I'd been too busy concentrating on the job at hand to pay attention to anything else. But now, with a sensation like cold water pouring down the inside of my spine, I saw Cherry, still standing in the middle of the room. She had been watching everything I did, probably as wide-eyed as she still was, rigid, as if nailed to the floor.
I took a step toward her — and the chimes rang.
I felt the first soft lick of weakness then, at the back of my knees. After long-continued tension, or sudden and extreme emotion, that weakness comes. For a little while. It passes. But it had come too soon. Everything was falling apart, going to hell. And Cherry was right in the middle of it, right in the way.
I moved fast to Cherry, sliding my feet on the carpet.
"Get out of here!" I said softly, but it sounded like a distant yell. "You want to get killed?"
She snapped out of it. But she hadn't moved yet.
The seconds were dying. Too many seconds. I turned my head toward the door and called, "Yeah, yo! That you, Paul?" I guess that's what I said; I'm not too damn sure what I did say.
Then I put my face about two inches from Cherry's and hissed, "Cherry, get into the bedroom!"
Her eyes were dark with something like panic. She looked as if she were going to faint. Her mouth was stretched wide and the corners were jumping up and down, twitching like rattled Jell-O.
I thought she was passing out on me. But then I got it — and she won me right there. I don't give a damn if she was acting like a maniac, or if there were eight guys with bombs and machine guns at the door. She was trying to smile.
And just a beat, half a second after I'd hissed, "Cherry get into the bedroom!", she said, with her lips quivering, eyes like saucers, "Shell — " gulp — "I thought you'd never ask me."
Then she turned with real speed and moved, ghostlike, over the floor. Into the bedroom. By then I was thumping toward the door. "Hey, yo!" I called — or something. "Just a second, Paul."
The last two steps were like the earlier ones, shoes sliding on the carpet. But I moved fast. Pressed against the wall, gun in my right hand — down at my side, not held in front of me — I used my left hand to turn the doorknob. Not too fast. Just like a dumb cluck opening the door for old Paul.
Then I gave the knob a flip and yanked my left hand back, looking straight into the mirror.
The door swung open.
SEVENTEEN
He was a pro. And better than most.
So much better I don't think I would have beaten him. I honestly think he'd have killed me.
I had a gun; I was ready, sure. But before I could have pulled the trigger I would have had to be certain. Not guessing. Certain it wasn't really Paul — or at least that it was a man with a gun, not just a man.
But not this bastard.
He was here on a job, a killing job. Or, rather, a double killing job, considering the rest of it. And all he had to do was see a body and put a bullet into it.
The door was only part way open, still moving. I could see half of him. Which meant he could see only half of me. But that was when he fired. Right through the wood, before the door was even out of the way.
The explosion sounded like a stick of dynamite going off. It was like a fist slamming my ear. The door jerked as the slug tore through it, and mingled with that crack and sound of wood splintering was the tinkling crash of shattering glass. Right in the middle of it his gun blasted again. No wait, no hesitation. The old murder one-two; if the first slug didn't do the job, the second would. And then maybe a few more in the head. The double rule of the sonsofbitches: Don't take any chances — and don't give him a chance.
The gunshots echoed, and burnt powder was sharp in my nostrils. The whole thing filled less than a second. Then, in sudden quiet, a piece of glass fell with a tinkle. He was halfway into the room by then, his gun held before him but his face already starting to show the shock — and beginnings of fear.
I didn't have to step forward. All I had to do was turn left a little and move my back away from the wall. Then I rammed my Colt into his side. Just in and out; you don't leave your gun touching a cutie like this one, you don't give him a chance at it.
So, in and then out as I took a step backward, away from him. But when I rammed the gun into him I got a lot of me behind it, and there's two hundred and six pounds if I use it all. Maybe I didn't break the rib, but I bent it, and a sound like chuh was squeezed out of his mouth.
I held the gun on him, hammer thumbed back, and said, "You want it?"
