Thunder On The Right (25 page)

The Spaniard straightened with a jerk, and the old fierce look of contempt was back in her face. "Then go, fool! After all, what have I got to fear? I can swear I took your money innocently—as a salve to your conscience! There'll be a scandal, but such things pass, and I—I am who I am! You will be gone, and who'll believe that whey-faced English girl!" The hooded lids lifted, and her eyes gleamed hard as onyx.

"And I'll see you hunted, Pierre Bussac! Even in Spain, my friend, I can reach you!

In Spain, I am still somebody, I and my family! You will see, Pierre Bussac, that I still have teeth!"

There was a smile in his voice. "If you mean the letter from Lenonnand, you might find the teeth have been drawn."

There was a pause. "What d'you mean?"

"That." There was a rustle of paper, a quick gasp. Then she said rapidly, "That's only one piece. I've got------"

"No doubt. But is half a letter any use—without its signature?"

"Where did you get it?
Give it to me!
" Her hand flashed, quick as a snake, but just as quickly he whipped the paper back out of her reach, and laughed again. "Oh, no, you don't! This is my passport to freedom, señora, and my warrant for your good behavior. You can try your Spanish tricks if you will, but I warn you that as sure as you try to trace me, I'll bring you down as well. And if you think you can prove yourself an innocent party to my—trade, shall we call it?—you'd better think again.

Accessory to murder, my fine madame! There"s a witness to where this letter was hidden------"

"That proves nothing! It wasn't in my possession!"

"No? Life in a convent's a bit communal for that, isn't it? But I wouldn't mind betting it'd pay to dig a bit deeper where this was found!"

Her breath hissed in a sharp little gasp. He gave his rough laugh. "That bites deep, doesn't it? Your little cache, your private hoard, your fine little powerhouse of money stolen from me . . . including, of course, half of what Dupre's lot paid—
in
notes stolen from the Bordeaux bank
,
damn them, and the number of every one
published in the police record!"

"No!" It was little more than a breath. Her eyes were black pits in a gray face.

He said, "It's true. I found out tonight. Corentin heard it from Aristide Celton." His teeth showed. "So you'd better hurry back to your treasure chamber, hadn't you, before the
flics
find it—or maybe our little witness has taken them there already?"

"No!" The word was still softly spoken, but some quality in it turned the listener's blood to ice. The woman seemed to have herself in hand again; she stood like a statue, and her eyes were hooded, as if she were thinking. But her breathing hurried, and there was sweat on her face.

Bussac said, "Yes, it's true. This is it, my fine lady. And if you'd had the wit, you'd have left a back door open, the same as I have."

"I can use the same one." Her voice was unrecognizable.

"Like hell you can," he said roughly. "We've had that out and I'm staying to listen to no more. Now get out and leave me. If you hurry you might get down to the convent before the flics have nosed out anything that matters."

He turned away to put out the lamp. The lighted wick dwindled, faded, dimmed to an amber thread. The woman leaned forward over the table, still breathing short and thick.

"I'm coming with you. To Spain."

He didn't answer, even with a glance. He was intent on the lamp. Her hand moved, as if blindly, on the table top. It found something; gripped it. The lamp went out, smoking a little, and firelight took possession of the room. She came around the table quietly. The rich silk rustled. The hand holding the knife was hidden in a fold of her robe.

She said, in a voice that was oddly unemphatic, "You'll take me with you."

He said savagely, "By God I won't! How many more times do I have to say it? Now are you going to get the hell out of here?"

She was standing just beside him. "I know the road," she said.

Something in her tone seemed to arrest him. He turned his head and stared at her for two full seconds. Then he said thickly, "As far as the cascade; so you do, señora.

And you think I'm having you track me and Marie across it into Spain? You've had your chance to get out and now, by God, I'll see you stay here! You'll have a bit of time to think up what you're going to say to the police!"

He was between her and the door. On the back of the door hung a clutter of stuff, and with it a mule's halter and headrope. He turned to twitch this off its peg.

