Man on a leash - By Charles Williams Page 0,74
that pretty, provided she was of legal age. He was good to her, and she liked him, so presumably she hadn’t bungled when she brought back only the first page of the three-page stock listing. She’d just hoped the others would never find out.
Then, when she learned they’d killed him, she began to go to pieces. She ran for Coleville. Kessler by this time had found out too that she’d double-crossed them in the matter of the stocks. This, plus the fact they were now afraid she’d crack up completely and spill the whole thing to the police, had got her killed. Heard had done it, and he was the rifle expert who’d killed Lew Bonner after Bonner received Debra’s letter addressed to Jeri and started an investigation of his own. It was Delevan—Top Kick—who’d been following Bonner around San Francisco that day.
Delevan had joined them by now in the planned big score, the kidnapping of Mrs. Carmody and himself, which was the reason their intelligence operations had improved to such an extent. He was a private investigator, and a good one until he began to itch for the bigger money. He replaced the one his father had killed, a man on whom the police didn’t have much of a line as yet except that his name was Croft.
There’d been no telephone out at the Van Sickle place, of course, and they couldn’t very well take him to a motel to make that first call to the bank, so they’d simply brought him back home. In their pickup camper, at night so they wouldn’t be seen entering or leaving the place. They’d put the camper in the garage, forced him to make the phone call the next day, and stayed there until late at night again to leave. It was during this time that his father had killed Croft.
He was in his own bedroom, gagged, his wrists and ankles bound with tape. They’d been a little slipshod and careless about it, at least until he taught them better, so he was able to break the inadequate bindings on his wrists. But before he could free his ankles, Croft came in to check him. Apparently his father had heard him coming and had replaced his hands behind his back. Croft, however, had leaned over him to see for sure, which was the last mistake he ever made in a life presumably full of them. He never uttered a sound, but the final death tattoo of his feet kicked over a chair that brought the others. They took him back and buried him in a remote corner of the Van Sickle ranch.
They hadn’t caught the girl yet, the oversexed chick in the next room, and nobody, so far, had copped out on what had happened to Debra. Romstead wasn’t sure, nor were the police, why Debra had hidden a deck of junk in the old man’s car out at the Van Sickle place, but it seemed likely that Heard, whose girl she was, was taking the stuff away from her when he caught her with it. He only smuggled the stuff; he detested the people who were stupid enough to use it.
Carroll Brooks was all right, recovering nicely in a San Diego hospital from a gunshot wound through the thigh. And the police so far had run down two hundred and fifteen thousand of the two hundred and fifty thousand dollars stashed in several safe-deposit boxes in San Francisco. They were hopeful of finding more.
“She was watching you—Mrs. Carmody, I mean—and hoping the police would get there in time herself. Standing there on the wreckage of one car with the second car balanced on top of it and teetering and ready to fall on you any second, beating what was left of the windshield out with a rock to get at the two men inside and kill them—”
She was running down now, he thought fondly, beginning to sputter and go further into left field after new indictments. She knew as well as he did, from the police reports, that Kessler and Heard were unconscious in there, and pretty soon she’d have to start looking for a way out of accusing him of wanting to kill two helpless and unconscious men who might already be bleeding to death anyway. So she’d demand to know if he’d intended to kill Kessler if he’d been on his feet and armed.
And he’d lie to her, as he had so much already, and tell her that of course he hadn’t. If he didn’t lie, he’d lose her, and he didn’t think he could face that. He needed her. She seemed to be the only human being he’d ever really needed in his life.