Double Take

by Chris O'Grady

They hit Wilder half a block from the square, three of them at once.

They worked it fast, staying close together.

Pros, Wilder thought.

He snapped a reflex left against the skull of the one on his right. That one dropped. Wilder swung to face the one trying to jab a gun into his ribs and used an elbow to knock the gun aside. He drove a short hard right up into the man's middle.

Sour breath Ooophed! into Wilder's face. He pulled back too far, to get away from it, but before he could turn to the one coming up behind him, the back of his head was kissed by a sap. A black universe billowed around him, then he felt nothing.

A jolt tumbled him and started to bring him out of it.

The jolt was a car stopping. They dragged him out of the car, up a dirt path onto a wooden porch and into a house. Lights went on.

Wilder's eyes weren't working right. One eye picked up a blurred picture of a room with furniture in it. The other saw the same furniture a couple of feet to the side.

He closed his eyes.

“Did you have to pick such a big guy?” gasped one of the men hauling him.

A laugh behind him.

“All right, laugh!” the first one said, “but you ain't lugging this bastard.”

The man on Wilder's other arm said, “Come on, let's get it done. He'll be snapping out of it soon.”

The one behind said, “He snaps out, we snap him back.”

They dragged Wilder a little farther. The one on his right pressed Wilder's hand down on a tabletop.

“Not yet,” the other gasped. “Dump the bastard on the sofa. Bring the stuff to him. We'll kill ourselves, dragging a guy this size all over this joint.”

One of the others laughed, but a moment later they dropped Wilder face down onto the cushions of a sofa. He could smell sofa-dust.

Everything stopped for awhile. Then he began coming out of it again, but not far enough.

Their voices went on around him, but he couldn't make out what they were saying, most of the time. Only snatches of words got through the cloud in his head.

“Is he still out?”

“Looks like it.”

“Keep those gloves on.”

“It's hot in here.”

“Never mind the heat. Keep the gloves on. We want his prints the only ones the Feds find here.”

“When do we pull the snatch?”

“After we get this guy back to his hotel.”

“Quit the talk, you two. Pick him up. We want his prints on light switches and walls. Doorknobs, too. Not just on lamps and little things.”

They lifted Wilder again. One of them groaned. The other laughed.

Wilder felt his hands being pushed against door-posts, light switches, and other stuff he couldn't identify by touch.

He tried to open his eyes. It seemed to take a long time. Finally they opened a little.

Below his head swayed a black-and-white checkerboard kitchen floor. A thick rope of his own spittle hung down from his mouth about a foot, bouncing and swinging back and forth, whenever they moved him.

“He's waking up,” the one on his left said. “His eyes opened a little.”

“I'll give him a booster,” the one behind said.

Wilder tried to shove himself forward. His legs thrashed, but his feet slipped on the kitchen floor.

He caught the sap low on the back of his neck. Red flame exploded behind his eyes. Someone made a whining sound. Wilder knew he was the one making it.

“Too low,” the man holding his left arm said.

“Yeah, he moved,” the voice behind agreed.

“Another one should do it.”

Wilder tried to make himself do something, but he couldn't think what to do. Another head-crack! The black cloud came back inside his skull, and he didn't have to do anything.

When they dumped him back into the car, he started to come awake again. He forced one eye open, found himself sprawled across the back seat. His face was pressed against the cold smooth glass of a side window. In the distant darkness, two green lights shone steadily. Farther off and a little to the right of them and much higher, a red light went on and off, on and off.

“Big boy's back with us again,” one of them laughed. The car swayed as they all climbed into it.

“Let me give it to him this time,” another said. “He like to busted my skull when we took him.”

“When I took him,” the third voice said. “Okay, but don't kill the guy. We want somebody the Feds can look for. If this joker hasn't got a record somewhere, after the way he was casing that bank, I'll eat this sap.”

Wilder closed his eyes. “A fall guy!” he thought. He hardly felt the familiar crack when they sapped him again. Maybe he was getting used to it.

A window curtain was blowing in the night breeze. Wilder lay on his back on the floor, watching the curtain move, and moonlight shining on the wall near the window.

His eyes had been open for some time. When he came awake enough for the pain to reach him, he tried to roll over onto his stomach. It seemed to take him forever. He felt better when the back of his head wasn't touching the floor anymore.

He crawled. He stopped, sweating, staring down at the carpet along his shaking arms. The sound of his own breathing was the only sound in the room.

After awhile, he crawled some more. Then he stopped again, listening to the breathing sounds.

His nose was stuffed up. He breathed through his mouth.

He crawled some more until the top of his head bumped into something. Tigers started tearing the inside of his head to pieces. When they stopped, he pushed up against the pain in the back of his neck, enough to lift his head so he could see what he'd come up against.

A wall.

Turning, he crawled along the wall carefully until he came to some furniture shoved against the wall. He used the furniture and the wall as props in the stages he had to take getting up on his feet. Then he started around the furniture, a dresser of some kind, miscalculated when he made the turn around the first outer corner. The floor came up and slapped his face. He hung onto the floor for a few minutes, then pushed himself up onto his arms again, crawled around the dresser to the wall on the far side, climbed to his feet again, and went on along the wall.

