“Down near Wyocena, on Route 16. The name of the place is Wofford’s.”
“And Peggy’s down there?”
“Yeah. In Room 24.”
“Okay,” Mike Fitzpatrick said. “Let’s get going, then. Wofford’s Motel, on Route 16. Come on.”
They went downstairs, the four of them—Fitzpatrick, his two fellow thugs, and Keller. Fitzpatrick’s car was out in front of the hotel—a long, slow, sleek sedan, with Illinois license plates. The car made Keller’s auto, which was two years old, look like a venerable heap.
“You drive ahead,” Fitzpatrick ordered. “We’ll follow along behind you.”
“Okay,” Keller said nervously.
He got into his own car and started it, driving back through the quiet streets of the town toward the highway. He saw the low black sedan in his rear-view mirror, keeping twenty or thirty feet behind him. His hands gripped the wheel tightly. It was all like something out of a nightmare, he thought. Kidnappings, gangland vendettas, black sedans with Illinois plates.
His mind’s eye leaped ahead fifteen minutes or so, to the arrival at the motel. He could see it all clearly—Fitzpatrick and his men going up to Room 24, knocking on the door; then the door opening, the sudden unexpected blaze of gunfire, Fitzpatrick falling in a bloody heap while Coppola and his gang raced for their cars and made a getaway.
On the other hand, he pictured what would happen if through some miracle Fitzpatrick or one of his men escaped the lead fury. Certainly they would kill him, for having decoyed them into the trap. They would not care that he had had no choice; all that interested them was the fact that the salesman had led them into a deathtrap.
Keller’s jaws tightened. His face was a pale, sweating mask. Desperately, he wanted out. He desired no part in the violence yet to come. He wanted to be a dozen miles away when the first explosions of gunfire began.
In no time at all, they were approaching Wofford’s Motel. Keller glanced at his watch. Almost eleven o’clock. The few miles between the motel and Portage had slipped by too fast. Now they were here. Now it was time for the showdown. A new thought occurred.
Suppose Coppola opened fire the moment Fitzpatrick stepped from his car? Keller was sure to get caught in the middle, that way. Bullets would be flying in every direction. It was not safe to enter the motel’s parking court. Perhaps Coppola intended to kill him, too, just to eradicate the one witness who might be able to help the police untangle the night’s violence.
He made up his mind. He slowed his car to a halt while he was still a hundred yards from the entrance to the motel. He yanked back the handbrake and got out. Fitzpatrick’s car had stopped not far behind his. Keller walked over to the parked sedan.
Fitzpatrick was sitting in front, next to the driver. He unrolled his window and looked out. The gangster’s face was shiny with sweat. Evidently Fitzpatrick was suspicious of a trap.
“What’s going on?” the mobster demanded. “How come you stopped out here on the road?”
“The motel’s right in front of us,” Keller said. “You go on around me and drive in. I’m gonna go up the road for a cup of coffee before I go in.”
“Like hell you are, bud,” Fitzpatrick snapped. “You ain’t going for any cups of coffee right now.”
“Huh? Look here—”
“You look here. How much does the girl owe the management for two days’ rent?”
Keller was startled by the question. He stammered for a moment before saying, “Oh, eighteen or nineteen bucks, I guess.”
“Good.” Fitzpatrick peeled two crisp new ten-dollar bills from a thick roll. “This ought to cover it, then. Here. Give her the dough and tell her we’re waiting up the road for her.”
Keller stared at the two bills in his hand. He hadn’t expected Fitzpatrick to pull something like this.
“Why can’t you go in there and check her out?” Keller asked.
Fitzpatrick smiled coldly. “These days I don’t go walking in nowhere without a couple of affidavits first. How do I know this ain’t some kind of trap?”
Keller tongued his dry lips.
How right you are! he thought silently. But what did he do now? He couldn’t possibly produce the girl.
“Whatsamatter?” Fitzpatrick demanded roughly, when Keller remained silent. “There is funny business going on here, ain’t there? Ain’t there?”
