The Second Talmage Powell Crime Megapack

by Talmage Powell

  The old man had struggled his shoulders up and was reaching for her.

  “My—blessed—Kit!”

  His dearest Kit, returning to a house of Rats…

  Then, as she closed the distance to his bedside, the old man had the strangest impression. She moved with the effortless grace of a feline still in the jungle. He noticed the peculiar slant of her eyes. A nudge of the imagination and the pupils were elliptical and vertical. The sinewy flow of her as she sat lightly beside him suggested the pent-up power of a guarding leopardess crouched at her maharajah’s side. Her voice was a purr, as she told him he looked wonderful and everything was going to be fine.

  The impression was all in his mind of course, but—

  A soft chuckle formed in his throat. Look out, Rats, he thought, the odds have changed!

  The old man closed his eyes. He could relax now. She was stroking his forehead with a velvety paw, the talons sheathed, and the old man murmured under his breath in quiet contentment.

  “Kit—Kitty,” he was saying. “Pretty Kitty. Nice kitty.”

  TO SPARE A LIFE

  Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, March 1970.

  Marilyn speeded up, and so did the souped-up yellow and black striped hot rod behind her. Straining, she watched a lonely, twilight half mile sweep past. She took her sandaled foot from the gas pedal, slowing to a crawl. Her gaze inched to the rear-view mirror. Instead of swinging out to pass, the hot-rodder applied brakes, matching her own pace.

  A shallow pulse of panic raced through Marilyn’s throat. The steering wheel began to feel slimy beneath her long, tapering, hard-curled fingers. No doubt of it now, the cats in the hot rod had cast her in the role of mouse.

  She looked at her surroundings for some sign of life. The emptiness of interior Florida threatened her, endless acres of greasy-green palmetto broken by patches of saw grass. Here and there reared a lonely, twisted pine tree or desolate, heat-blasted cypress in funereal shrouds of gray Spanish moss. The narrow state road was a vacant needle point in the grimly darkening distance, not a light in sight.

  Marilyn drew a breath, clinging to calm. Please, she thought, be a pair of harmless kooks getting bored with the game, ready to break it off…

  A college junior, Marilyn had worked most of the summer in her father’s modest real estate and insurance company. Five days ago, his hearty, benign presence had loomed beside her desk.

  “You’re fired,” he’d said, grinning. “Take that house guest invitation from your classmate in Sarasota. Go and get your water skis wet before you have to go back to school.”

  It had been a dreamy time, with an assortment of healthy young males vying for the attention of a glowing, lovely raven-haired girl with large, dark eyes and a sense of fun and humor.

  Marilyn had stretched out the final day with the gang on the beach, her packed bags stowed in her car. Shouted good-byes, an impromptu snake dance, promises of a reunion when the new semester opened in Gainesville had marked her departure.

  She hadn’t noticed the disappearance of the two shaggy youths who had loitered some distance away and watched the beach party disdainfully. She’d seen them again briefly in the parking area, lean, tanned, tawny-maned as young lions, their bell-bottoms garish splashes of color below open-fronted shirts. They’d lounged beside the zebra-striped rod. The taller had tossed a blue pill in the air, like a peanut, and dropped his head back to catch it in his open mouth. The action had caused an uncomfortable squirm of distaste in Marilyn. She’d got in her car and quickly driven away. By taking the short-cut on the state road she could be in her small home town in north-central Florida and having dinner with Mom and Dad in less than two hours.

  With a sudden whine of racing cams and squeal of rubber, the hot rod was a yellow-black blur swinging out and roaring past. It snarled its twin chrome exhausts at her, catapulting half a mile ahead in a matter of seconds.

  Marilyn drew her first deep breath since the rod had revealed itself a few miles back. They’d been very clever and deceptive following her through city traffic and deciding which road she would take. Now they had lost interest, and her fears—

  She broke the thought with a gasp. In a grayish cloud from smoking tires the rod had slammed to a stop, reversed. It was a returning projectile.

  Drenched with icy feeling, Marilyn saw the driver looking back over his shoulder as he steered. His companion was on his knees in the seat, facing rearward, half crouched on the turtleback of the open-topped rod. He seemed to be yowling something in wild excitement.

