there are other losses that cannot be compensated for. Janet, your sister. Paul Jensen, the guard."
"At least he got a chance to fight back. He had that much," I muttered, prowling restlessly around the carpeting, fists opening and closing. I felt cheated. Frustrated. I wanted to lash out at something. Anything. To hurt as I'd been hurt.
Janet was nearly ten years younger than me. Neither of us remembered too much about our father, and our mother had died during Janet's sophomore year at college. I'd been working for the Chicago firm, shipping a good share of my earnings home. The tall, pretty girl with the long golden blonde hair and the lively, sparkling blue eyes and friendly smile had been more than my kid sister; she'd been all the family I had left in the world. I'd danced with her at the college homecoming dance. We'd gone hiking and fishing and swimming together, summers. I'd watched her graduate, an honor student, destined for a fine career and an eventual marriage to some hardworking small town guy. I'd looked forward to being an uncle, to visiting Janet and her family at their home, to having a share in the happiness that should have been hers.
Even while she was at the university and I was in Chicago, we'd written regularly back and forth. She'd visited the city frequently after our mother passed away and some of the best times in my uneventful, routine existence, were comprised of the excursions to museums, shows, and baseball games with my sister. Janet delighted in everything she saw and did; just being with her had brightened many a dull, dreary weekend for me.
Then, after graduation, she'd been hired as a typist at the Merit Canning Co. A girl with her training and intelligence could have started working in Chicago at twice the salary she received. Janet wanted to stay in her home town. She liked the people. She didn't mind living all alone in the frame house where we'd been raised. "I'd painted the place last summer when I'd taken my two-week vacation. By then, Janet had been promoted. She became Arthur Hine's private secretary when the older lady who'd had the position for many years moved elsewhere with her husband.
From what little I knew of the robbery a week ago, Janet had been in the conference room, making the cash deductions for the company credit union from the payroll. It had been about two hours before the end of the factory shift. The Wausau bank had delivered approximately $63,000. via armored truck service; since there wasn't a bank in Merit, factory employees were always paid in cash at the end of each month. This was the reason for the high wire gate surrounding the plant and for employing a guard; these were precautions insisted upon by the insurance company.
According to Arthur Hines, he had been in his office, signing correspondence he'd dictated earlier in the day. The first he'd known about the holdup was when one of the five men materialized in the doorway pointing a revolver at him.
The Makis gang had succeeded in getting past the guard at the gate by the ruse of saying that they were looking for work. It was the end of the canning season, and as usual there was a rush to get the purchased crops of peas, beans, corn and the like, processed, so the factory was looking for extra help.
But once inside the main office, the five men had whipped out guns, demanding the payroll. They'd forced the frightened clerks and secretaries to stretch out face down on the tile floor beside the desks while they scooped up the money.
In the midst of the robbery, Paul Jensen, the ex-police officer who'd been the plant gate guard for the past five years, charged in with gun drawn. He'd shot two of the bandits, including the one menacing Arthur Hines, before a bullet from Willy Makis's automatic plowed into his heart. There'd been lots of screaming and panic; the main office had been riddled with bullets.
When it was all over, the trio of remaining bandits had careened through the open gate in the getaway car they'd stolen to use for the robbery. I no longer had a sister, and Dorothy Jensen, the tall, lovely brunette I'd met at the coroner's inquest, no longer had a father. The two bandits were scum from the bottom of the barrel. Both had long and varied records which became progressively worse with violence and severity of their crimes through the years. The world was better off without them. They should never have been spawned.
But, neither of the dead bandits had killed Janet or the guard. Their weapons had been checked by ballistics. Paid Jensen had been drilled through the chest with a .45 calibre bullet. My sister had been shot twice in the back with a .38 revolver. That meant that the murders were as yet unpunished. I stood in the cemetery, tears scalding my eyes, as I looked down at Janet's coffin being lowered into the grave beside our mother I swore a silent oath to devote whatever life I had left to getting the filthy swine who'd deprived my kid sister of her life.
Carl Richards, the soft-voiced, FBI special agent who'd flown in the day of the crime, had shown me photographs of the three killers still at large. I'd looked long and hard, branding their features in my memory.
Willy Makis, leader of the notorious gang that had blasted themselves into a place of prominence on the FBI's list of most-wanted fugitives, was 29 years old; about three years younger than me. He had husky, sensual features, a thick mop of dirty blonde hair trimmed crew-cut fashion. His nose was large; out of proportion with the rest of his face. His pale blue eyes had sardonic glints. He looked as if he was laughing at the world, poking fun of the struggling mass of honest, hard-working citizens from his superior pedestal. The description below the photo indicated that he was 6' tall and weighed 210 lbs. That made him two inches shorter and fifteen pounds heavier than me.
Vic Runkle was even bigger than his boss. He was also a blonde, with wavy hair and a wide forehead above small, mean-looking blue eyes and a broken nose that had set crookedly. My height, heavier by fifty-five pounds; he looked as if he could have been an All-American fullback, but that would have had to be at some prison, because according to his record, Vic Runkle had spent most of his adult years behind bars.
The third hoodlum was a wipsy, sad-looking gizmo named Sammy Lentz with scared, shifty brown eyes bulging behind dark-rimmed spectacles and a long, scrawny neck leading down to hunched narrow shoulders. He looked ill, even in that prison mug shot.
From what Carl Richards told me, the Makis gang had been in circulation for slightly more than two years. Including my sister and the guard at the factory, their total known kill list had mounted to more than a dozen victims-this in addition to many others who'd been wounded and crippled. It was estimated that their loot approached the million dollar mark. Now, after having lost two of their partners, the gang seemed to have just plain disappeared without leaving a tangible trace for the police and FBI to track them by.
Richards had told me something else following my sister's burial. He'd spoken with quiet earnestness, telling me to forget about revenge, assuring me that Willy Makis and his goons would eventually be caught and dealt with.
"You aren't trained to cope with that breed of two-legged jungle brutes, Mr. Kent," he'd said, his friendly brown eyes turning serious. "Go back to your work as a personnel man-or arrange with your employer to take some time off and take yourself on a fishing or hunting trip; anything to get your mind off what has happened up here. You can't do any good. You wouldn't even know where to start looking-or what to do if you did manage to stumble across the trail of the Makis mob."
"I'd know what to do."
"You can't carry a gun without a permit. You wouldn't know how to use a weapon even if you obtained a gun and carried it illegally."
"I was in the army. I can shoot."
"This isn't that sort of war, Mr. Kent. In this type of combat, there aren't any rules at all. You don't even know who your enemies are, sometimes."
"I know mine."
"There isn't any use in my talking with you, now. You're still too upset to listen," he'd finally said, leaving the house where my family had lived. And he was right. I was too upset. Too primed with terrible hate and too blinded by lonely bitterness to be rational about anything.
Arthur Hines was talking. I hadn't heard him clearly. I'd been standing in the doorway, staring out at the vacant secretarial desk Janet had occupied until a week ago, brooding about how wrong it was that her killer was somewhere in the living world, enjoying the cool, crisp autumn sunlight while she was in a metal box beneath the ground.
"I'm sorry. I wasn't listening," I said, turning back to look at him.
He'd lit another cigarette. He offered me one by shoving forward the copper-toned case on the desk. I shook my head.
"It comes as a great and grievous blow for me to learn that Janet was, uh, in trouble with some man," he said carefully, his dark blue eyes following me as I roved around the office. "I'm afraid that I can't be of much assistance, Norman. Your sister had her own set of, er, acquaintances-younger people, of course. I know extremely little of her, uh, personal life, although, as I say, I was very fond of her as a person as well as an employee."
I nodded. "What about that young foreman-the big, good-looking guy with curly black hair who was always pestering Janet for dates? I can't think of his name just now, but she talked about him several times, saying how conceited and persistent he was."
Arthur Hines meditated behind a cloud of smoke. "Uh, would that be Webber? Gorden Webber?" he inquired cautiously.
"That's the name. Why wasn't Webber at my sister's funeral if he liked Janet so much?"
"Why, uh, I really don't know the answer to that. I-"
We both turned, staring into the main office when we heard the outer door close and the rapid clatter of footsteps. I saw a gaunt, flat-chested dowager dressed in a severely-tailored pearl grey suit marching haughtily toward us. Her thin, pinched-looking face matched her querulous, shrill voice as she ignored me and glared at Arthur Hines from just inside the doorway to his private office.
"Do you realize that it is already 5:45 and that the country club lawn party begins promptly at 6:30?" she demanded, her long, aristocratic nose quivering indignantly. She had a hint of a moustache, a dirty greyish outcrop of hair above her impatiently-pursed, vividly-painted mouth. It didn't jibe with the purplish tint of her permanent. What hair was visible beneath the wide-brimmed navy blue hat she wore really didn't jibe with anything I'd ever seen. It was so obviously a dye job that I wondered where the old harridan got the nerve to appear in public.
Then, Arthur Hines, appearing completely docile and entirely overwhelmed by her sudden presence, introduced us. Florence Hines scarcely looked at me when she heard my name. I stopped looking at her too. I felt sorry for her husband. She'd been with him at my sister's funeral, but I guess nothing or no one really had registered with me that day. I hadn't realized what a dried-out, fish-faced bag Janet's boss was married to.
"Uh, dear, we were just discussing the horrible events of last week," Arthur Hines explained. He tried for a faint smile as he turned back to look at his wife after grinding out the cigarette. "Mr. Kent has suffered a great loss. I, uh, want to do everything I can to be of service and-"
"You? What could you do?" Florence Hines said disdainfully. She withered me with a scornful flick of her frozen blue eyes, "I must ask you to excuse us, Mr. Kent. We are very late, already."
"Florence, I-"
"Yes? What is it, Arthur?"
Arthur Hines gestured helplessly. "Uh, I don't wish to be rude, Norman," he said. "And, certainly my wife sympathizes deeply with you, too. But, there really doesn't appear to be much I can do at this time." His expression pleaded for me to understand the situation.
I did. Arthur Hines, the dapper, distinguished president of the Merit Canning Co had a boss. Janet had once confided in me, saying that her employer was far from happy with his marriage. She'd also mentioned the difference in age, explaining that Arthur had worked for John Merit, founder of the factory, since graduating from state university. Aggressive, domineering Florence, John Merit's daughter, had pounced on Arthur like a bird of prey, practically forcing their marriage.
Yes, I understood. Chances were, the shrewish, snobbish old biddy owned the controlling stock interest in the business and kept a tight rein on her husband by virtue of her hold on the purse strings. In exchange for prestige and social position, Arthur Hines had given away his manhood.
"No, there isn't much you can do, Mr. Hines," I said, shaking hands with him again. I pitied the guy despite his big fat bank account and pretentious surroundings. I walked out of the office without even looking at his wife again, wondering if he was any better off than my sister. As I crossed the shadowy outer office, I heard the acid, fault-finding tones of her nasal voice while she berated him, not caring that I couldn't help but overhear.
The last thing she said before I got to the door leading back outside was for my benefit, "Janet Kent was a girl with dubious morals. She was destined to come to a no-good end-I've predicted that ever since you were foolish enough to hire her," she was raving as I opened the door. "Now, I do not intend to permit you to become involved with her brother! He is undoubtedly just as wild-as opposed to decency and conventions as she was...."
I banged the door loudly behind me. I could have stormed back into the office and shook her until her false teeth clattered to the floor, until her malicious mouth stopped spewing insults at a girl who could no longer defend herself. What good would it have done? It wouldn't have stopped the whispers that my kid sister had been playing fast and loose.
The heavy wire gate clanged automatically closed behind me; I climbed into the Rambler parked at the curb. Most of the sunlight was gone. A few stubborn crimson rays bleached the fluffy bags of clouds and it was still light enough to drive without headlights. I pulled into a filling station and asked the attendant where Gordon Webber lived, while he pumped gas into the tank.
After he told me and gave me directions on how to get there, I paid him and drove off. The town hadn't changed much but I was a stranger to it. An intruder to be regarded with reserved caution and suspicious doubt. It was the town I'd been born and raised in. It was more than my being gone for so many years, returning only for those brief visits with my sister; there was something more-something close to fear and hostilitty apparent in the attitudes of the townspeople.
Cruising along the shaded streets, I decided it might be partly because I had changed. The town was the same. I was different, now. Janet's death had removed the light-hearted, easy-going soul from me. My face was haggard and bleak. My tense muscles and hard fists wouldn't unwind, nor was I pleasant to talk with. There was only hate and revenge in my thoughts. I wasn't friendly. Perhaps that explained why my presence in town wasn't appreciated. I guided the sedan to the curb in front of a white frame residence with the house number I'd been looking for.
Mr. and Mrs. Webber, a fall, amiable middlle-aged couple, politely informed me that their son wasn't at home.
"This is league bowling night," Mr. Webber added. "Gordy just left here with his sister, five, ten minutes ago. They'll be picking up some other fellas who bowl on the team."
"Thanks, I'll probably see him at the bowling alley, then," I said. They were both still standing in the doorway, watching me walk down the porch steps and return to the car. It was a few minutes past 6:00. There wouldn't be any bowling before 7:00, I was fairly sure, so I drove around for a while, sorting my thoughts, trying to decide what to do.
The one obsession that wouldn't give my mind any peace was the desire to seek out and smash the man who had shot my sister. But, it was as Carl Richards had said; I didn't even know where to begin looking-or what to do if I did locate Willy Makis and his two co-killers.
There's only one eating place in Merit. It's a small, dingy-looking cafe squashed between an even more dilapidated hardware store and the drugstore. The drugstore had a new black tile front and a huge electric sign. When I parked across the street and walked over, that recently-remodeled building stuck out like a rose blooming amid a field of thistles.
The lunchroom wasn't crowded. That wasn't surprising. The odor of rancid food blended with the smell of strong disinfectant-was enough to ruin even the hungriest appetite. I wasn't hungry, anyway. I told the stringy-haired woman in the soiled white uniform to bring me coffee when she padded tiredly to the booth and unenthusiastically inquired what I was going to have.
"Coffee? Just coffee?" she whined plaintively. "No food?"
"No food. Just coffee," I repeated. "Cream and sugar? That's a nickel extra."
"Just black coffee."
She sighed audibly, shuffling dismally back behind the chipped, dirty-looking counter. There were about ten faded, tarnished stools lined up along the counter, and I supposed that she was grumbling because she'd had that long walk to the booth for coffee, just black coffee.
I did some grumbling, myself, when I took an experimental sip of the foul, inky liquid she eventually deposited in front of me. It was tepid and so bad-tasting that she almost got the back of her uniform sprayed as she picked up the quarter and retreated with it.
"You can get your change on your way out," she said, slapping two coins on the counter beside the battered old cash register. Her dull, tired voice fitted perfectly with her surroundings and as far as I was concerned, she could keep the change. From the looks and smell of the place and her own slovenly appearance, she needed the money far worse than I did. Maybe, she'd use the fifteen cents to buy a clean cup, I thought shoving the cracked, pockmarked mug away from in front of me.
Just before I made motion to leave, the door creaked open and a paunchy, round-faced man wearing khaki slacks, shirt and a darker brown visor-type cap with a silver badge pinned to it ambled inside. Constable Fred Hamre's chubby features tried hard for a stern, official sort of stare as he saw me. He gave his pants a hitch, his pudgy hand brushing at the holster worn on his belt, as if to make sure it hadn't dropped off, then he harumphed, clearing his throat as he waddled across the dirt-splotched green tile floor and eased his flabby bulk into the booth across from me.
"Thought that was your car I seen out front," he said, thus once again impressing me with his great deductive powers. "Bring me coffee and a coupla donuts, Esther," he bawled as the mousy frump wearily lowered the magazine she'd been reading and limped toward a glass jar filled with unappetizing-looking brown baked things.
"Shouldn't it be parked there?" I asked, trying to sound civil. I'd already made myself unpopular with him twice. Once, soon after I'd arrived in Merit, by angrily asking why he hadn't had sense enough to set up roadblocks. He'd bungled his responsibilities badly; had wallowed ineffectually through the corpse-littered, bullet-splattered office, destroying fingerprints and any possible clues with his clumsy poking around. With his fumbling questions that gave the Makis gang more than sufficient time to accomplish a clean getaway before he finally did put in a call for help.
The second time, I'd lit into him at the coroner's office. He'd been munching on an apple and gabbing noisily with a pair of state police officers while I'd scanned the typewritten report. Shocked and sickened already, my emotions swirled even more violently when I learned that my kid sister had been four months pregnant. I exploded that day, directing some of my pentup wrath and bitterness at the incompetent oaf who was paid by the town for supposedly maintaining law and order. Carl Richards, the alert, soft-voiced FBI agent, had hustled me out of the building, warning me that accusing the local constable couldn't help, and could hinder his investigation-to say nothing of bringing me more trouble.
I looked at the self-important mass of blubber, as he slurped gustily at the putrid coffee then reached for one of the soggy-looking, greasy donuts. "Did you come in here to talk to me-or just to eat," I said, not trying any more to keep the resentment from my voice.
"Wanna talk-might as well eat, too," he mumbled between kingsized chomps, his jowls rippling, "It'd be a good idea if'n you got that chip off'n you shoulder, Kent. Folks 'round here don't like bein' pestered an' having' their affairs pried into," he said, waggling the remnant of the donut at me.
"Any folks in particular-besides you, that is?" I got ready to slide out of the booth, my hands braced on the seat. "If that's what you came in here to tell me, then I thank you for your kindly interest. Why, I really believe that you'd be as efficient and capable at being a diplomat as you are as a strong, sturdy pillar of the law! And now, if you'll excuse me-"
"Let your sister rest in peace, Mr. Kent. It won't do nobody no good for you to snoop around town, askin' questions about who was she runnin' around with." His round, florid features were flushed and his watery eyes lowered to the rim of the coffee mug as I paused, half-risen from the booth, staring at him.
"So that's it, is it? The town is afraid of a scandal-that worries you and the rest of these people more than the murders of my sister and that guard!"
"Now, it isn't that way, Mr. Kent. I-we-"
"What way is it, then? Go on, tell me!"
He sighed, lowering the mug. He shook his head. He looked ready to bawl. "You think I done a poor job of tryin' to catch them three bandits an' I guess maybe I did bungle things like you said I did," he admitted, he words were coming hard. I didn't try to make it any easier. I just stood there next to the booth, scowling down at the constable and allowed him to fumble for whatever else he wanted to say.
Finally, he raised his head and looked at me again. "Merit is a nice little town, Mr. Kent," he began slowly, laboriously. "All that I'm tryin' to tell you is that all of us livin' here feel awful bad about what happened to Janet an' to Paul Jensen." He sucked in a lot of air. I didn't think that would help much; not the stale, evil-smelling fumes hovering around us in that shabby cafe. "I feel worse about it all than most," Fred Hamre continued awkwardly. "When it comes to helpin' school kids across the street or bustin' up 'teen-age beer-drinkin' shenanigans; things like that; I'm all right. I never pretended to no one that I was smart or even a good small town lawman, but I done the best I could, Mr. Kent."
I kept staring down at the oversized constable. He bowed his head, seeming to shrivel up a Utile. He'd just proven one quality I hadn't expected him to have. Honesty. It takes courage to admit being incompetent. I still didn't like Fred Hamre very much; he was crude, coarse, over-stuffed with self-importance and completely unqualified for the job he held, but at least he was honest. Seeing some of his ego punctured by his self-inflicted stabs did give me cause to respect him for that much character.
"The Willy Makis mob has been rampaging around this country for more than two years," I said quietly, "It's as you say, Mr. Hamre. You did your best. I'd appreciate it if you'd forget the criticisms and angry ravings I tossed at you; a man your size makes a pretty handy target for abuse and I think I'd have blown my top, if I hadn't had someone to yell at."
His chuckle was a good-natured wheeze and his round face brightened as it bobbled agreeably. "Why, sure! There ain't no bigger target in this country than me," he said happily, pudgy hands patting his paunch affectionately. "Why, I sure can't hold it against you for cussin' me out the way you did-a man who gets a shock the way you did, when you drove up here and seen your only sister dead, is bound to come unraveled at the seams, Mr. Kent."
"Have you heard anything new from the state police or from the FBI?" I asked, shoving my hands into the pockets of my suit coat to discourage the flabby right hand he was about to extend.
He reached for the coffee mug instead. It was beyond me how he could drink that vile black sewage. "No, not a thing," he replied as he raised the cup, "Miss Jensen asked me the same question when I stopped by her place to return her pa's personal effects," he added, lowering the cup an inch again without tasting the bitter liquid inside, "You know, she's just as busted up about what happened as you are. Her eyes was red from cryin' when she came to the front door. She lost her husband about three years back-a car accident, it was-and now with her pa gone, too, she's just as alone as you, Mr. Kent." He clucked sadly, shaking his head.
"Her father was a brave man. I can't help wondering if both he and Janet might have been alive now if he had been less brave," I said, beginning to move away from the booth.
"Oh, Paul Jensen he didn't fire the first shot," Constable Hamre answered, his mouth full of donut. "He just popped his head inside the door and one of them fellas winged a couple shots at him."
"From what the other employees said about the bullets flying, and from the way that office looked when I saw it last week, I guess it's lucky that more innocent people weren't killed," I said moodily over my shoulder, heading for the door.
"Lotsa innocent folks can be hurt by gossip, too, Mr. Kent. Kinda take it easy on the folks livin' in this town, willya?" he called after me.
I had the distinct notion that Constable Fred Hamre was numbered among the other residents including Mrs. Florence Hines who were anxious for me to pull out of Merit, Wisconsin. I nodded, then stepped out into the cool, fresh air, filling my lungs with it to get rid of the rancid odors of the cafe.
The bowling alley was located on the opposite end of Main Street. I could have walked; the main drag was only two blocks long, but I returned to the car and drove over because Dorothy Jensen lived in that direction anyway. I intended to visit her after I had a talk with Gordon Webber.
It was nearly 7:30 when I parked the Rambler beside the ancient frame building and hiked across the gravel parking lot to the front entrance. A flickering neon beer sign proclaimed to be BUD'S BOWL. Cheap imitation brown brick siding to plastered over the rotting wood front. A plentiful supply of red and green neon tubing, too, giving the place a glaring mottled glow at night.
I could hear the muffled thuds of bowling balls being launched along the hardwood alleys as I mounted the concrete steps and entered the bar connected to the bowling alley. When I opened the door, a flood of warm air pervaded with the fumes of liquor and smoke came out at me. There was a boisterous, rollicking crowd of young guys in work clothes and casual sport togs clustered around the high, curved bar. There were a few young girls in one of the booths located along the glass wall, separating bowling alleys from bar. They were laughing and sipping beer. They didn't look old enough to be in a place like this, I thought, directing my attention to the crowded alleys where men wearing the gaudy green, pink, and yellow shirts of various bowling teams were having at it.
I didn't know Gordon Webber. I'd seen him once or twice and Janet had talked about him, but we hadn't met. While I was looking for him among the bowlers, I felt a touch on my arm.
"Were you looking for anyone in particular, Mr. Kent?" inquired a knowing, half-amused feminine voice. I turned to look at her. She was a tall, long-waisted brunette in a brown and white checkered dress. Her hair was cut short and loose ringlets curled across her forehead and ears, framing her piquant, interested features. She wasn't beautiful; not even pretty, but she knew how to be a woman and she was working at it.
Her dark brown eyes appraised the angle of my gaze and when she saw that I was taking inventory, inspecting her high-breasted torso, she smiled using well-trained muscles to send her smallish bust line against the fabric of the v-necked dress. I looked reluctantly away from her for an instant, staring past her at the bar behind her where a frowning young guy wearing a green flannel shirt and brown slacks was parked on a stool. There was a vacant stool next to him and an un-tasted martini on the bar. There was also a small brown cloth handbag beside the martini.
"Why, you don't remember me, do you?" she accused softly as she stepped closer, shifting gracefully to block my view of the guy. And to place her own willowy frame within range again. "Cynthia Webber-dance floor at the park pavillion-last year?-Fourth of July-does that ring a bell?" Her small left hand was resting lightly on my shoulder and her dark eyes teased me. The perfume she used was of sufficient potency to conquer the smoky, liquored flavor of our dimly-lighted surroundings.
It rang a bell. I vaguely recalled dancing two or three times with a flirtatious, challenging brunette at the local park the year before. That was the year I'd repainted the house and Janet had insisted on being escorted to the July Fourth celebration. She'd introduced me to Cynthia Webber and I still wasn't quite clear on how it was that I started dancing with her. The five-piece band had started up, she was in my arms, then we were moving across the floor, her body pressed firmly against mine.
"You've cut your hair," I said, smiling back at her. "That's what threw me. Of course I remember, Miss Webber. It's nice to see you."
"I saw you at Janet's funeral. You looked a million years old, Norman. I know how close the two of you were. I'm very sorry. I miss Janet, too. She was my best friend." Cynthia Webber's left hand came away from my shoulder. She looked genuinely sad.
I thanked her, then said, "Will you answer a question for me, Cynthia? It isn't the sort of question I enjoy asking, but-"
She glanced toward the scowling dark-haired young guy at the bar. "Excuse me for a little while, Roy," she called to him, leading me toward the door connecting the bar with the bowling alley. "We can talk more privately in here," she murmured as I opened the door, then followed her into the brightness and noise.
She led the way to one of the lanes which had been temporarily abandoned as one of the teams trooped through the door we'd just used for the pause that refreshes between games. She sat on the front bench. There were three rows of dark wood benches behind each of the eight lanes. They resembled old-fashioned church pews, which is probably what they were at one time or another.
The hardwood lanes, the modern lighting, and the automatic pin spotters didn't fit with the rest of the interior of either the bowling alley or bar. Cynthia Webber saw me survey the crew of perspiring, laughing and loudly-talking male bowlers as I eased down next to her on the seat.
"Now. What was that question, Norman?" she prompted, shifting position and turning her body so that one of her breasts grazed my upper arm. That brought my attention back to her. She didn't try to move away. Neither did I.
"Janet was your best friend," I began slowly, "She had other friends, though-Guys. I'd like to know who they were, Cynthia. Your older brother was one of them, wasn't he?"
She took a long time answering. Her dark eyes raised to mine, finally. "I know that Janet was pregnant, Norman. She told me, about a month before-well, before she died."
I shouldn't have been surprised. You don't keep secrets in a small town. I wondered how many others knew? Besides the guy.
"Did she tell you-his name?" I whispered hoarsely, my throat taut and dry. "Who was the guy, Cynthia? Was it your brother?"
"You'll have to ask him that, Norman. I-I honestly don't know. When I asked Janet, she just looked away from me and said that I'd be surprised. She wouldn't tell me."
"That sounds like her-trying to protect a no-good heel, refusing to cry about her troubles to anyone," I muttered, fumbling for a smoke. I shook two cigarettes up from the pack. She took one and held my hand, guiding my lighter to the tip of her smoke.
"She was a grand person, Norman. She was in love with life and everything that went with it. She was one of the happiest, least complicated girls I ever knew," Cynthia said quietly. "And, she wasn't a tramp. I don't care what anyone says."
"Is that what people think?" I moved away from her. Felt my frame tensing again. "I'd like to hear someone call Janet a tramp!"
"They say the same thing about me. Maybe, they'll stop after Roy-that fellow waiting for me at the bar-and I are married, next month."
I stood up. She did, too. "Thank you, Cynthia. I know you'll make Roy a wonderful wife," I said. Our hands met. I gave her fingers a gentle squeeze.
"Well, I'm going to do my damndest," she said fiercely. There was a flicker of resentment in her dark brown eyes. "I'll show the gossipy old hags in this town what a real woman can do to help her man!"
"I bet you will, at that."
"I-I wish I could have been more help to you, Norman. That miserable rat who got her in a family way isn't much better than those-those beasts who killed her!"
"It could be your brother, Cynthia. I have to find that out," I said as we walked across the bowling alley between the lanes and the benches.
She nodded. She was looking at the bowling team wearing dark purple shirts. I saw the lettering on back of those shirts. It was the Merit Canning Co. crew of bowlers. Then I saw the husky guy with curly black hair I'd been looking for. Cynthia's brother, Gordon Webber, was swaggering back from the foul line. He'd just rolled a strike and he felt pretty good about it.
"Be careful how you talk to Gordy," Cynthia cautioned, touching my arm again. "He's tough and he's mean, he has a hot temper."
"Thanks. I'll remember that," I said.
"There-there's one more thing I should tell you," she said, hesitating.
I looked away from her brother. She couldn't meet my stare. I didn't say anything. I just waited.
"Janet was seen around town with two or three other young men besides my brother," she said, her voice forcing its way past her reluctance to talk. "It-it could have been any of them; they're all employed at the canning company. But, that isn't what I was going to tell you, Norman."
"There was someone else, too? Give me his name, Cynthia. Please."
"N-no, I'm not sure that there was anyone else. It's probably just some more vicious gossip," she murmured. Her eyes flitted up to study my face for a brief instant. Then, she began to move away from me. I grabbed her arm and stopped her.
"What is it you're trying to tell me? Don't hold back on me, Cynthia. If it is just gossip, I'll ignore it; I know these small towns. I was born and raised here, remember?"
"I guess you have a right to hear it. I'm sure it can't be true, though," she said unwillingly. She took a quick, nervous breath. "People have wondered if Janet and Mr. Hines were more than only secretary and boss; you know-the standard story of older man making a play for young, innocent employee." She laughed shakily, perhaps more loudly than she intended.
Some of the bowlers, including her husky, dark-featured brother, had swung around to stare at us. I nodded. "You were right, Cynthia. It sounds to me like plain fantasy-a dirty rumor that was probably started by some of those gossipy old hags you mentioned."
Not that Arthur Hines was bad-looking or unattractive to women-even to girls young enough to be his daughter, like Janet. But, I just couldn't see him in the role of a passionate playboy; he was scared half to death of his angular frau, for one thing, for another I couldn't accept the notion of my sister having a sexual affair with a married man.
Gordon Webber was still glaring at me. The other bowlers on his team had returned their attention to the game. Cynthia started walking back toward the door leading into the bar and this time I didn't try to restrain her.
"Hi. Can I buy you a beer?" I asked, using a easy grin in an effort to erase Gordon Webber's glower as I strolled casually forward, my right hand extended. "We've never met, but my sister spoke of you often," I added when the scowl deepened.
He ignored my hand. "What were you yakking with Cyn about just now, Kent?" he demanded.
"We were talking about Janet. And, you." I watched his narrow dark eyes for any tell-tale sign of alarm. I saw only smoldering scorn and dislike.
"You trying to tie me in with that blonde floozie sister of yours? It won't tie, Kent! Get lost. Stop sniffing around, asking for trouble!" He deliberately jostled me as he spun around and stomped toward the ball rack.
I stood where I was for a minute, watching him wipe his big hands on the towel fastened to the ball return rack. Anger was beginning to build inside me again. There had been a few uneasy stares and snickers when he'd insulted Janet and read me off. Some of the other team members shuffled around uncomfortably as I walked toward Gordon Webber again.
He'd grabbed a ball and was preparing to roll as another bowler completed his frame. I stood directly behind him. I didn't say anything. I just stared at him.
He stepped along the hardwood lane and his right arm came back, raising the heavy black ball. It slid off the lane and rolled into the gutter halfway down the alley. He whirled, rugged features reddening as a few fellows laughed.
"Dammit! I told you to get away from me!" Gordon Webber flared as he stalked menacingly in my direction. "What the hell do you want around here?"
"These balls are heavy. It's been so long since I've bowled that I've forgotten how much they weigh," I said pleasantly, taking great delight in noting how upset and jittery my presence was making him. Our intense dislike for each other was instantaneous.
"Go watch somebody else. We don't have nothing to talk about," he growled, his big hands grabbing the ball that had returned to the rack. Some of the noise had diminished. Quite a number of bowlers using the other alleys were just standing around, watching us.
"Why weren't you at Janet's funeral?" I asked quietly just before he unleashed the ball. This time, it didn't go into the gutter. It whizzed thunderously along the hardwood lane and clobbered two pins. Gordon Webber stayed frozen for several seconds. When he did turn, his good-looking face was a distorted mask of sneering disdain.
"You think she was a perfect angel, don't you, big brother?" he said sauntering back to stand a foot away from me, his hands planted on his hips and his beefy jaw jutting out, "Know what she really was, Kent? She was a pushover! A willing chick who liked being plucked!-A-Yeeeowwww!"
His howl of anguish was caused by the thud of the bowling ball I'd dropped on his right foot. He cradled the smashed foot in his hands as he hopped painfully about, shouting and cursing at the top of his frenzied lungs. I laughed. It was funny, watching him. If he'd had a headband with feathers, he could have passed for an Indian doing a rain dance.
