Jane was afraid of the people who lived in that fortified house. She was in awe not of Sid Freeman but of his craziness. The strange, uncivilized teenagers he had brought in were one manifestation of it; his extreme premeditation was another. She could picture him sitting in that dim library, working all of it out as though the world outside were some enormous chessboard. As she walked along, a lot of sights and sounds that had struck her as little surprises came back to her.
Sid had said he had been watching television and reading newspapers and magazines and had not run across some runner who had come to his house. In the old days, Sid had never paid the slightest attention to published news. He had gotten all of the information that interested him from the people who came up the path to his house—and from Quinn. That was what had made it seem true: Quinn was dead.
She had bought without question the statement that Quinn was dead. It had seemed inevitable, even overdue. Selling commodities and services to criminals was a risky activity. Sid had stayed in that house in Minneapolis with lookouts and armed guards, while Quinn, and sometimes Christie, had traveled the country foraging for things that could be had only from people who didn’t care about laws, and delivering them to people who used them to commit crimes. All transactions had been in cash. When Jane had heard they were both dead, she had been only mildly surprised.
Of course they would be dead—if not now, then next week, or next year. The only part of the announcement that had even held her attention was that she had trouble imagining Sid without them. When she had tried to bargain with him, she had been surprised that the one who left the bigger void was not Christie. Christie had always floated in the background like some weird wraith, the only constant in Sid’s fortress, where everything was always in motion and even Sid couldn’t hold onto one identity for long. But now it seemed to Jane that Christie must just have been a young woman who had gotten some kind of titillation out of the excitement that surrounded Sid’s repulsive person.
It was Quinn that Jane had kept missing. She had kept thinking of him while Sid was talking, catching herself glancing suddenly into the shadows and expecting to see him. It occurred to her that he probably had been in the house that night. She had somehow sensed it—maybe smelled some subtle personal scent that human beings gave off, or heard him in another room whispering to Sid’s kids, just below the level of conscious hearing.
That made her wonder why Sid had not told Quinn to kill her. That was the way it would have been done. Quinn was the permanent second in command, the junior partner. He had always made her tense and careful, not because he wouldn’t do as Sid asked, but because she had never seen him experience a moment of reluctance. It had been as though his craziness had been worse than Sid’s, and Sid’s deliberation and physical torpor had held it back from its natural excesses.
Jane still wasn’t sure why Sid had not killed her. He had sent the two teams of men all over the country looking for Dahlman. She sensed that she had missed something, so she tried to remember events in order. After that night, the men had not come close to Dahlman. Maybe they had stopped looking. As soon as Sid had seen that Dahlman was in Jane’s hands, he had quit. Was that what he had wanted? Yes. He had, maybe on the spot, decided he liked the idea of having Dahlman disappear. It was much better than having him dead. If Dahlman was killed, then the police could not escape the conclusion that someone must have done away with him, and wonder who. If Dahlman just vanished, then the only killer was Dahlman.
Jane reached the vantage point that she had been looking for, and stared down at Sid Freeman’s house. The high, dark brown building looked different, and at first she wasn’t sure why. She moved her eyes along the row of upper windows. There were no lights, no shades. Usually it was possible for her to pick out the room where the lookout with the spotting scope was stationed, because it would be the only room on the floor with no lights. She looked at the ground-floor windows. There was the usual dim glow of inadequate, old-fashioned ceiling fixtures. Sid had never been good about changing bulbs.
She moved closer to get a better look, her heart beating a little faster. She studied the front of the house. The steel-mesh security door was slightly ajar. It wasn’t squared with the jamb, so the lock was not engaged. She had known it was possible that Quinn would simply have driven to the nearest telephone to tell Sid it was time to stop being Sid and get out. During her flight she had put that notion aside, because it was a thought that could lead to no possible change in her actions. She had to come here.
She could not leave him alone and let him use her name to fool helpless runners into giving him whatever money and freedom they had left. And she couldn’t go back to being Mrs. McKinnon knowing that some night she might wake up next to Carey and hear the sound of Quinn cocking the hammer.
Jane had to see. She kept to the land above the house and behind it. She approached it from the corner so she would not be directly in front of any window. She walked with such care and silence that she could not hear her own footsteps, and she stayed in the deepest shadows with her back to a stand of trees up the hill. She kept moving until her hand touched the cold, damp brick apron along the side of the house.
She barely breathed as she slowly edged along the stonework that was taller than she was. It had been designed so that if Sid was standing, no bullet from outside would pierce the siding and take off his head. Jane felt no indecision about where she should go. Sid was nocturnal, and the room he used for his work was the library to the left of the foyer. If he had not left, that was where he would be.
She stepped close to the window. Had it always had bars on it? She had never seen them before, because the shutters were kept closed. Why were they open now?
She moved her left eye close to the corner of the window and looked in, then pulled back quickly, her back pressed against the cold stones. She studied the image she had brought away with her. The body on the floor seemed to be genuine. It was not some other big man in late middle age who had been turned into a corpse so Sid could be presumed dead. This seemed to be Sid. The open blinds and the unlocked door made sense. If the little monsters had turned on him, they wouldn’t bother to lock up. Jane began to step toward the front of the house. She would have to go inside and get a look at his face in the light. She heard a faint sound: the window latch.
Jane dived away from the side of the house just as the arm jabbed out between the bars and fired a pistol down into the ground directly below the window. The arm swung upward like a pendulum, firing a shot every yard or two along the stone siding, as rapidly as the finger could pull the trigger. The sound of the pistol with its suppressor was like the strike of a snake, so the ring of the brass ejected against the stone was almost as loud.
At the end of the swing, in the instant when the arm reached horizontal, Jane leapt. She pinned the forearm to the wall with her left shoulder and hammered the fingers with her right fist.
The yelp was Quinn’s. He yanked his arm back and dropped the pistol so he could get his hand back through the bars quickly. Jane picked up the gun, ducked behind the trunk of a tree, and waited.
“Jane?” She could hear his position as though she could see him. He was under the window, where no bullet could reach him through all that stone. He wanted to hear where she was.
She decided that she would need to keep up with where he was, too. She had to make him talk. “What, Quinn?”
“It occurred to me that we have a problem.”
“Do we?”
“If I moved away from this wall—say, toward the door—you would shoot me through the window, wouldn’t you?”
“It’s possible,” she admitted. “I don’t like you.”
“But you’re behind the tree. If you move away from it, I’m going to be able to pop up and shoot you before you could get to the next one.”
“Assuming you have another gun where you can reach it.” She ventured a glance around the tree at the window. He was letting her see the end of the barrel over the windowsill. She aimed the pistol at it and waited. Just a tiny bit of his hand would be enough. The barrel disappeared.
“Janie? You here to see Sid?”
“I just saw Sid,” she answered.
“Oh,” said Quinn. “Hey, do you smell fat burning? Sid must be in hell already.” He laughed. “Courtesy of you.”
“How did I manage that?” she asked.
“Sid died for your sins. I couldn’t let you tell him that all this time the one sending him runners was me.”
“You mean he didn’t know? He really thought you were dead?” Of course, she thought. She had not caught Sid lying, because Sid had not been lying. He had been fooled, too.