His gun hand jerked. But just a little. Hardly enough to notice. That was all. He didn't want it.
I had spoken so softly that, normally, he might not have heard me at all. If you didn't know it before, you'd know it at a time like this: We move through our days only half alive, our senses dulled, a film before our eyes and plugs in our ears. But at such times all the senses become abnormally acute, everything is brighter, louder, more vivid. And sweeter — all of life becomes very sweet. Maybe it's nature's way of giving an extra chance to a man when he's next door to dying; it seems a hell of a note, though, that most of us have to get killed, or damn near killed, to find out about it.
Anyway, this boy heard me.
And he heard me when I half whispered, "That heat of yours is cocked, friend, so don't drop it."
He didn't. He leaned forward, very slowly. Sweat glistened on his upper lip. He did it right, slow-motion and easy, never letting the gun barrel stray toward me. He placed the gun on the floor like a mother patting a baby, then straightened up. A long sigh spilled from his lips as he came erect again.
"Kick it," I said. "Straight in."
He put his foot next to the gun, shoved it over the carpet.
I said, "Now, come on in, Pete."
He stepped farther into the room, and I slammed the door, then called out, "It's O.K., Cherry. Just stay put."
For all I knew, she was out that window and tearing down a street somewhere. But right now there were other things to take care of, two other things.
I said, "Look over there, Pete," and pointed to the far wall. He turned that way, his back to me. I got his gun, the almost-standard piece of the hood and heavy man, a Colt .45 automatic pistol.
I took out the slip and ejected the cartridge in the gun's chamber, then slapped the bare clip back in the Colt's heavy butt. "It is Pete, isn't it?" I asked him conversationally.
He didn't say anything.
Well, if he wouldn't join in the conversation, there was no sense keeping him here. Holding the Colt's barrel in my right hand, I swung it briskly through the air and cracked that heavy butt on the back of his skull, and Pete was no longer here.
I went out of the apartment and down the hall toward the back stairs, to take care of the other thing.
It was dark alongside the Spartan's wall, but street lights dimly illuminated Rossmore, straight ahead. Gun in my right hand, I walked toward the street, reversing the path that Pete — or whoever he was — had taken on his way to my door. Even though I hadn't actually seen anybody else in the black Imperial, I would have given ten to one a man was now sitting at the wheel, waiting to celebrate with his buddy. And I would have given nearly as good odds it was Joe "Mooneyes" Garella.
I remembered what Jim Gray had said to me, only minutes ago. If I could "squeeze" Mooneyes somehow, he would tell me much I wanted to know and a lot I wasn't even curious about. That trigger-quick dropper was sprawled on my apartment floor, and in another minute or two I might have all I needed to squeeze the juice out of Mooneyes. It seemed too good to be true.
It was.
I goofed.
I knew that if there was a man in the car he would have heard the shots — the whole neighborhood would have; heads had been hanging out of suddenly opened doors in the hallway as I'd left the building. I knew he'd be expecting his chum to come running back the way he'd come — that was why I'd come this way instead of trying to sneak up on the man from behind, which probably wouldn't have worked either.
I was going to be Shell Scott's killer, not Shell Scott, and with luck I might hop right inside that Imperial before the guy in it knew what was happening.
But you can't think of everything; at least, I can't, and I forgot one rather obvious thing: Shell Scott's killer didn't have a big gob of white hair.
At least, I guess that was it. When I started angling across the street toward the Imperial, my head must have looked like an albino bat flying at him. He naturally had the engine idling, and he just slapped the car into gear and gave it the gas.
He was moving toward me before he switched on the lights, and when they poured over me I had already heard the sudden roar of the engine and was trying to slow down, to change direction.
There wasn't time.
He was right on me, practically on top of me. He was dead center, too, big chromed bumper straight ahead and headlights to my left and right. And it had happened so suddenly I was still running forward; there wasn't a chance I could jump to one side or the other, not a chance in hell.
