Kill Me Tomorrow

by Richard S. Prather

  “I been thinkin’ on that myself.” It was Lucky Ryan, but his voice was different. “I been thinkin’ a lot on that. Long as Letch says kill her, he can’t hardly give much mind to how we do it. Or what we do before we do it.”

  Ace, laughing, “I had the same exact thing in mind, Lucky. But you can take what they call the first honors, buddy. One thing, even if she yells a little, nobody’ll hear her. And we sure don’t have no worries of being interrupted, not where she’s at.”

  “Sometimes, is better when they do yell some.” That was Fleepo’s voice again. “Some at first, I mean.”

  Lucky again, “Would you of believed it a couple days ago? A hot-looking movie star like her? A real movie star? Man, talk about gettin’ lucky.”

  “I don’t think you ought to do nothin’ like that.” That was the rumbling voice of Bludgett.

  “Come off it. What difference if she’s gonna be hit in the head right after?”

  “It just don’t seem right. I don’t like it. I can understand she’s got to be kilt. But, that other—well, you shouldn’t do it.”

  The hard, flat voice, the voice with muscles. “Quit worrying about every goddamn thing, Bludgett. You can stay outside in the yard. Play pattycake with Davey, take Lecci’s pulse—yeah, bring Letch his medicine. You can skip the party. Do anything you want, pray with Holyjoe if you feel like it. Just leave us have a little fun, OK?”

  No more conversation for a few seconds, then, “Don’t go back on them first honors, Ace. I’d give you a little trouble, come to that. Now I been thinkin’ more about it.”

  “She’s all yours, Lucky, buddy. Relax. She’s not going anywheres.”

  “Yeah, OK. Man, more I think about it, more I’m ready to go! Yeah, I mean! Only thing would keep me from that sweet-built babe now is if I was dead.”

  Silence.

  Silence until Fleepo said, “About here, Ace? What you think?”

  “Yeah.”

  Right then, a strange, never-before-experienced moment or series of moments for me. For me, sitting in Paul’s room listening, and remembering. Because it was at that point—two hours ago in time—that I had begun regaining consciousness.

  In a crazy way it was almost as if I were three people, or there were three compartments in me, each a little different from the others. I was the man sitting here now who knew the before and the then and the after-then; and the man to whom it had happened then and who had forgotten it; and the man then, coming out of nothingness without memory of the before, without memory of anything at that moment, merely a man becoming aware of sensations returning, the beginning of pain, of hearing, of consciousness, almost like a man being born out of a void into life, the beginning of life again.

  Yes, a man being born again into life—just when those dandies decided they’d reached a fine place for killing me.

  “OK, Lucky, pull over here. What are we, six, seven miles outa town? Good enough. Haul him out, Bludgett.”

  Lucky said, “Why here? Why don’t we wait till we’re where we’re gonna leave him?”

  “Too close to houses and that. Nobody’ll hear it where we’re at now. Get it done, then we lug him there and dump him.”

  Bludgett’s hands on me, lifting, movement. Other movement around me. And Lucky saying in an odd voice, “What’s that little popgun you got, Ace? Little snub—funny. Looks a helluva lot like Scott’s heater.”

  “Are you outa your conk? Come on, for crissakes, get the job done. You keep messing around we’ll have to tap Scott on the nut again.”

  I was dumped on the ground—plenty of feeling in me by then. I lay still, getting ready. Maybe there wouldn’t be a chance to run, maybe when and if I tried I wouldn’t be able to run. But I lay still, waiting.

  And Lucky was saying, “Sure a bunch of funny crap about guns tonight. Me with Frankenstein’s—”

  “Frankie, goddammit, I tole you guys a hunderd times—”

  “Lemme see that little heat, Ace. Scott carries a two-inch Special, and I’m goddamned if that don’t look—”

  “You miserable fleeper, you want some hick to come along and pop his goddamn glims at us while we’re all standing around—”

  “I said lemme see it. It’s funny, me with Frankenstein’s—”

  “Frankie. Goddammit, Frankie. Do I got to—”

  And then I was moving, trying to get up, scrambling, making it, starting to run. Slipping—aware finally of rain, of mud beneath my feet. Behind me, close behind me, shouts, swearing, a lot of four-letter words—and one gunshot. One, then what sounded like half a dozen all at once.

