Dead-Bang

by Richard S. Prather

  “Not … very many. Go on.”

  “I was brought into this room first and the man you shot bound me, and after that he bound André. Dave was brought in then and tied to a chair as well. I haven’t been able to speak with him, of course, but before they tied and gagged him there were sounds as of … scuffling.”

  “Yeah. Somebody popped him.”

  There were some more humming and grunting noises from behind me. I twisted around and said, “Be with you in a shake, Mr. Cassiday. I can only do one thing at a time.” He said, “Whuwh” and wiggled a little.

  I said to Bruno, “You weren’t mistreated?”

  “Not physically.” He stared silently for moments, the strong face slightly twisted, as if he were looking at something repulsive. “The men told me what they wanted—my formula for Erovite, working papers, record of experiments, everything—and insisted I write a note to Dru telling her to bring the ERO envelope to the location mentioned in it.”

  “Uh-huh. They knew what they were after, but did they know the papers were in an envelope marked ERO and that the envelope was in your floor safe?”

  “No. They seemed only to know that I did possess such papers. Naturally I refused to do what they asked.”

  “Naturally?”

  I finally got the rope untied and pulled it free of his wrists. He breathed deeply, rubbed first one wrist and then the other as I squatted to work on the last knot, in a separate rope binding his ankles to the chair legs. There were some more smothered comments from Dave Cassiday, but I ignored them.

  “On gaining possession of the formula and notes,” Bruno said calmly, “they would have killed me, and Dave. If Dru had been foolish enough to actually bring the papers—which I was confident she would not be—they would have killed her as well. They could not be sure that except for myself only Dru knew the entire formula, but men such as these would have killed her merely to prevent her from reporting to others what had occurred. Or for no sane reason. If you doubt it—” he nodded toward the white, waxy corpse in the chair near the man I’d shot. “That was André Strang. They killed him quite callously, with astonishing lack of any apparent human emotion, and for no other reason—unless there are reasons I’ve not considered—than to force me to write that note to Dru.”

  The knot loosened, I pulled the rope through it, and in a few seconds Bruno’s ankles were free. I straightened up. My feet were wet. Wet with cold blood. My socks squished as I stepped over to Cassiday and removed the tape gag from his mouth, started to reach for the rope around his wrists.

  “There’s a knife in my pants pocket,” he said.

  I stared at him, dully. Then I looked at my fingers, the tips red, as if sandpapered. “Now you tell me.”

  His wide face creased in a crooked grin, then suddenly his dark eyebrows pulled down and in, and he laughed.

  Some pair I’ve got here, I thought. Dead man, blood all over the place, I crash in and shoot a guy, Bruno says, “How do you do, Mr. Scott, so glad you could come for tea, isn’t it a lovely day?” and Cassiday starts laughing.

  He didn’t laugh long. “Stupid of me,” he said. “I should have mentioned it.”

  I grinned at him, shaking my head, then found the knife in his pocket, opened it, stepped behind him and with one neat flick cut through the rope around his wrists. They’d used only one rope on him, running it down and wrapping it around his ankles and the chair legs, so it only took one flick. “I don’t mean to be unkind,” I said. “But please speak up the next time this happens.”

  He was staring at me. Intent, not smiling. O.K., so he was the only funny guy in the room. “Don’t think I’m not grateful,” he said. “I am. For myself and for Doc. But where in hell did you come from?”

  “My name’s Shell Scott, but the rest will have to wait. I feel strongly we should get out of this joint.”

  “You and me both,” he said.

  I retrieved my shoes, took off my sticky socks and cleaned the redness from my feet as best I could with a handkerchief. Cassiday had stood up and was stretching, and while I squeezed my bare feet into the shoes he walked to the stocky guy, squatted, and put a finger against his throat.

  After a few seconds he said quietly, “He’s dead.”

  “If he was still alive,” I told him, “I’d trade in my Colt for a sawed-off twelve-gauge. Those were Super Vel pills I put into him. Three of them. He was probably finished before he rolled over on his back.”

