Hillerman, Tony (21 page)

“He’s in the building.”

And a reply, too low for Cotton to understand. There were two of them. And one had been waiting in the corridor all this time—from the sound, not more than fifty feet from where Cotton now crouched. To his right and on the main corridor floor below.

“His car’s in the parking lot north of this wing,” the first voice said. “The door’s unlocked and he left his shoes down there.”

“So that’s why . . .” Cotton couldn’t make out the rest of it.

“Probably. I locked the other door so that’s his only way out now. We screen him off from that end and it shouldn’t be hard to find him. Just a matter of checking out these corridors.”

There was a squeaking sound which Cotton couldn’t identify. Perhaps a door hinge. Someone had been able to pick the lock on his apartment door. These old capitol locks, he guessed, would be easy. The voices were now too muffled to be understood.

Cotton stood up, looked frantically around him. He would run. Run down the mezzanine floor to the stairwell at the end of the hallway and down the stairs, and out of the building. And once out he would be safe. But, before he could take a step, the men were in the corridor again.

“Right, I’ve got it.” The voice was that of the man in the blue coat.

And a second later the back of another man was in Cotton’s view—a stocky man in a heavy red windbreaker walking rapidly and silently away, skirting the railing around the rotunda under the capitol dome, disappearing from Cotton’s view in the direction of the west wing. There had been something white around the man’s right hand and he carried his left arm stiffly. A cast, Cotton thought. Was it the man on the airplane? The man who called himself Adams. Whom Whan knew as Harge. The fall in the Brazos must have hurt his wrist. But Cotton’s heart sank at the thought. Adams was a hunter. Adams would never let a quarry out of a trap as hopeless as this one. Cotton squatted back on his heels, feeling panic again and trying to concentrate. He had to think. To calculate what Adams would do.

Cotton rubbed his knuckles fiercely across his forehead, forcing thought. The other man, the blue topcoat, had walked in the other direction. Toward the east-wing stairwell. Would he go down to ground level? That seemed likely. One—probably the blue topcoat—would make sure he didn’t reach the unlocked door by the Game Commission offices. And then when Adams had searched the basement and the ground floor they would both work upward—making sure he couldn’t reach the stairwells unseen. It wouldn’t take them long. A simple matter of trotting through the corridors on each floor. No place to hide anywhere. Was there? Cotton tried frantically to think. Searching the service tunnel into the basement post-office area would take a few minutes. Usually some crates and boxes were stacked there which would have to be checked. So would the old Game Department exhibits stored in the hallway he had entered. And in the floor lobby the hall of statuary would use up time. Someone would have to check behind each of the marble figures. It would take them, if they were methodically careful, perhaps thirty minutes to work their way from the basement to the top floor. And it would be almost three hours, maybe more than three, before the first shift of custodial personnel came to work. Where could he hide? Break into an office? The noise would reverberate through the silent building—bringing them on the run. What else, then? He tried to concentrate. There was nothing else. He could only work his way downward toward the ground level—hoping for luck. Hoping that Adams would make a mistake. But Adams wouldn’t make a mistake.

Cotton considered his possibilities. The elevators were out of the question. They moved slowly, with great whining of motors and clanking of cables. Using one would be fatal. That left four stairwells. The broader, more used stairs at the ends of the shorter north-south wings or the narrower stairwells at the end of the east-west wings. He had come up the south stairs and they would take him very close to the door through which he had entered. But approaches to that door would be watched. Using the north or west stairs involved crossing the open rotunda. He had no intention of doing that. That left the east stairs, following the footsteps of the man in the blue topcoat. That was better than Adams, the hunter.

As he reached the third floor main corridor he thought suddenly of fire escapes. But where the devil were they? The building surely must have some. The fire code would demand it. He visualized the exterior of the massive old building, trying to see it in his mind’s eye as he had seen it every day for years. He saw dirty granite, ornate cornices, arrays of high, old-fashioned windows, the equestrian statue of some early governor, who had been an undistinguished general in the Civil War, in front, the broad sweep of steps flanked by stone lions leading to the formal front entrance. But he couldn’t remember where the fire escapes were located. Couldn’t remember ever noticing them. He dismissed the fire-escape idea and thought of the pressroom. His key would unlock that. And he could telephone the police for help. But if they watched any room it would be the pressroom—the natural place for him to go. Where else could he reach a telephone?