And as he turned, she was on him. The two shadows flowed together, towered grotesquely. Something glinted, flashed home with a small thickening thud. A curse, a gasp, and the locked shadows fell apart as Pierre Busac crumpled where he stood, and went down in the firelight to lie at his murderer's feet.

She stood there for a long moment, black and immobile against the firelight. Then she moved slowly, stiffly backwards, to stand gazing down at him. Seconds passed.

Then with a quick, almost violent movement she bent over him, pulled the heavy coat aside, and began a hurried groping through his pockets. Almost at once she stood up with what looked like a thick wallet in her hand. She glanced into this, and thrust it hastily into some hidden pocket of her robe and then paused, looking slowly around the cottage kitchen. Her gaze hesitated on the door of the room where Jennifer lay.

And as she looked, some stray gust of the stormwind, rattling the shutters, breathed a draft across the kitchen, and the door swung open a little further. The faint glow of the fire probed the shadows. The door creaked yet more widely, and the woman seemed to be gazing straight into the dark little room. The cruel firelight leaped and flickered to catch the gleam of Jennifer's terrified eyes.

She shut them, hardly breathing, hardly living.

The door creaked again.

Something in its desolate sound must have spoken of emptiness, of a deserted house with a dead man on the floor and a woman fleeing alone into the bare mountains. . . .

With a sound like a tiny moan of pain, Doña Francisca turned and leaped for the outer door.

A deserted house; a dead man on the floor, and a woman fleeing alone into the bare mountains. ... If it had been a nightmare before, this was the very stuff of horror.

Melodrama? That term with its attendant irony, belonged to another lifetime, where such things didn't happen. This had happened. This was real. She was in it; now; here.

She lay, her body one shivering ache, her mind beaten into numbness, her eyes fixed in a sort of fascination on the huddle of the murdered man. This was real. This was happening. To her, Jennifer. Here and now.

She had forgotten about Stephen and the long breakneck road from Luz; she hardly even thought about Gillian and the knife following her through the darkness; she lay in a kind of vacuum of fear, in what would have seemed a suspension of time itself but for the clock that steadily flicked second after second out into the dark well of the little room.

With that same empty creaking, like the scream of a mouse in a deserted wainscot, the door inched wider. A log broke, sending up spurts of yellow flame, little probes of light that fingered the crumpled body on which her helpless vision centered. The door squeaked again, with another ghostly movement that breathed cold pimples up her spine. The fingers of firelight plucked at the dead man till you could have sworn he was moving....

He was moving.

Jenny's head jerked sideways on the pillow, her eyes strained till the eyeballs seemed to crack in their sockets. Her body went rigid. She held her breath, her whole being concentrated in a new ache of terror on the body that lay huddled half on its face on the kitchen floor.

He was moving. As she watched, held in the nightmare-helpless grip of her bonds, there was a tremor of the hunched shoulders and a perceptible movement of the man's head. And now a hand moved; it quivered against the flagged floor, then spread, stiffly, in pain, and dragged its flattened way in under his body, as if to clasp the wound the knife had made. There was the sound of a sharp, gasping little breath, which whistled suddenly through clenched teeth, while the man's body went still again, hunching itself around its hurt as a hedgehog curls to protect its tender parts.

Then he seemed, from some source, suddenly to gather strength. The other hand went down, and he lifted the upper part of his body, slowly, until it was clear of the floor. For a very long time, it seemed, he stayed there, stretched rigid, shoulder muscles bulging, frozen into a grim arabesque of pain and effort, then he got one knee beneath him, and lifted himself with a grunt of pain. For a moment it appeared as if the effort had been too great; he lurched forward, and might have fallen again but for the leg of the table, which struck and held his shoulder. Instinctively, it seemed, a hand shot up to grip the table top and with an effort that even to watch brought the sweat pricking between Jenny's shoulder blades, the man had pulled himself upright, and was leaning over the table, doubled on to his fists, breathing with ragged hurtful gasps.

