Suez had said quite a bit in those few words. But the most important words had been “You've got to help me.” That meant she'd been in trouble; and now, with that phone suddenly dead, it seemed like bad trouble. Maybe even fatal. Nick Colossus and fatal trouble seemed to go together.
Nick—his name rang an alarm bell in my brain. But I stopped debating about it—there'd be time enough for that on the way out there. I could make up my mind on the way what I was going to do; the important thing now was to get started.
I felt for my .38 but, naturally, it wasn't in its accustomed place under my coat. Then I remembered the gun Palomino had kicked from Gangrene's hand in Feldspen's office Monday afternoon. I'd brought it home with me that night and put it in a dresser drawer in the bedroom.
I jumped to the bedroom and grabbed the .45, stuck it into my coat pocket and then said to Coral, “I've got to leave. Don't answer the phone, or even the door unless you know it's me.”
“But what happened?”
“That was Suez—I'll have to explain later.” I went out the door and down the stairs three at a time and was in the middle of the street before I remembered it would probably be wise not to leap into view so casually and without even a look around. But nothing happened; nobody was in sight. I started the car and took off in a hurry.
I raced to Wilshire and Hight, breaking all the laws, tramped on the accelerator for a mile and then swung onto Willow. Suez didn't live on Partridge Street. Why, I wondered, would she have been there at all? Why meet Nick?
Gangrene's big automatic was heavy in my coat pocket. I took it out and cocked it as I drove, thumbed on the safety and placed the gun on the car seat beside me. As I swung into Partridge with the tires screeching on the asphalt, I caught the number on the corner house. This was the thirteen-hundred block. That meant five blocks to go. In the eighteen-hundred block I slowed and checked the house numbers, caught the number 1854. It was a big frame house, solid, recently painted a charcoal gray. A tall TV antenna reared up from the roof.
I drove on past and took a right at the corner. There had been no cars in front of the house. None even near it. And that seemed strange. If Suez had come here to meet Nick, where was her car? She might have purposely parked it out of sight, but I was leery of this, jumpy. She'd said of Nick, “...but when I got here he was —” And that had been all.
I hoped she'd started to say he was dead. That would suit me just fine. But it seemed too much to hope for. I took a right at the next corner, parked at the curb and got out, .45 in my coat pocket. Looking toward Partridge Street, a block away now, I could see that tall TV antenna sticking up into the air. I headed toward it, walking alongside a brown house that needed painting. It seemed strange, unreal, to be walking through somebody's yard like this in broad daylight, hand on a loaded gun in my pocket. It was cold daylight, with thick clouds overhead.
In the backyard of the brown house a woman was hanging clothes on a line. She stared at me belligerently, her eyes asking me what right I had to go tromping around back here. At the rear of the property was a dirt alley, then the backyard of the charcoal gray house.
A little boy sat in the alley's dirt. He looked at me and said “Hi.” Friendly, smiling. I wondered if the sour washerwoman was his mother. My heart was pounding and my throat was getting dry. Something was really wrong; I felt it. I made it to the gray house, paused at the back door and listened. There wasn't any sound. Just neighborhood noises, a car passing nearby on the street. The sun went behind a cloud again and it seemed colder.
I tried the door. It wouldn't open, but it was only a screen door with a small latch inside. I put my left hand against the doorframe, pulled slowly and steadily with my right hand. The screw tore out of the wood and the latch fell against the door with a light tinkling noise that sounded like a gunshot in my ears.
I pulled the door open and went inside. As I shut the door silently behind me I looked back the way I'd come. The sour woman was at the corner of her property staring at me. Her mouth was open. I waited a few seconds to let my eyes adjust to the comparative darkness, then moved into the house. This was a small, neat porch. A wooden bench with a box of detergent on it was against the right wall. I pushed open a door into a kitchen, the .45 in my right hand now, safety off. All I had to do was squeeze the trigger. There were two doors leading out of the kitchen. I walked over blue linoleum, past a gas range with a coffeepot and big frying pan on it, tried the door on the right. It opened with a soft, high squeak. I let go of it, and it swung open another twelve inches, silently.