While he was still staggering and spinning like a whirling dervish, I helped myself to another heavy black ball. It had been years since I'd bowled; I couldn't recall exactly how to grip the ball or which fingers went in which holes, but I leaned forward and gave it the best roll I could. Gordon Webber had just gingerly lowered his maimed right foot to the hardwood near the foul line. The bowling shoe he wore was squashed and dented and from his agonized yelp of pain I guessed there might be some smashed toes. That didn't prevent him from swearing at me even more lividly and starting to hobble toward me, shoulders hunched, fists doubled.
That was when I sent the heavy black ball streaking along the lane. It wasn't orthodox bowling; I'd have been disqualified in tournament or league play. Because I didn't roll the ball along the alley. It went streaking through the air and caught Gordon Webber in the pit of the stomach. The breath whooshed gustily from his lungs as he sailed backwards to land with a bone-jarring thud on his butt in the center of the lane while the ball bounced into the gutter and clattered down the alley.
No one tried to prevent me from leaving. Actually, no one moved or even seemed to notice my departure until I was at the door. I saw through the glass partition that Cynthia Webber and her boyfriend, Roy, were among the spectators in the bar grouped at the glass. She smiled and winked at me while her boyfriend and everyone else were gaping at the floundering, pitifully-gasping guy on the floor.
I grinned and returned her wink. When the outside door closed behind me, I heard the sudden flurry of excited voices and sounds of confused activity from inside. Crossing the gravel parking lot and climbing into the Rambler, my smile ebbed. Oh, I'd learned one thing; I was pretty much convinced that the loud-mouthed, blustering character I'd tangled with had never been on intimate terms with my kid sister. Janet had called him conceited and persistent. It was the persistent tag that prompted me to wonder about their relationship-after all, if enough water flows over a stone it will eventually wear a stone smooth.
But now, after hearing the frustrated foreman's surly insults and coarse attempts to give the impression that Janet had been one of his sexual conquests. I was certain that the reason for Gordon Webber's hostile behavior was that he'd never really got to first base with my sister. That would explain why he'd stayed away from her funeral, why he'd reacted so belligerently toward me. Janet had slapped him down-had wounded his pride to the extent where he was still trying to hurt her back even though she could no longer be hurt.
I flicked on the headlights and drove out of the parking lot beside the bowling alley. Yes, I'd had the small satisfaction of shutting up one of the filthy tongues slashing at Janet's reputation. I'd eliminated the same guy as my sister's secret lover, but what real progress had I made? Was I any closer to revenging her?
There wasn't much of a moon. As I drove away from town, leaving the street lights and lighted store windows and neon signs in back of me, I wondered if the next person I intended to talk with would give me the same cool, wary treatment.
Miss Dorothy Jensen, lived in a cream-colored bungalow with brown shingles and trim, that was located not far from the cemetery. Constable Hamre had told me that she was home, grieving the loss of her father, taking it as hard as I mourned the death of Janet. I wasn't too keen about the idea of barging in. She probably wanted to be alone, wanted to cry until there were no more tears or heartaches left. She was a comparative newcomer to Merit, Wisconsin. There wasn't anyone around she could turn to; no one to share in her grief. That gave us something in common.
I saw that there was a garage attached to the house by a breezeway. Even at night, it looked newer than the house; like it had been built on within recent years. There was a slate blue station wagon parked in the garage. The headlights of my car outlined the vehicle as I braked to a stop in the blacktop driveway. Hiking toward the front door, I didn't know exactly what I was going to say to Miss Jensen. Or if she'd even listen.
CHAPTER TWO
When the door opened in response to my ring, a tall young woman wearing a beige coat and a light blue head-scarf stood silhouetted in the reflected light from a floor lamp in the living room behind her. Dorothy Jensen didn't recognize me at first; we'd only seen each other twice. At the county coroner's office, then at the cemetery. We hadn't really talked although we had been introduced. I guess neither of us had paid much attention to anything or anyone around us on either occasion.
"I was just leaving to take a drive," she said, opening the door a bit wider. "Won't you come in, Mr. Kent?"
"Not if it will detain you," I answered, still looking at her. Her dark brown hair swirled around her cameo-like face. Her intelligent dark brown eyes glistened with unshed tears and her straight, sensitive nose was. But even with the forlorn saddness reflected in her face, Dorothy Jensen was beautiful. Possibly the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen.
"Please." She stepped away from the entrance. "I was leaving because these rooms seemed to be shouting with silence. I know that sounds peculiar, but-"
"You don't have to explain. I know what you mean."
She closed the door as I walked past her. "They-they haven't caught those other men, yet. Just before you arrived, I was listening to a news broadcast on the radio." She led the way into the living room. She motioned for me to sit down. Then she unbuttoned the beige coat and removed it. I watched while she unknotted the scarf. The light blue dress she wore matched the color of the silken headscarf she folded and placed on top of the coat she'd draped carefully over the back of an armchair.
"Are you sure that you'd rather stay here?" I asked, seated in another armchair opposite a dark green sofa. "I feel restless. If you'd like to drive-"
"Later, perhaps." She sat down on the sofa, arranging the pleated folds of her skirt, demurely pulling the fabric over her knees. "I'm upset, but I don't think a drive will help much."
"Constable Hamre was worried about you. Frankly, I don't know exactly what I'm doing here. I just thought you might appreciate company. Someone to talk with."
"I do. Except that it doesn't seem as if there's much left to talk about," she said dully, the lustre gone from her eyes.
"It's natural to feel that way, at first. So did I. Until I decided that sitting around, staring off into space and brooding about the brutal unfairness of life wasn't doing any good."
"You sound as if you have discovered a new purpose, Mr. Kent. I wish I could," she murmured. She wasn't looking at me. She'd retreated into her private world of grief.
"How hard are you trying?" It came out more sharply than I'd intended.
It brought her head snapping up. A faint tint of color touched her high, softly-curved cheeks. "I loved my father, Mr. Kent! He was both father and mother to me ever since I was a little girl. You didn't know him. You couldn't know how-how gruff and strong and-and how wonderful he was!"
"I loved my sister as much as you loved your father.
Losing her hurt. Still hurts worse than I've ever thought a person could be hurt."
"One by one, everyone has been taken away," she said huskily, eyes blinking to hold back the tears. "First, my mother dying before I was even old enough to know her! Then, my husband, Bob, losing his life. And now, the only person I had left to love is gone." Sobs racked her body as she crumpled in a corner of the green sofa, hands covering her face.
I didn't enjoy seeing her cry. A fresh flood of memories concerning my loved ones renewed the empty pain in my chest and constricted the muscles of my throat. I lit a cigarette. There was a glass ashtray on the desk at the far end of the room. There was a pipe resting in the ashtray. I left it there as I crossed the room and stared down at the manila envelope on top of the desk. It was a bulky envelope labeled as the personal effects of Paul R. Jensen. I knew that it contained whatever items the burly plant guard had carried in his uniform pockets on the day of the robbery.
Dorothy Jensen was in control of her emotions again by the time I finished the cigarette and stabbed it out in the ashtray without disturbing her father's pipe. She took a small handkerchief from the pocket at the side of her dress and blotted away traces of her tears.
"I-I'm sorry I gave away like that," she said, rising. She walked over and looked down at the envelope. Her right hand brushed across it while she summoned an apologetic smile. "You have your own problems, Mr. Kent. I won't burden you any further."
"You wouldn't be much of a human if you didn't mourn those you missed," I said quietly. I patted her shoulder and smiled at her. "Look, Miss Jensen, I had no intention of sounding off the way I did a while ago. You were right; I did find a new purpose that's helping me recover some of my balance. Would you like to know what it is?"
I saw the interest come to her eyes. I told her my pledge to do everything I could to avenge the brutal killings and how I'd resigned from my office job in Chicago so I'd be free to work at keeping my promise.
Her dark brown eyes gleamed brightly while she listened. Then, her gaze began to lose some of its excitement. "How can you succeed where the police have failed, Mr. Kent?" she inquired. "The Makis gang hasn't been located-there hasn't been a trace of them since the day of the robbery. I told you that on the last news broadcast I heard-"
"They can't just vanish! They'll either pull another robbery or someone will spot them," I cut in brusquely. I had enough doubts of my own about the wisdom of what I intended doing; her added skepticism irritated me. "Anyway, that's better than moping around doing nothing."
She picked up the manila envelope. It was sealed. She reached across the desk and used the bronze letter-opener to slit the flap. We both stared down at the assortment of items that slid out of the envelope onto the walnut top of the desk. There was a ring containing keys similar to the one I'd seen the middle-aged guard at the canning factory jingling. A pocket comb. A tobacco pouch. Cigarette papers. A wrinkled red handkerchief. A badge. A .38 calibre police special revolver. A worn, fraying brown leather billfold. A small brown imitation leather-covered notebook. A packet of matches. A signet ring. A mechanical lead pencil. A wrist-watch.
"Mr. Richards seems to believe that the Makis gang may stay in hiding, permanently," Dorothy Jensen said, examining the various objects she'd spilled onto the desk.
"What if they don't rob and kill again? If they merely continue to do what you say they can't do-just vanish without leaving any trace?"
"It's too bad that the license number and vehicle registration number your Dad took down when he admitted their sedan through the plant gate turned out to belong to a stolen car," I said, picking up the notebook.
"My father always carried a notebook," she said, watching as I leafed through the pages. "I gave him that one for his sixty-fourth birthday. That was a month ago. He got into the habit of using a notebook when he was on the Milwaukee police force," she explained, smiling reminiscently.
"I see that he was a member of the doodler's club, too," I said, as I glanced at the pages filled with meaningless scrawls and sketches. There were a few entries that were legible; one sheet contained what seemed like a shopping list with the grocery items neatly checked off, another page with the name and address of some fishing lure manufacturing company and the name of a specific type plug in parentheses, an entry to the effect that the station wagon needed a tune-up and grease job, reminding Dorothy to take it into the garage.
She was looking across my shoulder. "He must have written that two days before-before he was killed," she said softly as she scanned the neatly-written message. "I remember that he hauled out that notebook and mentioned that the station wagon was due for a trip to the garage when he came home from the factory on the Wednesday afternoon before the robbery. I took the car in the next day."
While she was talking, I flipped over another page. It looked like more doodling at first. Whatever he'd written as his last entry in the notebook had been scrawled hastily. I couldn't make out the writing but I could read the numeral '41' at the end of the scribbling.
Dorothy Jensen took the notebook from me. A puzzled line appeared in her forehead as she tried to decipher her father's final message.
"This doesn't seem to make any real sense," she said slowly. "It looks like four separate words; I mean three words and that number." She moved away from the desk. She stood beneath the glow from the floor lamp near the sofa, studying the notebook in her hand.
I walked over to stand beside her. "He must have jotted down whatever it was some time between Wednesday and the day-" I didn't finish the thought. She knew what I meant. She nodded.
"Those two letters next to the number look like an abbreviation," she said, her slim index finger touching the page beneath the writing she was trying to guess at. "P. O. The word next to it seems to be spelled with a capital 'P'."
"That's what it looks like to me," I agreed. I was standing very close to her. I could detect the subtle scent of facial soap and the clean fragrance of her lovely, long dark brown hair. She was probably 5'7" tall, her flawlessly-proportioned build kept her height from being obvious. My lips were only inches from her cheek as I diverted my attention from the notebook for a furtive inspection of the full, graceful upward sweep of her breasts beneath the light blue dress. The dress buttoned all the way from neckline to hem. The superbly-curved shape it clothed confirmed my observation that here was the most beautiful young woman I'd ever met.
"Hmmm. P-I-E-R," she paused uncertainly, still attempting to spell out her father's last message. She glanced up, turning her face toward me. This placed her lips distractingly near to mine. I shifted away before both of us became embarrassed by my sudden impulse. "I'm not sure about those other two letters," she mused. "They ran together, but they could be another 'R' and an 'E'. Pierre," she said, testing the word. She shook her head, smiling wistfully. "That doesn't help much, does it?"
"Keep working at it, Dorothy. You're doing fine," I said, fervently grateful that people couldn't really read other people's minds. Or, could they? If what I was thinking just then had shown, I knew that I'd get my face slapped.
She returned to her intense concentration on the notebook. "This first word seems to begin with another capital letter. Capital 'B' it is, I think. B-then, I'm not sure if the next letter is an 'A', an 'E' or an 'O'," she said thoughtfully.
"What about that last letter; is it a 'V or an 'R'?" I asked, resuming my position at her shoulder, filling my nostrils with her feminine fragrance again. Like a moth being drawn to a flame. Watch yourself, Kent, I warned myself. This isn't the time, the place-and Dorothy Jensen isn't the girl. It was then that I realized that if she'd been married; if she was a widow, her last name shouldn't be Jensen, and she wasn't Miss Dorothy Jensen-she was Mrs. Dorothy ... whatever her husband's name had been.
"B-A-R," she said, sampling the word. "Bar Pierre P. O. 41." She looked at me. "That doesn't sound like anything, does it?"
"Not even like any tavern or nightclub I know of," I admitted. I took the notebook from her and squinted at the three letters in the first word. There was a mark that could have been a slip of the pencil or a comma after it, separating it from the word Dorothy had concluded was Pierre. "You know your Dad's handwriting better than I do, but I think that last letter is a 'V'," I told her.
"I think you're right," she replied, coming around to stand next to me, her pretty head cocked quizzically as she stared down at the page.
Mrs. Dorothy-who? Not that it made any difference. "What was your husband's last name?" I heard myself ask. It was completely irrelevant; a stupid question.
"Why, his name was Bob Jensen. I've often been teased about marrying him just so I wouldn't have to change my name," she said, the smile returning to her face. She was beautiful. That powerful impression kept nagging at my thoughts with increasing insistence. I'd been irked at her before when she'd doubted the practicality of my determination to hunt down and seek revenge from the trio of killers. I was equally annoyed at myself now for being distracted from that objective.
"Why did you ask?" she countered curiously.
I shrugged, grinning idiotically. "Oh, no particular reason," I muttered, feeling the lobes of my ears becoming warm. I peered more closely at the notebook, damning the tell-tale flush spreading over my face.
Suddenly, I forgot about embarrassment at the involuntary blush. I snapped my fingers as what Paul Jensen had written abruptly became important instead of meaningless doodling.
"B-E-V! That's short for Beverly!" I fairly yelled, seizing Dorothy's shoulders. She must have thought I'd flipped my lid. She stared up at me. Her lovely eyes were wide with bewildered wonder. "Willy Makis has a wife!" I said urgently, trying to make her understand. "I've read all there is to read about that gang since I decided to go after them! I read in one newspaper account that the authorities lost track of Beverly Makis about six weeks ago! They think that she sneaked away to join her husband!"
Dorothy took a discreet backwards step so that my hands left her shoulders. She was as puzzled as ever. "Yes, Dad could have written that first word to be Bev," she conceded. "But, that still doesn't make sense out of the rest of it, Norm."
"When you said P. O. 41, the first thing I thought of was a post office box number! That's what it is, don't you see?"
She was beginning to catch up to me. Her upthrust bosom rose and fell excitedly beneath the light blue frock. "And, Pierre is a city! It's the capital of South Dakota!" she cried, really elated now as she rushed toward me and re-examined the scrawled handwriting. "Yes, I can see that that's what Dad must have intended it to read!"
"He could have been suspicious of those five hard-' looking lugs," I said, speaking so rapidly that the words jumbled together. "After he'd passed their car through the gate, he probably decided to check on them more thoroughly; he may have seen a letter on the cushions of the sedan and copied down where and to whom it was addressed to before he walked into the canning company office!"
"Or, he could have noticed the address when he stopped the car at the gate and asked the driver for identification!" Dorothy was caught up in the rush of triumph at our decoding the cryptic scribbling. "Dad always asked strangers for their wallets-he used the information contained on their driver's licenses to complete the daily gate reports he turned into the office! He must have noticed something wrong about those men-must have realized that their identification was false-so he took down this name and address just as it probably appeared on a scrap of paper in Willy Makis's billfold!"
"Or, it could have been in Sammy Lentz's wallet," I added, slowing down my words. "Beverly Makis is also Sammy Lentz's sister; I read that in the detailed report Carl Richards showed me while he was here." I started pacing the living room, already beginning to think about the long drive I had ahead of me.
I was going to Pierre, South Dakota. It could be a wasted trip. We could be wrong about Paul Jensen's hurriedly-jotted notation. Even if we were right, that was no guarantee that Beverly Makis, nee Beverly Lentz, was still receiving mail at that post office lockbox. There was a better than equal chance that she'd already joined her arrogant, blonde killer husband and that by this time they'd be far away from that central South Dakota city.
But there was a chance P. O. Box 41 could lead me to the wife and sister of two members of the gang responsible for so many funerals. Not much of a chance, but better than nothing. Better than what I'd have five minutes ago.
"Where are you going?" Dorothy Jensen asked anxiously as I headed for the front door. "Shouldn't we report what we've discovered to the police, Norm?"
"You can contact Constable Hamre if you want to," I answered, hand on the knob. "So far, all it is is a possibility; I'm surprised that Carl Richards didn't ask you about it; the FBI has a reputation for being thorough."
"It was just an accident that we noticed it-and, as it was, if you hadn't been here I would have just passed over that entry without giving it a second thought," Dorothy said, hurrying over as I opened the door. She pushed it shut again. "I'm going with you. We can take my station wagon."
"Going where?" I said, trying for a blank stare. "Do you mean for that drive you intended to take just as I rang the doorbell?"
She knew. I could see that by the measuring look she gave me. I decided to level with her; to convince her that it just wasn't practical for a guy and girl who were little more than strangers to go chasing across the country on what was probably a worthless trail. She didn't give me the opportunity.
"You can share the driving with me," she said. Her voice was serious and her tone decisive. Her dark brown eyes met mine and held them while she added, "Because, whether you like it or not, I'm going to Pierre, South Dakota. With or without your company, Norm Kent!"
CHAPTER THREE
It was after 11 o'clock that night, when we'd stowed two of Dorothy's suitcases and her smaller overnight case into her station wagon along with my luggage. I'd driven to my own place to hurriedly pack and close things up, then I'd driven back. She waited behind the wheel of the station wagon while I pulled the Rambler into the garage and lowered the overhead door, then we started out.
The longer we rode, cruising at a swift, steady speed, traveling almost due West, the more senseless the mission seemed. Dorothy Jensen stayed awake for a while after we exchanged places in the front seat during a stop at a filling station located in the center of a small Minnesota town above Minneapolis and St. Paul.
"I've never been in any state west of the Mississippi River," she said, stifling a yawn as we resumed our route. "Bob and I always wanted to take a trip to Yellowstone and the Pacific coast states. Have you done much traveling, Norm?"
"My share, I guess. Most of it while I was in the army, though."
"Bob was in the army, too. He was a first lieutenant at the outbreak of the war in Korea. He was a captain when he received his discharge."
"I went in as a private. Thought I'd make it out as a sergeant-but the army already had too many of those, so I didn't."
"A corporal, then?"
"Well, no. I got that far once, then I was just plain Pvt. Kent again, along with the rest of my buddies."
"What happened?"
"It seems the army frowns on, uh, certain forms of recreation," I said solemnly, grinning as I drove along the concrete highway wending over rolling farmland hills and past dark fields. I was thinking of how one of the guys who'd been with our group of GI's at that off-limits German bar had been caught. Miller, that was his name. He'd been in one of the upstairs rooms with a buxom blonde. He'd told us later, after we'd all been busted, that he and the babe were naked and so busily-engaged when the MP's raided the joint downstairs that the first he knew of any commotion was when the babe let out a frightened squeal and shoved him off. He'd automatically jumped to attention and saluted smartly as an MP captain marched through the bedroom doorway. The captain had crisply informed Miller that he was out of uniform-a fact which poor yard bird Pvt. Alonzo Miller was sadly aware of, the understanding MP brass had winked, grinning while he told Miller to carry on and report downstairs when he'd finished his project!
Dorothy must have heard my chuckle. I stole a glance at her. No, she hadn't. She was slumped in the corner of the shadowy front seat, sleeping. Which was just as well. I lit a cigarette and concentrated on the splash of road revealed in the headlights. The terrain became more hilly and the farms were spaced further apart as the station wagon purred its way through central Minnesota. At about 5 o'clock in the morning, when there was enough dawn to see the thick forests and sloping meadows on both sides of the highway, I was out of smokes. Hungry, too; the only meal I'd had the day before had been the bacon and eggs I'd fixed for myself at noon.
There weren't any large towns between where we were and Watertown, South Dakota. Not many small towns, either. So, when I saw the truck stop, I drove up in front of the pumps. There were two semi rigs parked at the side of the concrete block building. I stared out at the spluttering neon 'EAT' sign, then looked at the exquisite features of my traveling companion. Dorothy had stirred as we left the highway and pulled up to the pumps. Her lovely dark brown hair was tumbled around her high, softly-curving left cheek. Her face was turned away from me, her head resting on the backrest. She wore the same outfit she'd worn when I'd arrived at her house; pastel blue dress beneath the beige coat, light blue scarf around her hair.
I debated waking her. If she hadn't been sleeping any better than I had since her father's death, she needed the rest. On the other hand, she could probably use a stretch and some breakfast.
"Good mornin'! Fill er up?" boomed a hearty male voice as a stocky, cheerful-looking man hustled out of the building and around the front of the station wagon. I had the window on my side rolled down. I didn't have to wonder any more if I should awaken Dorothy Jensen; the greeting had accomplished that.
"Good morning. Yes, and check the works under the hood, too, will you?" I answered. He nodded, inserting the nozzle of the gas pump hose into the tank. "Good morning," I said, shifting to smile at Dorothy. "How do you feel about hot coffee and a stretch? Or, is it too early to tell?"
She laughed sleepily, brushing aside her hair and tugging her skirt and coat into some semblance of order. "Good morning, Norm. You know, when I first opened my eyes; before I was really awake, I thought I was dreaming. I saw you here beside me and it gave me quite a start!"
"Oh, I usually affect beautiful young women that way," I said. "You're braver than most, though. You didn't scream and try to escape."
"You know what I mean. This-what we're doing-where we are," she said, gesturing with her hands, crinkling her pretty nose at me. "You'll have to admit that this isn't something people do every day. Incidentally, where are we?"
I told her. The attendant had finished with the fueling. He'd done the windshields and he was just raising the hood when I finished bringing Dorothy up to date on our progress.
She excused herself and left the car. I got out, too, watching her walk stiffly toward the door with the ladies sign tacked above it. She'd taken her overnight case from the back of the station wagon, saying that she'd freshen up and meet me in the restaurant. I talked with the greying, good-natured guy who was servicing the radiator, strolling around the blacktop drive, easing my own cramped muscles.
"You folks out on a late-season vacation trip or on your way to the Dakotas for some pheasant-huntin'?" queried the stocky serviceman. "Oil's down not quite a quart-want me to bring er up level or want to wait until you stop for gas again?" he added, showing me the dipstick.
"Might as well put in a quart," I told him. "We're on a hunting trip," I said in answer to his casual question. That was true. I walked slowly around the slate blue Chevrolet station wagon, kicking absently at the tires while I stared at the early morning haze leaving the grassy, rolling fields. I heard the lazy cawing of a crow somewhere in the distance. There was still a damp chill to the air. The sky was crowded with puffs of grey clouds, shrouding the sun before it really got a chance to do any shining; a cold rain or. possibly even some early-season snow was probably forecast, I thought, paying the attendant.
One of the truckers left the diner and ambled toward his silver rig. The stocky proprietor swapped waves with him as I pulled the station wagon away from the pumps and parked it next to the concrete block building. The blocks were painted green. There was a garage with a hydraulic hoist occupying half of the structure. I walked past the open doorway and entered the restaurant portion.
A plump, healthy-looking blonde woman garbed in a freshly-starched white uniform smiled, glancing around from the griddle where wheat cakes were being manufactured. "Good morning!" she called as I grinned back at her and sauntered toward one of the three leather-padded booths. The other truck driver was at the counter, idly scanning a newspaper while he munched on a slice of delicious-looking toast.
In a minute, the stocky, middle-aged guy who handled the filling station end of the business came in and took a stool next to the driver. The two men were talking as the woman placed a platter of steaming wheat cakes and a cup of coffee in front of the man wearing a khaki shirt and pants. I guessed they were a husband and wife team, running the truck stop operation together. My stomach growled reproachfully at me for ignoring it so long. The pungent, enticing aroma of those griddlecakes blended with the equally-inviting smell of sizzling bacon and crisply-browned toast voided my good intentions to wait for Dorothy before ordering.
I left the booth and approached the waitress. "Think I'll try a batch of those wheat cakes, too. Plus coffee, black. Oh, and maybe toast, two eggs, and bacon later, after my, uh, after the young lady joins me," I hastily ammended.
This uncertainty over my relationship with Dorothy Jensen prompted the robust blonde to smile knowingly. "Coming right up!" she said, turning back toward the griddle. While I walked over to the cigarette machine I heard her whisper. "Newlyweds-thought that's what they looked like when they drove in," she was telling her husband and the truck driver.
I'd about finished my smoke and the wheat cakes were on their way over when Dorothy stepped in, looking around for me. She'd combed her long, dark-brown hair and applied fresh lipstick after rinsing away the sleep from her lovely features. She was carrying a neat tan handbag. She wasn't wearing the headscarf; she'd probably left it in the station wagon when she'd taken back the overnight case.
"Good morning! Your hubby has an appetite just like Lloyd's," said the proprietress, her blue eyes twinkling as she smiled at Dorothy while she placed the platter of wheat cakes and the steaming cup of black coffee on the table.
"Good morn-! Oh, yes!-my husband always eats a huge breakfast," Dorothy said, recovering from her surprise nicely. Except that the rush of crimson to her cheeks only confirmed the matronly-blonde's surmise about our being on a honeymoon. Dorothy studied the menu for a minute, then ordered a breakfast combination labeled as special no. 3; this consisted of grapefruit juice, poached egg, toast and coffee, all for 35 cents.
I mumbled a brief apology to Dorothy for not waiting and dug into the first course of my own breakfast with eager relish. I couldn't help thinking of the grubby, musty eating dive in Merit, Wisconsin while I wolfed down the golden-brown wheat cakes dripping with butter and syrup. What a contrast between eating places there was! And, between the people who ran them.
The woman's timing was good. I'd just finished the last of the cakes and was down to one final sip of coffee when she came back to the booth bearing the breakfast Dorothy had ordered and the second portion of my own breakfast. She returned once more to refill my coffee cup, then favored us with a friendly, indulgent sort of smile, bestowing silent blessings upon what she was convinced was a pair of newlyweds. I grinned after her as she moved away from the booth.
"There could be more awkward moments ahead if we let people think we're married," I said between bites. "It might be better if we travel as brother and sister or something like that."
"Yes, I was just thinking the same thing," Dorothy replied, daintily chasing egg around her plate with one of the slices of toast. "I've always wanted a brother, anyway," she added lightly, her dark brown eyes dancing with amusement.
She was still eating when I took the roadmap from the pocket of my medium-blue suit coat and studied it while I worked at finishing the second cup of hot coffee We weren't too far from the South Dakota state line. Pierre, our destination, was located in the middle of the state, along the Missouri River. Still a long haul ahead of us. And, my reaction toward her was not of a brotherly nature.
We got going again a few minutes later. Even the truck driver fell into the spirit of things; he'd climbed into his rig and was preparing to pull back onto the highway just as we came out and got in the station wagon.
"You folks go ahead," he called, grinning at us through the window of his cab. "It's hard to pass on this stretch of road-and you're more in a hurry to get where you're goin' than I am!"
I returned his friendly wave. Dorothy was behind the wheel, so while she drove, I slouched in the front seat beside her. The sun was continuing to play peek-a-boo with the heavy layers of darkening clouds. It was toward the darkest part of the sky that we were traveling and as I began to doze, head nodding while my frame sprawled into a more comfortable position, I hoped that the ominous horizon wasn't an omen that we were speeding steadily along a trail leading to trouble. Fuzzily heard the radio weather news. Possible snow....
When I opened my eyes and became conscious of my surroundings again, I heard the rhythmic click of the windshield wipers and saw that we were cruising behind a string of a half-dozen other vehicles led by a pickup truck loaded with bags of feed. There were a few oncoming cars swishing wetly past on the road, the glare from their headlights reflected from the rain-slickened pavement.
"You should have roused me earlier," I muttered, flexing cramped legs and adjusting to a more upright position in the seat. It was late afternoon. As the procession we were driving as part of came over a rise, I saw the lights of a large settlement without knowing exactly where we were. At least it wasn't snowing.
"I thought you were awakening the last time I stopped," Dorothy Jensen said, flashing me a brief smile. She looked tired. No wonder. Driving, especially for so long a spell over unfamiliar roads, is a fatiguing chore.
"We'll stop first chance you get to pull off the road. How long has it been raining?"
"Since around noon. We're just coming into Pierre, Norm."
"You made good time. I wish I'd come around to give you some relief, though." I yawned, stretching lustily in the seat.
"I enjoyed the drive. I didn't realize how much unsettled area we still have in this country. Why, there are miles between the farms! It seems that wherever there are trees out here, there are buildings. And, I've never seen so many hills! So much wasteland!"
"Did you see many hunters? We may have some problem getting a place to headquarter in," I told her as we entered the city limits. "It's the tail-end of the tourist season, too; I read someplace that the Black Hills and Mount Ruslimore draw more than a million sightseers every year."
"There were a number of cars parked on gravel roads we passed. It's only been within the last half-hour that there has been much traffic, though. Driving was easy." She eased off on the accelerator when we saw the modern, clean-looking motel just ahead on my side of the road. She guided the station wagon into the sloping driveway before we saw the 'NO VACANCY' sign in front of the unit marked as the office.
"Stop, anyway," I said, reaching for the door handle. 'I'll steer for a while."
When I climbed out, the grogginess being rinsed away by the refreshing chill of the dreary drizzle, and circled to take over the driving, Dorothy obediently shifted across the seat, sighing gratefully as she relaxed beside me. Whether she knew it or not, she was pooped. The few hours of rest she'd had in the car weren't much of a substitute for a good night's real sleep in bed.
We saw more motels and tourist cabins as we drove on. All of them were filled with cars bearing licenses from various states. We both were surprised at the attractive, modern appearance of the downtown business district; it wasn't what you'd expect to see after traveling across miles of barren wastelands, rolling plains separating isolated farms.
"Look, Norm. There's the post office," Dorothy said. "Aren't you going to stop?"
I couldn't have stopped then if I'd wanted to. Traffic was heavy. There weren't any available parking spaces near the building.
"We'll get situated first. I'll come back, later."
"But, the window will be closed. There won't be anyone on duty for you to talk with."
"It's probably closed, already. Besides, if we don't want to spend another night in the car, we've got to locate a place to stay. The later it gets, the less are our chances."
Four hotels and a dozen motels later, I was ready to concede that there just weren't any chances for accomodations. Pierre was crammed with out-of-state cars.
In addition to the sportsmen and vacationists, I'd been advised that there was also a convention in town. We'd covered a good share of the city and we were on the highway, heading toward the bridge spanning the Missouri when Dorothy grabbed my arm, saying, "There, Norm! There is a sign that doesn't have a 'No' lit in front of the 'Vacancy'!"
I swiveled my stare, looking at the deluxe, modern motel to my right. It was a rambling, new-looking set of buildings with golden shingles on the roofs. Which was appropriate because the sign proclaimed the place to be the 'Golden Roof Motel'. I'd almost driven past the driveway entrance and a car behind me blared angrily as I yanked hard at the wheel and veered abruptly off the highway without giving a signal of my intentions.
"Stay in here and keep dry," I said, opening the door. I covered the distance between where I'd stopped the station wagon and the overhanging roof of the motel office in four long-legged strides, but managed to get moderately soaked by the pelting deluge, anyway.
A small, bright-eyed lady wearing a flowered print dress had watched my entrance from the doorway. She'd also noted Dorothy and as I hopefully inquired about lodgings, she smiled apologetically, saying, "All that we have available is one family-size unit. That is a unit with adjoining bedrooms separated by a bath. It rents for $16.00 per day. You and your wife wouldn't want that."
"Oh, she isn't my wife. She's my sister. That will do fine, just fine," I assured her. With total darkness closing in around the motel and the rain drumming with steady monotonous, now, I wasn't going to quibble over room arrangements or prices.
"Well, in that case, if you will sign the register, I'll give you the key. It's the last unit in the row. Number 18," she said, leading the way to the counter. While she wrote out a receipt and inquired how long we'd be guests, I signed the big book open on top of the counter.
"We'll take it for three days to start with," I said, frowning as I tried to crowd in Dorothy's name beneath mine. "We don't know if that will be long enough; if we decide to stay no longer, can we-"
"Just let me know the day before if you decide to remain more than three days. That will be $48.00. You will find towels and soap in the bathroom cabinet, sir. The bed linens are changed daily." She accepted the three twenties I extended and rang up the charge on a new cash register, then brought over my change.
