“Jungle Fury. I had to decide, myself, and it seemed —”
“Say no more. I saw the movie.” The helicopter pilot waved to me and trotted out to the machine. I said, “Off we go, Harry. Thanks for everything.”
“Of course. Shell—just be ... oh, good luck.”
“Thanks, Harry.” I hung up and ran to the helicopter. It squatted on the field like a monstrous mutant beetle, its rotors slowly turning over the half-plexiglass cabin and above the narrow tail. I climbed into the unfamiliar bug-like contraption, pulled the door shut and strapped the seat belt around my middle.
The pilot reached down and to his left, turned the throttle on the end of the control stick there, just as if he were feeding power to a motorcycle engine, and the sound increased as the twin rotors beat faster and faster over our heads. He raised the stick away from the floor and up we went, with a little lurch and sway, almost as if he were lifting the machine with his hand. Then he pushed the other stick, in his right hand, forward and for a moment it seemed that the earth, and not ourselves, was moving as it slid under and behind us, receded from us. It was a very creepy sensation for me.
The airport dwindled and I looked down through the bulging plexiglass blister to see the lights of Los Angeles spread out below us like jewels in the gathering dusk. It was a beautiful sight. I took a long look at it. There was a good chance I wouldn't see it again.
From the air, Desert Trails was the only bright spot in a world of blackness, like a liner plowing through the sea at night.
I looked at Malcolm Waters. “There it is,” I said over the roar of the engine and rush of air. “I've got exactly four minutes after seven.”
He checked his watch. “On the nose.”
“O.K. Here's the routine for the last time. After you dump me, disappear until exactly seven-forty-eight. Bring this thing down a hundred yards behind the main hotel building, on the opposite side from the pool. If I'm not there, stay put until somebody shoots at you.”
He grinned. “You left out the most important part. If anybody shoots at me, I get a thousand-dollar bonus.”
I grinned back at him. “Yeah. But nothing extra if they hit you.”
“They? That sounds like several people.”
“If there's any shooting at all, it will be from several people. If you can call them people. But don't worry about it. They'll shoot me first—so you'll be warned by all the popping.”
He grinned again, but without much tooth.
We landed in darkness, with no lights showing, more than a mile from the ranch. It was nine minutes after seven. I piled out with the recorder and ladder supplied by Feldspen in my hands, and in my pockets the smaller items I'd taken earlier from the Cad's luggage compartment: the ring of picks and keys, the sap, and pencil-sized flashlight. Malcolm Waters took off immediately.
We'd come down on the desert before the front of the ranch, so as I headed toward it, alternating walking with trotting, I could see the lights of the hotel, and pool. Several people were enjoying the heated waters of the pool this evening, and though I couldn't see the front of the bar, which faced the hotel, it was a sure thing that it was loaded, too. That was fine with me. I almost wished I was loaded.
I stopped about a hundred yards from the hotel, out past the stables, and placed the recorder on the ground. At exactly seven-thirty I started the tape unwinding, the small but powerful speaker aimed at the hotel. I had fourteen minutes before the blank tape would come to an end and the first sound—a gunshot—would come from the speaker. Exactly sixty seconds later the taped sound track would begin playing. At maximum volume.
I took off, trotting in a wide circle around the side of Desert Trails. When I was well behind it, I stopped trotting and walked, in order to catch my breath and calm my mind, to the rear of the hotel, then moved through the darkness slowly. As far as I could tell I was alone back here.
When I had been in the hotel before, and Flint with his two pals had escorted me upstairs to see Nick, I had noticed at the end of the second-floor hallway a curtain billowing inward before an open window. It was toward that window I was walking now. I found it with no difficulty; soft light spilled through it from the hallway inside. I extended four of the ladder's five sections, and the bamboo ends reached to a spot just below the window sill. It was seven-thirty-six when I started up the ladder; I had eight minutes in which to do what I'd come here for.