Directly outside the door was a narrow hallway. Across the hallway was an open door. I could see something inside that room, but I couldn't yet tell what it was. There wasn't a sound except the jarring thump of my heart in my chest and the rush of blood in my arteries hissing in my ears. The room across the hall was a bedroom. I could see the foot of the bed, the bedstead; all the way across the room, against the wall, was a chest at the base of double windows with yellow shades drawn over them.
My eyes grew accustomed to the dimness in here and I could see the interior of the bedroom more clearly. Something was crumpled on the floor. Something—or someone. I waited a moment longer. Still there was no sound in the house except those I made, none at least that I could detect. I moved forward slowly, crossed the hall. Sweat from my palm made the checked butt of the Colt automatic a little slippery in my hand. I gripped it tighter, finger light on the trigger.
Then, at the door to the bedroom, a delicate scent brushed my nostrils. Jasmine. That sweet, delicately feminine odor. Suez had worn Jasmine. I remembered her saying in her dressing room, “You get a whiff of jasmine, Shell, you look around for Suez.”
I almost turned my head, but I didn't. I kept looking at that form on the floor—I could tell now that it was a body—straining my ears to hear if anyone else were in this house with me. Suez was—or had been. There was another odor in the house, too; and only now, oddly enough, did I realize that it had been in my nose and mouth ever since I'd stepped into the kitchen. Gunpowder. The sharp, acrid smell that hangs in the air after a gun has been fired.
I stepped into the room. It was a man's body on the floor. I took another step forward, glancing around. Nothing moved; nobody was in sight. The door to a closet in the wall on my right was nearly closed. I glanced over my shoulder; the open doorway behind me was empty.
I took another step toward the dead man—and then alarm jangled through every nerve in my body like a sudden electric current I don't know if I heard a sound behind me, or maybe just felt the air stir. But I bunched the muscles in my right leg and drove my body forward. Whether I heard anything or not, I saw the man's face on the floor, and that told me everything, all at once, with a shock that slammed understanding into my brain and galvanized me into motion.
The man was dead, unmistakably dead. I had been thinking of what Suez had said about Nick Colossus. So I had been prepared to see him. But the dead man wasn't Nick.
It was Lou Rio.
Chapter Twelve
I moved fast, but not quite fast enough.
The blow fell, but when it struck I was moving forward, leaping over the body. It missed my head and slammed into my shoulder, deadening it suddenly, and my left arm and hand went numb.
My foot landed on Lou's dead hand and my ankle turned. I fell onto my side as I tried to twist around, straining to see who was behind me.
The fall saved my life. I sprawled on my side, but squirmed around in time to see Jabber's twisted face just as he shot at me. The last time I'd seen him he'd been among those beating on me in Nick's room, and he'd been wearing one of the red-and-white uniforms; but even though he was in a dark suit now I recognized his mean, hard face the moment I saw it. A sap swung from Jabber's right hand, and the gun flamed in his left.
The bullet snapped past me, and then I had my right arm raised, the automatic tight against my palm. I had to make the first shot good; if I didn't, I was dead. Jabber wouldn't miss again, not e
ven left-handed and hurrying the shot. The gun kicked in my hand, the heavy crack slamming against the walls of the bedroom. My slug caught Jabber somewhere in his body and jerked him violently. My second shot went right through the top of his head at the hairline. He flew backward, dead in the air, and fell hard. His head smacked the base of the bedroom wall—right next to the open closet door, where he'd been waiting for me.
I got to my feet in a hurry, and as I got up I glanced at Rio, touched him. He lay on his back, blood staining his white shirt in two places, more blood spilled down the side of his head. The stains were still spreading a little, still moist; he was warm. Rio had been killed within the last few minutes—probably, I thought, about the time I'd received Suez’ phone call, or even since then. Suez—I started to wonder about her, then forced the thought from my mind; there was no time for that now.
