She picked up the poker and stirred the fire. It was starting to catch, the dry logs beginning to crackle.
“There’s no love lost in this crime business. Fells and Bern were old contemporaries of his. He had probably used them on his jobs, so they had a close-knit deal going for them for years. They were bound to know a lot about each other during those years. Now suddenly Bern and Fells get a contract offered them to hit Bradley for not going after his primary target.”
“How would they know where to find him?”
“All they knew was what the newspapers mentioned about the note, but that was enough. I was their lead to Penta. They thought I would have to know something about him, thus the snatch.”
“They could have killed you.”
“No. They had too much professional in them. That would bring too much heat down anyway.”
“They killed Smiley,” she reminded me.
“Honey, those two were real jellybeans. They were in a hurry and used their old contacts on the job. When they got done with Smiley, they didn’t want to leave any witness around so they snuffed him. Stupidly, they used an old place that was a safe house once without realizing Penta ... or Bradley, knew about it too. Even Bradley’s timing was great. He was always presumed to be doing something else.” “Scratch Fells and Bern,” she mused.
“Two quick, accurate shots and gone. Too bad he didn’t have time to shake the place down. Maybe he tried, but that house was set up by experts and those two had a clever hiding place.” I let out a laugh. “I wonder if it’s still owned by the government.”
“Mike ... when I was in the hospital ...”
“That first orderly in your room was him. He wanted you dead, kitten.”
“That’s crazy!”
“Look ... you might have had a quick look at him in our office.”
“But I didn’t.”
“But you did have a tape of his voice. Someplace around there would be other tapes he made and a voice-print from yours would be another point of proof that could nail him. One thing. He wasn’t dumb. He knew he’d made that call and wanted to double-check on it.”
“Making that tape was almost accidental. I never thought ...”
“He couldn’t take the chance. Secondly, he wanted me to make myself vulnerable. He knew damn well I’d go ape if you got knocked off and come right out in the open. Luckily, Pat kept the cops on your door and stymied anything from him in that direction. Hell, he was getting plenty of openings on me anyway. He was there when I said I was going to the office and had plenty of time while I was there to get in position and damn near nail me from the car.”
I stopped, looked at the fire and thought back to the way I’d kept sloughing off the motive. It was as though there had been none at all.
“You know what the pitiful thing is?” I said. “I was the one who couldn’t see it. I got going on the DiCica bit and everything I did was a cover for Bradley. He was on top of the whole deal like the lid on a jar and everything was going his way in spades. If he could assist in nailing that drug cache, there would be no demotion ... he’d go up another notch and be even more important to his employers than ever. He’d be able to pull off political assassinations almost at will.
“Look how he put himself into the middle of it. He didn’t want any suspicion thrown on him now at all. He volunteers for the scout car with Candace, gives his report to our guys, but someplace he’s stopped long enough to alert both federal agencies and get them in a political scuffle. He’s supposedly off somewhere smoothing ruffled feathers while the bust is going on, and do you know where he is?”
“Where?” she asked. I could feel the tension in her voice.
“He’s on the way back here,” I said. “He can make his hit on us and still get back in the play in the city. Nobody will have missed him in all the excitement, or have bothered to look for him, since he would have already planted an alibi.”
The fire was blazing away by now, but Velda shivered and I was getting that feeling again. I was computing hours and minutes and knew that what I had just said was true.
I gave Velda a yank away from the brightness of the fire, and we darted in the shadows where the phone was. I picked it up, listened and tapped the bar twice, then put it down.
“The line’s cut, isn’t it?” Velda asked.
“It would have to be at the main road. There are no poles around here so the wires must go underground out to Route Twenty-eight.”
“You can tell the guards—”
“No. He’d have a two-way on this frequency with him. If the guard are on their toes, they might pick him up with those night scopes.”
“Might?” There was an odd note of finality in her voice.
Time was going by fast. I had to get in the game and Velda wasn’t going to be able to move with me. I said, “Come here,” and pulled her into the hallway. I got the chair over, stood up and shoved the hatch cover back. “You’re going up there.”
She pulled back, her eyes on the black hole in the ceiling. “I can’t.”
“Nuts. You have to. I had to force her onto the chair, then lift her up into the darkness. When her feet were inside, I handed her the flashlight. At least she had something to hold on to. I told her to stay quiet and don’t move, then felt for the hatch and put it back in place.
There was no way I could douse the fire, so I pushed a couple of chairs together in front of the TV, propped enough pillows from the sofa in them to make it look like they were occupied and went to the back bedroom and slid the window open. I crawled out, closed the window and stood there, trying to catch any sound while my eyes adjusted to the night.
When we first got there, I had imprinted the area on my mind and now I was bringing it all back into focus. If Bradley was out there, he could have night-vision glasses on him that could pick up any movement on the terrain.
