The Long Vendetta

by Clifton Adams

  “The sniping wasn't for me; it was for Jeanie.”

  The lieutenant interrupted the ritual of lighting his pipe. “Miss Kelly? How does that figure?”

  “I don't know how it figures, but I know it was Jeanie he was after with that rifle tonight. He missed me clean with both shots. It was dumb luck that Jeanie wasn't killed; it was her name on those bullets, not mine.”

  Puzzled, Garnett gazed at me over the bowl of his pipe. Only then did it occur to me that I had upset the delicate balance. That I had started the high-wire to swaying, and it was a long way down for all of us. Me and Jeanie, and the paid assassin.

  Garnett leaned forward and tapped the driver sergeant's shoulder. “Back toward the Palmer Apartments, Lavy. I think maybe we'd better talk some more to the girl.”

  I said quickly, “No!” There were beads of sweat on the back of my neck, and they were cold.

  Garnett looked vaguely surprised. “Why shouldn't we talk to the Kelly girl?”

  “Look, Lieutenant, she's had a hard night. I didn't tell her the killer was gunning for her. What's the sense of waking her up just so she can sit up the rest of the night and worry?”

  “I sort of thought she'd be doing that, anyway,” Garnett said a little too offhandedly. “I had the idea you and she were engaged, or something. You don't think it would worry her that a killer jerked you up and took you off as hostage?”

  “I called her,” I said, trying hard to keep it natural. “I called her before I talked to you, Lieutenant. I told her to take a pill and get some sleep... Can't the questions wait till later?”

  I counted every long, nervous second while Garnett made up his mind. Finally he leaned over and tapped Lavy again. “Never mind, Sergeant. We'll take Mr. Coyle home.”

  I looked at my hands and they were shaking.

  “It still doesn't make sense,” Garnett was saying. “Why would Storch suddenly drop you and go after the girl? Who changed the signals?”

  “I don't know. Whoever hired him in the first place, I guess.”

  “Brilliant deduction,” Garnett said sourly. “We know Storch is a pro, that he's merely acting as somebody else's gun. But why were his orders changed at the last moment?”

  Suddenly I thought I had the answer. “Tell me something, Lieutenant. You've seen the records on Koesler and Roach, the first two men on the killer's list. Did they have wives, or sweethearts, or a family? Was there anyone in the world, for that matter, that they gave a damn about, except themselves?”

  Garnett frowned. “I guess not. They were loners, but I don't see...”

  “Look again, Lieutenant. Roach and Koesler were killed the way they were because it was something that had to be done. A score to be settled without too much mess or fuss because, as far as the killer was concerned, there could be no real satisfaction in having them murdered. No matter how he went at it, there was no way to make them suffer as he had suffered. But me—the killer saved me for last, maybe through dumb luck. But now he knows about Jeanie, and he'll have his satisfaction.”

  “You're talking riddles, Coyle.”

  “I'm talking vendetta, Lieutenant, that has been festering in some sick brain for fifteen years.”

  “The dead German woman's husband? The father of the little girl? You think he's actually in this country, gunning for you?”

  “I think he's in this country gunning for me through Jeanie. Maybe he learned about me and Jeanie after Storch had already made his first pass. That would explain the change of signals. Now this man wants to hit me where it hurts most, Lieutenant —by getting Jeanie first.”

  Garnett sat for several seconds saying nothing. Then: “I don't like it. It's corny. All it needs is a jazz background and a hundred-dollar-a-day private eye.”

  “Have you got a better explanation?”

  He sighed. “No, I guess I haven't.”

  My apartment on Santee was in a three-story pile of crumbling red brick. I had moved in almost fifteen years before because any kind of apartment was hard to come by then, and this one had been available and cheap. For ten years I had been intending to look for something better, but somehow I never got around to it.

  Lavy pulled up in front and Garnett opened the door and let me out. “I almost forgot,” he said blandly. “Congratulations, Coyle.”

  “For what?”

  “For getting away from Storch. Wouldn't you say it's quite a trick, getting away from a man like Storch?”

  There didn't seem to be any answer to that, so I nodded. “Good night, Lieutenant. Sergeant.”

