by Ed Gorman
Lynn saw me before he did. In fact, it was her recognition that made him spin toward me and fire twice. The second shot ripped into my shoulder and jerked me backward two or three feet. I fired my .38, but the shock of being wounded marred my aim. My own two shots ripped into the wall behind him. Glass shattered.
Lynn was on him now, fighting for his gun. She slapped at him and shoved him and got her hand on his gun wrist.
I started to move, the pain in my shoulder exploding now. This time, the sweat covering me was cold. I managed to get within six or seven feet of him, but that was when he slipped his arm around her throat and swung her around to face me. He’d managed to get himself a hostage.
From where I stood now, I could see William Hughes flat down on the surface of a Persian rug. Linda Raines was crouched next to him, tears glazing her cheeks.
The pain from my wound ran the length of my gun arm. I was having trouble holding the .38. Bad enough he had Lynn. It would be even worse if he had Lynn and I dropped my gun.
“You listening to me, Lynn?” He increased his grip on her throat. She made a choking sound, her upper body surging instinctively as her breathing was cut off. “We’re going outside and getting in your car. And we’re going to drive out of here. Do you understand me?”
I called on all the private-eye writers I read. I needed their encouragement and guidance. They were always getting clubbed, stomped, stabbed, burned, drowned, and shot, but nothing stopped them from their appointed vengeance. Sure, they had six shots in their chest and one in their head, but by God they always managed to get the job done.
I was falling a little short of their record of accomplishments. All I had was a wound in my shoulder, and here I was dizzy, cold, and losing strength. I was afraid I was going to pass out. I wasn’t going to get a private-eye merit badge for this one.
I had a gun, but Adair had Lynn. “You could’ve helped, too, McCain. People always say you help when they’re in trouble. You should have figured out that that fire was arson. You owed it to Karen.”
“I didn’t know Karen.”
“Everybody knew Karen, and everybody loved her, too.”
Any other time, his madness would have made him a forlorn figure living out some impossible romance in his mind. But he had the gun and he had Lynn and he had already killed two and maybe three times, depending on how William Hughes was. Pity him afterward, Samuel Johnson had said of hanging killers in old London. That applied here too.
He began moving in small jerky steps toward the hall. He wasn’t having an easy time of it. Shuffling along with a hostage in tow isn’t easy. You have to keep a tight grip on her while always keeping track of what the other guy is doing. The hostage could make a break for it; the other guy could make a sudden move you couldn’t respond to quickly enough.
Then I realized his plan. He wasn’t going to take her with him. He was going to use her to get to the car and kill her before he got in it. Nobody was guiltier than Lynn, by his logic. Karen had been her sister. She’d betrayed Karen by not avenging her death. He’d killed the men involved. Now he would have to kill her too.
“God, stop him, Sam! Stop him!” Lynn’s voice was raw, her face a portrait of confusion and shock. Spittle ran down the left side of her mouth. Her knees kept buckling. Adair had to redouble his grip every thirty seconds; otherwise, she’d slide out of his grasp. She slipped into the low moan I’d heard many times in people who were starting to withdraw from reality following a traumatic event. She was coming apart. I had to help her.
I forced myself to stand up straight. For the moment, Adair was wrestling with her to keep her upright. She had to cooperate. If he had to drag her, he’d leave himself open. I’d get an easy shot at him.
I took two steps and started weaving. A new layer of freezing sweat caused me to shiver. Just moments ago I’d been boiling despite the air conditioning.
As I righted myself, my eyes met Adair’s. He had Lynn back under his control. He was watching me closely. I assumed that to him, I might have been trying to distract him, give Lynn a chance to bolt. He couldn’t be sure whether I was for real or just acting.
“God, McCain, are you all right?” Lynn said.
“Doesn’t look like your savior’s going to save you.” Adair vised her neck even tighter.