Later, he knew he must have circled the room like that a couple of times, before he was conscious enough to open some doors he passed. When he came to a door with a light switch on the wall just inside the doorway, he got the switch up.

A bathroom.

He started running water in the tub, wondering whose room this was. He got his coat, pants and shoes off, managed to get his tie off, too, and didn't bother with anything else.

It took him awhile to crawl carefully into the tub, with water still running into it, but when he finally slipped down and flopped his legs over the side of the tub after the rest of him, he went underwater, and that ended the half-conscious part.

He gritted his teeth, hoping his head didn't crack the bottom of the tub. It didn't. He got his head back up out of the water and just hung on. By the time the tub was starting to overflow, Wilder had recovered enough so he could sit up and lean down to the other end of the tub, turn the faucets off, and start letting the water go out.

Long after the last of the water gurgled down the drain, he was still sitting in the tub. When he began to shiver, he climbed out and peeled off the rest of his clothes, leaving them on the bathroom floor where they plopped. He dried himself with whatever towels were hanging on nearby racks, and when he was reasonably dry, left the bathroom and found they had brought him back to his own motel room.

So they had known even that about him. Figured!

He took his time dressing, careful of the way he moved his neck. He could still feel where the sap had rabbit-punched him. After combing his hair, he stood in the darkness of the motel room, looking out the big picture window across the north-south highway that passed it, studying the city beyond it.

His window faced eastward, upriver. The city was mostly on the north bank of the river, right in front of him beyond the highway. It climbed up the bluffs to his left, still scattered with lights in people's houses, even this late at night.

On his right, south of the river, the bluffs over there climbed up without nearly as many lights, only a small gleam, here and there. From where he stood, Wilder couldn't see the new highway bridge which spanned the river, but the road in front of his motel ran onto that bridge, less than a quarter mile to the south.

Off to his left, a high red light blinked, on and off. It would be standing on top of a steel tower, which he couldn't see in the dark, but knew was there. The local radio station's beacon.

Wilder smiled grimly. Okay, that's one thing. He looked for the other two, and found them almost immediately: green lights atop each end of the old iron bridge, which crossed the river in the east, in the old waterfront part of the city.

So they'd left his fingerprints in a house somewhere across the river. The two green lights had been closer than the on-and-off red one.

Wilder stared across the river at the wide dark bulk of hills to the south. Somewhere up there.

A truck on the highway drove past the motel. The floor under Wilder's feet trembled with its vibrations. He idly watched the truck until it passed beyond where he could see it to his right, headed toward the new highway bridge and its route into the hills south of the dark river.

He watched the two green lights shining steadily at each end of the old bridge a half mile or so upriver.

He'd have to get hold of his car before he could even start looking for them. He checked his watch. After two in the morning. They might have had as much as three hours since they'd mugged him near the square at, roughly, half past ten.

One of them had mentioned a snatch, a kidnapping. Apparently they didn't intend to grab their victim until the fall guy was ready. Okay, he'd been ready at least an hour, now. That meant they might have pulled the snatch already, left some kind of trail to the house they had filled with his prints, and be working on the payoff note or the phone call part of it.

It looked pretty bad, but maybe they had forgotten one thing: whoever paid off would have to get cash. That meant banking hours.

“Maybe I've got till midmorning,” Wilder thought.

For a moment, he was almost relieved. That bulge of hills climbing up from the south bank of the river was a lot of ground to cover, especially at night, but if he had until the banks opened, there might be a chance.

Then he made himself quit that kind of thinking. Maybe they had picked someone who had lots of cash on hand, in his home, or where he could get it fast, at any time, day or night. If that was the case, Wilder knew he had no time at all.

His lips pulled back from his teeth. He put the knuckles of his fists on the windowsill, leaned down hard, stared across the river-city at the high red blinker and the two steady green bridge lights.

All right, it wasn't good, but better to look at the worst of it now. If the payoff guy had the kind of cash needed at the ready, the whole thing would be speeded up. The three kidnappers might be getting paid off right now and already be on their way. Whoever they had kidnapped wouldn't be turning up where and when the kidnappers had promised, so the next thing would be a call to the cops. They'd bring the federal shysters into it. They might be in already. If they were, Wilder couldn't see himself driving around a city this small at this hour of the morning without getting himself picked up for questioning, just on general principles.

And wouldn't his three sap-happy pals just love that? Wilder practically handing himself over to the law, and them just watching the rest of it fall into place, with Wilder's name on tags, every step of the way, and a dead body at the end of the search, in or near the house full of Wilder's prints.

For a brief moment, he thought of getting back uptown, finding his car, and blowing on out of this burg. But after he looked at it awhile, he decided not to. They'd never stop looking for him, and they'd have his prints. That rap would always be hanging over him.

No, trying to find that house was worth the risk of delaying his getaway. Maybe the timetable of the snatch wouldn't move as fast as he thought. He might even have until the banks opened.

