The Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 20 Classic Mysteries!

The second day passed, and I knew my nerve was going. I was cracking up and I seemed unable to halt the process. Lew wasn’t moving fast enough. He had found nothing conclusive. The second night his shadow had lost Vicky and Pryor across town in a section of cheap hotels.

Lew was a worried man that night. He wouldn’t take his eyes off my face. He insisted on staying in the room until I had gulped the pills Hardy had given me.

But I palmed them instead and drank the water as if I were swallowing the pills. I lay back across the bed, closed my eyes, and after a time Lew went out. I waited until I heard his footsteps fade downstairs; then I sat up, threw the pills under the bed, and began dressing. I didn’t put on my shoes. I wanted no echoing footsteps as I slipped down the rear stairs out of the house.

I stayed in shadows and used back streets. I was still weak, and it took me thirty minutes or better to get from Lew’s house to my own. My place was dark, and I didn’t go in. I stood in the shadows of a row of royal palms across from the house watching, waiting. Expecting the two of them together.

But she came alone. She swung the green sedan in the driveway, entered the house, and I saw lights flash on. She appeared in the living room window for an instant, going toward the phone alcove. I moved quickly across the street, into my own yard. I could see her through the window. She was across the expanse of living room, talking quickly with someone on the phone. Then a shadow, the shadow of a man, long, distorted, showed briefly against the living room wall. Before I could catch a breath the light in there snapped off, and then Vicky screamed.

I hit the front door. It was locked. I fumbled for a key. A voice shouted from inside, “Stand back, or I’ll shoot her.” Sweat popped out on my face. I heard a door slam, and I ventured the key into the lock then. Another door slammed, and I tore toward the rear of the house. I heard the surging roar of the engine of the green sedan. I was hearing his words over and over, “Stand back, or I’ll shoot her.”

I knew him. I’d recognized the voice.

I hurled myself across the yard toward the driveway just as the big car careened out of the drive into the street with a scream of tortured rubber.

I stood there a moment, gasping. Then I forced strength into my shaking legs and charged back into the house.

My hands were shaking so badly I could hardly dial Lew Whitfield’s number. His phone screamed twice before anyone answered, and then it was Marge, not Lew. “I’ve got to talk to Lew,” I bellowed.

“He’s not here, Doug. He just got a phone call from Vicky. He’s on his way over there now.”

“He’ll be too late. Marge! Shoffner’s got her! He barreled away from here with her in my green sedan. Got that? Old man Wendel Shoffner, my yardman, has Vicky as hostage, at his mercy, in my green car. Call headquarters. Tell them to make it an all-car signal. That’s an order from the D.A.’s office!”

She got it, she said, and I didn’t waste any more time. I slammed down the phone and pushed my reeling body back out of the house. The second car, the light coupe Vicky usually drove was still in the garage. There was a key for it on my ring.

The sedan had disappeared by the time I got the coupe on the street. It had turned west, and I turned that way also. In the distance I heard a siren. Lew would get the call. A dozen cars would get the call. They’d pinpoint my home — and we would get him. But it would all be less than worthless if he harmed Vicky first.

I heard another siren and then another. They were converging on the downtown area. I saw the swarm of cars when I skidded the coupe into Central Avenue. A fire truck rounded an intersection and clanged to a stop just ahead of me. Patrolmen were trying to move the crowds gathering on the sidewalk, and a searchlight threw its yellow tongue up the side of the six-story Parker Building.

I’d stopped the coupe, but I couldn’t let go of the wheel when I saw that light snake its way up the face of the building. I knew then that he had her up there and we might never get her down alive.

Somehow I crawled out of the car and was able to stand. I found Lew standing beside his own car. He was snapping orders. To firemen with a net. To the cops rigging a loudspeaker system.

“For God’s sake, Lew, be careful!”

He showed only brief, surprise at seeing me. “We’re doing that. Doug: If we wanted to take chances, we’d send men up after him.”

I could see them now. Vicky and Shoffner, near the low parapet around the building roof.

Shoffner’s voice rang out thin and high-pitched: “Go away! All of you go away, or I’ll push her over!”

Lew’s shudder almost matched my own. “He’s cracked. He’s gone. Loony as they come. He’s Loren Sigmon’s father, Doug.” I stiffened. I had been the single eyewitness to Sigmon’s crime.