I picked up the key and started for the door. "Oh, is there a cafe or even a lunchroom anywhere nearby?" I paused to ask, looking back at her over my shoulder.
"The Golden Roof Restaurant is in the front of this building," she explained. "Rather, I guess you might say it is in the rear; depending upon which of the two highways you approach us from."
I thanked her, hand on the door. Then I turned again. "Would you know if the post office windows are still open? If any of the postal employees might still be on duty?" I asked.
She shook her head after consulting her watch. "Not any more. The building stays open all weekend, but you won't find any clerks to serve the public until Monday morning," she replied, smiling again as I nodded and opened the door. "We may have snow by then," she added.
Dorothy had the station wagon door open for me as I rushed through the rain and slid behind the wheel. It did feel cold enough to snow. "It sounds as if there isn't much we can do until Monday morning," she said after I explained about the post office as I pulled the car beneath the roof of the carport on the far side of the motel unit we'd been assigned.
"Not much, I guess. We can eat after we've unpacked and freshened up," I said. We both got out. I unlocked the side door with the key I'd been given. Then, we carried in our luggage.
"This is very nice," Dorothy said, appearing in the doorway of the bedroom she had chosen. There were really three rooms and a tiled bath; a sort of combination living room-bedroom with a studio couch, desk, several chairs and table, twin floor lamps and woolen scatter-rugs; two identical bedrooms equipped with double beds, vanity dressers, bureaus, large closets and more shaggy rugs on both sides of the bed.
"Do you want to use the shower first?" I gallantly asked, shedding my rumpled blue suit coat as I headed toward the bedroom where I'd lugged my own suitcases.
"No, I think I'll unpack before the clothes I brought along become more wrinkled than they already are," she answered. She sounded tired. She looked tired. She'd removed her beige coat and her light blue frock hugged the jutting curves of her breasts despite its disheveled need for a re-pressing. Some of the pleats in the dress had become smoothed out and others were crooked and limp from the rigors of our long journey. Her dark brown hair was more tightly-ringed with curls than previously; I suppose the dampness of the icy rain had something to do with that.
Weary and worn-looking or not, Dorothy Jensen was beautiful. I was staring at the graceful swell of her hips and at the vague outlines of her lucious thighs as hinted at by the folds of the blue dress. She wasn't aware of my gaze; she was taking in the arrangement of the living room while she leaned against the doorframe.
The bath with shower was located between the two bedrooms. Besides the separate doors leading into the living room, there were connecting doors in the bath.
"While you're unpacking, I'll scrub off these whiskers and duck under the shower, then," I said, quickly shifting my look to her face when she turned her head toward me.
"Don't hurry. I'm not particularly hungry, are you?" she said, walking further into the living room while I entered the bedroom to dig out a change of underwear and my shaving kit. I glanced at her while I opened my suitcase on the bed. She was at the windows, watching the rain trickle down the glass. It was as dark as it was going to get, although my watch showed just 6:25 P.M.
"Steak, french fries and a giant-sized chocolate malt won't be too hard for me to get down," I called back to her, my thoughts ungentlemanly as my eyes inspected the sweet curve of her behind and the long lines of her nylon-clad legs. As the middle-aged gal in the motel office had said, front or rear depended upon where you were standing as a point of view. To this I added my own observation that regardless of viewpoint, Mrs. Dorothy Jensen was a most perfectly-proportioned female.
Later, while I was splashing around in the. shower, I sternly rebuked my thoughts for refusing to come clean along with the rest of me. It was an ideal situation for hnakie-pankie; lovely babe just beyond the bathroom door, a rainy evening in a remote spot where neither of us were known....
There were just two reasons why nothing was likely to develop in the way of romantic maneuvers there in the motel or anyplace else. This wasn't supposed to be a pleasure trip. We were there to locate Beverly Makis, to obtain some kind of a lead that would put us on the trail of her husband and his two followers.
It was the second reason, though, more than the first that discouraged any notions I had of amorous activities with the tall, superbly-shaped young widow. Dorothy Jensen was a one-man woman. Her every word, her every gesture and expression regarding her late husband announced to me that Bob Jensen was still very much alive in her heart and mind. I'd known my share of women, some of them almost as lovely and desirable as the gorgeous brown-eyed girl I was registered as a brother of at the 'Golden Roof Motel' there in Pierre, S. D., but this was different. There had been rivals-guys who'd competed with me for the favors of those other girls, and I'd lost out to them as often as I'd beaten them with babes; that was part of the game.
This was the first time, though, that my competition was a ghost. I shivered, teeth rattling like a handful of dice when I knocked off the warm water and felt the icy sting of the shower spray rudely quench the final vestiges of sinful impulses. A brisk rubdown with the large, thick towel erased all thoughts except one. What could be accomplished by a trip to the post office and a peek inside lockbox no. 41, I wasn't sure, but it was on the agenda for sometime that rainy night
CHAPTER FOUR
Long after I'd finished getting into the rust-colored corduroy sport jacket and brown gabardine slacks and stowing the rest of my meager wardrobe in the closet, there still wasn't any sound of movement either in the bath or in the other bedroom.
I wandered around the living room, not trying to be particularly quiet. The rain seemed to have ceased. The window panes were still dotted with raindrops and only blackness was visible except for the lights of vehicles traveling along the highway. It was past 7 o'clock-closer to 7:30. I coughed, deliberately. The silence flowed back into the motel unit without any sort of sound in reaction.
An experimental tap on the closed bedroom door received the same result. Nothing. I rapped again, harder. Only silence from Dorothy's bedroom.
"Are you awake?" I called. "Hey! You aren't sick or anything, are you?" I rattled the knob. "Dorothy! Wake up!"
The knob turned and I cautiously pushed open the door. The room was dark but the light reflected from the floor lamps behind me invaded the shadows. I stepped uncertainly through the doorway.
"Dorothy. Dorothy, I don't like to wake you, but-"
"Hmmm?" She murmured drowsily without opening her eyes. She was stretched out on the double bed. She was resting on her side, her face and body turned toward me. She wore a white slip. It was hiked up and bunched around her hips so that the lace frills of her pink panties were visible. Her arms were pulled up so that her slender hands were clasped together on the pillow beside her and her lips were slightly parted as I watched the deep, regular rise and fall of her firm, full breasts.
She needed sleep more than she needed food, I decided. There was sufficient light so that I could find her handbag. I slipped out the keys to the station wagon and tip-toed quietly from the room, easing the door shut again.
At the desk, I used a sheet of writing paper with the motel letterhead to phrase a note, explaining that I'd taken the car and suggesting that she could eat at the Golden Roof Restaurant if she awakened before I returned. I took the key and locked the door. It was equipped with a night latch so that Dorothy could unlock it from inside.
It wasn't until I pulled up beside the restaurant and started toward the entrance that I thought of something. A hasty exploration of my hip pocket confirmed what I'd suspected; I'd left my billfold on the bureau, along with my handkerchief, comb, lighter and cigarettes.
Sighing, I returned to the station wagon, turned it around and drove back to the motel unit. Good old Norm Kent, I thought glumly as I unlocked the door. If I didn't have brains enough to remember to transfer items I needed after changing clothes, then how did I expect to cope with a clever, murderous mob of mugs?
My recriminations were scattered by the dismayed cry Dorothy Jensen emitted as I opened the door. Seeing her dash frantically into the bath, I nearly yelped, too, but for a different reason. I hadn't noticed that the shades were drawn over the living room windows when I'd driven back or I might have made a noisy entry. Then again, I was glad that I hadn't given the beautiful lass a warning. Dorothy must have awakened as I left a few minutes before. She'd read my note, then had pulled the shades and prepared for a shower. She'd been on her way to the bathroom when I'd opened the front door, carrying a peach-colored terrycloth robe draped over her arm.
What I'd seen, I'd scarcely had time to appreciate; it had only been a blurred sideview as she sprang for shelter, but one fact was established during that brief instant my ogling grey eyes were on target. Well, two facts, really. Dorothy Jensen's creamy pair of facts weren't false! That upper portion of her lush anatomy had seemed almost too nice to be true and I'd wondered. Now, I didn't have to.
"It-it was more my fault than yours," she respond-
"Sorry I popped in on you so suddenly," I called in to her. My voice sounded anything but remorseful, though. The bathroom door was ajar a couple of inches. While I watched, it closed and I heard the lock click. "If you will give me ten minutes, I'll go with you."
"Fair enough. I forgot my billfold and the rest of my junk on the bureau. That's why I came back," I said loudly. I hiked into the bedroom and began loading my pockets before I forgot again.
We were practically alone in the restaurant, I noticed as we entered the spacious, brightly-lighted building. She'd said ten minutes. I'd timed her. It had been closer to fifteen, but the extra time was worth waiting. She had donned a dark green jersey blouse and a tan wool skirt and either that short nap and the shower had refreshed and restored her, giving her sensitive, beautiful face a radiant, vibrant glow or else she was blushing about the embarrassing incident neither of us mentioned; some of both, I decided, hacking away at the huge, thick sirloin surrounded by french-fried potatoes and catsup.
Dorothy had ordered a roast beef plate lunch. "I guess I was hungrier than I thought," she said, smiling at me across the table we'd taken. "Where else were you going, Norm? If you had only intended to come here to eat, you wouldn't have used the station wagon."
She was too smart. I'd tried deceiving her the night before at her home but she'd known right away that I intended on following up the lead her father's notebook had provided. I tried again, anyway.
"I'm low on shaving cream," I said. "Thought I'd cruise into the city and see if I could locate a drugstore."
"Oh. Well, I can use a few items, myself."
"I'll get 'em for you; you should hit the sack so that you'll be rested by morning," I said earnestly.
"Thanks, but some of the things I need aren't usually purchased by men," she said, then retreated behind her glass of water.
So, we both went. I drove. The streets were wet and there was a fine mist coating the windshield, just enough so that the windshield wipers had to be put back into action. Although the night was chilled and nasty, there was considerable traffic in the downtown district. We were fortunate in approaching a drugstore just as another car vacated a space at the curb in front. While Dorothy walked further into the store and got waited on by a lady clerk, I hovered around the cigarette counter. I bought a carton of smokes, a package of flints and a can of lighter fluid, then wandered over and picked up a tube of shaving cream as Dorothy came toward me, carrying several packages.
"Ready?" I asked. She nodded.
"The store closes at 9:30," she said. I looked at the electric clock on the back wall. That was in five minutes. I paid the same lady clerk who'd served Dorothy for the shave cream, then we walked out of the drugstore.
"Anything else you need before I take you back to the motel?" I asked, opening the station wagon door for her. The drizzle had temporarily ceased again.
She was looking at me as I circled the car and slid behind the wheel. "You didn't really intend to stop at a drugstore, did you?" she said, but she didn't expect an answer. She knew that I'd concocted an excuse.
"I won't try to lie to you again," I said, starting the engine and flicking on the headlights. "No, I wasn't going to stop at a drugstore. Since you're so great at mind-reading, you probably know where I'm going after I take you back to the motel."
"I'm going to the post office with you."
"Nope."
"This is my car!"
"Nope."
"I have as much right as you do to-!"
"I'll lug you into the motel by force and lock you in if I have to," I growled, sounding as grim and un-budging as possible. "What I might do, if I see the opportunity, is strictly illegal. I'm not getting you involved and that's that. That's flat. Final. No more arguing about it."
"Oh, you and that masculine ego of yours make me furious! I'm not a schoolgirl, Norm! You don't have to feel that you have to protect me!" When she saw that I wasn't going to debate the issue with her, she lapsed into a sulk that lasted until I pulled up in front of motel unit no. 18.
"Here's the key. I'll carry m the packages," I said. She accepted it and she had the door open when I emerged with the armful of bundles.
"There is a flashlight in the dash compartment," Dorothy said, blocking the door when I turned and started back across the room after dumping the parcels on the table. "You'll locate a tool kit under the seat. You'll need a screwdriver to force open that lockbox," she said calmly. Her dark brown eyes pleaded with mine. "I could stand at the door and act as your lookout," she added.
My hands were on her shoulders. Again, without any voluntary impulse. I grazed her pretty, pointed chin with my left fist. "Having you along would be a distract-" I doubled back hastily, "would be apt to draw just that much more notice," I said. What I really meant was that having her near was just too much temptation-that I'd be the guy who was distracted.
With a quick movement, her lips brushed my cheek swiftly, so rapidly that she was out of my arms and smiling from a safe distance before the kiss registered. Even when it did, I knew it was a fond, unpassionable token; a kiss in keeping with our supposed relationship. A sisterly peck, admonishing me to be careful.
Dorothy whispered, "Don't get caught, Norm-Postal authorities can be just as stern and unyielding as police officers when someone is found breaking into lockboxes or tampering with mail!"
"There might not be anything in box 41," I said, removing the key from the door. "And, if there's anyone around, I won't even go near the boxes. Lock up after me. A pretty young woman alone in a motel room might give some character ideas about tampering with female."
She crinkled her nose, pretending disgust at the feeble pun. Maybe, it wasn't pretended. Anyway, she stood in the doorway, watching me back the station wagon around. I watched the frame of light from the room behind her disappear in the rear-view mirror as I drove up the sloping drive and swung unto the highway.
There hadn't been any parking spaces on the block around the large post office building we'd driven past that afternoon. Now, all spaces were available. I pulled in directly in front of one of the entrances. I saw that there was a dim light, at least, inside.
There was a small flashlight in the dash compartment, just as Dorothy told mc. There was also an assortment of screwdrivers along with wrenches, tape, fuses, and a pair of pliers in the metal tool box beneath the seat. I selected the largest screwdriver. I felt guilty, already, and I hadn't even done anything illegal, yet! It was lots colder than it had been. Almost cold enough to snow.
My footsteps echoed as I mounted the steps and entered the building. Only a few bulbs glowed dimly in the lobby. I didn't see or hear anyone when I paused to survey the premises. It was nearly 10 o'clock. All of the parcel post, general delivery, money order and postage windows were closed. A cool, damp breeze swept through the quiet lobby from one of the other doors. Suddenly, I was anxious to locate the lockbox and get this over with; I was about to commit my first deliberate violation of law and with each step I took I expected postal inspectors to converge on me. It was a nutty notion, yet I couldn't laugh it off and I felt like a traitor of some sort when my thoughts fervently hoped that lockbox number 41 would be empty.
When I slouched stealthily around the corner beyond the last service window and saw the long wall of square metal boxes with glass inserts, there was another overhead light encased in a frosted glass dome bathing the area in a muted glare. I wouldn't need the flashlight in the left-hand pocket of the corduroy jacket.
Then, there I was, standing a foot away from P. O. lockbox 41. Cold and damp though it was, a warm, uncomfortable sweat glazed my skin while I stared at the square metal mail holder. My initial peer had dashed away my hopes that the box would be empty; there were a number of pieces of mail inside. No sense in stalling or telling myself that the screwdriver my trembling right hand was closed around in the right pocket of the jacket couldn't be used to jimmy the lockbox, either. I knew that it could.
Anger at my cowardice and a grim self-reminder that killers like the husband of the babe who rented the postal receptacle I was about to break into never played by the rules brought my hand and the plastic-handled screwdriver out of the pocket as I glanced rapidly around to assure that the building was still deserted.
I wedged the tip of the wide blade between the two metal hinges and yanked, using the screwdriver as a pry-bar. I gave it another hard, urgent lunge. Then, another. The lock was stronger than I'd thought. I was really sweating, now. The wind swished at a calendar on the wall behind me and I must have jumped a foot.
Resisting the wild impulse to use the butt of the heavy screwdriver to shatter the glass insert, I shifted my attack to the side of the box where the lock was located. I used both hands to lever the blade against the stubborn metal. I almost fell backwards as the lock gave with a piercing rasp and the metal door popped open!
Hastily grabbing the contents, I squinted at the various circulars, newspapers, bills, and advertisements as I rifled through them. Most of the mail was addressed to 'Occupant, P. O. Lockbox 41', which didn't help worth a damn. Then, I nearly cheered in exultation. I stared down at the letter addressed to 'Mrs. Beverly Marks'. The handwriting on the envelope was feminine. I flipped it over and saw the return address: 'Miss Nina Dorrel, Route 3, Homa, La."
Up until then, we hadn't been sure. We'd followed a dubious memo left by Paul Jensen; a hurriedly-scribbled notation that had been practically illegible. I memorized the name and address of the sender of the letter, then turned it over and stared at the name it had been addressed to. There wasn't any doubt in my mind that Beverly Marks was a poorly-contrived alias used as a substitute for her true identity as Beverly Makis. I was also reasonably positive that she would come for her mail; the weekly newspaper stuffed in the box was dated four days ago and the letter from Nina DorreL whoever she was, was postmarked three days ago.
I jerked to attention and froze. Listening. I heard the brisk, staccato click of high heels crossing the dimly-lit lobby. Moving with feverish haste, I crammed the letter in my pocket and stuffed the other mail back inside the box. The lock clicked and held when I quickly closed the metal door. Running, not walking, I tip-toed across the floor and whirled, pretending to be casually sauntering into the post office building from a side street entrance just as the woman I'd heard approaching turned the corner and headed for the tiers of boxes.
Woman was right. I stopped, blinded by the sheen of her shimmering platinum blonde tresses. I'd seen silver-tinted blondes before; quite a few artificial babes paraded the streets in Chicago and Milwaukee with their hair bleached in an effort to attain that glamorous shade. But not like this doll.
She wasn't tall; probably not more than 5'2" minus the red pair of high-heeled shoes strapped around her ankles. She wore a knit navy blue dress beneath the pale blue cashmere polo coat she hadn't bothered to button or belt. Doll was the appropriate word for her. From where I stood, gawping foolishly, pulse rate soaring past the recommended speed suggested by insurance companies and climbing by the second, I saw her insert a key in the lock of box no. 41 and try unsuccessfully to make it work.
I'm surprised that she didn't hear the hammering thunder of my rewed-up heartbeats even if she didn't feel the heat from my intense, concentrated stare. She hadn't seen me. Or, if she had, she wasn't impressed or interested. She was rattling the door of the lockbox and twisting the key in her futile efforts to make it function.
I'd hoped that Beverly Makis would come to Pierre to call for the contents of that lockbox. What I hadn't expected was that she'd arrive almost before I'd had time to stuff back the mail.
CHAPTER FIVE
Conscious of the stolen letter in the pocket of my jacket, I was purposely ambling across the floor in her direction. She did turn around partially, then. There was an exasperated little frown on her face, a face that missed being beautiful, I noticed as I came nearer. It wasn't so much the arrangement of her features; her green eyes were interesting, her small nose was delicately-formed, and her red lips looked softly-inviting enough. It was an intangible quality of calculating contempt blended with awareness of her charms that I thought I saw in the petulant curve of her mouth and in the bored look in her eyes as she took me in from stem to stern.
"Problems?" I inquired, smiling while my own gaze roved approvingly down her gorgeous frame in return.
"This damned lock seems to be stuck," she said. She decided to play the frail, helpless damsel in distress. She stepped aside so that I could move closer to the stubborn lockbox. "Will you see if you can open it for me?" she murmured persuasively, vividly-painted fingertips touching my coat sleeve.
"Hmmm. It does seem to be stuck, doesn't it?" I grunted, wriggling and jiggling the key in the lock. Something must have got bent when I'd pried the door open. I resisted the temptation to haul out the trusty screwdriver in my pocket with her letter; after all, what did I care if she lost faith in my masculine prowess? Besides, one jimmy job was sufficient to last me a lifetime. And, besides, it might look a wee bit suspicious if I casually produced a tool from my pocket and demonstrated my abilities as a burglar. It would look more suspicious yet, if in extracting said screwdriver, the letter addressed to her should happen to flutter to the floor.
I grunted. I rattled the door. I turned and twisted the key. I removed it from the lock and stuck it back. Turned again. As she'd so apdy observed, the damned lock seemed to be stuck.
"Uh, couldn't you wait until Monday morning?" I finally gasped when my heroic efforts failed. "We, uh, don't seem to be making much progress, do we?"
"I can't wait. I don't live in town," Beverly Makis, alias Beverly Marks said, giving me an unlady-like push as she made another try at the lock, herself. A faint note of impatience had seeped into her voice. "What-is-wrong with this-stupid lock, anyway?" she panted, exerting all of her strength as she twisted savagely at the key.
The inevitable happened. It broke off in the lock. I was glad that the kindly old scoutmaster of troop 8 wasn't present to hear the shocking display of cuss words launched thereupon by the slim-waisted blonde. She pounded at the glass with her fist in a frenzy of rage.
"Wait a minute," I said, catching her wrist. "That isn't going to help."
"Oh, this is great, just great! You're a helluva a big help, too, aren't you?" She wasn't trying to be fetching and helpless, now. She was snapping viciously like a bitch in heat, her unbelievably-impressive breasts raging volcanically against the dark blue knit dress as she yanked her hand away from mine.
I forgot who she was for an instant. I reacted according to my natural impulses, too. "Shut up!" I growled, towering above her. "You're the one who broke off the key! Swear at me again and I'll give you a swat on the tail that you'll never forget!"
She opened her mouth, green eyes wide and incredulous. As for me, I'd desperately wished I'd held my temper in check; this wasn't how to win friends or influence platinum blondes. Or, was it?
Because instead of lighting into me again, Beverly Makis smiled. Not the mildly flirtatious smile she'd used when she'd asked me to help. This one was genuinely interested. She was staring up at me as if she hadn't seen me before.
"Why, I think you would hit me, at that," she said in a subdued, throaty tone while she closed the distance between us. "Know something? I might even like having you wrestle with me. Not here. Not now." She had her hands on my shoulders. Her upturned glance studied my face as she glided smoothly forward, the tips of her breasts bashed against my coat. "Yes," she purred, hands sliding to clasp behind my neck, "I really think I might enjoy being spanked by such a big, rugged brute. You are big, you know. Are you rugged? A brute?" she whispered, eyes nearly closed, her lips relaxed, waiting.
The kiss I'd received from Dorothy Jensen may have been a sisterly peck. As soon as my mouth came down on this superbly-stacked, quivering bundle of doll-like babe's warm lips it was like shaking hands with an electric eel! Her mouth not only met mine halfway; her fingers pressed insistently at the base of my skull, forcing my lips even more fiercely against hers until she moaned, the taunting tip of her tongue saying eloquently that she enjoyed her sex sessions wild with no holds barred. My own arms were wrapped around her and I could feel the yielding warmth of her compact body through both the knit wool dress and the cashmere coat. She laughed shakily as she relinquished her clasp around my neck and braced her palms against my shoulders, shoving us apart.
"Ummm, you are a brute! Help me crack open that awful old lockbox so we can get out of here," she said, deftly fending off my eagerly-reaching hands with a lithe, fluid sidestep. "Please find some way to pry open this damned door," she pleaded, tugging at the light blue polo coat which had become disheveled by my encircling arms.
"I might have a screwdriver or something in the car," I said, breathing as hard as if I'd just run the mile in four minutes flat. "Wait for me. I'll be right back."
My legs were rubbery and my walk was more of a galloping stagger as I rushed from the building and to the station wagon. I didn't feel safe keeping the letter in my jacket pocket with me. Hell, I didn't feel safe about anything-particularly being with that sensual, quick-passioned blonde! I stowed the envelope in the dash compartment with the flashlight. The ignition keys were still in the switch. I left them there.
Beverly Makis was fiddling with the lockbox. She had taken a fingernail file from her handbag. She'd succeeded in breaking that, too, when I rejoined her.
"You know, this is strictly illegal-even if it is your box," I mumbled, slipping the screwdriver blade into the crack just below the keyhole. I gave it a forceful pry and the door squeaked in sharp protest as it flew open. My technique as a burglar was improving with practice I thought, watching the small, magnificently-curved blonde grab at the mail inside.
A couple of circulars drifted to the floor as she shuffled through the contents. I stooped to retrieve them, saying, "You must be expecting money from home or an offer from Hollywood, the way you're going through that stuff. Say, what am I supposed to call you? My name's Norm-Norman, er, uh Kendall." I hoped she wouldn't notice the verbal fumbling while I grabbed for an alias of my own. Now I understood why she'd used the name Marks; it was probably the first name she'd thought of when she'd needed a new identification.
"Dammit! Junk! All junk," she said bitterly, stalking toward one of the writing boards mounted on the wall in the post office lobby. She tossed everything, including the newspaper, into the wire wastebasket beneath the desk.
"I'm sorry that you didn't find what you expected-I whatever it was," I said, catching up with her.
"What? Oh, the hell with it," she said vaguely while she continued walking through the empty building. She appeared to have forgotten me for the moment. I repeated my manufactured name and asked again what I was supposed to call her. I had a few appropriate pet names picked out but I kept them to myself. They weren't complimentary.
"Beverly Marks," I said thoughtfully after she'd supplied that information as we left the building and stood on the dark, deserted sidewalk. "Would that be Miss or Mrs. Marks?"
"That would be Mrs. Why? Does that make any difference?" she replied, giving me another appraising once-over.
I did likewise; my ogling wasn't new. I hadn't stopped since I'd first seen her enter the post office. "It might," I said, not wanting to sound over-anxious so as to give her any indication that our meeting was anything but accidental. "To your husband, I mean."
"My husband is long ago and far away. Forget him-did you say your name is Norm?" When I nodded, she said, "Well, don't worry about that louse. I'm not."
"Where do we go from here? I'm a stranger in these parts. Any suggestions?" I told her, shaking out a pair of cigarettes and offering her one.
She took it and steered my hand holding the lighter while her green eyes reckoned with my grey ones above the flickering flame.
"That depends on what your idea of a good time is," she said.
"You know the answer to that as well as I do."
"Do I?"
"Why waste time leading up to it. Just tell me where there's a place," I growled, once again deciding that the rough, masterly touch might be effective.
It was. She smiled. She was a dame who liked being wanted by every guy who looked at her. "Think it would be worth a two-hour drive?" she asked softly. She was playing with me. She wanted to be played with, too, but she was trying to make the game interesting.
"Where to?"
"Does that matter, Norm? Most men wouldn't quibble over the surroundings."
"I'm not most men, doll. This isn't my home playgrounds. I just don't want to get into anything I can't get out of. Like hubby charging into the bedroom with pistol or shotgun in hand."
"You think I'm trying to set you up for a cornball gimmick like that?" she drawled, plainly amused. "Maybe, you just don't want to get into anything. Period. You wouldn't be a wolf with no fangs, now would you?"
"Look, I told you that I'm not in a mood to chase you round and round the bush! Now either you tell me what's at the end of the two-hour tour or we say farewell and goodbye!"
For a moment, I thought I'd pushed too hard with the tough guy routine. She dropped her smile. Her sensual features hardened and her green eyes lashed at mine. Then, she shrugged and hooked my hand through her arm, pressing the arm tightly against her coat so that the back of my hand was securely nestled against the warm swell of her breast while she led us toward the dusty Oldsmobile sedan parked across the street.
"I live on a farm about forty-five miles west of here, Norm. I'm all alone there, but it's comfy and stocked with everything we need, including lots of liquor and the springiest inner-spring mattress you can imagine," she murmured coaxingly.
"Wait a minute! If I go out there with you in your heap, how am I supposed to get back-walk? I'm not that crazy about hiking in the country," I said, dragging my feet and looking back at the slate blue station wagon parked in front of the post office entrance around the corner. "I'll follow you in my car, and-"
"No need to do that, Norm. I'll be driving back this way in the morning. Just let your car stay where it is overnight. No one will bother it," she said, tugging insistently while I continued to balk beside the Olds.
I shook my head. "I left the keys in the ignition. Besides, my sister will be in a panic if I don't return to the motel-or at least take the station wagon back and leave her a note."
"Which motel are you staying at?"
I told her. After a few more minutes of debating the issue, she saw that I just wasn't going unless I at least drove the station wagon back to the Golden Roof MoteL So, that's what I did. She was right in back of me all the way and she kept the motor running while I cut the lights and coasted into the carport beside the darkened motel unit where Dorothy was asleep.
There wasn't time for a lengthy explanation. There wasn't room on the margin of the roadmap, either, and I knew that the blonde who was waiting for me would leave her car and come over to get me if I didn't make it fast. So, I just scribbled: 'Beverly Makis-farm 45 mi. W. of here', and had to let it go at that.
What I didn't know as I legged it over and climbed into the front seat next to the wiley blonde wife of Willy Makis was that she'd tossed another curve at me-not one of her lush physical curves. Because as we sped away from the city, leaving the lights that winked in the blackness behind us in the distance, I realized that we weren't driving west. We were traveling almost due south, unless the potent perfume Beverly Makis used had addled my sense of direction as well as corrupting my morals.
"I thought you said 45 miles west of Pierre," I said, my left hand resting experimentally on her right knee.
"Oh, did I say west?" she answered innocently, flashing me a winsome smile and allowing the gap between her legs to widen as she moved her left leg away. "I haven't been out here too long, myself. I get terribly confused, sometimes," she said, laughing softly as her attention returned to the ribbon of road revealed by the headlights.
"This isn't a highway. Are you sure about the distance?" My fingers were playing with the silken top of her nylon stocking where it was gathered by the clasp of her garter. She expected a further exploration; she was so confident of the magnetic drawing power of sex, so convinced that I could scarcely wait to enjoy her feminine charms, that if I hadn't reacted in typical male fashion she would have been suspicious of my motives. I allowed my fingers to inch slowly upward, leaving the nylon mesh behind hi the journey over even smoother, warmer flesh.
"You don't seem to let unmarked curves bother you," she said as her right hand left the wheel and firmly disengaged my creeping clutch. She carelessly flipped down the navy knit skirt and patted my hand consolingly. "I'm ticklish, honey. Let's save some fun for when we get home, shall we?" she drawled. "We don't want to wind up in a ditch."
"Your husband must be some kind of nut, leaving you alone and unprotected on some forsaken farm," I said, "What does he do for a living? Traveling salesman? Or, is he off someplace, pheasant-hunting?"
There was a side road to our left. She swung the Olds off the blacktop country trunk road and the big sedan lurched and rocked, bumping over the rutted, narrow path that was more like a forgotten cow trail than a road.
"Let's don't talk about him," she said gaily. "What about you, Mr. Norman Kendall? Tell me about your wife and how she just doesn't understand you. What are you-a bright young exec for some big city company who wants to cut a few capers during a two-weeks-vacation?"
"That's close. Except that I'm not married." "No? What about your sister?"
"My sister-" I'd almost given myself away. Nearly blurted out that my sister was dead. "Why, she isn't married, either," I finished lamely.
This evoked another searching look while the car jounced over the wet, badly-graded excuse for a side road. "I have a brother. He isn't big and brawny like you, though," she said.
"Oh? Is he living on the farm with you?" I remembered the picture I'd seen of Sammy Lentz, the scrawny, scared-looking hood who wore thick-lensed, dark-rimmed glasses.
"No. I haven't seen Sam in months. I've been all alone, Norm. You have no idea of how lonely a girl can get out here," she replied, a tragic tone to her words. "That's why I don't want you to think that I-well, that I make a habit of allowing strange men to pick me up in post offices. Or-anywhere else."
"Oh, I know that. You're really someone special, baby. And, what a dish like you sees in a lug like me, I won't even try to guess," I said, while my left hand began the pleasant climb up the smooth, warm softness of her inner thigh once again. I heard her sharp intake of breath at my touch. She frowned, but looking at her profile in the glow of the dashlights I could see that she didn't mean it. The tips of my fingers brushed at a wispy, frilly fabric then withdrew and slowly, lightly stroked the satiny flesh between stocking top and the ruffled hem of her panties.
We damn near did plunge down the steep, grassy embankment bordering the road. I decided she was right. We both were more at ease when I reluctantly ceased the fondling and substituted cigarettes for sex. Temporarily.
She'd estimated two hours time for a trip she'd told me was about 45 miles. That had sounded long for the distance. As we swayed and bumped along that winding washboard, up and down hills, then across a rickety wood bridge spanning a stony creek, then off onto still another, even more narrow, rougher side road, I was beginning to wonder if two hours would do it.
"Look. It's snowing," Bev Makis announced, having all she could do to keep the car following the slippery, rain-washed mass of gumbo that dipped into an abrupt ravine then climbed up at an equally sharp angle.
Sure enough. It was. The wind had been rising steadily, too. I saw the feathery flakes being driven across the headlights. I've always liked snow.
"Probably just a freak flurry," I said. "It's too early in the season for a heavy fall."
"Don't count on it. This wouldn't be the first October there's been a blizzard in the Dakotas." She was fighting the wheel as the big car kept skidding and swaying sickeningly on the treacherous mire we were traveling over. The buffeting of the gusts of wind didn't make driving any easier, and it got worse during the next hour.