“No funny business,” Keller said thinly. “The girl sent me to get you.”
“Okay, then bring her out here.”
Keller nodded helplessly. An idea struck him. He walked away, down the hundred yards of road and into the motel court. He stood behind some shrubbery for a couple of minutes, then walked out again and back to Fitzpatrick’s car.
“Well?”
“She won’t come,” Keller said. “She says she’s afraid to trust anybody. You have to go in there and get her yourself.”
Without a word, Fitzpatrick got out of his car, slamming the door hard. He walked over to Keller. With a lightning-fast motion he got one hand clamped around Keller’s throat and shook him.
Keller made no attempt to defend himself. Not against three men with guns. He sputtered and tried to breathe.
Fitzpatrick grated, “It’s a trap, ain’t it? Coppola’s holed up there with Peggy, and he’s waiting for me to come waltzing in and get cooled. Well, I’m just as smart as he is, and maybe a little smarter! Answer me! Is it a trap or isn’t it?”
Keller made a strangling sound. Fitzpatrick released him, and Keller gasped for breath. After a minute he said, “Don’t know what you’re talking about—traps—girl asked me to drive up to Portage and—”
Fitzpatrick slapped him hard, backhand. Blood began to well from a split corner of Keller’s lower lip. The gangster said after a moment, “All right, wise guy. We’ll see whether it’s a trap or not. You’re going to spring it.”
“I’m telling you—”
“Shut up. Come on. We’ll all go walk into that motel court. You can lead the way. You can walk up to Room 24 and knock on the door. Then the door opens. If it’s a trap, you’re the first one who gets shot.” Fitzgerald gestured with his thumb. “Let’s go.”
The hundred yards seemed to take forever. Keller’s legs longed to fold up under him.
He knew what would happen as soon as he entered the main plaza of the motor-court leading the three gangsters. Coppola’s men would open fire. He would be cut down along with Fitzpatrick and the others. Fitzpatrick was counting on having Keller crack before they reached the entrance. Fitzpatrick was right. Ten yards still remained when Keller said, “Hold it,” and stopped.
“You want to tell us something?” Fitzpatrick asked.
“Yeah,” Keller said, breathing heavily. “I don’t have anything to do with this. I’m just a guy who checked into the motel tonight. But you guessed right—it is a trap. Coppola and two other guys are in Room 24 with your girl. I guess the idea is to gun you down when you go to get her. They said they’d kill my wife and children if I didn’t decoy you into it.”
Fitzpatrick’s smile was ugly. “Good thing you wised up and told us in time, pal. This switches things around a whole lot.”
He glanced at one of his companions. “Get some rope from the car, Sammy.”
The heavyset thug jogged back to the sedan, opened the trunk, and took out a coil of hemp. Returning, he and his comrade quickly trussed Keller’s legs together, then his arms, while Fitzpatrick supervised.
“This is just to keep you out of trouble for a while,” Fitzpatrick explained. “And so we can find you again later if you’ve pulled some kind of triple-cross on us. So long, sucker.”
Keller lay by the side of the road, a hundred yards from his own car, unable to move, and watched the three gangsters stealthily move toward the entrance of Wofford’s Motel. The furnace salesman was bathed in his own perspiration by now. Thoughts spun wildly through his mind, as he figured all the possibilities and tried to compute the way they would affect him.
No doubt Fitzpatrick and his men would try some kind of sneak assault on Room 24. Keller figured the different things that might happen. If Fitzpatrick and his two fellow hoods succeeded in killing the Coppola outfit, they might still come back here and kill him too, just to silence him. But if Coppola emerged the victor, he would probably go after Keller for having betrayed him—or even just to shut him up.
Either way, Keller realized coldly, he was a dead man. Whether Fitzpatrick’s side won the duel or Coppola’s. His only hope was that all of them get killed. Every last one. Only then would he be safe.
The road was utterly silent. No cars were coming by—not now, after eleven o’clock. Keller wondered what Fitzpatrick planned to do. Duck around back, perhaps. Or try to lure Coppola into the open.
