Doom Weapon (14 page)

But scrambling up the side of the castle and hoping to hurl myself inside over a window ledge—

Running in through the front gates sounded more promising. I tightened the grip on my Winchester and prepared for a dead run from the woods to the front side of the castle. No sense in moving slowly, checking every few yards to see if anybody spotted me from the castle or the grounds. If I was going to die, I might as well be running.

I
didn’t get far before stumbling against a tree and barking my right knee pretty good. But all I could do was keep running.

I had my Winchester. I could fire from some distance and fire accurately. As I worked my way across the open stretch of grass, I heard more gunfire and more shouts from the back side of the castle. I still couldn’t decide who it was likelier to be—had Grieves’s men found Liz and Terhurne or the Turners? But why would the Turners be fleeing? Presumably, they’d paid Grieves off by then. But then there was the possibility that he wanted both the explosive device, whatever it was, and the money as well.

I thought of the “boom boom boom” sounds Grieves had made, saying they’d make him rich. And what McGivern, the miners’ top man, had said about all the noise Grieves had made in the countryside one day. Not to mention what I’d seen at the quarry.

The ground sloped down. I stayed to the long shadows of the few trees that ran east to west ending right at the creek line. I hadn’t planned on stopping but then I saw a figure emerge from the front gate and look around.

A sentry, judging from the way he started walking the length of the castle’s front, scanning the grounds and the forest beyond as he walked.

Shooting him would be easy. The trouble being that shooting him would also give my position away.

Then more shouting from the rear. The sentry was alert to everything now. He dropped his Winchester into position. He could fire with no problem.

Shouts had now given way to yelling and curses. A male voice. At first I couldn’t be sure whose it was but after a brief time Terhurne’s boisterous racket came clear.

“You have any idea what you’re doing? You’re pushing a sworn lawman around. You’ve already shot at me and that alone could get you ten years in prison.”

When they came into view in the moonlight, I saw the two thugs on horses and Liz and Terhurne walking slightly ahead. Both men had their guns trained on them.

Terhurne kept talking. He spoke with lofty authority, reminding the thugs that they had—at least according to Terhurne—just committed one of the most heinous acts in the history of the world.

One of the thugs finally said: “Shut up, old timer, or I’ll kill you right here and right now.”

“Leave him alone,” Liz said. “You’re only tough because you’ve got a gun.”

The thug laughed. “You sound like you’re pretty tough yourself, young lady.”

“Kiss my ass. And stop laughing at me!”

Liz was starting to warm up to the task of insulting these boys into louder and louder laughter. She didn’t seem to realize that her words were almost forcing them to laugh.

Terhurne wasn’t done yet. “You could let us go right
now and I’d make sure there wouldn’t be any charges. I’d be happy to say that you confused us with somebody else and that in the dark it was just a natural mistake, nobody could see what was going on.”

The thug responded by shooting Terhurne’s hat off his head. Liz scrambled in front of him and picked it up. She presented it almost formally to him, as if she was giving him some important award.

But this time the thug nearest her wasn’t so amused. Apparently sick of her holding him up, he kicked her hard in the side. “Now get movin’.”

He must have done more damage than it appeared. She grabbed the left side of her ribs and dropped to one knee. She didn’t cry but I could hear her whimper even from where I was.

“You touch her again, you’ll be sorry.”

“Yeah, old man, I’ll be sorry, won’t I?”

Terhurne wasn’t intimidated. He walked over to Liz and helped her up on her feet and took her in his arms. They might have been grandfather and granddaughter. The whimper again. Harder now. I wondered if the bastard had broken a rib.

The thugs slacked off some. They let Terhurne talk to Liz and then let him keep his arm around her as they walked toward the front gate of the castle.

The sentry was still there. He didn’t talk to any of them, just nodded. He put his rifle in their general direction.

Their horses sounded heavy and dangerous as they crossed the wooden bridge. Liz and Terhurne vanished from sight beneath the arch of the gate.