"How much further?" I'd looked at my watch. It was after midnight and blacker than any night I could remember, even with the whiteness being hurtled through the air around the sedan.
"Another two or three miles. If we don't slide off this damn goo and break our necks, first," she said tersely.
I stared at Beverly Makis. She was biting her lips and leaning intently forward in the seat, trying to guide the Olds along the sloppy, uneven surface rendered almost invisible by the streaming intensity of the snowflakes. I thought of what she'd said about a blizzard. I thought of being out there miles from anywhere. Under other conditions, being snowbound in a remote South Dakota farmhouse with a sexy blonde built for performance would have been a delightful possibility. The answer to now and where to spend the winter.
Right then, I found myself wishing that I'd allowed Dorothy Jensen to accompany me to the post office. That I was back in the cozy, civilized confines of the Golden Roof Motel and that I hadn't been such a goop trying to play private detective when, as FBI agent Carl Richards had said, I didn't know from nothing about how to cope with a situation such as I was unhappily involved in now.
Good old Norm Kent, I thought, hearing the shrill whining whistle of the wind bearing dense layers of additional snow to coat the already-whitening earth. Talk about guys so stupid that they didn't have sense enough to come in out of the rain-what did that make me? As if in answer, a blast of wind sent out a bubbling ripple of sound that rattled the car window beside me. It was like a derisive, mocking laugh.
"What the hell is so funny?" snapped Beverly Makis. "This is no time to think of jokes!"
It was then that I realized that the noise I'd heard hadn't been entirely from the violent wind that kept staggering the car.
"Nothing is funny," I muttered dismally. "And, who's thinking of jokes? If this snow gets any thicker and the wind any stronger, it won't make much difference if we're two or two hundred miles from shelter. We just plain won't get there."
CHAPTER SIX
We did get there, but we didn't know it until we were past the upward sloping driveway. I yelled, seeing the dim trace of lights from the farmhouse. She shifted into reverse. The wheels spun and the sedan rocked and slewed around, tires digging for traction beneath the several inches of snow that already clogged the road. The engine stalled. We were a quarter-mile from shelter.
"Better just leave the car where it is," I said. "You'd never get up that driveway without chains."
"Good thing you saw those lights. I'd have kept right on going if you hadn't seen them," she said, dousing the headlights and removing the key from the ignition.
"Are you sure this is your place? Not that we can afford to be choosy, even if it isn't," I-said, turning up the collar on my rust-colored corduroy jacket and wishing that I'd worn the lightweight but warm grey topcoat I'd left hanging in the closet at the motel.
"Yes, this is the farm. I didn't leave any lights burning, though. Come on. It must be my brother," she said. She'd buttoned her light blue polo coat. She pushed against the car door on her side as she levered the handle, but the velocity of the wind was so strong that she had difficulty in budging the door.
Her brother, Sammy Lentz. Sickly and consumptive-looking or not, the owlish-eyed runt was deadly dangerous. A killer without conscience. I just sat there with the snowstorm beating wickedly at the car.
"Come on! Help me get this goddamn door open!" Beverly Makis flung at me while she shoved frantically against the door with her shoulder.
"Slide over and use this door," I said, yanking on the handle. The door resisted at first, then whipped wide open as the wind caught it. There didn't seem to be much else to do but take refuge in the farmhouse. I'd heard of those sudden and savage Dakota blizzards, too. How people had been stranded in some isolated sector when the snowstorms started and how their frozen bodies had remained buried beneath the icy drifts until the Spring thaws.
She stumbled and almost went down, her shrill curses stiffled by the howling gale. I slammed the car door and put my right arm around her waist. Our heads were down as we staggered and wobbled like drunken sailors being pitched about on a wave-swept deck, battling blindly up the driveway through the dunes and drifts of cold, slippery snow that had already accumulated to a height of at least a foot in places, with tons more apparently scheduled to be dumped by the looks of the storm. The snowflakes were so close together and were being whipped through the darkness so fast that it was like walking through a frozen waterfall. We'd only been exposed to the needle-like stings of the flakes and the wrathful lash of the wind for minutes as we hurried in the general direction of where I'd noticed the lights, but my entire face felt numb and my eyes were tearing so that even if visibility had been unobscured by the frosty pellets my vision would have been hopelessly blurred. What a switch the weather had pulled!
Beverly pitched headlong when she stumbled over something submerged beneath a snowdrift in the yard. I scooped her up and stumbled, myself. She had both arms wrapped tightly around my neck and if it had been nigh impossible to navigate against the turbulent screams of the wind before, it was doubly difficult with her weight as an added burden, compact and cuddlesome though she was.
By the time I stubbed a toe against the lower porch step, I was at the verge of complete collapse. Every time I tried to replenish the air in my lungs, the wind thrust back my breath, then fiendishly snatched away even the stale air I finally managed to expel. The blonde was limp in my arms and I had to toss her around like a sack of potatoes, shifting her to my shoulder with her face and arms dangling behind me and her legs drooping in front of me so that I could have one hand free to haul us up the steps by clutching at the railing.
I banged at the door with as much energy as I had left, which wasn't more than a feeble thud. I hit the door again, then fumbled for the knob but had trouble in even finding it, let alone getting the half-frozen paw to function well enough to twist it.
Only people who have lived through one of those sneak blizzards can believe how incredibly cold and fantastically fast a Dakota snowstorm is capable of striking. The solid farmhouse door swung open so rapidly that it pulled me off balance, spilling me to the floor inside, my blonde burden sprawled unceremoniously beside me.
"Just lay right there. This .12 gauge could rip the head right off them shoulders, bud," droned a sing-song chant from somewhere above me. I was dimly aware that the door closed. That if my paralyzed reflexes ever thawed out, I'd be able to twist my head and at least manage a bleary look up at Sammy Lentz before the shotgun he'd mentioned caused permanent rigor mortis to stiffen my muscles more than they were.
Beverly Makis uttered a faint, piteous moan and stirred slightly on the linoleum beside me. "Ohhh, my-head," she whimpered giddily.
"Who's this character?" I heard Sammy Lentz demand in his twangy, nasal voice. I felt something hard nudge me in the small of the back and I hoped it wasn't a hair trigger on that shotgun.
"M-me? W-why, I'm j-just a f-friend," I stuttered. Partly from feeling like a frozen fish. Partly because I was scared. Scared? I was hysterical with fright!
"Okay, friend. Turn over. Lay on your back so's I can see your friendly face, huh?" The hard poke jabbed at my ribs, prodding me to accomplish the harsh, hostile instruction.
I flopped over and squinted, endeavoring to focus on the murkfly-swimming features of the small blob of shadow. When I tried to squint, my eyes were completely shut; the tears that the wind had sent streaming from my blinkers had frozen, pulling my eyes into distorted slits.
I brushed clumsily at my face with my nerveless hands.
"Well, well! Ain't you cute!" Sammy Lentz's baleful giggle cackled above me. "Yeah, I can savvy why dear little sis decided to snuggle up with you on a cold, stormy night like this instead a usin' a hot water bottle."
"N-now, wait a cotton-picking damn minute!" I said, my teeth still clicking like mad castanets. "I don't know you and I j-just met Beverly tonight, but I don't have to stay here and listen to your filthy insinuations! I-!"
"Why, no! Nohhh, you don't hafta stay, sweetheart," crooned the sadistic shrimp, leering down at me, his thin lips peeled back from his dingy, crooked teeth. "Who says you gotta stay? Not me! Hell, no." His ugly dark eyes were magnified by the thickness of his glasses. Then his false smile vanished and warped into an unholy grimace. "Up off your keister and out the door, friend."
"Sammy! No!" cried the blonde, scrambling unsteadily into a sitting position, her upraised face pale with cold and her green eyes wide with alarm. "He-he wouldn't last ten minutes out there! Besides, we don't want to kill him! Not yet!"
What did she mean, not yet! I scrunched around into position on my knees to stare at her. I must have resembled a praying mantis and that's probably what I should have been doing all along. Praying.
"I'll go," I croaked weakly. "Just give me a few more minutes and I'll leave. I'd rather have my blood frozen than spilled all over this floor. But, at least tell me why, will you?" I kept staring from the platinum-plated babe's face up into the sickly, whisker-stubbled scowl her older brother kept aimed at me along with the gaping black bore of the shotgun. Then I saw that there were two bores; a modified choke on the bottom barrel, a full choke above. It was one of those over and under hammerless pieces with a single trigger mechanism. I'd used a gun like that once. On a weekend duck hunt with Arthur Hines. It was just one of his expensive collection of firearms. I remembered that both barrels worked from the same trigger, although at the point-blank range separating my chest from the twin tunnels of destruction a second squeeze would be a waste of ammo.
"I must have whacked my head on that tree stump in the yard," Beverly gritted, wincing as she gingerly touched the top of her head, then climbed shakily to her feet. There was snow melting amid her silvery-blonde waves and more snow plastered over her coat. She brushed some of it from the folds, then began unbuttoning.
"You didn't give me no answer when I ast you who this guy is," Sammy whined querulously.
"He says his name is Norman Kendall. He was in the post office when I got to town and went to see if Willy had written."
"Yeah? Well, didja get word from Willy?"
She made a wry pout, jerking her thumb in my direction. "Ask tall, dark, and curly, here," she said, shrugging out of the light blue coat. "He was snooping through my mail the first time I came in. I walked back to the door and made some noise walking back toward the lockboxes and by then he'd replaced the stuff and pretended that he was just walking in, too," she explained, affording me a contemptuous glare.
Sammy Lentz had backed up so that if I had been delirious enough to grab for his legs he was now well out of range. "You a fuz?" he chirped, regarding me with added wariness, his scrawny index finger curled rigidly around the trigger.
I stayed rigid, too. If I did anything sudden; even an involuntary sneeze that I was doing my best to discourage, I'd never be anything but rigid.
"A-a what?"
"A cop," translated the big-breasted doll, giving me another scornful once-over. "Drag out your wallet." She looked at her brother. "I don't think so. That's what I brought him out here for, though. To find out."
"Yeah, I bet. You knew what Willy'd do to you if he thought you'd let some other guy-"
"Shut up! Anyhow, I didn't."
"I don't give a crap how many creeps you took on. I'm just tellin' you that-"
"Oh, climb off my back, will you? What are you doing here? I thought you were with Willy and Vic," she said, hips undulating tightly against the knit navy blue dress as she prowled over to the gas range and lit one of the burners, then hefted the coffee pot before setting it over the flame.
"Up, you. Real slow and careful," prompted Sammy, the twin tubes rising with me as I dug out my billfold and extended it in slow-motion movements. "Uh-uh. Put it on the table, then get over and brace against the door with your back to me," commanded the runty, sallow-faced hood. He was wearing a rumpled, seedly-looking brown suit, minus the coat. There was a revolver in his shoulder holster and I stared at the blue-black butt, wondering if it was the .38 that had snuffed out my sister, Janet's life?
After I'd shuffled over to stand facing the door, my hands braced against it, my feet spread wide apart as he'd ordered, he told his sister to frisk me. She did so expertly, staying far enough out of reach so that I couldn't snatch her and use her as a shield.
"How do you like being petted, big boy?" she murmured, giggling while her hands searched in even the most un-likely places on my frame. Then, at an irritated summons from her brother, she withdrew.
"This guy's name is Kent, not Kendall,'" I heard Sammy Lentz mutter while they examined the contents of the wallet.
"What about that, honey?" Beverly Makis drawled chidingly. "Do you think it's fair to give a poor, trusting girl a phony name? What else is phony about you, Norm, darling?"
"If you'd only tell me what I've done," I answered, my quavering voice sounding as if it belonged to a doddering old coot on his death bed. "Look, I'll admit I was jimmying those lockboxes at the post office-a guy has to earn a living, don't he?" I croaked miserably, hoping I sounded as pathetic as I felt.
"You tryin' to sell us a far-out package like that?" Sammy sneered. "Come off it, funny friend!"
"No, wait a sec," mused the blonde. There was silence for a long, tense moment. Then she said, "It could be, Sammy. It just could be. If he was the law, he wouldn't have botched the stake-out or let himself get caught in the act; not even if he was a private shamus tryin' to cut himself a slice of insurance company cake."
"Aww, hell!" scoffed doubting Sammy. "It couldn't be! It just couldn't be, Bev!" He used that hyena-like snicker again and it brought goosepimples to my skin. "But, if it was, wouldn't that be rich?" he wheezed, coughing between fits of what was supposed to be merriment.
"See for yourself," I said desperately. "I was broke; flat on my heels busted when me and the babe I've been traveling with hit Pierre! That's why I took the chance and cracked some of those tin mailboxes, hoping someone was dumb enough to send cash with a letter!" There was less than six bucks in the billfold, now. After paying for our motel accomodations, meals, and the items at the drugstore, that was all I had left.
My put-together explanation of what happened at the post office didn't sound convincing to me. Once again, Beverly Makis had easily won a battle of wits with me, pretending that she hadn't observed me rifling through her lockbox, then getting me to accompany her to the desolate farm.
"Ahhhh! This character is full of B. S.!" Sammy rasped. "Turn around! Then, start levelin'-and the next time I think you're lyin' will be the last time!"
"Sammy, he was poking around in other lockboxes," I heard the small, streamlined blonde say as I swung away from the door. It was a good thing Sammy was flicking a fast, owl-eyed stare at his sister so that he didn't see my own gape of surprise at her he on my behalf. "He was!" Beverly insisted defensively, hands jutting from her sleek, well-educated hips. "He'd already busted into the box above; the door was still open half an inch or so when I went over!"
The thin, pallid punk didn't like it. He was staring at me. The .12 gauge in his hands had been doing that ever since we'd stumbled in out of the snowstorm. He picked up the wallet with his left hand, holding the walnut stock of the shotgun in the niche of his right armpit. He thumbed open the bill compartment and saw it was empty except for a five and some change in the coin purse.
Beverly Makis was reaching into the dirty white painted cupboard, stretching upward for some cups as she stood on tip-toes.
"Why d'ja come out here with her?" Sammy asked, closing the wallet and dropping it back on the table.
"Believe me, I wouldn't have if I'd known you were going to be so-upset about finding your sister cheating on her husband!" I blurted. "What normal, red-blooded man wouldn't make a pass at her?" I pleaded fervently.
This drew a slow, satisfied smile from the blonde at she splashed steaming black coffee into three cups.
"You-broke-as busted as you claim to be, taking time off from a jimmy job for a romp in the country with a dame?" Sammy Lentz queried derisively, his features still warped with murderous disbelief.
"I-well, I-" My face had thawed, leaving my lips dry and cracked and my throat raw with fear. I cleared my throat nervously, saying, "She looked like money to me. I won't he to you-I was going to roll her after we, uh-"
His high-pitched screech of cackling laughter was accompanied by another fit of consumptive coughing as he doubled over, wheezing for breath. For a second or two, the hammerless shotgun was canted toward the linoleum to my left, but I didn't even think of rushing him. I just stood there between the outside door and the table, staring at both he and his sister. The table separated me from the temporarily-deflected .12 gauge. Maybe, I could have lunged for the table and flipped it over on Sammy before the twin barrels belched out an epitath, but I could have been wrong.
CHAPTER SEVEN
It was 4:14 a.m. according to my watch when the bedroom door eased open. There was a kerosene lamp with the wick turned down so that light in the cold, drafty room was at an absolute minimum. If there ever had been a furnace in the creaking, musty old farmhouse and the cast iron radiator beneath the windows was more than decoration, it wasn't being used. There was a space heater in the large living room in addition to the smaller, older unit parked in a corner of the kitchen. This didn't do a thing for the upstairs stall they had me chained in.
The house had been quiet except for the eerie, dismal moaning of the wind that kept buffeting the old-fashioned frame structure and causing it to creak on its fieldstone foundation. Sammy Lentz had marched me up to the room nearly an hour ago. Where he'd located the rusty, heavy length of tow chain, I didn't know. While my back was to him I guess he must have clubbed me with the butt of his automatic because when I opened my eyes, there I was, chained up like an untrustworthy Fido.
He hadn't tied my hands or feet. He'd just made a tight loop of the chain and padlocked it around my neck. Oh, he was a cute one! He'd hitched the other end of the chain around a timber ceiling rafter that the exposed log ceiling joists rested on above the bed. There was enough slack so that as long as I behaved and didn't try to roam the premises I wouldn't strangle; I could even stand up next to the high, antique-type brass-posted double bed if I slithered around and squirmed enough. I knew because I'd tried that. The cold, rough links bit into my throat as I worked my shivering frame into an upright stance, the backs of my naked legs pressed against the side of the bed. Sure, I could stand. Not comfortably, but the scrawny sadist hadn't given a damn about my comfort or he wouldn't have stripped me down to my jockey shorts!
There was a faded patchwork quilt and a dusty, torn white bedspread covering the lumpy mattress. I'd returned to the bed after pulling them loose and wrapping both covers around my quaking body as well as I could. I'd just sat there, too miserable with cold to worry about my dully-throbbing noggin or what was going to happen to me next.
Actually, I didn't want to think about that. There wasn't a reason why the sickly, scared-face little hood and his whorish sister should leave me living. Even if Sammy Lentz believed my story about being a post-office burglar-which I was morosely aware he didn't-he still wouldn't take the chance of allowing me to get away and sic the police after him.
Watching the door and seeing the shadowy form of the platinum blonde glide stealthily inside, easing the door closed again while she stared toward where I was huddled on the bed, shivering beneath the soiled sparseness of the wrappings, I wondered why Beverly Makis had bothered to he to her brother on my behalf? She was wearing the navy blue knit wool dress, but she'd slipped on a quilted pink kimono over it. I could see her breath as she smiled archly, swaying across the bare plank floor in my direction.
"Want a cigarette?" she inquired, keeping her purring voice low.
I knew that if I tried to talk, I'd probably bite my tongue off; my teeth were chopping away at a furious pace. I bobbed my head, then groaned, wishing I hadn't. There was a bump at the back of my skull that felt as immense as one of the breasts bulging beneath the sensationally-shaped babe's clothes.
She lit a smoke from the pack she'd taken from one of the kimono's slash pockets, then leaned over and stuck it between my still, numbed lips. I had both my arms buried beneath the covers wrapped around me. She lit a cigarette for herself, then perched daintily on the edge of the bed.
"Just how dumb are you, Norm?" she murmured, blowing smoke placidly through her nostrils, her green eyes penetrating the screen as she studied my face. "How much do you know about us?"
"I-k-know I'm in t-trouble!" I stammered between violent clicks, the cigarette falling from my mouth and rolling down the bedspread. Reluctantly, I untangled my right arm and hand from the covers and reached forward to recover it.
"You didn't know what trouble was until now. My brother didn't buy that yarn about your being a sneak-thief. He can't afford to believe you're just a poor, stupid schmo, Norm."
"W-well, that's w-what I am."
"You're more than that. Tell me the truth. It's possible that I can talk Sammy into just leaving you here like this instead of killing you as he plans when this damn blizzard stops and we can get out of here. I won't even try unless you-oh!" She almost fell on top of me when she saw the grayish-brown Norway rat scurrying across the plank flooring. She'd thrown herself backwards, swinging her legs off the floor as the dull-colored, ugly rodent scampered out of an otherwise-empty closet and angled swiftly across the barren room to disappear somewhere in the shadows in the furtherest corner from the flickering kerosene lamp on the marble-topped bureau.
I'd seen the rat before she had. I'd watched it cautiously stick its pointed snout around the closet door frame, noted its large ears and plump, shaggy body accompanied by a long tail as it became bolder, emerging with quick, furtive movements. That sagging, rotting old farmhouse was probably crawling with relatives of the nasty, mean-eyed pest, I thought as Beverly Makis glanced fearfully back toward where it had been when she'd noticed it.
While she was recovering from the unpleasant start at the sight of the rat, I did some thinking. It was a cinch I'd die if I didn't at least pretend to play along with her. I had nothing to lose by telling her what she wanted to know, and by doing what she'd wanted me to do ever since our paths had crossed.
I hauled my other arm out from the bedcovers. Slipped both hands under and up the sides of the bulky, quilted kimono until they encountered the warm, yielding contours billowing out from beneath the knit wool dress. My hands cupped and closed around those huge, soft bulges; if nothing else, at least my fingers were getting warmer than they'd been beneath those flimsy covers.
She liked it. She shifted so that she was facing me, her legs curled on the mattress, resting across mine. She took the cigarette from my mouth. Mashed it out on the chipped plaster wall behind the bed. Did the same with hers.
"Ohh, how I hate rats!" she said, shuddering, her arms sliding around my neck, causing the chain to clink dully. "Before we go on from here, I'd better tell you that if you have any notion of grabbing me and threatening to hurt me unless Sammy releases you, it won't work, Norm." She stared intently into my eyes. She must have been reading the contemplative gleam I was surveying her with.
"Why wouldn't it?" I said, my tongue wet my lips.
"Because my dear brother isn't that fond of me. Not when his own hide is at stake." She was undoing the cloth buttons on the front of the robe with her left hand while her right arm stayed cosily circling my back-just beneath where the chain collar was fastened around my neck.
"Willy Makis wouldn't like it if anything happened to you, would he?"
"Then, you do know who I am-Sammy-"
"Is Sammy Lentz, who is equally able with shotgun or that automatic clipped in his shoulder holster. Yes, I know."
"A cop of some sort?"
"Nope. Just a guy who lost a sister during one of the capers your brother, husband, and Vic Runkle cut in Wisconsin. I was fond of my sister."
"How did you get here? I mean, how did you know about that post office lockbox?"
"There was a guard at the plant where the payroll was robbed. He must have seen your address when he asked for identification at the factory gate. He jotted it down in a notebook."
"Too bad. For you, I mean." The quilted pink robe fell away from her shoulders. I'd been busy, myself. With the front of that navy blue knit dress. Her left hand had descended to the bedcovers. It rested lightly on my thigh, just below the hip. She squeezed boldly. Who was seducing who around here, I wondered? I was beginning to sense how a prostitute felt about her chosen profession; I was in a similar spot-she did it for money, I was doing it for my life. Maybe.
"You probably saved my life once already, tonight," I said, stripping the clinging wool fabric from her creamy shoulders. There was a set of hooks holding the brassiere strap in place. I unhooked the white harness and pulled it roughly aside. She smiled encouragingly, removing the bra altogether by a graceful shrug of her shoulders and a careless sweep of her left hand.
She saw the admiring rove of my eyes while my hands slid beneath those pink-capped volcanoes and gently shoved, raising the nipples and exciting them into erectness. I could feel the urgent, wanton throb of her heart as well as my own male stirrings of aroused passion at the touch, sight, and smell of her, the potent perfume mingled with the even more sensual scent of a woman's body. "Be nice to me," she pleaded. "Be nice-and rough!"
I wasn't even cold when the bedcovers got flipped to the floor; when her dress and rayon white panties followed the covers as she hurled her nude, ecstatically-quivering shape on top of me, the wild, hungry pressure of her eagerly-crushing lips and the provocative darts of her tongue goading my rapidly-building desire to greater frenzy. My head was pressed deep into the pillow I'd had wedged behind me when I'd been sitting up in bed. My hands dug at the warm, writhing smoothness of her naked flesh, my every stroke and intimate probing of her delightful softness serving only to prompt her to greater, more intense passion, her torso undulating and arching only to come back against mine with increased gyrations.
"Nowww, Norm! Hurry! Nowww," she gasped, her eyes closed, her lips apart, her face flushed with delicious enjoyment and she shifted positions, legs sprawled open wide, those surging, swelling breasts heaving above my face. She was ready to explode with the pent-up store of lust my daring fingers had uncovered, then we were both beating out the climactic symphony of sex with our violently-bucking bodies until the moment of glorious release caused my own vision to blur with indescribably-exquisite pleasure....
She'd sagged, still on top of me. Her flaming body was like an electric blanket. We just stayed that way for several minutes, each too spent, too contented to move. Her platinum blonde hair was spilled on the pillow beside my face. Whatever else Beverly was, she definitely was a natural blonde I thought, my hands beginning to traverse idly downward from the small of her back across the swells of her nicely-formed fanny.
"That's the first time-I've ever been-raped," I said, breathing hard from the workout we'd shared. "How many different positions for-this sort of exercise are there-supposed to be?"
"Shhh. I don't-want to talk, yet," she sighed without opening her eyes.
"There isn't much else we can do. Now."
"That was good. Very good, wasn't it?"
"If I do have to die, I'll die happy," I assured her. Despite the delights of the last ten or fifteen minutes, I wasn't happy. Who could be happy chained up like a dog? Knowing that even if she did persuade Shotgun Sammy not to blow my head off wasn't a good idea-I'd probably be left there to freeze and starve? Eventually, the coldness of the barren, drafty upstairs bedroom forced the separation of our bodies. I watched Beverly reach for her frilly white panties. All I had to slip back into was the jockey shorts and the bedcovers on the plank floor.
While she was dressing, she said, "We'll be getting out of this old farmhouse just as soon as the blizzard quits. Sammy got separated from Willy and Vic somewhere in Missouri. They were traveling in two cars. Sammy is an epileptic; he had an attack and wound up with his car on its side in some farmer's field."
Too bad he didn't break his neck, I thought. Aloud I said, "So, that means he doesn't know where his pals are holed up?"
"Oh, he has a pretty good idea," she said, wriggling into the navy blue dress. "Don't ask too many questions, Norm," she added quietly, her green eyes filled with grave warning. My grave. "The less you know about us and our plans, the better your chances are of living."
"As I mentioned before, you saved my life once, tonight. Why, Beverly? Why did you back up that farfetched story I told your brother about my reason for being in the post office? If you hadn't, he'd have pulled that trigger just to hear the noise!"
"You came in handy, Norm. I've been cooped up in this dusty, drafty old shack almost six weeks, now! And before that, when I was being spied on by the cops while I wasted away in an Atlanta, Georgia apartment, there wasn't a man with guts enough to be friendly with me! They were all scared to death if my husband so much as suspected them of touching me they'd get castarated or something!" she said acridly. She swayed her way back to the bed where I was bundled again, feeling the dank cold soak into my skin. Her lips lingered lightly on mine, then she patted my cheek as she straightened. To her, I was a stud horse. Suitable for breeding purposes and to restore her faith in her own sexual prowess and desirability. Well, I sure wasn't in a position to quibble or question her motives in keeping me alive!
"Will we get another chance to get together-before you and Sammy run?" I inquired hopefully, giving her what was supposed to be an ardent, admiring, and appreciative going-over with my eyes. She'd picked up the quilted pink kimono and was slipping into it when I'd spoken. She smiled.
"It depends on how long this snow keeps coming down," she said, gazing at the powdery flakes glancing off the dark panes of the windows. "There are lots of other positions I know-including a few tricks you don't find in 'how-to-do-it' books," she said lazily, moving toward the door. Watching her glide silently from the room, seeing the smooth shift of those talented hips, I didn't doubt it.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was some time past 6 o'clock on a snow-clogged Sunday morning when 1 lapsed into what was more unconscious exhaustion than a sleep, my last thoughts dim, dreary doubts that I'd ever awaken alive. I'd heard of people flopping down in snowbanks; signs of slumber are one of the symptoms connected with freezing to death. So, I was surprised and grateful when the dark void disappeared from around me, banished by the simple process of instructing my eyes to open again. Never again would I take even that automatic visual function for granted, I immediately decided.
Another surprise was that I wasn't cold. Then, looking down across my body and legs, I saw why. There'd only been the skimpy worn and faded patchwork quilt and the thin, torn white bedspread for covers before. Now, there was another, heavier quilt on the bed and pulled over me. The room wasn't much improved by the increased light reflected from the snow outside through the windows. I got my third surprise when I looked at my watch. It was 1:55-almost 2 o'clock in the afternoon My stomach was awakening, too. It growled and grumbled about being neglected.
There wasn't anything I could do about that. The length of rusting steel chain was still looped and locked around the beam above the bed and the other end was still clamped securely around my neck. It was well that I hadn't had a nightmare and flipped off the edge of the high, uncomfortable bed; the fall would have tightened the chain and-I refused to entertain such morbid thoughts. I shifted my stare to the window again, watching the steady, seemingly-undiminished streaks of white bombarding the cheerless, snow-shrouded landscape.
That wasn't pleasant, either. I closed my eyes again. The blackness was better than anything else I'd looked at. That's the way I was when the door got shoved open and I had visitors.
Sammy Lentz, with shotgun, scowled as he followed his sister into the room. Maybe, he slept with it, for all I knew. I didn't enjoy looking at either his warped little face or at the .12 gauge which was equally repulsive under the circumstances.
So, I looked at Beverly Makis, instead. She wore a checkered green and black flannel shirt and medium-grey woolen slacks. There was a band of red ribbon tied around her blonde hair and her prety, small-featured face had a glowing, freshly-scrubbed look about it. She smiled, her green eyes flashing a silent reminder of what fun we'd had and promising more to come.
"Hungry, Mr. Kent?" she said brightly.
The steaming dish of scrambled eggs, the cup of coffee, and the two buttered slices of bread on the tray she was carrying looked even more attractive and desirable to me just then than she did. I scrunched up into a sitting positions, hands reaching out with marked eagerness.
"I thank you. My stomach thanks you," I said, tormented by the aroma of the food. Balancing the metal tray on my lap, I snatched up a slice of bread and wolfed away.
"It's a waste of time to feed this creep," Sammy said in his sing-song whine. "Get your ass back downstairs now and finish packin'," he said, glaring at her. "You heard the weather report. It's s'posed to clear sometime this afternoon. You know what that means."
"You haven't even got the tire chains on my car, yet," Beverly said, as she turned away from me and glared back at her runty brother.
"Itold you to get a wiggle on, didn't I?"
"So you can shoot him?"
"What the hell is that to you?"
"Nothing, but-"
"Just because you sneaked up here and let this character satisfy your itch didn't buy him nothin' from me."
Cop or no cop, I can't see this guy as the stupe he tries to act like!"
While I gobbled another mouthful of scrambled eggs, I frowned at the shriveled killer. I didn't appreciate compliments; whether Sammy Lentz could see it or not, I was a stupe.
Beverly was swaying towards the door. She looked back at me over her shoulder. "Sorry, honey. I tried-I really did," she told me. She flashed me a rueful smile, then left the room. And left me with my last meal. And Sammy. And, the shotgun tucked beneath his arm while he prowled over to squint out the window through his thick-lensed specs, giving the snowdrifts and the swirling flakes the same malevolent scowl he'd used on me.
"You got nobody but yourself to blame for what's gonna happen to you," he muttered nastily without turning away from the window. "Just in case you really don't know why this has gotta be, I'll tell you."
"Do you know what the penalty is for murder in this state?" I said shakily. "It's death by electrocution. The chair, Sammy."
"They can only fry you once, no matter how many guys you give it to. I've fed lead to five people that are dead for sure-maybe more. Good try, Kent Not good enough, though."
"Look, what's the difference if you just leave me here, trussed up like this, or blast me with that .12 gauge? I'd rather have a chance-even an almost non-existent one like trying to gnaw through this chain-than just being blasted like a caged-up animal Why do I have to be dead? What harm can I do you?" I flung at him angrily. His utter unconcern and unrelenting attitude to casually turn around and pull the trigger without the vaguest compunction was torturing my frazzled nerves.
He did turn, then. The shotgun slowly rose, centering on where I sat on the mattress, the empty dish and cup rattling visibly and audibly on the metal tray on my lap.
"That sex-machine sister of mine happens to be the private property of the guy I work for," he said moodily. "Not that I give a damn about your layin' her or about why you really started sniffin' around her in the first place. But, Willy Makis, he's a funny guy. He'd bump her, too, if he found out she let another guy straddle her."
I could have told him that it had been the other way around. That wouldn't have helped, though. "Will you answer one question?" I said hastily, seeing the kill-crazy crackle in his myoptic brown eyes, the way the maniacal smile spread across his homely little face.
His wispy shoulders rose and fell in a tolerant shrug. "Sure. I like to do a guy a favor when I can," he said, giggling at his own brand of humor. "Hey! No more sudden moves like that" he snapped, jiterbugging away from the bed as I swung my bare legs to the floor, holding the tray.
"I just want to be standing when you shoot," I said thickly, my mouth feeling as if it was stuffed with dry cotton. The links of the chain pulled at the skin of my neck. I let the tray fall to the floor. It made a clatter that was loud in the room.
"What's the question, friend?" Sammy Lentz asked irritably, the shotgun jutting out in front of him. He'd shoot from that position, from down around his snaky, scrawny hips. The twin muzzles were aimed so that either blast would rip out my chest.
"That gun in the shoulder holster," I said weakly. "Is that a .38?"
"What? Say, what kind of-"
"My sister was killed during that payroll job you were in on a week ago. There were two .38 slugs in her back. I want to know if you put them there." He stared at me for a long instant. He was convinced I was crazy as well as stupid, now, asking such a question when my life was on the verge of ending.
