I was impressed with how well this one held up after more than thirty years. It was the first story I sold to Cathleen Jordan after she became editor-in-chief of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; before that, she’d been my editor at Doubleday. Sadly, this great lady is no longer with us. But apart from the satisfaction of the sale, I had the bonus of meeting John Lutz, whose fine story “Time Exposure” appeared in the same issue, and beginning a friendship that has lasted to this day.
• • •
“But I never been to Iowa!” Murch said.
His visitor sighed. “Of course not. No one has. That’s why we’re sending you there.”
Slouched in the worn leather armchair in the office Murch kept at home, Adamson looked more like a high school basketball player than a federal agent. He had baby-fat features without a breath of whisker and collar-length sandy hair and wore faded Levi’s with a tweed jacket too short in the sleeves and a paisley tie at three-quarter mast. His voice was changing, for God’s sake. The slight bulge under his left arm might have been a sandwich from home.
Murch paced, coming to a stop at the basement window. His lawn needed mowing. The thought of it awakened the bursitis in his right shoulder. “What’ll I do there? Don’t they raise wheat or something like that? What’s a wheat farmer need with a bookkeeper?”
“You won’t be a bookkeeper. I explained all this before.” The agent sat up, resting his forearms on his bony knees. “In return for your testimony regarding illegal contributions made by your employer to the campaigns of Congressmen Disdale and Reicher and Senator Van Horn, the Justice Department promises immunity from prosecution. You will also be provided with protection during the trial, and afterwards a new identity and relocation to Iowa. When you get there, you’ll find a job waiting for you selling hardware, courtesy of your Uncle Sam.”
“What do I know about hardware? My business is with numbers.”
“An accounting position seemed inadvisable, on the off chance Redman’s people traced you west. They’d never think of looking for you behind a sales counter.”
Murch swung around. “You said he wouldn’t be able to trace me!”
Adamson’s lips pursed, lending him the appearance of a teenage Cupid. “I won’t lie and say it hasn’t happened. But in those cases there were big syndicate operations involved, with plenty of capital to spend. Jules Redman is light cargo by comparison. It’s the senator and the congressmen we want, but we have to knock him down to get to them.”
“What’s the matter, they turn you down?’
The agent looked at him blankly.
Murch had to smile.
“Come on, I ain’t been in this line eighteen years I don’t see how it jerks. Maybe these guys been giving your agency a hard time on appropriations or—” He broke off, his face brightening further. “Say, didn’t I read where this Van Horn is asking for an investigation into clandestine operations? Yeah, and maybe the others support him. So you sniff around till something stinks and then tell them if they play ball you’ll scratch sand over it. Only they don’t feel like playing, so now you go for the jugular. Am I close?”
“I’m just a field operative, Mr. Murch. I leave politics to politicians.” But the grudging respect in the agent’s tone was enlightening.
“What happens if I decide not to testify?”
“Then you’ll be wearing those numbers you’re so good at on your shirt. For three counts of conspiracy to bribe a member of the United States Congress.”
They were watching each other when the doorbell rang upstairs. Murch jumped.
“That’ll be your escort,” Adamson suggested. “I’ve arranged for a room at a motel in the suburbs. The local police are lending a couple of plainclothesmen to stay there with you until the trial Monday. It’s up to you whether I ask them to take you to jail instead.”
“One room?” The bookkeeper’s lip curled.
“There’s an economy move on in Washington.” Adamson got out of the chair and stood waiting. The doorbell sounded again.
“I want a color TV in the room,” said Murch. “Tell your boss no color TV, no deal.”
The agent didn’t smile. “I’ll tell him.” He went up to answer the door.
He shared a frame bungalow at the motel between the railroad and the river with a detective sergeant named Kirdy and his relief, a lean, chinless officer who watched football all day with the sound turned down. He held a transistor radio in his lap; it was tuned to the races. Kirdy looked smaller than he was. Though his head barely reached the bridge of Murch’s nose, he took a size forty-six jacket and had to turn sideways to clear his shoulders through doorways. He had kind eyes set incongruously in a slab of granite. No-Chin never spoke except to warn his charge away from windows. Kirdy’s conversation centered around his granddaughter, a blond tyke of whom he had a wallet full of photos. The bathroom was heated only intermittently by an electric baseboard unit and the building shuddered whenever a train went past. But Murch had his color TV.
