There was none of the actress in her voice now. There was only death. She had finished acting. The play was over and she could put away the smiles and tears until the next time.
I swung my head around until my eyes were fixed on Jerry. He stopped rocking. I said, “Then I guess you’ll have to marry Jerry won’t you? He’ll have you trapped like you had Ed and Lou trapped. He’ll have something you’ll pay dearly for, won’t he?”
I think she laughed again. It was a cold laugh. “No, Mike. Poor Jerry will have to go too. You see, he’s my alibi.” Her hand went out and picked up my gun. “Everyone knows how crazy he is about me. And he’s so jealous he’s liable to do anything ... especially if he came up here and caught us together ... like tonight. There would have been gunplay. Unfortunately, you killed each other. The nurse was in the way and she died too. Doesn’t that make a good story, Mike?”
Jerry came out of his chair slowly. He had time to whisper incredulously, “Marsha!” The .45 slammed in her hand and blasted the night to bits. She watched the guy jerking on the floor and threw the gun back on the table. The rod she held on me was a long-barreled revolver and it didn’t tremble in her hand at all. She held it at her hip slanting it down enough to catch me in the chest.
She was going to get that shot off fast for the benefit of the people who were listening. She was killing again because murder breeds murder and when she had killed she was going to put the guns in dead hands and go into her act. She’d be all faints and tears and everyone would console her and tell her how brave she was and damn it all to hell, her story would stand up! There wouldn’t be a hole in it because everything was working in her favor just like when she killed her secretary! It would be a splash in the papers and she could afford that.
The hate was all there in my face now and she must have known what I was thinking. She gave me a full extra second to see her smile for the last time, but I didn’t waste it on the face of evil.
I saw the kid grab the edge of the table and reach up for the thing he had wanted for so long, and in that extra second of time she gave me his fingers closed around the butt safety and trigger at the same instant and the tongue of flame that blasted from the muzzle seemed to lick out across the room with a horrible vengeance that ripped all the evil from her face, turning it into a ghastly wet red mask that was really no face at all.
KISS ME, DEADLY
CHAPTER 1
All I saw was the dame standing there in the glare of the headlights waving her arms like a huge puppet and the curse I spit out filled the car and my own ears. I wrenched the wheel over, felt the rear end start to slide, brought it out with a splash of power and almost ran up the side of the cliff as the car fishtailed. The brakes bit in, gouging a furrow in the shoulder, then jumped to the pavement and held.
Somehow I had managed a sweeping curve around the babe. For a few seconds she had been living on stolen time because instead of getting out of the way she had tried to stay in the beam of the headlights. I sat there and let myself shake. The butt that had fallen out of my mouth had burned a hole in the leg of my pants and I flipped it out the window. The stink of burned rubber and brake lining hung in the air like smoke and I was thinking of every damn thing I ever wanted to say to a harebrained woman so I could have it ready when I got my hands on her.
That was as far as I got. She was there in the car beside me, the door slammed shut and she said, “Thanks, mister.”
Easy, feller, easy. She’s a fruitcake. Don’t plow her. Not yet. Hold your breath a minute, let it out easy, then maybe bend her over the fender and paddle her tail until she gets some sense in her head. Then boot her the hell out and make her walk the rest of the way home.
I fumbled out another cigarette, but she reached it before I did. For the first time I noticed her hands shaking as hard as mine were. I lit hers, got one out for me and lit that one too. “How stupid can you get?” I said.
She bit the words off. “Pretty stupid.”
Behind me the lights of another car were reaching around a curve. Her eyes flicked back momentarily, fear pulling their corners tight. “You going to sit here all night, mister?”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m thinking of throwing you over that cliff over there.”
The headlights shone in the car through the rear window, bathed the roadway in light then swept on past. In the second that I had a good look at her she was rigid, her face frozen expressionlessly. When only the red dot of the taillight showed in front of us she let out her breath and leaned back against the seat.
In a way she was good-looking, but her face was more interesting than pretty. Wide-set eyes, large mouth, tawny hair that spilled onto her shoulders like melted butter. The rest of her was wrapped into a tailored trench coat that was belted around her waist and I remembered her standing there in the road like something conjured up too quickly in a dream. A Viking. A damn-fool crazy Viking dame with holes in her head.
I kicked the stalled engine over, crawled through the gears and held on tight to the wheel until my brain started working right. An accident you don’t mind. Those you halfway expect when you’re holding seventy on a mountain road. But you don’t expect a Viking dame to jump out of the dark at you while you’re coming around a turn. I opened the window all the way down and drank in some of the air. “How’d you get up here?”
“What does it look like?”
“Like you got dumped.” I looked at her quickly and saw her tongue snake out over her lips. “You picked the wrong guy to go out with.”
“I’ll know better the next time.”
“Pull a trick like that last one and there won’t be any next time. You damn near became a painting on the face of that rockslide.”
“Thanks for the advice,” she said sarcastically, “I’ll be more careful.”
“I don’t give a hoot what you do as long as you don’t get strained through my radiator.”
