Kill Me Tomorrow

by Richard S. Prather

  “Noxzema?”

  “Listen, this is serious stuff. It’s nothing to joke about. What I mean, well, before I go, I’d like to—to shake your hand once again, Miss Brizante.”

  “You—you imbecile fettucini-spumoni-spaghetti-ravioli—” Those weren’t her exact words, of course. It was all in Italian, and I translated it as something generally unflattering.

  But then she stopped, suddenly. She composed her face, that lovely, sensual face, let the smooth lids half conceal those black-magic eyes. She reached up and grasped my wrists, pulled my hands down and placed them on her waist just above the swelling softness of her hips. She wound her arms around my neck, pressed her body against me, lifted her face.

  Very softly and sweetly she said, “I could kill you myself, you stupid,” and then pressed her soft warm mouth against mine.

  Well—how can one say what can’t be said?

  It was a kiss which only started upon the lips, and spread from there throughout anatomy I had not previously suspected I owned. And then it spread on into what I can only describe as indescribable dimensions. It would require a three-dimensional language to describe merely the pucker—and for the rest, well, it is simply not true that there’s no rest for the wicked.

  If it was true that Rome burned in Lucrezia’s eyes, then not only all Italy but the rest of Europe and half of Brazil flamed in her mouth and tongue and lips. The rest of Lucrezia was not exactly petrified, either. Her body moved against me, the soft masses of her breasts molding against my chest, her thighs and hips moving slightly, only slightly, but it was the kind of slightly that makes centimeters seem like meters and inches feel like yards. What I mean, I had never been kissed by a hundred and twenty-five pounds of lips before.

  Just when I’d decided Lucrezia had not merely pressed her mouth to mine but had annealed, cauterized, fused and vulcanized it there, and from now on she and I would go through life with Siamese lips, stuck together in eternal osculation, suddenly her lips were gone. It took me a while to figure it out, but as soon as I did I opened my eyes. Four or five inches away I could see—Lucrezia’s eyes.

  Slowly she unwound her arms, stepped back from me.

  “All right, Shell,” she said, her voice humming like hot winds in a beehive. “Now—you can go.”

  “Go?”

  “Now you can go.” She flung out an arm dramatically—just like an actress. “And do what you have to do!”

  “But … if I go, I can’t do what I have to do.”

  “Shell, you said—”

  “Never mind what I said. You think I want to go out there and get killed? You think I’m some kind of nut? I want to live—”

  Just then Tony Brizante, perhaps attracted by the noise I was making, came in. “You still here?” he said.

  I glanced at my watch: three-fifty A.M. Wow, I thought, where does the time go? Memory came back: murder, hoods, tape—it all seemed pretty dull stuff now. But man is a creature of habit. So I checked to make sure my gun was still in place, and had not been fired, then walked to the door.

  Behind me that soft sweet-hot voice said, “Be careful, Shell. And come back. Please come back.”

  “And how,” I said. “By the way, I presume you won’t mind—now—if I call you Lucrezia?”

  There she went again. I walked out into the dark night, with a whole Italian banquet in my ears.

  When Tony was telling me about running down Mimosa to meet Jenkins, he’d said he could hear Fred’s tires screeching even before he saw him pull up and park at the intersection. Now I knew what had flickered in my mind then. When tires skid on asphalt they leave streaks—visible streaks of burned rubber. If Jenkins had stopped to get rid of the tape he wouldn’t have slowed leisurely. He’d have hit the brakes hard.

  Two blocks from Mimosa on Willow Lane my headlights picked out fresh black lines stretching for at least twenty or twenty-five yards over the asphalt. Except for the beam of my headlights and light in one house a block away, the street was dark; more important, no other headlights were brightening the darkness. On my left was a row of houses, all with neatly mowed lawns before them, not much there in the way of cover. But on my right, set back a yard or so from the sidewalk, was a thick six-foot-high mass of oleander, which is so often used in Arizona both for decoration and as a screen for privacy.