At half past ten Monday morning, he was escorted into court by Adamson and another agent who looked like a rock musician. Jules Redman sat at the defense table with his attorney. Murch’s employer was small and dark, with an old-time bullfighter’s handlebar moustache and glossy black hair combed over a bald spot. Their gazes met while the bookkeeper was being sworn in, and from then until recess was called at noon, Redman’s tan eyes remained on the man in the witness chair.
Charles Anthony Murch—his full name felt strange on his tongue when the court officer asked him for it—was on the stand two days. His testimony was complicated, having to do with dates and transactions made through dummy corporations, and he consulted his notebook often while the jurors stifled yawns and the spectators fidgeted and inspected their fingernails. After adjournment the first day, the witness was whisked along a circuitous route to a hotel near the airport, where Kirdy and his partner awaited their duty. On the way, Adamson was talkative and in good spirits. Already he spoke of how his agency would proceed against the congressmen and Senator Van Horn after Redman was convicted. Murch was silent, remembering his employer’s eyes.
The defense attorney, white-haired and grandfatherly behind a pair of half-glasses, kept his seat during cross-examination the next morning, reading from a computer printout sheet on the table in front of him while the government’s case slowly fell to pieces. Murch had thought that his dismissal from that contracting firm upstate was off the books, and he was surprised to learn that someone had penetrated his double-entry system at the insurance company he had left in Chicago. Based on this record, the lawyer accused the witness of entering the so-called campaign donations into Redman’s ledger to cover his own thefts. The jurors’ faces were unreadable, but as the imputation continued, Murch saw the corners of the defendant’s moustache rise slightly and watched Adamson’s eyes growing dull.
The jury was out twenty-two hours, a state record for that kind of case. Jules Redman was found guilty of resisting arrest, reduced from assaulting a police officer (he’d lost his temper and knocked down a detective during an unsuccessful search of his office for evidence), and was acquitted on three counts of bribery. He was sentenced to time served and fined five thousand dollars.
Adamson was out the door on the reporters’ scurrying heels. Murch hurried to catch up.
“You don’t live right, Charlie.”
The bookkeeper held up at the hoarse comment. Redman’s diminutive frame slid past him in the aisle and was swallowed up by a crowd of well-wishers gathered near the door.
The agent kept a twelve-by-ten cubicle in the federal building two floors up from the courtroom where Redman had been set free. When Murch burst in, Adamson was slumped behind a gray steel desk deep in conversation with his rock-musician partner.
“We had a deal,” corrected the agent, after Murch’s panicky interruption. His colleague stood by brushing his long hair out of his eyes. “It was made in good faith. We gave you a chance to volunteer any information from your past that might put our case in jeopardy. You didn’t take advantage of it, and now we’re all treading water in the toilet.”
“How was I to know they was gonna dig up that stuff about those other two jobs? You investigated me. You didn’t find nothing.” The ex-witness’s hands made wet marks on the desk top.
“Our methods aren’t Redman’s. It takes longer to subpoena personnel files than it does to screw a Magnum into a clerk’s ear and say gimme. Now I know why he didn’t try to take you out before the trial.” He paused. “Is there anything else?”
“Damn right there’s something else! You promised me Iowa, win or lose.”
Adamson reached inside his jacket and extracted a long narrow envelope like the airlines used to put tickets in. Murch’s heart leaped. He was reaching for the envelope when the agent tore it in half. He put the pieces together and tore them. Again, and then he let the bits flutter to the desk.
For a numb moment the bookkeeper goggled at the scraps. Then he lunged, grasping Adamson’s lapels in both hands and lifting. “Redman’s a killer!” He shook him. The agent clawed at his wrists, but Murch’s fingers were strong from years cramped around pencils and the handles of adding machines. Adamson’s right hand went for his underarm holster, but his partner had gotten Murch in a bearhug and pulled. The front of the captive agent’s coat tore away in his hands.
Adamson’s chest heaved. He gestured with his revolver. “Get him the hell out of here.” His voice cracked.
Murch struggled, but his right arm was yanked behind him and twisted. Pain shot through his shoulder. He went along, whimpering. Shoved out into the corridor, he had to run to catch his balance and slammed into the opposite wall, knocking a memo off a bulletin board. The door exploded shut.
A group of well-dressed men standing nearby stopped talking to look at him. He realized that he was still holding pieces of Adamson’s jacket. He let them fall, brushed back his thinning hair with a shaky hand, adjusted his suit, and moved off down the corridor.