I paused at the top of the ladder and looked into the hall. The window was open again, sheer curtain billowing inward. In the right wall, halfway down the hallway inside, I could see the closed door through which I had gone once before to meet Nick. At first I didn't see anybody. But that was because I was looking toward the far end of the hall. Then the glow of a cigarette nearby caught my eye and I saw that a man was leaning against the wall inside on my right, not more than six or eight feet from me. He dragged on the cigarette again. It was Whitey. Slobberlips. The Un-Continental.
I tried to tell myself that I was calm, cool, and collected, but my heart was pounding as if it were the wrong size, and it would have taken at least two quarts of water to ease the dryness in my throat. I knew that in a very few minutes all sorts of noise was going to blast from that recorder I'd left in the desert; and quite a while before that happened, I had to be in Nick's room. Nick was asleep now, almost surely; but once that tape had unwound for fifteen minutes, he would be wide awake—along with every other living thing for miles around.
But I couldn't just stand here on my ladder. After all the thinking and planning, the work and expense, getting clear up to here, I couldn't let a racing heart and bunch of overactive glands ruin the whole operation. Not just because a stupid lob like Whitey was nearby. Stupid—that was, of course, the key word.
I calmed down then. I grinned, took out the sap and held it in my right hand, high overhead. Then I leaned back a little, so my face wouldn't catch the glow of light from inside, and I said softly, “Hey, Whitey.”
He took the wet cigarette out of his mouth and looked down the length of the empty hallway away from me and I saw his jaw sag perhaps an inch. Then he squeezed his eyes shut, opened them, and stared, shaking his head just a little.
“No, stupid,” I whispered. “Over here.”
Slowly he turned his head, looking as if he really deserved the name of Old Slobberlips, which was how I now thought of him.
“Huh?” he said, looking at the wall. “What? Where ... what...”
“Here, out here.”
His eyes rolled toward the window.
“Yeah, here. Well, don't just stand there, stupid. Come out here.”
His face got all twisted. “Who—ha—wha —” he was so bewildered that it must have ached. His expression was a complex blending of agony, astonishment, and a wild surmise. “Wha—who —” he went on wetly.
“Oh, Whitey,” I said. “Don't just stand there. Come out here.”
And finally he was able to move. And, able to move, he naturally came over and stuck his head out the window, and naturally I swatted him murderously on top of it. If you have heard old ladies thumping melons in the market, and if you can imagine the sound multiplied about five times, then you know what it sounded like when I sapped Whitey. Boy, he was a ripe one. He flopped halfway out of the window, arms dangling down the side of the building.
I couldn't leave him dangling there—at any minute somebody else was likely to wander through that hallway—and I couldn't leave him sprawled on the floor inside, either. So I pulled myself past him through the window and, standing inside, lifted his feet and pushed him out the window. He made hardly any noise when he landed on the ground below.
I headed for that door leading upstairs. The door leading to Nick's suite—and to Nick Colossus. The hallway was still empty, so I tried the knob—naturally the door was locked—then took the ring of picks out of my pocket and started working on the lock. It was a tough one. I looked at my watch. Only three minutes to go. And now I was afraid it wouldn't be nearly
enough. I had to get this door open, and then open another one at the head of the stairs inside it. And then there was Nick. I had a chance just so long as I got inside Nick's room before seven-forty-five, before he woke up. I got to work on that door again.
The lock tumblers turned and I yanked the door open. Up the stairs I went, picks in my hand. I tried the same pick on the door at the top of the stairs—and it worked. My heart felt as if it were pounding inside my mouth as I eased Nick's door open and stepped into his suite of rooms—into that room where I had been severely and expertly beaten. It was dark inside here. I closed the door, leaned back against it, listening. But only for a few seconds, there couldn't be more than a minute left. I turned on my pencil flash and shot its beam briefly around the room.
It fell on the desk where Nick had sat, the long couch against the wall, the two overstaffed chairs. And then on the closed door beyond which, I knew, was Nick's bedroom—and the sleeping Nick Colossus. I reached up and felt the .38, cold under my coat, but left it in the holster. I took the sap out of my pocket again. Holding it in my right hand, flashlight burning in my left, its glow dimmed by my fingers, I walked to that closed door.
