Hoodwink

TWENTY

I landed on my forearms on the rough wood floor beyond the threshold, scrambled forward until I had my ass-end out of the doorway. A third bullet came winging inside, but it was well over my head; I heard it smack into something on the far side of the room. I rolled out of the wedge of light that slanted in through the open door, across the carpet, and into the shadows, — came up on my knees. And caught the edge of the door and threw it shut so hard it rattled in its frame.

Shaky-legged, I got up and stumbled over to the wall beside it. There was no key latch or tumbler lock on the door, but what it did have was a pair of angle irons bolted to the wood, with another pair on the wall parallel; and down on the floor was a heavy two-by-six about four feet long. I caught up the bar and shoved it through the angle irons. Once it was wedged in tight, ten men wielding half a tree couldn’t have battered the door down. Then I leaned hard against the wall, grip ping it with my hands, and tried to get my breathing and my pulse rate under control.

A minute or two passed in silence. There had not been any more shots, and that made me wonder if he’d left his hiding place up in the rocks, come down onto open ground. If so, I wanted to know it. And I wanted a look at the son of a bitch in any case-Ivan Wade or whoever he was. He must have been here all along, searching the damn place, and he’d heard me coming down that winding road. He’d had enough time to get his wheels and himself out of sight before I appeared-and more than enough time to draw a bead on the front of.this building. If he had been a marksman, I would not be alive to think about it right now.

A pair of narrow windows flanked the door; I went to the nearest one and peered through one of the chinks in the boards. The clearing-what I could see of it-looked as still as before, and nothing seemed to stir among the rocks beyond. But the sun had broken through the milky haze, and its glare off the Duster’s hood was dazzling enough to create blind spots from this vantage point.

I moved across to the other window and found a gap to look through there. A little better; I had a wider range of vision and not so much reflected glare. As I looked, something glinted up above, between a pair of boulders that leaned toward each other at forty-five degree angles, like two drunks on a park bench, to form a cavelike open space at the bottom. Two or three seconds later, I heard the report of the rifle as he squeezed off, saw the pale muzzle flash. But he was not shooting at me or the building this time; he was shooting at the Duster. It was a stationary target and he had better luck with it than he’d had with me: he hit what he’d been aiming at, which was the right front tire. The faint hiss of escaping air was audible after the echoes of the shot faded.

His reason for flattening the tire was obvious enough, and it made me dig my nails into the palms of my hands. He did not want me opening the door and making a run for the car and driving the hell away from here. He wanted me right where I was, trapped inside, where he could finish me off one way or another, sooner or later.

He put a second shot into the right rear tire, just to make sure the Duster was crippled good and proper. When he did that I shoved away from the window and went groping through the dark room, looking for matches and some kind of weapon. The matches were no problem; I found a box on top of the stove’s high closet. But a suitable weapon was a lot harder to find. There was a rifle lying half under the canopied bed, but the firing pin had been removed; I threw it into a corner. Over against the south wall, I found a wood hatchet with a rusted blade-and that was all I found. A hatchet against a rifle. Some odds.

I took it and the matches over to where the Tiffany-shaded lamp hung from the ceiling. But there was no oil in the fount, and the wick was dry as dust. The only other lamp in there lay shattered near the bed; it was matchlight or nothing.

I went back to the window, peered out again. Stillness. What was he up to now? Sit up there and watch and wait? If he had water, food, and enough time and patience, he could wait for days until thirst and starvation forced me out; there wasn’t anything at all to eat or drink among the wreckage. There were other things he could do, too. He could come down and break through the boards over one of the windows and shoot me through the bars. Or toss in some sort of incendiary device, then sit outside and pick me off when the fire drove me out.

And how was I going to prevent him from doing any of those things? How was I going to get out of here alive, armed with a hatchet and with all the windows barred and the only exit this one door?

The irony of it was bitter. Both Colodny and Meeker had. been killed in locked-room situations, and now the murderer had me trapped in similar circumstances-closed up inside a box, with no evident means of escape. He didn’t need any gimmicks this time; the juxtaposition of events had done it all for him. All he needed was that frigging rifle of his and a little patience, and afterward he could bury my body up in the rocks somewhere or toss it into a ravine. Who would ever find out what had happened to me? Who would ever know I had become victim number three?