  “Crazy pillheads…goofballs…” Marilyn choked. She twisted the wheel, taking to the outside lane, giving the rod room. In the rearview mirror she saw it again screech to a stop, almost lifting the front wheels from the rough, graveled macadam.

  She mashed the gas to the floor, gaining a bare quarter-mile lead while the rod was meshed into forward gear.

  Spidery prickles swept over Marilyn as she heard it coming, a high keening in the turgid silence. Her thoughts tumbled desperately. Can’t outrun them… Narrow road… Tricky, sandy shoulders… Don’t give them room!

  Her heart matched the laboring of the two-door’s engine as it hurtled along the very middle of the road. She watched the intermittent white lines come slashing at the center of the windshield.

  The rod rocked from one side to the other, the driver not quite taking the chance of trying to pass with two wheels on the shoulder.

  An image of coiled tension, Marilyn flicked a glance in the rearview as the rod beeped a horn that played a raucous how-dry-I-am.

  The highway was surging at her with terrifying speed, but she kept those center-line marks streaking under the hood.

  Then a hard thump and shattering of broken glass on the roof jarred the sedan. In the small mirror, Marilyn glimpsed the other car close on her rear bumper. The driver’s companion was standing crouched, holding the top edge of the windshield, drawing his arm back to throw another empty beer bottle.

  A wave of fear left Marilyn feeling faint at the thought of mangled wreckage, bloody human forms.

  She shivered, fighting the faintness. Ahead, the road made a long bend through a lovely area of banyan trees and vine-trellised cabbage palms, and fifty yards to the left of the highway in the shady clearing stood one of those out-of-the-way country stores. It was an ugly, unpainted, rambling wooden building with a long ramshackle porch and rusty tin roof, but a dim light glowed from one of the dusty windows, warmly beautiful to Marilyn.

  She did nothing to telegraph her intention to the other driver. When she was almost abreast of the store, she slammed down the brake and pulled the steering wheel over hard.

  The sedan pitched and slewed in a sickening half-spin. She fed gas, and the tires took hold. The building and lacy banyan trees swam at Marilyn. She mashed the brake pedal and the sedan slithered to a stop in a shower of sand, dust, and dead pine needles.

  She was out of the car before it stopped rocking. From the highway came the sounds of screaming rubber, the rise and fall of an angry engine, the crash of changing gears.

  Marilyn raced across the gritty planking of the gallery and threw herself against the front door. The latch was an old-fashioned metal lever which rattled as she depressed it. The door yielded perhaps half an inch. She shook it and banged on it with her fist.

  “Please…whoever’s in there…open up!”

  Her efforts created sepulchral echoes. She drew back a little. The iron hasp and heavy padlock securing the door loomed in her vision.

  A soft whimper fell from Marilyn’s lips. She slipped a glance over her shoulder. The zebra-stripe had skidded to rest near her sedan. Both youths had got out, a little hesitantly at first.

  Marilyn was chilled to inaction for a moment. Then she forced herself to move. A glance through the iron-barred window beside the stout door revealed a gloomy interior of shelves cluttered with a few canned goods, a plank counter bearing a small glass showcase, a table near the rear stacked wit
h work clothing. There was no movement, no sign of life. A single small naked bulb dangled over the rear counter, a night light, Marilyn realized dimly, required by the county sheriffs department.

  Her cheek pressed against the rough planking, her nails dug in as voices rose behind her.

  “The babe has found an empty pad, Rajah.”

  “How about that, Zeno?”

  Footsteps softly crushed across the blanket of dry pine needles on the yard, voices in the dusk…

  “She sure turns me on, Rajah.”

  “From the sec I glom her on the beach, Zeno.”

  Marilyn broke free of her paralysis, peeling away from the wall and dashing toward the end of the porch.

  “We got a hunt, Rajah.”

  “My bag, Zeno!”

  Marilyn jumped from the open end of the porch, half stumbled, darted toward the rear corner of the building.

  She heard them yelling instructions to each other. They were splitting up.