"Your-sister?" he echoed, narrow forehead furled. "I didn't even know-wait a minute, her name was-"Janet Kent. She worked as a secretary in that factory office."
"Yeah, yeah. Now I remember. Naw, I didn't even see her get it; I was busy scoopin' the dough into a sack and when that gate guard stuck his face inside and the shootin' started, I had my own problems gettin' outa there with the take. There was lead flyin' around. All them guys and babes started divin' for cover and screamin'-hell, I can't savvy why more people didn't get sprayed."
"Don't sound so damn disappointed, you bastardly shrimp" I blurted, infuriated by his cold-blooded contempt for human life.
"Just keep that loose jaw of yours flappin', big man," he said, eyes magnified by the dark-rimmed glasses leaping with joyous lights of wickedness.
I'd have swapped my soul for a gun. For any kind of a weapon I could use to obliterate that sadistic sneer. But, he had the gun; both guns. He was snickering again as he stood four feet from where I was braced against the side of the bed, expecting the bore to wink sardonically as it errupted with the blast that would tear through my chest. We both were temporarily distracted by the sound of footsteps and Sammy Lentz mouthed a string of muted obscenities at his sister when she pushed open the door and stared into the room.
"I-I came up to tell you that I'm ready," she said, her complexion nearly matching her frightened green eyes. She licked at her soft red lips. "I-I'll wait fo you downstairs, Sammy."
"Stay and watch, why don't you?" I called hoarsely. "It's about time you saw your pimp of a brother at work-if you haven't watched a killing before, that is."
Sammy Lentz cackled happily. "Sure Stick around," he jeered watching as she whirled and fled.
It was while he'd looked at her that I got a wild, perhaps impossible idea. It was better than just standing there, dying in my tracks. I grabbed the heavy, rusted chain with both hands, reaching above my head to do it. I hauled up on it while I lunged toward the goggle-eyed gunman and I heard his shrill, astonished yelp as my legs scissored around his scrawny body. The shotgun boomed and the headboard of the antique bed splintered as I swung backwards on the chain, my legs hauling Sammy Lentz in with me.
He ducked, frantically attempting to re-center the .12 gauge on me and scoot out of my reach at the same time as my legs dropped away from him and my feet hit the planks. I gagged, choking as the chain twisted into my throat. I'd had to release my grip on u and the slack was out of it before I could recover my balance, but if I hadn't freed my hands to grab the horribly-cursing hood and pull him back, he'd have eluded me and staggered back out of reach.
As it was, his pile-driving knee rammed into my groin and the impetus of that coupled with my being off-balance, toppled me backwards on the mattress with the struggling, swearing shrimp and his shotgun on top of me. Shrimp or not, Sammy Lentz wrenched away. He was off the bed, backpedalling unsteadily, his right hanc diving for the automatic in his holster.
He'd yanked away. Without the shotgun-I had that. I'd used one hand to try holding the viciously-struggling hood and the other hand to twist at the .12 gauge, mainly to keep it from slamming me in the face. When Sammy tore loose, I still had my left hand clenched around the barrel.
There wasn't a chance for me to get up off my back. The bluish-black automatic was in his hand even as I feverishly juggled the heavy shotgun, my right hand desperately searching for the trigger.
The deafening blast sent the walnut stock recoiling against my naked chest. I didn't know if Sammy Lentz had fired first or not; if I was wounded or just winded by the bruising jolt of the shotgun. I feebly propped myself up on my wobbly elbows and stared at where I'd last seen the sadistic little killer crouched, ready to shoot.
He wasn't there. He was on the floor. Some of him, I mean. There was more of the mangled hunk of dead meat that had been Sammy Lentz splattered gorily around the room. What was down there, crumpled and sodden with gushing blood didn't have a head. Only a totally unrecognizable stub.
"Sammy?"
The sound of Beverly Makis's voice from downstairs helped me snap out of the nauseated trance with which I just sprawled there on the bed, staring at the havoc wreaked by the shotgun. I heard muffled footsteps on the stairs, then scraping along the upstairs hall.
"Sammy? What was all that ruckus about? Did he try to jump you? I-" She was in the doorway. Her hand flew to her mouth and her green eyes blinked wide open when she saw me sitting on the bed, the empty but still ugly-looking gapes of the shotgun bores focused on her frame.
"Come in," I said. It wasn't my voice. It was a squeaky gibberish that was loud in the stillness. I tried again. "Get in here. Get me out of this chain collar."
She didn't budge. She wasn't looking at me. Fortunately for her, from where she was standing she couldn't see the upper portion of her brother's twisted body; just his legs the toes of his shoes pointing lifelessly toward the ceiling.
"You-how did you?" she gasped in a hushed, horrified tremor. "He-he's d-dead, isn't h-he?" she whimpered.
"Where's the key to those padlocks fastened to this chain?" I demanded sharply. "I told you to get in here!"
She looked at me, then down at the .12 gauge. She shook her head, taking a quick, fearful backwards step that put her in the hall.
"N-no! Not in there," she protested. "There aren't any keys to those padlocks. After Sammy fixed you up like that last night and took away your clothes so that even if you did get loose somehow you couldn't escape through one of the windows, he-he threw the keys outside."
"He threw the-now, listen, girl! Make another move and I'll pull this trigger!"
"Who do you think you're kidding?" she sniffed contemptuously, her pretty, wanton features becoming etched with hardness as she recovered from her shock. "You can pull that trigger all day and listen to the clicks if you want to!"
"Why would he throw away the keys?" I asked, lowering the heavy gun. She'd heard both blasts. She knew my threat was an empty bluff.
"Because he didn't trust me, either. He thought I might try to unshackle you. I might have, too, Norm. I didn't want you to die."
"You gave up on trying to talk Sammy out of killing me plenty easily not long ago."
"I-I saw that there wasn't any use."
"Take a look out those windows. Think there's any use in either of us thinking that we're going anyplace, Beverly. You'd go off the road before you got a mile from this farm." She followed my gaze. Maybe, the forecast called for the blizzard to halt and the sky to clear, but right then what little we could see of the sky was foreboding and murky and if the wind had slackened, it wasn't obvious; the snowflakes were still whipping past the windows, piling the drifts even higher.
While she was still standing there indecisively, I glanced unwillingly back down at the floor near the bed. I was careful not to look directly at the torn up corpse. I saw that the automatic was a foot from his out-sprawled right hand. My thought was that if I could scoop it closer with my bare toes and manipulate with enough dexterity and get the gun in my hand, maybe I could shoot myself loose from that manacling chain.
Not a bad thought. Except that even when I stretched to the limit, the tendons in my leg cramped from the straining effort, my toes wriggled in frustration, inches short of the pebble-grained bluish-black butt of the weapon. The rough, rusty links ground into the sides of my neck, partially choking off my wind as I tried one final desperate lunge, then flopped wearily back onto the mattress.
Beverly Makis had shifted her gaze back to me. "You aren't much better off, now, than you were before you bested Sammy in that battle over the shotgun, are you?" she taunted. Her smile was mildly scornful again. The shotgun! Damning myself as a slow-witted fool, I grinned back at her. "Thanks, baby. Thanks a lot," I said, picking up the heavy over and under model firearm. By sandwiching the walnut stock between my naked, hairy legs with the barrel jutting out half a foot beyond my feet, I swung out at the automatic on the plank floor, using the added extension to span the inches my own reach had been short.
The automatic skidded toward the bed in response to my maneuvers. I put the shotgun on the mattress again, then used my bare toes on both feet as a sort of pliers to clamp around the automatic on the floor and carefully swung my legs up onto the bed with the deadly-looking luger dangling between my feet.
I heard applause and twisted my head to stare at Beverly Makis. The sexy blonde laughed, clapping some more. "Nice going, Norm. You're a real athlete." she quipped, switching to perform a mock arm-lift that sent those majestic mounds leaping against the checkered flannel shirt, her loins rolling forward in a seductive thrust.
"Bring me my clothes, will you?" I called across the room to her. "You can do that much for me at least, can't you?"
She pondered the request, bold green eyes traversing my next-to-naked frame. "Well, I don't know," she drawled appraisingly. "I like you just the way you are, Norm, honey," she said, cocking her head, hands on her hips.
"Get my clothes!" I yelled. Maybe, some of the intense quaking and quivering I was doing was caused by reaction setting in; I'd never killed a man, before. No matter what a warped excuse for a human Sammy Lentz had been, he was dead. Beheaded by the blast from the shotgun. It had been my finger that had pulled the trigger.
"What are you waiting for?" I snarled, waving the luger wildly in the air as I glared at her. "Dammit, move! Or do you want me to strip you and toss you out in the snow after I get shed of this stupid chain"
She moved. She was on her way downstairs when I pressed the muzzle of the luger against one of the links above my head and fired. One shot didn't do a damn thing. Neither did another, except to give me an earache and send a few rusted splinters of metal flying from the chain. The third slug parted one side of the link. That was enough. Feeling like a hound who'd broken loose from the doghouse and scampered off with part of the leash still jingling merrily from the collar, I flexed my legs and stretched gratefully as I scrambled off the bed on the opposite side from where Sammy Lentz was sprawled. I padded stiffly into the drafty hall. That must have been something to see; a big, black-haired guy in jockey shorts ambling awkwardly down the rickety flight of stairs with a gun in his hand.
CHAPTER NINE
It was early Sunday evening and it was still snowing. I cursed the weather, the weatherman, the musty, dreary farmhouse, I was on my list of things to swear at, when an unexpected series of violent sneezes interrupted me.
Beverly, sulking on the three-cushioned, faded brown sofa, her legs kicking petulantly, draped over one of the worn, curved arms of the couch, raised her blonde head to say, "God Bless You." I didn't think she meant it.
We'd both prowled restlessly around the shabby, barren rooms, alternating wary, furtive stares at each other with equally-glum glances out the windows. She'd grudgingly prepared hot tomato soup, pork chops, mashed potatoes, and peas to go along with the coffee I'd brewed. There hadn't been much talk. I'd used her brother's razor to shave after my body got warmed enough by my clothes and by standing near the space heater so that the safety razor wouldn't leave jittery nicks all over my face.
She had a portable radio. We'd listened to local broadcasts intermittently since late afternoon. I listened now as I heard my name mentioned. There was static and the volume diminished, then increased. I walked over to stand above the small table beside the old-fashioned sofa and frown at the news commentator's words.
"...are still searching for the former office worker's body," droned the guy on the radio. "Kent, sought by Wisconsin police authorities following his assault on another man in a bowling alley Friday evening, is also believed to have abducted Mrs. Dorothy Jensen, a young widow who's father was slain during a recent robbery. Mrs. Jensen's car, a late model blue station wagon, was discovered missing from her home when neighbors reported seeing a man answering Norman Kent's description force the lovely brown-haired widow into the station wagon."
"Shut up!" I snarled, as Beverly Makis began to giggle, then laughed hysterically. Forced Dorothy Jensen into the station wagon? I nearly laughed, myself; I'd done my best to dissuade her from going with me! What the neighbors had seen was me helping her into the car!
". ... Kent's own car, a new Nash Rambler, was found locked in Mrs. Jensen's garage. Authorities believe that the husky, dark-haired man went berserk. His own intense grief at the loss of his sister, Janet Kent, who was slain in the Wisconsin robbery, being responsible for the outbreak of violence. The police, conducting a widespread manhunt at this very moment, hope that the fugitive can be captured before any harm occurs to the woman he seized and forced to accompany him...."
"Oh, would Sammy have howled at this! This is funny!" shrieked the blonde, her head thrown back against the sofa and her bustline jiggling in rmrthful amusement.
"Be quiet!" I thundered, stalking to hover above her. "I want to hear the rest of this guy's report!"...." When it was learned that Kent and Mrs. Jensen had registered at the Golden Roof Motel just beyond the west city limits of Pierre, late yesterday afternoon, the search became intensified. Many private citizens as well as National Guard units volunteering their services." The commentator paused and I glared at Beverly Makis when she burst into a new fit of giggling.
"Mrs. Elizabeth Baker, owner of the motel, told police that the accomodations shared by Kent and his attractive woman captive had apparently been abandoned some time late Saturday night or early Sunday morning," said the radio newsman, his voice becoming more clipped with excitement. "All luggage was still in the motel unit. Police now fear that Kent forced his hostage to drive into the storm that has been pummeling this area with snow and sub-zero temperatures in one of the earliest and most severe blizzards in recent history. Both the terrified young woman and the emotionally-unstable man who kidnapped her may be discovered on some isolated country road, frozen victims of the storm...."
I whirled and snapped off the radio. I felt like snapping off the laughing blonde, too, as her shrill giggle frayed at my nerves. What really upset me was what the guy on the radio had said about Dorothy being missing. Where could she be? Why had she driven away from the motel? And, when?
"Oh, ho! Ho!" Beverly shrieked, kicking both legs in the air as she fell back on the sofa cushions, limp with laughter. "So, you're emotionally-unstable! A sex-fiend kidnapper, yet!" she screeched.
I did turn, then. Donned what I wanted to be a realistic grimace of insanity while I fingered the butt of the luger wedged inside my belt. "Don't call me names!" I growled in my most fiendishly-guttural growl as I advanced on her. "I get a buzzing in my head when people call me names or laugh at me," I said, leaning over her.
That stopped her. It paralyzed her, in fact. A dull glaze dimmed the lights of merriment in those wide green eyes staring up into my glowering features. I must have looked the part. Suddenly, she wasn't having any fun.
"W-wait, Norm!" she cried weakly, cringing against the cushions. "I-I like y-you! Y-you k-know that! Did-didn't I prove that? Remember w-what a w-wonder-ful time we h-had together? There can be more, Norm! Now!" Her hands were shaking so much that she couldn't even hold the buttons of the shirt as she fumbled to undo them.
I clamped my left hand on both her wrists, saying, "You know where your husband and Vic Runkle are holed up! I want them! They killed my sister. I want to see them die just the way your brother died-the way you're going to die if you don't tell me where to find them!"
Just about everything else I'd tried, I'd botched. The performance I was giving as I leered down at the panting blonde atoned for some of my ineptness. She tugged desperately, trying to free her wrists, her breasts lurching frantically against the checkered green and black shirt.
"I-I d-don't know for s-sure!" she whimpered. "S-Sammy thought they were heading s-south! To a hideout s-somewhere in the Louisiana bayou region!"
"To a hideout near a place called Houma?" I persisted. I removed the luger from inside my belt and held it while my left hand retained its punishing hold on her trembling wrists.
"Y-yes! Vic Runkle had a girl-friend down there! Her name is Nina! Nina-oh, I-I can't think of her last name!" Beverly moaned, wincing when she stared at the automatic pointed down at the vicinity of her naval. "H-Honest to god, Norm! I just c-can't remember!" she babbled, almost incoherent.
I relinquished the grip on her wrists and stepped away. I placed the luger in the pocket of my corduroy jacket hanging across the back of a chair near the space heater. When I turned and walked slowly to where the blonde was sobbing, her hands covering her face, I glanced around the dimly-lit living room. There were two kerosene lamps burning in addition to the Coleman lantern suspended from a chain on the kitchen ceiling. Walking back to stand above the whimpering form on the sofa, I looked toward the frosted panes of the living room windows.
I saw only darkness and the faint outlines of snow dunes in the yard and surrounding fields. It had stopped snowing, though. Only an occasional flake fluttered past the windows and the stubborn northern wind had finally blown itself out.
Gently, I withdrew her hands from her face. "Was Nina's last name Dorrel? The address, Route Three, Houma?"
Her blonde head rose far enough off the arm of the sofa to nod while her frightened green eyes anxiously begged mine not to hurt her. "Y-Yes. Yes, that is where I-I think m-my husband is in hiding," she whispered "P-Please, y-you aren't going to-"
"What else can you tell me? What about all the money they've stolen? Do they have it with them?"
"I-I d-dpn't think so."
"Then, where? No stalls or tricks, Beverly."
"Willy has a hunting lodge. It-It's on an island on Lake Of The Woods. That's a big lake between Minnesota and Canada," she stammered, still expecting the worst from me. She actually believed what the radio commentator said about me-that my mind had snapped after my sister's murder-that she was in mortal danger of losing her own life at my hands.
"Which island, baby? There must be hundreds of 'em," I said, lowering myself to park on the cushions beside her, causing her to cringe involuntarily away from me again. "From what I know of geography, it would take months-maybe years to locate that lodge without more of a description than you've given me."
"I-I don't know the name of the island. I swear I don't! I-wait!" She squirmed around so that the middle of her back was braced against the arm of the sagging old sofa. "Wait, there is one thing I remember! I was only up there with Willy, once. We went through an old fort; some sort of a historic landmark!"
"That isn't much help. You can do better than that."
"I-I'm trying to remember the name of that fort-or of the island it was on!"
While she moistened her lips, forehead crinkled and eyes narrowed with thought, I reached out slowly and rested my right hand on the trembling inside of her upper thigh. My left hand fingers worked at the belt buckle of the grey cloth belt circling her medium-grey slacks. "Come on," I coaxed, "Your memory can't be that poor."
"A trail-the sign at the fort said it was the start of the Old Dawson Trail to Winnipeg, Canada! Fort St. Charles! That's the name!"
"How far from this fort is your husband's hunting lodge?" I asked, unhurriedly undoing the buttons at the side of her slacks.
"We had to go by boat to get there. We cruised past at least six or seven other islands on the way. It-it isn't a very big island, Norm. Mostly rocks and brush and woods with the log lodge in the middle. Willy bought the island a few years before I married him. He-he told me never to let anyone know about it," she said earnestly, watching my hands work at tugging down her grey wool slacks.
"You think he's stashed most of the stolen money up there?"
"Yes. The plan is to charter a plane in Canada and fly to Europe," she whispered, shuddering as my fingers hooked around the hem of her pale blue silken undies. "I-I was supposed to stay here until he came for me. Sammy decided we shouldn't stay here, though. Not after you found me. He-He thought that even if you weren't a cop, someone else-that girl the police say you kidnapped-might start snooping around or raising a holler about your disappearance. He said we should try to locate Willy and Vic as fast as we could and that all of us should clear out of the country now instead of waiting for the heat to cool off."
"So, you were going to head for Houma, Louisiana?"
"Y-yes. We-were."
"You still are," I said. I was working on the buttons of the flannel shirt. I grinned reassuringly down at her. "We are, I mean."
"W-We?" she gasped. "I-I don't understand, Norm. Just take me to the cops or leave me here if you'd rather. There ought to be a snow rescue crew-or one group of those men who are searching for you and the woman you-you were with-coming along this road by morning," she said in a troubled, nervous tone. She moistened her full, sensual lips again, leaning forward to permit me to pull the checkered flannel shirt down her shoulders, her eyes darting away from my grinning stare.
She preferred being in police custody to the notion of going around the country with a guy she was now totally convinced was a maniac. I laughed at the thought. Then allowed my chuckle to fade. Who knows? Maybe, I was off my rocker, thinking I could take on a pair of vicious killers and subdue them before any harm came to Dorthy Jensen.
Because, even while I took liberties with the lush, quivering blonde, there on the frazzled brown mohair couch, I was positive that Dorothy was in the slate blue station wagon, speeding southward. She must have noticed the letter I'd stuffed into the dash compartment and opened it. I didn't know what it might have said, but I couldn't think of any other reason why the beautiful brown-haired widow would so abruptly vanish from the motel. Either she hadn't read my hastily-scrawled and cryptic note on the margin of the roadmap I'd left on the front seat or she'd decided that I could handle whatever situation I was involved in while she followed up whatever lead the letter had contained.
"Relax and enjoy this," I muttered, hauling an unresisting but uncooperative Beverly into my arms and adjusting her into the more generally-accepted and practiced position on the dusty, faded sofa. "Tonight, it's my turn to control the act."
It didn't take too long or too much fondling to get her warmed to the idea. A challenging, encouraging smile softened her tense features and amorous interest kindled in vivid green eyes as her own arms looped around my neck. My neck was still raw and tender from the scrape of the chains I'd finally pried out of with the aid of the screwdriver in my coat pocket, using it to snap open the padlock.
"Mmmm, isn't this good?" sighed the talented young nymph while my hands roved freely from the resilient roundness of her superb, stately breasts, down across the flat, firm expanse of her belly, over the warm, silken hillside hideaway....
"Save your breath," I growled, my face cushioned between her twin, fragrant, creamy pillows. "You're going to need it!" I said, panting even more than she, calculating and greedy blonde bitch though she might have been, this much I'll have to say for Beverly Makis: when it came to sexual athletics, she was terrific at demonstrating that good things did come in small packages.
CHAPTER TEN
Later cooling off outside, I struggled with the tire chains. Trying to get them fastened around the rear wheels of the Olds, after first having to dig out the car. I was beginning to wonder if I wasn't a sex-fiend as that news announcer had said over the radio. I hadn't intended to ravish the blonde-not even if I hadn't exactly taken her by force. It was just something that happened. It had been different, last night. Last night, I'd been trying to save my life, playing up to her in the hope that she had enough influence with her brother to prevent him from lolling me.
I felt as low an animal as Sammy Lentz had been; as immoral as Willy Makis or hulking Vic Runkle. What was I becoming, anyway? I'd killed a man. I'd had intercourse with the wife of one of the nation's most-wanted criminals. The press and radio had me labeled as a combination kidnapper and demented fugitive. This whole situation had snowballed, starting with what I considered my justified assault upon a loud-mouthed jerk in a bowling alley after Gordon Webber insulted my dead sister. No doubt fat Constable Fred Hamre had recalled his previous error in not notifying the state police immediately after the payroll robbery and wasted not a moment in calling for help when neighbors reported that I'd accompanied Dorothy Jensen from her home. Good for them, I thought bleakly, rubbing my chilled hands together briskly.
I moved away from the wheels, the chains finally hitched. I'd borrowed Sammy Lentz's topcoat, gloves, and hat. He wouldn't need them, I thought, stooping to pick up the Coleman lantern I'd taken from the kitchen and hiking the quarter-mile back toward the farmhouse.
At first, looking at the two-tone Ford sedan parked in the machine shed being used as a garage, I'd been tempted to appropriate Sammy Lentz's car. I'd thought better of it, recalling that Beverly had mentioned an accident her brother had suffered as a result of an epileptic seizure. She'd said that his car had rolled over, so I knew that the car he'd driven to the farm was either stolen or purchased and registered in whatever name he'd given as an alias. Either way, once the police arrived and found his body, the Ford would quickly be the target of more intensive searching.
I clumped up the porch steps, kicking some of the snow from my pants and shoes. I'd have to change outfits before we left the place. It wouldn't be a good fit, knew that. Sammy's topcoat was ready to burst at the seams across my back and shoulders. The rest of his duds weren't going to be any more comfortable.
Beverly was not in the living room where I'd left her. The hair at the nape of my neck stood up as I remembered the .12 gauge shotgun I'd forgoten about. It was upstairs. On the bed I'd been chained to. It was empty. Or had been. That didn't mean that it still was. There had to be more shells, somewhere; either among Sammy Lentz's belongings, there in the downstairs bedroom off the living room. Or, in his pockets. In the clothes he'd worn.
I shrugged out of the tight topcoat and tossed it toward the sofa. A floorboard creaked as I moved slowly dug my hand into the pocket of my corduroy jacket in the direction of the darkened downstairs bedroom. I and fished out the luger. I didn't know how many shells were left in the clip. If the treacherous blonde was lurking somewhere in the house, waiting to blast me with that twin-barreled shotgun, I wasn't sure whether I could even shoot back-not even in self-defense. Killing a sadistic guy who's doing his utmost to murder you is one thing. Shooting a woman is something else.
There wasn't anyone downstairs. Not in the bedroom. Not in the dining room or in the kitchen. I returned to the living room, sweating despite the coldness of the drafty old house. I picked up one of the kerosene lamps from the crude built-in shelf on the wall behind the space heater. It was then that I noticed that the other lamp that had been burning was gone.
I stared for a long minute at the partly-ajar door leading upstairs. She was up there. She'd taken the lamp and-
"Eeeeeehhhh! Eeeeeehhh" I nearly dropped the lamp I was holding as her piercing screams of terror split the silence. She shrieked again. I leaped forward, then froze in my tracks when the tremendous boom of the shotgun rattled the house!
Again, the .12 gauge thundered, again Beverly Makis wailed in hysterical anguish. I hastily set the lamp on the shelf and threw open the stairway door, bounding up the steps two at a time, the luger gripped tightly in my right fist. I richocheted into the narrow, darkened hall and into the dimly-lighted bedroom where the shadow of the length of chain swayed across the wall.
She was standing in the middle of the mattress. She still clutched the shotgun. She wasn't looking at me. She wasn't looking at the shattered remnants of her brother. She stared in transfixed horror at the two bloodied, furry brownish-grey rats the charges from the .12 gauge had mangled. I caught a flicker of movement from the shadows near the closet. I turned and looked in that direction. Saw that there were at least a half-dozen live rats scurrying around the room.
I advanced on the bed. Took the useless shotgun from her rigid fingers. "It's okay," I said gruffly, circling her waist with the hand with the luger clenched in it and hoisting her down from the bed. "Snap out of it, babe," I commanded, shaking her roughly as she continued to shudder. She flung herself against me, her face buried in my rust-colored jacket.
"They-they were crawling all over-all over h-his body!" she moaned, shuddering at the recollection. "I-I got m-more shells for the gun f-from his suitcase, downstairs! I came up here to get the shotgun, and-and I didn't notice those horrible beasts at first!"
She'd placed the kerosene lamp on the floor at the foot of the bed. I could guess what had happened. She'd loaded the shotgun, intending to ambush me when I came looking for her. Then, she'd noticed that grisly sight; perhaps one of the bolder rats had even brushed against her ankle. I stared around her quaking form-Sammy Lentz didn't deserve pity but I shuddered, too, at the notion of rats nibbling at his corpse.
"Do you have any more shells with you for this cannon?" I asked, leading her toward the door. She came willingly, still clinging to me. She nodded, hand inserting into one of the pockets of her slacks.
I took the four .12 gauge shells and broke open the gun and replaced the ejected cases with two fresh cartridges. Then, I moved her into the hall behind me. I stuffed the luger back inside my waistband and snapped shut the barrels of the shotgun. There were more than half-a-dozen sets of malovent, flickering litle eyes visible as the Norway rats clustered patiently in the dark confines of the open closet, waiting for another opportunity to approach the lump of flesh that had been Sammy Lentz.
One of the rats, larger than either of the two Beverly's shots had killed, crept cautiously out into the flickering light beyond the closet doorway, pointed snout and greyish whiskers twitching as it looked directly toward where we were standing, almost defying me to do anything about it.
I did something. I leveled the heavy gun and pulled the trigger. The explosion kicked the walnut stock against my right shoulder, but it wasn't too much of a recoil and I fired again, shifting my aim to try for more of the shattered rodent's relatives in the closet before they could duck for concealment. From what I could see after the squeals and scurrying patter of fleeing rats stopped, there were four shaggy bodies scattered on the closet floor. I broke the gun again and stuffed in the other two shells. Then, I started walking toward the bed. I grabbed the edge of the mattress and raised it off the bedsprings.
"W-what are y-you going to do?" whispered the blonde in the hall behind me.
"I'm going to do-this," I grunted, flipping the bulky mattress off the bed. It fell over what remained of her brother. Except for one of his outstretched hands; the hand which had held the automatic before the point-blank blast loosened his grip on life as well as gun. Reluctantly circling the bed, I reached down and shifted the mattress so that he was completely covered. It wasn't much. If those rats were hungry enough, they'd eat their way through to him. I hoped it would be enough to discourage them until Sammy's body was discovered.
Back downstairs, Beverly started giving objections. She didn't want to travel with me. I couldn't force her to, she said, plumping down on the sofa. She got up faster than she sat down when I reappeared in the downstairs bedroom doorway after struggling into a pair of dark brown slacks four inches short and almost that many too snug around the middle. I'd stowed my own wet pair of pants into her brother's suitcase, along with the shaving kit, a couple white dress shirts, the suit coat that matched the slacks, and a few other accessories. Including three extra clips for the luger and the remaining shells in the cartridge box for the shotgun.
"You don't have to go with me," I said indifferently, the suitcase in one hand and the shotgun in the other. I'd located the canvas case it belonged in. It would be easier traveling with the weapon sheathed. "Stay here. With your brother. And the other rats."
That did it. She was up and out the door before I was.
Even with tire chains, for a while it looked as if we weren't going to do any traveling. She was behind the wheel and she kept arguing that it was impossible to drive. The snowdrifts were too deep, she said. The roads were invisible. Even if we did get the Olds moving-we'd just get stuck worse in another drift."
"Let's wait back at the farmhouse until a plow comes through," she begged, slumping when the heavy car rocked and the tires whined, digging through the snow without gaining traction. "We'll freeze to death if we get stranded on the road, Norm. It's no use. This damn car won't budge!"
"Try again," I said, climbing out. I got in front of the car and pushed when she shifted into reverse. The tires howled, the chains burrowing deeper and deeper, then the big car slid and slipped slowly back until it was finally out of the ruts the rapidly-spinning wheels had dug. "Now, wait. Just hold it there," I instructed, wading through the knee-high snowdrifts around the car. I opened the door on her side. "Move over," I told her.
She obeyed. I could see that she didn't think I was going to do any better than she had. I slid beneath the wheel and shifted into forward gear. The Olds crept into reverse and tromped on the accelerator again. The ahead, then lurched, sliding back into the ruts. I shifted car trembled, then staggered backwards. I rammed the shift forward and fed the engine more gas. The Olds rocked ahead, then hovered, tires really howling now as the chains clawed at the ground. I allowed a burst of pent-up breath to pop from my lungs as the heavy car wallowed forward, then began plowing more steadily through the sloping mounds of white ahead of the headlights.
There weren't any utility poles to guide the route taken by the country road submerged beneath the vast sweep of the snow. About all that helped was that the road was between hills and there were spots that had almost escaped drifting altogether, sheltered by the sloped terrain.
"How far is it to the first main road?" I asked, crouched behind the wheel, intent on driving.
"Too far," she replied sullenly. "We'll never make it."
"I didn't ask you that. People who don't answer my questions aggravate me. I'm beginning to get that buzzing in my head again," I said, accompanying the words with a facial twitch that became my interpretation of a maniacal scowl. I hoped she was looking at me; it would be a shame if my talent for that sort of portrayal didn't have an audience.
It did. "I-I'm s-sorry, Norm," she said, shifting noticeably away from me on the seat. "We're about nine miles from County Trunk D. That connects with the highway that will take us into Winner."
"Winner? Where's that?"
"Not too far from the Nebraska state line."
"Okay. Now, you watch for the road, too. If we can just keep moving, we'll make it through."
That was all the conversation for the next half-hour. Twice, I was afraid we'd run out of luck. The Olds bucked and twisted, slewing with snow being showered across the windshield as we slammed into mountainous drifts, but somehow we managed to fight through them and then, slipping and skidding as the car climbed a sharply-banked hill, suddenly, there was the plowed stretch of blacktop and we lurched onto the country trunk road.
After that, it wasn't bad. The chains clinked and clattered against the frame; I knew that we'd snapped plenty of links and that traveling over the comparatively clear surface of the highway would eventually jar loose the remaining links, but I didn't stop. It was approaching 11 o'clock when we drove into the town of Winner, and I saw the lights of a filling station that was open. There were two other cars in the station, being serviced at the pumps. One of them was filled with noisily-laughing, joking high school fellows and girls.
The other sedan had a red dome light mounted on the roof. Its side bore the insignia of the state highway patrol. We needed gas, but not that bad. I didn't stop. The hopeful gleam in the blonde's green eyes ebbed into despair, but she didn't try anything foolish. Maybe, the right hand I'd dropped to the butt of the luger in my waistband discouraged her.
There was another filling station open for business when we cruised into a small community. There was a huge orange road grader parked in front of it and two county workers clad warmly in windbreakers, the ear-flaps of their caps pulled down, were exchanging shouts with a burly, middle-aged man standing beside the red gasoline pumps as I swung the Olds in off the highway. Practically all the money in the wallet I'd retrieved from the table in the farmhouse went to pay for the filled fuel tank and as we continued on our journey, I asked Beverly how she was fixed for cash.
"Where would I get any money?" she countered, still sulking in the furtherest corner of the front seat. "Oh, I guess there's ten or fifteen dollars in my purse. Take it You may as well. That will give you a crime record almost as varied as my husband's."
"Fork it over," I said grimly, waggling my right hand fingers at her while I concentrated on the dark surface of the highway. The snow was piled higher than the car on both sides of the road but the state highway department workers had done an excellent job of clearing the concrete. I felt the bills being slapped into my waiting hand and I grinned to myself, staffing them into my coat pocket. The thought of robbing the wife of a robber like Willy Makis struck me funny.
