Recoil (23 page)

On the lawn the three men paused, Meuth still talking expansively. The bald man nodded to acknowledge something Meuth said. The gray-haired man peered around, turning on his heels, taking in everything. His face lifted and his eyes seemed to focus directly on the grilled vent. Mathieson had the impulse to jerk back away from the opening. Vasquez's hand gripped his arm: “Steady. He can't see us. But don't move—he might see the shadows shift.” The whispered words were carried away behind them by the thrumming fan.

The bald man had a well-used metal tool kit box. He led the other two out of sight toward the porte cochere.

Vasquez pulled back away from the vent. “Pick a comfortable spot and settle down. They'll be here a while. Don't move around—they might hear creaking.”

He saw Perkins lead the two saddled horses into the stable. Faintly he heard the bang of the house's front door. Probably Meuth—slamming it to warn them in the attic.

Vasquez was climbing into the side wing with Homer and the two boys. Mathieson made his way over the rafters, palm and knee, brushing past the stacked suitcases and into the little false cave behind them where Jan and Amy were hunched under the low dormer roof. The space was tight, most of it taken up by the luggage. Jan was watching him but in the dimness her expression had the false serenity of withdrawal. He guessed she had simply thrown all the gears into neutral. He fitted himself down onto a beam beside her and captured her cool hand; he rubbed it gently between his palms but she only gave him a distracted wisp of a smile.

Roger eased in opposite him and Amy flashed her teeth, squeezing to the side to make room. Mathieson saw the mischievous grin pass between them—a game of hide-and-seek: Amy, who lived a life of splendid carelessness, was enjoying this. Her pixie face was faintly aglow with wide-eyed excitement.

Then they waited.

Disquieted by uneasy imaginings he ran his mind back over the preparations they had made, trying to discern whether they'd overlooked anything. They'd picked this hiding place because it was big enough to accommodate eight people and their possessions; they'd studied it by flashlight from the top of the trapdoor and they'd placed the luggage back far enough from the nave so that it wouldn't be seen by anyone who didn't actually crawl most of the length of the attic. There'd been a bigger, more comfortable and more obvious pair of dormer wings at the opposite end of the house but that was right by the big attic fan and they'd ruled it out when Vasquez pointed out that the noise of the fan would prevent them from hearing anyone's approach. Homer, Vasquez and Roger were armed with revolvers and if they were discovered the plan was to try and get the drop on the hoodlums; after that they'd have no choice but to keep the prisoners incommunicado for an indefinite period. But if that happened it would be a costly risk: When the two electrical inspectors disappeared their colleagues would trace their movements.

Somewhere in the house there was a faint thud—probably another door slamming.

Mathieson's shoulder was jammed up against an overhead rafter and he had to keep his head bent below the sloping roof; his muscles began to ache. Across the way he could only just make out the huddled shadows of Ronny, Billy, Vasquez and Homer. The three vents threw just enough light to distinguish outlines but not colors. He remembered the rehearsals up here last week—Vasquez urging him to keep a gun in his pocket, growing angry over Mathieson's repeated refusals.
If it comes to shooting it'll make no difference whether you're armed or not—you're still part of it
.

He kept looking at the luminous dial of his watch. Beside him Jan shifted her position slightly. He tensed; but there was no sound. The beam on which he sat was pinching a groove into his rump. He wanted, of all things, a cigarette—he hadn't smoked in years.

Thirty-five minutes had passed. It was almost noon. Despite the exhaust fan's powerful circulation the corner was close with musty heat; he was sweating heavily.

The faintest of clicks—his eyes flashed toward Roger and he saw a pale flash ripple along the blued gun barrel as it lifted. The cords stood out in Roger's neck.

Mathieson turned his face a bit and then he caught it on the flats of his eardrums: the scrape of wood on wood.

There was light—dim irregular reflections that moved the shadows under the center roofbeam. In alarm he watched the shadows dance, faint as ghosts. He knew what it was: Someone had come up through the trapdoor and was playing a flashlight around; what he was seeing was secondary and tertiary reflections of the light beam.