  Beyond the store, the landscape was indistinct in the twilight pall but she had an impression of swampiness, tall grasses, and a tangle of trees in the distance. Her running feet were renewed with faint hope.

  She angled away from the one who seemed nearer. She could hear his running feet directly behind her. Then she saw the shadow of the other one, flowing across the clearing to cut her off.

  She tried to change directions. Her toe caught in a tough root She pitched to her knees, flinging out her left hand to break her fall.

  She was scrambling up when she felt his presence flowing over her. She heard his breathing, glimpsed the white savage mask of a face in its growth of heavy beard.

  “No!” The word was a crazed mingle of snarl and scream. “You won’t… I won’t let you… Let me go!”

  Her left arm felt as if it were being torn from the shoulder socket. She thrashed wildly in his grip. Her mind seemed to burst. Nothing was real. Nothing mattered right then, except the sanctity of her person.

  She felt the hands of the second youth grabbing at her free arm, her shoulder, her throat. They grunted soft, vicious curses, almost no match for her transformation in this insane moment. She fought bitterly, clawing, kicking, biting.

  Then her face exploded. One of them had struck hard with his fist. The back of her head struck the stone-like bole of a wild palm as she hurtled backward and down.

  The pain lasted for a fiery fraction of a second. Then she seemed to float in a weird nothingness. She had the strangest sense of detachment, as if a stranger lay here with two sweaty, hard-breathing strangers standing over the limp body.

  A soft breeze flapped the bell-bottoms and touched bearded faces marked by her raking nails. The two standing figures were quite still for a moment, immunized to real fright by pills but touched with caution.

  “Glom the back of her head, Zeno.”

  “Yeah, all bloody.”

  “Is she dead?”

  “Who cares?”

  “Nobody saw it.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But they’ll see her car, some cruising county fuzz.”

  “So we’ll park it out of sight behind the store.”

  “How about her? She comes to, busts a window in the store, finds a telephone before we’ve made miles.”

  “Not if she’s in her car trunk.”

  “Hey, man! That’s cool! If she ain’t kaput already, she’ll suffocate before anybody finds her.”

  “Go get her car. I’ll drag her out of here.”

  Marilyn was vaguely aware of hands shoving under her armpits, of muscles straining against her weight. She sensed she was being half lifted and dragged, her heels bumping roots and grinding through sandy soil.

  She floated away. Then the pain of twisted arms and legs came through as they lifted her and stuffed her callously in the car trunk. Somewhere in her mind despairing words formed, begging for mercy. The trunk lid slammed shut over her, locking automatically, the thud of a sealed coffin.

  She was swaddled in blackness and silence for a long time. At last she choked a soft moan. Despite bleeding where the scalp had been scraped, her head wound was superficial. Her brain resumed its function with sparkles of pain.

  She tried to move. She was wedged between the trunk lid and spare tire, and she thrashed wildly for a moment, in the grip of a nauseating claustrophobia.

  She fainted in the midst of the useless, helpless effort. When she came to, she was weak, trembling, bathed in sweat.

  She could move her left arm a little, and groped in the blackness. By straining, she reached the latch, but her fingers were powerless against the hard metal.

  She fought down a fresh wave of panic. Her moving hand touched a tire tool. It was wedged under the spare. There was no way she could get it out.

  Her muscles were cramping, but the growing fire in her lungs was the more real pain. She realized she was having to breathe very fast. Her heart was racing in its hunger for oxygen.

  She tried to scream; then restrained herself. Very little oxygen was left in the sealed trunk. The faster she used it, the quicker she would die.

  Everything in her collapsed. She closed her eyes and wept silently. The pain was mounting steadily. She felt as if her chest were being crushed with a two-ton weight.

  She tried not to think of Mom, Dad, the nice young associate professor at school, the faces she would never see again.

  The scene tomorrow morning built frightfully in her mind. The storekeeper would return, see her simple black sedan, look it over, call the sheriff finally. They would talk, search the car. At last the trunk would be opened, and they would fall back and ask, “What kind of beast could do this?”

