Cornered!, Page 2

  The fact that the coleslaw was just plain coleslaw that Martha, Bob Saywell’s wife, had made up in the same way she’d always made it up did not prove Bob Saywell’s statement a deliberate lie—not in Bob Saywell’s mind. Bob Saywell did not lie. He merely invented a little as he talked.

  “Quite a storm,” Dr. Hugh Stewart said.

  Bob Saywell moved down the counter a little, straightened a napkin holder, then looked back at Hugh Stewart. “Did you say something, Doc?”

  “I said it’s quite a storm, Mr. Saywell.”

  “Oh, sure, Doc. It’s quite a storm.”

  Dr. Hugh Stewart did not realize the extent of harm Bob Saywell had done him during these past months. It was not that Bob Saywell said or did anything definite. It was just that when business lulled and Bob Saywell chatted with this customer or that, it was quite easy for Bob Saywell to wonder aloud about the advisability of seeking Dr. Hugh Stewart’s services. You had, after all, some pretty good doctors you could trust over in Graintown, Drs. Orwell and Nordly. And you never knew about a young fellow like this, full of just school training and no real experience. He was a stranger to Arrow Junction, wasn’t he? How could you get to know anyone in only eight months? And wasn’t there a little something funny about him anyway, with that quiet way of his and all?

  Hugh Stewart, of course, did not know why Bob Saywell would attempt to damage him, since it was a well-known fact that the Arrow Junction area could use another doctor. But the truth was that there were two specific reasons why Bob Saywell opposed the presence of Dr. Hugh Stewart.

  The first was that it was necessary for Bob Saywell to remain constantly influential in Arrow Junction. He wished to share this influence with nobody, with the possible exception of Reverend John Andrews. And Reverend Andrews was, in reality, no competition with that halting, ineffectual manner of his. It was just that Reverend Andrews was a representative of the Good Lord, and Bob Saywell was not going to compete with that, but rather join forces. There was nobody in or around Arrow Junction who attended church services with greater regularity than Bob Saywell.

  But Hugh Stewart was a threat to Bob Saywell’s monopoly on influence. Bob Saywell knew well enough how most folks got to worshiping a doctor once he was established. The idea then was simply to prevent Dr. Hugh Stewart from becoming established. By so doing Bob Saywell not only retained his own power, but proved once again that he could make or break a man in this community, a proof that certainly did not displease him.

  The second reason for Bob Saywell’s opposition to Dr. Hugh Stewart made itself apparent just at the moment Bob Saywell rounded the counter and walked over to recheck his supply of drug items.

  Ann Burley walked into the store.

  Dr. Hugh Stewart looked up and smiled at her. There was a fleeting but noticeable exchange of looks between them that Bob Saywell did not fail to see. There was a quickening in Bob Saywell’s blood at the sight of Ann Burley. His mouth turned dry, and a pulse showed visibly at his throat. The looks between Ann Burley and Hugh Stewart sent a small rage of jealousy through him.

  Still, even that whipping jealousy, even the persistent desire for a continuing monopoly of influence in Arrow Junction, evaporated from Bob Saywell’s mind as he continued to stare at Mrs. Ted Burley coming along beside the counter. The cold had put a blush in her cheeks. The powdery snow had caught in her pale-blond hair and was now suddenly melting and shimmering like white jewels. Bob Saywell’s mind skipped to that newspaper clipping he’d placed beneath the flour canister in the kitchen. His palms turned moist.

  “Morning, Mrs. Burley!” he exploded. “Quite a storm, isn’t it?”

  There was a troubled look in Ann Burley’s eyes. But Bob Saywell did not notice that. And it was not evident in her voice when she said, “Yes, it is, Mr. Saywell.”

  Once again Bob Saywell let himself think exactly how it would be with Ann Burley. He let his mind wheel through a cascading flight of imagination. There was a note of pure beauty in Ann Burley’s face. The blond hair (that was dyed, Bob Saywell was certain) set off those dark eyebrows of hers, enlivened those brown eyes. And Bob Saywell had seen well enough last summer how Ann Burley looked when she walked down the sidewalk wearing those thin summer dresses.

