Cornered! Page 13

  “We know who you’re after, Quirter. You won’t get her! We’ve got the girl, Quirter. Do you understand? Now you’d better come out of there, no gun, your hands up!”

  Inside, Billy’s mean grin appeared faintly once again. His mind darted with this information just given him by Harvey Jenkins. “All right,” he shouted. “I’ll make a deal with you. Send the girl in, I’ll send everyone else out.” Now he was certain he had it—had it absolutely. Make the deal just like he’d now announced—except he wouldn’t send Gloria out. He’d keep her and take her with him in the Chrysler just as he’d planned; he would also take the other girl, to kill later…

  Harvey Jenkins was miserable, miserable with the realization that he’d just given Quirter an advantage in telling him they had Ann Burley. From behind, a state trooper wriggled up and said, “We brought in a doctor from Graintown. Just in case.”

  Jenkins nodded dully. “Yeah, that’s good.” His tone was bitter now, no longer even trying to simulate eagerness. “Maybe we should bring in the undertaker too, huh?”

  Billy Quirter shouted, “You hear me, Sheriff?”

  “I heard you,” Jenkins said through the loudspeaker. “You’re crazy, Quirter. We’re making no deal like that.”

  “I’m not crazy, Sheriff. I know what I want. I want the girl! Now I told you—everybody in here is all right now. They won’t be if you don’t send that girl in here. Seven for one. It’s a good deal. Take it. Or you’ve got seven corpses!”

  “Listen, Quirter. Be reasonable. I swear I’ll play square with you. You leave those folks in there alone and walk out here with no gun, hands up, there’ll be no shooting. I promise. It’s the only way you’ll come out alive, Quirter!”

  “I say you’d better listen to me, Sheriff!” Quirter screamed. “I want that girl! You get her and send her in and everybody stays alive. That’s the only way it’s going to go, do you hear me? Now I’ll give you a deadline to do it. Five minutes. My watch says ten-five. At ten-ten I start shooting in here!”

  Harvey Jenkins lowered the microphone and looked wearily at Wade Miles beside him. Miles nodded. “He means it. He’ll do it.”

  Jenkins turned around. Oddly, he was not frightened now. Oddly, he’d come to the end of his fear, and there wasn’t any more. He was in a kind of suspension. And he wondered, with the situation in front of his eyes now, how he could have been so frightened. It was really simple, in the end. You had a killer. You had to deal with him. If you won, you won. If you lost, you lost. He did not see how he was going to win, but he kept trying. He said to the state trooper, “Go get Reverend Styles. Maybe he can talk sense to Quirter.”

  Deputy Miles said, “It’s fairly sure he’s got Reverend Andrews in there. If he can’t do no good—”

  “Maybe he isn’t good enough. Reverend Styles has got more punch. Maybe he can swing it.” Sheriff-elect Jenkins nodded to the trooper. “Be careful. And tell Reverend Styles to watch his step coming back with you.”

  “Right,” the trooper said, and wriggled away.

  Inside the store, Billy Quirter listened to the small ticking of his watch. He examined the faces before him. One minute had gone by. Two. No one said anything for another thirty seconds. Then Dr. Hugh Stewart said, “You’re crazy to think they’ll send her in, Quirter.”

  “Shut up, Doc.”

  Three minutes were up. Outside, the trooper wriggled back alone. Jenkins looked at him.

  The trooper shook his head. “The reverend said he couldn’t make it. Said he wanted to. But he said there was something important he had to get back to at home. Said he was saying a prayer for you.”

  Jenkins nodded, eyes smoldering. “Yeah.” He turned and looked at the store front. Beside him, Deputy Miles said, “Thirty seconds left, Harvey.”

  Inside, Billy Quirter looked at his watch. Ten seconds left. Eight. The room waited in strained silence. Five.

  “Will he do it?” Jenkins whispered to the cold breeze. “Will the bastard really do it?”

  The seconds were running out. Three left. Two. One…

  Billy Quirter fired a bullet into the supine corpse of Ted Burley.

  Bob Saywell came a half a foot off his seat, then collapsed in a dead faint, tumbling to the floor in a soggy heap of perspiration. Hugh Stewart held his breath, swearing inside. And Billy said softly to him, “Let fatty be.” Then he raised his voice.

  “That’s one, Sheriff!”

  Sheriff-elect Jenkins did not swear silently, but loudly and steadily.

