The door of Room 24 opened a second time. Keller, crouching in the shadows, stared. The girl emerged this time.
She was nude. The brightness of the almost-full moon showed her pale, lovely body, and showed the tear-stained puffiness of her face. She came stumbling out of the room as if she had been pushed.
Keller saw Fitzpatrick go racing across the motor-court toward her. It was a mistake. Abruptly fat Coppola himself came from the room. He was wearing an improvised gas mask made out of strips of cloth, evidently torn from the girl’s clothes.
Coppola chuckled harshly. Fitzpatrick was caught in the middle of the motor-court, with no place to hide. He had never expected Coppola to have been able to withstand the gassing, it seemed.
Coppola was holding the big .357 Magnum. He brushed aside the gauze that had protected his eyes and face and fired twice, in rapid succession.
The first shot caught Fitzpatrick square in the chest. The impact of the big slug ripping into him knocked the scar-faced man back almost ten feet. Fitzpatrick let out a grotesque howl and shrank into a crumpled dead heap. His gun went skittering out of his hands and came to rest no more than five paces from where Keller was hiding.
Coppola’s second shot was aimed at Fitzpatrick’s fleshy henchman, Sammy. But this time Coppola was not quite so lucky. The girl, Peggy Ryan, running wildly and blindly around the motor-court area, lurched in her hysterical flight and crossed in front of Coppola the instant his bullet was released.
Keller gasped. The .357 slug entered the girl’s body between her shoulder blades and ripped its way right through her. A fountain of blood erupted between her full, ripe breasts. She stood transfixed, a white statue stained with red, frozen in the moonlight for a fraction of a second. Then the force of the shot knocked her down.
Sammy, who had been spared by her lucky lurch, made the most of his opportunity. He rose from his hiding place behind the car and pumped two slugs into Coppola’s flabby body. The mob boss looked astonished and amazed. Coppola still had not fully realized that he had killed the girl instead of his remaining enemy. He frowned in a curious fashion, then clutched at his stomach and started to sag. Sammy tried to fire again at the falling Coppola, but his gun clicked and refused to deliver a shot. He had fired his last round.
Smoke had just about ceased to billow from Room 24 now. The gas bomb had spent itself. Sammy rose from hiding and looked around cautiously in all directions. Keller drew his breath in sharply as he saw the snout of a gun project from the glassless window of Room 24. Sammy had underestimated the number of his opponents. There was one left, the lean, hard-faced man who was the dead Coppola’s second-in-command.
The gun in the window chattered three times.
Sammy whirled as the slugs thudded into him.
“What the—”
He never finished the sentence. He went down as though his legs had instantly turned to spaghetti. The motor-court was very silent. It was the silence of the tomb.
Keller, huddled up in the dark shrubbery near the entrance, felt some of the tension ebb out of him. The duel was over. They were all dead—Fitzpatrick, Sammy, the girl, Fitzpatrick’s other thug, Coppola and the blond boy and the three others.
There had been only one survivor. The hard-faced man.
Keller shifted his feet. He was getting cramped. He looked out across the shambles that the pleasant little motel had become. Three dead men lay sprawled on the base of the L, over to his right. Closer to him lay the ugly corpse of Fitzpatrick. On the balcony was Coppola’s body. Here and there in the parking area lay the corpses of Fitzpatrick’s two henchmen, the girl, and the young blond-haired boy.
But there had been one survivor. Keller stared with new horror as he understood the full implication.
As he watched, the door of Room 24 swung slowly open for the last time. The hard-faced man came out. He looked in all directions. He had no way of knowing how many henchmen Fitzpatrick had come with.
But there was no sign of anyone else. Keller watched as the lean, cold-expressioned killer began to tiptoe across the balcony to the stairway, down to the parking area. He was going to drive away, now, before the police arrived.
The motel walls were cracked with bullet holes, and half a dozen windows had been smashed during the violent battle. No doubt the other guests had remained huddled under their beds all the while, not daring to look out. In only a minute or two, the police would probably show up.
Maybe, thought Keller, the police would get here in time to apprehend the hard-faced man.
Maybe not, though.
His mind dwelled for a moment on what might happen if the hard-faced man escaped. No doubt there were other members of the Coppola organization still in Chicago. They would want revenge. The hard-faced man would tell them of the furnace salesman who had tipped Fitzpatrick off about the ambush, and so caused the deaths of so many men.
They’ll come after me, Keller thought. They’ll kill Beth and Jeanie and Tom and the baby, and me last of all.
He could not let the hard-faced man escape.
Keller stood frozen in an agony of indecision. He was a law-abiding man. He knew how to use a gun, but he had never shot at any living thing in his life. And he knew that if he let that coldblooded killer escape, he was signing not only his own death warrant but that of his wife and children.
For the past twenty minutes, while bullets had sprayed all around, he had huddled in the shadows, strictly a spectator. But now the time had come to act.
Keller was not a particularly brave man. But now he had no choice.
Fitzpatrick’s gun lay gleaming in the moonlight, a few steps away. A hundred fifty feet further away, the hard-faced man was getting into a car.
Keller stepped forward.
His fingers closed on the warm butt of Fitzpatrick’s gun. It was, he noticed, a .38 automatic. He prayed it still had a shot or two left in it.
He straightened up. A hundred fifty feet away, the cold-faced man had the car door open. In a few seconds he would be gone, heading for Chicago and revenge.
“Hey, you!” Keller shouted. “Over here!”
The mobster paused uncertainly, before entering the car. He turned. He looked around.
Keller saw him as he stood in the moonlight—saw the cold, fleshless face of the man who so many hours ago had yanked him into a motel room and started this whole long night of violence. Keller raised the gun. He felt perfectly calm.
For Beth, he thought. For Jeanie and Tom and the baby.
He squeezed the trigger and a sound like a clap of doom exploded in front of him and a white hot pellet sprang across a hundred fifty feet of air and tore through a man’s heart. The hard-faced man dropped without a sound. Keller smiled crookedly.
He let the gun drop from his hands. In the distance, police sirens finally shrilled. The nervous reaction came sweeping up over him, and Keller laughed hysterically in relief. The night of violence was over. Beth and the children were safe from gangland vendettas. Policemen were springing from their cars and advancing into the corpse-littered motor-court. Keller walked toward them, weak-kneed but happy, to tell them all about it.
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