She plucked the cigarette from her lips and blew a stream of smoke at the windshield. “Look, I’m grateful for the ride. I’m sorry I scared hell out of you. But if you don’t mind just shut up and take me somewhere or let me out.”
My mouth pulled back in a grin. A dame with nerve like that sure could’ve made a mess out of a guy before he gave her the boot. “Okay, girl,” I said, “now it’s my turn to be sorry. It’s a hell of a place for anybody to be stranded and I guess I would have done the same thing. Almost. Where do you want to go?”
“Where’re you going?”
“New York.”
“All right, I’ll go there.”
“It’s a big city, kid. Name the spot and I’ll take you there.”
Her eyes got cold. The frozen expression came back in her face. “Make it a subway station. The first one you come to will do.”
Her tone wiped my grin away. I eased the car around another turn and settled down to a straightway, jamming hard on the gas. “Damn rape-happy dame. You think all guys are the same?”
“I ...”
“Shut up.”
I could feel her watching me. I knew when she dropped her eyes in her lap and knew when she looked back at me again. She started to say something and closed her mouth over the words. She turned to stare out of the window into the blackness of the night and one hand wiped her eyes. Let her bawl. Maybe she’d learn how to be a little polite.
Another car was coming up behind us. She saw it first and pressed back into the seat until it was past. It went on down the long incline ahead of us until its taillights merged and disappeared into the maze of neons that were part of the town below.
The tires whined on a turn and the force of it made her lean across the seat until our shoulders touched. She pulled away at the contact, braced herself until the car rocked back to level and edged into the corner. I looked at her, but she was staring out of the window, her face still cold.
I slowed to fifty coming into the town, then to thirty-five and held it. The sign along the road said HANAFIELD, POP. 3600, SP
EED LIMIT 25. A quarter mile up the highway a flashing red light winked in our direction and I got on the brakes. There was a police car in the middle of the road and two uniformed cops stood alongside it checking the cars as they came by. The car that had passed us further back was just getting the okay to go on through and the flashlight was waving at me to make a full stop.
Trouble. Like the smoke over a cake of dry ice. You can’t smell it but you can see it and watch it boil and seep around things and know that soon something’s going to crack and shatter under the force of the horrible contraction. I looked at the dame and she was stiffly immobile, her lips held so tight her teeth showed, a scream held in her throat ready to let go.
I leaned out the car before I reached the cop and took the beam of his flash in the face before he lowered it. “Trouble, officer?”
His hat was pushed back on his head and a cigarette drooped from his mouth. The gun he wore hung cowboy style and for effect he draped his hand on its butt. “Where’d you come from, bud?”
A real cop, this guy. I wondered how much he paid for his appointment. “Coming down from Albany, officer. What’s up?”
“See anybody along the road? Anybody hitchhiking?”
I felt her hand close over mine before I answered him. It closed and squeezed with a sudden warmth and urgency and in a quick movement she had taken my hand in hers and slid it under the trench coat and I felt the bare flesh of her thigh there, smooth and round, and when my fingers stiffened at the touch she thought I was hesitating and with a fluid motion moved her grip up my forearm and pulled my hand against her body where there was no doubting her meaning, then amplified it by squeezing her legs together gently to keep it there.
I said, “Not a thing, officer. My wife or me have been awake all the way and if anybody was there we sure would know about it. Maybe they came on ahead.”
“Nobody came ahead, bud.”
“Who were you looking for?”
“A dame. She escaped from some sanitarium upstate and hitched a ride down to a diner with a truck. When they started broadcasting a description she beat it outside and disappeared.”
“Say, that’s pretty serious. I wouldn’t want to be the guy who picks her up. Is she dangerous?”
“All loonies are dangerous.”
“What does she look like?”
“Tall blonde. That’s about all we got on her. Nobody seems to remember what she was wearing.”
“Oh. Well, okay for me to go?”
“Yeah, go on, beat it.”
He walked back to the patrol car and I let out the clutch. I took my hand away slowly, keeping my eyes on the road. The town went by in a hurry, and on the other side I stepped on it again.
This time her hand crept up my arm and she slid across the seat until she was beside me. I said, “Get back where you came from sister. You didn’t have to pull a stunt like that.”
“I meant it.”
“Thanks. It just wasn’t necessary.”
“You don’t have to drop me at a subway station if you don’t want to.”
“I want to.”
Her foot nudged mine off the gas pedal and the car lost headway. “Look,” she said, and I turned my head. She had the coat wide open and was smiling at me. The coat, that’s all, all the rest was sleekly naked. A Viking in satin skin. An invitation to explore the curves and valleys that lay nestled in the shadows and moved with her breathing. She squirmed in the seat and her legs made a beautifully obscene gesture and she smiled again.
She was familiar then. Not so much the person, but the smile. It was a forced, professional smile that looks warm as fire and really isn’t anything at all. I reached over and flipped the coat closed. “You’ll get cold,” I said.
The smile twisted crookedly on her mouth. “Or is it that you’re afraid because you think I’m not quite sane?”
“That doesn’t bother me. Now shut up.”
“No. Why didn’t you tell him then?”