I didn't think out the next move, it just happened. I was as surprised as he must have been. I gave a great, an enormous bound — forward, as if I were trying to reach my bedroom phone in one jump instead of four, spread out in the air as though planning to fly smack through the windshield, arms stretched out as if to grab him. If he really had thought at first that a monster bat was going for him, now he must have thought it had turned back into Dracula — because in that split-second I actually saw his hands leave the wheel and go up to shield his eyes.
You've seen these highly athletic fellows leap gracefully at leather horses in gymnasiums, and sort of pat them with their outstretched hands as they go over, and then do a flip in the air and land past the horse, sort of dancing on their feet? Well, I guess that's what I thought I was doing.
I'm not sure what I thought, because I wasn't thinking. There are times when a man must stop depending on his brain and use something else, and I was probably figuring this problem out with my tail. Even though I was doing it, even though I was in the air and turning damn near upside down, very nicely, and the car's driver was going "Aacck" and nipping his hands over his enormous pale eyes — yeah, it was Mooneyes — to protect them from the gruesome sight, I had no high hopes for a successful culmination to this maneuver.
As I say, you've seen these athletic fellows leaping over horses. Well, I am not one of them. I've got lots of muscles, but I'm not Nijinsky. Even though this movement had been engineered by my subconscious mind — I wouldn't have done anything like this if I'd been conscious — it would have been a catastrophe if Mooneyes hadn't helped me.
Yes, he helped me.
He didn't mean to. He fully intended to run me down, and squash me, and maybe then back up over me a couple of times. But that was when he had been the attacker.
Now, the bat man was attacking him.
What could he do?
He defended himself, naturally.
He slammed on the brakes so fast he must have sprained the sole of his foot. It didn't help much. But it helped a little. The tires squealed on the asphalt as my hands touched the hood of his car, and at that point, even if not using any brain, I used all the brawn there was in those arms and shoved like a man pushing death away, which is what I was doing.
I turned completely over in the air, feet flying over my head — and onto the roof of the Imperial. Not like Nijinsky. Not like those athletic fellows. Like a sack of cement. But instead of being rammed head-on by the Imperial's front end and chromed bumper I landed tail-on atop the Imperial's roof. I landed and bounced and skidded, then I was going one way in the air and the Imperial was going the opposite way beneath me.
Then I landed on the street. It seemed as though I landed simultaneously on both shoulders, my fanny, and my head, though there must have been some lapse of time between separate impacts. But I managed to land at one time or another on most of my anatomy, and it didn't do any of it much good.
I was alive, though. Bruised, aching, the skin scraped from one hand and my right ear, muscles pulled in my thigh, and a large ache in my — well, delicately, my derrière.
All that — and happy.
Mooneyes didn't even try to back up and run over me. He knew when he'd had enough. There is a time for fight and a time for flight, and he'd had enough fighting for tonight.
I sat in the middle of the street for a while, because I needed time. Time to become capable of getting up. I made it on the second try. Then I found my gun. Then I limped back up to my apartment.
It was a good thing I hadn't sat down there in the street any longer. The guy on the floor was twitching a little, coming back. Glass was all over, every which way. It figured. There went my damned do-it-yourself project, already — I told you.
Cherry wasn't in sight.
I hobbled into the bedroom.
She was there, standing by the window, but with her back to it.
"Cherry, it's O.K. You can come out in the front room and join us now."
She fainted.
Caught me by surprise. Fooled me. Like I said, you can't think of everything. Probably this was going to take some time, so I went back and, once more, hit what I now thought of as the back of Pete's head. Maybe he wasn't Pete. No matter; whoever he was, he stopped twitching.
And I started. It didn't last long. It never does. And it wasn't fun while it lasted. But, then, this wasn't a fun night. I found some brandy and had a shot, then poured a couple fingers into another wineglass and took it into the bedroom.