It seemed futile, hopeless, but I refused to let myself think that way. If I did, it would lead to panic, and as soon as you panicked in a crisis like this, you were a dead man. I leaned back against the rough adobe wall and shut my eyes and tried to concentrate on ways and means.

I managed the concentration part of it all right, and right away my mind began to throw up answers. Click, click, click, like tumblers falling one by one in the combination lock to a safe. The only problem was, my brain works in mysterious ways, and none of the answers had to do with a way out of here.

What they did have to do with was the deaths of Colodny and Meeker. Inside of five minutes I knew-Christ, I finally knew-how both of them had been killed, or seemed to have been killed, in locked rooms. Both of them, because the answer was the same in both cases. Not who, yet-I still wasn’t sure if it was Ivan Wade or not. But Who was outside and I was in here, and how the hell could I tell Eberhardt or anybody else how Colodny and Meeker had died if I couldn’t get myself out of this locked room?

I began to prowl again, chain-lighting matches. The furniture shapes reared up out of the gloom; the flickering matchlight crowded shadows into corners and up against the ceiling beams. There was no window in the back wall, where the bed was, but one was cut into each of the left-and right-hand walls. Getting the boards off them would be no problem; could I get the iron bars off too? Maybe. The adobe was old and cracked and I might be able to chip the bars loose with the hatchet. But then what? Even if I could get out through the window, I still had a good sixty yards of open space to cross, no matter which direction I took, before reaching any kind of cover. He could sit up there with his rifle and pick me off when I-

The ceiling, I thought.

Not the windows-the ceiling, the roof.

I fired another match and followed it back to where the bed was. The downward slant of the ceiling’s construction put it about seven feet from the floor where it joined the rear wall; the space between the last beam and the joining was a good three feet wide. I was getting old, not to mention fat and scruffy, but I still had some strength and dexterity of movement left. And I could still fit through a hole a couple of feet wide.

If could make the hole in the first place …

When I climbed onto the bed, dust blossomed upward from the velvet coverlet, clogging in my sinuses, clinging grittily to my face and arms. The heat in there was stifling; sweat drenched me, and I had to pause to wipe it out of my eyes before I lit another match. I was half crouched, but I saw in the matchglow that I could stand all the way up. And when I did that, my head was a couple of inches below the ceiling, between the beam and the wall joining. Which made an awkward position to try doing demolition work. Even crouched again, it would not be easy to get any leverage into my swings.

I held the burning match up close to the ceiling and banged on the adobe with the hatchet’s blunt end. Dust and small chips showered down on me, put out the flame, and set me off into a spasm of coughing for the next several seconds. Another match showed me gouges in the adobe, a seaming of small cracks that spread out from them. I could break through it all right for the first few inches, but what if it had been reinforced with wood or heavy wire? What if it was too damn solid for me to penetrate all the way to daylight?

The hell with that, I told myself. Get to work, for God’s sake. You think too much.

The match had gone out; I scraped another one alight and started to bring it up. But I was looking past the gouges I’d made, toward the beam, and in the wobbly flame I saw something that caught and held my attention. It was a three-sided mark near the top of the beam, where it was set into the adobe; it shone up faintly and blackly in the matchlight, like a scar. When I moved the flame closer to it I realized that it wasn’t a mark but three cutlines sanded smooth and painted over so that you had to be where I was to see them. From down on the floor and away from the bed, they would be invisible.

I switched the hatchet to my left hand and probed over the cutout area with my fingertips. And as soon as I pushed against the upper left-hand corner, the whole section popped out like a lid on a hinge. Inside was a space-a hidden cache-that had been hollowed out of the top of the beam and part of the ceiling. And inside the space was an iron strongbox about eight inches long and six inches wide.

With the aid of another match, I fumbled the box out of there and managed to get it open; it wasn’t locked. It contained several papers, some of them yellowing, at least two photographs, three small gold nuggets, and a packet of ten-and twenty-dollar bills that looked as if they would add up to at least two thousand. I closed the box again, without looking at the photographs or any of the papers, and laid it down on the pillow end of the bed. Then I straightened back up and went to work on the ceiling.