For moments I stood there, breathing deeply, filling my lungs and blood with fresh oxygen, then I took a last deep breath and held it. I turned the doorknob with the hand holding my flashlight. The door was unlocked and swung open without a sound. I stepped inside, heartbeat thudding, blood drumming in my ears. When I moved the flashlight farther into the room it dimly illumined Nick's bed—and Nick.
Silently, carefully, still holding my breath I walked to the bed, stood alongside it. Nick Colossus lay on his back, both monstrous and hairy arms outside the covers. Even in sleep, lying quietly, he looked like an avalanche that had only momentarily come to rest. The covers rose and fell over his thick body with his breathing. His jaw hung a little slack, lips slightly parted. His skin still looked bulletproof, and he needed a shave.
So we met again, Nick and I. Here was the louse who had told his boys to slug me, kick me, work me over, and dump me in the desert. The louse responsible for the cold-blooded murder of Lou Rio, and framing me for it. The slob who had caused me practically all of my hell and most of my lumps over the last lumpy days.
I grinned and slowly let out my breath, and I said softly, “O.K., Nick, now it's my turn.”
Then I shifted the little flashlight in my hand so that, while I could still see Nick clearly enough, the beam of light fell full on my face—on my recently washed white hair and eyebrows, and on my cheery grin, because for this moment at least I felt cheery—and then in a loud voice, I said:
"Hey, Nick, wake up!"
Chapter Seventeen
He came out of sleep like a man who hadn't even closed his eyes. One moment he was lying there unconscious and the next he was coming up off the bed at me.
I'd held the light on my face so that he would be sure to recognize me, get a good look and recognize me fast, because that was important to my plan. And it worked well enough; almost too well. He recognized me immediately and came at me so quickly that I barely had time to swing the sap.
I had time, though.
I wasn't able to carefully pick a spot, but the sap landed just about an inch above the handsome gray area at the side of Nick's thick black hair. I swung the sap not hard enough to kill him, but hard enough that I wouldn't have to worry about him for quite a while. Whatever he'd started to yell came out in a whisper as he went limp and slumped back on the bed.
I threw back the blanket which had been over him. His shirt was off and his muscular chest bulged beneath a silk undershirt. Otherwise he was fully dressed, including his shoes. That was exactly as Viper had described it, as was the location of Nick's .45 on a small table next to the bed.
I dropped the sap into my pocket and shoved the .45 under my belt, then jumped into the front office and flicked on the lights. They blazed brightly in the room, shocking my eyes after the dimness.
And then there was the sound of a gunshot. It had started. My fourteen minutes were up and the unrolling tape out there in the blackness of the desert had reached the spot where a single gunshot had been recorded. In one minute more the real noise would start—but even now everybody in and around the hotel would be looking out into the desert listening. That's what I wanted. It was too soon, but I hadn't expected this to go perfectly. Everything was working out wonderfully well so far, and I wasn't going to kick just because I was a few minutes behind schedule. Not yet. But that meant I had only four minutes before Malcolm Waters landed his helicopter out in back again, four minutes in which to do everything for which I'd planned to have more than twice that long.
But at least everybody was listening now, ears cocked out into the desert, wondering if they would hear any more sounds. They would. They were going to hear the sound track from Jungle Fury, and if that didn't jar them a bit, nothing ever would.
Well, if I had only a minute, a minute it would have to be. I swung my head around, examining the office closely. On the wall behind Nick's desk were those three framed pictures—a photo of Desert Trails itself, the photograph of a U. S. Senator, inscribed “To Nick Colossus—name it and you can have it,” and an oil painting of a desert landscape. On Nick's desk were the ashtray made out of twenty-dollar gold pieces, and his small desk calendar.
I got busy. I took all three pictures off the walls and stuffed them under my shirt. They made an awkward mass an inch and a half thick, but I thought I could carry them there all right. The ashtray and desk calendar I stuffed into my coat pockets. A last quick glance around showed me the walls bare and the desk bare except for the beige phone. I jumped for the bedroom door and inside. Nick lay silently on the bed.