The sentry didn’t leave his post. He’d most likely stay there for some time, see if he could spot anybody in the forest himself. Grieves was probably nervous. He was in this isolated hotel and within a couple hours of each
other the Turners and then Liz and Terhurne show up. He had to be wondering how his hiding place had been discovered all of a sudden.

I needed to get closer. I couldn’t count on jumping him from where I was. But as I started to move, the sentry turned and looked in my direction. His rifle barrel came up a bit. Had he spotted me? Cold sweat made me shiver. Now it wasn’t just a matter of me getting in there to grab Grieves. It was also a matter of saving Liz and Terhurne.

Never taking his eyes off the area of the tree I was now lurking behind, the sentry started walking my way. Fast. His Winchester was pointed just about where my chest would be.

H
e was maybe ten feet from me when he turned abruptly and started stalking toward a large boulder that rested about fifteen yards away. I’d considered that as a hiding place but decided that the tree offered a better position to shoot from if it came to that.

I froze in place. He circled the boulder, his weapon ready. The large rock gleamed like mica in the moonlight. But he wasn’t taken with the beauty of it. He just wanted to make sure that nobody was hiding behind it.

He walked around it twice. Maybe he thought that somebody was playing a game of hide-and-seek with him.

When he finished, he walked to the front of the boulder, pushed his hat up with his thumb, and then leaned back against the rock, his Winchester leaning right back with him, and fixed himself a smoke.

He kept scanning the area. He was far enough away that I had managed to become one with the shadows. He spent a long time staring at the tree but then swung his head away, convinced, I guess, that there was nothing worth seeing there.

I could hear voices in the resort, echoing off the
scarred emptiness of the west side of it. Liz screamed and then cursed and then Terhurne cursed and cursed and cursed. There was a single gunshot. My stomach knotted. Had Grieves or one of his thugs killed Liz or Terhurne? They were certainly expendable. They didn’t have any money and except perhaps for sex with Liz, they had nothing to trade. And even that, for all her fetching qualities, wasn’t much in the way of a trade. If they wanted her they’d simply rape her.

I knew then that I had only one chance to get inside and I had to be ready to take it.

The sentry would pass within ten feet of me—if he took the same way back to the gate. I’d have to jump him there. Ten feet was a problem. I wasn’t exactly an athlete. And in midair I’d be vulnerable as hell. All he’d have to do is sense me. And then turn around and start blasting away. That’s what I’d do.

I reached down and found a few rocks the size of acorns. They’d have to do.

He stood up, dropped his smoke, killed it with his boot heel. Then he stretched. He was taking his time. He hadn’t shown much curiosity about the scream and the lone shot inside the castle. He didn’t show a whole lot of curiosity at that point, either. He’d given up looking around. He was either bored or tired or both.

He lifted his Winchester, grabbed it tight, and set off walking slowly back to the castle.

If he didn’t respond to my trick in the right way, he’d kill me easy. The thing was to bounce the rocks off the boulder so that he’d turn away from me to see what was making the noise behind him.

That meant I had to move out of the protection of the deepest shadows and stand where he could see me any time he angled his head in the direction of the tree.

I had no choice. I moved slowly. Coyotes and an owl
went to work on the night air. Doing me a great favor. I’d accidentally stepped on a few twigs. The sentry might have picked up the sound otherwise.

I pitched the rocks so that they would land on the top of the boulder, just where it began sloping down to the far side. I just had to hope he would turn left rather than right.

The rocks made more noise than I’d anticipated.

Boredom and fatigue didn’t affect him then. He swiveled like a gunny in a dark alley, confronting an enemy he couldn’t see.

And the swivel took him in the direction away from me.

My assault wasn’t perfect. He saw me just as I’d covered about half the distance between us. He started to raise his rifle. I started to dive through the air for him. I had to land on him before he could get a shot off and alert everybody in the hotel.

I landed hard enough to slam his rifle to his chest. He couldn’t squeeze the shot off. I rode him all the way down to the ground, ripping the Winchester from his fingers and already smashing him in the face three or four times before he’d even settled against the grass.