It was slow, hard going. Pieces of adobe and clouds of powder poured down on me, forcing me to duck away after every swing, to stop every minute or two until the air cleared. The muscles in my arm and shoulder began to ache from the awkward strokes. My chest tightened up, the way it used to when I was still on cigarettes; I could feel each breath, little shoots of pain in the lungs. I made a lot of noise, too, but I did not care if the sounds carried up to where he was in the rocks. He wouldn’t know what I was doing, and unless I kept it up too long and made him suspicious, I doubted he would come to investigate. The real worry I had was whether he could see the back part of the roof from his vantage point. Those two leaning boulders had not seemed that high up, but from ground level height angles can be deceiving. None of this would do me any good at all if he had vision of the roof from front to back.

But I was making progress with the hole, widening it out to better than two feet. I came across a layer of chicken wire, but it was so old and brittle that I had no trouble whacking through it with the hatchet. At the center of the hole, where I had penetrated farthest, it felt four or five inches deep. I told myself the roof couldn’t be any more than six inches thick and kept on methodically slugging away at the adobe.

A long time later-what seemed like a long time-I made another weakening swing … and broke through.

Along with adobe chips and powder, a shaft of daylight came slanting down into my face this time. I blinked at it, coughing, for two or three seconds. Then fresh determination and a sense of rage buoyed up my strength, and I hammered and scraped at the edges of the hole until I could feel the sun hot against the upper part of my body, see a good foot-and-a-half’s worth of the hazy sky. But I was careful not to send any pieces of adobe up onto the roof, where they might be seen in the air or heard clattering. All of it fell down around me:

the bed and the floor near it were half buried under shallow layers.

When I had the hole widened out to two feet I dropped the hatchet, came down off the bed, and leaned against one of the posts, dripping. I had known a guy once, in the Army, who had worked as a cowboy on a ranch in Wyoming, and his favorite expression was, “I feel like I been rode hard and turned loose wet.” That was how I felt right now. My right arm tingled with fatigue, my neck and back were stiff, my head throbbed, my throat burned from the dust and heat. Even if I were ready to drag myself up through that hole, which I wasn’t, my body was not yet ready to respond.

The room was full of light now, spilling in through the hole; I no longer needed matches to see where I was going. I dragged myself over to the right front window and squinted out through the boards. Absolute stillness, like looking at a slide picture on a screen. I went to each of the side windows in turn, and it was the same in those directions, too. If he had come down while I was working on the hole, he was somewhere around to the rear or behind one of the other buildings. But I did not think he’d come down; I couldn’t think it, because if he had, I was finished. No, he was still up there under the leaning rocks, still waiting.

So all right. Maybe he had heard me banging through the roof and wondered what I was doing, but now he was going to hear and wonder plenty. Now I wanted him to get suspicious and come investigate.

I went back to where the hatchet lay on the bed. My right arm was on the mend; I picked up the hatchet and started to beat on the nearest window boards with as much strength as I could muster. Then I moved to the front and beat on those boards for a while. Then I got some tin plates from the mess on the floor and pounded on them, yelling and screaming all the while like a lunatic. Then I used the hatchet to pry loose some of the boards on a side window and hurled them out through the bars. Every minute or so while I was doing all of this, I looked out toward the leaning rocks. But the son of a bitch didn’t bite. Maybe he suspected it was a trick. Maybe he had steel nerves. Maybe he was as crazy as I was pretending to be.

Maybe it was just a matter of time before he did bite.

I tore off more side-window boards, flung them outside. I found several unbroken glasses, cups, plates, and hurled them against the walls and the window bars. I screamed like Tarzan on a jungle vine and imitated a cackling laugh at the top of my voice. I used the hatchet to beat some more on the remaining window boards. I looked out toward the rocks for the fiftieth or hundredth time-

Movement.

Just a shadow at first, moving among other shadows. But after a few seconds he came out into the open, a man-shape in dark clothes-too far away for me to see who he was. Not that I was particularly interested in his identity right now. I kept watching him, yelling and banging things with the hatchet, as he started down out of the rocks. He was coming, all right. He was coming.

I hurried across to the bed, shoved it out of the way, and dragged one of the tables over under the hole. Then I went back, breaking more crockery on the way, hooting and cackling, and looked out again. Still coming. I might have been able to recognize him if I’d stayed there a little longer, but all I wanted was to make sure he was going to come all the way to this building. And it looked like he was-warily, slowly, but on his way just the same.