Once he'd decided what to do, he packed his bag, left the motel unit, locked the door, kept his key, and crossed the highway carrying the suitcase. Nothing moved on the highway in either direction.

Wilder glanced southward at the double string of lights on each side of the new bridge that carried the highway across the river.

He walked beside the road away from the river until he came to the first side-road leading into town, turned down that, and in a few blocks was in the middle of the old part of the city, at the foot of the bluffs.

The moonlight made the houses look ugly. Their boards were warped, and most needed paint. Sleazy-looking curtains hung limply in blind black windows. Along some streets, broken brickwork served as sidewalks. Others had cracked concrete slabs. The remainder were just plain dirt paths.

Looking down cross streets toward the river, Wilder could occasionally glimpse moonlight dancing on the swift-flowing water. He passed a gin-mill with red neons and a jukebox going inside. A girl's voice wailed the words of a song: “Anyone who had a heart…” He couldn't make out most of the words of the song. He didn't have to. She wanted some screwing, but as usual the word love was substituted for what she meant. The guy she was bitching about probably had something else on the line.

All the songs were the same, except the bim singing this one sounded like she meant it.

A block away, he could still hear her insistent wailing, over and over, “Anyone who had a heart would take me…”

Two blocks ahead, a prowl car passed across the street Wilder was on. It disappeared up the bluff toward the heart of the city.

Wilder didn't slacken his stride.

Behind him, he heard heavy footsteps. Too near. He dropped the suitcase, and stepped aside, turning.

Two running men, out of drinking money, looking for more. One had a pen knife, the other a broken bottle.

Wilder dealt with them so swiftly and savagely that when the prowl car found them lying in the roadway, half an hour later, they gave the cops a good laugh by wanting to file a complaint against the three guys they swore mugged them. The desk sergeant who booked the two laughed so hard he threw in resisting arrest as well as the usual drunk and disorderly.

By then, Wilder had gone the rest of the way through slum-town until he came to the cross-street which led from the square higher up down to the old bridge. He walked up to where the street leveled off a couple of blocks short of the square. His car was still where he'd parked it.

Tossing the suitcase in back, he drove back down the hill and across the old iron bridge under the two green lights high up atop the criss-cross of ironwork. The grillwork of the bridge's roadway rippled beneath his tires.

A collection of houses on the south bank of the river looked about the same as the ones back in slum-town, but there weren't as many of them. And there was more space between them for shaggy-looking trees and patches of weeds to somewhat mute the ugliness of the houses.

As he drove off the south end of the bridge, Wilder stopped the car and looked down a side road leading off to the right, down river. A half mile in that direction he could see the double strands of lights on the highway bridge. He decided not to bother exploring the river road. The angle wasn't right, and it was too close to the two green lights. He'd seen them from higher up.

He drove on up the climbing ground until he was beyond the little collection of houses, and woods were on both sides of the road. A little farther up, the road forked. A harsh yellow blinker-light marked the fork. He turned into the road on the right and wound on up.

Several side streets opened on his right, but he went on up the hill to the top, checking his rear view mirror and his side mirror, keeping the two green bridge-lights and the farther off blinking red radio beacon in view.

When the road ran over the crown of the highest hill and dropped down the other side, his three signal lights disappeared from the mirrors, so he stopped, turned the car around and went back up top to where he could see all three of them again. He parked at the side of the road.

In the single brief glimpse he'd had of the three lights, when his framers had dumped him back into their car, the red blinker was higher and a little to the right of the two greens. Looking at them now, the more distant red one was too far to the right, which meant he'd first seen them from a point farther west of this road he was on.

He drove back down the hill, turned into the first street on his left and went along it to where it dead-ended. Nowhere along it could he catch even a glimpse of any of his three guide-lights. Trees lining both sides of the street were too thick, and houses were in the way on the downhill side.

At the dead-end, he turned the car around, drove back, went downhill again, and checked the next side street. Same thing. He checked every street right down to the fork in the road, and knew he hadn't been taken into any of them, which meant they'd used the new highway. So he drove down to the river road, hung a left along that until he reached the highway. He waited until a tractor-trailer passed and thundered out across the new bridge, then he turned uphill on the highway, away from the river again, and kept going on up the bluff to the topmost point where he could still see his three guide-lights. When they disappeared from his mirrors, he swung the car around on the highway and went back downhill, this time checking the right side of the road for any side streets leading off along the side of the bluff.

A third of the way down to the bridge, he passed a dirt road on the right side of the highway. Passing it, he continued on down to the river road, didn't pass any more side roads leading off to the right, turned around and went back up, and turned into the dirt road.

Cutting his speed to nothing, he checked his view of the two green bridge lights and the farther-off one, the red tower blinker. The red light was left of the two greens.

He drove slowly on along the dirt road.

Downhill, to his left, he saw a house that looked as if it was hanging right over the river. He checked his three guide-lights, found the red was still to the left of the other two, and went on.

Up the slope on his right. He glimpsed the dark outline of another house with the moon behind it now. He checked, found the red blinker still left of the two greens, and kept going.