And there he stayed without movement other than the convulsive clapping of a hand to his injured side, and the distressed heaving of his fight for breath, while the clock in the corner ticked gently on, and the small noises of the fire held the quiet kitchen, infinitely more compelling than the fitful roar of the storm without. And still the man stayed there, leaning on his hand, and Jenny lay stiff in her bonds and watched him, and the wind plucked at the shutters and then raced on up the gullies and into the clefts of the bare mountains, like a dark vengeance pursuing Gillian. . . .

Pierre Bussac lifted his head. Slowly his body straightened, one hand still clamped to his side. The other groped blindly among the debris on the table, stirring up a clatter of crockery whose homely domestic note sounded oddly in the charged silence. The searching hand found; clenched. He shook his head sharply, once, as if to dispel the last of the rack of pain. Then, still slowly, with a sort of terrifying deliberation, he lifted a knife from the table and turned toward the bedroom door.

This part of the nightmare had happened before. Once before she had shrunk in her bonds as she watched him approach the bed where she lay. But there comes a point where terror anesthetizes itself, a point beyond which it has no more effect. And Jennifer, mercifully, was beyond terror now. She simply lay still, her back arched stiffly away from the bed, as if in resistance to the blow that was coming. Her eyes flinched from him. That was all.

He had paused to lean against the doorpost, his big body blocking out the firelight.

His breathing was rapid and harsh. He seemed to stay there interminably, a shadow of menace, before he gathered himself with a visible effort, and came forward, faltering only a little, across the room.

Once he turned his head back, as if listening, and she saw the sideways gleam of his eyeballs. Then his shadow fell over her. She felt his hand groping, gripping her wrists. He pulled her over onto her side, jerking at the rope that bound her. The cold line of the knife slid between her hands and the rope. It sawed viciously at the bonds.

"Marie," he muttered thickly. "She'll run into Marie. . .."

The ropes slackened, parted, fell away. As he thrust the kitchen knife under her ankle bonds, Jennifer reached numbed hands and managed to rip away the ghastly gag.

She spat out the rags with which her mouth had been stuffed and passed a dry and bruised tongue around a mouth that felt unmentionable, fighting back a wave of nausea. She began to chafe the blood back into her wrists.

Bussac muttered in that thick, slurred voice, "She'll get . . . Marie." He hacked at the rope, but the knife was blunt, and his hands were unsteady. Jennifer tried to say,

"Give it to me," but failed to make any sound but a little croak. She leaned forward and took the knife from his unresisting fingers, and sawed afresh at the now-fraying rope that bound her ankles. Bussac straightened himself.

"Marie . . ." he said again, and lurched like a drunken man back across the little room into the kitchen.

And then Jennifer was free. It could not have been so very long that she had lain there—those aeons of terror-filled time —because the rope had not yet deadened her limbs. Her feet tingled, and her body ached, but she got up from the bed with little more than a slight giddiness, and walked with a reasonably steady gait into the kitchen after Bussac.

He turned from the table, with a chipped cup in his hand, and she caught the heady reek of brandy.

"Got to go," he said thickly. "You've got to help. I'm hurt. That damned Spaniard hurt me. You'll have to help. Here." He sloshed more brandy into the cup and held it out to her. She took it without hesitation, and gulped a mouthful. Its sour pungency bit and burned her sore mouth, then ran like fire down into her body. She gasped and shuddered, and drank again, and this time the spirit pierced her like a new life, hot and red, that licked through her veins till it tingled in her finger tips and set her body glowing.

She managed a hoarse, breathless whisper. "Yes. She ran out. She had the knife.

Which is the way? Tell me the way to go."

"You'll never find it. It's my own . . . secret way. I'll have to show you. ..." But his hand was still clamped against his side, and in the glimmer of firelight his face looked sunken like that of a dead man.

Jenny said, on a little sob, "Oh, dear Lord. . . . Where did she hit you? Let me see."

"Let be, woman," he said roughly. "There's no time."

She said sharply, "Don't be a fool. You'll not get fifty yards like that."

She thrust him down into a chair, and he went, unresisting. She pulled open his coat and ripped away the shirt, which was slimy and matted over a place that showed black and oozing in the firelight. It was a small wound, with the dark blood slowly gathering and swelling, to trickle sluggishly from its lips as the water gathers and then drips from a leaking tap.