  He came forward to meet her, fairly bristling. He was absolutely going to make that trip over to Graintown today to see what he could see, even through the storm. He was going over to the Graintown library and check the newspaper files and prove what he was certain about anyway. That newspaper clipping under the canister was about the impending execution of a killer on the West Coast named Tony Fearon. It contained a review of the trial, including mention of a threat Tony Fearon had made when he’d been convicted, a threat that he would make certain the girl who had been the witness against him would be killed before he died.

  Oh, Bob Saywell’s brain was canny. He had a good memory. And he could remember the news stories way back at the time right after the trial when a reporter attempting to interview the girl had revealed she’d completely disappeared from California.

  Well, she’d gone to somewhere. And Bob Saywell was pretty sure he knew just where. Oh, she was something all right, so clean and ladylike around a community like Arrow Junction, when in truth she was nothing but a big-city floozy mixed up with something degraded and criminal, bringing that degradation and criminality right along with her.

  Bob Saywell swallowed, trying to hold down the excitement he felt when he thought about what she really was, what it would really be like if he could…

  “Saved you some real fine special chops, Mrs. Burley!” Bob Saywell, pillar of Arrow Junction society, babbled. “You just come take a look…

  Just then George Herbert burst into the store. “You folks heard yet? Terrible thing in Graintown! A shooting right there in Corly Adams’s station. Corly dead! Joe Bingham dead! Henry Dawson was there. Saw it all. They say Henry’s like to being crazy. Keeps staring at people like he don’t know where he’s at. Nobody knows how it come about. Just these two fellows came in and started shooting. One of them dead too. Say he’s some kind of gangster from out in California. Other fellow got away. They’re looking all over for him! I tell you…”

  Dr. Hugh Stewart was the only one who noticed the color go out of Ann Burley’s face. He barely caught her before she fainted.

  chapter three

  The storm was biting in by midafternoon that day. There was cold wind and driving snow. Drifts were building steadily along the snow fences of the fields. Roads were gradually becoming more difficult.

  There was a good amount of confusion in the courthouse in Graintown. Sheriff-elect Harvey Jenkins and Deputy Wade Miles were not at all certain of their next move. But the sheriff had notified the State Police, and gradually some order was being restored.

  The roads leading in and out of Graintown were being blocked this minute. Each car was being stopped and checked. Some preliminary searching had been done through the town, but nothing intense yet.

  “We’ll get him, don’t you worry,” Sheriff-elect Jenkins had said, assuming authority prematurely by twenty-seven days, doing it with a great deal of outer bluff to belie the confused uncertainty and fright he felt inside.

  The truth was that ever since he’d viewed that body of the late Sheriff, Joe Bingham, he was shaking inside with the kind of fear he hadn’t felt since the threat of his infantry company being shipped overseas during World War I, a threat evaporated at the last minute only by the Armistice. The truth was that Harvey Jenkins wished to bloody hell he’d never run for the office of sheriff in the first place, just to try to get a little prestige by beating a weak candidate like Ed Madison.

  But despite Sheriff-elect Jenkins’s promise, no trace had yet been found of Billy Quirter; and Billy Quirter had now been identified by West Coast bulletins as the half-brother of a killer awaiting execution in a California prison. That was enough, along with the knowledge of Quirter’s performance in Corly Adams’s service station earlier tha
t day, to make Harvey Jenkins know that the capture of Billy Quirter was going to be dangerous, nasty business.

  Sheriff-elect Jenkins felt sick to his stomach, and he kept remembering how, when he was a child some fifty years ago, he used to solve being frightened by running to his bedroom, jumping into bed and pulling the covers over his head…

  Billy Quirter, when he re-examined that Chamber of Commerce map, saw that Arrow Junction was not a crossroads. There were, in fact, no two roads to cross, but simply one road that came in one side and went out the other.

  Billy was hunched inside a woodshed on the north rim of Graintown. The shed was open on one side. That side faced a snow-covered field. Unfortunately the wind was cutting straight in. Billy was shivering steadily now. His skin had a bluish tint along his jaw. He’d lost his hat. Snow was sticking to his black straight hair.

  But Billy was all right. He was thinking quite clearly.

