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.There was a doorway across the room in front of him and another in the wall to his left.Evidently the cellar was divided into several rooms.He wondered just which one of them Mr.Findley was supposed to have been chopped up in.There was a faint light in the room to his left, and Rhodes assumed that it was coming from the outside.He shined the light down at the floor.It was dirty, but the dirt had been scuffed around.He didn’t see any ninety-year-old blood stains.“Anybody here?” he called.“Claude? Clyde? This is Sheriff Rhodes.I want to talk to you.” His voice echoed hollowly from the stone walls.There was no answer to his call, but then he hadn’t really expected one.“I’ll wait right here by the stairs for a minute.Why don’t you two come in here where we can talk?”There was still no answer.Rhodes listened closely, but he could hear no movement in the other areas of the cellar.Maybe he had been wrong.Maybe Claude and Clyde weren’t down there after all.He counted to sixty twice and was about to move into the next room when he heard something in there scrape against the stone floor.It might have been a rat, but then again it might have been something else.He waited for another minute, but the sound was not repeated.“Claude? Clyde? Is that you? I just want to talk.Your daddy’s in jail, but your mother and sister are all right.You can see them later if you come with me.”The twins, if they were there, weren’t talking.Rhodes was going to have to go looking for them.He decided to try the room with light coming in, not that there was much light at this time of day.That room was where the sound had come from, however, and if he were hiding out in a cellar, he wouldn’t want to be in complete darkness.The part he didn’t like was going through the doorway.He’d seen it done in the movies often enough, heroic cops getting a running start and lunging through the door in a forward roll, coming up with their.44 Magnums blazing, but he didn’t want to shoot anyone, and besides, he was holding a flashlight that he didn’t want to drop.The fact that he didn’t think he could do a forward roll on a stone floor, or any other kind of floor for that matter, entered into it, too.He stepped to within a foot of the door and shined the light inside.There was nothing he could see there but stone walls and spider webs.There was a small rectangular window on the wall opposite the door.The last of the late afternoon light leaked through it.Rhodes extended his arm, pushing the flashlight through the doorway.Something came out of the darkness to his right and smashed into the light, sending it crashing to the floor.The lens cracked on the stone and the halogen bulb shattered.The light went out.Rhodes was through the door and across the room almost by the time the light hit the floor.He hadn’t known for sure he could move that fast, but he was glad to see that he could.No forward roll, though.He didn’t have a.44 Magnum, but his short-barreled.38 Police Special was in his hand and he was pointing it at the two dark forms that hulked against the opposite wall on either side of the doorway.One of them was holding something that looked like a three-foot length of two-by-four.“You boys are mighty hard to find,” Rhodes said.The one with the two-by-four took a step forward.“You better stay where you are and put that thing down, Claude,” Rhodes said.“Or Clyde.”“You gonna make me?” the twin said.Good grief, Rhodes thought.He wished people would come up with some new way of making conversation with him.“Yes,” he said.“If I have to.”Claude, or Clyde, hesitated longer than Rhodes liked, but then he tossed the plank to the floor.It clattered against the stone, bounced, and lay still.“Is there another way out of here besides those front stairs?” Rhodes said.The twin who had thrown down the plank said, “No.”“Well, what do you say we go up those stairs and have our little talk, then,” Rhodes said.“This place is getting on my nerves.You two can go first.”The twins didn’t seem to like his suggestion, but after looking at one another briefly they turned and went through the doorway.Rhodes followed them [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]