  There were two or three more shots—but I just kept running. A long way, it seemed. Running, slipping and stumbling, falling. Finally falling and staying down. Then that confused sense of the flood falling in sheets of thunder … and the blackness like cold napalm.…

  I sat and thought for a while.

  There were a couple of minutes when, adding together all I knew—knew for sure—plus what I’d guessed, I thought I had enough fact and solid evidence, not to mention sensible deduction, to clap half the hoods in Arizona into the pokey. I should have known better than to feel like that, even for a couple of minutes.

  “Do you have a pain somewhere?” Paul asked me.

  “Sort of. I was just thinking of what I know about those bums, and I was preparing to cast them all into dungeons.”

  “So?”

  “So consider my evidence.” I pointed to Paul’s tape recorder. “Plenty of good stuff there. Shell Scott spilling the real inside dope about local—maybe national—crime, right? Wrong. I could be reading Alice in Wonderland—it’s nothing but my voice. The keen stuff I got from Bludgett? Coercion, torture, false confession extracted from quailing victim—besides which, it is merely in my head, which Bludgett failed to sign, thus it would be my word against his. Not to mention the fact that I failed to advise him of his rights and have an attorney in attendance. DiGiorno is Lecci? So? Can’t do anything until I can prove he’s committed a specific crime, and he’s merely a mafiosi multiple murderer. Add all of it up, Paul, and what have I got?”

  “A look of pain. That’s why I asked you if—”

  “The only thing that might—not in this case, of course, but some other case—stand up in court is the Voiceprint testimony. Such has elsewhere been admitted into evidence, and even helped lead to conviction. Unfortunately, the Jenkins tape was procured in a slightly illegal manner. Even I, in making my comparison tape, forgot to get permission of the tapees, such as Lecci, Reverend Archie, and Lieutenant Weeton, would you believe it?”

  “What half-baked undertaking are you attempting to justify in your own mind, Sheldon?”

  “Well, you know what they cliché, if you want a thing done right, do it yourself.” I paused. “This we’re sure of, those bastards kidnaped—that’s a crime—Lucrezia Brizante. I mean, that really is a crime. I know that. I know where she is, and all I have to do is go there and get her, and bring her out, and I shall have proved a crime.”

  “What in the name of God are you going to do?”

  I told him as little as possible, but did ask his help in getting some more “instruction” I needed, and a little equipment required for the job I had in mind. He managed to come up with everything I wanted in twenty minutes. Before then he hadn’t asked me any very serious questions.

  But when I was ready to leave he said, “You really know where she is?”

  “Sure. An old joint called the King mansion at Sunrise Villas. Oh, I’m not positive. And I couldn’t have figured it out from the hypnosis alone. But with that plus what I got from Bludgett earlier, and what I already knew, yeah.”

  “I suppose some of your—friends will be there?”

  “I’d say the four jollies you’ve met through me tonight, if they haven’t already killed Lucky Ryan or he hasn’t shot some of them up. But I’ll make a bet Ace still has him conned, and Lucky doesn’t yet know they were going to plug him—with my gun—just as soon as he
banged me. Then, The Letch, I’d guess. Maybe one, two more. Who the hell knows?”

  He shook his head. “How come you’ve lived so long?”

  I grinned. “Obviously because of my keen intellect, my meticulous planning, my extraordinary insight into the hoodlum mind, my vast knowledge of criminology, criminalistics, criminal-crostics, crossword puzzles, and anagrams, plus, of course—”

  “That’s enough. I just didn’t understand before.”

  We walked to the door and I stepped outside.

  Paul looked at me for a moment. “Shell, I—” He stopped. Then he went on, “Give me a call at eight in the morning, will you? Sometimes I sleep right through the alarm.” He shut the door in my face.