  He ran his finger along the line indicating Route 7 which split through the center of Arrow Junction. Then he ran his finger along the other line, the red one indicating railroad tracks. They would be watching Route 7 closely, Billy was certain, but maybe not the railroad. The railroad yards were straight east of where he huddled in that lean-to.

  He shoved the map in his pocket and pulled the topcoat tighter around his thin neck. He moved out carefully. Billy didn’t care a damn for anything now, including his brother. If Tony had let Billy handle that gambler instead of losing his head and lousing it up, why, he wouldn’t be where he was. Getting that girl and grabbing the fifty Gs were the only things that mattered in the world right now.

  And nobody was going to stop him.

  chapter four

  Ann Burley lived one mile west of Arrow Junction, just one eighth of a mile of dirt road off Route 7. You could see the house from the graveled snow-covered highway even through the continuing storm. Bob Saywell, when he drove by on his way to Graintown, slowed just a little, eyes narrowing above his fatty pink cheeks. Dr. Hugh Stewart’s car was parked in the yard. There was yet no sign of Ted Burley’s pickup truck.

  Bob Saywell could still remember with pumping anger how Dr. Hugh Stewart had carried the limp figure of Ann Burley to a table. He could remember how he’d rubbed her wrists, touched her forehead gently. Bob Saywell could feel his own fingers twitch as he thought about that.

  Bob Saywell swore. It was not a profane swearing. But rather a vicious repeating of Biblical declaiming: “Thou harlot! Thou slut!”

  Because he was almost sure now. By the time Dr. Hugh Stewart had revived Ann Burley, insisting that he drive her home, Bob Saywell had hurried back to the kitchen. He’d taken the newspaper clipping from under the canister and looked at it again carefully. There was almost no doubt. The vague familiarity of Ann Burley’s face when she had first arrived in Arrow Junction with Ted Burley was explained. She was Ann Rodick. The witness in that trial.

  Bob Saywell’s cheeks fairly quivered. She’d lied about her identity to Ted Burley. She’d lied to every decent citizen in this community. Now there had been the appearance of those gangsters in Graintown. And Ann Burley had fainted when she’d heard about that.

  All right. Soon he would absolutely confirm it. And then…

  Bob Saywell was traveling on Route 7. Route 7 created, in effect, a long S over a span of three hundred miles. Arrow Junction was very near the center of that S.

  There were, at that moment, two cars traveling toward the center.

  One of them was a 1948 Ford sedan containing Reverend and Lottie Andrews, who were just returning toward Arrow Junction from a ministers’ conference in Babcock. The other was a new Chrysler containing Sam and Gloria Dickens, who were returning to the West Coast from a visit at the small town of Bannerton, Sam Dickens’s old home town.

  Of the two cars, only Sam Dickens’s carried a radio. The strongest beam you could get was from the direction in which Sam Dickens was driving. West. The beam came from Station KWTC in Babcock. Right now a local announcer at KWTC was relating the latest news on the hunt for Billy Quirter. He was doing it with a monotoned twangy Midwest accent, and the words were merely an irritating hum of sound in the ears of both Sam and Gloria Dickens. Neither was listening carefully enough to realize that the search for Billy was going on in the path of their intended route. Both were angry, as the Chrysler rolled with slow uncertainty through the storm.

  Finally Gloria reached out and snapped off the radio. “Some goddam sport.”

  Sam Dickens shifted his hands on the steering wheel. He was a large man with beefy hands and a florid face. He would be forty-seven on his next birthday, and right now his neck ached as though he were going to be ninety-seven. Good God, he thought, what a trip! But to Gloria he said, “Now take it easy, honey. And do you have to swear?”

  Gloria uttered a four-letter word that made Sam Dickens’s face turn even more florid.

  “You know I don’t like you to swear, Glory. That word in particular.”

  Gloria said it again.

  Sam Dickens sighed, looking sideways at his wife—his third wife, to be exact.

  She was twenty-two years old. When Sam had first seen her in the chorus line at that hotel in Las Vegas his throat had caught just like a kid falling in love for the first time. She’d been beautiful, with those long shapely legs and that tantalizing smile. He’d made up his mind instantly. Four weeks later they’d gotten married.