  “Super Vel?”

  “One’s usually enough.”

  As I tied my shoelaces, Cassiday said to Bruno, “Where in hell did this guy come from? How did he find us? I heard you talking—while this baboon was ignoring my conversation.” The quick, crooked smile he flashed me took some of the sting Out of “baboon.” “But that didn’t tell me much. It couldn’t have been something in the note they made you write … could it?”

  “Yes, Dave,” Bruno said. “That’s what it was.” He quickly explained.

  Cassiday was looking at him in an odd way, and when Bruno finished he said, with something close to incredulity in his voice, “You mean, you managed to think of that, and do it, while André …” He let the question trail off.

  Bruno didn’t say anything. Before straightening up I took another look at the incredibly white face of the late André Strang. “What did happen to him?” I asked neither of them in particular. “Him—and who else? It looks like there was a massacre in here. All that blood couldn’t possibly have come from one guy.”

  “It did,” Cassiday said. “I watched it. Doc and I both watched it. The blood came from that cut in André’s calf, in a steady stream, until he died, and after he died, for a hell of a time after he died—”

  “Wait a minute. Not for a hell of a time after he died, please. I’ve seen a lot of men bleed, and I’ve bled a bit myself. You can bet the boy I just shot has already stopped bleeding, and I’d guess there are as many holes in him as there are—”

  Bruno interrupted me. “There is, in André’s body, only that one cut, Mr. Scott. Upon my continued refusal to do as they wished, the shorter and slimmer of the two men who brought us here—who seemed to be in charge, I would say—explained matter-of-factly that they would kill André most horribly, by letting him bleed to death before me, if I persisted in my refusal. I …”

  His voice and brisk narrative faltered a bit, then he went on. “I did not believe him. The man took a leather case from his jacket pocket, and from it a filled hypodermic syringe. A ten c.c. syringe with, I believe, a twenty-three gauge needle. He thrust the needle into the large vein in the ante-cubital fossa—pardon me, the area at the crook of André’s arm—and emptied the syringe’s contents into his bloodstream. After a few minutes during which no one spoke—except André, who just before he was gagged said he was beginning to feel strange, light-headed, with a cool prickly sensation on the skin over his entire body—the same man took a small sharp instrument from the case and cut quite deeply into André’s calf. Very casually as if he were merely … opening an envelope.”

  Bruno took another deep breath, moving his legs, tensing them, and turning his feet back and forth, working to restore full circulation.

  “Can you walk?” I asked him.

  “In a short while, Mr. Scott. The bonds were quite tight. Unnecessarily so.” He reached down and rubbed one ankle, then the other. “André’s wound began to bleed and did not stop, did not clot, continued to bleed. Clearly, André was injected with something similar to heparin—a drug which helps to prevent clots in the blood, reduces the prothrombin, increases the clotting time—but much more effective than, say, warfarin. It is something of which I have no personal knowledge. When I saw what was occurring I told the men I would do as they wished. I asked them to stop the flow of blood. They said they would do so only after I completed the note.”

  I looked at him more closely, at the clear bright blue eyes, the firm and now unsmiling mouth. “You mean, you had to write that note to Dru while André Strang
was bleeding to death?” And as I asked the question I understood that odd note in Dave Cassiday’s voice.

  “Yes. It was difficult. I completed the note as quickly as I could. But—” He looked at me. “I know something of the nature of men, Mr. Scott. How base and cruel some men can sometimes be. But I did not believe they would let André die. They did, however. Deliberately. Even after I had given them the note. It was, their spokesman told me calmly, in order to impress upon me the seriousness of their intent, their determination to achieve what they were after. Or words of that nature—that ‘they meant business,’ I believe the man actually said. I was quite seriously upset, and not as attentive to the exact nature of his remarks as I would otherwise have been.”

  “That’s hardly surprising. Then you’re telling me all this—” I indicated the redness around us—“came out of one man? André? It just … drained out of him?”

  Bruno nodded.