  I stood there and burped. I was scared. Probably Paul was quite aware of that, but I didn’t give a hoot. I burped again. There was lots of gas on my stomach.

  I didn’t feel well at all.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  By the time I had the laser in place, YAG rod aimed at the base of the high stone wall surrounding the King mansion, it was exactly midnight, and I was trying to decide whether to puke or merely throw up. I didn’t feel well.

  I hadn’t asked Dr. Fretsindler if I could borrow his laser. There was, I’d felt, a chance he would reply No! Some might say I had stolen it, but that would be untrue. I intended to return it. Nothing in the whole world would please me more than to return it. It, and the car, of course.

  A swell girl once told me, “If you’re going to do something wrong, do it right!” Though the hoods’ talk about Weeton’s preparing to “get a warrant out” on me was probably true enough, I felt sure neither he nor those hoods intended the real law to get its hands on me until after I was dead, so I doubted there was yet an APB out on me or a hot sheet on my car. But there were too many people other than the police, like Weeton and pals, who might recognize my Cadillac; thus, remembering the swell girl’s advice, I had also stolen the car attached to the laser’s little trailer. Borrowed it, that is.

  It had taken me half an hour, after coasting without lights to a stop near the creepy old joint on Willow Lane, to find an opening in the oleander hedge and lug the two laser components from their trailer, and set them up in the slimy ooze.

  Slimy ooze was right. It had stopped raining for the last several minutes, but you wouldn’t believe the muck. My feet went down into it at every step so deeply that most of the time thick mud was around my ankles. That, plus the fact that the sloppy earth slanted downward as it got farther from the wall, made it difficult to get my gadgetry aimed just right, but by shoving a couple of rocks under the rear end of the laser’s metal box I managed to get the rod pointed at the wall’s base, and was finally ready.

  But the laser wasn’t. It still had to be plugged in.

  Actually, all I wanted or needed the laser for was a little part of the job. I knew, from what Bludgett had told me, there was no point in trying to go over the wall. I had also seen the solid-steel gate he’d mentioned—though I had not walked around all four sides of the wall, since even with lots of luck I didn’t expect to find a hole already in it. Consequently I was going to attempt making my own hole. Just as soon as I got the laser plugged in.

  The thing required merely an ordinary 110-volt source of power but, since I couldn’t walk up to the gate and ring the bell and ask Lecci or whatever answered if I might please use one of his outlets, that had been the bit of “education” or know-how I’d asked Paul to discover for me. It was simple enough. For an electrical engineer who climbed mountains during thunder-and-lightning storms as a hobby.

  For me—well, even back in Paul’s warm, cozy room it had sounded like one more good way to get killed, and I know plenty of those already. Out here in the off-and-on rain, with thunder in my ears and frequent flashes of lightning in my eyes, it struck me as the best way of all. I had with me the only equipment required—a knife, and a long coil of two-wire electrical cable with three feet of its outer insulation stripped from one end and alligator clamps affixed to both wires thus exposed. The other end of the cable was already plugged into the electrical cord attached to the laser. All I had to do was climb a telephone pole and attach my two alligator clamps to the two correctly selected wires, thus completing the circuit, and, presto, the wizardry would commence.

  With the cable looped under my belt and trailing behind me I walked to the telephone pole—the same pole by which I’d stood while looking at Bludgett and Ace in the headlights of my car—and started climbing. That part was difficult but not impossible. It was only after some mild agony, when I’d finally reached the top, that I realized the frequent lightning flashes which illumined everything for miles around with a brilliance marvelous to behold must naturally, whenever they did that, also illuminate me similarly. Thus if anybody in the old mansion happened to glance out this way they might see something which would puzzle them.

  Well, the hell with it. I had other worries. Keeping Paul’s information firmly in mind I examined my immediate vicinity. I had to use a pencil flashlight for brief and occasional illumination, and also had to hope if anybody noticed it they would think it was tiny lightning, so that’s what I hoped.