  Billy jerked his head first at Hugh Stewart, then at Reverend Andrews. “Both of you—around here. Drag the plowboy over to the door and heave him out. Make a try for it, you’ll wind up just like the country hick here. Now do what I say, and fast!”

  Hugh Stewart looked at the man’s eyes and knew there was only one thing they could do: what he told them, and quickly.

  He stood up, glanced at Reverend Andrews. The reverend, amazingly calm, walked around the counter with him. They dragged the heavy body of Ted Burley toward the door.

  “Okay,” Billy Quirter said, “heave him out now. Then back to where you were.”

  They did just that. They got the door open, shoved the body out, then closed the door and returned to their seats.

  Outside, Sheriff-elect Jenkins leaned limply and defeatedly against the car and stared at the sprawled figure in front of the store.

  “It’s like I said,” Deputy Miles breathed. “He meant it.”

  Billy Quirter’s voice knifed out again.

  “You get the picture, Sheriff? Now send the girl in. Because if you don’t, another one gets it. You’ve got five more minutes!”

  chapter eighteen

  Inside the store, there was no doubt that Billy Quirter would keep it up. Another of them was going to die in five minutes. Every one of them, including Bob Saywell who had revived in a heap on the floor, knew it.

  Bob Saywell tried desperately to faint again, certain he would be the next; but it wouldn’t work. Hugh Stewart sat at the counter, stone still, heart beating fast, looking for some slight chance to go for Billy and finding none. Sam Dickens sat unmoving, soothing with words a terrified Gloria, whose bluff exterior had at last crumbled. And Reverend Andrews sat with Lottie, his hand tightly clasped around one of her plump wrists as though to feed her the necessary strength and courage to keep this up.

  Two minutes went by.

  Outside, Sheriff-elect Jenkins, in hurried conferences with the State Police, realized that there was absolutely nothing they could do. If they tried rushing the store, there was no telling how many would die. Deaths were a certainty that way. And they couldn’t, certainly, give the girl to Quirter.

  So they had simply to wait for the second five minutes to go by and another body to be thrown out.

  Jenkins cursed the fear that had initially forced him to make the mistake of revealing the fact that they had the girl. He was wondering, with great guilt and self-accusation, why he had been afraid all of his life of things that could not have been half so bad as he had thought they would be…

  Three minutes were gone.

  Jenkins was not alone with a feeling of guilt. Ann sat in the car down the street, staring at the store and at the crumpled body of her husband. She felt as though blood were running off her own hands, the blood of Ted Burley, the blood of whomever else Billy Quirter was going to kill in the next two minutes. She sat there silent and still, face beautiful in the cold winter light, certain in the guilt that she had brought this terror to this place.

  Four minutes gone. And who would die next? Hugh Stewart…?

  She bit her lip until she tasted blood. The trooper beside her said, “Easy, Mrs. Burley. Maybe you’d better not look any more. Maybe—”

  Her movement was so fast that he didn’t have a chance to stop her. She threw open the door and ran down the snow-covered street. “All right! I’m here! I’m the one you want!” Tears stung her eyes as she shouted, “Get it over! Hurry!”

  Wi
th Jenkins swearing as he watched her, a half dozen troopers yelling for her to turn back, Ann kept coming. Inside, Billy Quirter finally saw and heard her and knew, at last, that he had his target.

  A fixed, deadly smile on his lips, he raised his gun carefully. He watched her run in the peculiar method of a woman, watched her come closer and closer to afford him the better target. Then he saw her exactly through the hole he’d smashed in one window.

  Two things happened at almost the same second.

  With the diversion, Reverend Andrews, who had been waiting for the right moment, picked up one of the large tomato cans from the stack behind him and sent it flying over Hugh Stewart’s head straight at Billy Quirter. It was a good, accurate throw, and the can caught Billy squarely on the left cheekbone just in time to throw off his aim a little.

  Billy swore with surprised pain, as his gun exploded. The bullet, instead of catching Ann in the heart, was off to the side. She sprawled on the street. Billy, despite the blood spurting from his cheek, started to fire again, aware of only one thing now: to kill that girl.

  But Hugh Stewart, in motion almost at the moment that Reverend Andrews had thrown the can, came over the counter, followed by a swift Reverend Andrews. Hugh Stewart knocked the gun from Billy’s hand.

  But Billy, back to reality, suddenly squirmed away. Reverend Andrews dived at him. Billy reacted like a crazed jackrabbit. He was not thinking any more, but simply reacting in purely animal terms. He went straight for the front of the store and threw himself through the already punctured window, smashing through it with his broken arm, spinning on the snow outside, then scrambling to his feet and running straight down the street.

