“Yeah, that’s the place where the meeting was, the one Jenkins bugged. It’s the place Fred bugged because that’s the house you pointed out to him.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It would take too long to explain, Tony. Go on.”
“We came home. I still did not know if it was important, but I felt I should talk to you about it, maybe it would mean something to you. So I came next door here and phoned.”
“Did you tell Lucrezia what you were going to do?”
“No, just that I would be back soon. I called three times in maybe ten minutes but didn’t reach you, and when I returned Lucrezia had gone—as I said. On the table by the phone was our local paper, the Sunrise Villas News, and in it is the story of the shooting at you last night, there at Mr. Yarrow’s home. Lu, it must have been, had made a pencil line under the address given.”
“Sixteen-ninety-four North Palma Drive.”
“Yes … Is that important? I paid no attention to numbers, only that it was a different house—”
“Tony, when you first told me about following Yarrow Tuesday morning, you said you saw him turn off Claridge and go into a house about half a block down Palma Drive. When I called on Yarrow last night, I went to a house on Palma nearly two blocks from Claridge. I didn’t think of that or realize what it meant until a little while ago, unfortunately. But the house where you and Lucrezia saw Yarrow today was the one nearly two blocks from Claridge, right?”
“Yes. But that is where I saw him go. Do you mean when I followed Mr. Yarrow—”
“I mean, Tony, you did not follow Mr. Yarrow. I’ll explain when there’s more time. What else can you tell me?”
“That is all there is. The Highway Patrol phoned, and I told them my daughter had been driving the car. Then I called you, left the message. But I have heard no more—”
“What time did you first call me?”
“We got home a little after six-thirty. I called you the first time … about quarter to seven it must have been.”
“Tony, I know Lucrezia pestered you to tell her what was going on, and you explained most of it to her this morning. But did you mention the possibility of a tap on your phone?”
“No …” He was silent. “My God, if it is my fault—”
“Maybe that angle isn’t important, Tony. If it is, the fault’s more mine than yours. But let’s not jump to conclusions.…” I stopped. He started to speak, but I said, “Let me think, Tony. Just hold on a minute.”
It was clear enough that while Tony was trying to reach me from the house next door, where he was now, Lucrezia must have phoned me once from Tony’s house. The timing, all of it fit—but didn’t explain much yet. It was difficult for me to think with real clarity, not merely because I was so worried about Lucrezia, but because when Bludgett knocked me off the stage he hadn’t done me any good. I’d come to with a sizable headache, and I still had most of it.
Yeah, Bludgett—there were too damned many things to think about all at once. I looked at my watch. Twenty minutes after eight. Forty minutes since Bludgett had roared into the thunderous night. Plenty of time to get in touch with his pals by now, if he’d wanted to. And I rather supposed he might have wanted to. But the only important factor at the moment was Lucrezia. What had happened to her—and why. That was the part I couldn’t get, because I simply eliminated coincidence and assumed she’d been grabbed by the bastards I now thought of as Lecci and Company. Company like the Reverend, Ace and Fleepo, Weeton.…
Thunder still boomed and rumbled outside. Most of it in the past minutes had been soft and distant, but occasionally there was one of those solid cracks as a bolt struck the earth nearby. I could hear the rain, still coming down hard.
I went back to that why?
It was almost too much for me to believe the boys had grabbed her, and it’s a lot easier for me to believe the worst of hoods than it is for most. But it simply didn’t make sense. Not even hood-sense. She was Lucrezia Brizante, not Sally Smalk from Corn-Ear, Nebraska. She wasn’t a woman they could just snatch, knock around, kill. Unless … Unless she was, somehow, so enormously important to them they were willing to take the big chance—and had reason to believe they might get away with it.
