by Sam Roskoe
And now I felt that sickening touch again as I reached up and dipped my fingers into the cold wet spot beneath my chin.
When I brought my fingers away they were stained red. I looked at them for a long time, the coldness now in my brain, my thoughts coming slow and unfocused.
Shot? Me? Again?
Had I taken a slug from a .45 to the face? How could that be? How was it that I was still standing?
Confused, I stumbled backward.
Through the window I saw Johnny Jackson drop his gun. He clutched his leg as he tumbled to the floor. Fresh blood pumped out between his laced fingers.
Was it my bullet? Had I been the one who caused that wound, I wondered?
And if the slug from my .38 had downed Johnny Jackson, why hadn’t the slug from his .45 downed me?
I staggered forward, my .38 aimed at Jackson’s body through the broken window, my other hand pushed up under my chin to stop the blood.
He rolled and tumbled, groaned and cursed every God that might want to listen. Then he saw me. He found a few more curses that I wasn’t sure had existed before that night and he threw them at me for good measure.
I shrugged them off, but I wasn’t all me in that moment. The coldness was spreading, reaching down my neck to my chest. A slow, icy trickle of blood had made its way from the wound in my neck and was hell bent on reaching my waistband no matter what I did to stem the flow.
I wanted to pull my hand away and take a look at the damage and I didn’t ever want to take my hand away in case it would be the death of me
And then Johnny Jackson filled in the blanks my brain didn’t want to think about.
“Goddamn you, Finch! This is the second time you’ve had me on the floor with that pea-shooter of yours pointed at me,” he said, through gritted teeth. “It should be me on the other end of a gun, you know that?”
“Shoulda, coulda, woulda,” I said, my voice strained.
Johnny Jackson squirmed into a sitting position and pulled his hand slowly away from the wound in his leg.
“Awww, Jesus, will you look at that? I’m here lugging a cannon with me and what does it get me, nothing that’s what.” He looked at me, anger heating up his cold eyes. “I might not walk again, you know that? And you walk away with a shaving cut.”
As he spoke I pulled my hand away from my neck.
There wasn’t as much blood this time and it was already beginning to feel sticky. Congealing. A good sign. A great sign.
A wave of relief rushed me and I let out a long, pleasurable sigh.
“Proud of yourself, are you, Finch?”
“I will be once I get some law out here.”
“Law? Are you kidding me? What are you going to tell them, you just happened to be here on private land, with both those gates locked at the front? Land that belongs to a wanted man. Besides…” He winced as fresh pain poked at his leg. “Besides, you forgot about my ties in this town, Finch. Ain’t one of them boys that will put me away on your say so.”
I smashed out the fragments of glass still in the window and clambered inside.
“So maybe I should just put another one in you, say, about chest high and then I won’t have to waste my time making any calls, will I?” I pointed the .38 at Johnny Jackson’s chest. “Or maybe one in your thick skull? How does that sound?”
“Like a bluff,” he said, his voice unwavering, despite the pain in his face.
“Don’t think I’m capable?”
“I think you’re a doo-gooder and you wouldn’t shoot a man when he’s down, that’s what I think. Especially an unarmed man.”
As he spoke, I noticed how close that cannon of his was. Nothing more than an arm’s length and he could finish off what he’d started.
Johnny Jackson’s eyes followed the path of my interest.
“Naughty, naughty. No toys for you.” I reached over and snatched the .45 from the floor. I turned it over in my hand. “So much noise for someone already too loud to begin with. Tell me, Johnny, does it make you feel like a big man having this gun?”
“No.”
“Really now?”
“It makes other men small, especially when they feel a bullet, that’s what it does.”
“You’re a real poet, Jonny, you know that?”
“I’m in pain, that’s what I am, now why don’t you call an ambulance for me doo-gooder.”
I hefted the .45 in my hand.
“Maybe I just leave you here to fend for yourself.”
“You wouldn’t do that,” he said, a nervousness creeping into his voice.
“It’d save me a lot of hassles.”
“No, you’re not that type, Finch. You’re not like me, not like…”
“A killer? You sure, Johnny?”
He licked at his lips. Squinted at me. Whatever thoughts were running through that brain of his, they weren’t happy thoughts.
“How about we make a deal, you and me, we come to an agreement?”
I wagged my head at him. He’d already ruined most of my evening, which had already started poorly to begin with. Now he wanted to make deals.
“You’ve got nothing to offer, and I’m already sick of wasting time on you.” I rose from my crouched position at his side. “I’m taking Tarquin Meriwether somewhere safe, somewhere far away from here and if I see you again it won’t just be your leg I aim for next time.”
The look on his face was all smug as he wagged his head at me.
“Are you sure about that?” he said, mimicking my earlier question.
“Don’t try this reverse crap on me, Johnny, you’ll lose and I’ll win.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He shifted around, dragging his wounded leg with him like a piece of dead wood.
“Tell me, Finch, how are you supposed to go to that somewhere far away from me, when the man you’re supposed to take with you has vamoosed?”