  Cassiday said, “Nobody who didn’t see it can know how horrible it was, Scott. He got pale and clammy and then started to sweat, finally began making awful noises behind his gag, and then, well, he went into convulsions. Just before he died. But even after that he kept bleeding.”

  “Hypoxia,” Bruno added. “He convulsed because of a lack of oxygen. The blood carries oxygen to all the cells, to the brain, and he didn’t have much blood left in him then. Too little blood, too little oxygen, hypoxia, convulsion, death.”

  I looked at Cassiday, noticed his puffed eye, and asked, “How’d you get the mouse?”

  He put on half a smile. “For a couple of seconds I made the mistake of thinking I was a hero. After they got us all into the house there was a minute or so when I was in the front room with only the slim guy guarding me. Well, he took his eyes off me and I grabbed for his gun.” Cassiday licked his lips. “Didn’t even touch it. He merely moved the gun out of the way and smacked me with a fist like a bag of rocks. Next thing I knew, I was on my butt.”

  “This slim guy. He’s left-handed?”

  “Well … yeah.” He looked puzzled. “Did I mention it?”

  I shook my head. “It’s just the most likely explanation. He bounced his fist off your left eye, so probably he was swinging his right. If so, the gun would have been in his left hand—he didn’t hit you with the gun or you’d be cut. And if he’s left-handed, that might help us find him—”

  Cassiday completed the thought in my mind. “If he and that big ox don’t find us first. Let’s get a move on.”

  Bruno pressed his feet against the floor, leaned forward, and stood up. For a moment he closed his eyes, undoubtedly feeling pain in his long-bound ankles and legs. “Just a few moments more now, I think.” He looked at a watch on his left wrist. “Almost eleven,” he said as if to himself, then looked at me. “So it was not Dru, but you, who deduced that reversing the safe combination in my note, that is the numbers alone in reverse order, revealed the address where I was being held?”

  “Well, yes. She may have come up with the same idea since I left her. She was very worried about you.… How did you guess I figured it?”

  “It wasn’t a guess. Not really. More like your left-handed man. If it had occurred to Dru, she would have told you immediately, and you would have been here long before now.”

  I nodded. Then I nodded again. “When that gave me an address on Fifty-eighth Street, the fact that the info was to have been delivered to a house on Fifty-seventh here in Weilton, only a block away, just about tied it up. Incidentally, the thing that made me consider reading those numbers backward is also the reason for much of the delay. I went first to the Church of the Second Coming—”

  He winced as though he’d just felt another shooting pain in his feet. Perhaps higher than his feet.

  “And it was the … what they call the Chorale, and the Sainted Pastor, that, ah, inspired me. Hey, that reminds me, Doctor Bruno, you should know that tonight Festus Lemming pronounced you none other than the An …”

  I couldn’t do it. I mean, I couldn’t come right out and say it, just like that. “How’s the feet? Think you can get a wiggle—”

  Cassiday blurted, “Church? Almost eleven? Let’s go. We’ve got to—”

  “Festus Lemming pronounced me what?” Bruno asked.

  “We’d better get a move on, Doctor,” I said. “Don’t want any more blood on the floor, do we? Those two creeps might come back any min—”

  “Festus Lemming?”

  “Yeah. You’ve got to know. I mean, you’ve got to know. Well, we both realize there’s still a Flat Earth Society, don’t we? Sure we do—people who would swear on a stack of Bi … people who swear the Earth is flat as a pancake. Really believe it. And there are others who say that’s silly, the Earth is round, and we live on the inside of it—”

  “Will you stop wandering all over this flat hollow Earth of ours and get to the point, Mr. Scott?”

  “Well, he said you were … he—I was right there, I actually heard him say it. That you were—Oh, hell, you’re the Antichrist.”

  “Come now, Mr. Scott. Lemming, of course, encounters serious difficulties when attempting to think rationally about any subject. But not even … he …”

  Cassiday had stepped up next to me, his face showing concern. “I tell you, we’ve got to get the hell …” About then my last words penetrated and his face took on another expression. “Oh, come on.”

