if he had until the banks opened there might be a chance.
Then he made himself quit that kind of thinking. Maybe they had picked someone who had lots of cash on hand, in his home or where he could get it fast, at any time, day or night. If that was the case, Wilder knew he had no time at all.
His lips pulled back from his teeth. He put the knuckles of his fists on the windowsill, leaned down hard, and stared across the city at the high red blinker and the two steady green bridge lights.
It wasn’t good, but better to look at the worst of it now. If the payoff guy had the kind of cash needed at the ready, the whole thing would be sped up. The three kidnappers might be getting paid off right now and already be on their way. Whomever they had kidnapped wouldn’t be turning up where and when the kidnappers had promised, so the next thing would be a call to the cops. They’d bring the federal shysters into it. They might be in already. If they were, Wilder couldn’t see himself driving around a city this small at this hour of the morning without getting himself picked up for questioning, just on general principles. And wouldn’t his three sap-happy pals just love that? Wilder practically handing himself over to the law and them just watching the rest of it fall into place. Wilder’s name on tags, every step of the way, and a dead body at the end of the search, in or near the house full of Wilder’s prints.
For a brief moment, he thought of getting back uptown, finding his car, and blowing on out of this burg. But after he further thought, he decided not to. They’d never stop looking for him and they’d have his prints. That rap would always be hanging over him. No, trying to find that house was worth the risk of delaying his getaway. Maybe the timetable of the snatch wouldn’t move as fast as he thought. He might even have until the banks opened.
Once he decided what to do, he packed his bag, left the motel unit, locked the door, kept his key, and crossed the highway carrying the suitcase. Nothing moved on the highway in either direction.
Wilder glanced southward at the double string of lights on each side of the new bridge that carried the highway across the river. He walked beside the road away from the river until he came to the first side road leading into town, turned down that, and in a few blocks was in the middle of the old part of the city, at the foot of the bluffs.
The moonlight made the houses look ugly. Their boards were warped and most needed paint. Sleazy looking curtains hung limply in blind black windows. Along some streets broken brickwork served as sidewalks. Others had cracked concrete slabs. The remainders were just plain dirt paths.
Looking down cross streets toward the river, Wilder could occasionally glimpse moonlight dancing on the swift, flowing water. He passed a gin mill with red neon and a jukebox going inside. A girl’s voice wailed the words of a song: “Anyone who had a heart . . .” He couldn’t make out most of the words of the song. He didn’t have to. She wanted some screwing but as usual the word love was substituted for what she really meant. The guy she was bitching about probably had something else on the line. All the songs were the same except the bim singing this one sounded like she meant it. A block away he could still hear her insistent wailing, over and over, “Anyone who had a heart would take me . . .”
Two blocks ahead a prowl car passed across the street Wilder was on. It disappeared up the bluff toward the heart of the city. Wilder didn’t slacken his stride.
Behind him, he heard heavy footsteps too near. He dropped the suitcase and stepped aside, turning. Two running men probably out of drinking money and looking for more; one had a pen knife, the other a broken bottle.
Wilder dealt with them so swiftly and savagely that when the prowl car found them lying in the roadway half an hour later, they gave the cops a good laugh by wanting to file a complaint against the three guys they swore mugged them. The desk sergeant who booked the two laughed so hard he threw in resisting arrest as well as the usual drunk and disorderly.
By then, Wilder had gone the rest of the way through slum town until he came to the cross street which led from the square higher up down to the old bridge. He walked up to where the street leveled off a couple of blocks short of the square. His car was still where he’d parked it.
Tossing the suitcase in back, he drove back down the hill and across the Old Iron Bridge under the two green lights high up atop the crisscross of ironwork. The grillwork of the bridge’s roadway rippled beneath his tires
A collection of houses on the south bank of the river looked about the same as the ones back in slum town, but there weren’t as many of them. There was more space between them for shaggy looking trees and patches of weeds to somewhat mute the ugliness of the houses.
As he drove off the south end of the bridge, Wilder stopped the car and looked down a side road leading off to the right, down river. A half mile in that direction he could see the double strands of lights on the highway bridge. He decided not to bother exploring the river road. The angle wasn’t right and it was too close to the two green lights. He’d seen them from higher up.
He drove on up the climbing ground until he was beyond the little collection of houses. Woods were on both sides of the road. A little farther up, the road forked. A harsh yellow blinker light marked the fork. He turned into the road on the right that wound up the hill.
Several side streets opened on his right, but he went on up the hill to the top checking his rearview mirror and his side mirror, keeping the two green bridge lights and the farther off blinking red radio beacon in view.