I went down on my belly, crawling and stopping, trying to bury myself in the grass. Bradley wouldn’t have had time for a ground survey like I had, so any small contour I might make could just be a hillock to him. The arc I made took me away from the rock outcropping, circled around it, then I came in from the other end.
Now I could see where the guard was. It was Eddie’s station, and I could see him, a vague silhouette against the light. I didn’t want him to make any sudden turn and blow me away so I didn’t say anything until I was there, right on top of him, and reached out my hand and grabbed his arm.
The damn gun toppled out of his fingers and he fell over on me, the blood wet and sticky from where it was seeping out of his head. I picked up the rifle and sighted it at the other rock hill. What was night became a greenish-tinted dusk where everything was dim, but discernible. I turned the night scope on the other pile of rocks and saw a pair of legs sticking out where they shouldn’t be and threw the rifle down.
The bastard was here! Damn it, I should have stayed in the house instead of trying to contact the guard posts. He’d had all the time he needed to nullify their positions and now he’d be inside. He’d take his time. He’d make sure he held the high ground and wanted to take me by surprise. If he found the place empty, he’d have to revise his thinking. But first he’d make sure. He would have found the car in the back, so we weren’t far off. He’d realize that I couldn’t move fast with Velda and that I sure wouldn’t leave her.
So he’d search. First the rooms, then for less obvious places.
I was running like hell, the .45 in my hand. I got to the house and stayed on the grass, edging to the back. The lock would have been easy enough for a pro to open. Or he could have knocked a pane out of the door window, reached in and turned the knob. That didn’t matter. What mattered was that he was in there.
My feet felt the gravel and I stepped over it, got to the window and pushed it up. This was the one time I could die in a hurry, but the window went easily, he wasn’t in the room and I slid in as silently as my shadow.
In the living room the firelight was dancing, throwing a dul
l orange glow over the place, the sound of the logs burning obscuring any small sounds I might have heard. I stepped out into the weird patterns the fire was making on the walls, listened again, then got down almost to my knees and started an animal crawl across the room.
The beam of a pencil flash made a quick splash of light around the corner. Then I heard it, the drag of chair legs across the floor. A hand suddenly slammed against the ceiling and he laughed. The bastard laughed!
I went in just as I heard a muffled scream from Velda and there in the dim, weaving light patterns were a pair of male legs sticking down from the attic opening, slowly going up as he raised himself with his arms.
For a second I was going to snatch him down. I changed my mind.
I cocked the .45, took real deliberate aim and touched the trigger. The gun blasted into a roaring yellowish light and for that one second I saw the leg jerk and twitch with a grotesque motion, and even before he could scream, I did it again to the other leg and the whole man came tumbling out of the ceiling opening, his hand still holding onto Velda, pulling her down with him.
My foot kicked him to one side, and I pulled Velda to her feet so we both could look down at Bradley. The impact of the slugs had shocked him almost breathless. Then the pain really hit him. His hands reached out, clawing wildly. He looked up at me with eyes so full of hate they seemed nearly black.
Quietly, I said, “He was your brother, wasn’t he?”
He started to go wild then, thrashing his body in fury and pain, still trying to drag himself away. He was leaving a trail of blood behind and his face was tight with a screaming grimace. “My twin, you bastard! You killed my twin brother. You killed me, you rotten ...”
I leaned down and put the muzzle of the .45 directly against Bradley’s forehead. “If I do,” I told him, “I’ll cut off more than your fingers, Penta. I’ll do it with your own knife.”
Velda was standing there, not interfering, coldly observing.
I said, “There’s a CB radio in the car, doll. The state troopers guard Channel Nine. Call them.”
She nodded once and went to the door.
I was grinning down at Bradley. I wondered what the State Department was going to say. In a way it was too bad he was going back alive. The publicity was going to be terrible. It was going to louse up the big story that would put the NYPD on top and give Ray Wilson a glory sendoff and make Candace president some day.
The grin got to him. I was grinning at him the way I had at his brother back in the courtroom. Suddenly his body wrenched into spasms. He started ripping his clothes and screamed, “You killed me!” He glanced down and was ripping at his clothes again and screamed, “You killed me!”
“Not yet,” I told him. He tried to twitch his head away from the gun, but I held it on him. He had thrashed around so he was pointing away from me, blood spatters streaking the wall. I felt some of it on my face and grinned again.
His hands were trying to reach his shattered legs, the agony foaming at his mouth. He saw my grin again and choked out another scream, making it into words. “You killed my brother and you killed me!”
Then he found the small-caliber pistol his hands had really been groping for and brought it up in a sweeping, deadly arc, one finger tightening around the trigger.
There was one smashing roar of the .45. His blood went all over the place. Fresh specks of crimson were on the back of my hand. I stood up slowly and gave him a hard grin he couldn’t see any more.
I said, “Now I killed you, you shit.”
