Cold In The Grave_A Kilroy Mystery

by Stephen Mertz

  Sparky two-stepped in at me again. I saw it coming and tried to turn but the kid was too fast. He swung the long barrel of his pistol and whacked me hard between the left ear and eye. The pain was white-hot. I stumbled back, shaking my head, blinking, ears roaring.

  I heard Gia cry out.

  Gallagher snarled, “Let's go.” He waved my .44 toward the door to the alley. “I don't want no monkey stuff from either of you, got it?”

  Gia stayed close to me, touching my arm lightly as we moved toward the door. My vision was clearing from the punch. I slipped my arm around her. We stepped out into the night, Gallagher and Sparky tailed us out, keeping close behind us.

  “W-what are you going to do?” asked Gia.

  The catch in her voice said she already knew the answer.

  We both did.

  “We're going to shut that pretty mouth of yours, doll,” said Limp. “This time for good.” Without warning, the hard barrel of my own Magnum jabbed forcefully into my left kidney. “And you, Kilroy, I'm going to waste you, pally, just for the fun of it.”

  6

  The walls of the alley loomed above our heads like a dark canyon. A three-year-old Ford stood waiting, its idling engine the only discernible sound in the darkness. The city could have been a universe away. You sensed its nearness, throbbing out there somewhere just beyond the shadows, but that was all. Right now, the alley was a world unto itself.

  Gia Passionne clasped her arms before her to ward off the night chill.

  “Please.” Her voice quavered. “I won't talk! Don't--”

  “Get in the car,” said Gallagher. He glared at me. “And don't kid yourself, bud. I'll blow you both away right here if that's the way you want it.”

  Limp hadn't looked very bright to begin with but saying something like that was really dumb. We were as good as dead anyway, he was telling us – and so we had nothing to lose by putting it all on the line the first chance that came along.

  I opened the back door of the Ford.

  Gia climbed in.

  The black kid, Sparky, circled around the rear of the vehicle, still bopping in that weird double-time. He slipped in behind the steering wheel, turned and watched me over the back of the front seat, waiting for me to follow Gia into the car.

  I eased into the back seat obediently. Gallagher came forward then to slam the car door shut after me. That was my chance and I took it. I flung myself backwards hard and fast, and the car door slammed into Gallagher like it was supposed to with the impacting thump of metal against flesh. I followed through and out.

  The big cretin landed noisily several paces away, overturning a stack of filled trash cans.

  Sparky leaped out from behind the steering wheel on the far side of the car and came rushing around its back end again, after me.

  I looked around. The bottom metal rung of a fire escape ladder was suspended a dozen feet to my left, just next to the rear entrance of The Tattle Tail. I took a running leap and grabbed the bottom run, pulling myself up. I commenced climbing.

  Below, Gia erupted from the back seat of the Ford, keeping her head, bee-lining away from the car for the mouth of the alley that gave onto Colfax. The black kid made a grab for her, but she executed a graceful sidestep as if she were onstage dancing and went on sailing past him.

  Gallagher hauled himself up out of the trash and I moved with surprising agility for a man his size. One of his thick arms snaked around Gia's throat in a murderous mugger's grip and he yanked her to him.

  She bit and scratched, but he had her.

  I was still climbing. I'd almost made it past the second story of the building to the roof when Sparky decided to risk a shot. The dirty orange stabbing flash and the report of his pistol came together, rumbled like thunder, echoing from the walls of the alley. Chips of brick razored at my face. Close, but no cigar. I lifted myself over the ledge, onto the roof of the Tattle Tail and out of sight.

  Sparky cut loose with two more shots. Both rounds whistled high over my head, arcing into the night.

  I wasn't running out on Gia. My only chance was to separate Sparky and Gallagher, to even out the odds. I was hoping they wouldn't decide to just waste the lady and then come up together to take care of me.

  “I've got the broad,” I heard Limp say. “Go up and waste that guy!”

  The fire escape ladder rattled as Sparky started up after me.

