Read Online with These Hands (Ss) (2002) by Louis L'amour - Free Book Online Page A

room. One of them was the doll who wore the diamonds. The other was a younger girl, not over twelve years old. While I was looking, the door opened and a guy came in with a tray. He put it down, made some crack to the girl, and she just looked at him. I could see her eyes, and the warmth in their expression would have killed an Eskimo.
    Maybe I'm dumb. Maybe you'd get the idea sooner than me. But only now was it beginning to make sense; the girls were prisoners in what was probably their own home.
    The babe who wore the ice that night had been working as a plant. She may have been forced to do it while they held her sister here. Maybe there were others of the family in there too.
    Who this bunch were and how they got here did not matter now. The thing that mattered was to get those two girls out of there, and now. Once they were safe, then we could get to Mooney and spread the whole thing in his lap.
    The trouble was I knew how these boys operated.
    Randolph Seagram, lying back there on the floor with a knife sticking out of him was evidence enough. They were playing for keeps, and they weren't pulling any punches.
    Nobody had rubber teeth in this setup.
    Nevertheless, I seemed to be cutting myself in. And that was the big question. After all, I wasn't any private dick.
    There was no payoff if I was successful and at least one of those guys in that house had reason enough to hate my insides.
    I could get down out of this tree, go back over the wall, make a call to Mooney, and then go home and get a good night's sleep.
    I had a good notion to do it. It was the smart thing to do. Except for one consideration.
    This was a tough mob. Maybe they had left the doll alone up to now. It looked as if they had. But there was no reason why they should any longer. They might decide to blow and knock off the babes when they left. They might decide to do worse. And they might make that decision within the next ten minutes.
    I am still thinking like that when I hear one of the boys down below running. He's heading toward the gate.
    Another car comes in and swings up under my tree. Two men get out, one of them carrying a briefcase.
    "Something's going down," I tell myself, "something interesting." See? That explains it. I'm just a nosy guy.
    Curious.
    There was a dark window a little to the left of the one to the girls' room. Working out on the limb ... I was out on a limb in more ways than one. I swung down to the ledge of the dark window. It was a French window, opening on a little, imitation balcony.
    With my knife blade, I got it open and stepped down in the room.
    For a moment I hesitated, getting my bearings. Then I felt my way through the room to the door.
    The hallway was dark, too, and I made my way along it to the stairs, then down. I could see light coming from the crack of a door that was not quite closed and could hear the low murmur of voices.
    Four men were inside. That scared me. There were two men outside, and two who had just arrived. Counting the three whom I already knew to be inside and the two who had just arrived, there should now have been five in the room.
    That meant that there was another guy loose in the house.
    Crouching near the foot of the stairs, I peered into the room and listened. I could see three men. One of them was a hoodlum, or I don't know the type when I see one. The other two were the ones who had come in the car, and I got the shock of my life.
    The nearer of the pair, sitting sideways to me, was Ford Hiesel, a famous criminal lawyer, a man who had freed more genuine murderers than any two living men. The man facing me across the table was another famous attorney, Tarrant Houston, elderly, brilliant, and a man who had for a time been a judge and was now director of some of the biggest corporations on the Coast. The fourth man, the one I couldn't see, was speaking.
    "You have no choice, Mr. Houston. If you attempt to notify the police, the girls will be killed. Their safety lies in your doing just what