  “Get him!” Sheriff-elect Jenkins breathed to Deputy Wade Miles.

  And Wade Miles, with smooth and professional dexterity, flashed out from behind a car with machine gun in hand.

  He danced to the side in beautiful rhythm in order to get Billy Quirter into a range where he would hit nobody else. Then he fired. He moved, fired, moved, fired, the staccato jerk of his gun matching the short crazy chops Billy Quirter, being cut to pieces, made with his legs.

  Billy went sprawling as the bullets licked at him. And Deputy Wade Miles kept it up, reinserting one more clip and putting one final burst into the now motionless form of Billy Quirter, as Billy’s blood turned the snow red.

  Wade Miles finally quit, standing just a few feet from the sprawled body. He wiped a hand across his mouth, eyes colder than the winter wind blowing in from the fields around.

  Harvey Jenkins came up and put a hand on his shoulder. “Nice going, Wade.”

  Wade Miles nodded briefly, then turned and walked evenly with the sheriff back to where Dr. Hugh Stewart knelt beside an unmoving Ann. A few seconds later, the doctor from Graintown, Dr. Edward Orwell, came up and bent beside Hugh Stewart. He examined the wound with Hugh Stewart and finally said, “Bad, I’m afraid.”

  “That’s right,” Hugh Stewart said softly.

  Dr. Orwell shook his head. “I’m not that good a surgeon.”

  Hugh Stewart straightened. “I am.”

  chapter nineteen

  When the surgery was over, Dr. Hugh Stewart stood in his office beside the still figure of Ann and smiled at Dr. Orwell. Dr. Orwell put out his hand and shook hands solemnly with Hugh Stewart. “I’m truly amazed. The finest work I’ve seen. Tremendous nerve and control—after what you’ve been through, knowing what you told me about how you feel about this girl. Perfect skill. You shouldn’t be here, Doctor. You should be somewhere where that kind of talent can be used every day.”

  Hugh Stewart stood silent for a moment, then turned to look at the beautiful still face of the girl he loved. “I think,” he said, “we will be moving on, Doctor.”

  Below, inside Bob Saywell’s store, Bob Saywell lay shaking on one of the tables, while his wife kept sniffling. One by one, the natives of Arrow Junction filed in, looking at the blood on the floor, at the shattered window, then quietly, respectfully, after a curious glance at the quivering Bob Saywell, shook the hand of a calm Reverend John Andrews—the word of his conduct had spread as quickly as any word had ever spread in Arrow Junction.

  Reverend Andrews, sitting with Lottie, looked his subjects in the eye, knowing that never again would he feel insufficient in front of them and thanking the Good Lord for that knowledge. At the same time he was praying for the soul of Ted Burley, even for the soul of Billy Quirter, and hoping that some purification might sometime come to Bob Saywell before his time was up.

  Sheriff-elect Jenkins drove back to Graintown with Deputy Wade Miles beside him. Just a mile out of town, as they watched the new Chrysler of Sam Dickens pull into a motel on the outskirts of town, Wade Miles said calmly, “I been thinking, what with you taking over now, and me behind you as deputy, this ain’t no county to fool with any more. What do you think, Harvey?”

  Harvey Jenkins smiled briefly, feeling a tremendous calm. He nodded. “I think you’re right, Wade.”

  And Sam Dickens, as he helped Gloria out of the car in front of the motel unit he’d just rented, looked at her with a tender, happy smile that was obliterated by the tape on his face.

  She looked back at him, detecting the smile nevertheless and returning it rather shyly, dropping her lashes just a bit, just as she had when he’d first talked to her.

  He felt awfully good, despite the cuts on his face. And he was no more worried about things coming up than Harvey Jenkins was. He was ready. Ready for anything, including Johnny Masters at the studio, or anyone else who came along after Johnny Masters.

  They walked slowly up to the door. Then suddenly—just at the precise time Tony Fearon knew finally and totally that Billy hadn’t made it, knew it somehow, and started screaming his bitterness to the walls and bars—suddenly Gloria stopped Sam Dickens, looked up at him, blinked, and said, “Why don’t you carry me in, Sam? You know. Like we did the first time? Like the first time after we were married?”

  Sam looked at her and nodded. “That’s not a bad idea, Glory. That’s not a bad idea at all.”