When the road ran over the crown of the highest hill and dropped down the other side, his three signal lights disappeared from the mirrors. He stopped, turned the car around, and went back up top to where he could see all three of them again. He parked on the side of the road. In the single brief glimpse he’d had of the three lights when his framers had dumped him back into their car, the red blinker was higher and a little to the right of the two greens. Looking at them now, the more distant red one was too far to the right, which meant he’d first seen them from a point farther west of this road.
He drove back down the hill, turned into the first street on his left and went along it to where it dead-ended. Nowhere along it could he catch even a glimpse of any of his three guide lights. Trees lining both sides of the street were too thick and houses were in the way on the downhill side.
At the dead-end, he turned the car around, drove back, went downhill again, and checked the next side street. Same thing. He checked every street right down to the fork in the road and knew he hadn’t been taken into any of them, which meant they’d used the new highway. So he drove down to the river road, hung a left along that until he reached the highway. He waited until a tractor-trailer passed and thundered out across the new bridge, then he turned uphill on the highway, away from the river again, and kept going on up the bluff to the topmost point where he could still see his three guide lights. When they disappeared from his mirrors, he swung the car around on the highway and went back downhill, this time checking the right side of the road for any side streets leading off along the side of the bluff.
A third of the way down to the bridge, he passed a dirt road on the right side of the highway. Passing it, he continued on down to the river road, didn’t pass any more side roads leading off to the right, turned around and went back up, and turned into the dirt road.
Cutting his speed to nothing, he checked his view of the two green bridge lights and the farther off one, the red tower blinker. The red light was left of the two greens. He drove slowly on along the dirt road.
Downhill to his left, he saw a house that looked as if it was hanging right over the river. He checked his three guide lights, found the red was still to the left of the other two, and went on. Up the slope on his right, he glimpsed the dark outline of another house with the moon behind it now. He checked, found the red blinker still left of the two greens, and kept going.
At another house, a big one down the bluff, Wilder checked the alignment of the lights. Still not lined up right. “Almost there, though,” h
e thought.
Switching off his headlights he drove on, keeping his speed down. The moonlight gave him enough light to drive with.
Another house appeared ahead, up the slope this time. Wilder slowed to a crawl and checked the two greens and the on and off red. They were lined up the way he’d seen them from the back seat of the kidnappers’ car.
Wilder hit the brakes and switched the headlights on again. Just ahead was the end of the dirt road. He glanced down toward the river. No houses. He checked the guide lights again. The distant red blinker was just a shade to the right of the two unwinking greens on the bridge, but lower down.
He looked uphill at the white painted house standing in the moonlight a short distance from the road. Nothing and no one moved that Wilder could see.
Setting the hand brake and putting the car in parking gear, he got out to look farther up the slope, beyond and above the white house. There were no other houses nearby. He stepped back to the edge of the dirt road just to be certain no other houses were farther up the bluff behind the white one. There weren’t.
Good, this was the place, then.
Cutting the headlights, he switched the motor off, took the car keys with him, and walked along the dirt road to a driveway leading up to the house. He climbed the driveway to a level parking area beside the house. A dirt path led from the level area to wooden steps that mounted to a side porch. The driveway continued past the level area and went around behind the house.
Wilder turned at the foot of the dirt path below the porch and looked back down at the river and his three guide lights. He grinned and nodded. They looked just about right: the red blinker atop its invisible tower was just far enough to the right of the two green bridge lights, and just high enough above them.
He went on around to the back of the house and up onto a small back porch. The back door was locked. The top half of the door was glass. He kicked the glass in and listened. When he heard no sound inside the house, he reached in, only to find that the door locked with a key, and the key wasn’t in the lock inside. He picked enough of the glass shards out of the bottom and both sides of the window and crawled through.
He didn’t turn on any lights as he went through all the ground floor rooms. Wilder made sure nobody was there, climbed stairs to the second floor to make certain no one was up there either, and returned to the first floor to hunt for a cellar.
In the kitchen he found a stairway which led down to a cellar. Descending them, he found the cellar was pitch-dark. In the upper floors of the house, moonlight had given him enough illumination to see, but no moonlight reached the cellar. That meant there were no windows down here. Wilder went back up and found a light switch at the top of the flight of cellar stairs. Closing the door to the kitchen, he flipped the switch and went back down. Now the cellar was lit by a single bulb in a fixture bolted to an I-beam. A quick glance around the walls reassured him that there were no windows to reveal the cellar light to anyone outside. Near the furnace, he saw a hole dug in the cellar’s dirt floor, a shallow grave. A shovel leaned against the cinder block foundation wall. Grabbing it, Wilder dumped all the dirt back into the hole. Stomping the dirt down hard, he took the shovel with him when he went back upstairs. Before reentering the kitchen, he switched the cellar light off and leaned the shovel against the kitchen wall beside the cellar door. Wilder left the house the way he’d entered it and went down to his car. Leaving the headlights off, he started it up and drove onto the driveway, up, and around the house to the rear. He