Redman and his lawyer were being interviewed on the courthouse steps by a TV crew. Murch gave them a wide berth on his way down. He overheard Redman telling the reporters he was leaving tomorrow for a week’s vacation in Jamaica. Ice formed in the bookkeeper’s stomach. Redman was giving himself an alibi for when Murch’s body turned up.
Anyway, he had eighteen hours’ grace. He decided to write off the stuff he had left back at the hotel and took a cab to his house on the west side. For years he had kept two thousand dollars in cash there in case he needed a getaway stake in a hurry. By the time he had his key in the front door lock he was already breathing easier; Redman’s men wouldn’t try anything until their boss was out of the country, and a couple of grand could get a man a long way in eighteen hours.
His house had been ransacked.
They had overlooked nothing. They had torn up the rugs, pulled apart the sofa and easy chairs and slit open the cushions, taken pictures down from the walls and dismantled the frames, removed the back panel from the TV set, dumped out the flour and sugar canisters in the kitchen. Even the plates had been unscrewed from the wall switches. The orange juice can in which he had kept the rolled bills in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator lay empty on the linoleum.
The sheer, cold logic of the operation dizzied Murch. Even after they had found the money they had gone on to make sure there were no other caches. His office alone, its contents smeared out into the passage that led to the stairs, would have taken hours to reduce to its present condition. The search had to have started well before the verdict was in, perhaps even as early as the weekend he had spent in that motel by the railroad tracks. Redman had been so confident of victory he had moved to cut off the bookkeeper’s escape while the trial was still in progress.
He couldn’t stay there. Probably he was already being watched, and the longer he remained the greater his chances of being kept prisoner in his own home until the word came down to eliminate him. He stepped outside. The street was quiet except for some noisy kids playing basketball in a neighbor’s driveway and the snort of a power mower farther down the block. He started walking toward the corner.
Toward the bank. They’d taken his passbook, too, but he had better than six thousand in his account and he could borrow against that. Buy a used car or hop a plane. Maybe even go to Jamaica, stretch out on the beach next to Redman, and wait for his reaction. He smiled at that. Confidence warmed him, like whiskey in a cold belly. He mounted the bank steps, grasped the handle on the glass door. And froze.
He was alerted by the one reading a bank pamphlet in a chair near the door. There were no lines at the tellers’ cages and no reason to wait. He spotted the other standing at the writing table, pretending to be making out a deposit slip. Their eyes wandered the lobby from time to time, casually. Murch didn’t recognize their faces, but he knew the type: early thirties, jackets tailored to avoid telltale bulges. He reversed directions, moving slowly to keep from drawing attention. His heart started up again when he cleared the plate glass.
It was quarter to five, too late to reach another branch before closing, and even if he did he knew what would be waiting for him. He knew they had no intention of accosting him unless he tried to borrow money. They were running him like hounds, keeping him within range while they waited for the go-ahead. He was on a short tether with Redman on the other end.
But a man who juggled figures the way Much did had more angles than the Pentagon. He hailed a cruising cab and gave the driver Bart Morgan’s address on Whitaker.
Morgan’s laundromat was twice as big as the room in back where the real business was conducted, with a narrow office between to prevent the ringing of the telephones from reaching the housewives washing their husbands’ socks out front. Murch found the proprietor there counting change at the card table he used for a desk. Muscular but running to fat, Morgan had crewcut steel-gray hair and wore horn-rimmed glasses with a hearing aid built into one bow. His head grew straight out of his T-shirt.
“How they running, Bar?”
“They need fixing.” He reached across the stacked coins to shake Murch’s hand.
“I meant the horses, not the machines.”
“So did I.”
They laughed. When they were through, Murch said, “I need money, Bart.”
“I figured that.” The proprietor’s gaze dropped to the table. “You caught me short, Charlie. I got bit hard at the Downs Saturday.”
“I don’t need much, just enough to get out of the city.”
“I’m strapped. I wish to hell I wasn’t but I am.” He took a quarter from one stack and placed it atop another. “You know I’d do it if I could.”
The bookkeeper seized his wrist. “You owe me, Bart. If I didn’t lend you four big ones when the Dodgers took the Series, you’d be part of an off-ramp by now.”
“I paid back every cent.”
“It ain’t the money, it’s the doing what’s needed.”
Morgan avoided his eyes. Murch cast away his friend’s wrist.
“Redman’s goons been here, ain’t they?”
Their gazes met for an instant, then Morgan’s dropped again. “I got a wife and a kid that can’t stay out of trouble.” He spoke quietly. “What they gonna do I don’t come home some night, or the next or the next?”