The worst of the cold was gone, one large convulsion of it that had nearly knocked me down. My palm was so sweaty, I had to squeeze the gun so tight that it hurt. I was still dizzy. I needed to move with great deliberation.
Adair started moving again. They went three or four steps and she kicked him. Both his face and his voice registered the pain. For a millisecond his grip loosened, just enough time to take a single unencumbered step. But he was quick and he was pissed. He swung her back to him and smashed the side of her head with the bottom of his gun. She slumped in his arm. Blood snaked down from her temple. He was better coordinated than I’d guessed. His eyes had never left me.
But he paid a price for knocking her out, and as he started moving again, he discovered what the cost was. Conscious, she walked with him. Unconscious, she was dead weight. An ungainly hundredpound bag of flesh, bone, blood, and water. He cursed. He couldn’t just hold her now, he had to hold her and drag her.
Another convulsion rocked me. I needed to reach out for something to lean against, but there was nothing. A drunkard’s walk as I tried to move forward. One step, two steps, three—
This time I couldn’t stop myself from starting to fall. I didn’t sprawl, though. I was able to hold my descent to one knee.
And that was when it happened. I wasn’t sure of anything until it was over. Instinct guided me. I was too weak to think anything through.
When I dropped to my knee, he opened fire. But he hadn’t been fast enough to follow me down. Two blasts went over my head and tore into some kind of glass in the living room.
He got so intent on killing me that he loosened the arm that held Lynn. She slipped from his grasp to the floor, leaving him unprotected.
I fell sideways because of sheer weakness. He blasted at me again but again he wasn’t quick enough. He’d fired just as I slumped over.
I had a target and I took it. Somehow before it all came crashing down, I got a shot off. I was conscious long enough to see him start to crumble, an expression of complete surprise on his face.
Then Linda Raines called my name and I was gone.
THREE DAYS LATER
The second day, the doc let me have roast beef and mashed potatoes for dinner. My mother visited twice and told me that my father was a bit stronger than when I’d last seen him. Molly and Doran stopped by to tell me that they were off to New York to meet his editor and to find the nastiest lawyer available for his false-arrest suit against Cliffie. Jamie brought me the new issue of Ellery Queen and informed me that Turk wouldn’t be suing me after all, because his lawyer wouldn’t do anything until Turk paid off his bill. And since Turk was broke and Jamie wouldn’t loan him any money, the suit was off.
Judge Whitney appeared all imperious and immediately began telling the nurses on the floor how to rearrange my room and complained that they weren’t stopping in to check on me often enough. And Wendy brought me the newspaper that told of Reverend Cartwright’s second failed attempt to destroy Beatles records.
LOCAL PASTOR NEARLY DROWNS; SAVED BY PROTESTOR
Yes, it seemed that Cartwright’s attempt to start tossing albums and 45s off Indian Creek Hill turned disastrous when a strong wind came up and blew him right off the cliff and into the water sixty feet below. The only person thinking quickly and clearly enough to help him turned out to be one of the high-school boys who’d shown up to taunt him. The fifteen-year-old dove off the cliff, located the drowning pastor in the choppy water, and then swam him to the narrow shoreline, where he administered CPR. All that would be left for Cartwright now would be to order a nuclear attack on his ever-increasing mountain of Beatles material.
The third night, Wendy snuck in a sausage pizza
and two cans of beer inside a shopping bag. It was fun hiding it all from the nurses. Wendy was really good at playing innocent, even though the two nurses who came by sniffed the air and looked at her suspiciously. Around eight thirty when one of the nurses popped back in to tell her that visiting hours were over, Wendy said that since we were getting married this coming weekend, she would appreciate it if she could stay in my room all night.
The nurse, an older sentimental soul, gave one of those smiles contestants on quiz shows do when they’ve just won a new Chevrolet. “That’s very nice, miss. I’ll tell the people at the desk so they’ll let the night nurses know.”
When she left I said, “That’s a pretty expensive pizza. Marriage.”