  I climbed the creaking stairs, unlocked the door to my apartment, and in my mind I kept repeating:Take it easy. Don't, for the love of heaven, do anything that might tip them the killer's in Jeanie's apartment.

  I stepped to the window and saw that the sedan was still there.Make it look natural, I thought. Snap on the lights. Act as you normally would if you weren't tied in knots and your nerve hadn't gone to buttermilk.

  I snapped on the lights. Several minutes crawled by, then the police sedan moved away from the curb and disappeared in the darkness. I began to breathe again—but not for long. As I started for the door, another car, a dark, unmarked sedan, pulled up at the curb on the other side of the street. I listened as the motor was switched off. The headlights blinked out, but the door didn't open.

  The first thing I thought was Garnett. He had radioed somebody to keep an eye on me, just in case. Then I thought something else. The killer. Not the hired gun, but the real killer who had hired Storch. Maybe that was him down there in that car, waiting to see what I was going to do.

  If it was the killer, I wanted him. If I could just get my hands on him, that much of it would be over. I'd still have Storch to deal with, but maybe Storch would listen to some sort of reason and let Jeanie go, if he knew the cops had nabbed the man who paid him. I reached for the phone and dialed the police.

  Garnett wasn't there, but I was put through to a sergeant in Garnett's division. “Mr. Coyle.” He listened politely while I told him who I was and explained about the car. He asked me to wait while he talked to the dispatcher. Maybe thirty seconds limped by while I listened to the hollow confusion in the receiver. Then: “Nothing to worry about, Mr. Coyle. Lieutenant Garnett called in a while back and asked for somebody to keep an eye on your place.”

  I didn't know whether to be relieved or angry. “Thank you, Sergeant. Thank you...” I hung up.

  I couldn't leave the apartment without being seen by the cops. Still, I had to let the killer know that I had followed his instructions to the letter. I had to convince him that he would be all right as long as no harm came to Jeanie. I had to take a chance, so I used the phone again.

  Jeanie's voice was drawn as thin as a silken thread, not in panic but in the certainty that death was at her elbow every second. I said, “Jeanie, everything's all right. I've done just likehe said, but there's been a little hitch...”

  Storch's voice broke in, cold and deadly: “That's too bad for your girl friend, Buster.”

  “Listen to me,” I said without yelling. “I dumped the Plymouth. I told the cops your story. Everything's exactly the way you wanted it. There's just one thing—the police think I need protection, so they're watching my place. I can't come back tonight without giving everything away.”

  There was a long silence.

  “All right,” he said at last, “we sit it out. You there, me and the girl here. Maybe it's good you and the cops are so cozy. Keep playin' it cozy, Buster, and maybe you and the girl will come out of this thing alive, after all. And keep your ears open when you're with the cops. I got nothin' personal against you and the girl. You figure a way to get me out of this town and I'll do right by the girl friend.”

  I thought coldly. But I said, “That's what I want. But so help me, if you as much as lay a hand...”

  I'll bet,

  “Relax, Buster. You do your part; I'll do mine. It's up to you.”

  The muscles in my throat were so tight that I
couldn't make a sound. I could almost see the killer smiling.

  “But I don't like waiting around,” he added. “When I wait I get impatient, and when I get impatient...”

  “I get the idea. Let me talk to Miss Kelly.”

  “You can talk to Miss Kelly when this is over— that is, if it works out the way I want it to and she isable to talk. So don't get cute, Buster. Handle it any way you like, but one wrong step and you've got a dead girl friend on your hands.”

  He hung up. I sat for a long while listening to the mocking hum in the receiver. Once in a demonstration of electronic equipment I saw a sound generator shatter a crystal glass with pure tone. Some singers do it with their voices; it's a favorite trick of Italian tenors. And that is what I felt like right now, one of those crystal glasses an instant before it flies all over the room. Somehow... I didn't know just how, but I was going to kill Marvin Storch.