I didn’t have much choice but to kill him. He’d be too dangerous to leave alive. I couldn’t shoot because of the sound. I could take the bowie he carried and cut his throat but I wasn’t much for cutting people. About all that was left was to strangle him and then break his neck so he couldn’t come around later. Despite what you may have heard, strangulation is an imprecise method of killing somebody.

I dragged the corpse behind the boulder. The body was busy with its purges. Dying smells.

I had no idea if anybody was watching me from the castle. Not much I could do about it, anyway. I finished
hiding the body, grabbed my Winchester, and ran toward the waters of the moat gleaming in the moonlight.

There hadn’t been any sounds from inside for minutes. When I got to the bridge, I slowed down. I had to move as quietly as I could. Frogs and crickets and night birds covered some of my entrance.

The first thing I saw was the courtyard, decorated in a style that was supposed to be medieval. There was even a gallery where the king and queen passed judgment on the entertainment that took place in the courtyard. Wide steps led up into the hotel itself.

Except for a few shields and spears and coats-of-arms, the medieval motif was dropped inside the hotel. Then it became, from what I could see in the dark, a very expensive European hotel with vaulted ceiling, small shops, two or maybe even three restaurants, and then the usual concierge’s desk, tiny offices for various hotel functionaries, and a check-in desk so long and wide you could probably play tennis on it.

But there was, over it all, the stench unique to a large fire. If anybody ever rebuilt this place, they’d have to deal with the smell. It would be a long time before the odor simply vanished into the air. And it would get only worse as I got closer to the wing that had been burned down.

Silence.

Well, the usual creaks and groans of any large building but nothing else. This was a testament to one of two things. Either none of the people in the building were speaking above a whisper or they knew I was there and were observing me from a place I was unaware of.

Three floors with dozens of rooms. I could spend all night looking for Liz and Terhurne. I thought of the first thing you learned as an agent. It was true in wartime and it was supposedly true at that moment. That noth
ing mattered but the job you were doing for the government. Anything personal was irrelevant. Meaning, in this case, that my priority should have been Grieves. But I couldn’t get Liz from my mind. I didn’t like thinking about what they might do to her before they killed her. Most people think that there are no fates worse than death. But they’re wrong.

I didn’t expect to find much on the ground floor and I was right. I spent fifteen minutes opening office doors onto darkness. All three restaurants had ample window space so spill light from outside made them easy to check. What nights there had been in these places. People from all over the world—rich and powerful people, of course—had spent hours in there. The so-called Frontier West was the selling point. Silks in the evening but in the day you wore costly cowboy clothes purchased in one of the shops I’d just checked out. The clothes were nothing like real range clothes and most of the people looked silly as hell in them but slap them on tame horses for trail rides and they could fancy themselves real true Western folk. Folk who frequently asked, “Is Jesse James anywhere around here?” They’d be photographed endlessly for use later back at home where they’d bore their friends with an interminable reprise of their frontier adventures.

I was just about to try the next floor when my right boot stepped in something slick on the floor to the right of a carpeted stairway.

I hunched down, touched a fingertip to the mess and then gave it a sniff. Blood does have a smell, much as some medical people say otherwise. And there was no doubt this was blood.

The pool of it was at an angle to the central staircase. I tried to reconstruct what might have happened. There had been a single shot. A scream. Somebody had been
wounded or killed right at that spot, thus the pool of blood. I then followed the smaller splotches of blood to the staircase itself and could see in the moonlight that the injured or dead person had been taken up to at least the second floor.

The dark at the top of the stairs was rich and deep. Anybody could be watching me from there. I took each of the first steps carefully, slowly, my Winchester aimed right into the center of the gloom above me.

Each tiny noise I made was magnified a hundred times, at least to my ears, in the odd quietness of the place.

On the fourth step I stopped, tensed.

A single sound from upstairs.

The cold sweat came again. This time accompanied by a pounding heartbeat. I was exposed completely there on the staircase.

The sound again. At least this time I had some sense of what was making the sound. A footstep, then another. Easy to imagine somebody getting into position to shoot.