  I glanced around the flat roof. A row of stubby air vents, silhouetted in the middle of the roof against the lights of busy Colfax Avenue, looked like my best bet. I hurried over to them, lowering myself to a crouch behind the vents that were just high enough to conceal me from view from the point where Sparky would climb over the ledge, following me onto the roof. I'd be able to spot him through a narrow crack running down the mortar between two of the vents, for all the good it would do me. Gallagher still had my .44. My hands never felt emptier.

  Seconds passed, then Sparky hauled himself over the ledge and dropped onto the roof, pausing there, his legs spread slightly, knees bent, gun and eyes panning the gloom. As if on his command, the moon chose that moment to slide out from behind high scudding clouds, illuminating the roof like a well-lighted street. Sparky's eyes zeroed in on the row of vents and he started forward, slowly, cautiously.

  There was a crumpled-up Coors can at the base of the vents next to my left knee. I picked the can up, wondering how I was going to go about this and deciding there was only one way.

  Sparky was less then twelve feet away from me and still approaching. I think he was smiling.

  He was murmuring, “Come on out of there, whitebread. You know you gotta die. Come on out now and make it easy for both of us.”

  I pitched the beer can.

  The aluminum flew and hit the parapet sharply a few feet behind him.

  In the stillness of stretched nerves the sound must have screamed out of the darkness at Sparky like the shriek of a banshee. He saw the beer can fly out from behind that row of vents. He knew it was a trick, but the wired energy from too much dope made him jump and the racket of the can clattering jerked his intention away from me for the microsecond it takes for mind to reason over instinct.

  I lunged and delivered the side of my right hand in a martial arts chop to the face. Cartilage and bone fragments plowed backwards into his brain and Sparky died on his feet, his pistol clattering to the rooftop with the rest of him. The weapon landed near his outstretched dead hand.

  I snatched up the gun and jammed it under my belt. I had an idea. I picked up what was left of Sparky and carried him over to the low ledge that ran the perimeter of the roof.

  Down, below, Limp Gallagher still held Gia, gun in his fist pointed at her head. Gia had given up struggling and Limp was glancing around to see if anyone was getting nosy, but nobody was.

  Denver’s that kind of town.

  I struggled and worked but finally got Sparky's corpse in both my arms and held it out in space over the ledge, away from the building. I released it. The dead body plummeted downward in a loose-jointed back flip to slap the pavement loudly and suddenly at their feet.

  Limp started, eyeballing with surprise the thing that had bounced before them, grasping immediately what had happened. His Neanderthal mug twisted upwards in my direction, pistol tracking upward, but that instant of distraction while he’d looked at Sparky was all I needed. By the time he looked up and saw me, I was staring down at him along the length of my arm with Sparky's .38 drawing a bead on the center of his sloping forehead.

  “Let her go or you're a dead man,” I told him.

  His left arm stayed around Gia's throat.

  He could see or sense even from that distance that I was psyched out to kill him if I had to. He stepped away from Gia, releasing her. His pistol dropped to the pavement.

  I descended back down the fire escape, not taking my eyes or aim from him for an instant, trying to keep my gun arm steady. I made the last short drop from the bottom rung of the fire escape and approached him.

/>   Limp stared down at the battered remains of Sparky.

  “You didn't have to do that. The kid was all right”

  “He bought his own farm. I didn't ask to play with you guys.”

  Gia came over to stand at my side.

  “We've got to get out of here,” she whispered tautly, very nervous, forcing herself not to look at the dead thing at our feet, her lovely eyes flashing wild, near hysteria.

  I reached into my jacket pocket and brought out my car keys. I handed them to her.

  “I'm parked across the street. The Lancia. Get it. Bring it here.”

  Just like that the hint of hysteria was gone. She took the keys and darted off.

  There still weren't any people nosing around. Shootings happen more often than you might think along Colfax. People do have ears, though, and telephones. A police cruiser, or several of them, would be racing in our direction right now. Time was running out.

  “Tell me what this is all about,” I growled at Gallagher. “Who hired you to do this? Is it tied up with what happened to Cheryl Kaplin?”