He momentarily stopped conjecturing and fought with his bonds. They were well tied; they sliced painfully into his wrists and ankles. But he knew a little about knots. And he had strong fingers. He struggled to maneuver himself into a position where he could go to work on the ropes.
There, he thought, bending and twisting backward. His clutching fingers managed to snag the ropes binding his ankles. It was difficult work. A chill wind roared down on him. In the forty-degree weather, his hands were growing numb rapidly.
But he had an end of the rope, now, and he deftly twisted and maneuvered. He had to get free, he told himself. Had to. For Beth and the kids.
The rope gave momentarily in his hands. He took up the slack, weaved it through a loop, and suddenly he realized that he was going to get his legs free. The knot was open. It was just a matter of unwinding the tight cord, now. Around and around and around, and abruptly he could move his legs again. He paused for a moment, letting the circulation return. Then, bracing himself against a tree, he clambered to a standing position.
Hands, now. That was a tougher proposition. His wrists were pinioned behind his back, and it was impossible for him to reach the cord with his fingers. He looked around, hoping to find something he could use to sever the cord with. Rub it against a tree trunk? That might take forever before the friction weakened the rope. But there had to be some way. He had to get free. His heart pounded mercilessly. Five minutes had passed since the Fitzpatrick outfit had entered the motel grounds. What was happening? Why was it so silent?
The car, Keller thought in sudden triumph.
Fitzpatrick’s sedan was parked just behind his own car. Breathless, Keller ran to it. It was as he thought. The sleek sedan sported a hood ornament—a streamlined torpedo shape that came to a sharp point!
Keller approached the mobster’s car back-first. He put his feet on the bumpers and stood up, leaning back, so his wrists faced the sharp hood ornament. He set to work, digging the point of the ornament between the fibers of the rope, ripping, weakening. It was tough work. But he kept at it, twisting and pulling and once almost toppling face-forward off the bumpers.
And finally the frayed rope snapped.
Keller whipped his arms apart. Feverishly he undid the knots, ripped off the fragments of rope, freed himself. He rubbed his aching hands together. He was free!
His first thought was to get into his car and drive away. Far away, maybe even home to Beth. He could always come back some other time to pick up his belongings from the motel owner.
But a moment later he realized with strange clarity that to run away now was the worst thing he could do. He had to stay here and find out what happened. He had to make sure none of Coppola’s gang escaped to make good their threat against him and against his family. He had to make sure none of Fitzpatrick’s men escaped to carry out vengeance against him. He could not run away now. If he did, he would live in lingering fear, never knowing when violence would enter his life once again.
He stood there, thinking things through. Suddenly a single shot split the silence of the night. Keller frowned.
Then, cautiously, he began to make his way toward the entrance to Wofford’s Motel.
Two more shots—and a man’s scream—shattered the night before Keller reached the entrance. He paused for a moment at the arched neon gateway to the motel. For the second time tonight he was sticking his neck out when it was safer just to remain hidden away like a turtle in its shell.
But this time he had to know what was happening.
He ducked around the gateway and peered into the long L-shaped court of the motel. Lights were on all over the place, but no one was coming out of his room to investigate the shooting.
Keller glanced up at Room 24. The front window, he saw, had been splintered by a bullet.
Suddenly bright bursts of light spurted from the facing wing of the L. Keller ducked instinctively, but the shots were not aimed for him. He realized that Fitzpatrick’s men were lying in the courtyard, concealed behind two of the parked cars. From where he stood he could see them plainly—the heavyset one named Sammy, and the thin, short one. Fitzpatrick was nowhere to be seen. His two henchmen lay behind the cars, sighting over their hoods and pumping shots through the window of Room 24. All the way across the court, on the facing wing of the L, they were drawing fire from two men Keller had never seen before. He realized that these must be other confederates of Coppola. He remembered that Coppola had said that three more “associates” of his were registered in other rooms of the motel.
Then he saw the third “associate.” There was a man sprawled grotesquely out in a pool of blood, almost at the feet of the two Coppola thugs at the far side of the motor court. So one of the pudgy gangster’s men was dead or seriously wounded already. That left five, including Coppola himself, to fight off three attackers. That is, if Fitzpatrick were still alive.
