The Heaven Makers Read Online Free PDF Page A

you,” Mossman said. “I’ve told him you’re coming. It shouldn’t take more’n twenty minutes to get down here. Hurry it up, will you?”
    “Sure, Clint. Right away.”
    Thurlow put the receiver back on the phone. He prepared himself for the pain of light, turned on the bedside lamp. His eyes began to water immediately. He blinked rapidly, wondered if he’d ever again be able to experience sudden light without pain.
    The realization of what Mossman had said began to grow. His mind felt numb. Ruth! Where is Ruth? But that wasn’t his concern any more. That was Nev Hudson’s problem. He began dressing, moving softly as he’d learned to do in the nights when his father was still alive.
    He took his wallet from the nightstand, found his wristwatch and buckled it onto his left wrist. The glasses, then—the special polarizing glasses with their adjustable lenses. His eyes relaxed as soon as he put them on. The light took on a sharply defined yellow cast. He looked up, caught a view of himself in the mirror: thin face, the dark glasses behind heavy black rims, black crewcut hair high at the temples, nose long with a slight bulge below the glasses, wide mouth with slightly thicker lower lip, Lincolnesque chin, blue-shadowed and with divergent scar-like creases.
    A drink was what he needed, but he knew he couldn’t take the time. Poor, sick Joe Murphey, he thought. God what a mess!

Chapter 5

    Thurlow counted five sheriff’s cars drawn up at an angle to the curb in front of the Murphey Building as he pulled to a stop across the street. Spotlights drew patterns of erratic brilliance across the front of the three-story building and the blue and white sign above the entrance: “J.H. MURPHEY COMPANY—FINE COSMETICS.”
    The lights reflected bursts of brilliance off the sign. The reflections speared Thurlow’s eyes. He slipped out on the curbside, searched for Mossman. Two furtive huddles of men crouched behind cars across the street.
    Has Joe been shooting at them? Thurlow wondered.
    He knew he was exposed to the dark windows of the building across there, but he felt none of the fragile loneliness he’d experienced in fire fights across the rice paddies of the war. He felt it was impossible that Ruth’s father could shoot at him. There’d been only one direction for the man to explode—and he’d already done that. Murphey was used up now, little more than a shell.
    One of the officers across the street pushed a bullhorn around the rear of a car, shouted into it: “Joe! You, Joe Murphey! Dr. Thurlow’s here. Now you come down out of there and give yourself up. We don’t want to have to come in there shooting.”
    The amplified voice boomed and echoed between the buildings. In spite of the amplifier’s distortions, Thurlow recognized Mossman’s voice.
    A second floor window of the Murphey Building opened with a chilling screech. Spotlight circles darted across the stone facing, centered the movement. A man’s voice shouted from darkness behind the window: “No need to get rough, Clint, I see him over there. I’ll be down in seven minutes.” The window banged shut.
    Thurlow ducked around his car, ran across to Mossman. The deputy was a bone thin man in a sack-like tan suit and pale cream sombrero. He turned to reveal a narrow face full of craggy shadows from the spotlights’ reflections.
    “Hi, Andy,” he said. “Sorry about this, but you see how it is.”
    “Has he been shooting?” Thurlow asked. He was surprised at the calmness of his own voice. Professional training, he thought. This was a psychotic crisis and he was trained to handle such matters.
    “No, but he’s got a gun all right,” Mossman said. The deputy’s voice sounded weary and disgusted.
    “You plan to give him his seven minutes?”
    “Should we?”
    “I think so. I think he’ll do exactly what he said he’ll do. He’ll come down and give himself up.”
    “Seven minutes and no more then.”
    “Did he say why he wanted to see