Another house, a big one, down the bluff. Wilder checked the alignment of the lights. Still not lined up right.

Almost there, though, he thought. He was getting close.

Switching off his headlights, he drove on, keeping his speed down. The moonlight gave him enough light to drive with.

Another house appeared ahead, up the slope this time. Wilder slowed to a crawl and checked the two greens and the on-and-off red.

They were lined up the way he'd seen them from the back seat of the kidnapers' car.

Wilder hit the brakes and switched the headlights on again. Just ahead was the end of the dirt road. He glanced down toward the river. No houses. He checked the guide-lights again. The distant red blinker was just a shade to the right of the two unwinking greens on the bridge, lower down.

He looked uphill at the white-painted house standing in the moonlight a short distance from the road. Nothing and no one moved, that Wilder could see.

Setting the hand-brake and putting the car in parking gear, he got out to look further up the slope, beyond and above the white house. There were no other houses nearby.

He stepped back to the edge of the dirt road, just to be certain no other houses were further up the bluff behind the white one. There weren't.

Good, this was the place, then.

Cutting the headlights, he switched the motor off, took the car keys with him and walked along the dirt road to a driveway leading up to the house.

He climbed the driveway to a level parking area beside the house. A dirt path led from the level area to wooden steps that mounted to a side porch. The driveway continued past the level area and went around behind the house.

Wilder turned at the foot of the dirt path below the porch and looked back down at the river and his three guide-lights. He grinned and nodded. They looked just about right: the red blinker atop its invisible tower was just far enough to the right of the two green bridge lights, and just high enough above them.

He went on around to the back of the house and up onto a small back porch. The back door was locked. The top half of the door was glass, so he kicked the glass in, listened, and when he heard no sound inside the house, he reached in, only to find that the door locked with a key, and the key wasn't in the lock inside. So he had to pick enough of the glass shards out at the bottom and both sides of the window, so he had enough room to crawl through.

He didn't turn on any lights, just went through all the ground floor rooms, made sure nobody was there, climbed stairs to the second floor to make certain no one was up there, either, and returned to the first floor to hunt for a cellar.

In the kitchen, he found a stairway, which led down to a cellar. Descending them, he found the cellar was pitch dark.

In the upper floors of the house, moonlight had given him enough illumination to see what he needed to see, but no moonlight reached the cellar. That meant there were no windows down there. So Wilder went back up and found a light-switch at the top of the flight of cellar stairs. Closing the door to the kitchen, he flipped the switch and went back down. Now the cellar was lighted by a single bulb in a fixture bolted to an I-beam.

A quick glance around the walls reassured him that there were no windows to reveal the cellar light to anyone outside.

Near the furnace, he saw a hole dug in the cellar's dirt floor. A shallow grave. A shovel leaned against the cinder-block foundation wall. Grabbing it, Wilder dumped all the dirt back into the hole. Stomping the dirt down hard, he took the shovel with him when he went back upstairs. Before re-entering the kitchen, he switched off the cellar light.

He leaned the shovel against the kitchen wall beside the cellar door and left the house the way he'd entered it and went down to his car. Leaving the headlights off, he started it up and drove into the driveway and on up and around the house to the rear, where he parked as close to the back of the house as he could. Digging some rags out of the trunk, he found a pair of leather gloves and went back into the house with all of it.

He started in with the loose stuff in the kitchen, worked his way through the ground floor, room by room, and then went upstairs and through the rooms up there. Then he started back down, polishing the banisters, doorframes, light-switches, doorknobs, even the panels of doors, in case they had pressed his hands against those, too.

Wilder wasn't at all sure any of this business was going to do any good. Maybe you had to scrub a lot harder than he was doing to get fingerprints off things. But since he had to wait for the snatchers to arrive with their kidnap victim, he figured he might just as well keep busy this way as just sitting on his hands.

Although the easiest way would be to just burn the house down.

For a moment, he gave that some thought, but decided against it, at least for the time being. After he squared things away with the three jokers and their frisky little head-crusher, he might have to try that way. But first he had to wait for them to show.

He kept on scrubbing at invisible fingerprints in the dark house.

Once he paused in his work, thinking he heard a car approaching. He crouched beside one of the front windows for a minute or two, saw nothing and decided he had imagined it, and got back to his housework.

Finishing the ground floor, he went over it again for places he might have missed, wiped the cellar door, the cellar light switch, and then climbed out onto the back porch and went over the parts of the door he was likely to have touched, when he broke in.

When he noticed the scatter of glass he had knocked and pulled out of the top half of the door after kicking it in, he cursed and had to begin wiping the pieces which had straight edges, the pieces he had touched with his fingers when he plucked them out of the bottom and sides of the frame.

When that was finally done, he thought for a moment, went around the outside of the house to the side porch and up onto it, where he wiped the front entrance free of his prints, too.

He was standing on the porch, looking northward down the slope at the old bridge and the lights of the city across the river, when the headlights of a car appeared in the west. It was coming along the dirt road from the highway.