  I swung sharply right and stopped with my front tires against the low curb, the Cad angled in so its headlights were pointed at the base of the oleander hedge opposite the spot where those skid marks ended. Then I grabbed a flashlight from the glove compartment and climbed out of the car.

  In my mind was the thought that the added illumination from my headlights would help me spot the tape if it were here, lessen the time required to find it and get the hell away. Obviously, the more time I spent here the more chance there was that one of those low uncouth characters I’d spoken of to Lucrezia would happen along and spot me.

  For some reason, with that thought so prominent in my mind, it didn’t occur to me that the beam of those headlights—slanting away from the street toward an oleander bush, and of course toward me poking about in an oleander bush—would be a circumstance of remarkable interest to any low types who might note it. So who’s perfect? So who thinks of everything? Especially within minutes after being stupendously kissed by Lucrezia Brizante?

  The search for the tape was anticlimactic. There wasn’t anything unusual in sight at the base of the hedge, and I saw nothing in the massed oleander leaves and branches. So I bent over, forced my way with some difficulty through the stiffly resisting hedge, and even before getting all the way through saw the reel, with a snakelike length of tape trailing from it, on the ground another dozen feet ahead of me.

  As I stepped toward it I saw something else that brought me to a stop for a moment. I had become so used to seeing rows of small, compact homes or the three-sided squares which comprised the usual apartment complexes here at the Villas, that to see a two-story building almost the size of a hotel startled me.

  I couldn’t see the base of the building, and knew it was two stories only because its upper half and the irregular roofline and a couple of old-fashioned rounded towers at its corners, reminiscent of some nineteenth-century mansions I’d seen, loomed above me against the sky and were given a kind of nebulous solidity by the faint light of the moon.

  The base of the building was hidden by a solid-looking stone wall, about twenty feet from me and visible in the glow from my Cad’s headlights filtering through the hedge. The wall was ten or twelve feet high, and extended to my left and right until it faded into the darkness.

  I didn’t waste time admiring the quaintness—or spookiness—of the scene. I jumped forward, grabbed the reel and rewound the few loose feet of tape upon it, then crammed it into my coat pocket as I walked to the hedge and began forcing my body back through it the same way I’d come.

  I stuck my head out on the other side, realizing the beam of my Cad’s headlights was half blinding me.

  Realizing, in truth—as I poked my head through the oleander hedge, like a fat bird peeking from its nest—a great deal more than that.…

  CHAPTER TEN

  It was a single second that included a minute of visual acuity, mental shock, emotional shambles, intestinal paralysis, and intellectual rigor mortis, all wrapped up in a general all-over sick feeling.

  On my left were two men, moving toward me, looking very alert and intent on what they were doing. Or, rather, about to do. Also looking very unnerving, partly because of the guns in their hands, partly because of their physiques and features. One was an enormous creature, not unusually tall, but so wide of shoulders and chest and middle and hips that he closely resembled one of those statues on Easter Island.

  The other was a mere wisp, a frail reed in comparison to the creature. A few inches shorter and maybe a yard thinner, he had a face actually lopsided, nose bent to the left, left corner of his mouth turned up, left ear “cauliflowered” and jutting out farther than
the other.

  The enormous guy had a totally hairless head and a face about the size of a square basketball, its features in reasonably harmonious relationship except for a nose so ridiculously small it appeared to have room for only one nostril.

  I could see both men quite clearly, in spite of the fact that my Cad’s headlights were striking me smack in the eyes, because they were close enough—five or six yards away—that the headlights’ glow also made them stand out from the darkness behind them. There was another factor, too—some other source of light, wavering and apparently becoming brighter, which fell on them and made it more easy for me to clearly note their features.

  The source of that light might have puzzled me if I’d had time to think about it. But I was not at that moment concentrating on anything except those two guys with guns in their hands, and the fact that—for the first time in my life, come to think of it—I had gotten myself entangled, apparently permanently, in an oleander hedge.

  The thin guy moved more quickly than his buddy. He spotted me, and his eyes seemed to pop forward in his tilted face, and he flipped his gun up and let go a shot at me. He moved a bit too quickly, though, and the pill tore through leaves and branches a yard or more to my right.