From his vantage point near the entrance to the motel, Keller watched the thin Fitzpatrick man edging through the side of the motor-court while the bigger one covered him. Suddenly Keller heard shots from a distance, muffled-sounding.
He knew where Fitzpatrick was. The scar-faced man had gone around back of the motel, and was firing into the rear window of Room 24. Another scream told him that a second Coppola man had been hit. The men in Room 24 were under attack from both front and rear, now.
But the two men at the far end of the L were preventing any careful assault from the front, because they were keeping up a more or less constant fire.
Keller wondered about the girl in the room under fire. Probably she was locked in the bathroom and out of danger. But was Fitzpatrick so anxious to kill Coppola that he was willing to risk hitting the girl? Evidently he was, Keller realized.
There was another exchange of shots. One went astray and smashed into the window of Room 23, Keller’s room. He grinned despite himself. It was a lucky thing he was somewhere else, he told himself.
For two or three minutes after that exchange, there was silence. By this time, Keller thought, the motel proprietor had probably notified the police of the gun battle. But it would take time for the cops to arrive—maybe as much as ten or fifteen minutes, if they were coming from Portage, the nearest good-sized town. Plenty could happen in ten or fifteen minutes.
Keller noticed that the thin man was still creeping toward the porch, despite an occasional burst from the two strafers on the other wing of the motel. A sudden loud interchange of shots took place and one of the two Coppola men uttered a horrible gargling scream and dropped forward onto the concrete parking area.
Two Coppola men down now. The remaining man out there huddled behind a stanchion and pumped a fruitless shot toward the two Fitzpatrick men. The odds were narrowing, now. Four against three.
But where was Fitzpatrick?
Keller heard a sudden voice.
Coppola’s. “Fitzpatrick, can you hear me? Call off your men or I’ll kill the girl! I’ll kill her!”
Silence.
Then, out of nowhere, the sound of shattering glass, followed by a howl of rage.
Smoke began to pour from the front window of Room 24. A curious greenish greasy smoke.
Keller realized why Fitzpatrick had been silent so long. The ga
ngster had obviously taken the opportunity to slip around back through the dark woods, past the motel grounds, back to his car. He had taken some sort of gas bomb out and, returning, hurled it through the rear window of Room 24.
Coppola was smoked out! Keller heard choking, coughing sounds. Smoke still billowed through the broken window. He wondered how long Coppola and his two henchmen could remain in the room.
He got his answer a moment later. The door of Room 24 was flung open. The youthful blond boy Keller had seen with Coppola earlier emerged. Blood already streaked his white shirt, and Keller realized that he was the one who had been wounded before. Now he came out coughing and screaming, with a gun in his right hand and his left arm thrown over his eyes.
The thin Fitzpatrick man sprang up immediately and fired two shots. The blond boy grabbed at his middle as a spout of red suddenly burst forth. He toppled forward, tumbling over the low railing and dropping with a heavy thud onto the hood of somebody’s parked car.
But in the same instant the gun of the remaining Coppola mobster across the motor-court spoke. This time his aim was accurate. The thin man fell, yelling.
Keller revised his score. There were still two men in the room, Coppola and the hard-faced man, along with the girl. A third Coppola man was dug in for sniping across the way. Fitzpatrick was someplace in the back of the motel, and the heavyset man named Sammy was stationed out in front, behind a parked car.
Three against two. But it could only be a few more seconds before the smoke bomb forced Coppola and has aide out of Room 24. And in only a few more minutes the police would be here to mop up the survivors.
Fitzpatrick had appeared now. He came suddenly around the other side of the motel, rounding the L no more than fifty feet from Keller. But he did not even see Keller. The gangster took careful aim and blew the head off Coppola’s sniper.
Two against two. And Fitzpatrick and Sammy were still fresh, while the two men in the room were struggling against the effects of a gas bomb.
Blood on the Mink Page 15