  “Kiss my ass. I'm telling you nothing. I'll kill you for what you did to Sparky. Sparky was all right. I'll kill you slow, man.”

  In the distance I could hear the siren of a cruiser answering the call, sounding like it was blaring up Fourteenth at about Josephine or Race, two, three blocks over at most, moving in fast.

  The Lancia roared into the alley with the pedal down. Rubber squealed as Gia braked inches short of running us down.

  I looked back at Limp.

  “Kiss mine,” I said.

  I cracked him alongside the head with the revolver.

  He sighed, his eyes rolled back until only the whites showed, and the Neanderthal mountain collapsed unconscious next to his dead friend.

  I scrambled into the Lancia, behind the steering wheel, as Gia slid over. I threw the car into gear. Rubber screamed again as we got the hell out of there, fishtailing onto Colfax, heading east.

  Five blocks to Colorado Boulevard. If I could just make that, I could catch the boulevard running south and hopefully lose any pursuit in the traffic. We did that and more before I slowed down to a legal cruising speed . . . before I realized the mix-up.

  Damn damn damn!

  I was still carrying Sparky's long barreled revolver, the gun I had slugged Limp with. My own.44 was still back there on the pavement behind The Tattle Tail, where I had ordered Limp Gallagher to drop it. That was my gun Limp had been holding. He'd been toting it since relieving me of it in Gia's dressing room.

  I did the only thing I could do. I drove a block over to a side street, climbed out of the Lancia and dropped Sparky's gun down a sewer drain.

  Gia watched from inside the car with uncertain eyes.

  I went back to the trunk, got my spare handgun from the metal box. Then I got back behind the wheel. I found a phone booth. I called one of the DPD substations and reported that one of my .44 Magnums had been stolen. Then I drove aimlessly to give the woman and myself a chance to unwind from what had happened to us.

  Neither of us spoke for a while.

  It reminded me of the immediate aftermath of fire fights in ‘Nam. The pounding pulse slows only gradually. Things start to register – where you are, what's happened, what you've done- - disjointed at first, a piece at a time.

  So, it was going to be that kind of a case. The kind that always catches you napping because they're rare and far between, disguised at first to seem as one of a hundred other day-to-day jobs. But when you pry off the lid for a closer look, you find something else happening below the surface. An explosive, deadly something just waiting to be touched off by the wrong combination of people, time, place, and circumstance. And by then it's too late and you're in the middle of it, snagged up with the rest of them whether you like it or not. Like I was right now.

  Slowly, imperceptibly at first, the atmosphere in the Lancia warmed and it wasn't just the car's heater; it was sideways appraising glances and then eye contact that told me we were both thinking rationally again, or close to it.

  “We've still got to have our talk,” I said, when I thought the time was right.

  Gia flashed the briefest smile.

  She said, “My place or yours?”

  It was the kind of thing you say at a time like that. We had survived. We had survived together. I wasn't sure how much closer I was to learning the truth about all that had happened, but I did know one thing. The Beasts had been dealt with, at least for a while.

  Now it was Beauty's turn.

  7

  She was staying at a budget motel on Colfax, eight blocks east of The Tattle Tail. She changed from her robe into something presentable and hurriedly packed a suitcase while I sat out in the car. No one from the club had come looking for her . . . yet.

  Another half hour and we registered together into a motel further east in Aurora, not far from Denver's Stapleton International Airport, stopping at a liquor store along the way. The first thing we did in the motel room was to further recover from the death's edge we had just gone through. I fixed rum and Cokes, handed her one and sat down next to her on a small couch.

  Color had returned to her high-cheekboned face, the raven-black hair back in place. She had slipped into slacks and a very classy print silk blouse. To look at Gia now you would not have guessed what she'd just been through.

  “I want to thank you, Kilroy . . . for saving my life.”

  “I think I saved both our lives,” I agreed humbly.