  If I got the chance, I would shoot him in the back without the slightest qualm. Fighting fair with a man like that was like fighting fair with smallpox. All I asked was the opportunity, and I would kill him.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Sometime during the night I dozed off in a chair. It was just getting light when I awoke. I was stiff and still scared and angry. The police sedan was still across the street. That was cops for you, hanging on like bulldogs when you didn't want them, but where were they when all the shooting was going on? I limped down the stairs and had a look out the back way, just on the off chance that Garnett had overlooked something. He hadn't. A plain-clothes man lounged against a telephone pole in the alley. I went back up the stairs and got the gas hotplate going and the coffee started. I wondered if Garnett had gone to bed or if he was so hot to land Storch that he'd checked sleeping off his schedule. I wondered about a lot of things while the coffee boiled and tried not to think of Jeanie. It wasn't easy. Like not noticing that your heart had stopped beating, or that your clothes were on fire.

  I don't know why I hadn't thought of it before, but I was halfway through my first cup of coffee when I remembered the Luger. It was my only souvenir of the war, a lethal little beauty of blued Krupp steel that I'd taken off a Kraut officer and now kept carefully wrapped in oiled rags, stuck away at the back of a dresser drawer. I got the pistol and unwrapped it. I looked at it with a kind of cold affection that men can have for fine steel. I took it in my hand, getting the feel of it, pleased with its heft and balance. Finally I removed the clip and checked its action. It was perfect. That Kraut had known his guns. The sear had been worked down and only a whisper of trigger pressure was needed to put the deadly mechanism in motion.Tchuck! Like the shutter click on a high-speed camera. The sound of unleashed violence.

  I promised myself,I'm going to kill Marvin Storch.

  With this gun,

  I thumbed the cartridges out of the clip and carefully wiped each of them. It was old ammunition, but I somehow knew that the round with Storch's name on it would do its work, and that was all that mattered.

  It was a strange Buck Coyle who stood there in the gray morning light so fondly caressing a gun that he hadn't bothered to look at in more than ten years. It was a Buck Coyle that I didn't recognize or like, but he had taken charge in anger and there was nothing I could do to stop him.

  It took almost an hour to detail strip the pistol, clean every part and put it together again. Outside, it was growing lighter. The smell of coffee and bacon seeped through the floor and walls of my apartment. The cop in the sedan got out and stretched his legs and yawned. He glanced at his watch and peered up and down the street. Looking for his relief, I thought.

  Then I saw the other cop, the one that had been staked out in the alley, round the corner of the building and call something to the first cop. The first cop looked at his watch again. They walked toward each other and started jawing.

  Something in the back of my mind nudged me. If I was to get out of the building without them seeing me, now was the time. I shoved the Luger into my hip pocket, grabbed my coat off the back of a chair and made for the stairs.

  Out the back of the building, up the alley, and into another street.

  I wished for my M.G., but it was still parked in front of the Palmer, unless one of Garnett's brothers in Traffic had spotted it and towed it away. I wished for a cruising hack to happen along and get me out of the neighborhood fast, but that was the morning for cabbies to be doing something else. So I walked. Walk, don't run, I told myself. Finally, I reached the end of the block and stepped onto a thoroughfare, and that took off some of the weight. Finally a cab came along and I gave the driver the Palmer's address.

  When the taxi turned into the street I saw another of those familiar unmarked sedans parked across the street from the apartment building. Because of what I had told Garnett about the attempt on Jeanie's life, he had already staked out her protection. It was a sour joke that the killer they were protecting her against had spent the night right under their noses in Jeanie's own apartment.

  Then a thought hit me and left me in a cold sweat. Storch was a careful man, a pro, so he must have spotted the police car by this time. I could only imagine the kind of rage he must be in, figuring that I had double-crossed him. The picture in my mind made me sick, but reason told me that he hadn't killed Jeanie yet. He wouldn't kill either of us until the very last minute. We were too valuable to him alive.

  I had the cabbie stop in front of the Palmer. I got out and walked over to the police sedan, and a lanky, rawboned plain-clothes man peered at me bleakly. Then he said, “Good morning, Mr. Coyle. You always up this early?” He saw that I was surprised that he knew me. “I pulled duty at the hospital when you were there,” he said. “My name's Fenton. Sergeant Fenton.”