Wilder went to the back end of the porch and jumped the rail. Crawling into the kitchen again, he heard the car motor out front get briefly louder, as it was given enough gas to make the steep stretch up the driveway. When it reached the level area, the motor quieted.

Wilder picked up the shovel and stayed close to the kitchen door.

If they had already killed whoever they'd kidnapped, they would be bringing the body around to the back, close to the cellar stairs in the kitchen. Wilder didn't think they'd do any killing before they arrived here, but with kidnappers, you never know. They were all a little cracked for even pulling a snatch.

Then his hand tightened on the shovel. If they drove around to the back of the house, they'd see his car!

All the sapping his skull had taken earlier must have scrambled his brains. He should never have left his own car so close to this place.

“What brains?” he muttered disgustedly.

He listened. Their car wasn't going along the side of the house. They were stopping beside the house.

Wilder breathed a sigh of relief. He knew he was in luck.

He glided silently toward the front of the house, hearing car doors opening and the sound of voices.

Peering through one of the living room windows, he saw a man pushing a young woman up the side porch's steps. Another man was down by their car, leaning into the open window, talking to the one at the wheel for a moment, before turning and following the first one and the woman up onto the porch.

Wilder went over and stood beside the door, with the shovel handy, in case his mitts weren't enough.

A key entered the door lock. The door swung open.

The woman was gasping: “Please, I have money. I'll pay you more than…”

The man laughed and shoved her ahead of him through the doorway. She stumbled over a piece of furniture and fell to the floor. The man followed her inside.

The one coming up the porch steps cautioned: “Don't turn on any lights. We can finish her in the cellar.”

The man in the doorway grunted a reply just before Wilder hit him. He used his left fist, keeping the shovel ready for the other one, if he needed it.

The one on the porch heard some of the noise.

“What's the matter?”

Wilder was busy trying to grab the one he'd clipped, to keep him from hitting the floor.

“Tripped,” Wilder growled. “This damn furniture…”

“All right,” the second man said. “Cut the noise.”

He came inside just as Wilder was easing the unconscious man to the floor. Stopping, he peered into the dark room.

“What the hell are you doing?” he whispered impatiently. “I told you to wait. We'll kill her downstairs…”

The woman on the floor turned and screamed.

The man in the doorway swung his head, saw her, looked at Wilder in the dark and at the shape on the floor near him and jerked a gun out. By then, Wilder was already swinging the shovel. Its edge slashed into the man's side, bending him over. The gun clattered to the floor.

Releasing the shovel-handle, Wilder moved in on the man. This was the one who had let the other two do all the hauling, but who had done most of the sap-work on Wilder's head.

Wilder drove knuckles into the man's face. The first sock would have quieted him, and the second one put him out, but Wilder drove a third and a fourth in, fast, before the man could fall. Just for luck, and for the repeated sappings his head had taken.

The woman on the floor was silent, staring up at Wilder.

He went over to her. She was crying, crawling away from him backward across the floor.

“Who…who are you?” she whimpered, crawling away faster. “Leave me alone…leave me alone.”

Her voice rose. She sounded hysterical. Her breathing was hoarse, desperate.

Wilder decided not to bother trying to calm her. Leaning over, he clipped her once, not too hard, just enough to put her out and stop her noise.

She fell loosely onto her side. Her head hit the floor harder than he would have liked, but he shrugged and went back to the doorway to hunt for the gun. It turned out to be a small automatic. He had a hard time picking it up from the floor with the leather gloves on his hands.

He couldn't make out what caliber it was, but he had no time to care. The one in the car was calling something.

Wilder peered through the open front doorway at the car standing out there with its motor running. He could make out the pale blur of the driver's face leaning toward the open window on this side, out of the dark interior.

“Hey, you guys!” he was calling softly. “Keep that bitch from hollering. I can hear her out here.”

Wilder jacked the action of the automatic, to make sure there was something in the chamber, in case he had to shoot the one in the car to keep him from driving away. A round popped out of the gun and fell onto the floor. Wilder left it there, went out across the porch, down the steps, and along the dirt path to the car.

The man inside asked: “What's going on in there?”

Pulling open the door, Wilder leaned into the overhead inside light that came on, and pointed the gun at the driver's face.

“Come inside,” Wilder told him. “We'll find out what's going on.”

The man stared a moment before he recognized Wilder. Then he started to cry.

Wilder reached in and grabbed him, hauled him out, kicked the car door shut to kill the inside light, and checked the man for hardware. He found a revolver, stuck it under his belt, and prodded the crying man up the path and the porch steps and on into the house.

“Sit on the floor,” Wilder told him. “Over by the window, where I can see you.”

The man was starting to hiccup as he went over and sat in the moonlight shining down through one of the windows. He let up a little on the crying, but the hiccuping was getting louder.

Wilder checked the other two men and found them still out. He used their shoelaces to tie their wrists, went over to the woman, found her still unconscious, and went back to the hiccuping man. Squatting beside him, he watched his scared eyes and listened to the hiccups for awhile.

“Where'd you get her?” Wilder asked.

The driver tried to answer, but the hiccups slowed things. Wilder slapped him and repeated his question.

