‘Are you going to tell me who you are?’ Shearson asked them. ‘Do I get to know why you’re kidnapping me? Are you Symbionese Liberation Army? Are you Israelis? Not that it really makes a great deal of difference.’
Della ignored him. ‘I want you to step out of this door with your hands up,’ she instructed him. ‘And I’m just going to warn you that if you attempt to get away, or do anything at all except what I tell you to do, then Ed here is going to take your balls off as fast as you can say Vatican choir.’
‘Well, you can’t be Israelis,’ said Shearson. ‘Israelis never have such a colourful turn of phrase.’
‘Move!’ said Della, and pulled him towards the door.
Shearson grinned at her as he stepped out on to the landing. ‘Whatever happens, my dear,’ he told her, ‘I’d like you to know that you were a great lay.’
With Shearson ahead of them, Ed and Della walked out of the bedroom and along the landing. There was no sign of Peter Kaiser or of either of the Muldoon brothers. The house was so silent they could almost hear the dust falling.
Ed looked nervously from one side to the other as he escorted Shearson down the staircase. Shearson was humming to himself under his breath, and that unsettled Ed even more. It sounded as if Shearson knew something that he and Della didn’t.
They crossed the living area. Shearson remarked loudly, ‘I wish you’d tell me what devious political purpose this kidnap is supposed to serve.’ And almost instantly, every light in the living area was switched on, and both Muldoon brothers stepped out from passages at the side, with automatics raised in both hands.
Later, Ed remembered what happened in such detail that he couldn’t believe it had all been over so quickly. He had thrown himself forward, right on to Shearson’s back, and toppled the senator to the floor. As he did so, he had twisted himself around and seized Shearson’s neck in the crook of his arm, wrenching it back, so that Shearson’s head protected his chest. Della had dived behind one of the sofas.
Calvin Muldoon had dodged down beside a chair, squinted along the sights of his Colt .45, and fired twice. One shot had shattered a white porcelain lampshade base into a blast of snowy shrapnel. The second had echoed its way down one of the passages.
There had been a second’s silence, and then Calvin’s brother had fired a wild shot that broke a window on the other side of the room. There had been another second’s silence. Neither dared to shoot again in case he hit the senator. There had been a sharp smell of gunsmoke in the air.
‘Muldoon!’ Ed had called out. ‘Muldoon – there’s nothing at all you can do.’
‘You just try to move and I’ll get you,’ Calvin Muldoon replied. ‘Either that, or I’ll get the woman.’
Ed had thought about that, in one of those vivid, jumbled, instant flashes of processed information. Then, without hesitation, he had lifted the pump-gun and fired.
The shot had blown the stuffing out of the cushions in the chair which Calvin Muldoon had been using for cover. The room had suddenly been filled with smoke, and echoes, and hundreds of floating duck feathers. Calvin Muldoon had been hit in the neck, and he had suddenly appeared with his hand held around his throat, kneeling bolt upright, his face as horrified as one of Shearson’s Kwakiutl masks. Thick red blood had been jetting out from between his fingers across the floor, spurt after spurt after spurt. His brother had shouted, ‘Calvin! Calvin, my God! Calvin!’
Next, they were out of the door, out into the night, and running. Della was way ahead, crossing the wide front drive to the travelled stand where the cars were parked. Ed trailed fifty or sixty feet behind, trying to drag Shearson along by the sleeve of his nightshirt.
‘I can’t run! I can’t run!’ wheezed Shearson.
‘I don’t give a damn!’ Ed shouted at him. ‘Run, or I’ll blow you to big fat pieces!’
There were three cars parked by a windbreak of red pines – Ed’s own Caprice Classic station wagon, in which he had driven up to Lake Vista with Della; a Chevy Suburban wagon which the Muldoons used to drive around the grounds; and Shearson’s rented Lincoln Continental. The chauffeur, a quiet and serious man with a permanent frown, had been put up in the guest cottage close to the main gates.
‘Keys!’ said Della, as Shearson and Ed caught up with her. ‘Did you remember your car keys?’
‘I didn’t even know I was going to have to drive tonight,’ said Ed.
Shearson gasped, ‘No more running. Please. I beg you. No more running.’
Della opened the Suburban’s left-hand door, and felt around for keys. ‘No damned keys,’ she said. ‘Why couldn’t they be careless for once?’
Ed, one-handed, the pump-gun still waving at Shearson Jones, opened up the Lincoln. It smelled of leather and car-freshener. ‘No keys here, either.’
Della looked back towards the house. Peter Kaiser appeared briefly in the open front doorway, and then disappeared again. All around them the night was windy and strewn with stars. They could hear Muldoon shouting, and Peter calling, ‘Don’t do that, you’ll choke him, for Christ’s sake!’
Della bit her lip. ‘They’ll be after us in a minute. You wait until Peter Kaiser finds those papers are missing. Listen – get in the car.’
‘What’s the point? We can’t get it started.’
‘Just get in the car. It’s downhill all the way to the guest house. If you can give it enough of a push to start with, we can coast to the gates, and then get hold of the keys from the chauffeur.’
Muldoon appeared in the doorway of the house now, and unexpectedly fired a shot. Ed saw the flash of the .45’s muzzle, and heard the bullet drone away into the pines.
Shearson said, ‘You’d better make up your tiny minds, because they’re quite liable to shoot us all.’
Ed tugged open the back door of the Lincoln. ‘Get in,’ he ordered Shearson. Shearson beamed smugly, and wedged himself inside with a great show of puffing and blowing.
‘I hope you realise this is all futile,’ he said, as Ed slammed the door on him.
Della opened the passenger door. ‘Give me the gun,’ she told Ed. ‘I’ll try to give you some cover while you get us started.’
Ed looked at her for one questioning second, and then tossed the pump-gun across the roof of the car. Della caught it in one hand, without effort, as if she’d been trained in gun-handling all her life. Even Ed couldn’t have caught it like that.
Releasing the Lincoln’s parking brake, Ed gripped the steering wheel in one hand and the door frame in the other, and started to push. At first, the car wouldn’t move at all. He grunted, and pushed again, and it swayed forward about a half-inch. Behind him, Shearson Jones said, with mock concern, ‘You don’t want me to get out again, do you? Would that be of any help?’
Ed gasped, ‘You stay – where you – are. I need – the ballast—’
There was another loud shot from the house, and a bullet pinged off the Lincoln’s rear bumper. Ed shouted to Della, ‘They’re trying to hit the tyres!’
‘That’s another fallacy,’ said Della. ‘You can’t burst a tyre with a bullet. They’re aiming for the gas tank, more likely.’
‘Whatever,’ panted Ed, and heaved at the Lincoln again. Gradually, with a slow gravelly crunching sound, the limousine began to creep forward. At first it wasn’t rolling at any speed at all, and Ed was worried that it would come to a stop as soon as it came to a gentle rise in the driveway. But he kept on heaving at it, and it picked up more and more momentum, until Della had to run along beside it.
There was a crackling fusillade of pistol-shots from the house. One of them ricocheted off the Lincoln’s trunk, with a noise like a complaining seagull. Another struck the gravel close to Ed’s feet.