  “When that man fell off the roof . . . when you dropped him . . . it was horrible--”

  “There was no telling what Gallagher was going to do,” I said. I had to grab his attention. Dropping that other creep seemed the best way. Don't worry, he didn't feel a thing. He was already dead. They were going to kill us, remember.”

  She eyed me speculatively.

  “Back at the club you said you were a private detective, but you didn't tell me who you're working for.”

  “Yes, I did. I told you it was someone who cared about Cheryl.”

  She grimaced.

  “That narrows the field down quite a lot, from what I could tell. Cheryl seemed to be one of those people who are truly alone in this world. It was sad to see her like that; to see how far down the ladder she'd gone.”

  “You knew her before?”

  “We were part of a dance team together on the club circuit until just over a year ago.”

  “That explains a few things,” I said. “It also backs up the theory that her death was premeditated murder.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Someone thinks Cheryl told you something before they had her killed. They think you know who they are, or that you’ll figure it out. So, they sent Gallagher and Sparky to kill you.”

  “Well, I sure wish they wouldn't think that! Cheryl never told me a thing. She drew a deep breath, releasing it fast. Then, “I'm catching a morning flight to Vegas. I've got an ex-boyfriend out there who'll take care of me if these hoods or whoever they are try to hassle me again. He knows a few hoods himself.” She shook her head. “I still can't believe what just happened. It happened so fast! And that big guy you slugged before we drove off – he works at that place! I should've never gone there to work after what happened this morning. I should've booked out on a plane right then.”

  “You mean the two men who were following you all day?”

  “Yes, that and the fact that I was almost run over by a car this morning on my way to do some shopping.”

  “Someone decided to wipe the slate clean,” I said. “You and Cheryl, both out of the way. Same day, same m.o., and a good chance no one would make the connection. They missed you this morning, so they tried the direct approach tonight.”

  Strands of midnight hair fell across her forehead. She flicked the strands away with two long, delicate fingers.

  “This is incredible. Someone trying to kill me, and I don't even know why! After that car almost ran me down this
morning, I guess I just passed it off as just one of those things, y'know? But then, after what happened to Cheryl . . . I didn't hear about that until I got to the club tonight. Now you know why I was so jumpy when you showed up. Guess I was jumpy with good reason, huh?”

  “Did you know Cheryl was working at The Tattle Tail when you came to town for your gig there?”

  “No. The first time we saw each other, the afternoon before I started, in the bar . . . well it was kind of embarrassing, really. I checked in at the club after I registered into that motel room, to sort of size the place up. I had just sized it up that they were turning tricks upstairs, then Cheryl comes down to the bar for . . . a break, I guess. We were both real surprised to see each other. They had my name on the marquee, of course, but I'm using a different stage name now than I was when Cheryl and I were working together.”

  “Tell me about those days,” I suggested. “Maybe you'll remember something that will help us figure this out. We've both got a stake in it now. Even if you leave Denver, you don't want someone around here who wants you dead.”

  “You still haven't told me the name of your client,” she pointed out. “But you're right and I do want to help; for Cheryl, and because I owe you for what you did tonight, Kilroy. But I still don't know where to begin.”

  “Were you and Cheryl close friends when you worked together?”

  She thought about that for a moment.

  “We spent lots of time together. I guess we got to be friends. We worked and traveled together for about a year. A booking agency picked us up and we did okay. There were three of us, actually. Cheryl and me and a male exotic. The guy was hetero as all get-out on stage but nothing but gay all the way on his own time.”

  “What happened to the act?”

  “We, uh, hit a snag. Our male partner got himself busted in Kansas City making a pass at a vice cop, so there went the act. We’d worked out a whole threesome routine that people loved. It was really hot. After that, Cheryl and I tried working as a duo for a while, but it didn't click. The threesome with a guy was our gimmick, something for the men and the ladies in the places we played, and without him the bookings seemed to dry up to nothing. The last time I saw Cheryl before this time, we’d worked together at a place our agency booked us at here in Denver, out at a dive on Federal that isn't there anymore. After that I moved on to Vegas. Had me a boyfriend and everything. Cheryl decided to stay here.”