And then it started. I heard the rattle of sporadic gunfire, shrill screams, the thudding of drums. My minute was up and the Jungle Fury sound track was blasting its noises at the Desert Trails.
I felt sick. Soon slobs would be rushing up here to report to Nick Colossus that strange things indeed were afoot. And I was at this moment, according to schedule, supposed to be well away from the hotel, in the desert behind it. In three minutes Malcolm would be bringing the helicopter down—to pick me up. Cold sweat actually, literally, sprang out on my skin, from my scalp to my big feet. I think it even popped out on my toes. But I forced my mind away from possible horrible consequences and to the job at hand.
As I bent toward Nick, those sounds from the desert sands banged against my ears. It was quite faint in here—but outside it must have been a shrieking clamorousness striking amazement and maybe even curdled horror into numerous hoodlums and guests. The amount of time I had before two or three hoods burst in here depended upon the extent of their amazement and horror. Perhaps the sound track from another movie, a different Magna production, would have been better, but I had merely told Feldspen I wanted something which would provide an enormous amount of noise and snatch the attention of practically everybody within hearing distance. And he had chosen quite well. I'd seen the film itself as half of a double bill, and if I recalled the scenes, these were the sounds of the climax.
Yes, at this very moment the elephants were trumpeting out there on the black California desert. The great elephant stampede had begun. Now the savages were attacking. I could hear them screeching. They were killing everybody, all the white hunters, and soon they would be dancing around the golden-haired tomato cooking at the stake like blonde shish-kebab. It was Jungle Fury, all right. I would have given a thousand dollars to be at the bar right now, examining the variety of available expressions. I would have bet it all, too, that plenty of double bourbons and Scotches and martinis would be sold this night.
But all of those thoughts occupied only about four seconds in my mind, four seconds during which I grabbed one of Nick's leg-like arms and hauled him to a sitting position. I got the beefy arm around my neck and wrestled him onto my back, strained to straighten up with him. There is nothing at all weak about me, and my 206 pounds is mostl
y muscle and very little fat, but at first I couldn't move that flesh monster.
But then I shifted my feet, got better leverage, and strained upward. At the same moment the sound of the African “savages” screaming, “Ogbooogi-jooweejie-bahgoa!” or something very like it as they raced into the white man's camp squirted a little extra adrenaline into my bloodstream, and I stood erect with Nick Colossus draped limply over my back, and staggered into the brightly-lighted front room.
I made it to the door, started down the steps. I could hear footsteps pounding in the hallway below and for a moment I thought it must be somebody racing up here for Nick and I let go of his wrists with one hand, grabbed for his .45 in my belt. But the feet pounded on by the door. Probably a drunken guest fleeing from the attack. I staggered down the steps to the hallway door, and with every inch Nick got heavier.
Every rib that his thugs had banged and bent ached, and seemed about to crack. Every bruise and contusion felt as if it were getting blacker and more tender. My left arm under its bandage, seemed bathed in fire. But I made it to the door, kicked it open and stepped into the hall.
As I stepped through the door a woman in a pink dress looked at me, opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again in ghastly fashion, then silently spun around and jumped into the room behind her, slamming the door.
Now that I was out of Nick's room and in the hotel hallway, I could hear the awful noises banging eardrums in and around the hotel. That recorder Feldspen had supplied me with must surely have been one of the most powerful made, for the sounds seemed not a hundred yards and more away, but practically inside the hotel itself. The monstrous war drums boomed practically in my ears, and the shouts and battle cries and shrieks and screams blended into an absolute horror of eight-dimensional whoops and ululations.
The purpose of all this sound had originally been to draw all attention to the front of the hotel, and perhaps cause several of Nick's hoods to go out there to investigate, but also to drown out the sound of—and keep curious eyes from—the soon-to-be-descending helicopter. But hearing it now in my own ears, it seemed likely that not only would that dual purpose be accomplished, but in addition half the people here would be thrown into such confusion that I might have driven up right past the pool in a red and white sports car and taken Nick away in it.
Slab Happy (The Shell Scott Mysteries) Page 19