He stopped at the doorway where the two men had talked below him. The lettering, barely visible in the dim light, said ad valorem tax division. The knob wouldn’t turn. Down the dark hallway he stopped again at the door labeled income tax division: file room. That, too, was locked.

He remembered then that on the second floor main below him was a janitor’s room. If there was a nightwatchman (There
must
be a nightwatchman. Where could he be? Asleep somewhere? Or dead?), then this room might be his hangout. The door might be unlocked. And it surely had a telephone.

He ran down the stairs, carefully, soundlessly. At the bottom he paused to listen. Silence. Then a faint, faraway clattering sound. Perhaps a box toppling in the basement. Silence again. The janitor’s room was across the rotunda in the west wing. He walked rapidly (too much risk of sound with running). Now that his logic assured him that death was likely, his mind made it seem unreal. He crossed the rotunda floor without the dread he had expected. And now the janitor’s door was less than fifty feet away.

“Be open,” Cotton prayed. “Be open.”

The door was closed, but the knob turned easily in his hand. He closed it behind him. Inside there was almost total blackness. Cotton stood with his back to the door trying to recall the layout of the room. There was a desk, he thought, against the west wall, and shelves with bucket, soap and so forth. But what else? What to stumble into? He had only glanced into the room on walking past. He couldn’t remember.

Cotton was aware of a strong chemical aroma—a mixture of something astringent (ammonia perhaps?) and something which smelled sweet and sick and reminded him somehow of accidents and hospitals.

He moved cautiously toward where the desk should be, his hands groping blindly in front of him. They found the edge of the desk, touched a wire basket, papers and finally the smooth, heavy plastic of the base of a telephone.

He wouldn’t risk a light. He would dial 0 for the operator and ask her for the police. But his finger paused as it reached the proper hole. The receiver was cold. Cold and dead. No dial tone. He held it against his ear, thinking that this made no sense.

Then he heard, faintly in the dead silence, the sound of breathing.

The sound of air inhaled through nostrils, exhaled slowly, inhaled again. Regular, slow breathing. Just to his left. Only a few feet away. Cotton stepped backward. Opened his mouth. His vocal cords seemed numb. “Who is it?” he whispered. The whisper was loud, almost hysterical. “Who’s there?”

Only the sound of breathing. Someone standing there? Staring at him in the darkness? “Who’s there?” Cotton whispered again. The breathing didn’t change. Asleep? The night watchman? Cotton fumbled in his pockets, found his matches, lit one.

The flare of the light blinded him for a moment. Then he saw behind the desk a fat man looking at him. The man wore the blue uniform of capitol custodial personnel. His gray hair was mussed. His eyes, half opened, looked at Cotton’s coat front. He was asleep. Asleep with his eyes open. Then Cotton noticed the blood, a trickle down the side of his neck. And at the same instant he recognized the smell. It was chloroform.

Cotton shook out the dying match, struck another, and examined the man. The blood came from a bruised cut on his left ear. He had been apparently struck on the side of the head and then subdued with the anesthetic. Now he was sleeping it off—probably for hours. Cotton held the match high, inspecting the room. The telephone wire had been cut. The watchman’s heavy belt hung from a coat rack, its holster empty. There was no window in this interior room. Two walls were lined with shelves, cans of cleaner, jugs of liquid soap, tool boxes, rolls of insulating tape, cleaning cloths, sponges, boxes of paper towels and toilet paper. And the back wall was partly occupied by the gray metal shape of a circuit-breaker box. Cotton stared at it, at the small lock which secured its metal door, seeing a way to even the odds against him.

He moved two jugs of liquid soap to the desk top out of the way and sorted through a tool box, selecting the heaviest screwdriver. It would be noisy, so he’d have to work fast. With a fourth match, he inspected the lock. Then, working in the dark he jammed the screwdriver under the edge of the door and wrenched it outward with all his strength. The metal screeched and bent. He jammed the screwdriver further in, and wrenched again. This time the lock snapped. Cotton fumbled inside the box, snapping the circuit-breaker toggles down. There seemed to be four rows of five—four circuits for each floor of the building. He flicked them all down.