“You and me are friends.”
“You got no right to say that.” Morgan’s face grew red. “You got no right to come in here and ask me to put my chin on the block.”
Murch slammed his fist on the table. Coins scattered. “If you don’t give it to me I’ll take it.”
“I don’t think so.” Morgan leaned back, exposing a curved black rubber grip pressing into his paunch above the waistband of his pants.
Murch said, “You’d do Redman’s job for him?”
“I’ll do what I got to to live, same as you.”
Telephones jangled in back, all but drowned out by the whooshing of the machines out front. The bookkeeper straightened. “Tell your wife and kid Charlie said good-bye.” He went out, leaving the door open behind him.
“You got no right, Charlie.”
Murch kept going. Morgan stood up, shouting over the racket of the front-loaders. “You should of come to me before you went running to the feds! I’d of give you the odds!”
His visitor was on the street.
Dusk was gathering when he left the home of his fourth and last friend in the city. His afflicted shoulder, inflamed by the humid weather and the rough treatment he’d received in Adamson’s office, throbbed like an aching tooth. His hands were empty. Like Bart Morgan, Gordy Sharp and Ed Zimmer pleaded temporary poverty, Zimmer stepping out onto the porch to talk while his family remained inside. There was no answer at Henry Arbogast’s, yet Murch swore he’d seen a light go off in one of the windows on his way up the walk.
Which left Liz.
He counted the money in his wallet. Forty-two dollars. He had spent almost thirty on cabs, leaving himself with just enough for a room for the night if he failed to get shut of the city. Liz was living in the old place two miles uptown. He sighed, put away the billfold, and planted the first sore foot on concrete.
Night crept out of the shadowed alleys to crouch beyond the pale rings cast by the street lights. He avoided them, taking his comfort in the invisibility darkness lent him. Twice he halted, breathing shallowly, when cars crawled along the curb going in his direction, then he resumed walking as they turned down side streets and picked up speed. His imagination flourished in the absence of light.
The soles of his feet were sending sharp pains splintering up through his ankles by the time he reached the brickfront apartment house and mounted the well-worn stairs to the fourth floor. Outside 4C he leaned against the wall while his breathing slowed and his face cooled. Straightening, he raised his fist, paused, and knocked gently.
A steel chain prevented the door from opening beyond the width of her face. Her features were dark against the light behind her, sharper than before, the skin creased under her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. Her black hair was streaked with dirty gray and needed combing. She’d aged considerably.
“I knew you’d show up,” she snapped, cutting his greeting in half. “I heard about the verdict on the news. You want money.”
“I’m lonesome, Liz. I just want to talk.” He’d forgotten how quick she was. But he had always been able to soften her up in the past. Well, all but once.
“You never talked all the time we was married unless you wanted something. I can’t help you, Charlie.” She started to close the door.
He leaned on it. His bad shoulder howled. “Liz, you’re my last stop. They got all the other holes plugged.” He told her about Adamson’s broken promise, about the bank and his friends. “Redman’ll kill me just to make an example.”
She said, “And you’re surprised?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” He controlled his anger with an effort. That had always been her chief weapon, her instinct for the raw nerve.
“There’s two kinds in this world, the ones that use and the ones that get used.” Her face was completely in shadow now, unreadable. “Guys like Redman and Adamson squeeze all the good out of guys like you and then throw you away. That’s the real reason I divorced you, Charlie. You was headed for the junkpile the day you was born. I just didn’t want to be there to see it.”
“Christ, Liz, I’m talking about my life!”
“Me, too. Just a second.” She withdrew, leaving the door open.
He felt the old warmth returning. Same old Liz: deliver a lecture, then turn around and come through after all. It was like enduring a sermon at the Perpetual Mission in return for a hot meal and a roof for the night.
“Here.” Returning, she thrust a fistful of something through the opening. He reached for it eagerly. His fingers closed on cold steel.
“You nuts? I ain’t fired a gun since the army!”
“It’s all I got to give you. Don’t let them find out where it came from.”
“What good is it against a dozen men with guns?”
“No good, the way you’re thinking. I wait tables in Redman’s neighborhood. I hear things. He likes blowtorches. Don’t let them burn you alive, Charlie.”
She shut the door. The lock snapped with a noise like jaws closing.