Cherry was still crumpled on the floor. I picked her up and put her on the bed. It wasn't easy.
Then I looked at her. Gorgeous. Absolutely gorgeous. Gorgeous Cherry on my bed. At last. Me standing there. Brandy in wineglasses. Room not completely dark, just dim, almost like candlelight. That's the way to live, huh?
I looked at myself in the cracked mirror. Yeah, I'd ruined some more of my wardrobe. And some more of me.
Cherry moved, sighed.
I sat down on the edge of the bed next to her.
When her eyes fluttered open I said, "Hi. Relax. How about a drink?"
"What?"
"This'll spark you up. Here's some brandy." I was casual about it. So I'd saved her life probably. And mine. And captured a vicious killer. No sense pouring it on. Play it light, I figured.
She didn't say anything right away. She sat up, blinked a few times, and took a deep breath. Then she looked up at me, and her face softened. I wasn't sure, but I thought her lips curved just a little into a small smile.
"But, Shell," she said, "I don't like brandy."
EIGHTEEN
Actually, she did — that had been a small smile I'd detected. She even had a second brandy after that first one. There was more to this gal than met the eye — and one hell of a lot met the eye.
I said, "Want another brandy, Cherry? Hey — that's good; if only it was cherry brandy — "
"It's awful."
"Yeah, I suppose it was. But I hurt my head."
"You poor thing."
"Sympathy. That's what I like. Tender solicitude — "
"Oh, stop it. You're alive — "
The lightness suddenly got heavy. Her voice broke. Her shoulders rose and fell, and then she pressed her hands to her face and started sobbing, sobbing and making small shrieking sounds, muffled against her palms.
I put my arms around her, pulled her against me. After a while she stopped crying and lifted her head. Tears glistened on her cheeks, and mascara had made shadows beneath her eyes.
"Oh, Shell," she said in a new, a different voice. "I heard the shots, and waited. You didn't call. It seemed forever. I was so afraid. . . . I thought — "
Her mouth was only inches from mine. And then an inch, and then . . .
I had known kissing Cherry would almost surely be lots of fun. I hadn't guessed it would be whatever it is that starts where fun leaves off. How can a kiss be — or at least seem to be — so much? So much more than just lips meeting
? Man, I don't know. I guess it's that sometimes, once in a while and rarely, rarely, lips connect in a way that disconnects a man's noodle and sends it into an nth dimension.
Something like that must have happened.
Something like that . . .
They were lips that said hello and were warm friends two seconds later, carrying on a conversation Casanova would have censored, carrying on a dialogue to bring dead libidoes back from limbo, carrying on a bedroomy hoo-hah in hot, hushed whispers — man, how they carried on. It wasn't a kiss; it was lips making love between clean sheets illumined by candlelight. It was the scent of sex, the sound of blood, soft light behind closed lids, the taste of mouth and lips and tears and tongue. And maybe heart. It was all the five senses, a whole census of senses. . . . That nth dimension, I guess. If there's a better name, it's not important. But it lasted half of forever, and ended as soon as it started.
There were whispered words, and then Cherry pulled it up again, up into lightness. Where, after all, it has to be most of the time.
"Well," she said, "now you know why I don't drink much brandy."
"I have gin and vermouth. Which would you like?"
"They might even be good together. Mostly gin?"
"I'm afraid there isn't time to experiment — even with something as good as that might be. But . . . There's a guy in the front room."
"Is he — "
"Not dead. Unconscious, as the result of a splitting headache."
I stood up, but as she got off the bed Cherry said, "Shell, I saw what happened — in the street, I mean. I was looking out the window. I thought you were going to get killed."
"I considered that possibility myself. Actually, that's all I considered."
"You're — a remarkable man," she said quietly.
I didn't quite know what to say to that. So I mumbled, "Oh, I'm just naturally graceful," and then we were walking into the front room, and Cherry said:
Kill Him Twice (The Shell Scott Mysteries) Page 12
