Dave didn’t answer me. He said to big Ed, “I’ll be back in a couple of minutes. You know what to do if Scott tries anything.”
Dave walked out of the room, but Ed didn’t watch him go. He didn’t take his eyes off me. Or his gun. He was much too far away for me to have even a slight chance of getting close to him—at least while he was staring at me, waiting for any movement, for that first step. Maybe even hoping for it.
I knew I couldn’t just stand here waiting for Dave to come back with more of his miserable juice, that I had to try something, and fast. But I also knew if I gave Ed any reason for taking some shots at me he wouldn’t have to hit me dead center or blow my head open. If he merely nicked me in a couple of places I could wind up like Dave’s guinea pigs and horses. Even if I didn’t get shot, the blood inside me was changing, thinning, walls of arteries and veins might be weakening.…
I pushed all that away, tried not to think about it, but it was difficult to concentrate on anything else. Beyond Ed in the corner on my right, movement flickered upon the television tube, the head and shoulders of a television newscaster filled the screen.
Except for sound from the set it was completely quiet in the room, and though the man’s voice was low I could clearly hear him saying, “… on Filbert Street, and moments from now will turn to march up Heavenly Lane, the short private drive leading onto the grounds of the Church of the Second Coming. There has—as yet—been no evidence to confirm the report, but it has been reported or rumored that the ladies plan to make part of their march in, ah, the nude—as an, ah, emphasis of their protest against the … what they allege is … the fanatical antiwoman, antiflesh, and antisex attitude of Pastor Lemming. It, mm, is only a rumor at this point—”
Only a rumor. Still it gave me an idea—at least, the beginning of an idea—and, along with it, hope.
“Hey!” I said. “You hear that, Ed, baby?”
20
Ed’s brows twitched. “Huh?”
I pointed a thumb toward the set. “Television announcer, the latest news. When I was here around noon, Cassiday told me ten of the best-looking gals in Citizens FOR—gorgeous gals, actually, and built!—were going to march to Pastor Lemming’s church. When I left, they were talking about parading at least part of the way in the nude. Without any clothes on. But I don’t suppose they really would.…”
Ed’s lips slowly took on a round, pooching shape, as if he were saying “Whoo.” But there wasn’t any sound, and he didn’t take his eyes off me.
From the television set: “Pastor Lemming has just announced, and I quote, ‘Members of the subversive antiGod, antiChrist, antidecency heathens who call themselves Citizens FOR will not be permitted to profane the Almighty’s earthly Edens. God will strike them, will smite them. Yes. I am rallying members of the Church of the Second Coming to my side and we will work the will of God in opposing the filth and obscenity of Citizens FOR, for though the foul forces for filth fill the, er, ah, fill the land, we are not weak but united by God in the defense of God.…’”
There was a little more but it sure sounded different when the voice and delivery were not Lemming’s own. And I feared Ed’s not overlong attention span was weakening and wandering. I was losing him.
But then the announcer—even his usually calm voice showing some slight excitement—mentioned a report just received and continued, “… because of conflicting reports that reached us earlier, apparently due to a lack of agreement among the ten representatives of Citizens FOR, we were unable to film the beginning of the march now in progress on Filbert Street, on the outskirts of Weilton. However, two of our camera trucks are now racing to the scene—”
“How about that?” I said. “They’re actually going to do it.”
“Do it?” Ed echoed questioningly.
“I don’t know what they’re going to do, but whatever they do do, the station’s going to take pictures of them doing it. That’s what the announcer just said, anyway. You heard him, Ed. Wouldn’t it be crazy if those gorgeous babes stripped naked, and the television guys actually took pictures of them? Moving pictures?”
He was silently going “Whoo” again.
“Probably they wouldn’t really fling their clothes off. Not all ten of those beauties. Not all their clothes. But … I did hear them say they were going to. Even if they stripped, you don’t suppose anybody would show it on television, do you?”
“I … don’t s’pose.”
“I can believe the guys will take plenty of pictures, all right. But I know those bastards. They’d probably keep the whole damn thing for themselves. Run the movie at home, you know. Maybe run it over and over.”