It was a clear night. The Budweiser sign in the window of the corner bar might have been cut with an engraving tool out of orange neon. Someone gasped when he emerged from the apartment building. A woman in evening dress hurried past on a man’s arm, her face tight and pale in the light coming out through the glass door, one brown eye rolling back at Murch. He’d forgotten about the gun. He put it away.
His subsequent pounding had failed to get Liz to open her door. If he’d wanted a weapon he’d have gotten it himself; the city bristled with unregistered iron. He fingered the unfamiliar thing in his pocket, wondering where to go next. His eyes came to the bright sign in the window.
Blood surged in his ears. Murch’s robberies had all been from company treasuries, not people; his weapons figures in ledgers. Demanding money for lives required a steady hand and the will to carry out the threat. It was too raw for him, too much like crime. He started walking away from the bar. His footsteps slowed halfway down the block and stopped twenty feet short of the opposite corner. He turned around and retraced his steps. He was squeezing the concealed revolver so hard his knuckles ached.
The establishment was quiet for that time of the evening, deserted but for a young bartender in a red apron standing at the cash register. The jukebox was silent. As Murch approached, the employee turned unnaturally bright eyes on him. The light from the beer advertisement reflecting off the bar’s cherrywood finish flushed the young man’s face. “Sorry, friend, we’re—”
Murch pointed the .38 at him. His hand shook.
The bartender smiled weakly.
“This ain’t no joke! Get ’em up!” He tried to make his voice tough. It came out high and ragged.
Slowly the young man raised his hands. He was still smiling. “You’re out of luck, friend.”
Murch told him to shut up and open the cash register drawer. He obeyed. It was empty.
“Someone beat you to it, friend. Two guys with shotguns came in an hour ago, shook down the customers, and cleaned me out, even my wallet. Didn’t even leave enough to open up with in the morning. You just missed the cops.”
His smile burned. Murch’s finger tightened on the trigger and the expression was gone. The bookkeeper backed away, bumped into a table. The gun almost went off. He turned and stumbled toward the door. He tugged at the handle; it didn’t budge. The sign said PUSH. He shoved his way through to the street. Looking back, he saw the bartender dialing a telephone.
The night air stung Murch’s face, and he realized there were tears on his cheeks. His thoughts fluttered wildly. He caught them and sorted them into piles with the discipline of one trained to work with assets and debits. Redman couldn’t have known he would pick this particular bar to rob, even had he suspected the bookkeeper’s desperation would make him choose that course. Blind luck had decided whom to favor, and as usual it wasn’t Charlie Murch.
A distant siren awakened him to practicalities. Soon he would be a fugitive from the law as well as from Redman.
He pocketed the gun and ran.
His breath was sawing in his throat two blocks later when he spotted a cab stopped at a light. He sprinted across to it, tore open the back door, and threw himself into a seat riddled with cigarette burns.
“Off duty, bub,” said the driver, hanging a puffy, stubbled face over the back of his seat. “Oil light’s on. I’m on my way back to the garage.”
There was no protective panel between the seats. He thrust the handgun in the driver’s face and thumbed back the hammer.
The man sighed heavily. “All I got’s twelve bucks and change. I ain’t picked up a fare yet.”
He was probably lying, but the light was green and Murch didn’t want to be arrested arguing with a cabbie. “Just drive.”
They passed a prowl car on its way toward the bar, its siren gulping, its lights flashing. Murch fought the urge to duck, hiding the gun instead. The county lock-up was full of men who would ice him just to get in good with Redman.
He got an idea that frightened him. He tried tucking it away, but it kept coming back.
“Mister, my engine’s overheating.”
Murch glanced up. The cab was making clunking noises. The warning light on the dash glowed angry red. They had gone nine blocks.
“All right, pull over.”
The driver spun the wheel. As he rolled to a stop next to the curb the motor coughed, shuddered, and died. Steam rolled out from under the hood.
“Start counting.” His passenger reached across the front seat and tore the microphone free of the two-way radio. “Don’t get out till you reach a thousand. If you do, you won’t have time to be sorry you did.” He slid out and slammed the door on six.
He caught another cab four blocks over, this time without having to use force. It was a twenty-dollar ride out to the posh residential district where Jules Redman lived. He tipped the cabbie five dollars. He had no more use for money.
The house was a brick ranchstyle in a quiet cul-de-sac studded with shade trees. Murch found the hike to the front door effortless; for the first time in hours he was without pain. On the step he took a deep breath, let half of it out, and rang the bell. He took out the gun. Waited.