  I tried not to keep watching the window of Jeanie's apartment and wondering if Storch was watching me. I said as pleasantly as I could manage, “Glad to see you again, Sergeant. It is pretty early, I know, but I wanted to check with Miss Kelly before going to work.”

  The sergeant grinned and nodded. He remembered Jeanie from the hospital.

  I said, “Has everything gone... all right, Sergeant?”

  “Smooth as silk, Mr. Coyle. There's a man watching the back of the building, too. We'll keep a sharp eye on Miss Kelly until they catch the murderer—and that won't be long.”

  “I hope you're right, Sergeant.” Then I wished him good morning and headed toward the Palmer.

  In front of Jeanie's door, I changed the Luger from my hip pocket to my waistband under my coat, and prayed for just one single unguarded second on Storch's part. That didn't seem too much to ask. I knocked.

  “Jeanie, it's me. It's Buck.”

  The door came open, fast. Jeanie stared at me with eyes that hadn't closed since I had seen her the night before. Storch held her left wrist behind her in a punishing wrist lock, and he had the muzzle of the .38 jammed in her throat, beside a throbbing artery.

  “In, Buster,” he snarled. “Easy, now, or the girl gets it.”

  I had been right about one thing—waiting hadn't done Storch's temper any good. I stepped inside, and he kicked the door closed. Then, in an explosion of rage, he hurled Jeanie against the wall and slammed the .38 in my stomach. I spewed and bent almost double. He straightened me with a vicious underhand blow with his left fist and then rode me back against the wall with Jeanie.

  “So you just had to go and play it cute, didn't you, Buster? You think I'm blind or something? You think I can't spot a cop as far as I can see, even if he is in plain clothes and drives an unmarked car? Looks like I made a mistake about you, Buster. You're a lot more stupid than I figured.” Storch shoved his face close to mine. “Go ahead! Give me an excuse. Just any excuse at all!”

  Just then I found my voice and said an especially stupid thing, even for me, “Since when does Marvin Storch need an excuse for killing?”

  He blinked, then looked vaguely amused. “You got no brains, Buster, but you got moxie; I'll give you that much. I like boys with moxie. When a slug sets th
eir insides on fire, I like to hear them cry.”

  Death was so close that I could almost hear them shoveling dirt on my coffin. It didn't seem possible that anything I might do could make matters worse, so I spit right in his flat face.

  He couldn't actually believe that I had done it. Only a sigh away from death, and I had spit in his face. Maybe a dozen seconds passed. We didn't make a sound. We didn't even breathe. Then, slowly, his loose mouth began to curl in a smile so cruel that it set my scalp to prickling. And he lifted his hand— his gun hand—in a distracted sort of way to wipe at his face.

  Here was the second I had prayed for. I grabbed for the Luger.

  He recognized the play and stopped it with brutal efficiency. He merely dropped his raised gun hand, crashing the butt across the bridge of my nose. My hand never reached the Luger. I felt the grinding of bone and cartilage and knew that my nose was broken, and then a blinding fireworks display went off just behind my eyes.

  When I could see again he had the Luger in his left hand and the .38 in his right, and I was on the floor and he was standing over me smiling that loose-lipped smile. And he was saying to Jeanie, with cold unconcern:

  “Go ahead, yell your head off—if you want to see him get it.”

  The scream got as far as Jeanie's eyes, and that was all. Suddenly she crumpled to her knees and hid her face in her hands and sobbed with a bitterness to break your heart—all without making a sound. I started toward her and Storch kicked me back.

  My eyes watered and the throbbing in my nose spread all through my head. I started toward Jeanie again and got kicked back again. Storch said coldly, “I never saw such a dumb head. You're just begging for it, ain't you, Buster?”

  I got up on my knees and tried to master the knack of breathing through my mouth. “I don't get it,” I said, thinking out loud. “Why don't you go ahead and kill me?”

  Now there was a glint of triumph in his eyes. “That's not the way my orders read, Buster. The girl gets it first, then you.”

  “Who gave you those orders? Who's paying you?”