“Country club,” the man finally gasped. “When her escort drove out the gate, we tailed them, cut them off, took her, and brought her here.”

“What happened to the escort?”

“Jake tied him up and drove his car to where the guy lives. We followed along behind. Jake parked in front of his house, got out and in with us, and we came up here.”

“No,” Wilder said. “He'd be spotted too soon, left in his car like that.”

“It's a convertible,” the man blurted, forgetting his hiccups. “We put him in back, down on the floor. Nobody can see him back there, with the top up.”

Wilder thought about it, and shrugged.

“Okay. When were you collecting the ransom? Tonight?”

“I…I don't know…”

“Don't bother lying,” Wilder growled. He stared at him a moment, then shrugged. “It doesn't make any different to me. Not now. I'm in the clear. Your little frame is out. You can't nail me for this snatch. I've made sure there hasn't been a snatch. And don't worry about me turning any of you jerks over to the law. You'll be up-ended one of these days. You can't help but be. You're dumb enough to see to that, without any help from me. So answer what I ask you. Was the ransom pickup tonight?”

After hesitating a second, the man shook his head.

“No. Tomorrow noon.”

Wilder nodded.

“That sounds right, When the banks are open. Who's in this thing, besides you and those two?”

“I don't know. Jake handled all the…”

“It won't wash,” Wilder said. “You must know.”

“Mister, I swear I don't know. Jake told us: Be careful, he said. All through it, be careful. No fingerprints. Wear gloves, always. Get a fall guy. Fix it so the Feds can hang it on somebody, so they won't keep looking for anyone else, even if they suspect more than one handled it.”

He squinted up at Wilder, his eyes gleaming in the moonlight.

“I swear, mister, that's the way Jake set it up. He kept it that way, too. He's the only one knows if anyone else is in the deal. The split's three ways, so there can't be.”

“Maybe the split's three ways on the part you see,” Wilder pointed out.

The man shook his head. “That's the funny part. We pick up the ransom money ourselves, all three of us. There's no middleman.”

Wilder was beginning to lose interest, but he asked, “Who makes the call? Or delivers the ransom note?”

“We do,” the man replied. “Or anyway, Jake does. We…stash the broad here, leave, and don't come back. Then we make the money touch. Jake makes it.”

Wilder chuckled.

“All right. I'd better start talking to Jake.”

Reaching out, he probed the side of the driver's head roughly with his fingertips. The man winced away. Wilder grinned.

“Smarts, huh? Is that where I clipped you when the three of you picked me up at the square?”

The man nodded, his eyes scared, peering up at Wilder.

“Then I owe you for a little sap work you put in on my head.”

The man tried to slide away along the wall, but before he could, Wilder snapped a short one into his jaw. His head clunked against the wall, bounced off it, fell forward, and hung down his chest.

Wilder went over to the one he took to be Jake, the one he had clipped four times. He tried to wake him, but couldn't. He stopped trying, listened to the way Jake was breathing, and decided Jake wouldn't be waking up except in a hospital, or maybe a morgue.

Wilder shook his head. He shouldn't have piled in those two extra punches. It never paid to be vicious.

He carried the woman out and around behind the house to his car, where he laid her on her side on the front seat, with her legs and feet stuck forward under the dashboard, and her head near the middle of the seat, where he could get a hand over her mouth quickly, if she woke up screaming. She seemed to be the screaming type.

All the way out the dirt road to the highway, he left the headlights off, turning them on only when he saw there was no traffic coming either way. Driving across the bridge, he turned in at his motel, left the motor running while he went into his room for the wet clothes he had left on the bathroom floor. The room key he left on the dresser, and he made sure the front door was unlocked before he closed it behind him, going out.

The woman was beginning to stir, but Wilder took the extra moment to open the lid of the trunk in back and heaved the soggy clothes in. Then he drove away from there.

A mile north of the river, he left the highway at the big cloverleaf that served the main part of the city and found himself on a wide smoothly-paved boulevard lit by high hard silver lights which blotted out the light of the westering moon. Residences on both sides of the street looked new, expensive, surrounded by well-kept spacious lawns. In thirty years, these houses would all be boarding houses, but right now they were probably the best in the city.

Big shiny automobiles were parked in some of the driveways. An occasional car was parked at the curb.

Pulling over in front of one of the less big, less shiny cars, Wilder cut his lights and started to work on the woman to bring her the rest of the way awake.

It didn't take long. She was almost conscious when he started. Sitting her upright, he pinched her a few times. Snapping out of it, she stared at him and cringed back against the door on her side of the car. She opened her mouth.

“Easy, easy,” Wilder said, keeping his hand ready to shut her mouth if she started any screaming. “I'm taking you home. Where do I take you?”

She went on staring at him. Her mouth was still open, but not wide open anymore.

Her glance left him and flicked around. She seemed to recognize the street.

“You got it?” he asked. “I'm trying to get you home. What those three mugs were doing with you, I don't know. I think you're better off home where you belong, though.”

He studied her narrowly.

“You understand what I'm saying?”

Her eyes round, she nodded. She didn't say anything.