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I don’t know how the place got by the health inspectors, because it stunk. There were two bums down at one end of the counter taking their time about finishing a ten-cent bowl of soup; making the most out of the free crackers and catsup in front of them. Halfway down a drunk concentrated between his plate of eggs and hanging on to the stool to keep from falling off the world. Evidently he was down to his last buck, for all his pockets had been turned inside out to locate the lone bill that was putting a roof on his load.
Until I sat down and looked in the mirror behind the shelves of pie segments, I didn’t notice the fluff sitting off to one side at a table. She had red hair that didn’t come out of a bottle, and looked pretty enough from where I was sitting.
The counterman came up just then and asked, “What’ll it be?” He had a voice like a frog.
“Coffee. Black.”
The fluff noticed me then. She looked up, smiled, tucked her nail tools in a peeling plastic handbag and hipped it in my direction. When she sat down on the stool next to me she nodded toward the counterman and said, “Shorty’s got a heart of steel, mister. Won’t even trust me for a cup of joe until I get a job. Care to finance me to a few vitamins?”
I was too tired to argue the point. “Make it two, feller.” He grabbed another cup disgustedly and filled it, then set the two down on the counter, slopping half of it across the wash-worn linoleum top.
“Listen, Red,” he croaked, “quit using this joint fer an office. First thing I got the cops on my tail. That’s all I need.”
“Be good and toddle off, Shorty. All I want from the gentleman is a cup of coffee. He looks much too tired to play any games tonight.”
“Yeah, scram, Shorty,” I put in. He gave me a nasty look, but since I was as ugly as he was and twice as big, he shuffled off to keep count over the cracker bowl in front of the bums. Then I looked at the redhead.
She wasn’t very pretty after all. She had been once, but there are those things that happen under the skin and are reflected in the eyes and set of the mouth that take all the beauty out of a woman’s face. Yeah, at one time she must have been almost beautiful. That wasn’t too long ago, either. Her clothes were last year’s old look and a little too tight. They showed a lot of leg and a lot of chest; nice white flesh still firm and young, but her face was old with knowledge that never came out of books. I watched her from the corner of my eye when she lifted her cup of coffee. She had delicate hands, long fingers tipped with deep-toned nails perfectly kept. It was the way she held the cup that annoyed me. Instead of being a thick, cracked mug, she gave it a touch of elegance as she balanced it in front of her lips. I thought she was wearing a wedding band until she put the cup down. Then I saw that it was just a ring with a fleur-de-lis design of blue enamel and diamond chips that had turned sideways slightly.
Red turned suddenly and said, “Like me?”
I grinned. “Uh-huh. But, like you said, much too tired to make it matter.”
Her laugh was a tinkle of sound. “Rest easy, mister, I won’t give you a sales talk. There are only certain types interested in what I have to sell.”
“Amateur psychologist?”
“I have to be.”
“And I don’t look the type?”
Red’s eyes danced. “Big mugs like you never have to pay, mister. With you it’s the woman who pays.”
I pulled out a deck of Luckies and offered her one. When we lit up I said, “I wish all the babes I met thought that way.”
She blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling and looked at me as if she were going back a long way. “They do, mister. Maybe you don’t know it, but they do.”
I don’t know why I liked the kid. Maybe it was because she had eyes that were hard bu
t could still cry a little. Maybe it was because she handed me some words that were nice to listen to. Maybe it was because I was tired and my cave was a cold, empty place, while here I had a redhead to talk to. Whatever it was, I liked her and she knew it and smiled at me in a way I knew she hadn’t smiled in a long time. Like I was her friend.
“What’s your name, mister?”
“Mike. Mike Hammer. Native-born son of ye old city presently at loose ends and dead tired. Free, white, and over twenty-one. That do it?”
“Well, what do you know! Here I’ve been thinking all males were named Smith or Jones. What happened?”
“No wife to report to, kid,” I grinned. “That tag’s my own. What do they call you besides Red?”
“They don’t.”
I saw her eyes crinkle a little as she sipped the last of her coffee. Shorty was casting nervous glances between us and the steamed-up window, probably hoping a cop wouldn’t pass by and nail a hustler trying to make time. He gave me a pain.
“Want more coffee?”
She shook her head. “No, that did it fine. If Shorty wasn’t so touchy about extending a little credit I wouldn’t have to be smiling for my midnight snacks.”
From the way I turned and looked at her, Red knew there was more than casual curiosity back of the remark when I asked, “I didn’t think your line of business could ever be that slow.”
For a brief second she glared into the mirror. “Is isn’t.” She was plenty mad about something.
I threw a buck on the counter and Shorty rang it up, then passed the change back. When I pocketed it I said to Red, “Did you ever stop to think that you’re a pretty nice girl? I’ve met all kinds, but I think you could get along pretty well ... any way you tried.”
Her smile even brought out a dimple that had been buried a long while ago. She kissed her finger, then touched the finger to my cheek. “I like that Mike. There are times when I think I’ve lost the power to like anyone, but I like you.”
The Killing Man Page 21