Beads of sweat stood out on Roger's forehead. His knuckles went pale on the grip of the revolver. Its muzzle stirred, pushing toward the central runway where, if the searchers advanced this far, they would appear.

Across the way Mathieson could see subtle movements—Homer and Vasquez preparing themselves; he caught, once, a glint of light on steel.

Cramp put a stitch in Mathieson's neck. He opened his mouth and drew a shallow breath. Jan sat absolutely still except for her eyelids: She was blinking very fast, staring sightlessly and fixedly at an indeterminate shadow amid the suitcases. A pale movement—it drew his eye: Amy, lifting her hand to chew on a fingernail.

The vague dappling of lights grew dimmer. He guessed they were prowling toward the far end—toward the attraction of noise and movement: the exhaust fan.

Then a voice. It startled him by its very faintness; the fan, drawing air, sent the sound away and made it seem to reach him from a great distance downwind:

“It's just a fan.”

An ordinary voice—no menace in it—but the skin of his back crawled.

His nerves were so keyed up that the tiniest movement in the corner of his vision drew his alarmed attention. It was Roger: his thumb curling over the hammer of the revolver.

A creaking of planks. The lights came lancing down the attic—the flashlights pointing this way now. Two of them: the beams crisscrossed, bobbing around the rafters, throwing the shadows into sharp relief. Against the sudden light Jan's profile in silhouette was preternaturally still like something carved out of stone. Then he heard something catch in her throat: She dipped her face, stifling it, With great care he slid his arm around her shoulders. She was rigid.

“This insulation's making me all itchy. Come on, there's nothing up here.”

The lights receded. He heard the scrape of the trapdoor. Darkness returned.

He let the breath out of him; he sagged back against the roof.

Jan stirred. His grip clenched her shoulder. “No.” He mouthed the whisper against her ear. “Wait till they've gone—wait till we hear the car.”

“God—God …”

“Take it easy. It's all over.”

2

His back ached and his arms were getting weak; he took a break and set the ax beside the stacked logs. In the night the cool breeze brushed his cheeks. Lamplight from the windows of the house made little pools on the lawn above him. He filled his lungs and dragged another limb to the sawhorses: Meuth had pruned the maples during the week and dragged the limbs around behind the barn with his tractor and they'd been waiting for the ax. Mathieson had volunteered for it because he needed to be alone and because he needed to work hard with his hands and body, exhaust himself to the extreme so that there wouldn't be any strength left for feeling and thinking.

In the end his muscles rebelled and he had to quit. He put the ax away and left the barn, walking stiffly in slow weariness, guiding on the porch lights.

He stopped under the porte cochere, reluctant to go inside. The scene still reverberated in his skull. They had fought many times but never quite like this.
God, the things I said
. At its climax she had burst into screaming tears. They were real tears—it was real emotion—but her histrionics had been so theatrical he'd found himself unmoved; and that had frightened him more than the rest. He'd rushed outside.

On the porch steps he sat down with his elbows on his knees, face in his hands.

An insubstantial cloud drifted across the moon; he forced himself to his feet and stumbled inside and up the stairs.

He looked in on Ronny. The boy lay asleep on the bed, covers thrown back, positioned as if he'd tripped while running in sand. Mathieson pulled the door silently shut and went on along the hall.

She was at the dressing table prospecting for pins in her hair. She had a headache again: He could see the pain across her eyes. She looked up, locking glances with him in the mirror, and he saw her breathe in through her nose, slowly and expressively, pinching her lips together. Her hair, still fresh from washing, shimmered in the lamplight; the portable dryer was in the open suitcase; now she was taking her hair down. She twisted half around to look at him directly and his glance traveled the long column of her back—even in anger she still had the capacity to arouse him deeply.

She swung her legs around and crossed them and leaned forward as though she had a severe pain in her stomach: She held that attitude, watching him, anxiety behind the surface anger in her eyes. Her arms hugged her upraised knee.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“Are you?”

