He understood now what was expected of him. In a moment it no longer seemed strange at all, and his lips parted, hungrily.
A little later, when the shotgun fired at the other end of the building, Pat didn’t hear a sound.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Gunfire and uproar brought Gliddon running, cursing through the fragments of sandwich that he spat out of his mouth, grabbing up his shotgun from where he had left it leaning against the stacked crates of food. At the far end of the building, Ralph reported to him that the prisoner as yet unquestioned, Bill Bird, had somehow got loose. Ike had seen him, with unbound hands, sneaking out a door and then making a break for it. Ike had fired at him, evidently missing completely; and then Ike had gone in hot pursuit.
“Get him!” Gliddon snarled, shoving Ralph toward the door also. “He could maybe try something like doubling back, to get the Jeep—”
“I hope to hell he does. Get him!” And Ralph ran.
Gliddon drew a deep breath, let it out. Well, all right. He had pretty well made up his mind anyway that he was going to have to cut out alone, and probably tonight, sometime before dawn. So anything that got Ike and Ralph out of the way, kept them from raising any objections, might well turn out at this stage to be an actual advantage.
He trotted toward the shed where the aircraft was kept, at the other end of the building from the Jeep. Should he stop on the way and finish off the people left in the cells? No, first things first; it looked like there was a good chance of one witness getting away anyway. First make sure of the painting and the plane.
He reached the aircraft shed, which was attached to the north end of the building. He, Ike and Ralph had built it carefully out of old lumber so it wouldn’t look strange from the air. Now at once Gliddon dragged open the wide doors. In the moonless night the section of abandoned road which served as runway was vaguely visible. Lantern still in hand—now was no time to worry about showing a little light—Gliddon then turned back toward the deep end of the hangar-shed, where he had stashed the packaged painting in the middle of a stack of rotted lumber, studded here and there with rusty nails.
And as soon as he had turned, he stopped. In the beam of his lantern stood the slim young girl, Helen, bending over the pile of old boards and timbers. Her hands were free, and now she was down to wearing nothing but her jeans.
“God,” said Gliddon, speaking aloud but to himself. “They’re all loose.” And any one of them could finger him for kidnapping, at least.
“Don’t you point that gun at me,” the girl said, straightening up and turning, a hand on one hip. She put her other hand on a flimsy table that Gliddon had brought into the shed when they were doing some maintenance on the aircraft engine, as a place to set down tools and parts.
And Gliddon paused for a moment, struck by her face. It was suddenly different. And her voice … maybe he was starting to go crazy himself, he spent so much of his life around nuts of one kind or another.
She was starting to say, again, “Don’t you—” just as Gliddon fired. And at the same moment, somehow, the table she had been holding came flipping up into the air toward him. As if the girl had tossed it, though no little girl could possibly—and the charge hit the table in mid-air and blew the middle of the table into fragments. The legs and various splintered parts of the top went flying everywhere. The thin wooden tabletop was not enough to save the girl, of course, not at close range like this. She went down at once. Gliddon shone the lantern briefly on the bloody mess, then set it down so he could rub his right forearm. One-handed wasn’t a good way to fire a twelve-gauge, even if you did have a powerful grip. Anyway, he hadn’t broken any fingers, though one had been torn slightly by the trigger guard in the recoil.
He set the weapon down too. Then it took him a minute to dig through the lumber pile and get the painting out, bulky and heavy inside its special protective crate and wrappings. Grunting, he wrestled the package over to the Cessna, got the cargo compartment open and worked the package inside. A tight fit; carefully planned by the Seabrights, probably, even as far back as when they bought the aircraft; give them credit for being planners. That was one reason Gliddon didn’t want to ride with their plan to the very end, not once it had become obvious that they were keeping important secrets from him.
He reloaded his shotgun—he liked a simple double-barrel for reliability, two shots were enough if you knew when to use them and could put them where you wanted. Then he headed back into the building to finish off the two live witnesses he could still reach. In passing he glanced down once more at the dead girl. He thought she had moved amid the blood. Even so, there didn’t appear to be any need to waste another shell on her, but he would check again on his way back.
Tonight everything was one surprise after another. Looking into the room where he had left the punk called Pat, he saw that the kid appeared to be dead already. Pat lay still,
