Kill Me Tomorrow

by Richard S. Prather

  Perhaps because I had felt most exposed, perhaps because I was obviously outnumbered—certainly, after this night of nights, not because I was any smarter than they were—I was the first to recover my wits.

  Weeton was no longer a worry. Bludgett, for sure, was out of it. But before me in the brightly lighted courtyard there yet stood three hoods, all three of them transfixed, gazing aghast at the prone, still body of Bludgett, their almost-hero, eyes riveted upon him and ears still pierced by that hideous dull crackophony, that medley of a head breaking and again breaking.

  There were those three. And inside the house, only three or four more. And Lucrezia.

  I sure as hell wasn’t going to leave while Lucrezia was still here. And if I hesitated, these guys would either shoot me or take cover in the house—and then I’d never get across that muddy plain. To Lucrezia. If I was ever going to charge, now was the time. Even logic said the time was now. They, whoever they are, say the best defense is a good offense, and I sure needed plenty of defense.

  So—I charged.

  Lucky Ryan saw me coming and let out a yell, yanking his gun up and toward me, and ten feet on his right Fleepo—somehow—already had his gun aimed at me. Beyond Fleepo, Ace was turning fast. I snapped a shot at Lucky and missed, let two go from the gun in my left hand and hit Fleepo. I don’t know where I hit him, but when a man takes a .45 bullet you know he’s hit. He went back at least ten feet, both arms flying out loosely from his sides. I squeezed off one more at Ace but he merely bent down, far down in a low squat, and the gun jumped in his hand.

  In the bright light I could barely see flame lick from the gun’s muzzle, but I saw it, and felt the slug slide by my neck so near it must have been no more than an eighth of an inch from the skin. Lucky’s gun blasted from so close it startled me that I wasn’t hit and, still running, I snapped my head around, kept my eyes and my gun on him and squeezed the trigger twice. Both bullets smacked into him, and the way they rammed him, the way he went down, I knew that sonofabitch was dead.

  I swerved, tried to run toward Ace, and my feet slipped in the thick mud. I slid, went down. If I hadn’t gone down that way, I’d have gone down Ace’s way, and for good. Because he let go three in a row, pulling his gun down right at me for the last one—at least I thought it was right at me, but the slug went past between my arm and side, ripping through my coat but not through me.

  Then I was up, running toward him, and the gun in my right hand was empty. From twenty feet away I hurled it at him and, by God, I hit him. I got him low on the leg, and it was a freak of luck that I touched him at all, but I hit him, and the shot he triggered went way the hell off to one side instead of near me or maybe in me. I triggered the Colt in my left hand and it blasted once but only once, so I threw it at him but two hits in two throws was more than a mere mortal could hope for. I missed him by two yards, but when he pointed his gun at me and squeezed the trigger, nothing happened.

  Except that I reached him, ducked the hand swinging his empty gun at me, and slammed a left into his gut. It was like hitting a steel boiler. It moved him back, but it didn’t knock him down or even bend him over. He caught me high on the cheekbone with a right hand, and it was a good one. It jarred me.

  It also sent a little more juice into me, fired me up enough that the long hard right I swung had more steam in it, and this time when I hit his gut it was still like hitting a steel boiler, but it bent him. He made a soft sound, like a man with smoker’s cough, but he was kind of atilt and his hands weren’t in my way. I had time to set myself, not much time but enough, and when I brought my left hand up from near my knee and the balled fist smacked his chin, the sound alone would have told me I had him.

  I did. But I got to hit him one more time. I was glad. I wanted to hit him one more time. His head snapped back in the way a head sometimes goes when the neck’s going to break, but it rolled forward a little again as he sort of straightened up and then started to drop. I barely had time to get one last shot in as he went down. I got it in.

  I stood there for a moment, heart pounding heavily enough to shake me. Then the blood cooled, the fever stilled, a little. I looked at Ace near my feet in the mud, then slowly turned around. Bludgett lay motionless at the wall’s base. Near me was Fleepo, still breathing, froth of blood wiggling on his lips. I walked toward Lucky Ryan, but didn’t go close. There was no question about him.