  In my immediate vicinity there was, first, the telephone pole, a couple of inches from my nose. That was about the only thing I was sure of. And there was the crossarm, and the transformer, and a whole bunch of junk. Most important, there were two wires, parallel and about two feet apart, leading from the pole off into the darkness toward the old King place. They simply had to be the 110-volt service for the house.

  Sure they did. One of them was a bare aluminum wire—that would be the neutral line. The other was a black-insulated wire—and it would be the hot one. I got my first alligator clamp stuck onto the aluminum wire without great difficulty, except that I started to fall off the pole once. But before affixing my second clamp to the hot line, I was supposed to skin off, with a “skinning knife,” the neoprene insulation which, as it was intended to do, insulated the wire inside, and which, if it remained on, would effectively prevent efficient contact with my clamp from being made. I did a lot of thinking about that.

  I didn’t have a skinning knife, but since I wasn’t an expert, maybe a pocketknife would do for me. It would have to. I took quite a lot of time making certain I’d found the correct place to affix my second clamp. Finally I was satisfied.

  Yes, I said to myself, that’s the right place. Yes. Yes. It’s the 110-volt line supplying current to the old King mansion. It’s not one of those real hot 7,200-volt lines, which can be somewhat tricky. Yes. Yes, that’s the right one. Actually, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I’d never realized before that a telephone pole was such a complicated thing. Always before they’d just been goddamn poles sticking up in the air.

  The thing was, if I had the right line, all was fine and dandy. But if I had the wrong one, zap, and the electrical wizard would go spinning through the ether, burned to a crisp. Wouldn’t hurt to wait another few seconds, I supposed.

  I looked around. Lightning pulsed far off to the east, beyond the Superstition Mountains, silhouetting the Superstitions and Four Peaks near them. Beautiful view, I thought. Be a great place to build a house. Yeah, right up here where the top of the telephone pole was. That’s where I wished I was right now—up here in a house. Before a crackling fire, with a crazy blonde, getting soused, that’s what I wished.

  I attacked the insulation with my knife, neoprene flew, I was down to bare wire, and—stuck my second clamp into place.

  No zap.

  Even so, I couldn’t be sure there was juice flowing through my electrical cable. You can’t wet a finger and go spat on it, like ladies do with irons. So I simply slid and half fell down the pole, then, presuming the laser would be doing its job, commenced a quick circuit around the base of the ten-foot wall. It was just a stone wall all the way. No cracks, no more gates. The spot I’d chosen was as good as any other.

  All during the circuit I wondered if my labori
ously pluggedin machine was doing anything at all, or just sitting there in the mud like a piece of junk. But as soon as I got back near it I knew something was sure as hell happening. For a couple of seconds I thought a car’s headlights were aimed my way, but then I realized the glow came from an area of wall glowing stupendously, like the little boulder on which I had performed for Bludgett.

  I didn’t even need my pencil flash to see that the rocks on which I’d propped the laser’s rear end had sunk down slowly—and quite deeply—into the mud, so that the infrared beam being emitted from the end of the YAG rod was aimed four or five feet higher than it had been when I left.

  So I simply hauled the rear end of the black case up out of the mud and stood there holding it, moving it around a little and aiming at the wall’s base, and as the glow dimmed above and brightened below I began thinking this really might be going to work. Finally I turned off the switch, picked up the foot-long chisel and heavy rubber-faced lead hammer I’d brought along, and moved to the wall. When I chopped at its base with my chisel—sort of tentatively exploring the area before banging away with my hammer—the stone crumbled astonishingly, even more easily than the granite rock had when Bludgett poked it with his screwdriver. So I simply kept working away with the chisel until I had a hole nearly three feet wide and a couple of feet high, not quite all the way through the wall. I had to punch with the chisel while lying flat on my stomach to finish the job, but it required merely a half-dozen raps and—that was it.

  I was already on my stomach. I simply wriggled forward, squirmed through the hole—a few pebble-sized hunks of weakened rock, along with a sprinkling like sand, falling down on me as I went through—and then I was inside.