  His next shot would have hit me—and by the time he got it off, his large pal was pumping a slug out of his gun as well—except that when both pills tore through the space where I’d been I was no longer there, having discovered that a bullet flying even a yard away from a man tangled in a hedge is enough to prove he is not inextricably tangled.

  I simply lunged backward, jerking and wriggling at the same time, feeling the grab of bending limbs and hearing cloth tear, but I flew out of the hedge so fast I went down flat on my back, down hard enough that it banged half the wind out of me. I sucked in air as I got to my feet and yanked the Colt from its holster, then sprinted parallel to the hedge for ten yards, stopped, looked back toward my Cad.

  It was perfect.

  That was a thick hedge, true; but light did filter through it, enough light did; and between it and me, like cracked and fragmented figures in a surreal painting, I could see the blurred outlines of the two men.

  They were so dimly visible I couldn’t tell which of the moving figures was the big man and which the thin one. It didn’t make much difference to me, because since those first two shots there’d been two more fired toward where I’d been and a third this way, apparently at random but too close for comfort. So I aimed at movement, squeezed off one shot with a second right behind it and heard a short sharp yell, almost a bark, that was not merely a cry of surprise or fright. I’d hit one of them.

  When I’d leveled the Colt and squeezed its trigger I had heard the sound of tires sliding as a car came to a sudden stop, and noted that light coming through the hedge was moving, dancing. Finally, then, I realized what that wavering glow was which only seconds ago had made it easier for me to see the two men.

  I heard a car door slam, voices, a yell. A rumbling, stentorian shout, “Yeah, the sonofabitch is in there somewhere.” I couldn’t see him, but I could imagine the shouter pointing. “Behind them bushes there.” A second later, “Wait a minute—watch out. He just drilled Frankie square in the biscuit.”

  “The hell with Frankenstein. Bludgett, get your ass outa the light, you goddamn freak!” That was another voice, high and flat and hard, a voice I’d never heard before.

  I was not simply standing there listening to the noises in the night air. Even before I’d heard that car door slam I had jerked my head around and seen, rising above the hedge and darker than the sky beyond it, the silhouette of a telephone pole. On both of its sides the hedge had been trimmed. Thin leafy branches of the oleander were growing toward the wood, touching it in a few places. But at either side of the pole was a foot or so of comparatively open space.

  I was at the pole and easing my body carefully past it while the man with that flat hard voice was speaking. I pushed my head forward slowly, wishing at least for the moment that the hair on my head wasn’t so white. But then I was looking to my right, field of vision almost unobstructed, and no shots rang out.

  So little time had passed that the enormously wide egg was still standing—no more than twenty feet from me—right in front of my Cad’s headlights. He had to be Bludgett. So Frankenstein was the boy I’d hit. Hit hard. He was flat on the parking strip in front of my car, sprawled on his face. Maybe that was why Bludgett was still there, standing over him. The guy on the ground didn’t move. He probably wasn’t going to. The “biscuit” is the head.

  It had been five seconds, maybe a couple more, since the man had yelled at Bludgett to get out of the light. I guess he got impatient, because he yelled at him again and jumped forward, jerked at the big man’s arm. Then he looked around, stepped to the side of my Cad and reached in through the open window, hit the switch and doused the lights. But before complete darkness fell—the lights of the other car were already off—I had time to see two things of interest.

  One was the man himself. He was of medium height, dressed in pale gray slacks and a blue T-shirt, built like a weight-lifter—good shoulders, well-defined pectorals bulging on his chest, flat stomach and almost too-narrow waist and hips. He was a blond, hair more a light coppery-gold than straw-colored, and there was a lot of it, bushy atop his head and lancing down into a sharply defined widow’s peak on his forehead. Big chin, a strong face. I’d remember him.

  The second thing of interest was Bludgett’s finally moving. When he stepped forward just before the lights were doused, he took Frankenstein with him. He simply bent over and bunched some cloth in his hand, or grabbed the guy’s belt, picked him up—I mean, with one hand picked him up—and walked off with him.