  I started wondering about the men inside, still in the house. Bludgett had run, perhaps unaware of it, with his gun in his hand. It lay a few feet from him, a gleam of metal in the mud. I walked toward him, passing near Weeton. The lieutenant was on his stomach, side of his face in the mud, but his mouth had room for air to get in, and some was getting in. So he was alive, too.

  Bludgett’s long-barreled revolver was a murderous weapon. Not another Colt like the one I’d taken from him yesterday, but a .44 Magnum, the closest thing you can get to a cannon in a handgun. Solid, shocking, powerful, heavy. It matched the man. I swung out the cylinder. Every chamber full; no empties. He hadn’t fired a shot.

  I was in a hurry, but I took time to press a finger against Bludgett’s massive neck. A pulse still beat there. Not a very vigorous pulse, but I could feel the push of his blood against my finger. Maybe it didn’t make good sense, but I was glad he wasn’t dead. I had, I guess, a kind of mild, warped affection for Bludgett—one more indication, I suppose, of my basic depravity.

  Then I straightened up and ran—walking would have pressed even my luck too far—around behind the house again. I stayed close to the building’s side. It was still bright as day. As I approached the shattered and open window, I could hear men talking. I thought: What the hell?

  It sounded like two men, not a tape recording, but I wasn’t going to make up my mind about that—not this time—until I was in the room, or had at least looked into it. The base of the window here, too, was about four feet above the ground. I moved on hands and knees to its middle, and didn’t wait when I got there, didn’t even let myself wonder if maybe some guy was inside with a gun pointed my way. He couldn’t point it at every spot where a head might pop up, and I was getting too damned tired to worry a hell of a lot about it anyhow.

  So I just stood up and leaned in a little, looking over the barrel of the Magnum, finger very tight on the trigger.

  Nothing. Two men just to the left of the door, standing, talking. I heard the end of one sentence. “… over by now.”

  I presumed he’d said, “I guess it must be all over by now,” something like that. Well, he was almost right. It was almost over.

  The man speaking was Pete Lecci, and the guy he was talking to was the halfway-familiar man I’d gotten such a quick squint at minutes ago. I glanced around. On my right, the three big wide overstuffed chairs—empty—and the two couches at the intersection of the walls. Those were empty, too.

  I didn’t see Reverend Archibald.

  Lecci and the other guy were eyeballing me in the true “eyeball” sense of the word. It appeared if their lids spread open any further those orbs might roll out on their cheeks. I kept the gun pointed in their general direction as I climbed through the window, after a look right and left. Still nothing.

  “Where’s Holyjoe?” I said.

  Lecci said, “He went upstairs. To the girl.”

  I started toward them, got almost up to them, before it struck me that, for Lecci—especially for Pete “The Letch” Lecci—such sudden and almost bountiful helpfulness was perhaps too good to be true.

  It may be a fault. Sometimes, a fault. But I’ll never regret that I am such a suspicious lad.

  The only place the bastard could be, if he was still in the room, was behind one of those big wide chairs. I damn near muffed it anyway. I jerked my head around—but kept my gun pointed at the two men.

  So when I saw the Reverend Stanley Archibald he was rising from behind his chair much as I’d risen from beneath the window sill, and his gun was already aimed at my chest, and upon his face was an expres
sion seldom if ever seen in a pulpit, except perhaps those where the Black Mass is performed.

  I moved about as fast as I’ve ever moved, unquestionably as fast as I had at any time during the last thirty-six hours—straight toward Lecci. I jumped at the wrinkled old creep and flipped my hand and the gun in it toward Archie and was pulling the trigger before the muzzle was even pointed at the wall behind him. I wanted to make noise, and you can bet I did. The Magnum roared in the room, making the sound of Archibald’s .38 caliber revolver sound, comparatively, like a pop—a deadly pop, true. Deadly when the slug hits you. His didn’t hit me.

  He fired once and missed. I fired four times and missed him twice. To put it positively, I hit him twice.

  And to express it simply, but accurately, it was horrible.