“You think they’d do that?”
“Hell, yes, they would. I know they would. Just run it over and over, especially the good parts—and I’ll tell you something else, Ed, those gals have got some good parts. It’s a shame. Those bastards will make a movie of those gorgeous naked tomatoes—if anything marvelous does happen, I mean—and keep it for themselves, keep it a secret, Guys like you and me, we’ll never even be sure it happened, much less see it. I don’t know about you, Ed, but it gripes the hell out of me. Why, those dirty—”
“Bastards!” Ed said.
“You said it.” While talking to him I’d been trying to keep an ear tuned to the newscaster’s remarks, and he had just informed his expectant audience that the studio’s camera trucks were ready at the scene.
I held up a hand—and took a small sliding step forward—and cried loudly, “Listen, Ed!”
From the television set: “And now, live from Weilton—”
From Ed: “Whoo!” Audibly this time. His big square head jerked an inch left, but stopped. He wasn’t going to take his eyes off me, no, sir. He knew his duty.
I gazed intently beyond him to the set in the corner—and took one more little step forward.
“Hey!” Ed said.
“Hey is right, pal,” I replied excitedly. “Hey, boy. I can’t quite see what …”
There they were. Ten of them carrying little signs on sticks. It was a long shot and I couldn’t read the signs, but it was the lovelies of Citizens FOR, ten gorgeous and curvaceous gals—with every stitch of their clothes on. Well, I hadn’t really expected anything else. But I was a little disappointed. They were marching in single file up Heavenly Lane toward the church, nearly past the parking lot and about to step onto the grass.
The camera zoomed in and panned over the ten lovely faces, as a deep male voice said, “And here they are, already approaching the church, just as in an earlier statement to the press they said they would—”
“Just as they said they would!” I cried. “My God, my God. Oh, Lord in Heaven.”
“What’re they doin’?” Ed asked. “What’re they doin’? Is they—”
“Oh, Ed,” I cried, “don’t look! Don’t look, Ed!”
And I took another step forward, bugging my eyes at the television screen. I was getting a little nearer Ed, true, but that wasn’t entirely my intention. I had been trying to move closer to the long polished table on which I’d earlier been lying, and I had succeeded. It was now little more than a foot away. Just one more sliding step and I’d have my hands against it.
“What is it?” Ed asked hoarsely. His eyes were fixed on me like hot rivets and the tendons were bulging in his thick neck. His head was tilting slightly toward the television set as though pulled by a bone magnet. “Are they doin’ it? Did they?”
“Ed, don’t ask. Why, how can it be? How could they show this on television?”
“Is they naked? Did they take their clothes off like you said? Pants and all?”
“Pants and all!” I howled, throwing my hands into the air and letting them fall as I tottered forward. Letting them fall to grip the table’s side. “I can’t believe my eyes! Can I really be seeing on television, ten gorgeous, shapely, sexy, naked babes? Naked as jaybirds? Naked?”
I had to say “naked” three times in a row before Ed cracked. But h
e had probably been fighting his baser nature, his carnal desires, longer than ever he had before. If there were ten tomatoes on the tube, with their clothes off, pants and all, he just wouldn’t have been a man if he hadn’t looked.
So he looked.
And once he’d decided he simply couldn’t afford to miss this unprecedented high point of television history, he did not merely turn his head a trifle and slide his eyes left and take a little peek. No, he did not. He did what any real man would do, he snapped his head around as if it had been shot from a cannon, with his eyes opening wide as he let his head carry them forward several inches through the air, aiming them toward and closer to the television tube. At the same moment, before he even got a little look—and this is the sad thing, really—he had begun to smile wetly in anticipation.
Well, that ruined him, of course. Not merely the smile, the whole thing. Another big, strong man, like so many sinners before him, had given in gladly to his weakness, and got what for. His fate was sealed the instant he decided to look.
I did what I had to do rapidly, but I suppose I could have taken my time. Because Ed looked, I mean looked, with an intentness and total concentration I had rarely observed except in bird dogs, and perhaps for a while he actually thought he was seeing that which he had dreamed of seeing, for he was still smiling when I hit him with the table.