We made good time, now that the chains were off. I'd asked the filling station proprietor to remove them after he'd filled the tank, and told him to keep the change when I'd handed him the five, the only bill in the wallet. Since the gas cost was $4.85, I guess that wasn't too generous, at that.
We traveled through Ainsworth, Nebraska and as we continued southward, the snowdrifts bordering the highway became less steep. It was a long haul to Columbus, but we only stopped once getting there. For hot coffee at a highway drive-in that was also a truck stop. Then, pushing on after some of the fatigue and muscle tiredness had been temporarily banished by the stimulating effects of the caffein, we drove through the rest of Nebraska and we were well into Missouri by morning.
There wasn't any snow to hamper us, then. Only warm, pleasant sunlight and green rolling fields, with silvery-blue creeks sparkling in pastures and fluffy clouds in the sky. I glanced at the blonde. She'd been silent for hours; not sleeping, just sitting there staring bitterly through the windshield. She was sleeping now. Her head leaning against the side window, her small white hands folded in her lap. I grinned, stifling a yawn of my own.
Half an hour later, I swung the Olds onto what appeared to be a seldom-used gravel side road. Followed it away from the highway several miles, then parked beneath a grove of trees that formed a roof over the road. We'd crossed the Missouri again and I knew we weren't far from Kansas City. I quietly eased the keys from the ignition, then folded my arms so that they covered the automatic wedged inside my belt. I relaxed as much as I could, sitting there beside the heavily-breathing blonde and permitted my own eyes to flutter shut the way they'd wanted to for so long.
Dorothy Jensen was the last thought I remembered as I lapsed into a drowsy stupor that preceded total unconsciousness. I wondered how far ahead of us she was and why she'd decided to follow up the trail that lead to certain danger, possibly death, instead of turning the letter I'd filched from the post office lockbox over to the police or the FBI? It worried me. Mostly because I thought I knew the answer.
During the brief time she'd been asleep on the bed in the motel room, when I'd tip-toed in and had seen her curled innocently, unaware of my presence, I'd also seen something else. Dorothy had brought along her father's .38 calibre police special revolver. It was in one of the suitcases open on the floor at the side of the bed and at the time I hadn't given the significance of the gun much thought.
Back in the living room of the home she'd shared with Paul Jensen in Merit, Wisconsin, I'd told her to overcome her grief and loneliness by finding a new purpose. I'd even helped her do that; I'd explained my own determination to avenge the brutal murders of her father and my sister, Janet.
Oh, sure-I'd been a big help to the beautiful, sensitive young brunette, hadn't I? I'd talked her into committing suicide. It was me and my bright idea that had planted what could be the seeds of self-destruction in her mind. Dorothy Jensen was on her way to find Willy Makis and Vic Runkle. Maybe, she had some whacky notion of walking in on them with her Dad's gun in her hand, telling them she was turning them over to the law, expecting them to meekly surrender to her. Or, if her tortured emotions and sense of personal loss ran even deeper, she might have delusions of charging at them-the .38 blazing out in revenge. ... It was dark. I don't know if it was my own groans that woke me as I roused from the nightmarish vision of Dorothy's tall, lovely body being ravished by lead slugs from machine guns held by a diabolically-smirking pair of hoods or if it was the noise of the car door being opened. I opened my eyes and grabbed Beverly Makis around the neck just as she was scrambling from the Olds. "You aren't tired of my company, are you?" I said crossly, hauling her back to the front seat.
She yanked away from me. "Let go! Or do you want to watch me go to the toilet right here on the seat," she snapped.
I let go. I stared past her. There was a shallow drainage ditch beside the road. Up ahead of the car was a reasonably-thick growth of grass and weeds. "There's a place," I said, pointing it out to her. "Don't worry about being modest. Not after all we've been to each other, honey."
She had a few unkind names to call me. I grinned, watching her feverishly work loose her slacks as she hurried toward the grassy clump. According to my watch, it was 7:19 P.M. It had been close to noon when I'd parked to grab some rest, myself. We had a long, long ride ahead of us, yet. While the somewhat haggard-looking and more than somewhat disheveled blonde limped back toward the car, I was studying the roadmap beneath the glow of the dash lights. Houma, Louisiana is located almost on the Gulf of Mexico. We were still in northern Missouri, with the rest of the state and all of Arkansas as well as practically the entire length of Louisiana to cover.
"Now, you can sit here and wait for me," I told her.
I climbed stiffly out and stretched, breathing the cool, quiet evening air. Then I hiked behind the car to let nature take its course.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
There was a story on the front page of the newspaper I picked up at a drive-in restaurant outside Springfield, Mo. when we again ate in the car. It was about Dorothy Jensen and me. As usual, I'd been wrong. She hadn't taken off on her own, to tangle with the men who'd killed her father. She'd been stranded in a farmhouse with an elderly couple and their married expectant daughter and husband. I chuckled as I read how the older couple had become grandparents of a healthy baby boy only hours before the snowplow cleared the road to their farm, approximately 35 miles west of Pierre. Beverly was driving.
"What's so damn funny?" she demanded when I laughed again, relieved that Dorothy wasn't in the serious jeopardy I'd imagined. Although it didn't say so in the newspaper account, Dorothy had ventured forth searching for me. She had seen the note I'd scrawled on the margin of the map. She'd been out in the rustic countryside, trying to follow my lead, when the blizzard trapped her and drove her to the shelter of the farmhouse.
"Do you know what happened to that woman I kidnapped?" I asked in answer to the wiry blonde's irritable query. That brought a quick, nervous side-glance. She looked scared. "You don't have to talk about it, Norm," she said, voice switching to a tone of reassurance. "Did-did they find her body?" she added in a troubled whisper, staring straight ahead again, small hands gripped so tightly around the steering wheel that her knuckles were pinched white.
Why, hell! She sincerely believed that I had gone berserk and killed Dorothy! I opened my mouth to tell her what was in the paper, then closed up again, deciding that the tempestuous, treacherous wife of Willy Makis was easier to handle if I kept her afraid of me.
"Never mind," I growled, raising the paper so she wouldn't see that I was grinning; I resumed my tough-guy role as a demented kidnapper. "Just you be quiet and drive. Talking about what happened to that woman makes my head buzz and I hear voices whispering all sorts of notions to my brain."
She was quiet after the one gasp that escaped from her lips. She drove while I finished reading. At least, I was no longer being sought for abducting Dorothy; her statement to the police that she'd accompanied me willingly cleared me on that score. The intensive manhunt had been called off. The last paragraph of the story said that although I was still being sought on an assault charge by Wisconsin authorities, searchers were now combing the isolated foothills in an effort to locate my body. I lowered the newspaper and folded it on my lap.
There hadn't been a word about Beverly Makis. For some reason, Dorothy hadn't given out the real reasons for our trip to South Dakota. That puzzled me. She must have known that I was either with the wife of Willy Makis or-dead as the newspaper suggested, lost and buried somewhere in the snow. Why hadn't she told the police about the lockbox, about the brief message I'd written along the border of the roadmap on the front seat of her station wagon?
In a town called Harrison, Arkansas, at about 2:30 a.m. on Tuesday morning. I took over the driving. Beverly had been at it ever since we'd pulled away from the drive-in eatery outside Springfield. She'd done a good job of following the winding, steeply twisting road through the rugged Ozark terrain. When we sighted the street lights of a town on the other side of the mountainous plateau, I had her stop and we switched places.
She slumped docilely in the seat, head drooping and shoulders slumped beneath the wrinkled flannel shirt. It had become progressively warmer as we'd traveled southward. She'd rolled up her sleeves and the shirt was unbuttoned halfway down her front so that the impressive curves of breasts confined to the pale blue bra were admirably revealed in the glow of the dash lights.
I was tired, too, but fairly wide-awake. We kept traveling until breakfast in Little Rock. It was mid-morning by then, and warm. The place we stopped at was un-crowded and clean. I gave the blonde permission to change clothes in the washroom. Then, uncomfortable and unshaven, myself, I had her accompany me to a men's clothing store where I bought two pairs of tropical-weight slacks and two light sport shirts. That took care of the bankroll.
"What are you going to do for dough, now?" Beverly asked, sounding a bit spiteful as we got back in the Oldsmobile and continued on our way. "Rob a bank? That's about the only thing you haven't done that the bum I'm spliced to has. So, what does that make you, Mr. Kent? I'll tell you! That makes you the same breed as Willy! Except that he's a successful crook and killer!" She laughed, twisted in the front seat so that she could glare at me while I drove. "Look at you!" she added scornfully. "You look like you've been on a cheap binge!"
"You wouldn't win any beauty prize, either," I snapped back. "Did you look in the mirror in that ladies John where you changed into that white print dress? Did you see the bags beneath your eyes? The pinched lines on your face?"
"If I was the uglist hag in the world, I wouldn't let a filthy, slob like you lay a finger on me!"
"Who the hell wants to?" I muttered wearily. Conversation subsided after the brief harrangue. Money was a problem, though. I flipped a fast, searching look at the brooding blonde. She was staring out through the side window at the green blue of countryside. She spun around in the seat when I veered the Olds off onto a sideroad.
"Now what?" she demanded warily. "Now, you open your purse."
"My purse! I told you-!"
"Open it."
"No! There isn't any-!" she swore instead of completing her denial as I snatched the handbag and twisted the metal clasp. I spilled the contents onto the seat between us. Lipstick, compact, hankie, nail file-all the usual junk a woman carries was scattered on the cushion. I flipped open the blue leather billfold. She hadn't lied. There was a dollar crumpled in lonely solitary confinement and some change, but that was all. I disgustedly tossed the billfold at her.
"Okay, put it back," I growled. Then, while she swore some more, savagely cramming the items back into the cloth handbag, I had an inspiration. I opened the car door and climbed out.
"Say! What-!" Beverly dived over the front seat, desperately striving to restrain me from opening the tan cowhide train case on the rear seat cushion. "Let that alone!" she shrieked furiously, draped halfway over the backrest, her large bosoms thrusting angrily against the flowered print frock while her hands battled at mine. I reached out with my open left palm and shoved her in the face, sending her tumbling in disarrayed protest to the front seat again.
"Now, stay there!" I said. The snaps clicked and I lifted the lid of the satin case. What I'd expected to uncover was hideout money she'd planted among her personal things; possibly a stray twenty or two that she'd crammed out of sight with the idea of using it in an emergency or something.
What I saw when I yanked open the lid of the luggage was-nothing but bundles of green currency! I was too stupefied to move for a minute, just gaping down at the loot. I picked up one of the thick sheafs of bills and thumbed through them. There were all denominations; from singles up to fifties!
"Where-did you get this money?" I demanded hoarsely, staring uncomprehendingly at her.
"You figure it out! You're so damned smart," she blasted bitterly back in response, her green eyes murderous glints.
When I noticed the printing on the paper wrappers, I didn't have much trouble figuring it out. The money was the approximately $63,000 stolen from the Merit Canning Co. Sammy Lentz had evidently been in possession of the take from the last robbery the gang had pulled before going into hiding. He'd brought it to the South Dakota farmhouse where his sister was shacked up and she'd undoubtedly transferred the money to her own luggage after Sammy got killed-probably during the time I'd been out wrapping the chains around the tires after the blizzard.
Making a mental note of the amount I borrowed $100 in small denomination bills, I placed the rest of the bundle in my hand in the train case and closed it again. I stowed the cash in my wallet as I climbed back behind the wheel and started the engine.
"Before you go anyplace, you'd better look at the front tire on this side," Beverly Makis said sullenly, scowling down at the floormat. "I think I heard a hissing."
We hadn't had a flat tire, yet. I sighed, switching off the ignition and removing the keys as I reopened the car door and got out. I supposed we were about due. But, both front tires were okay. I even hunched down and listened for any sort of hiss of escaping air, but that wasn't what I heard as I stood up again. What I heard was the other car door opening.
Beverly Makis laughed wickedly as she raised the shotgun she'd hurriedly hauled from its canvas case. "This is where we part company, wise guy," she said, finger curled around the trigger. "Up to now, I went along with you-I wanted to get to Willy, anyway. But I'm sick and tired of that crummy crazy man act you've been pulling on me; oh, don't look surprised, I never really fell for that gag-I happened to look at that story on the front page of that newspaper you left in the front seat just a couple minutes ago and read where that dame, Dorothy was still alive, I knew you'd been stringing me."
"Now, you wouldn't really shoot me, would you?" I asked, taking a slow stride toward her, hands reaching out for the barrels of the .12 gauge. That's when she pulled the trigger. Twice. She was trying to pull it again when I ungently grabbed it away from her.
"Damn you! You unloaded it!" she screamed, beating and kicking at me with frenzied frustration.
I'd never struck a woman in my life. And, the chopping right that caromed off her chin and made her green eyes glassy as she pitched forward and sagged in my arms had been delivered without a conscious thought on my part. I dragged her back to the car, set the shotgun against the side and grunted from the effort of hoisting and dumping her in the seat. Her white flowered frock was hiked up and bunched beneath her, exposing the full length of her shapely limbs as well as the wispy white step-ins she'd replaced her pale blue undies with. I didn't bother to pull down the skirt. After discovering what a cold-blooded slut she really was, learning that she was a killer as her brother, Sammy, had been, I wasn't the least bit interested in renewing sexual play with her.
At 6:30 that evening, we coasted into the driveway of a motel appropriately named THE KNOTTY CEDAR MOTEL. I rented a unit from a grizzled old man in overalls and a misshapen brown hat. He didn't ask us to register. He didn't say much of anything. From the shabby, rundown condition of the place and the absence of other autos, I guessed he was too glad for the business to be fussy. The blonde kept fingering the livid bruise on the side of her pointed chin while she sprawled sulkily on the bed inside the locked motel unit, watching me shower and shave with her brother's kit. She continued to watch while I changed into fresh shorts and she didn't say a word until I ambled from the bathroom and jerked my thumb in a motion for her to get up.
"What for?" she said in a voice chocked with rage. "I'm half-starved, dammit! When are we going to eat?"
"Up-or do you want to get socked again?" I muttered, wrenching her up into a sitting position when she refused to budge of her own accord. She scrambled off the mattress, the thin white floral fabric of her frock spilling down over her legs and her blonde hair tousled untidily across her forehead as she glared at me.
"Now what?" she said in a clipped, indignant voice. "There isn't much more you can do to me that you haven't done, already! When Willy hears about how you-"
"Who are you trying to kid?" I jeered. "You've enjoyed everything-including that wallop. You're one of those babes who likes it rough. Get in the bathroom-better take the paper along to read or something," I said, propelling her in that direction.
There was only a small window in the tiled cubicle. Not big enough for even a doll her abundantly-curved size to wriggle out through. The door could be locked from either inside or out by key. Despite the drab appearance of the motel, the units were solidly built and the door wasn't apt to give way even if she applied her best muscles against it. The one's in her rear.
I shoved her inside and pulled the door closed and locked it. She must have realized how foolish and futile it would have been to resist. I stood there, waiting to see if there was going to be a reaction. Then, when there wasn't, I quietly departed and drove into town.
When I reopened the bathroom door about forty-five minutes later after returning with hamburgers, baked beans, ice cream and hot coffee, she was sitting on the stool with the cover down. Everything was the same as when I'd left her in there. Except for one detail. Obviously, she'd taken a shower and busied herself brushing out her hair and making herself pretty again. She'd been so preoccupied with doing that that she'd neglected to put on her clothes.
"I thought you were never coming back, Normie," she purred, rising from the stool and swaying cutely toward where I stood gaping at her in the doorway. Her bare arms slid around my neck and her fresh-smelling form crowded against mine. As my own arms folded around her cool, smooth nakedness and my hands automatically began their delightful tour of exploration again, I remembered that I wasn't the least bit interested in further intimacies. Not with a evil, wanton whore who'd been ready to blast me with both barrels of the .12 gauge earlier that day. Her hands were on my slacks.
"Look, the hamburgers, beans, and coffee will get cold-and the nice cream-I mean the ice cream will melt," I spluttered weakly while we tangoed across the shadowy room, angling toward the bed. Her fingers were pulling the zipper down.
Later, munching on a cold, not especially tasty hamburger, I sighed philosophically, looking down at the bed where the nude blonde was languidly lunching too. Oh, well. I thought, food was still food, and fun was still fun no matter where or under what circumstances you partook.
Beverly tossed another tantrum when I told her she'd have to sleep in the bathtub, even after I lugged in the matress and bedding for her comfort. She just wouldn't understand that regardless of our passion session I still couldn't trust her while I slept. Eventually, she must have given up and used the bathtub bed I'd arranged because the motel rooms were still quiet when I opened my eyes the next morning.
After dressing, I slipped out and went into the public telephone booth across from the office building. I watched the cars whizzing past on the highway as I waited for the long-distance operator to put through my call. It was a sunny day. There was already heat in the sun rays invading the booth. Finally, I heard the operator tell me to deposit more coins, which I did. Then, after she told me that Mrs. Dorothy Jensen was on the line, I said, "Good morning, Mrs. Jensen."
For a moment, I didn't think anyone had heard. I was ready to say it again when Dorothy's voice came echoing hollowly over the wires.
"N-Norman? Is-is it really you?"
"No one else but," I replied brightly. I felt good just hearing her voice. "You haven't looked in the dash compartment of the station wagon, have you?"
"W-Why, no. No, I haven't."
"There's a letter in there. It's postmarked Houma, Louisiana, written by a gal named Nina Dorrel. I'm on my way down to meet her-and the pair of house guests she has staying with her."
"I-I see. We-Mr. Richards and I were just ready to leave this place, Norman. The-police found-a man's body. In an old farmhouse west of Pierre. They-"
"Richards? Carl Richards is there with you, now?"
"Yes. He's standing right beside me." She paused She must have been listening to something he was telling her; I could hear the muffled, indistinct tone of a man's voice.
"Tell him about the letter. Tell him-"
"You tell me, Mr. Kent. Where are you? Where are you phoning from?" Carl Richards, the FBI special agent asked with quiet authority.
"I have Beverly Makis traveling with me-and $63,-000. Her brother, Sammy Lentz brought to that farmhouse with him. Don't bother trying to trace the call; I'll tell you where we are in a minute."
"Mr. Kent, you are being unwise and you are becoming more than a little problem. Did you have anything to do with Sammy Lentz's death?"
"You'll get answers to all of the questions. Right now, the important thing is to land Willy Makis and Vic Runkle. They're apt to get jumpy if they learn that Sammy is dead-and that his sister is missing. It might be a good idea to keep it out of the papers and off the radio and TV for a while. Until-"
"Too late," Carl Richards said, "The local authorities have already released the story; it'll be spread across the country by now. Listen, Mr. Kent. Just stay right where r you are. I'll board the next plane out of here and join you."
"Make it a ticket to Houma, Louisiana-or as near to there as you can get. I'll meet you at the police station there."
"All right. Where are you now?" I told him. We still had a long distance to travel from where we were. It was likely that he'd arrive in Houma before we did, I said, then I asked to speak with Dorothy again.
"Norm, please be careful," she said. Her voice was low.
I liked that. I grinned, looking out at the skinny proprietor of the motel. He was clipping bushed beside the office building, a stubby corncob pipe clenched between his jaws. He didn't grin back, but I was feeling too chipper and pleased with myself and the bright warm world to mind.
"I'll be careful-I'm sorry you got snowbound, looking for me. When this is all over, maybe we can arrange to get lost in a blizzard together, somewhere," I said, surprised at my daring.
"That doesn't sound very brotherly," she answered, laughing softly.
"It wasn't meant to."
"Norman, please don't take any more unnecessary chances. If that-that woman you have with you is as ruthless and clever as Mr. Richards says she is, you-"
"I can handle her," I said. I was fervently grateful we didn't have telephone TV. If Dorothy knew how I'd already handled the willing blonde, she probably wouldn't even talk to me. "Look, why don't you fly along with Carl Richards?" I said, quickly switching subjects, "Leave the station wagon at a garage or something. After those two guys are caught, we can return to Pierre for a few days of just relaxing."
"I intend to accompany him. As to our plans for afterward-let's not go into that now, Norm." Her voice had lost it's warmth. I knew that the ghost of her husband had materialized in her heart once more, preventing even the possibility of another romance.
"It'll be good to see you anyway," I concluded lamely, my own spirits troubled. "Goodby, Dorothy." Leaving the phone booth and hiking slowly back toward the motel unit, I calculated how far we were from our destination and the rendezvous with the beautiful brown-haired widow and the FBI man. We weren't far from Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Several hours drive from the Louisiana border, then the long, long haul downward through the state, almost to the Gulf of Mexico.
Entering the motel unit, I unlocked the bathroom door. I was just turning the knob to open it when Beverly Makis yelled at me, saying, "Stay out! Can't a lady have any privacy?"
She didn't have to elaborate. I knew what bathrooms were designed for.
It was my fault that we never got to Houma. I shouldn't have bragged to the blonde about how the FBI and Louisiana law enforcement agencies were soon going to converge on her hubby and his henchman. She'd listened without comment, except that her smoldering green eyes had narrowed. She was quiet all day. Too quiet. I should have known that her unusual silent and restrained behavior spelled trouble.
It almost spelled my death.
We were in Louisiana, cruising steadily toward Natchez. Outside of brief delays at filling stations and roadside diners, we'd pushed on, making excellent time ever since leaving the motel at 9 o'clock that morning. Now, it was about 5 o'clock in the afternoon and we were on a well-traveled stretch of highway when there was a sudden bump that yanked at the wheels and I took my foot off the accelerator as the Olds lurched and rode roughly. This time, there was a flat tire.
I'd stashed the shotgun in the trunk, along with the luggage I'd also borrowed from Sammy Lentz. While I was erecting the bumper jack to remove the punctured right front tire, Beverly stood on the shoulder of the road, staring moodily around at the scenic, fertile green countryside. She wore a pastel pink summer dress and a gentle breeze fluffed at her lovely blonde hair. Glancing up to see what she was doing, I reflected that to look at her, no one would suspect what lusty liar and treacherous tramp she was.
Then, bending to my work, I succeeded in removing the damaged tire. I rolled it to the rear of the car and hauled out the spare. Beverly had wandered over and she was still standing near the open trunk when I began mounting the other tire.
Perhaps it was because we were out in the open, with other motorists speeding past on the busy highway. Or because it was still daylight and the blonde's meek, acquescent attitude had lulled me into a false sense of security. Anyway, I goofed. I was careless. It wasn't until I got up, intending to lower the bumper jack, the spare tire mounted in place, that I realized what Beverly Makis had been doing, furtively fiddling around behind the sedan. By then it was too late. She had the shotgun. This time, she had shells for it, too. From the half-filled box of cartridges I'd packed in the suitcase.
"Keep right on doing what you're doing," she cooed sweetly, moving to the side of the car so that the heavy weapon she had aimed at me wouldn't be noticed from the road. "I wouldn't try to dig for that luger you've got tucked beneath your belt under that fancy dark sport shirt," she advised, enjoying my unhappy self-disgust. "Unless you think the red blood might make an interesting pattern on the shirt and those slacks you bought with my money."
No, I didn't care for having my duds damaged. Or me, either. I lowered the jack and picked it up. She was right behind me as I lugged it back to the trunk and tossed it into the storage compartment. When I started to turn, I did have some notion of trying to grab for the barrels. She'd moved discreetly back so that I wasn't going to make it. I didn't try.
"Use your left hand to dig out the automatic," she commanded crisply, a smile twitching teasingly on her red lips. It was her eyes that I didn't like; she had the same glittering gleam of excitement and anticipation in those green orbs that her kill-crazy brother had whea he'd been about to use that same shotgun. The look of a cat who'd just pounced on an unprotected nest to de-Tour baby birds. I let the luger drop into the dust beside the car. She gestured for me to move away from it. I did. Watched while she stooped in a quick, fluid bend and snatched it up, still covering me with the .12 gauge.
"Get in. You drive," she said. I heard, the safety snick off on the luger. She opened the rear car door and tossed the shotgun on the back seat. Well, at least there weren't two muzzles gaping at my chest. One was more than enough, I thought, obediantly sliding across the front seat and pulling the door closed behind me. She was in back with her luggage. "Where do we go from here?" I mumbled morosely, inserting the keys in the iginition switch.
She laughed, triumphant and pleased with herself. "To a funeral, big boy!" she maliciously informed me. "Start driving. Stop at the first place where they've got a phone," she ordered and I kept right on doing everything she requested. I pulled the Olds back onto the road and drove sitting rigidly in the seat.
She didn't have to tell my who's funeral she had in mind.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The placid croaking of frogs, the lilting, monotonous chirping of crickets or whatever the hell they were. The dark road, wending its way through the swamplands and cypress trees where we were parked. Waiting for the company Beverly Makis had phoned didn't do anything to settle my queasy stomach. I didn't think that relief was just a swallow away, either.
The blonde had me covered constantly. She stayed in the rear seat. I had to sit there in front of her, my back and head outlined a nice target for the luger in the feeble glow of the dash lights.
"Well wear out the battery," I said, flicking another look at my watch. It was midnight. We'd been parked there for hours.
"All right," she said grudgingly. "Turn them off."
I hadn't gained a thing. The moon, floating above the marshy wastelands where we were waiting, sent a sickly, garish gleam over the front seat. I slapped at another mosquito, cursing insects, women, guns, and the nerve-jangling duet of crickets and frogs. She just laughed.
The last highway sign I'd observed before following her direction turning off the main roads to guide the Olds over countless bumpy, narrow trails until we'd reached the heart of the swamp, had mentioned a community called Lafayette. My guess was that the forlorn, desolate area we were parked in was about fifty miles north of there.
"Maybe, your friends had car trouble, like we did," I said, more to make conversation to keep her mind off simply blasting me and having it over with than because I felt like talking. "Or, maybe they got picked up by the law," I added in a more hopeful tone.
"Vic will get here. He knows this section of the country better than you know anything. What's wrong? The way you've been fidgeting and squirming in the seat I'd almost think that you didn't like it here. Don't you appreciate peace and quiet, Norm, honey-boy?"
"You must know this part of the state pretty well, yourself."
"I should. I was born and raised not far from here. Nina Dorrel and I double-dated with local yokels, lots of times. We call this place 'Suicide Swamp'. Want to know why?"
I didn't. Not particularly. Not that sort of subject, not at that time and under those circumstances. Yet, I nodded. She'd probably have told me, anyway, just to torment me.
"There's an old story about an Indian girl who knifed her white lover, here," she explained cheerfully. "Then, do you know what she did?"
"Knifed herself, too?"
"Uh-uh. She stripped off her clothes and curled up on the ground in a grassy hollow near the quicksand slew. She was found a week later, stretched out beside her lover. There was a cottonmouth moccasin coiled around her breasts and, according to the legend, there was another snake-a diamondback rattier on the chest of the white man."
I needed a cigarette. I swore when the pack proved empty. This seemed to amuse the blonde immensely. She was still giggling as I spotted the distant flash of headlights in the rear-view mirror. There was another car traveling toward us on the pitch-black, rutted dirt trail that led into the swamp. The moon had scurried for cover behind an ominous curtain of dark-tipped rainclouds.
"Switch on the parking lights again," commanded Beverly Makis. "Hurry up!" she snapped when I didn't move swiftly enough to suit her. I dared a glance into the back seat. She was twisted on the cushions, looking out through the window for another glimpse of the approaching car. I knew that at the first indication of a lunge for the luger, it would spit out a bullet, and it was still aimed directly at my body.
So, I lunged against the car door, instead, jerking frantically at the handle. I fell in a rolling dive just as the automatic spewed forth an arc of flame and lead slammed through the open door into the earth several inches from my desperately-twisting frame. She shot again as I gathered my legs under me and tore off at a zig-zagging gallop. I didn't hear where the second bullet went but I heard the savage whine of the third shot and I dove headlong for the protection of a low-hanging tree.
The headlights came on full. The other car swerved to a stop right behind the Oldsmobile. I didn't wait around to see who was getting out. I whirled and rattled through the dense swamp grass and underbrush, making one helluva racket. That terrified, pell-mell flight through the blackness nearly accomplished what the luger and the shotgun hadn't. Before I knew what was happening, I was mired in something clammy and thick that reeked of decay and death! My first frightened though was that I'd plunged into a quicksand bed-I almost screamed, threshing to keep my balance, to wrench my legs out of the sucking, putrid mud.
If I had yelled, I'd have been dead for sure. Behind me, I saw the winking, bobbing beam of light. Someone was chasing after me with a flashlight. I heard the brittle, crashing sounds to the left of me. Then, I heard the sharp, surly stutter of a machine gun spraying the underbrush. Instead of flailing and writhing to escape from the slimy fetid mud, I ducked, praying that the spires of weeds and cat-tails and the tall marsh grass would provide sufficient concealment.
"Did you nail him, Vic?" I heard Beverly Makis call out, then I saw the second blob of light swaying across the blackness to join the other searching glare from the flashlight held by the man her call had marked as being Vic Runkle.
"Damned if I know," I heard a harsh, guttural male voice reply, "Somethin' bounded out of the thicket and I let fly. Let's go take a look. Where's Nina?"
"I told her to stay with the cars-just in case that bastard tries to sneak back there."
"Good thinkin'," I heard the hulking man with the machine gun say approvingly, then I heard the sounds of their footsteps crackling through the dry brush. They were moving away from where I crouched, shivering.
It couldn't have been quicksand I'd wallowed into. It. was a struggle to get out, but I finally achieved a foothold on solid ground again. They'd circled to the left-so I started moving to my right, being as careful and quiet as possible. Every time I stepped on a twig or stumbled, causing the waist-high grass to rustle loudly, my pulse rate jumped another notch.
The night air had turned chilly and I couldn't quit shaking. I leaned against the trunk of a gnarled tree. I didn't dare slap at the hungry army of mosquitoes that were viciously attacking me. I listened, unable to see a thing. I didn't hear anything, either. Not even a frog or a cricket. I guessed the staccato clatter of the machine gun had scared the other inhabitants of the swamp as much as me.
The moon slipped away from the heavy clouds a few minutes later. A frog croaked cautiously. Then, another.
Soon, the dismal, dark-smelling wasteland area was once again alive with the night noises of the creatures. I yanked my arm away as I felt something brush it. If I'd had a weak heart, I'd have had it, then and there. That yarn about Indian girls and snakes fixed my imagination so that it seemed as if every twig was a coiled rattler and every rustle of the wind through the grass and trees a slithering cotton-mouth moccasin.
How could any night seem as long and unending as that one? My watch must have stopped, I thought, shaking my wrist, then holding it close to my ear again. I'd flopped down in the grass, trying to urge some strength back into my muscles. No, the watch hadn't stopped. It was 1:58 A. M., and there wasn't any way I could make time move any faster. Besides, what was my hurry to see the first traces of dawn? I didn't know the terrain. They both did. As soon as it was daylight, I'd be a target. I should have been grateful for the darkness, but I wasn't. If death had to come to me, I wanted it in the sunlight. A crazy notion. What difference did that make? If you're dead, you're in the darkness permanently.
With those and similar thoughts for company, I closed my eyes. The mosquitos didn't bother me; I almost laughed aloud. Another half-baked notion had just occurred to me. Maybe, I wouldn't die from a gunblast. Perhaps those damn mosquitos were draining me dry; maybe, that was why I felt so weak, so incredibly tired. This whole proposition had been a series of fizzles and failures. I'd fumbled again and this time, there wouldn't be a recovery. Why had I yielded to the stupid impulse to avenge my sister's murder in the first place? Why hadn't I had sense enough to listen to Carl Richards? Why hadn't-?
I stiffened, opening my eyes. I listened tensely, sprawled in the deep grass. Then, I heard it again. The soft, purposeful sounds of someone or something swishing through the weeds and grass. The noise was becoming more distinct. There wasn't any moon again. No sweeping beam of light from a flashlight, either.
What was it? Some swamp animal? I supposed there were cougars, wolves, bear, and deer as well as the smaller animals and reptiles prowling the desolate marshlands. Or, it could have been Vic Runkle, stalking through the blackness, deciding that the light was a giveaway. He'd be at home in the swamp, able to move silently, sure-footedly where a guy like me would stumble around like a stampeding herd of elephants.
Not that it made me feel less frightened to think that I was being stalked by a human being; without even a club for a weapon, both of my shoes sucked off by the oozing mud, my clothes torn from the thickets I'd fled through and soaked with fearful sweat. I wasn't even confident that I'd win a wrestling match with the blonde babe with the luger-and Beverly Makis was smaller and 80 pounds lighter than me. From the description of Vic Runkle, he was my height; 6' 2" and he outweighed my 195 pounds by 55 pounds with the build and muscles to match.