“What?”
Johnny Jackson’s smile was wide enough to fit in two rows of teeth.
He pointed over my shoulder.
“Can you outrun a car, Finch? Because you’re going to have to if you want to catch up with that drunken old lush.”
I turned to see Tarquin Meriwether behind the wheel of a silver bullet sportster. He was already halfway toward the gates. And those gates began to open as he approached.
“It looks like it’s not going to be such a good night for you, Finch,” Johnny Jackson said through a laugh.
I turned around and brought the weight of the .45 up under his chin.
“For both of us,” I said, but Johnny Jackson couldn’t hear me.
Chapter 11
You don’t have to leap tall buildings in a single bound, or be faster than a speeding bullet and you certainly don’t have to be stronger than a locomotive, in fact you don’t have to do much of anything at all when your quarry is so drunk that he crashes his car before he even hits the open road.
It was my only break, in what felt like an ongoing vendetta against any kind of good luck coming my way.
I reached the drive as Tarquin Meriwether going not more than a few miles an hour, wedged the British sportster at an angle between the two gates stopping them dead. Whatever he was trying to do, or wherever he was trying to go, he was still trying when I reached the car.
“Damn fine automobile, but useless on these treacherous back roads, old boy,” he said, but not to me. He didn’t know where he was or what was happening. His eyes focused on some place in the distance that I couldn’t see and probably didn’t exist until you’d downed a good quart of Bourbon.
Probably more than a quart when it came to the drunken screenwriter.
I waved a hand before his face.
Tarquin Meriwether tried to follow the motion, but his eyes could only do so much before glazing over.
“We have to get you out of here, do you understand me?” I said.
“I’m tickety-boo. Fine and dandy. Why, you could put me and this silver beast on th
e track at Le Mans and we’d romp home in first place. Oh yes.”
He was still addressing that drunken faraway place that I couldn’t quite make out. Whatever he was hearing, it didn’t sound like it had anything to do with me.
I grabbed him by the collar and pulled his face around to meet mine.
A waft of Bourbon hit me full in the face.
I recoiled.
“How much have you had to drink?” I asked.
He giggled.
“Plenty.”
“Too much,” I said.
He raised a hand in the air, finger out as if he were declaring something to a waiting crowd.
“We’ll never surrender to such petty orders. I’ll drink, by God, until I can’t stand, and I’ll sit when I can’t stand, and if I should fail at the sitting, well by God they can pour the liquor into my open mouth as I am prostrate upon the ground.”
His drunken declaration was surprisingly clear and with only a few slurred words. This was a man who took his liquor more seriously than anybody I’d met before. Drinking wasn’t just a way to escape for Tarquin Meriwether but an act of faith.
I had to make him lose that faith and in a hurry. Johnny Jackson was a lame duck now, but there was no point hanging around where the law might come poking their noses. That was the kind of chance I wasn’t going to take.
I slapped him hard across the cheek.
“Bar’s closed, lush,” I said.
Tarquin Meriwether’s eyeballs rattled around inside his skull like pool balls looking for a pocket to call home.
“Well I never,” he said.
I slapped him again.
“That’s the second time I’m going to try slapping sense into you. If I have to do it a third time it won’t be with an open palm.”
“You brute,” he said.
“Some people seem to think I’m a do-gooder. Now get the hell out of that car before someone sees you. Me and you need to scram but quick.”
He rubbed the red skin on his cheek, and then blinked a few times to refocus.
“And who in Hades would you be to give me such orders?”
“I’m the man you hired. The man who’s going to put you under a cold shower until all that liquor is washed away.”
He squinted.
Realization was the slow spreading of a smile on his lips.
“Mr. Finch? Is it really you, Mr. Finch? Yes, it must be. The keen detective that you are, you found me here.”
I glanced at the road beyond the mansion, but there was nothing out there to concern me. Not yet. With my luck running the way it had, every street between Beverly Hills and Hollywood might be crawling with uniforms, and each one with a clear picture of me on their person.
“It’s me, now let’s get a move on.”
His moves weren’t exactly what you would call swift. He fumbled about inside the tiny silver sportster until he got into a position where he couldn’t figure out which leg was which, or where either began and ended.
I reached in and undid the puzzle as I pulled him bodily out of the car and dropped him onto his unsteady feet.
A moment later he was patting himself down like all drunks do when they want to look normal. Everything he did took too long and he was having a hard time trying to keep balance through the whole charade. A couple of times he teetered on the edge of a full collapse, only to bob back into position as though a buoy pushed and pulled by the tide.
“Wait here,” I said, nudging him over to the side of the path. I climbed behind the wheel of the silver sportster and a few coughs and splutters later the car jumped into life. I dropped the thing into reverse.
The tires spit out smoke at the rear.
The gates chomped down harder on the nose of the car.
I fisted the dash three or four times.
“Trouble, Mr. Finch?” Tarquin Meriwether called to me.
“I’m thinking of taking it on as a middle name.”