“Once when I was a kid I saw a dogcatcher about to net a dog. I kicked him in the shins, grabbed the pup and ran. The damn mutt bit me and got away, but I was still glad I did it.”
“I see. But you believed what the man said.”
“Anybody who jumps in front of a car isn’t too bright. Now shut up.”
The smile twisted a little more as if it weren’t being forced: I looked at her, grinned at what had happened and shook my head. “I sure get some dillies,” I said.
“What?”
“Nothing.” I pulled the car off the road into the dull glare of the service-station sign and coasted up to the pumps. A guy came out of the building wiping his eyes and I told him to fill it up. I had to get out to unlock the gas cap and I heard the door open, then slam shut. The blonde went up to the building, walked inside and didn’t come back until I was counting the money into the guy’s hand.
When she got back in the car there was something there that hadn’t been there before. Her face had softened and the frost had thawed until she seemed almost relaxed. Another car came by as we rolled off the gravel to the road only this time she didn’t pay any attention to it at all. The coat was belted again, the flicker of a smile she gave me was real, and she put her head back against the seat and closed her eyes.
I didn’t get it at all. All I knew was that when I hit the city I was going to pull up to the first subway station I saw, open the door, say good-by, then check on the papers until I found where somebody had put her back on the shelf again. I thought that. I wished I could mean it. All I felt was the trouble like the smoke over dry ice and it was seeping all over me.
For five minutes she sat and watched the edge of the road, then said, “Cigarette?” I shook one into her hand and shoved the dashboard lighter in. When it was lit she dragged in deeply and watched the gray haze swirl off the windows. “Are you wondering what it’s all about?” she asked me.
“Not particularly.”
“I was ...” she hesitated, “in a sanitarium.” The second pull on the butt nearly dragged the lit end down to her fingers. “They forced me to go there. They took away my clothes to make me stay there.”
I nodded as if I understood.
She shook her head slowly, getting the meaning of my gesture. “Maybe I’ll find somebody who will understand. I thought maybe ... you would.”
I went to say something. It never came out. The moon that had been hidden behind the clouds came out long enough to bathe the earth in a quick shower of pale yellow light that threw startlingly long shadows across the road and among those dark fingers was one that seemed darker still and moved with a series of jerks and a roar of sound that evolved into a dark sedan cutting in front of us. For the second time I heard the scream of tires on pavement and with it another scream not from the tires as metal tore into metal with a nasty tearing sound as splintering glass made little incongruous musical highlights above it all.
I kicked the door open and came out of the car in time to see the men piling out of the sedan. The trouble was all around us and you couldn’t walk away from it. But I didn’t expect it to be as bad as that. The gun in the guy’s hand spit out a tongue of flame that lanced into the night and the bullet’s banshee scream matched the one that was still going on behind me.
He never got another shot out because my fist split his face open. I went into the one behind him as something hissed through the air behind my head then hissed again and thudded against my shoulders. My arm went on that one and I spun around to get him with my foot. It was just a little too late. There was another hiss of something whipping through the air and whatever it was, it caught me across the forehead and for a second before all time and distance went I thought I was going to be sick and the hate for those bastards oozed out of my skin like sweat.
I didn’t lie there for long. The pain that pounded across my head was too sharp, too damn deep. It was a hard, biting pain that burst in my ears with every heartbeat, sending a blinding white light flashing into my eyes even though they wer
e squeezed shut.
In back of it all was the muffled screaming, the choked-off sobs, the cadence of harsh, angry voices biting out words that were indistinguishable at first. The motor of a car chewed into the sounds and there was more jangling of metal against metal. I tried to get up, but it was only my mind that could move. The rest of me was limp and dead. When the sense of movement did happen it wasn’t by command but because arms had me around the waist and my feet and hands scraped cold concrete. Somewhere during those seconds the screaming had been chopped off, the voices had ceased and a certain pattern of action had begun to form.
You don’t think at a time like that. You try to remember first, to collect events that led up to the end, to get things relatively assorted in their proper places so you can look at and study them with a bewildered sort of wonder that is saturated with pain, to find a beginning and an end. But nothing makes sense, all you feel is a madness and hate that rises and grows into a terrible frenzy that even wipes out the pain and you want to kill something so bad your brain is on fire. Then you realize that you can’t even do that and the fire explodes into consciousness because of it and you can see once more.
They had left me on the floor. There were my feet and my hands, immobile lumps jutting in front of my body. The backs of the hands and the sleeves were red and sticky. The taste of the stickiness was in my mouth too. Something moved and a pair of shoes shuffled into sight so I knew I wasn’t alone. The floor in front of my feet stretched out into other shoes and the lower halves of legs. Shiny shoes marred with a film of dust. One with a jagged scratch across the toe. Four separate pairs of feet all pointing toward the same direction and when my eyes followed them I saw her in the chair and saw what they were doing to her.
She had no coat on now and her skin had an unholy whiteness about it, splotched with deeper colors. She was sprawled in the chair, her mouth making uncontrollable mewing sounds. The hand with the pliers did something horrible to her and the mouth opened without screaming.
The Mike Hammer Collection, Volume 2 Page 44