This was confirmed when I raised my head a few inches to peer over the tips of the blades of thick grass as the moon reappeared temporarily. Vic Runkle, holding the machine gun in front of him in both hands, ready for instant operation, was methodically combing the bog-filled, grass-covered area. He was about twenty yards from where I lay and just before I lowered my head again, his squarish face twisted in my direction and I could see the wavy, dirty blond hair above his wide forehead and ruggedly-hewn features.
Eventually, he was going to swing over in my direction. When that happened, I had a choice. I could either stay where I was, or I could make a mad scramble to escape. Either way, I'd had it. I peeked through the high, broad blades of grass again. Yes, he was coming. Moving slowly, mean little blue eyes roving carefully across the silent expanse of marsh around him, but heading almost straight for me.
Fumbling frantically in the pocket of my muddied slacks, I yanked out my cigarette lighter. Goodbye, old faithful, I thought as I was about to hurl it as far as I could into the darkness, hoping whatever noise it would make might cause the hulking moose with the machine gun to swerve in its direction. I didn't throw away the lighter. Just as my muscles tensed, ready to throw, I heard more rustling from somewhere toward the dirt road where the cars were parked, then the muted voice of Beverly Makis calling out.
"Over here," Vic Runkle answered. He'd paused. Perhaps twelve yards from where I was sprawled, holding the lighter in a tight fist that jerked spasmodically while the rest of me just plain trembled. He swung around to look at the jiggling light as Beverly staggered and stumbled her way across the spongy, uneven marshland.
"Any sign of him?" she queried, luger in one hand, flashlight in the other.
"Naw, not yet. He can't get far, though. Not with water on all three sides of him." That information didn't raise my morale. There wasn't much left to raise, though.
"We have to get him," said the blonde. The flashlight beam abruptly traversed the grass where I was hiding, some of the muffled light glancing off my face. I ducked. But, she hadn't been deliberately looking for me. She'd shifted the light and tucked it beneath her arm while she withdrew a pack of cigarettes.
Both she and Vic Runkle lit up. "Douse the light," Runkle said. "Watch it with these smokes, too. This damn grass is dry enough to burn. Why do we have to get this guy? Why can't we just lam outa here and leave him here?"
Yes, why can't you? I thought in complete agreement of the big bruiser's suggestion. Then, Beverly Makis spoiled it.
She said, "Because he knows about the hunting lodge. He'd have cops and FBI men all over those islands before we could even get up there to join Willy."
"How'd he find out about Moungeny Island?" Vic demanded angrily. "Did you chicken out and tell him? You know what Willy will do when he hears how you-"
"Oh, shut up! No, I didn't tell him. It was that yellow-spined brother of mine who spilled his guts, trying to save his own skin. But, this jerk we've got cornered blasted Sammy, with Sammy's own shotgun, yet!"
"That bastard! Sammy, too. For cracking, I mean."
"I wish that Willy was here. He knows this miserable hole even better than we do. He'd flush out the-"
It was here that her description of me became obscene again. Vic Runkle finally broke in on her tirade, saying, "I told you that Willy was on his way up to Pierre. When we heard about Sammy getting it, Willy figured you might be in a jam, too. He took off by plane, yesterday. Geez! Know what time it is?"
I knew. It was 2:17 a.m. on Thursday morning. It seemed impossible that the series of incidents leading up to the uncomfortable spot I was in now had transpired in less than a week. There'd been more than enough blood and violence to last several lifetimes. It was far from being over; the grim certainty of that fact didn't do anything to stop my nervous chills.
"What do you think he'll do when he finds out I'm not up there?" the blonde was asking.
"I left word. I called a guy we know in Pierre right after you phoned me," Vic Runkle answered. "Willy'll push on up to the island in that chartered plane. Soon as we get up there, we'll be on our way outa the place. Specially since you don't, know who else this guy we're walkin' down might've tipped. You sure you winged him?"
"No, not sure. The damn fool caught me off guard and dived out of the car so fast there wasn't time to get a bead on him. He's so stupid it's pathetic! But, the luck that guy has!" she complained bitterly, the aroma of burning tobacco wafting across my nostrils as they both began to move again.
"Taking a plane is risky," rumbled the hulking hood beside her. They'd veered away, heading for a thicket and a group of low-hanging trees located to the left of where I was crouched. "We got no choice now, though. "We'll drive over to Baton Rouge-just as soon as we nail this monkey and grab the next flight north."
Their voices faded. They both had the flashlights on again, working the glaring arcs across the grassy terrain. I waited motionless until they were further away. Then, bent low, I legged it through the marsh as fast as I could travel over the bumpy, sodden earth, unmindful of the swishing sounds of the tall grass or the snap of twigs. It was a good thing I did sacrifice silence for speed. They'd evidently reached the water barrier in the direction they'd walked, because I darted for cover behind a cypress tree just before the flashlights swept back across the grass where I'd been hiding.
The light from the car headlights filtering through the frees and underbrush guided me as I backpedalled, keeping watch on those twin streaks from the flashlights. Then, ducking as low as I could without getting down and crawling, I twisted around and circled the road where the cars were parked. I intended to cross it and cut across country just as rapidly as I could run. They'd said the swamp was bordered on three sides by water. I knew that if I could stay reasonably close to the dirt road, it would lead me out of there.
Just as I was ready to leave the cover of the ferns and foliage, about to tear across the road and dive for concealment on the opposite side, I made myself stop to think. The drive from the main road into the tangled jungle where I now stood, panting and unsteady, had taken nearily three hours. Great-I was afoot and unfamiliar with the area. If I got out at all, barring any encounters with snakes, cougars or other deadly denizens of the swamp. Eliminating the more likely possibility, that I'd just get lost in fetid wastelands or buried in a bed of quicksand; it would take me closer to three days to reach civilization and help.
Fighting back the wild impulse to run away, I did sprint across the dark stretch of road behind where the two cars were parked with headlights blazing, waiting until the playful three-quarter moon dodged elusively behind more dark-tipped clouds. My bare feet felt like raw hamburger, but not wearing shoes did give one advantage; my steps were careful, less noisy than they would have been. When I was about thirty feet from the rear of the Chrysler parked behind the Olds, I stopped. Any plan I had for swiping either car got erased when I saw the tawny-haired babe outlined in the brightness of the headlights as she stood in the road between the two vehicles.
Nina Dorrel wore a V-necked blouse and a white skirt. She was as tall as Dorothy Jensen, but at least twenty pounds heavier-the extra weight was all in her breasts and hips. There was the .12 gauge shotgun leaning against the rear bumper of the Olds. She'd obviously placed it there while attending to an urgent need.
For, Nina Dorrel was a dope addict. She was standing so that her left side was toward me while she faced the dense outgrowths of thickets, trees, and marsh where her boyfriend and Beverly were still searching. And, she had the white skirt hauled up clear past her waist, holding it in her left hand while her right hand rammed the hypodermic needle into the naked expanse of flesh of her inner thigh.
I wondered vaguely how many other women ran around without underwear. She wasn't wearing anything except tawny hollows and creamy curves beneath the blouse and skirt. Even from where I stood, I'd heard the slap of the needle as she administered the "fix". Now, withdrawing it and allowing the skirt to drop, she sighed, her head thrown back and breasts arched with satisfaction.
Shifting positions, I had the misfortune to stumble over a rock or something that was hard and unyielding. This sent me off-balance and there was considerable thrashing and rustling of the ferns as I slipped some more, trying to recover, and almost fell, instead. When I squinted fearfully toward the voluptuous redhead, she was in possession of the shotgun and walking slowly toward the brush where I crouched.
"Come out, come out whoever you are, you l'il ole sweet thing," she drawled musically, her hopped-up features blissful. Nina wasn't afraid of anything or anyone. She was goofed to the eyeballs. That didn't seem to affect the steadiness with which the twin barrels of the shotgun were focused on the thicket I was part of.
There was only one thing I could do. I did it. I pitched my frame in an ungraceful sideward lunge and landed hard on my right shoulder just as the shotgun boomed and the thicket got blasted by the waspishly-snarling charge. Even before my legs were under me, I was off and running-slithering and rolling as I used both hands to dig at the grass and brush, while I stumbled and went down again only to keep fleeing by crawling on my knees. Anything to put distance between me and that second blast!
"Don't let him get away!" I heard a shrill voice shriek from the other side of the road.
"We're coming, baby!" Vic Runkle also yelled in accompaniment to the blood-thirsty blonde's savage cry.
"Hurry! Hurry! He's right in there, someplace!" Nina Dorrel screamed back at them.
But, I wasn't where she was excitedly jabbing toward. I was fifty feet to the right and still scurrying further in that direction. I tripped over a rotting log and conked my head on another one, not hard enough to stun; enough to hurt. I was winded and shaking as if my shivering frame was fastened to a malted milk machine. There's a limit to how much of this sort of thing I could take; if my heart hadn't been weak before, I wouldn't have wanted to be applying for life insurance. My forehead felt as if it was bleeding. I'd scraped it in falling, grazed it on the bark of the fallen tree trunk. I fished for a handkerchief and mopped at the blood, sweat, and tears. Now, I knew what Winston Churchill meant. I stuffed away the handkerchief, my hand encountered the cigarette fighter again.
As soon as my fingers touched the lighter, I got an idea. I hauled it from my pocket. Somewhere to the left and nearer to the dirt road, I heard brush snapping and crackling as the people who didn't like me kept relentlessly hunting me down. I hadn't much time. I yanked at some of the dry grass surrounding me and heaped into a mound beside the log.
The fighter winked as the wheel spun against the flint It was enough to put a flame on the tip of the wick, I thrust it into the midst of the pile of grass, then jumped up and started running at full speed, hurdling the log, as the fire caught and the grass burst into a loudly-flickering flame.
"There he goes!" screeched Beverly Makis. I heard the luger slam out a shot, but I was careening crazily between trees and crashing through ferns and weeds and there weren't any more shots.
While Vic Runkle was stamping out the fire, I was busy setting another one. I kindled a third fire, then a fourth. They were beating frantically at the second blaze. Scampering through the darkness and stooping to flick the trusty lighter again, I glanced back over my shoulder and saw flames leaping higher and higher and saw that both new blazes were rapidly gobbling at the tinder-dry brush and grass.
My hope was that the fires would not only be a distraction and keep the three pursuers busy, but that the blazing marshlands would be notices by someone. Help would arrive in the form of fire-fighters as well as state patrol units to investigate.
So intent was I on being a firebug that I almost galloped head-on into Nina Dorrell. Luckily, she was as surprised as I was. She'd been prowling across a shadowy clearing on the other side of the thicket I burst through and there we were, screaming at each other. I recovered a second before she did. She was just bringing up the .12 gauge when I smashed into her, sending us both backwards to the ground. It was no time for niceties. I punched her in the belly, as hard as I could. Her distorted face flopped back to the grass while she wheezed and writhed, hands clawing for the air that had been thumped from her lungs. I grabbed the shotgun and she wasn't in condition to give me an argument about it.
When I saw the massive bulk of Vic Runkle hove into view from between two trees, only a distance of fifteen yards separated us. He saw me, too. The machine gun pivoted even as I yanked the trigger of the .12 gauge. My shot missed him completely; hadn't even touched him, and there I stood, out in the open, above the moaning redhead, watching the spiteful smirk broaden his wide, squarish features as he raised the sub-machine gun to his shoulder.
That was the moment Nina Dorrel selected to kick out viciously at my legs, her white skirt hiked up well past her nude thighs and both heaving breasts popped from the torn, twisted chiffon blouse as she cursed at me and hurtled herself up from the ground, fingernails raking for my face.
Vic Runkel must have discharged a stuttering burst from the machine gun just as his sweetheart lunged up from where she'd been concealed from him in the waist-high grass. Nina Dorrel's lush, full body jerked in rhythm to the tatoo of lead slugs that walked up from where the first bullets plowed into the grass short of their target as he corrected his aim, intending the rest of the burst for me.
One stinging hot whisper grazed the side of my neck, but the redhead's body absorbed at least half a dozen shots and she was dead when the impact of the bullets pitched her limply into my arms. I went down with her, more to save my own life than because I was trying to break her fall.
Vic Runkel came crashing forward. He kept shouting her name over and over as he ran. He didn't have the machine gun when he dropped to his knees and cradled her tawny head between his hands, he didn't even notice when I grabbed the heavy .38 from the holster beneath his suit coat.
The moon came out again as I climbed shakily to my feet, the gun pointing tremblingly down at the big, harshly-sobbing hood as he groaned in anguish seeing the crimson splotches that soaked through her clothing.
Then, I heard the sound of a car engine starting. There wasn't anything I could do about that; Beverly Makis must have crept close enough to make out what happened, then streaked it for the cars.
"I-I d-didn't mean it! I wouldn't have hurt you for all the money in the world!" cried the big blonde gunman, his harsh, guttural voice intense with agony as he held the redhead's unheeding form in his arms. He was still there, still sobbing drunkenly, his blue eyes sightless with grief, when the first fire-fighting units wailed along the dirt road an hour or so later.
I watched a pair of uniformed state troopers leading the unresisting hulk toward a radio car. I saw that someone had thrown a blanket over Nina Dorrel. I clumped wearily along with another pair of officers in the direction of where the Chrysler was parked. I couldn't help remembering that eerie legend Beverly Makis had delighted in telling me. The details weren't the same, but as I sucked gratefully at a cigarette provided by one of the troopers; it seemed to me that the name "Suicide Swamp" was for real.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Carl Richards and Dorothy Jensen stood beside me at the New Orleans airport while we watched the huge twin-engined plane being refuelled and serviced by the ground crew. It was 2:21 on an overcast, humid Friday afternoon. The flight was scheduled to leave for St. Louis in approximately nine minutes. Our luggage was being transported to the rear of the silver airship in a cart behind a small tractor.
"If it wasn't Vic Runkle who killed your father and my sister, that leaves only Willy Makis," I said, looking at the tall brunette beside me. Dorothy was wearing a light tan suit and her long, dark brown hair was curled around her shoulders. Her eyes met mine and she nodded.
"And that is what I would like to do," she said quietly, her gaze returning to the plane on the concrete runway beyond the fence. "Leave Willy Makis-and his wife-for Mr. Richards and the police to capture, Norm."
"You wouldn't have to accompany us, Mrs. Jensen," Carl Richards said, "When we transfer to the Minneapolis flight at St. Louis, you could probably obtain accomodations to Des Moines and arrange for transportation from there to Pierre where you left your station wagon."
"That sounds sensible," I said, trying to sound indifferent. "So, Beverly Makis slipped away again," I said, looking at the FBI agent standing on the other side of me at the railing. "Her, and the $63,000. she has with her." Carl Richards nodded. His friendly brown eyes became reproachful as he glanced at me. "The Oldsmobile was found abandoned at the Baton Rouge airlines terminal. She boarded the 6:58 a.m. flight bound for Kansas City, but she wasn't on the plane when it landed yesterday; the stewardess remembers a blonde answering her description leaving the flight at Tulsa, Oklahoma."
"Where she probably switched flights," I said, recalling how tricky the well-stacked female could be.
"She did. Unfortunately, to a chartered ship. We haven't been able to locate the pilot, yet. He flew her to Omaha, according to the Tulsa airport officials."
"Where she disappeared without trace," I completed for him. As usual, I was wrong. Carl Richards shook his head. "Where she boarded another airline plane at 4:45 p.m., yesterday afternoon. That flight landed at the Twin Cities Airport last evening. She was using an assumed name, of course, but we're convinced it was her."
"She must be on her way to join her husband," Dorothy declared. Her voice was drowned by the powerful roar of the airliner's engines as the pilot started them to prepare for the scheduled take-off.
"Try to remember the name of that island," Carl Richards said, his neatly-combed sandy hair ruffled by the wind the propellers were causing. It was at least the dozenths time he'd said that to me.
"I am trying," I said, raising my voice to be heard above the roar. I guess I sounded belligerent and defensive; I should have. I was.
Ever since I'd been released into the competent government agent's custody, he'd quietly kept after me, reminding me that I was still far from being absolved from guilt for some of the violations of law charged against me; things like the assault of Gordon Webber, the burglarizing of the Pierre post office, and the rampaging fire I'd started in the Louisiana marsh-to say nothing of my involvement in the deaths of Sammy Lentz and Nina Dorrel.
Vic Runkle hadn't talked. Hadn't even spoken once since those state troopers took him into custody. The .38 calibre weapon I'd turned over to the authorities was not the gun that had fired the shots into my sister and Dorothy's Dad. A small portion of stolen loot had been discovered in one of the suitcases ni the trunk of the Chrysler; only seven thousand out of the estimated million bucks total.
I tried to justify my actions, claiming that I'd been more of a victim of circumstances than guilty of any intended wrong-doing, but Carl Richards wasn't much impressed. He was a better listener than a talker, which I suppose applies to all FBI men. He did say enough to let me know that to date I'd accomplished as much harm as I'd done good.
He followed Dorothy and me up the ramp into the airliner as a nice-looking blonde stewardess ticked off our names. He settled into the seat behind us and said nothing until we were airborne, flying through the dull grey sky toward St. Louis.
Then, leaning forward, he gently reminded, "I gave you a map of that Lake-Of-The-Woods region, Mr. Kent.
You can put your time into use by studying it, trying to recall the name of that island."
I was perfectly willing. I hauled the folded map from the pocket of my medium-grey suit coat and opened it spreading it across my lap. One of my hands accidentally brushed Dorothy's silken knees and she shifted quickly, while my hand bounded away as if it had been burned.
Sure, I'd study the names of the islands on that map. The only trouble was, there were roughly 14,000 of them.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The ivy league stripe brown sport coat Carl Richards wore with the charcoal wool sharkskin slacks held its shape and crease far better than the new suit I'd purchasde in New Orleans. He still looked handsome and fresh as he sauntered around the Warroad, Minnesota cabin we were sharing.
Dorothy Jensen had decided to accompany us. It was late Friday night and I presumed she was asleep in the cabin next to ours. My eyeballs ached from focussing Wearily on the map on the writing desk across the room from where a fire crackled cheerfully in the stone hearth.
"Look, this is useless," I finally objected, wearily shoving back the chair and staggering to my feet to look at the quietly-prowling FBI agent. "Right now, I can't even remember the name of this place we're staying-let alone pick out one name from thousands!"
"You said that the blonde mentioned some sort of historical landmark. Concentrate on that," Richards calmly advised, puffing placidly on a pipe while he stood near the darkened windows.
"My memory never was good. What with the shaking around and being shot at, my mind is a total blank," I said gloomily.
Carl Richards didn't sympathize. "Keep at it a while longer, Norm. Remember, every minute counts, now. Once Makis and his wife climb into that chartered plane you overheard Vic Runkle talking about, we may never get them."
"What do you think I am?" I nearly shouted at him. "An iron man? A memory expert!"
"You aren't a saint," Carl Richards cut in, his voice as soft and pleasant as ever except for a steel edge. "You aren't the smartest man I've ever met, either-but you aren't completely unintelligent, Mr. Kent."
"Saint!" I yelled, snapping my fingers. He did have nerves, after all. My yell had startled him into dropping his pipe. He stared at me as if I'd suddenly nipped. "St. Charles! Fort St. Charles!" I babbled, whirling to pounce on the map, my index finger shaking with excitement as I searched for the name.
"What about St. Charles?" he prodded, hurrying over to stand beside where I stooped over the desk.
"There! There it is!" I whooped triumphantly, stabbing at a tiny dot located in Moose Bay, between the coasts of Ontario, Canada and the northwest tip of Minnesota.
"Magnussen Island," mused Carl Richards, leaning past my shoulders, his own voice more terse. "Is that the landmark Beverly Makis told you about?"
"Yes! She said that she remembered the launch cruising past some other islands on the way to her husband's hunting lodge! Six or seven islands, she told me!"
"Look at the islands nearby. See if any of the names jog your memory some more." I did. I scanned the numerous dots and tiny blobs representing islands on the map until the whole thing swam in front of my blurring vision. It wasn't any use. To save my soul, I couldn't come up with another thing that would help.
In the morning, along with three law enforcement officers from Minnesota, Carl Richards and a Chippewa Indian guide left the Warroad dock in a launch. They were heading for Fort St. Charles where Richards told me he'd arranged to be joined by representatives of the Canadian police authorities to take part in the search for the island where Willy Makis-possibly his wife, too-might be in hiding.
Dorothy and I had breakfast in a rustic, cleanly-maintained restaurant affording a view of the large surface of the lake. The sun wasn't shining but the sky reflected in the water added to the lake's silvery blueness. It was a scenic view, but I was doing most of my looking at the lovely, brown-eyed widow seated across the table.
She wore a light blue dress beneath a beige full-length coat. She'd removed the pale blue scarf from around her head. It was the same ensemble she'd worn the night all of this had started, and the same thought about her being the most beautiful woman I'd ever met returned to me as I sipped at the second cup of coffee.
"Do you think they'll find the right island?" Dorothy inquired, her own gaze intent on the wide expanse of lake.
I shrugged. "It may be too late. Makis knows by now that his hideout isn't safe. If his wife didn't reach him, it's a sure thing that she found some way to contact him; to let him know what's happened."
"Let's hope this is the end," she said, sighing. "It will be for me. No matter what results Mr. Richards and those other officers have, I'll be leaving some time this afternoon."
"Leaving?" I echoed unhappily. "Leaving for where?" She turned to smile at me, then. There was fond regard in her dark brown eyes and regret in the curve of her red lips. "I telephoned home, last night. After we arrived here. I wanted to be certain that the house was still standing. Mr. Hines often urged me to let him know if there was anything he could do for me."
I nodded. Arthur Hines, the genial president of the Merit Canning Co. had kindly offered any assistance he could provide to me, too. "And?" I said, smiling back at Dorothy. "Is the town still standing? Did he have anything to say about that warrant with my name on it, by any chance?"
"Not by any chance. I asked about that, Norm," she said, her right hand sliding across the table to rest lightly on mine. "Mr. Hines used his influance and managed to persuade the factory foreman you fought with to drop the charges he'd filed against you."
"It wasn't exactly a fight," I muttered, then decided there wasn't any point in explaining. "Well, I'll have to thank Arthur Hines when-and if-I ever get back there."
"Oh, you'll see him some time this afternoon," she replied, withdrawing her hand. I just looked at her, puzzled.
"He pilots his own private plane, you know."
"No, I didn't know that."
"He insisted on flying up here when I told him that I'd decided to leave. He offered to take me all the way to Pierre so I can pick up the car; I tried to refuse; I didn't want to impose on his generous good nature, but he insisted. He said it was the least he could do and that he'd thought a lot of Dad-that he enjoyed flying and had intended to log some more flying hours this weekend, anyway."
"Great guy," I mumbled. Arthur Hines may have been noble and considerate. He may have been fifteen years older than the gorgeous, perfectly-proportioned brunette daughter of his deceased employee, but none of those qualifications prevented him for being human. From having a man's eye for beauty, a male urge to possess a young woman. "That's a long ride," I said grumpily, dragging out a fresh pack of smokes and tearing at the cellophane. "And, a long, lonely haul from Pierre back to Merit," I added to disguise my suspicious thoughts.
Dorothy stared levely at me. "What are you trying to say, Norm? That Mr. Hines is the sort of man who might make a pass at me while we're in the cockpit of his cabin plane?"
"Forget it," I said. I looked away from her, pretending to be hunting for my lighter. I got it out of the pocket of the medium-grey suit coat and spun the wheel viciously. Nothing happened. I gave it another irritated whirl. Still nothing. Old Faithful was out of flint.
That afternoon, I parked on the edge of the bed in the cabin, staring listlessly at the four walls and furnishings while Dorothy was in the next cabin, completing her packing. It kept getting darker and more overcast outside every hour. There had only been a sparse scattering of snow up there, so far. The sky looked capable of remedying that condition at any moment. I had a vague hope that Arthur Hines had chickened out; had been grounded somewhere between Merit, Wisconsin and War-road, Minnesota where we were.
As usual, my hunch was wrong. I went to the door and opened it, hearing the rap. There stood the slim, wiry businessman next to Dorothy, his dark blue eyes cordial, his tanned cheeks smooth-shaven and his dark brown moustache neatly-trimmed. He wore a tweed jacket and faultlessly-pressed brown wool slacks.
His right hand came out along with a grin. He looked more pleased to see me than I was to see him. But, what could I do? I had to accept his firm handshake and pretend it was simply charming to see him again.
"Well be saying goodbye almost before we can say hello," Arthur Hines said, striding into the cabin with the same militant bearing I'd noted that day when I'd called at his office. He reminded me of some of the earlier movie versions Errol Flynn acted in; sort've a sophisticated, debonair modern-day knight. Then, I remembered how swiftly he'd been transformed into a meek, nervous coward at one scathing glower from the frizzled old hag he was married to and I decided he didn't resemble Errol Flynn at all.
"Mr. Hines says that the airport weather forecast chart warns of possible snow by tonight or early tomorrow morning," Dorothy said. She'd preceded him into the main room of the cabin. She stood with her back to the fireplace. She'd changed into some sort of a tan twill ski suit, complete with attached hood. She blushed, noting that both Arthur Hines and I were inspecting her with visible admiration.
"I understand that the FBI and police authorities from both our country and Canada are closing in on the last of those bandits," Arthur Hines said. "Good! The sooner that gang leader is tracked down and shot down like the evil cur he is, the better off civilization will be!" Even Dorothy looked surprised by his vehemence. I was. It wasn't the type of talk you'd expect to hear from a prominent business executive. We talked for about half an hour, discussing events of the last week, ruminating briefly about future plans, reflecting on what a relief it would be when all the unpleasantness, death, and violence was far behind us.
Arthur Hines glanced at his watch, rising from the chair he'd taken. "Well, my dear," he said, smiling across the room at where Dorothy stood at the windows. "By now, the plane should be serviced and ready-we must get started. At a cruising speed of 135 miles per hour, we have a long flight ahead of us."
It was then 2:15 in the afternoon. I stood up, too. "Think you can make Pierre before night?" I asked, a shade of worry in my mind. The sky looked as if someone had thrown dirt at the fast-moving clouds drifting angrily amid the splotches of greyish-blue that was visible between them.
"Oh, yes. And, if not, my plane is fully equipped with instruments," he answered, moving toward the door, his wiry shoulders set at a jaunty, confident angle. "I've been flying for years, Norman. Night landings aren't difficult-a bit of bad weather will only be an interesting challange."
There he went, trying to act like Errol Flynn, again, I thought, annoyed. I look at Dorothy. She had walked to the center of the room. She was looking at me, but I couldn't read what her brown eyes were trying to say.
"Would-would you mind waiting outside for a minute, Mr. Hines?" she finally asked.
Arthur Hines chuckled. "Why, of course not. I'll walk back to your cabin and see to your luggage. I'm completely at your disposal, my dear." We both watched him walk to the door and open it. When it closed behind him, I looked at the tall, beautiful young widow again.
"This seems like-" I got that far after an awkward silence when my casual attempt at a goodbye was interrupted by the jangle of the telephone on the writing desk.
"Aren't you going to answer it?" Dorothy said softly when it rang again and I still hadn't looked away from her. There didn't seem to be any reason not to. I've never liked goodbyes, anyway. I walked over and picked up the receiver.
It was the unexcited voice of Carl Richards that I heard after my hello. "The name of that island you've been racking your brain to remember is Moungeny Isle," he said. There was so much buzzing and humming on the line that I could scarcely make out what he was saying.
"Yes, that's it!" I said, grinning across the cabin room at Dorothy Jensen. "You got them, eh?"
"No. No, we did not get them. We did get the pilot of that plane they'd chartered, though. He was down at the dock when we cruised into the cove. Busily at work repairing a damaged pontoon. The seaplane was ready to go, but Makis and his wife must have spotted us coming. They got away in their launch. It was much faster than our boat, loaded down as it was."
"Oh, I see."
"The reason I'm calling is that I want you to notify the local law authorities and have them alert every other police agency in the area. Do you understand that, Mr. Kent? I'm calling from a pay station at a place on the Minnesota penninsula called Sugar Point. We're on our way in with the prisoner."
"I understand. I'll relay your instructions."
"Do that at once. They won't get away. Not this time." He broke the connection. I hung up, too. I wished that I was as sure of that as he'd sounded.
"What is it, Norm?" Dorothy asked anxiously, walking toward me. I told her while I picked up the phone again to contact the Warroad police. The officer I spoke to got extremely interested when he finally slowed me down so that he could decipher what I was telling him. He assured me that all other law enforcement personnel in the area would be alerted, too.
Dorothy was hesitant about leaving with Arthur Hines. I wasn't. I wanted her out of there. Away from any possible trouble. I moved away from the desk and placed my hands on her shoulders.
"The best thing you can do is get in that plane and forget all this," I said urgently. "I'll call a taxi while you check out of your cabin. The sooner, the better, too. Having snow to worry about was bad enough. Now, with Willy Makis and his wife on the loose and God knows where, I want you away from here-fast!"
Her brown eyes were quizzical and her lovely lips were parted as if ready to protest. I cancelled any objections by hauling her roughly into my arms and lowering my mouth to hers. When I released her, I didn't wait for her reaction; I whirled and picked up the phone again. While I instructed the local transportation company to despatch a cab immediately, I heard the door open and close and she was gone.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
"Want me to wait?" asked the driver of the taxi as we set down the luggage and watched Arthur Hines and Dorothy emerging from the small airport administration building where Hines had stopped to obtain clearance and information about the weather before taking off in the 5-passenger cabin cruiser plane the driver and I had parked near after leaving them off.
"No, thanks. The walk back to the cabins will do me good," I said, paying him. The place where Carl Richards and I were staying was close to a mile from the landing field and the dull grey air had-a definite chill of snow in it. I thought that a hike might help dispel the headache I was getting.
The driver climbed into his cab and drove away while the slim, erect businessman and my girl were crossing the field toward me. The brisk breeze was tugging at Dorothy's blue scarf and the beige coat she'd pulled on over her tan slacks and the tan ski jacket. She'd removed the hood from the jacket in favor of the scarf while the three of us waited near the doorway of her cabin for the taxi to appear and had placed it in one of her suitcases; the travel case where I'd seen her father's .38 calibre revolver.
Now, ready to go, Arthur Hines flashed another of his genial smiles at me as we shook hands and I watched him swing up into the plane. I handed him up one of the suitcases.
"Goodbye, Norm. You must visit me, some time," Dorothy said quietly, her dark brown eyes carefully evading mine as I reached for another piece of luggage from the ground beside the plane.
"Yes, I'll have to do that," I muttered. "You intend to stay on in the house in Merit, then?"
"Mr. Hines has offered me a job. It's been years since I've taken dictation or typed, but those things come back quickly, once you've learned them, I've heard."
"Sure. Well, that's fine," I said. My voice was as flat and stale as a bottle of cheap champagne that had sat for hours without a cap. "All the luck in the world to you, Dorothy. Here's hoping you meet another man who's right for you, some day. I don't think your husband, Bob, would like you to spend the rest of your life in mourning for him." I handed, Arthur Hines the last of the luggage.
"No, I-I guess he wouldn't," she answered in a small, guarded voice. She stepped toward the plane. I moved to help her climb through the doorway into the enclosed compartment where Arthur Hines was seated at the controls.
If I hadn't been so busy taking a last look at the beautiful brown-haired young woman, I might have noticed how scared and stiffly the dapper, clean-shaven business executive had become. His lips were compressed into a bloodless line above his dark brown moustache and his dark blue eyes were glassy with fear as he stared at me when I boosted Dorothy aboard.
Then, I did notice. It was enough to paralyze the nervous system. A wicked, long barreled .45 calibre automatic aimed in the rock-steady grip of a toothy, sardonically-smirking savage named Willy Makis.
"Alius room for one more, peasant," crooned the husky, big-nosed killer, his dirty yellow hair an unruly mop that spilled across his scalp in every direction. Willy Makis had worn his hair trimmed crew-cut fashion in the police photo I'd seen. It had grown out now, and I could understand why he'd given up attempts to tame it.
"T-They w-were h-hiding behind the seats!" Arthur Hines blurted, his tanned features the color of dead ashes and his eyes bulging in their closely-spaced sockets. "They'll k-kill us! They'll kill us all!"
"Why, we might-we just might do that," Willy Makis said cheerfully, his own pale blue eyes pleased at the thought. He beckoned again with the .45, saying, "My 1'il ole wifey, she's been a-tellin' me all about what friendly hospitality you showed her, Mr. Kent. Come in, come in! You've been so interested in me-askin' all sorts of questions and all-why, you must be just about a-dyin' to meet me, now aren't you?"
I heard gales of shrill, female laughter as I clambered clumsily into the plane. Then I saw Beverly Makis standing in the narrow aisle behind her husband. Her green eyes mocked me past his wide, bullish shoulders.