  Bruno slowly cocked his big head on one side, not looking at my face in the hope of reading something there, just staring vacantly. “Hmm,” he said. “Yes. Hmm, yes.” Then he looked at me. “Really did it, didn’t he?”

  “Really did.”

  “Of course.” Bruno’s arms were hanging loosely at his sides. He didn’t wave them in the air, or shrug, or kick the wall. He just bent his hands at the wrists, out and up, then kind of slapped them in against his pants, pat. “I should have guessed.” Pat-pat. “I should have anticipated it. I should have been ready for it!”

  “Doc,” Cassiday said, “forget it for now. Wait till we—”

  “For years he’s been telling those imbeciles they’d better follow his example and start committing suicide or they’d miss the Second Coming. Been telling them he can name the day. And, of course—had to, couldn’t get around it, no way to get around it—when Christ came again the Antichrist would already be here, that’s what he told them and told and told them, the Antichrist here on Earth, raising all kinds of hell—naturally, only thing the Antichrist is good at.” Pat-pat-pat. “Tomorrow night, that second-rate Saint Paul has to name the year and day, so of course he’s got to have an Antichrist helling around somewhere. And who else? Who else would it be, who else could it be?”

  “Doctor Bruno,” I said, “they may hear you at the Church. And it’s just possible that somebody heard all those extraordinarily loud shots and will send the fuzz—the cops—”

  His hands were going out and flapping in against his pants with a solid beat and rhythm now, a steady pat-pat-pat-pat-pat. “Those goddamned ding-dong ding-a-ling dum-dums who call themselves the Lemmings of the Lord—hoo! And their Sainted Most-Holy—hoo-hoo! I hate myself. I should have been ready, I should have known—”

  Bruno interrupted himself this time, cutting the sentence off and looking at me once more. “You know, Mr. Scott, there are one hundred horrible rumors about that man. And ninety-nine of them are true. Everyone knows Festus Lemming is a teetotaling, nonsmoking, nonfornicating vegetarian. But did you know there is a rumor that, when in high school, he took his first—and last—girl bouquets of lettuce?”

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “Now you do. There is also a rumor he is so mean he beats his cat for purring. But I doubt it—that’s the only one I do doubt. If he had a cat, by now it would have covered him up. There is also a hideous rumor—”

  “You’re making these things up, aren’t you?”

  “Of course. But I feel these rumors I am making up deserve wide circulation. What good is a rumor if nobody ever hears
about it—”

  “Mr. Bruno. Doctor. Your hands are O.K. now, I can tell. So your feet must be in pretty good shape, too. Therefore, let us both use our feet to speed us to my car, and once we’re in it you can yell all you want—”

  Cassiday interrupted me. His face was a little pale as he said rapidly, “Scott, my car and Doc’s are at that goddamn church—we both drove in after André phoned us—and we probably should not leave them there. The services usually end at eleven, so about two minutes from now the whole congregation is going to pour out, filled to the brim with whatever the Pastor poured into them tonight, and head for the parking lot. If we’re going to get our cars, we better do it fast.”

  “Yeah. Good … thinking.”

  He stepped to Bruno’s side, gently turned him till he faced the door, continuing to speak. “If those cats see Bruno—do I have to spell it out? He may be the Antichrist, the King of Sin, but I’m at least a Prince—I’m the guy who made Erovite for him, packaged and sold it. They do not love the Doc, but I’ll bet they’ve got enough hate left over for me.”

  I could understand Cassiday’s concern. I had no desire to go back to the Church of the Second Coming, myself. Not ever, much less in the next couple of minutes. And certainly not later than a couple of minutes from now. Not when all of Lemming’s sheep, with their teeth filed to sharp points by their Pastor, would be pouring out through those massive doors and under the golden cross.

  Into the hallway went Bruno, pushed by Cassiday. I followed them out.

  And I noticed as we left the room that I was walking, not as I usually do, but as I had seen the stocky man moving a bit earlier tonight, with a kind of half-on-tiptoe almost-mincing gait, over the sticky film of blaaahd on the floor beneath my feet.