I picked up two of the tin plates and hammered on them as I went back to where I’d positioned the table. I found two more glasses, another cup, and laid them and the plates on the table. When I climbed up and poked my head out, the roof slant and front lip blocked my view in that direction; I could see part of the distant rocks but not the two where he had been hiding. I picked up the glasses and cup and plates and set them on the roof to one side, anchoring them in little potholes so they wouldn’t slide off; laid the hatchet beside them. Standing on tiptoe, I got my arms through the hole and wedged down on the roof. And then heaved and squirmed upward, head down, angling toward the rear wall so I wouldn’t reveal myself above the roof’s peak.

Doing it silently was my main concern, and I seemed to manage that well enough. But a sharp edge of adobe or chicken wire put a gash in my leg as I came through. I tried not to pay any attention to it, except that it stung and burned like fire. The roof’s surface was irregular, pocked with little holes, studded with bumps; I got my feet and hands braced and turned back to face the hole. Leaned down into it with the glasses and the cup and shattered them back under against the walls. Then I beat on the tin plates, down inside so the noise would come from in there. After ten seconds or so, I tossed the plates back against the wall, pushed out of and away from the hole, and began to crawl up the roof slant to the front, the hatchet in one hand, like an Indian in an old cavalry movie.

When I got to within a foot of the edge I lay still and listened. Silence. Have to chance a look, I thought; I’ve got to know where he is. I eased my head up, an inch at a time. And there he was, forty feet or so from the building, moving at an angle toward the left-hand corner-eyes fixed straight ahead, the rifle jutting out in front of him at belt level. I gawped at him a little as he cut past the corner and started around on that side.

It was clear enough what he had in mind. He could not see inside from the front, because I hadn’t broken any of the boarding off those windows. But he could look in through one of the unboarded side windows. Which was just what I wanted him to do-come right up close and peer through the bars.

I eased my body around to the left, teeth clamped against the pain in my leg, and crawled toward where I judged the near window to be. I had to do it even more slowly than before, because of his nearness and the risk of making noise. He was not trying to be quiet, though; I could hear the faint shuffle of his steps on the rocky ground.

Close to the side edge, I stopped again and lifted my head for another look. Twenty feet away now, still angling toward the window. A few more steps and he would be near enough for me to make my move, even if he didn’t go all the way up to the window.

I drew back onto my knees, got one foot down- the leg that wasn’t gashed-and unfolded myself in sections until I was standing up. My shoe scraped a little on one of the pebbly bumps; I froze in place. I could see him, his head and shoulders, and I thought that if he looked up, I would have to take an immediate running jump. But he did not look up. He moved forward one more pace, until only his head was visible.

I took a limping step myself, closer to the edge. The building was built low to the ground, but anything above three feet was too high for me; standing up there, looking down, made my stom ach queasy and more sweat roll out of my pores. I took a firmer grip on the hatchet. I was not breathing at all now.

He had stopped and I could see him crane his head forward as if startled: he was staring through the bars and I knew he had seen the hole in the ceiling. I took one more step-and as soon as I did, he jerked his body and his head back, looked up, started to bring the rifle up.

I swallowed my fear and jumped straight down at him.

He tried to dodge clear, but surprise made him slow and awkward; one of my bent knees hit him in the chest, the whole weight of my body drove him over backwards and flattened him into the ground. We broke apart when we hit, like something splitting in half, and he lost the rifle and I lost the hatchet. But I didn’t need the hatchet. I dragged myself onto all fours, hurting and shaky; he didn’t move at all.

I could have broken both legs, I thought fuzzily. If I hadn’t hit him just right, coming off that damn roof, I could have broken a dozen bones.

Yeah, another part of me said. And he’d have shot you dead if you hadn’t jumped off the damn roof.

It took me a minute or so to get up onto my feet again. After which I went over, checked to see if he was still alive-he was-and then stood looking down at him, gawping a little the way I had on the roof. Because he wasn’t anyone I had expected to see. Because there were some holes in the deductive reasoning I had done back in San Francisco, Not only wasn’t he Ivan Wade, he was not even one of the Pulpeteers.

The guy lying there on the ground was Lloyd Underwood.