Another footstep. Weight on a wooden floor, a flat spot in that floor, a faint creaking sound.

The first floor was marble. The second was wood.

A bad choice awaited me. Go back or go on? Either way I was a damned good target. I stared hard into the darkness above me. But even though my eyes had adjusted to the worst of the gloom, I still couldn’t make out any human shape up there in the shadows.

Then he made it easier for me.

To get the shot he wanted, he had moved away from the side of the staircase to the edge of the top step.

He had a clear shot.

But I fooled him. He was expecting me to stay within the range of his aim. I’d be standing up and running
back down the stairs or I’d be hunching down and hugging the side of the staircase.

What I did was throw myself to the far side of the staircase and start rolling back down the steps as quickly as I could.

He fired. He fired four or five times, in fact. His bullets chewed up carpet and they chewed up wood but he wasn’t lucky enough to chew me up.

When I rolled back down on the marble floor, I kept right on rolling until I was out of his range, off to the side of the staircase.

A shout from far above me, the third floor: “What the hell’s going on down there, Lars?”

“Must be that federal man he told us to watch for.”

“You get him?”

“No, but I will.”

“You damned well better.”

“You the boss now, asshole?”

All this conversation going on in the gloom, no faces attached to it.

I could hear the shooter reloading. He was taking his time. Probably figuring that he was just making me all the more nervous.

What he was making me was mad that I hadn’t yet reached the second floor. My only concern was that there might be one or two other men on that floor. It wouldn’t be hard to find another way up. But I didn’t want to open a door when I got up there and take three bullets in the chest for my trouble.

I took another tour of the first floor. This time I knew what I was looking for. An alternate set of stairs that would take me upward.

The shooter had to know I wasn’t dumb enough to try the grand staircase again. He also had to know that I’d be frantically looking for another way to get up there.

It took me longer than I’d expected. Not that there weren’t alternate, smaller staircases. There were three others in fact on that vast floor. The problem being that they were all open, exposed. I couldn’t get up them without making at least a few small noises. Easy for him to hear me and sit in the darkness, waiting for me.

I even considered the dumbwaiter I found in the kitchen, the problem being that I’d be trapped on it if it made too much noise—trapped and with no easy chance of escaping.

Behind the largest office on the first floor, I found a door that seemed out of place in the sumptuous setting. A plain, unadorned door.

I opened it and found my means of getting to the second floor. Maybe even the third. The management must have used those stairs when they had to get up top quickly. A resort had to have a dozen little emergencies a day.

I started climbing.

The echoes in the narrow stairway were even louder. Not even moving on tiptoe helped all that much. I considered taking my boots off but not knowing what lay on the other side of the door, I decided against it.

The other trouble was the darkness. In effect, I was moving inside a long coffin, sealed without any light getting in at all. I could stumble at any moment. And that would likely be heard by somebody. And the narrowness was getting to me. I’ve never been one for cramped spaces. We all have fears that can turn us into raving lunatics at the wrong moment. And this was one of mine. It was so tight in there that I could smell myself, sweat, tobacco, gunpowder.

As I went step by step, I kept touching the wall on the right, hoping that its seamlessness would suddenly turn into a door frame. After a few minutes I wondered
illogically if I wasn’t on a stairway at all but some other passage used for a purpose I couldn’t even guess at.

But, finally, the feel of a frame. Then, lowering my hand, the feel of a doorknob. Finally—as long as it wasn’t locked.

It turned without any problem at all.

I leaned my sweaty head against the door in a moment of relief. I couldn’t get Liz from my mind. I should never have let her come along, the hell with her getting a story that no other newspaper would have.

I set my Winchester against the wall, making sure it wouldn’t fall and rattle its way down the steps I still couldn’t see. The clatter would be bad enough. What if it also misfired?

I stood up straight, fixed my Colt firmly in hand, and started to ease the door open an inch at a time.

It was when I had gotten the door open just far enough to peek out that the rifle point stabbed at the side of my head and a male voice said, “I was betting you’d find this stairway, Ford, and looks like I was right.”