Even as I leaped forward and shoved the table with a horrible smack into Ed’s gut, I almost hated myself for doing it. I felt like those callous scientists who catch boy boll weevils in traps reeking with the synthetic scent of girl weevils in heat, or lure male Costa Rican macaws to their doom with the recorded croak of a female Costa Rican macaw laying eggs. Yes, I almost hated myself. But I did it, anyway.
I jumped forward, yanking on the side of the table and lifting it. Three of its legs left the floor, and I shoved with all my strength, trying to sail the furniture at Ed like a huge angular discus. The table’s right end swung up in an arc, the left end slowed by that one leg dragging on the carpet, and the fastest-moving part of the table—its sharply pointed corner—caught Ed at just the right spot to remove his appendix and hip bone if it had been moving a little faster.
Ed let out a noise of astonishing volume and complexity. Complexity, because it was a blend of pain, shock, disbelief, and dismay, at least. And, surely, it was not merely physical pain he expressed with that unbelievable howl. For Ed was still staring at the television set, bent over several inches and slightly twisted, and it was possible he had not even detected my movement, had not realized I was preparing to ruin him. If so, it followed that when the excruciating pain got him he did not know I had done it. Thus he must have felt he had suffered a massive and spontaneous embolism, or mysteriously ruptured himself. I would hate to think what he might have believed if that point had caught him smack in the middle.
Or maybe it was that he’d had just enough time by then to get his eyes carefully focused, only instants before they unfocused, but long enough for him to realize those ten gorgeous babes, contrary to what he’d been led to expect, still had their clothes on, pants and all.
The noise he made was accompanied by such a great rush of breath that his lungs should have emptied and collapsed, and he bent forward far enough that when I reached him and swung my right fist in a low-swooping uppercut it had to travel only a foot and a half to reach his chin.
He spun to the side, arm flipping, automatic sailing through the air—but not before his finger had tightened on the trigger and sent one .45-caliber bullet past my leg, his gun so close I could feel its muzzle blast slap the cloth of my trousers.
Ed reeled, staggered away from me, still on his feet but very unsteady on them, making a yard sideways for every yard forward. I jumped toward a window in the front wall. A few feet left of the window was a big overstuffed chair, alongside it a lamp on a small table. I grabbed the lamp, hurled it through the window, and, as the glass shattered and sprayed outward, picked up the table and banged it against shards sticking up from the bottom sill.
“What the hell’s—”
That wasn’t Ed’s voice. It was a shout from Dave Cassiday behind me. I turned, saw him running up the hallway, lined by his den and half a dozen other rooms, his feet skidding as he saw me and tried to slow down. I kept turning, swung the table around my body hip high and let it fly. Cassiday ducked, flipping both hands before his face, lost his footing, and started to fall. On my right, Ed had caught his balance and stood facing me. But his gun wasn’t in his fist. There was time. Time for me to put one hand at the bottom of the window and another at its side, and hoist myself through.
But as I turned and reached toward the window my eyes fell on the television screen and a scene—brief but vivid enough to stun the cerebellum—so startling, in fact unnerving, that at almost any other moment it would have stopped me. But at this moment it didn’t even slow me down. My feet slipped on the lawn, or on broken glass, and I fell. Seconds later I was up and sprinting toward the iron gate and Roxbury Drive beyond it.
My Cad was parked two blocks away, but reaching it would be a breeze if I got over the fence. I don’t quite remember how I got over the thing, but it must have been at least as speedy a performance as my first attempt. Maybe practice makes perfect. Or maybe there was so much adrenalin and thyroxin and smog and steam in my blood that I could almost as easily have gone through the fence as over it.
My feet slapped the sidewalk and continued slapping to the corner and around it, and I felt very damned good except for one thing—the fact that I kept mentally repeating as I ran, with my heart pounding and the blood churning inside me, “adrenalin and thyroxin and smog and steam … and something else.”