  The first heavy .44 Magnum bullet hit him with such stunning force that even to hear the sound would tell a man it was the sound of death. The impact hurled him back toward the wall and while he was moving the second slug hit him, hit him and seemed to hammer him into the wall. He slammed the wood, his head thudded back against it. For a long slow moment he hung there, then he fell.

  It was queer, crazy, freakish. But he fell on his knees. There was just a little bit of life left in him, and while he was still on his knees the Reverend Stanley Archibald’s lips moved slightly, very slightly. Then his head dipped, and he simply slid forward and died.

  In all the commotion, I had hardly noticed that I’d banged into Lecci and creamed him pretty good.

  He was on the floor, kind of sprawled out every which way, with his shriveled lips wiggling and his dark, sunken eyes apparently unfocused completely. While he tried to figure out how he was ever going to get on his feet I looked at the other man.

  He was big, maybe two hundred pounds, around six feet. A lot of chest and stomach on him. Rather pleasant, slightly heavy face, with a broad chin and sharp nose. He had a healthy head of brown hair, gray at the temples, and he was tanned, looked fit, the kind of skin you associate with steam baths and rubs and either sun or sunlamps.

  I’d never seen him before. But I said, “Now I know why you looked familiar. You remind me very much of Henry Yarrow.”

  He stared at me with what appeared to be near panic in his dark brown eyes. Those brown eyes rolled toward Archie’s body, dragged over Lecci—looked like The Letch was going to make it now—and then stopped on the huge gun in my hand. Finally he looked at my face.

  “I’m not going to shoot you,” I said irritably. I was irritable. “Unless you sneeze or something.”

  “What … where are—the others?”

  It was entirely in the way he said it, but it really was funny. I said, “Don’t worry about it. You better worry about me.”

  He nodded. I think if I’d told him to spin around on one toe he would have tried to do it.

  “Where is she?” I asked him.

  He told me. It was a kind of tower room at the upper-left corner of the building’s front, one of the towers I’d noticed when I had been outside this house for the first time an hour or two before sunrise Saturday morning.

  “Is she all right?”

  “Yes. Absolutely.”

  “Absolutely? Lucky Ryan wasn’t in this room when I banged inside. Why not? Where was that bastard?”

  “They sent him up outside her room.” He looked a bit closer at my face. “Outside, not in it. Really. They just didn’t want him in here. They wanted him to think he was guarding the door or something. It was just so he’d be out of the room.”

  “Because they were playing the tape.”

  “Yes,” he nodded. “She’s all right, believe me. She hasn’t been hurt—or anything.”

  “Let’s hope, for your sake, for the sake of everybody around here, that you’re correct.” I paused. “Anybody else in the house? Besides Lucky and those who were in this room when I first came in?”

  “No. Eight of us. That’s all. Where—”

  “Never mind. Who are you? What’s your name?”

  “Stephens. David Stephens.”

  I looked at him silently for at least ten seconds. “Kerwin Stephens’ brother?”

  “Yes.” He nodded. “Yes.”

  “Well.” I said. “So you’re the guy Gil Reyes talked to early Tuesday morning.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  For quite some time I’d known, by combining information from three sources—the Jenkins tape itself, Voiceprints, and Bludgett—the identities of six of the seven men on that tape: Lecci, Weeton, Archie, Ace, Fleepo, and Frankie. It would have been logical to assume Henry Yarrow was number seven, except that Professor Irwin had assured me my No. 1, Yarrow, was not on the Jenkins tape, which eliminated him.

  Enter: David Stephens. The seventh man.

  “Tell me, Davey,” I said—using the name one of the hoods had used for him when I’d been eavesdropping on them, while unconscious—“Kerwin’s the boy handing out the federal loot, the millions of the billions, right?”

  “Yes,” he nodded. “Yes.”

  Very cooperative. I couldn’t help wishing all crooks were like this. Of course, he wasn’t the ordinary kind of thief. Neither was his brother.