“What, trouble?”
“Either that or calamity, one or the other will do.”
“What’s your middle name now?”
“Don’t have one. Don’t want to hang around here thinking of one either,” I said.
I hopped out of the car.
“Can you climb?” I asked back at Meriwether’s side.
“What do you have in mind, a mountain excursion for you and I?”
“We won’t need Sherpas if you’re worried.”
“I was thinking more of a mulled wine or an aged scotch for when we made our camp at the base of the mountain.” A hungry look came to his eyes as he mentioned liquor. That same hunger you could see in the eyes of all drunks just before the bar opened. He was soused but not enough that his next drink wasn’t already on his mind.
“No liquor for us. Just a little rough terrain to traverse.”
“Shame,” he said. “I was beginning to think we could forget the mountain and the camping altogether and go straight to the scotch part.”
I pulled him toward the trapped car.
“That’s our mountain,” I said.
“A trifle,” he said, waving theatrically towards the silver sportster. “I may not be a young man any longer, but I’m not ready for a wheelchair just yet. Lead on, Mr. Finch, lead on. Later we will celebrate with a drink or two and whichever watering hole you prefer.”
“It’ll be water in a motel room that’s not big enough to tickle a cat, let alone swing one. Let’s move.”
“That’s not exactly what I had in mind, you know. Water is to bathe in, Mr. Finch, it’s for washing, not drinking.”
“It’s all you’re getting until I have what I want.”
I helped him up onto the hood of the silver car, and there he stood as if he were trying to balance on a strip of angel hair pasta.
“I think someone better stop the world before I fall off,” he said, blinking.
I jumped up and put a hand up under his arm to steady him.
We moved slowly, but steadily toward the gap between the iron gates. It was big enough to fit both of us side by side, but in Tarquin Meriwether’s delicate, drunken state, he had problems grasping just how much space there was.
“A little help would not go without appreciation,” he said.
“Walk forward,” I said.
He gave me a look that was half suspicion and half disbelief.
“That’s your advice? What next, Mr. Finch, will you tell me that dying can be cured if the dead would only take in air and breathe?”
“Dead men don’t take advice, and that’s what you’ll be if you don’t get moving.”
“A threat now, is it?”
I threw a thumb over my shoulder in the direction of the mansion.
“You think that ape back there was pointing a gun at you to test his aim? He was here to kill you. And if there’s one with killing in mind, then there will be others.”
“Kill me, you jest. That man was merely here to…” He lost his voice as he tried to remember the recent past.
He couldn’t remember much of anything at all, and I’d seen it with drunks all my life. For a drunk, the past was a cloudy sky where faces and shapes came to life only if they looked hard enough.
Tarquin Meriwether stood on the hood of the car trying his hardest to figure out what was in the clouds just about then.
But I didn’t have that kind of time.
I pushed him, hard, through the gap in the fence.
Drunks, children and cats have a knack of falling in just the right kind of way to stay injury.
Tarquin Meriwether didn’t fall, he hit the ground running and only came to a stop when a particularly stubborn tree that had been waiting around a hundred years for its moment, got in the way.
He hit it with both arms outstretched then dropped onto his ass.
I stepped down off the hood and out past the gates with a casual air that angered all the nearby trees, then I picked up Tarquin and walked him back to my waiting car.
Steinbeck, legs in the
air as though someone had recently tickled that stomach of his, gave me a look of ‘you better be here to continue the rubbing’, but I didn’t have that look in my repertoire just then.
My stomach tightened and the spot between my shoulder blades began to itch.
I stopped at the side of the car and checked the road in all directions for a solid reason to be suspicious.
Nothing moved.
A rich and quiet place it was, the only sounds came from the firefly street-lamp lights fizzing to life as darkness rolled across the Hills.
I was jumpy, that was all. Seeing Steinbeck like that had put the jitters on me. There was nobody coming, and there’d been nobody there in my absence.
At least I hoped it would be that way.
I shook the feeling away as I climbed inside and Tarquin Meriwether clambered in beside me.
“So, what will it be now, oh master sleuth?”
“Cold shower for you, then we’re going to make us a list.”
“And I’ll be dry throughout, I suppose? Not a drop in the house?”
“You can do all the drinking you want once you’re safe.”
“And will that come to pass, Mr. Finch? Am I going to be safe from those who wish me ill? From those who wish to…” He swallowed a lump that formed in his throat. “…kill me?”
“The ape with the gun wanted you dead back there. I don’t know why, and I’m guessing you might have an idea once you’ve sobered up. But if I’m sure about one thing, someone wants you dead.”
“I didn’t know that…that man from Adam. I swear I had never clapped eyes on him before this day.”
He crossed his heart. At least he tried to. His fingers missed and he ended up placing the cross over his ribs.
“That’s what you remember now with God knows how much liquor sloshing around inside you. Later on, you might just remember why he was there.”
“I can say with all surety that I do not know that man nor have I any notion why he would want me dead.”
“Then maybe someone hired him to do the job.”