“Don’t worry. I don’t want to get married any more than you do, Sam. But I like having a boyfriend.”
“So you wouldn’t marry me even if I asked you?”
“Oh, God, you’re not one of those, are you?”
“‘One of those’?”
“You know. You don’t want to marry me until I say that I don’t want to marry you, and then you want to marry me just so you can prove that I really wanted to marry you in the first place.”
“Gee, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about but, it sounds kinda fun.”
“You know damned well what I’m talking about.”
The nurse was back with half a dozen roses in a white glass vase. She placed it without ceremony on my rolling table. She plucked the tiny white card from it and handed it to me.
I scanned the words. I laughed so hard it hurt.
“Who’s it from?” Wendy asked.
“Molly. She must’ve snuck off to send the flowers and write the card.”
“What’s it say?”
“‘Maybe I made a mistake. Last night he told me he knows John Lennon.’”
“That poor girl. He’s probably an axe murderer.”
Every few minutes I had to adjust my position in the bed. The pain from the wound wasn’t as bad as it had been the first two days, but it helped to keep shifting the shoulder slightly.
She leaned forward in her chair and touched my hip. “Don’t you see, Sam? All those serious affairs you had and nothing came of them? You got hurt or they got hurt or you both got hurt. I think you went at them too hard. I just want us to have the kind of thing we would’ve had in high school if I hadn’t thought you were kind of a dork.”
“You really thought I was a dork?”
“Well, Sam, you knew I was a snob. I was a cheerleader, for God’s sake.” She stood up then and leaned over so she could see me better. “You’re not over loving Jane, and I’m not over being Bryce’s second choice. We have to face it, so we may as well face it together. But we’ve got to take it slow. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Dear Abby’s got nothing on you.”
“I’ll bet Dear Abby never snuck a sausage pizza into a hospital.”
Then she kissed me and said, “Will you be mad if I change my mind about staying all night? I just realized that that chair will cripple me for life if I try to sleep in it.”
“You mean you wouldn’t wrench your back out of shape even for love?”
She poked me in the chest and grinned. “Not even for love, bozo.”
On the fourth day, they started me walking up and down the hall three times before dinner. On my second trip, I decided to do something useful. I stopped in to see William Hughes. His room was seven down from mine.
According to Wendy, he’d been shot in the chest and the left side. Lying in his hospital bed, reading a paperback copy of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, his open blue pajama shirt revealed white tape around his chest and an IV drip positioned on his left arm. The room was bright with the Indian summer afternoon. Two small monitors sat on a tall thin table next to his bed. They made tiny bleating noises every five seconds or so. The medicinal smell was sharp but clean.
Hughes showed no particular interest when he looked up and saw me crossing from the doorway to his bed. He closed his paperback, stretched his arm across to the rolling table where he took his meals and kept his personal items. He grabbed a Zippo and a pack of Pall Malls. “The doctor comes in and gives me the big speech every time he sees the smokes.” He had a grin that made you feel better about the world. He lighted his cigarette and clanked shut the top of his Zippo. In the sunlight I could see how much of his gray hair was turning white. I could also see that his burnished skin was more wrinkled than I’d realized. He was getting old.
“How’re you feeling?”
“Now, how do you think I’d be feeling, McCain?”
“Stupid question, huh?”
“Very stupid.”
“You planning to stay on with Linda?”
“I’m not sure that’s any of your business. But she plans to sell the house and move on.”
I nodded. I hesitated before I said it. It wasn’t the kind of thing I wanted to think, let alone put into words. “Were you protecting him?”
The smoke he exhaled did a lovely blue dance in the sunbeams. Then he looked at me and said, “Why don’t we cut the bullshit, McCain? You’ve got something to say to me, so why don’t you say it.”
“Maybe I just stopped in to see how you’re doing.”
“Oh, I’m sure that’s true. I keep asking the nurses about how you’re doing. We have something in common now, something we’ll remember the rest of our lives. When Adair shot us. But that still leaves something unsaid, doesn’t it?”