After a lifetime the door was opened by a very tall young man in a tan jacket custom made to contain his enormous chest. It was Randolph, Redman’s favorite bodyguard. His eyes flickered when he recognized the visitor. A hand darted inside his jacket.
The reports were very loud. Murch fired a split second ahead of Randolph, shattering his sternum and throwing off his aim so that the second bullet entered the bookkeeper’s left thigh. He’d never been shot before; it was oddly sensationless, like the first time he’d had sex. The bodyguard crumpled.
Murch stepped across him. He could feel the hot blood on his leg, nothing else. Just then Redman appeared in an open doorway beyond the staircase. When he saw Murch he froze. He was wearing a maroon velvet robe over pajamas and his feet were in slippers.
The bookkeeper was motionless as well. What now? He hadn’t expected to get this far. He had shot Randolph in self-defense; he couldn’t kill a man in cold blood, not even this one, not even when that was the fate he had planned for Murch.
Redman understood. He smiled under his moustache. “Like I said before, Charlie, you just don’t live right.”
Another large man came steadily through a side door, towed by the automatic pistol in his hand. He was older than Randolph and wore neither jacket nor necktie, his empty underarm holster exposed. This was the other bodyguard. He held up before the sight that met his eyes.
“Kill him, Ted.”
Murch’s bullet splintered one of the steps in the staircase. He’d aimed at the banister, but that was close enough. “Next one goes between your boss’s eyes,” he said.
Ted laid his gun on the floor and backed away from it, raising his hands.
The bookkeeper felt no triumph. He wondered if it was fear that was making him numb or if he just didn’t care. To Redman: “Over there.” He gestured with the .38 toward Randolph’s gun where he’d dropped it when he fell.
The racketeer stayed put. “You’re losing blood, Charlie.”
“Shut up.” He cocked the hammer.
Redman took a step toward the pistol.
“Pick it up. Slow,” he added, as Redman stooped to obey.
He accepted the firearm with his free hand and dropped it carefully in a pocket to avoid smearing the fingerprints. To Ted: “Get the car.”
Murch was waiting in front with his hostage when the bodyguard drove the Cadillac out of the garage. “Okay, get out.”
Ted slid out from under the wheel. Murch made Redman take his place and climbed in on the passenger’s side. “Start driving. I’ll tell you what turns to make.” He spoke through clenched teeth. His leg was starting to ache and he was feeling lightheaded.
In the side mirror, the bodyguard stood watching them until they reached the end of the driveway. Then he swung around and sprinted back inside.
“He’ll be on the phone to the others in two seconds,” Redman said. “How far you think you’ll get before you bleed out?”
“Turn right.”
The big car took the bumps well. Even so, each one was like a red-hot knife in his thigh. He made himself as comfortable as possible without taking his eyes off the driver, the revolver resting in his lap with his hand on the butt. He welcomed Redman’s taunts. They distracted him from his pain, kept his mind off the drowsiness welling up inside him like warm water filling a tub. He wasn’t so far from content.
The dead bodyguard would take explaining. But a paraffin test would reveal that he’d fired a weapon recently, and the gun in Murch’s pocket was likely registered to Randolph. Redman’s prints on the butt and the fact the dead man had worked for him, together with the bullet in Murch’s leg and a clear motive in his testimony in the bribery trial, would put his old boss inside for a long time for attempted murder. “Left here.”
The lights of the Fourteenth Precinct were visible down the block. Detective Sergeant Kirdy’s precinct, the home of the kind, proud grandfather who had protected Murch during the trial. Murch told Redman to stop the car. It felt good to give him that last order.
Charlie Murch had stopped being one of the used.
He recognized Kirdy’s blocky shape hastily descending the front steps as he followed Redman out the driver’s side and called to him. The sergeant shielded his eyes with one hand against the glare of the headlights, squinted at the two figures coming toward him, one limping, the other in a bathrobe being pushed out ahead. He drew his Magnum from his belt holster. Murch gestured to show friendship. The noise the policeman’s gun made was deafening, but Murch never heard it.
“That was quick thinking, Sergeant.” Hands in the pockets of his robe, Redman looked down at Murch’s body spread-eagled in the gutter. A crowd was gathering.
“We got the squeal on your kidnapping a few minutes ago,” Kirdy said. “I was just heading out there when you two showed.”
“You ought to make lieutenant for this.”
The sergeant’s kind eyes glistened. “That’d be great, Mr. Redman. The wife and kids been after me for years to get off the street.”
“You will if there’s any justice. How’s that pretty granddaughter of yours, by the way?”