  It’s one thing to be strong. But this guy had to be seen to be believed. When he picked Frankenstein up, the man was absolutely limp, so naturally he bent in the middle, head and arms dangling loosely on one side and legs flopping on the other. Which meant, in order not to scrape him along the ground, Bludgett had to lift him into the air a ways. So he did. Just cranked up his arm and bent his elbow and walked off as if he were carrying a suitcase.

  It was, perhaps, unlikely I would live long enough for it to happen, but as I watched that scene with something approaching awe I couldn’t help thinking: Man, I hope I never get clobbered by Bludgett.

  There was conversation over there in the darkness, but I wasn’t able to make out any of the words. I heard the slap of shoe leather on pavement; somebody was running—but away from me, the sound getting a little fainter.

  I still had the flashlight in my left hand, gun in the right, but neither of them gave me a real sense of security. It was clear I couldn’t make it back to my Cad. And I wasn’t about to get into a gunfight, any kind of fight, with three men—at least three—if I could help it.

  So I eased back, brushing against the telephone pole, and moved slowly a couple of feet from the hedge. I turned and started to walk away from the activity behind me, and thought I heard the faint cry of a siren. I stopped, listened. The sound became clearer, and in a few seconds I could distinguish two sirens, wailing almost in unison at first and then falling into their separate rhythms, even in the warm night their thin and whining dissonances strangely chilling.

  Two of them, getting louder. On their way here, undoubtedly. That didn’t surprise me. But what happened next did.

  There was a shout—the same hard, flat voice: “Fleepo! Get back here. Crank it up!”

  I wasn’t sure of that first word. A man’s name, undoubtedly. Fleepo, or Flippo, or maybe even Cleepo. But shortly after the slim-hipped muscle-boy yelled, there was, again, the soft slap of shoes on the ground, then the sharper splat of them on pavement. A car engine turned over, caught.

  I moved back to the telephone pole. Just beyond my Cadillac headlights flicked on, the car door opened, somebody jumped in, the door slammed. I could hear the thud of another pair of feet well to my left. The car backed up, jumped forward, swerve
d around my Cad and headed down Willow Lane. The sound of thudding feet stopped. Then the same thing was repeated. Door opening, slamming, engine catching. Headlights lit up the darkness half a block to my left on this side of the street. The car came toward me, gaining speed rapidly, raced past me and skidded around the corner.

  I stood there, wondering.

  Obviously, those lads did not like the law. Almost certainly, they had good reason for not hanging around to jaw, as they might put it, with the fuzz. Particularly if there was a body hereabouts, with a hole in its head. Even if they hadn’t put the hole there.

  My natural impulse was to sprint to the Cad and get the hell out of here myself. But also fresh in my mind was what had happened when, thinking all the would-be killers had flown, I’d run out through the front door of Henry Yarrow’s home.

  I pressed my left hand against the pocket of my coat, felt the round reel of tape there. And made up my mind. The Cad it would be. But I wasn’t about to walk over to it, whistling, and I didn’t. None of my sly stratagems made any difference. Nothing happened.

  So I climbed into the Cad and left that scene like a bomb, maybe fifteen seconds before the first police car arrived.

  I should have felt very good about it. I did feel good. Still, there was one small kernel of discontent.…

  It had been too easy.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It was the right tape, the second “Jenkins tape.” No question about that.

  I punched the rewind button, stopped the machine, started playing the tape for the second time. Not from the beginning. The end of the plastic tape was stretched and torn—undoubtedly by Jenkins in his haste to get away from wherever he’d been—and the whole thing played for just over fifty minutes. But it was only the last six minutes which would be of real interest to others—and were fascinating to me.

  After reaching my rooms at Mountain Shadows I’d taken time to shower and change clothes again, then arranged with the desk for the use of two tape recorders. I’d used one to play the Jenkins tape, while making a duplicate of it with the other. The first three-quarters of an hour consisted merely of conversation and a few phone calls of no apparent importance, and there were never more than two or at most three people conversing. But in those last six minutes seven men spoke, and it sounded as if a planned meeting was in progress.