  They would lift out the cold, dead body and wish the stiff, unfeeling lips could answer the question. Perhaps in the light of day they would wish it almost as much as she wished it right now in her dying moment.

  A strange warmth suffused her. Then the fire seemed to die as her lungs gave up the impossible fight for oxygen. Bright motes began showering through her brain.

  Her face rolled limply against the spare tire. The tread roughness meant nothing at first. Then a final thought struggled—spare tire. Pounds and pounds of compressed air, loaded with life-giving oxygen; enough air, taken a sip at a time, to be alive when the storekeeper came a few hours from now.

  The thought of the zebra-striped car gave her a final ounce of strength. Her fingers fumbled along the spare tire, found the valve stem. She unscrewed the cap, set her fingernail on the tip of the core, and pressed her lips about it. She depressed the core and the first squirt of air volleyed deep into her lungs.

  Only a little at a time, Marilyn cautioned herself. It was going to be a long night but a brand new morning would come—for her and, incidentally, for a pair of pillheads.

  THE INSPIRATION

  Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, October 1970.

  Juliano stirred on the soured straw ticking, the movement of his slender body provoking a creak from the hardness of the crude plank bed. A breeze filtered out of the warmth of the Mexican night through the cracks of the slab-and-sod lean-to. It was tainted with the smells of the nearby bullring, parched sand, horse sweat, the faintest suggestion of old and rotten blood.

  Juliano stared into the darkness. The silence seemed to pulse. None of the usual small sounds came from the stable or bull pen, the pawing of a hoof, a whinny, the blowing of slobber. Even the gaunt coyotes in the desolate hills above San Carla de la Piedras were ignoring the fullness of the moon.

  Juliano squirmed to a half-sitting position, a premonition chilling him. He glanced at the lax form of Jose, his twin brother, beside him. Burro, his edgy mind formed the thought, one could not look at you and guess that our sister is in trouble.

  His angry condemnation was followed by a quick barb of remorse. Jose loved Lista even as he did. It was only that, for all their likeness, they were different. When time came to sleep, Jose slept.

  Juliano got up and pad
ded to the open doorway. Clothed in the coarse, gray cotton pantaloons in which he both worked and slept, he was tall and very slender for his fourteen years. The moonlight lent a quality of brown satin to his bony, ridged chest, wiry arms, and an almost gaunt, broad-cheeked mestizo face that was shadowed under a mane of coarse, hacked-off, black hair. His details added up to a look of a particular kind of hunger, the hunger one suspects in the sinewy puma that has survived every hardship.

  His large, liquid black eyes searched his surroundings, the shadow of the stable against which the lean-to clung, the barren stretch of dusty earth between him and the bullring thirty yards away, the pens against the wooden wall of the arena where the bulls for Sunday’s fight were black, lurking shadows.

  Nothing moved, and the night was as silent as death. The scene was suddenly not good, as it had been three years ago when he and Jose arrived barefoot in San Carla, papa’s gift of twenty centavos easing the pain of papa’s explanation that it was now time for their hungry mouths to leave his table.

  San Carla had seemed the jewel of cities to their young, goggling, peon eyes. The sun-baked buildings of board and dusty stucco were two, three, even four stories high. The narrow streets spilled their traffic into a broad plaza where pigeons flew from a towering stone monument and a man of great authority in a brown cotton uniform could make the cars stop by blowing his whistle.

  Now, memories of the time before that first day came like a burro’s kick, in sharp pictures. The mud-brick adobe on the rocky farm far back in the hills where one coaxed the straggly corn with a tireless hoe and water carried into the fields. A dung fire burning on the hearth. The pat-pat-pat of mama’s hands making tortillas. The ill-tempered old goat with one broken horn. The treasured red hen that laid eggs with two yolks. The corn-husk doll Lista had played with about the time he and Jose were born…

  Juliano went rigid in the lean-to doorway as a weak, gasping outcry came out of the night. A similar note of torment was surely what had awakened him.

  He’d taken only a few jerky steps when he saw her, a slender, twisted form on the ground beyond the corner of the barn. He ran, and fell on his knees beside her. His mind whipped away from what his eyes saw. For a second he was about to faint.