I turned toward Jabber and saw something that puzzled me. The gun he'd fired at me lay on the floor near the wall, but another gun was stuck into the waistband of his trousers. Something about it worried me oddly, but it wasn't until I stepped to him and grabbed the gun that I understood why. It was a .38 Colt Special with a two-inch barrel, and—there was no doubt at all—it was mine. My gun, the one Nick had taken from me yesterday at the Desert Trail. It had been fired.
And that made everything clear enough. There was no gun near Rio; the little automatic with which Jabber had just tried to kill me was undoubtedly Lou's own gun. Jabber had tried to sap me first, too, instead of just shooting me in the back—and that fit the now obvious plan. If Jabber had managed to knock me out, he would then, I felt sure, have shot me with Rio's gun and put my own gun—from which the three bullets had undoubtedly just been pumped into Rio—in my right hand or next to it. Jabber would then have taken off in a hurry, leaving two dead men in a neat frame. With bullets from my gun in Rio, and a bullet or two from his gun in me, it would have been an open-and-shut double killing.
Only seconds had passed, but already I was jumping toward the kitchen again. My thoughts were racing as I tried to fit the rest of this together. There'd been no sirens yet. And that puzzled me. I was missing something. The frame had gone sour, so far, but I knew there was something I was missing.
Sudden sound banged against my ears. It came from the front of the house and as I landed in the middle of that hallway I could see the front door crash open. In a split second I saw half a dozen things—clear out in the street a car was already stopped, angled toward the curb, and another was sliding, with tires shrieking, to a stop beside it. In the doorway, at least four or five men were trying to charge inside. I recognized the guy in front as a hood named Snails Sullivan, one of Lou's men, and right behind him was a real bad one, a mean one, the man I least wanted to see now, or for quite a while.
Gangrene.
I was holding the .45 automatic in my left hand, my own gun in my right. Snails raised his arm as if pointing at me. I didn't even see his gun. But I heard the gun crack, and the bullet snatched at my left arm. I felt the hot sting as the metal ripped flesh, and the .45 clattered to the floor. I flipped up the .38 and squeezed the trigger twice, and Snails stumbled and fell.
Gangrene spotted me then, recognized me. He let out a yell and jumped forward like Death in a hurry to happen—to me. That ugly, bony, corpselike face was pierced by a hole in its middle, a hole that was Gangrene's mouth, and from his mouth the yell burst and swelled. He just let out a harsh roaring sound and charged at me.
I pulled the .38 onto his chest and squeezed the trigger—and the hammer clicked on an empty cartridge.
Behind Gangrene the other men were piling inside; a couple more shouts went up from them. But I saw them from the fringes of my vision, all my attention focused on Gangrene. As he got one step closer he flipped up his hand, a hand filled with gun, but before he could squeeze the trigger I jumped for the kitchen door, shoving my useless Colt back into its holster.
Even while pain seared my left arm and I slammed my foot against the linoleum, the realization flashed through my brain that this had really been set up, this had been a near perfect one. The sweet part of Nick's frame—because naturally this one shouted Nick Colossus, this was the way that smart, murdering louse would do it—was that he wasn't framing me with the law, not with the cops. He'd set this up to frame me with the hoods. To frame me with Lou's men. It was even possible, I now saw, that Jabber might have been going to merely sap me—leaving the killing to Lou's gang.
And it looked as if it was still going to work. Not one of these boys so close to me now would ask a single question. They'd just take turns pumping me full of slugs.
I landed in the middle of the kitchen, alongside the gas range. My eye caught that big frying pan and I grabbed it as I passed. When I skidded to a stop I turned toward the door behind me and started throwing the heavy pan before Gangrene even came in sight there.
But he wasn't about to slow down when he had me so close to dying, and I let go of the thing at almost the instant when he slid into the open doorway and tried to come in after me. The pan hit him low, about at the belt line, and it bent him over. I didn't wait to see what happened next, I was going out the door. I made the back door in two jumps, caught the wooden bench with one hand as I went out and threw it into the middle of the floor.