“I'll make it up to you.”

“How?”

“I don't know yet.”

“I'm going to pieces, Fred.”

“You can't. Not yet.”

“Easy to say. Easy for you to say.”

“When I put Ronny to bed he said something to me. He said, ‘I want to be a rodeo rider if I grow up.'”

She only looked at him blankly.

“‘
If
I grow up.'”

Comprehension changed her face.

“That's why you've got to hang on.”

She turned away from him and her hands plucked blindly at things on the dressing table. She picked up the hair brush and put it down, prodded a lipstick without lifting it, found a pin left in her hair but didn't take it out—merely touching things as if there were communication in the act.

He said, “You've got to try.”

“I feel like Humpty Dumpty—a lot of little pieces nobody will ever put back together.”

“I know.”

“I'm learning to hate you.”

“I'm learning to hate myself.”

She took the pin out and put it down very gently in the little box. Then with growing ferocity she began to brush out her hair.

He stripped off his sweat-sodden clothes and went into the shower. When he came out of the bathroom the lights were turned off in the bedroom; before he switched off the bathroom light he saw her in the bed, lying on her side, facing away from him, crowded as far over as she could get without falling off.

He turned it off and felt his way to the bed and got in. He was careful not to touch her.

Too charged to sleep, he just lay there. Something Homer had taught him kept coming back:
A man comes at you hand-to-hand, there's one way to put him out and it works every time if he doesn't know to look for it. Doesn't take much of a blow. Hit him with the heel of your palm—bring it up, short and hard, right up into his nose. Drive the nasal cartilage right up into the head. You hit a man hard enough that way, just once, it'll drive the splinters right up into his brain and kill him instantly
.

The thought had sickened him at the time and he'd changed the subject immediately. But now in fevered visions he saw himself slamming his palm up with vicious rage into face after face—Gillespie, George Ramiro, Deffeldorf, Tyrone, Ezio Martin, Frank Pastor …

And then all at once he had it, the structure of the plan. It brought him bolt upright in bed.

He got up and left the room, striding down the hall barefoot, belting his robe. At Vasquez's door he banged impatiently and when he heard a grunt he pushed inside.

Vasquez lay across the bed, reaching for the lamp. When it came on he flinched from the light and sat up squinting. He was wearing satin pajamas—bright green. “What the devil?”

“I've got to talk to you.”

“Evidently.” Vasquez reached for the clock and turned it toward him. “At half past two it had better be utterly fascinating.”

“I've figured it out.”

“Have you?” Vasquez threw the sheet back and slid his feet into a pair of moccasins. “I can't really see you. You'll have to wait a moment.” He padded to the bathroom.

Mathieson was too keyed up to sit; he walked to the door and back. Vasquez hadn't shut the bathroom door and when Mathieson passed the foot of the bed he saw Vasquez bending over the sink, running water, prying his eyelids open one at a time.

Contact lenses, he thought. I'll be damned.

From a hook Vasquez took down a green-lapeled dressing gown; he folded it around his trim shape and crossed to the straight chair at the writing desk. He sat down before he spoke. “Proceed.”

“We've been making a mistake in our whole approach to this thing. I just figured it out.”

“Indeed.”

“We've been trying to contrive some cockeyed scheme to nail them all together—simultaneously.”

“It's hardly cockeyed. We can't attack one or two at a time and leave the rest free to retaliate.”

“Sure we can. That's been our mistake. You ever go bowling?”

“Not for a good many years.”

“Neither have I. But that was the image. We've been trying to bowl a strike—figure out how to hit all ten pins with one ball. But if you bowl a strike into the pocket—you know the term?”

“Yes.”

“Then think about what really happens. The ball doesn't actually hit all ten pins. At most it hits three of them. Those three pins take care of the rest.
They
knock the other pins down.”

“That's attractive,” Vasquez said, “but I've never put much trust in analogies. We're not dealing with bowling pins. Suppose you bowl a spare instead of a strike? You've got one pin left standing. But this one would be a bowling pin that can shoot you to death.”