  Now, well, she certainly didn’t look like she did when she was dancing. But after ten months of marriage he’d gotten used to this other look of hers: like a kid, hair in a pony tail, wearing a blue striped sweater and black matador pants, not even using any makeup except a little lipstick.

  So, Sam Dickens thought, she was just a kid. Still, he knew, she had real potential. She was a lot smarter than she’d like you to think. Once, before they were married, Sam had walked into her hotel room and found her reading Sophocles, for God’s sake. It was her second time through. King Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonnus, Antigone. And she knew what the hell it was she’d read, although she had some kind of juvenile notion that she ought not to make anything out of it. She had a really big heart. Out of the money she’d saved from dancing she’d bought Sam the camel’s hair topcoat he was wearing right now, the most expensive coat he’d ever owned, and he’d owned some good ones. And guts. You didn’t get in Gloria’s way when her back was up. She’d become a foster child when she was eight and went through five homes. She’d learned how to handle the hard knocks with the toughest of them. But at times she seemed to revert to being the child that she really was underneath that flip front of hers. That was when Sam realized the difference between their ages. It took something like this trip to do that, but, by God, this trip had really done it.

  “Return to the womb,” Gloria said. She hiked her legs under her and stared out the window at the swirling snow with grim boredom.

  “What?” Sam Dickens asked.

  “I said return to the womb. That’s what this was. My God.”

  “All right. What’s the matter with that?”

  “It’s proof of retarded development.”

  “Glory, you dance real good. You’ve got nice legs and a real sexy smile. Sometimes you show a real good brain. But as an amateur psychologist you stink.”

  Gloria used her word again.

  Sam Dickens compressed his lip. “So it didn’t work out so well. So what? That’s life, isn’t it?”

  “This is life? This crummy country? Look at the snow. It keeps snowing and snowing. So I like snow. But I like something else once in a fat while. It snows out here like a horse—”

  “Watch your tongue, Glory. Don’t be so foul-mouthed.”

  “It’s this stinking country. It’s enough to make anyone foul-mouthed. Even a lady, which I ain’t.”

  “You’re a lady. You just hate to admit it, for some reason. You’ve got some notion that—”

  Gloria uttered her word for the fourth time.

  Sam Dickens didn’t try t
o argue any more. There wasn’t any use. He couldn’t really blame Gloria anyway. The whole trip had been a mistake. So this state was home. Or rather had been. It certainly wasn’t any more. He’d forgotten altogether what it was like. And he couldn’t blame Gloria, what with the way it had gone. And Gloria had never been east of Las Vegas in her life.

  “You know,” Gloria said, “I keep thinking about your aunt—the one with the nose.”

  “All right, Glory. Lay off.”

  “Now she was something. What a sweet old soul. I’ll bet hers was the original witch’s in a snowdrift. Talk about cold! That old tweet would freeze an Eskimo’s—”

  “Glory, I’m telling you. I’m going to stop at the next service station and wash your mouth out with soap.”

  “You and how many others, I wonder?” Gloria said insinuatingly.

  Sam opened his mouth and closed it. His face flushed even more. One thing he’d learned for certain. He’d made himself the best producer in Hollywood he could. But that was just about all he was now. He certainly wasn’t a kid in the old home town any more. Going back to Bannerton was positive proof of that. Apparently Bannerton felt the same way about him. And what Gloria had just needled him about in a roundabout way, well…

  What was he supposed to do? So he’d walked away from the big Carwell kid’s insults. That had made Gloria mad. Good God, he thought, I can’t fight every young punk in Bannerton that comes along and dislikes me because I got out of the damned town and did something with my life.

  Sam’s hands gripped over the wheel tightly. All right. So maybe in some basic way she was right. Juvenile or not, right or wrong, sometimes there was honor in not running away. Because the Carwell punk wasn’t the only thing he’d run away from. He’d also run away from the situation in Hollywood.

  Maybe that had avoided a showdown between him and Johnny Masters. But only temporarily. Sooner or later he was going to have to face Masters. Fight him, in fact. Not with fists. But he was going to have to fight him just the same so the studio would know whose policy it was going to be when he produced a picture: his or Masters’s. With Masters’s young bull drive it was going to have to be one of them.