There were all kinds of yelling hell behind me, shouts and stamping feet and roared curses. I ran like a man possessed, like a man trying for a three-minute mile—and that's just what I was doing. The little kid was no longer in the alley's dirt.
But the woman was still in her backyard. As I spotted her a shot cracked out behind me. It didn't really mean much to me at this point. I was beyond emoting, past reacting, practically a rocketing zombie.
But it meant much to the babe. She screamed. It was a beauty. It came from both big toes and gained volume with every inch up, bursting from her mouth like an air-raid warning. And that was only the start. That was just the first one. The second one topped it by ten tortured eardrums. Windows must have cracked in nearby houses. But by the time the second scream ripped from her horrified throat I was at the Cad, and in it, and then on my way.
I heard another shot—but that was the last one. I slapped the steering wheel left at the corner, barreled three blocks and skidded around the next corner to the right. In two minutes more I knew it was over.
For now. But not for long.
There were probably forty or fifty men, I guessed, who worked for Lou Rio all of the time or part of the time. Heist men, muscle, union goons, hired gunmen—professional killers. And all of the heavy boys, all of the punks who carried guns would be carrying them. Just in case they might get a peek at me. They would all be out for my blood, out to kill the man who'd killed their boss. It didn't make any difference whether or not they'd liked Lou Rio personally—probably few of them had—but he was theirs, their kind. He was the boss.
And, too, he was not just a hood, but the big one, Lou Rio himself. No matter which little punk killed me, he would instantly be much bigger. It would be a real feather in the cap of the one who got Shell Scott.
I couldn't stay away from all of them indefinitely. Besides which, all of Nick's men would be ready, willing and able to put a bullet in me if and when a chance offered—because that would make all of Lou's boys happy. And the police would naturally assume that one of Lou's boys had got me. No, it seemed fairly certain that I wouldn't last. I just hoped that, before it happened, I could kill Nick Colossus.
I stormed into my rooms at the Spartan. Coral stepped back, saying, “I knew it was you, Shell, but I was almost afraid to open the door. You sounded so ... so fierce.”
“Come on. We're getting out of here, and fast.”
“But you said it might —”
“I know what I said, but it would be worse to stay here now than to take a chance on leaving—it's the lesser of two evils, so shake a leg.” I ran into the bedroom, yanking off my coat and shirt. The bullet Snails had tossed at me had dug a nasty slice in my left
forearm; it was painful, but not disabling, and I tore off a piece of my white shirt and wrapped it around the arm; that would do until I could get to the first-aid kit in the Cad. I started climbing into another shirt and a dark sports coat, and Coral said, “What happened, Shell? What's the matter with your arm?”
“I'll tell you later.”
“Where are we going?”
“How in hell do I know?” I yelled at her. Then I calmed down a little and said more quietly, “I'm sorry, honey. Just take my word for it: We've got to move, and fast. A lot of guys are now so anxious to kill me that some of them are practically sure to come here. Ordinarily they wouldn't—but things have changed, believe me. So get whatever you need. Now, move.”
She moved. Without another word, with no argument, she trotted out of the room. In half a minute she said, “All right. I'm ready.”
“Come on.” I led the way out and to the Cad. I didn't even have to stop for extra cartridges, because there are always some boxes in the luggage compartment of my car—along with a few thousand dollars worth of equipment I've used at one time or another in my job.
Coral slid into the car and I got behind the wheel, tore away from the curb. I pulled all the usual routines for shaking a possible tail, including going the wrong way up one-way streets and timing my approach to intersections so I was the last car through before the light turned red. When I was satisfied that we weren't followed I started looking for a motel. We'd left all the downtown L.A. hotels behind. When I spotted the Oasis, a sprawling, expensive-looking motel complete with coffee shop, pool, and palm trees, I pulled in and parked before the office.
“This is as good as practically any other place we might find,” I said to Coral. “Believe me, honey, I'm sorry for this mess you're in. I know you were in a mess before today, but it's worse now. So, you'll simply have to stay here for a while.”
Slab Happy (The Shell Scott Mysteries) Page 13