Assume Brizante’s phone was tapped. So what? What could they have heard? Merely a gal—or, rather, Lucrezia Brizante—trying to phone Shell Scott, having me paged. Why get excited? They couldn’t have listened in on anything important. She hadn’t talked to me, the calls hadn’t been completed.…
I was missing something. In me was building that goddamned nervous feeling, the tension that tells you there’s something else—but not what else. It felt as if my nerves were prickly worms trying to crawl out through my skin. So the hell with it. I knew where I was going, even if I didn’t have all the answers.
Last night I’d plucked Jimmy Ryan’s Colt .45 from the limb of a tree; this afternoon I’d taken another Colt automatic from Bludgett. Both of them were now wrapped in a bath towel and tucked away on a shelf in my clothes closet, and—considering where I was going and what I had in mind—I would probably need more armament than merely my .38. What I really needed was a bazooka and a machine gun and immortality, but what the hell. I’d settle for my .38 and two Colt. 45’s.
I started talking again and told Tony that, as far as Lucrezia’s whereabouts and what had happened to her were concerned, the Highway Patrol could have the paint on Tony’s front fender analyzed and come up with the make and model of the other car and damn near figure out how much gas was in its tank, that they’d be working on it, and so would I—and short of hell and high water, earthquake and eruption, I’d find her.
Then I said, “We’ll keep hoping this has nothing to do with that probably tapped phone of yours, but just in case it does there might be trouble heading your way. So let me talk to Sergeant Striker. I’ll hang on while you go back to your place and get him. There are some things he should know, especially about Lieutenant—”
“He had to leave.”
“He left? When?
“About … seven, seven-fifteen. It was just a little while before the Highway Patrol called me—”
“Is he coming back? Why did he leave?”
“I don’t know if he’ll be back. Lieutenant Weeton phoned him here, and he had to go on some kind of special duty. He said the lieutenant is in charge of everything when the captain goes home at night, so he had to leave.”
It shouldn’t have affected me as much as it did, I suppose, but my face got cold and I could feel the sudden wetness on it.
“Tony, you’ve got a gun in your house, haven’t you?”
“Shotgun and rifle. But—”
“Go home. Load the shotgun. Keep the blinds drawn, stay in the house, and keep that boomer handy.”
“What? My God, do you think—”
“Don’t worry about what I think. I’ve got to go.”
“But, load the gun? And stay in—”
“Just do it, will you? I’ve got to get going. Good-bye.”
I had actually started to hang up the phone when it happened. I knew what it was. I knew immediately. Behind me there was a sort of calamitous-and-catastrophic-sounding CRASH and a somewhat lesser sound of splintering-booming-thundering. It was very much as though a bolt of lightning had landed three feet from my ear. But I knew it wasn’t that. It was merely hell and high water, earthquake and eruption.
My back was to the door. Even without looking I knew, I just knew, that someone—or something—had crashed through that door like those villains you see tearing through houses in animated cartoons.
I dropped the phone and swung around ducking and bending aside before I even started turning, and I saw him—need I say who?—coming at me like a great oak uprooted and flung at me on the winds of a typhoon. The cuffs still encircled each of his wrists, but they were separated, no longer joined in the middle.
But that wasn’t all.
Beyond Bludgett, who had one humanoid arm
cranked back and was already uncranking it and the ridiculous fist at its end, were a regiment of other guys. They were jumping in over the door that Bludgett had hit and knocked absolutely flat on the carpet, their intention clearly to do the same thing to me.
If I hadn’t swerved and ducked even before starting to turn, Bludgett’s enormous fist would have caught me squarely in the head. As it was, the thing whistled by two inches from my skull, and I just kept on leaning to my left, got leverage for one foot and half hopped and half shoved myself aside.
Bludgett couldn’t stop, kept going. I heard him hit the wall. I hoped he’d keep on going through the wall, but knew it was a forlorn hope. Actually it didn’t matter much. What had looked like a regiment of hoods streaming in the door turned out to be only three others, but three—with Bludgett—was enough. Three without Bludgett was enough. Two of them I recognized: hard-muscled and slim-hipped Ace; the square milk-white face and short burly body of Lucky Ryan. The third man was dark-skinned, lean, with hard black eyes, thin black moustache.