  I said, “Kerwin Stephens, chairman of the Commission on AGING. The one lad, above all, who can report that Sunrise Villas does—or does not—qualify for, say, fifty or a hundred million bucks from the AGING fund.”

  He nodded. Silently this time.

  “Would I maybe be not too wide of the mark if I guessed any fat grants to Sunrise Villas would have been administered and distributed by Lecci’s handpicked do-gooder? And that Sunrise Villas is—was—about to qualify absolutely?”

  He swallowed. “Was is right.”

  There was a little spark left in him yet.

  He even started to go on, “Only it wouldn’t have been Le—” and cut it off abruptly, his eyes rolling away from me toward “Le—” which is to say, Lecci.

  It was all right. I was reasonably certain he’d been going to say, “Only it wouldn’t have been Lecci’s handpicked do-gooder,” something like that. I’d used the name myself merely to shorten the conversation. Which had already lasted long enough.

  “OK,” I said. “We can wrap up the details later.” I shifted the heavy Magnum in my hand, gripped it by the barrel. “You want to turn around?”

  “What? What for?”

  “I don’t have any rope. Look, you’re getting off easy. I’m going to feed your brother poisoned birdseed.”

  “What?”

  “Well, you can watch if you want to.” I lifted the gun.

  He got it then. He turned around. He turned around and just stood there. Not a squawk out of him. David Stephens. A born loser. Whop. And he’d lost again.

  Lecci had finally struggled to his feet, amoeba-splotched gray skin corpse-pallid from the exertion, that crepey wattle beneath his chin still wiggling. He’d struggled to his feet just in time to see what happened to Stephens.

  I turned toward him.

  “You—” he said.

  I raised the Magnum over my head.

  “You—wouldn’t.”

  “Wouldn’t what?”

  “You—you wouldn’t hit a ninety-year-old man!”

  “Wouldn’t I?” I said.

  I stood outside the door upstairs and yelled, “Lucrezia!”

  The hallway was dark. In the beam of my pencil flash I saw a switch on the wall, flipped it. The hallway stayed dark, but a slice of brightness slid beneath the door. Sure; the boys would have wanted illumination inside when necessary, but not a switch that might be used—like dot-dash-dot, maybe—by the occupant, or prisoner. Prisoner … Lucrezia!

  “Lucrezia!” I yelled, even louder.

  “Shell?”

  “Yes. It’s me! Are you all right?”

  “I’m all right. But—you! Are you—”

  “I’m … swell.” I’d already tried the door, which naturally was locked. “Lucrezia,” I said, “I suppose this will sound like a silly q
uestion. But I turned on the light from my side. I don’t suppose you can unlock the door from your side, can you?”

  “You’re right. It’s a silly question.”

  “Stand against the wall the door’s in, this wall. But clear over in the corner. I’m going to shoot the lock out!”

  In a few moments she said, “I’m ready!”

  “I’m ready, too!” I called.

  After a little while she said, “Aren’t you going to shoot the lock out?”

  “Oh, yeah. Stand back!”

  “I’m already back.”

  “Oh, yeah. Well, here goes.”

  I gave it a blast. Terrible crashing roar. Shot hell out of the lock. It was absolutely ruined. But it seemed so grand, so dramatic … I gave it another shot.

  Then I flang the door open and jumped inside.

  Lucrezia was standing in the corner.

  But not for long.

  I no sooner stopped staggering around the room—caught my balance, that is—than she cried, “Oh, Shell … Shell!” and started rushing toward me.

  It was romantic, exciting, keen. Like movies. The girl rushing toward her guy, arms flang out, and on her face an ecstatic expression … On her face … What was going on?

  Lucrezia had come to a stop, a fast stop, almost a skidding stop, and her expression as she looked at me—at my face, hair, chest, feet, coat, pants, just about everything—was … Well, it wasn’t ecstatic.

  I kept forgetting that I’d been wallowing about in the muck for what seemed a week. First escaping from those four would-be killers and lying in the mud for a while. I’d never gotten around to really cleaning up after that, I recalled, a little sadly. Then, of course, there’d been climbing under the wall, leaping back through it, all that junk.