Cornered! by James McKimmey Read Free Book Online Page B

of him…
    “Don’t like my bacon so damn well done,” he said.
    “I tried to do it the way you like.”
    “Maybe you don’t know how to do anything the way I like. Maybe it’s too bad you’re here and Ma isn’t. She knew everything there was to know.”
    He stood up and disappeared into the parlor. He reappeared dressed and shoved his thick arms through the sleeves of a heavy mackinaw. “You going to town today?”
    “I’d planned on it.”
    “Well, I don’t have chains on the sedan yet. I didn’t count on that today. I got to go clear over to Webster in the truck in this damn storm.”
    “If I knew how, Ted—”
    He laughed harshly. “You couldn’t do anything in this world if I didn’t watch you. And I don’t have time to be teaching you how to put chains on a car! I’ll do it myself.”
    She looked at him in honest wonderment. Then she said, “Did your mother know how, Ted?”
    “Sure she did! She did it lots of times!”
    She examined him closely, nodding.
    “Got to get going,” he said, pulling a wool-lined cap over his hair, unfolding the flaps down over his ears. “See you try to keep from getting sassy with every man in town, do you hear?”
    Her examination of him turned from curiosity to amazement. For a moment she was ready to laugh. He’d only started this kind of thing recently. She could still not believe he was serious. But he was, she saw, dead serious.
    “Ted, you don’t honestly believe that I—”
    “Damn, yes!” He left the house, slamming the door against a gust of snow-driven winter wind.
    By midmorning over coffee she had become entirely introspective. And she had again allowed her feeling of fear to be felt fully. She thought of how Tony Fearon must be sitting in his cell right now, dreaming, she was certain, of how it would be when he knew she was dead, just as he’d threatened…
    Shortly after that she got into the old sedan that Ted had readied earlier with chains. She drove into Arrow Junction and parked outside the Arrow Junction General Store.
    She walked inside and saw Dr. Hugh Stewart. When they exchanged smiles, something warm and strange happened to her. It was a feeling of having seen someone truly familiar again, as though suddenly everyone in this community including Ted had become strangers—everyone except herself and Hugh Stewart.
    She walked down the length of the counter, noticing Charlie Bacon, then Bob Saywell as he came around the end of the counter.
    At that moment George Herbert had burst into the store and announced what had happened in Corly Adams’s service station that morning. Ann could not be certain. But it seemed exactly what she had been waiting for—a positive sign that death was approaching on the run.
    The trouble in Graintown could have been the result of any two hoodlums, any pair of bandits. But the premonition in Ann Burley, as she fainted, had become an engulfing terror.

 
chapter eight
     
    When Dr. Hugh Stewart drove Ann Burley home at midday, Bob Saywell immediately prepared to make his trip through the storm to Graintown and the public library. As Bob Saywell passed the Burley farmhouse and noted the automobile of Dr. Hugh Stewart parked in the farmyard, Billy Quirter was on his way to the railroad yards.
    Billy was cold. But he moved with a deadly determination. He ran from the back of a woodshed through a grove of elms and oaks. The wind whipped at him, slicing through with its cold to the inside of his bones. The snow now was like fine white sand, granular, stinging when it struck Billy’s freezing face. But Billy darted relentlessly from cover to cover.
    The railroad yards were on the northeast edge of Graintown. At the east end was the train depot. Outside the depot, the tracks moved westward a short distance to the switch-offs for the cattle and hog pens on the tip-end of Graintown’s small stockyards. At that point lay two alternate tracks that carried the stock cars to the loading chutes. Two boxcars stood