Even as I recognized the two men, I wondered what Ryan was doing here with Ace and the third guy—probably Fleepo—his appointed executioners. But I would have to ponder that question another time, if ever.
There wasn’t time to get out my Colt or even think of getting it out. There were no other guns in sight. I guess they didn’t want the sound of gunshots to bring possible help—help for me, like bellmen and maids—on the run. Nearest to me was the guy called Ace. Despite his muscular build, he clearly wasn’t much of a man for the rough-and-tumble. He wasn’t planted, getting set. He was actually jumping at me, one foot clear the hell off the floor and both his hands reaching.
No matter what else happened in the next few seconds I knew I was going to get him. I did, and I got him good. Those reaching hands were before his face, so I didn’t even try to bang through them, just bent my knees a little more and then shoved as hard as I could, letting right hand and arm slice up toward his middle as my legs uncoiled, and when my projecting knuckles smacked against his gut he jerked astonishingly in the air, and the breath flew from his mouth like gas from a geyser, and I saw him spin off to one side atilt, falling, but I didn’t see him land.
I did see the leather-covered sap swinging and jerked my head aside. Almost in time. It barely clipped me, but it made my head ring like a lead gong and slowed me down a little. Enough. The sap was in Lucky’s hand. Almost on top of me was the black-moustached man. I was already bent to my left, but still balanced. I yanked my right leg up, snapped it out and felt the heel of my shoe ram into the guy’s groin. A knee came up and hit my chest hard, knocking me off balance. I spun around, trying to get my feet planted.
Turning, everything blurred, almost out of focus, I got a glimpse of Ace doubled up on the floor and saw the moustached boy six feet away on his back, so the guy yanking on me had to be Lucky—but that which was now before my eyes made all else pale into insignificance.
It mattered not that I was still on my feet, or that of the four strong lusty men who had attacked me two were now temporarily out of commission, or that with only a few more moments of grace it was at least possible I could have sent Lucky to join his friends on the carpet.
It mattered not. That was the stuff of which dreams were made.
What mattered was Bludgett.
Bludgett, all set, ready and eager and homicidal, feet spread, arm cocked again, cocked and then triggered.
I saw that huge fist coming at me and tried to move my head, but knew my head wasn’t moving fast enough, certainly not as fast as it would soon be moving, and in that elastic moment I remembered the many—too many—times I’d thought, Man, I hope I never get clobbered by Bludgett. The too many times, because I already knew if you hold the dumb goddamn thought long enough you are going to get it, and now, sure enough, I was going to get it.
In what remained of that sickening instant there was time only for very quick little thoughts, so I thought, “No!” And then “No!” But each time a dirty little voice from somewhere, somewhere smarter than where I was, whispered, “Oh, yes.”
With that fist merely a blur half an inch from my head, my very last thought was, That Which He Feared Has Come Upon Him, and even though it wasn’t original it was true as true could be. Because, right then, it sure did come upon me.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The flood fell in sheets of thunder and the mud was filled with lightning. Wetness whipped me with a heavy lash. Freezing blackness oozed over me like cold napalm. For a while there was no pain, and then the pain began.
With the pain, memory. Very little at first. Memory of men and blows … of something blurred, too deep in mind to reach … And awareness of now. Now: I was lying flat, face down, in mud. Rain fell steadily on my back. I could hear thunder, swelling and fading. When I rolled over and sat up, my right arm almost buckled, pain darting in the muscles, and my head throbbed, throbbed, throbbed, a dull knife slicing through it with every beat of my heart.
Minutes passed while I sat there, and slowly memory returned. Not all of it, some of it. I remembered Mountain Shadows. Lucrezia Brizante, the lovely Lucrezia. Everything from meeting her in the cocktail lounge up until … the convention room, and Bludgett. Yeah, Bludgett, and the laser, and getting socked or pushed or flung off the stage.