As he opened the door to what was now utter blackness, there was the sound of running feet, and then a thump and a muffled curse. One of the men—at least one—was on the second floor with him. Across the rotunda, not seventy-five yards away. And the man would know where the circuit breakers were. Where he was. Cotton fumbled at the door knob, found the locking lever, pushed it up to keep the man from restoring the power. Then he grabbed wildly at the desk for something to use as a weapon and ran from the room, slamming the door behind him.

He ran down the corridor toward the stairwell, realizing as he ran that the weapon his hand had reached was one of the plastic jugs of soap. Almost useless. He slowed abruptly, panicked at the thought of crashing blindly down the stairway. As he slowed, he heard running footsteps behind him. At that moment it occurred to him that the soap might save him. He screwed frantically at the cap and ran down the stairs, leaving a splashing stream of the liquid behind him. He reached the bottom, the bottle still gurgling, and sprinted up the dark first-floor hallway. Behind him there was a yell, turned mid-breath into a scream. And then a clattering confusion of thumping, and the sharp crack of metal striking the marble on the stair landing. Then a man moaning.

The Attorney General’s office was about here. Cotton felt along the wall, found a doorway, felt the glass pane which bore the gilt lettering. He smashed at it with the soap jug, reached through the shattered glass to unsnap the lock. In the reception room he crashed into the corner of the secretary’s desk, lost his balance and fell. Outside, somewhere, a voice was shouting: “Harge, Harge. Where are you?” Cotton was up again. Finding the door to the office of Second Assistant Joey Walters. Finding his way through it, past the desk and the chairs to the window where Joey had removed the heavy screen to keep his bird-feeding box on the sill. Sliding the window up. Jumping six feet into the shrubbery below. Cursing the tearing, breaking branches. Blessing the finches which came to this window to feed, and Joey for feeding them. And then running wildly, sock-footed, across the dead dark grass under the starlight, gulping icy air, and freedom, and safety, and life.

>21<

W
hen he finally looked at his watch in Janey Janoski’s apartment it was eighteen minutes before 4
A.M.
Either the nightmare occurrence in the capitol had been incredibly brief or he had set something like a cross-country speed record in traversing the six blocks to Janey’s address. He had arrived here without really planning to do so. In his panicky race from the capitol building, his instinct for preservation had led him first down the blackness of the alley behind the Health-Welfare Building and from there down an equally dark residential alley. And then his bursting lungs and a bruised foot forced a halt which allowed his first coherent thought. The only hope of flagging a cab would be on Capitol Avenue. But at this hour there would be no cab—nor any other traffic. The first car which came along might well be his hunters, cruising the streets, knowing that anything that moved would be he. His second thought was to arouse some householder and ask to use the telephone. But when that thought arrived, he was halfway down a third alley and only three blocks away from Janey’s place. He had stood in the darkness a long time—watching and listening, making sure he wasn’t followed—before he rang her bell.

“I’m warning you right now,” Janey Janoski said. “When you finish that cup of coffee you’re going to have to answer two questions. If you don’t I’m going to make you go home.”

“Which two?” He could think of a dozen.

“What did you do with your shoes, for starters? And why are you out jogging at four in the morning? And why not tell the police to come and talk to you? And what in the world happened at the capitol tonight? And . . .”

“That’s more than two. I don’t want the police to know where I am because I don’t want anybody to know where I am,” Cotton said. “And that’s because I just had the living hell scared out of me, and I’m still scared, and if you give me a minute or two to recover my normal lion-hearted courage, then maybe I’ll decide I don’t mind if the police know where I am.”

“I think maybe the man at the police station thought I was drunk,” Janey said. “He wanted to know how I knew the nightwatchman had been chloroformed, and how I knew somebody broke into the Attorney General’s office, and how I knew they should be looking for a man in a blue overcoat and a man in a red windbreaker with a cast on his arm, and . . .” Janey paused, and took a breath, “who I was.”