“We can always have this talk when you’re feeling better.”
“Just get to it, McCain. Right now.”
I sighed. “If you knew Lou set up that fire, it was your legal duty to tell the law. You protected him because he saved your life. You committed a crime.”
The head sank slowly back to the propped-up pillows. “The outfit I was with in Korea, bunch of racists. Used to taunt me all the time. I figured the gooks would probably treat me better than the assholes in my outfit did. So if one of them had had to save my life, I wouldn’t be here today complaining about them. But Bennett—he was decent to me. I could tell I was sort of mysterious to him. Like somebody from outer space. But he was decent and if he caught somebody giving me a hard time, he shut him down right on the spot. The same with saving my life. He could’ve been killed right along with me. But he didn’t care. He ran crisscross in front of all the gunfire and grabbed me and dragged me back to where I belonged. And he got me patched up enough so that I could hold out until they got a medic to take care of me. Bennett was some kind of half-assed medic himself. Did a damned good job on me. Damned good job.”
He lolled his head to the right so he could see the table. He stabbed out his cigarette in a round tin ashtray. He left his head lolled like that, just staring at me. Something had changed in his demeanor. He wasn’t as severe and formal as usual. And when he spoke, the language was a lot looser and friendlier.
“There I was with all these peckers picking on me because I was colored and I was half bleeding to death when Bennett went all heroic and rescued my ass and—” He smiled. “And I still didn’t answer your question, did I?”
“No, no you didn’t.”
A deep sigh. He touched brown fingers to the white tape. His face reflected pain. “Lou was shady. Took me a long time to figure that out. He ran on two tracks. There were the businesses everybody knew about, and then there were the businesses almost nobody knew about. He used a lot of different corporate names, so it was hard to trace any of it back to him. I put up with it. As far as I knew, nobody was being hurt. It was just—shady. Even when Roy Davenport got involved. Davenport was a mean son of a bitch, but I never knew about him actually hurting people. He did, of course. Maybe I forced myself not to realize that—you know, so I wouldn’t turn against Bennett. But I happened to be around, the night that Raines and Davenport forced Bennett to write the letter admitting that he’d paid them to set the fire. They wanted it as insurance. They were afraid that Bennett had enoug
h clout to set them up and turn them in. Later on, they started blackmailing him with it. That was when I couldn’t handle it any more.”
“You were friends with Karen.”
“I was half-assed in love with her. Just like most men were.”
“So what did you do?”
“I knew Davenport had the letter. I had to figure out where he kept it, and then I had to figure out how to get it. He’d just fired this secretary he’d been dallying with, and she was real, real pissed. I offered her five hundred dollars for the combination to his safe. I got the letter with no problem.”
“What happened to it?”
“I put it in my safe deposit box in the bank. I’ll turn it over to the law as soon as I leave here.” His face was grim. “I didn’t figure on anybody getting killed. That came out of nowhere.”
“Maybe I should stop back.”
The voice came from behind me. When I turned, I saw Mike Parnell in his wheelchair sitting outside the door.
“Hey, Mike, c’mon in.” Hughes waved him in. Then to me, “Mike and me play shuffleboard over at Henry’s Tap all the time. He’s been up here every day visiting me.”
Mike rolled in, right up to the bed. His new white T-shirt bore a vivid image of the American flag and beneath it, the slogan “The Blood of Heroes.”
“You like hanging out with Commies, do you, William?”
“Oh, now, c’mon, Mike. You know what I told you. There’s some people who just don’t understand why we need to be over there. That doesn’t make them bad people, that just makes them full of shit.” I got the grin when he finished talking.
“Well, if there’s one thing McCain is, it’s full of shit. Always has been.”
“So you two know each other?”
“Old friends,” I said.
“Used to be old friends, you mean.”
I guess it was the sudden tension. Or maybe it was just because I’d been standing for so long. The legs started to tremble and the head started to spin a little.