And then—too suddenly—Bludgett again, his fist swinging at me, the other men with him.…
I couldn’t have been with Bludgett, getting smacked across the back, and then immediately afterward in my own rooms with Bludgett—and three other lobs—getting smacked in the head, smacked by Bludgett again.
But that’s the way it was. The space between, or rather the segment of time between, had been plucked out and thrown away. Or smacked out and thrown away. A minute, an hour, or hours—I had no idea how long, nor did I have any idea what had filled the minutes or hours.
Wouldn’t you know? I thought. Wouldn’t you know the one blank bit would be the bit between Bludgett and Bludgett?
The one blank bit, that is, except for the one just ended. The blankness which had begun when that huge fist connected with my forehead. There was, naturally, no memory of anything from then until now, since when unconscious one is not conscious. And I had sure been unconscious.
So how had I gotten here?
There was something … That thing “too deep in mind.”
Running, shouts, sharp sounds—shots, probably. Gunshots. But it was all thick and blurred, not real, confused, like one picture on a single film exposed a dozen times. I knew I’d been with the four hoods, had been knocked out. I remembered that vivid moment in my room. But how I’d gotten there—or here—I didn’t know. I didn’t even know where “here” was.
I stood up. At least I was able to stand. Everything worked. There were no bullet holes in me. Lights shone in the darkness not very far away. I walked toward them.
It was a gas station. Two pumps, a guy reading a paperback book. I rubbed mud from the face of my watch. It was still running, and the time was nine-sixteen, so I guessed I’d come to about nine o’clock. From the attendant I learned the station was on the road between Scottsdale and Sunrise Villas, about five miles from Mountain Shadows. I had change in my pockets, wallet inside my coat. Everything—except my gun.
I dropped a dime into the pay phone on the wall, dialed Mountain Shadows. I wasn’t able to reach Paul Anson, but I managed to get Artie Katz brought to the phone. He’d been parking cars at the hotel entrance, but when I told him who I was and where and asked if he could pick me up in a hurry, he said, “Right away, Mr. Scott. I’ll bet you’re surprised how quick.”
I hung up, smiling—probably for the first time in hours—and went into the rest room, and stopped smiling. Over the washbasin was a large mirror in which I caught sight of myself from the waist up. I seemed to be entirely mud. But by looking very closely I could see, under the wet earth, a huge lump on my forehead, plus a cut over my right eye.
I washed my face and han
ds but didn’t even try to do anything about my clothes—my lovely, brand-new, custom-tailored, shimmering, color-of-a-dragon’s-eye suit. What I needed was a complete overhaul; a dab here and there wasn’t going to make much difference. So I spent only a minute or so in the john, then walked outside and was trying to light a wet cigarette—it can’t be done—when I heard a sound.
It was a zooming sound, a muffled roar, and for a moment I thought it was a fan-jet flying low through rain and storm over the Valley of the Sun. But then I saw on my right, where five miles distant Scottsdale lay, a pair of headlights rushing toward me with astounding speed.
It was Artie Katz. It had to be. The tires shrieked, skidded on the wet pavement, he slid to a stop fifty yards past the station, backed up heedless of death, whipped his frail-looking buggy around, screeched the tires again, and with a grinding jerk made the heap spring forward to stop inches from my quaking knees.
“How was that?” he asked, grinning his toothy grin.
I didn’t say anything. I eyed his automobile dubiously, then opened the door and climbed in.
“I figured you’d think I got here pretty quick,” he said, presumably disappointed by my silence. “I did it in just over three minutes.”
“I don’t believe you’re here yet, that’s all,” I said. “Or, rather, I simply lost a little extra time somewhere—I’m good at that. Three minutes? Ha, I defy you to prove—”
Vrooom. My head snapped back. I’d barely got it forward again when the tires were screeching and we were swerving a little, a little too much, on the highway. “Are we there?” I asked.
Kill Me Tomorrow Page 18