“Okay. Which way? Where do I drop you?”

She didn't say anything, just went on staring at him.

He was about to start in all over when suddenly she asked: “Larry? What did they do to Larry?”

Wilder grimaced, but held onto his patience.

“Was Larry your country club guy?”

Sliding along the seat, she grabbed his arm, digging her fingernails in. He felt their bite through his sleeves and shoved her back to her side of the car.

“What did they do to Larry?” she cried. “If you hurt Larry, I'll see that you…”

Wilder grabbed her by the throat and shook her. When he let go, she couldn't talk for a moment. Before she could start up again, he said: “Just tell me where you live, lady. If you don't, you can walk. Take your pick, but take it quick. Where do you live?”

She tried to speak, but couldn't, so she pointed straight ahead. Switching on his lights, he moved away from the curb and drove along in the harsh silver glare.

“Say when.”

“A little farther,” she said huskily. Then: “Is Larry all right?”

Wilder shrugged. “I tried to get some kind of story out of one of those guys. He didn't seem to know much, said they tied Larry and left him on the floor of the back seat of his convertible. They parked it in front of Larry's house.”

She sighed. “All right, then,” she murmured. “I guess I might as well go home. I can call the police from there…”

They drove without speaking until she pointed ahead.

“That's our place, the Spanish-style house. One down from the next corner.”

Wilder nodded, turned into the driveway and drove almost as far up as the house. He cut his brights, but left the dims on, waiting for the woman to get out.

She sat there looking at the lights coming from a ground floor window at the side of the house, halfway back. She made no move to get out.

After waiting a moment, Wilder said, “Go on in. The sooner your family knows you're all right, the better they'll,,,”

She snapped: “The only family waiting in there is my husband, and the only thing he'll feel is…”

Wilder sat with his hands on the steering wheel, wondering how much whining she'd try giving him before he had to heave her out of the car onto her ear. Glancing at her, he saw an odd look on her face. She was looking past him. He started to turn.

“No, I wouldn't,” a voice beside him said softly.

Wilder sat still for a moment, and then he laughed.

“Great,” he said. “The irate husband. Now I suppose I say I can explain everything. There was a moon. We're young. We couldn't help ourselves. The hell with the children. Whoopee!…”

“Get out of the car,” the quiet voice said. “Keep your hands in sight.”

“Look, mister,” Wilder said patiently. “Some guys tried to kidnap your wife tonight…”

“Never mind the talk,” the voice said softly. “Do as I say. Get out of the car. And be careful.”

Wilder sighed, nodded, and pushed the door open. The man backed off a few feet. Wilder got out, slammed the door shut, too tired of all of it to think of trying anything yet.

Inside the car, the woman called: “Lester, he's telling the truth. He was only trying to help me…”

“Go into the house, Beryl,” the man said, not raising his voice from the even tone he had used speaking to Wilder.

Groaning with exasperation, Beryl jumped out of the car on her side, and ran across the lawn in the moonlight. Wilder heard a door open and close.

“Go on,” Lester said. “Follow her inside.”

Wilder went into the house with the woman's husband too close behind him in the doorway to warrant attempting to try slamming the door in his face. He kept his hands at his sides, where Lester could see them, and waited for a chance to get at the gun under his belt.

“Straight ahead.”

Wilder walked through a high dark-panelled central hall toward an open doorway, which poured light out onto the thick rug on the floor of the hall. In the patch of light near the doorway, the rug was intricately patterned in deep reds and royal blues.

“That's right,” the voice behind him murmured. “Go on inside. Sit down. No, not so near the door. Take that chair.”

Wilder followed instructions, crossed the room and sat in a straight chair, which stood off to one side facing a big mahogany desk.

The desk dominated the room. Racks of books climbed the wall on the right, up to the ceiling. A brick fireplace took up the middle third of the opposite wall. Nothing was in the wall behind the desk but a tall arch-topped window. Wilder didn't know what was in the wall behind him, besides the doorway through which he had entered the room.

Lester remained behind him for a moment. Wilder didn't turn his head, and kept his hands in sight, the palms flat on his thighs above the knees. Then Lester went past him around behind the desk and stood there, looking across the wide neat desk-top at him.

Lester was a slim man with graying hair. Under his eyes were pouches. Below a straight narrow-nostrilled nose was a trimmed mustache without any gray in it. The mouth was thin, the eyes china-blue.

For a moment, he stared at Wilder without saying a word. He held the gun in his hand as if he knew how to use it. The weapon looked like a single-action .32 revolver, from where Wilder sat. The hammer appeared to be back to full cock.

Footsteps sounded in the hall behind Wilder.

Lester smiled slightly. “Mrs. Keelman can't seem to…”

She came into the room, already talking: “I've phoned the police…”

Lester Keelman's blue eyes blazed.

“You what?” he snarled.

The woman paused near Wilder.

“I…I called the police to tell them…”

“And told them what?” Keelman asked. He almost had his voice under control again, but his blue eyes still glared at his wife.