Dorothy Jensen was crouched against the far side of the cockpit, her right hand cupped in terror to her mouth while she stared at the guy in a red and black plaid shirt and dirty overalls as if she was hypnotized.
"You'll never get this contraption off'n the ground if you don't start the motor, dude," Willy Makis instructed playfully, his thick, lips pulled back with his grin, exposing large, tobacco-blemished tusks that passed for teeth again. His voice hardened when Arthur Hines just sat there petrified. "I said, git this plane into the air! I ain't goin' to tell you a third time!"
The tweed hunting jacket across the wiry shoulders of the businessman pilot jerked and twitched as Arthur Hines broke loose from the rigid immobility of fright and fumbled at the controls. The prop whined and turned slowly at first, then white puffs blasted from the engine exhaust as the motor caught and roared causing the plane to shudder.
Which wasn't much of a trick; I was shuddering, too, and I didn't even have a prop or an engine. In fact, right then, with that immense, ugly army-model .45 centered on my middle, I wasn't even sure I had legs, and if I did, they were buckling and knocking together that I almost fell to the cockpit floor.
"You, girlie, and you, Mr. Kent, you two meander back this a-way an' make yourselves comfy," Willy Makis suggested in his easy-going drawl. I took Dorothy's arm and guided her past the six-foot joker, moving with extreme caution so as not to give that automatic in his hand an excuse to bark at me. Not that he'd need an excuse. I had the dull, hopeless feeling that none of us were to live, anyway. The unshaven, unkempt blonde killer deftly probed my person for a weapon. His hands fell away from me and his pale blue eyes glinted as they roved over Dorothy.
"I'll frisk her," Beverly Makis said testily, aware of her man's intent. I saw that the compact blonde wore a ski suit, a tight-fitting green sort of jumper, complete with parka hood. Also complete with luger. As I clumped into the bucket-type seat next to Dorothy, Beverly Makis backed further into the plane, covering us with the weapon. She saw me staring at it.
"It was damned nice of you to include those extra clips for this when you packed my brother's stuff, you bastard," she said sweetly, undulating forward as I turned my head away from her and placed my left hand over Dorothy's. Her hand was as cold as ice. Her lovely profile was tense with fright although she was doing her best to remain composed and steady.
"We'll get out of this. I won't let anything happen to you, darling," I whispered huskily. Who was I trying to fool? Who was I to make that sort've a promise? I stared at where Willy Makis was sprawled comfortably in the seat next to Arthur Hines in the cockpit. The engine was revved up to take off speed. When the brakes were released, the cabin cruiser shot forward, wheels thumping swiftly across the field. We were airborne, circling above the field in a climbing turn.
"Which-which way do you wish me to fly?" Arthur Hines asked, his reedy voice a dry croak as he glanced fearfully at his smirking co-pilot.
Willy Makis rubbed reflectively at his hooked beak, pale blue eyes calculating. "Well, now, I'll tell you," he finally twanged cheerfully. "One of them there mechanics a-gassin' up this job told us that you all was headin' for Pierre, South Dakota. Now, that seems like a nice place to head for-an' Bev and me, we surely wouldn't wanta take you folks outa your way!" He threw back his big head, his mirth filling the cabin.
Beverly Makis was giggling. "Honey, you sure are full of laughs, today," she snickered. She'd moved up and was seated right behind me. Without seeing it, I knew that the luger was there, too. A slug could tear through the backrest cushion and still have more than enough velocity of rip through my frame.
"Why not?" Willy Makis answered using the flat, long barrel of the .45 automatic to scratch at his dirty blonde hair. "Here we are with these friendly folks-and with close to a million bucks in that suitcase back there. Now, what could be nicer'n that, huh?" He twisted so that his smirk included Dorothy and me. "Some one must have seen you and your wife get aboard this place," I said. "The mechanic you talked with-just as soon as the FBI man I was staying with finds out I left on the plane-don't you think he'll know what's happened, Makis? In a few hours, they'll be combing the sky for this ship!"
"Uh-huh, that's a plain and certain fact. 'Ceptin' the one place they won't look is where you folks said you was a-goin'," he replied. He nudged Arthur Hines, "Now, ain't that right, huh?"
"P-Please! If-if we take you to where you want to go, please promise me you won't kill m-me!" quavered the ashen-faced president of the Merit Canning Co.
"Honey, if we land at the airport in Pierre, people are bound to see us," Beverly Makis said worriedly from behind where Dorothy and I sat.
"Didn't you say that there's a big, level field back of the farmhouse where you was stayin'?"
"Yes, but honey, they've had lots of snow, there! Can this dude with the moustache set us down without havin' us all killed?"
"What about it, dude?" Willy Makis inquired, again nudging Arthur Hines. Each time the pale, perspiring amateur pilot got nudged, I thought he was going to leap right through the plexiglas windshield. He cleared his throat, dubiously saying, "This-this plane isn't equipped for landing in snow. I, uh-"
"Sure, he can do it. I got confidence in you, Mr.-say, you sure look like some guy I should know," Willy Makis said, his pale blue eyes studying Arthur Hines more intently. "Where? Now-where could it have been I seen you a-fore?" he mused, the front sight of the automatic massaging his shaggy blonde sideburn as he frowned in concentrated puzzlement.
Beverly Makis lit a cigarette. She tossed the lighted match down my neck. I yelled, swatting desperately at the searing scorch while she giggled as if it was the funniest thing. She slid out of the seat so that my wildly-flailing arms didn't even come close to the luger she had aimed at me during my painful writhing to extinguish the flaring paper match and remove it from between my shoulder blades. I glared up at her.
"Still the same cute, loveable girl I remember you as, aren't you?" I growled, hurtling the charred matchstick right at her.
"Watch how you talk about my being loveable, Normie," she said, batting her green eyes coquettishly, pretending to flirt with me. "He's the most jealous man I ever did know!"
"Hey!" exclaimed Willy Makis triumphantly. He was still peering fixedly at Arthur Hines who was fidgeting unhappily as he stared out at the murky, sullen winter sky ahead of the propeller. "Now I know you!" Willy Makis said, giving Hines another comradely nudge with his elbow. "You're the big shot owner of that Wisconsin factory where we pulled our last job! Right?" He nudged Arthur Hines again. Harder. "Right?" he repeated persistently.
Arthur Hines nodded, more unhappy and scared than ever. "Y-Yes. Yes, that is right," he murmured unwillingly.
"Where you murdered my father!" Dorothy Jensen snapped, half-rising from the seat to jab a vengeful finger toward the husky tow-haired hoodlum. "Where you killed an innocent, defenseless girl. Shooting her in the back! Oh, you're a big, brave bandit, aren't you, Willy Makis?" she said, her exquisite nose quivering with hatred and loathing and her dark brown eyes blazing with contempt. "How many other helpless lives have you snuffed out with that gun in your hand? What are you waiting for? Why don't you shoot me, too?" she shrieked, ready to lunge out at him, her breasts tossing, her hands jutting scornfully from her hips, her features flushed with fury. I grabbed her and wrestled her back to the seat. I was just in time. Beverly Makis would have shot her in another second. I saw the look of disappointment in her narrowed green eyes as the luger relaxed slightly again.
Willy Makis had hauled himself up from the co-pilot's chair at the controls. He was frowning in puzzlement as he looked down at Dorothy. "Your father" he said. "Who was your father? And, what's this about me plugging a girl in the back?" He acted genuinely bewildered as he stepped closer. His right hand snaked out and tilted back Dorothy's chin. The .45 in his left fist was slanted at me.
"My father's name was Paul Jensen!" Dorothy said, her brown eyes unafraid as she slapped the hand aside and stared upright into the unshaven features of the husky killer. "He was the guard at the plant gate. He did a great service by killing two of the slimy snakes that were with you before you shot him down!"
Willy Makis nodded, not taking any particular offense at her. "Oh-the old duffer I drew a bead on just a-fore he flipped a bullet at me-that was your old man, huh?" he said, a note of grudging respect in his voice. I was afraid he was a-gonna give us trouble. Sammy Lentz was drivin' for us. When we got to the gate, your pa made Sammy fork over his wallet. He gave Sammy's papers a real once-over, and he sure stared at the rest of us, too."
"He was the best cop on the force before he retired!" Dorothy said fiercely, tears visible in the corners of her eyes. "He knew there was something wrong with you and those others. That's why he wrote down your wife's address in his notebook."
"Oh, so that's how you and your black-haired boyfriend here located me," Beverly Makis said, "I wondered about that."
"I killed your old man," Willy Makis said, his pale blue eyes on the beautiful curves of Dorothy's body, seeming to bore right through her clothing to caress the creamy white flesh beneath. "I had to. It was him or me and I alius did like me."
While they were talking, I happened to dart a fast look up at the front of the plane. I saw a few scattered snowflakes streaking rapidly past the windshield. I saw something else, too. Arthur Hines had reached beneath the instrument panel. He slipped a snub-nosed revolver into the inside pocket of his tweed jacket. I diverted my gaze quickly. I didn't want Willy Makis or his wife to turn and get suspicious about the activities of the pilot; the gun Hines had managed to sneak into his pocket was about the only chance for living through this situation that any of us had.
"Now, tell me about my sister," I said. My voice was raw. My hands were bunched into fists. "Tell me how it was either her or you-and her with her back turned!"
Willy Makis swung his leer from the girl beside me. "Just what the hell are you and this here brown-eyed bit of fluff talkin' about?" he demanded, his good-humor pose forgotten.
"I'm talking about those two .38 caliber slugs you put in her back on the day of the robbery," I said, tempted to permit my hands to fly out and seize his throat even if it was suicide to make any sort of sudden move. "Why, Makis? What possible defense can your warped brain have for cold-bloodedly murdering my sister?"
"I'll hafta do somethin' about that wild-flappin' tongue of your'n," he said softly, his eyes leaping with killer-lights. "That'll be later. Right now, I'm tellin' you that I didn't use no .38 on that job. I used this baby I've got cocked and ready to put a tunnel through your guts if'n you try what you're thinkin' of tryin'."
"Don't, Norman. Please don't," whispered Dorothy, clutching at my arm as she twisted in the seat to stare into my face. "He-he means what he says! He'll shoot, then laugh about it as you die. He's worse than an animal. He's insane."
"Why, you just know that ain't true," Willy Makis drawled, acting as if he wasn't riled. But, I could sense the bestial lusts her stinging words had roused. "You get up, baby doll," he twanged, his right hand sliding forward, his big hand closing beneath Dorothy's left armpit, the palm pressing against her surging breast. He hauled her up from the seat. "You just come back here with me," he said, forcibly pulling her along as he circled the seat I was in, dragging her into the narrow asile. "You watch her boyfriend and the pilot, Bev."
"This isn't no time for you to play around with her," snarled the blonde, keeping the luger poised a foot from the back of my head. "I don't give a damn what you do after we get on the ground-rape her then, if you want to-and I can tell that you do-but not now, Willy."
"Why, Bev-you just know that it's you I love," he chuckled from somewhere behind me. I heard Dorothy's stifled gasp and I twisted around in the bucket seat. They were still in the aisle, back near where the suitcases were piled. Willy Makis had tucked the automatic into the hip pocket of the dirty blue denim overalls and he was using both hands to rip at the beige coat while Dorothy twisted and kicked, her fists beating at his chest and face.
There was a piercing roar that thundered in the cockpit and I was dimly aware that the savage sound had been my own maddened bellow as I flung myself up from the seat. The last noise I heard before the barrel of the luger descended with skull-splitting impact on the side of my head was Dorothy's scream as the coat and tan twill jacket she wore ripped from her body....
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
My head was pillowed on something warm and soft and fragrant; that much I knew, my other senses returned slowly. I was able to open my eyes and hear the muffled drone of the plane engine again. I was on the floor. Someone had dragged me to the rear of the ship near the luggage. There wasn't much light. From my prone position I could see that the snow flurries had thickened and that in a few more minute, it would be completely dark.
Willy Makis was seated in the co-pilot berth again. Beverly was reclining in the bucket-seat she'd knocked me out of with the viciously-whipped barrel of the gun that was now canted carelessly in her hand as her legs dangled from their draped position across the arm-rest of the seat.
"Well, well, she giggled, seeing me begin to stir in an effort to locate Dorothy Jensen. "Did you have a comfy nap, big boy? You slept right through the refuelling stop we made in North Dakota. Relax and stay there in your girl friends lap-and don't look so worried. She's still starry-eyed and unsoiled by my dear hubby's hot, hungry hands!"
"Shhh! Don't try to talk," Dorothy's voice floated quietly down from behind me. Then I knew where I was. She had my head cushioned tenderly on her lap and her soothing fingers gently stroked away the throbbing pain from the side of my skull. "It's all right, Norm. He-he didn't rape me. He did it mostly to frighten me and stop me from calling him more names, I think," she murmured. "How do you feel? I-I thought that she'd killed you-you were so white and still for so long."
"I'm okay," I lied. "We must be almost to the farmhouse," I muttered, squinting to focus on my watch. I didn't try to leave my resting place. I liked it there, "We'd better be. Even the best filer would have trouble bringing this ship down in a snow-covered pasture at night."
"What about that?" Beverly called, hearing what I'd said. "How much longer?" she asked querulously, shifting positions in the seat and sitting up straighter, the lax luger once again on duty.
"We-we should be over the farm in another five minutes-if the directions you have given me are correct," Arthur Hines answered in an nervous voice.
"Get up in front and keep your eyes peeled for that shack," Willy commanded, leaving the cockpit and motioning at his wife. I'll stay back here and keep those two company."
"How's your check, honey?" Beverly asked solicitiously, swaying provocatively against him as they passed in the aisle between the seats, her fingers stealing up to brush lightly across his blondely-bearded features. "After this, do your petting when she can't use her claws on you-or else stick to me," she said, giving added emphasis to the latter notion by guiding his right hand to the front of her tight-fitting green ski outfit. She'd unloosened several of the buttons on the blouse and her intent had been for Willy's big hand to slip inside, but he hauled it roughly away and gave her a lusty whack on the fanny that sent her staggering ahead toward the cockpit, saying, "That'll keep. Shut your face and do like I told you."
Then, lowering his 210-lb. torso in to the seat on the opposite side of the aisle from where his wife had been sprawled, Makis grinned toothily back at us. "You got Dorothy trained; Kent. Or, does she fight you off, too?" he drawled lazily, winking.
"That's one more score I've got to settle with you," I said, swinging up into a sitting position on the floor. "Even if you hadn't murdered my sister, I'd still get you," Big talk. I sounded like a boy trying to impress the teacher he had a crush on with his bravery. I looked at Dorothy, then.
Her dark brown hair was in tumbled disarray, wavy strands tousled across her forehead. He tan twill jumper jacket was ripped and rumpled and her slacks were wrinkled and twisted, partly due to the position she'd been in while cradling my head on her lap. She looked beautiful. And, she didn't appear to be hurt in any way. I felt better.
"Not that it makes a damn difference," Willy Makis said idly, his gaze directed toward the cockpit momentarily. "But, I didn't kill your sister. It musta been Sammy-or Runkle."
"No, it wasn't. Neither of their guns fired those two bullets. Don't try to he out of it, Makis?"
"The hell with you. One thing I ain't never done is killed no females, Kent. I like girlies too dang well for that," he said, directing a smirk at Dorothy. "You just wait 'til we get snug and cozy in that farmhouse, doll. I already found out that them purty proud peaks is the real McCoy; now, what I wanta know is, are you that nice all over, huh?" he leered, playfully bouncing the fist holding the automatic on one of his knees.
"There! That's it!" Beverly Makis cried shrilly, pointing out through the cockpit windshield. "Down there! See that house and shed on the hill above that dirt road?"
Arthur Hines was looking, too. Visibility couldn't have been good; the flecks of snow were coming out of the sullen, rapidly-darkening sky at a faster pace. "Where can we land?" he asked hollowly. "I-I don't see anything except hills and ravines below us."
"There's a pasture just behind the machine shed. See where I mean?" the blonde said anxiously, jabbing her finger against the plexiglas as she rose from the seat "Right there!"
Willy Makis was on his feet, too. He'd taken a step forward toward the cockpit, his right hand steadying him by gripping the backrest of the seat. The plane's nose dropped as Arthur Hines put it into a shallow earthward dive. "Norm! My father's revolver is in that suitcase beside you," Dorothy whispered urgently.
I glanced at her white, frightened face, looked up front. The three others were more concerned about making a safe landing than they were about us. I -edged in the direction of the travel case stacked atop another suitcase. Luck was with me; the case was positioned so that the side with the snaps was toward me. I reached out and pressed one of the two lock buttons, holding the brass-plated snap so that the noise of it's opening wouldn't be heard.
My hands yanked hastily from the luggage as Willy Makis glanced back at us over his shoulder. I didn't think he'd noticed what I was doing, but I wasn't sure. He stared at us, then began to turn as if to walk back toward us. My heart groaned as our hopes evaporated.
"Look out, you fool!" Beverly Makis shrieked frantically. The plane's engine roared and the nose came up so abruptly that Willy Makis stumbled backwards and almost went down from the suddeness of the climb.
"What the hell is happening?" snarled the unkempt blonde gunman, bracing himself as the plane leveled off again and banked in a circle to the left. "Try another dopey maneuver like that and it'll be your last move, Mr. Hines!"
"I-I wasn't t-trying anything," Arthur Hines quavered. "We nearly crashed into that windmill tower beside that machine shed. If your wife hadn't yelled, I never would have seen it!"
"Yeah? Well, now you know it's there-" Willy Makis kept talking, bluntly predicting terrible things for the jittery businessman at the controls if the next landing attempt wasn't more successful.
While he was yammering and his lithe, buxom blonde wife was hovering behind Arthur Hines, helping keep a lookout for further hazards, I was fumbling with the other lock on the travel case. It seemed to be stuck. Cold, clammy sweat popped out all over me as I pressed desperately at the lock button. Finally, it opened with a click that sounded to me as loud as the clang of a blacksmith's anvil. I gaped wildly frontward, expecting to see Willy Makis swinging around with the .45 about to blaze me, but he was still gripping the backs of the bucket seats as he stood swaying in the aisle, watching Arthur Hines send the plane into another glide toward the snow-covered field below us.
Then, I had my hand on the revolver. It had been buried beneath something silken and filmy, but there wasn't time to reflect on the elegance of Dorothy's lingerie. I withdrew my hand and crammed the .38 beneath the folds of my suit coat, wedging it into my waistband and tugging the coat flaps over it. I shut the suitcase, then scrunched my way back to sit on the floor beside Dorothy, so that Willy saw nothing amiss when he did fling another suspicious glance back at us.
"You-you may be pitched through the windshield if you aren't in a seat," Arthur Hines stammered weakly, working hard at the controls as the white ground whizzed thirty feet beneath the plane. Beverly plopped into the co-pilot's seat again, her hands shoving against the instrument panel, the barrel of the luger aimed at the windshield. Her husband eased his husky frame into the seat he'd been standing beside. He tossed one final glare back at us just before the fast-skimming wheels grazed the crusted surface of the snow.
I'd wrapped my arms around Dorothy, holding her tightly. She had her face pressed into the fabric of my suit coat and her arms were wound tightly around me, too. It seemed as if we were traveling much too swiftly; I had my muscles tensed, ready for the cabin cruiser plane to nose forward and flip over completely on the treacherously-uneven surface of the snow.
Instead, the wheels bumped and the light plane did swerve, shuddering and vibrating from the impact of the landing, but it slithered to a stop at the far end of the pasture in what I thought was a miraculous landing. Arthur Hines flicked off the ignition and slumped back against the pflot's seat, his arms dangling at his sides. "How do you like that guy?" Beverly Makis finally spoke in a tiny, shaking voice as she shifted to look back at her husband. "He passed out!"
"Never mind about him. We got to-" Willy Makis got that far as he heaved himself up from the seat and turned toward where I was already standing. I'd shoved Dorothy aside so that she was sprawled on the floor behind some of the luggage. It wasn't much protection for her, but it was all we had.
"This gun belonged to Paul Jensen," I heard myself say in a blurred growl, "It has a bullet in it with your name on it, Makis. Remember?" The .38 police special was gripped in my right fist. My finger was taut against the trigger. At a range of ten feet, even I couldn't miss so large a target as the surprised-looking killer's guts.
"Now, where the hell did that come from?" Willy Makis drawled in his casual twang, his pale blue eyes half-amused and mocking. The automatic he held in his left hand was still aimed down at the floor. I was watching it. At the first sign of a twitch, I intended to fire.
"Tell your wife to drop the luger," I ordered. "She can't get a shot at me-the bullet would have to go through you."
"Maybe, you'd better had do like the man says, Bev. No sense arguin' with Mr. Kent here. He sure sounds mad. Like he really means business, don't he?" Willy Makis observed, not at all disturbed, according to voice and manner.
"Drop your gun, too-or try to use it!"
"Why-I wouldn't want to drop it, Mr. Kent. Why don't I just park it on this here seat, instead? You know-dropped guns have a habit of goin' off, sometimes and, we sure wouldn't want that purty ladyfriend of your'n to get hit by a stray slug, now would we?" he said, his pale blue eyes brightened noticeably as I took my gaze off the .45 for a split second to look at his face.
It was that fraction of time that almost killed me. His first shot was too early-fired as he whipped up his hand. The slug screamed off the travel case on the floor at my feet. The' second shot caught me in the fleshy part of my left thigh, spinning me like a rag doll. It passed through skin without striking bone and richocheted off the tail compartment wall behind me.
He'd squeezed off those two blasts before I'd even pulled the trigger once. And when I did-there was only a hollow, empty click. The damn thing wasn't loaded. Willy Makis gaped foolishly at the .38 in my hand, even more astonished than me. He threw back his head and began howling at the realization that a poor, dumb peasant had tried to take him with a empty gun.
That's when I drew back my arm and pitched the revolver at his gleeful mug with every ounce of strength I could summon. It bounced off the lower part of his face; smacking him flush in the mouth and splintering every single front tusk as he sagged to his knees like a steer clubbed in the slaughterhouse, his pale blue eyes rolling glassily. He wasn't out. He tried to rally as I left my feet in a running dive and rammed him with the top of my skull, sending us both spilling brutally to the aisle of the plane.
Dorothy was screaming and Beverly was cursing, displaying her remarkable vocabulary of four-letter obscenities as she danced around in the cockpit, trying to separate me from her husband's rolling, flailing form long enough to use the luger. I had troubles of my own. Willy Makis, spitting blood and splinters from his mouth with gore flooding from his nostrils, was clinging to the .45 automatic in his left hand while his right fist bashed up into me face. He was on top of me. Then, I was astride him, my right hand still fastened to his left wrist, my left hand shoving and prying at his whiskery chin, trying to force his head back far enough to snap his neck if I could. Then, he was atop me again, using both hands to rip savagely at my grasp on the automatic.
I almost yelled out, my other arm twisted beneath my body was crushed by the double weights of both of us. It was as Carl Richards had warned me, there were no rules. Not even the violent laws of the jungle applied when you tangled with killers like Willy Makis. So I scrambled around beneath his bloody bulk, twisting until I could butt him squarely in the face, loosening any teeth that weren't already slivered in their sockets, and then it was my turn to be on top again.
"Norm! She's going to shoot!" Dorothy shrieked. I quickly tensed, flashing a look at the cockpit where the blonde was taking deadly aim. There wasn't much I could do; if I relinquished the grip on the automatic, Willy Makis would jam it against my body and blast.
There were three sharp, bangs in rapid succession. I expected to be dead and it was with the utmost gratitude that I gazed incredulously at the blonde as she pitched forward and crumpled behind the co-pilot's seat. There were spurts of deep crimson flowing from the holes in the back of her green ski jacket. The sight shocked me so much that I momentarily forgot my own peril. Long enough for Willy Makis to twist free and see what had happened to his wife.
Arthur Hines still held the snub-nosed revolver with which he'd saved my life and destroyed hers. His moustache was quivering as he licked at his lips, the gun wavering in an arc that included both the husky blonde killer and me.
"Why, you son-of-a-bitch!" Willy Makis shouted in horrible anguish, tearing away from me completely with a series of frothing oaths. The .45 bucked savagely in his left fist just as Arthur Hines emptied whatever slugs were left in the. revolver into the charging bulk of his body. I couldn't count the shots; the roars echoing from the plane interior were deafening, too close together to be distinguished.
Both men were literally torn to pieces by the chunks of lead that plowed into their bodies. Willy Makis's sightless blue eyes stared up at the ceiling of the cabin when I flipped him over. He'd died with a gun in his hand.
Arthur Hines had been knocked back into the pilot's chair by the impact of the .45 slugs that practically disembowled him. His tweed hunting jacket was a dripping mess of blood, his handsome features were drained of my semblance of color, leaving the waxen look of impending death. Why he still lived at all was a mystery I couldn't fathom. His agonized eyes pleaded mutely with mine, reflecting the indescribable intenseness of his pain.
"Dead? Both-dead?" he said, far gone already to make his hard-working lips function. I heard the subdued sounds of Dorothy's sobs. I'd glanced around at her before I'd examined either Willy Makis or Arthur Hines. She was still sprawled on the floor behind some of the luggage. She wasn't hurt but on the verge of collapse from what we'd just lived through.
I plucked the .38 revolver from the floor beneath the instrument panel and stared down at the ugly-snouted weapon, my stunned mind fighting the idea that was crowding all other thoughts away. I looked down into the dying face.
"Why did you kill my sister?" I asked, my voice sounding as lifeless as Arthur Hines would be in another minute with the blood running in rivulets from his clothes to the floor.
His dark blue eyes focused enough so that I could see the remorse. "Janet was-blackmailing-me," he said, his body racked with a cough. "She said I-fathered her unborn-child. She was going to-my wife. My wife would have-cut me off without a dime."
"You took advantage of that robbery to kill Janet," I said, trying to make it easier for him. All my desire for revenge ebbed away, along with my bitterness toward the world, with the last drops of blood from his slowly-settling body. I held him in the seat by his shoulders. "When you came out of your office and saw that Paul Jensen's shots had killed the bandit, you saw your chance to protect your position and to put an end to Janet's threats to tell your wife, if you didn't agree to get a divorce and marry her. You picked up the gun the bandit had dropped. You shot her in the back while the other employees and bandits were screaming and scrambling around the office. Those shots weren't even noticed, amid the shooting being done by Mr. Jensen and those other bandits."
Arthur Hines opened his mouth, but no words were there to come out any more. The best he could do before his fluttering eyes closed was to nod his head. Twice. Then, seeming to shrivel, his slim frame sagged and would have toppled beside Willy Makis's corpse if I hadn't been holding him. I pushed his body gently back in the seat and his limp head lolled back against the instrument panel.
The .38 revolver that had killed my sister fell to the cockpit floor with a dull thump. I left it there. I turned and walked out of the cockpit without looking back. Dorothy had stopped sobbing. She took the hands I reached down to her; I pulled her up, my arms turning her away so that she wasn't looking at the results of the triple slaughter, either.
"Come on," I said huskily after we stood just clinging to each other for a long moment. "Let's get out of here. Out in the cold, fresh snow."
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The comforting blanket of the warm sun bathing the beach quickly dried off the glistening jewels of salt water that beaded my skin. Beyond where we were stretched so pleasantly on the wide, sloping sands, we could hear the rythmic sweeps of ocean waves blended with the happy, carefree squeals and shouts of other gals and guys in swim suits as they splashed and frolicked, making the most of the Hawaiian tourist resort f acuities.
There were families as well as big-shot business execs with their mistresses; only a few minutes before, a cute, pudgy little girl with bright golden curls and twinkling blue eyes had gravely approached where I'd been sprawled, watching Dorothy towel her lithe, wonderfully-curved body dry and shake out her long dark brown curls after removing the white rubber bathing cap.
"Mister, can I bury you?" the youngster in the pink sunsuit had inquired. "It won't take long, and it won't hurt you a bit. I promise!"
So, I got buried. This accomplished, the satisfied golden-haired girl scampered eagerly off in search of more willing souls to bury. I watched her go, smiling after her, my arms locked behind my head. The sun glasses had slipped down across my nose and I lecherously ogled the tall, beautiful brunette as she dipped down, bending over me so that some of the water trickling wetly from the cleavage between her lush, creamy breasts dripped down and splashed on my face.
I pulled my arms out of the damp, warm sand and grabbed for her, hauling her down beside me. "Too bad they didn't have your size," I said solemnly, my hands resting lightly on her bare, tanned shoulders while my busy eyes roved happily up and down the pearl-colored swim suit. "When are you going to marry me, Mrs. Jensen? We can't go on posing as brother and sister forever, you know. Not when people see us like this."
I demonstrated what I meant. I pulled her up so tightly against me that the front of her suit was as covered with sand as my naked chest and dark blue trunks were. Her lips had been parting to object. I used my favorite method of sealing off protests and from somewhere behind where we were sitting in the ardent embrace, a wise guy whistled.
The little girl in the frilly pink sunsuit was back, too, when we reluctantly came up for air. "Mister, can I bury you again?" she asked eagerly.
Dorothy reached up and stroked her bright yellow curls. "Not right now, dear," she said softly. "There has been enough burying for today."
I knew what she meant. She didn't mean just for today, either. The little girl smiled at us and scampered off to investigate the ruddy, corpulent grey-haired man and his wife who had just arrived at the beach and stretched out in the sand some distance from where we were sprawled.
Dorothy turned back to smile at me. Her dark brown eyes sent high-voltage excitement across my frame. I nearly grabbed for her again, right there in the daylight with hundreds of other vacationers who were also enjoying Christmas in Hawaii watching us.
"Norm, I've meant to tell you how wonderful I think it was-I mean, how you kept quiet and let the town of Merit bury its leading citizen without saying anything about-"
Dorothy didn't know how to put what we'd done into words, but she didn't have to. I hadn't seen any sense in tearing down the image that the people living in Merit, Wisconsin had of Arthur Hines. Carl Richards knew the truth. He'd agreed that no good would come of reopening old wounds. The fact that Willy Makis and his gang were i either all dead or in prison and the stolen money recovered was the end of the case as far as the FBI was concerned.
Neither the lovely, sensitive-minded young woman I'd fallen in love with or I had given any thought to a financial reward. So, the week before Christmas when Carl Richards called us together and grinned as he handed us a certified check, we'd both been too surprised to know what to say.
The check had been issued in both our names. For the sum of $52,000! How the insurance companies who'd declared the reward dividend arrived at that particular amount, I wouldn't even attempt to guess. The catch was that the check was redeemable only at the Hawaiian First National Bank!
So, here we are, I thought, staring past Dorothy's lovely profile at the hazy horizon extending far out into the Pacific. I wondered if we were really alone. Or, if the ghost of her husband was still there between us. It was time to find out.
"Did you mean what you said about selling that house and starting a new life?" I asked, shifting so that I was looking straight into her face. "Now that we've cashed that check and have had our two weeks of luxurious living at this place, I suppose it's time to think about the future."
She had been smiling. The smile still lingered, but her dark brown eyes lost some of their glow. "Yes, I meant that," she answered slowly. "It's more than time for me to start living again. I've mourned long enough, haven't I?"
"More than long enough."
"What about you, Norm? What will you do, now?"
"That depends. On how you answer this next question." I tenderly touched her cheek when she started to glance away from me. "Is there room for me in this new life of yours?"
I'd done it. I'd clowned with her, before. I'd grinned and tossed off at least a dozen light proposals without ever once receiving an answer. She had to stop evading the issue, now. This time was for real. Whatever her reply was would mean one. Either hello or goodbye. Forever. My insides were churning more turbulently now than they'd done in the darkest moments of death and danger. Because, if it wasn't the answer my heart and every fibre were praying to hear, there just plain wasn't going to be any real future.
She was silent for so long that I didn't think she intended to answer at all. Then, just as I was ready to ask her again, she braced her soft, slim hands on my shoulders and pushed herself up to her feet.
"Coming?" she asked quietly, reaching down for my hands. I rose off the sand, unable to understand her abrupt decision to leave our sunny, comfortable place overlooking the tranquil blue of the sky and the Pacific.
"Where?" I asked.
Her hands squeezed mine. She started off, tugging me along. "Sometimes, you can be very, very dense, Norm, darling," she said with fight, gay reproach in her lilting voice.
"Granted. An FBI man named Carl Richards told me once that I wasn't a saint-and that there were plenty of men with more brains than I've got," I said, following her, our hands still locked together. "I still don't know why we-"
"Oh, Norman! You don't expect us to be married in our bathing suits, do you?" she said, laughing softly.
I braked to a halt and snatched her into my arms with a triumphant whoop of joy that must have been heard by everyone within miles. My eyes gleamed as I grinned at her.
"Oh, I don't know," I said, laughing crazily, feeling as if the rich sunlight streaming around us was pure gold. "I'd love you even if you weren't wearing anything at all!