The thought stayed with me as I drove to the freeway and headed, well over the speed limit, toward downtown L.A.
It was in my mind when I passed the Civic Center and the L.A. police building, when I turned onto the Santa Ana Freeway.
And it was still in my mind when, a mile before the turn-off to Weilton, with a thin film of sweat on my face and a strange chill tension gliding beneath my skin, I discovered I was sitting in a pool of wetness. And looked, and it was blood.
21
All during that short fast ride, with the thought of Cassiday’s “juice” filling my mind, I tried to concentrate on other things. And, part of the time, succeeded.
Especially when I remembered my last glance at the color television set in Dave Cassiday’s living room. And that brief but vivid sight of Lula. The shot was live and had included all, or at least most, of the girls, no longer marching in single file but gathered in a group on the grass. I’d gotten a glimpse of red-haired Dina on the screen’s left and pint-sized but quart-curvy Ronnie next to her, a blur of others, but closest to the camera and facing it, dominating the foreground, had been tall and slim but shapely Lula. Lula of the chocolate skin and charcoal eyes, the wild black hair and wild breasts, breasts so remarkably eye-catching and full, so heavy and yet high, she should have sent pictures of them to soldiers, sailors, and U.S. Marines to help win, or prevent, wars—as I had briefly thought when I’d first lamped Lula.
But it occurred to me now that those goregous globes might possibly start World War Three, commence it on August Fifteenth, today; and perhaps it had already begun. For in the second or so before the picture was replaced, very speedily replaced, with a shot of the soaring Church of the Second Coming and its golden cross—and the figure of Festus Lemming, himself, before the open doors of his church, a distant and diminutive figure, but reconizable, thin and angular and as rigid as the cross above him—Lula crossed her arms, gripped the green sweater at each side, and smoothly pulled it up over her head.
Over, and probably off. “Probably,” because I and all other viewers could only guess. The scene vanished instantly, to be replaced by the much more obscene view of Festus Lemming; and Americans last sight before the guessing began was: Lula, arms stretched high, sweater turned inside out and concealing her face, a circumstance that coul
d not have been more perfectly designed, by hiding the loveliness of her eyes and brows and smiling lips, to emphasize the startling thrust and weight and curve and jiggle—yes, for an instant they jiggled—of those astonishingly eye-catching jugs.
They were not bare. Not quite. That, I suppose, would have blown lots of fuses, in people if not television sets. They were cupped and half-covered by a lacy contraption remotely resembling two peek-a-boo doilies which, for some reason, reminded me of a pair of the slingshots used by David to slay Goliath. Though in this case, I figured Goliath was the winner in a breeze.
As I kept a heavy foot on the gas pedal, on my way to Weilton, an unusual tension and unease began to fill me. I couldn’t decide whether I was worried more about what Lula had started to do, or had done, and the possibility that those nine other lovelies had followed suit, perhaps birthday suit, or about Festus Lemming glaring at the world from the steps of his church. Festus Lemming confronted by that which he had spent his adult years—to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he had reached them—in damning and denying. Confronted by that which it was his whole purpose and passion to destroy. Confronted by ugliness, obscenity, filth—the nakedness of woman.
It was, I thought, unlikely that Festus Lemming had looked upon a woman gloriously—or shamefully—nude since his infancy. If what I feared had come to pass, then unless Lemming had covered his peepers or turned away or declined to look, he had been forced to digest with his eyes the undeniably jarring sight not merely of a female person unclothed but of ten peeled tomatoes, each a gorgeous and voluptuously fashioned sizzler, each stupendously sexy alone and apart; and all ten together in the altogether, the whole gang bare en masse naked, would surely have been a sight so severely shocking to Festus as to frazzle every nerve in his nervous nervous system.
More even than that, Festus was a man who did not care to allow people thus to cavort nakedly in groups, not merely in public but in private woods or dwellings, or even large tubs—like the dandy in the cabin where I’d left Regina Winsome. What, then, would his all-embracing righteousness demand if the worst should happen in the shadow of the Holy Church itself, on God’s very own green grass?
Dead-Bang Page 19