“I told them what those men, those kidnappers did with Larry. My God, Les, we can't just let him lie there all night on the floor of his car…”

“Larry again,” Keelman said. His lips drew in. His voice was soft again, thoughtful. “Even now, you can't think of anyone but Larry…”

“Well,” Beryl said uncertainly, “at least you don't have to keep pointing the gun at this poor man. He helped me. I told the police he kept those three men from…”

Keelman nodded, looking at Wilder. “I know,” he said. “I know what he did.” He stared at Wilder a moment longer, then returned his bright blue gaze to his wife.

Wilder laughed.

“No wonder they were getting a three-way split.”

Keelman looked back at him. Keelman's eyes showed that he understood what Wilder was saying, but his mind was occupied with something else.

Wilder studied him, then said: “It'll take some fancy rigging.”

Keelman's eyes lost some of the far-off thinking look they held. He nodded and smiled slightly.

“I think I can still manage it, though. You shot her. I shot you.”

Wilder tilted his head toward the woman.

“She the one with the loot?”

“Loot?” Keelman chuckled. “Oh, I see. The money, you mean. Yes. My dear, adorable, young, popular wife is indeed the one with the loot. But not after tonight.”

Beryl Keelman came around beside the desk. Her mouth hung open. She turned horrified eyes from one man to the other. Her tongue came out a little and licked her lips.

“Les, what are you…what are you saying?”

Wilder laughed, shaking his head.

“He's saying he was the one who had you snatched, lady. Wake up.”

Stunned, she stared at Wilder, then turned her head to look at her husband. She shook her head slowly from side to side.

“Les?” she whispered. “Just for the money?”

Keelman's lips lost their slightly mocking smile and became thin, white.

“It isn't just money to the one without it, my dear.”

She stared at her husband a moment more. Then her face hardened. Spinning around, looking sick, she moaned in a low voice, “Oh, Larry, get me away from here…”

She ran toward the door.

Keelman's gun cracked three times. Each shot sounded small, flat, abrupt, and very vicious. The flashes looked like pale yellow-tulip bulbs on fire.

Wilder dove for the floor in front of the big desk, pulling at the gun in his belt. The gloves he wore made him fumble. He hit, rolled, and brought up hard against the desk front. Carved scrollwork punched into his back.

He heard another shot. A hole ripped into the floor nearby. Splinters fell on his face from the slug chipping the edge of the desk just above his head.

Finally getting the revolver out, Wilder fired up at the ceiling light. It exploded. The last thing he saw before the room went dark was Beryl Keelman lying face down on the floor, halfway to the open doorway leading to the center hall.

Keelman got off another shot. Wilder pulled his arm back down below the desk level, but he still felt the heat of the blast scorch his wrist slightly.

Across the desk from him, Keelman was making slight clicking sounds. Probably slipping another couple of bullets into his gun's cylinder.

Stretching out one leg, Wilder hooked his toes around a leg of the chair he'd been sitting on before the shooting started. He drew it toward him. One leg of the chair scraped on the floor. Keelman fired at the sound. Wilder's foot felt the slug hit the chair, but he kept pulling it toward him until he could get a hand around one leg of the chair, high up near the seat. When he had a good solid grip, he heaved the chair up and over the wide desk.

Keelman cried out. Window-glass shattered.

Keelman fired another shot. Wilder smiled, rolled over onto his stomach and snaked around the end of the desk, where he brought his feet under him. Ready to duck if he had to, he raised himself enough to see Keelman outlined in the tall, now-broken window behind the desk, leaning far out, peering toward the front of the house. He was talking to himself. The last of the moonlight softly touched the gray in Keelman's hair.

Giving up trying to spot Wilder outside, Keelman hurried around the other end of the desk and left the room. Wilder momentarily wished Keelman had come around this end of the desk. He'd have liked to belt Keelman once, just for goodbye.

Shrugging, he stood up. Maybe it was best this way.

He tried to hear if the woman still breathed. Probably not, not with three in her back.

Shrugging, he went over to the window and jumped through it into the moonlight, onto the soft grass of the lawn.

Crossing the stretch of lawn, he got into the shadows of tall bushes at the side of the yard, out of the moonlight. He had to stay there until Keelman was through prowling around the car Wilder had come in.

When Keelman finally decided Wilder wasn't in the car or trying to reach it, he crossed the yard in the moonlight on his way back inside the house. Wilder let him go, waited until he heard the front door close before getting into his car. Releasing the hand brake, he let the car roll silently back down into the street. Then he turned the ignition on and started the motor.

He knew he would always regret not trying for the ransom money Keelman might have had on hand. Some instinct told him Keelman never intended paying off the three kidnappers with anything but bullets, but his instinct might have been wrong. Maybe the guy actually meant to pay them the ransom money and feel lucky if he got his wife's estate, if the cops believed the kidnap story.

Wilder was almost up to the cloverleaf before he heard the first siren, far back in the city. The police might be in time to do friend Larry some good, but Wilder doubted if they were going to be in time to help Beryl Keelman.

As for the bank he'd been casing before the three kidnappers put their snatch on him, Wilder decided to let that wait awhile. Quite a while.