Kiss Me Once

by Thomas Gifford

  “I hope it’s over.”

  “Oh, my poor Lew, it’s not over. Not enough bodies for any self-respecting opera…”

  “If there’s a God, you’re wrong. You know that.”

  “You mustn’t forget Max because Max won’t forget me. I told you, Max and I both can’t get out of this alive. It’s a given, darling. I’ve known that all along … that’s why I went to Harry Madrid that time. Even then I knew one of us had to die … But don’t think about it now, just go to sleep and I’ll watch over you …”

  He was tired, slipping away. But something clicked. “You went to Harry Madrid which time? When? Why did you go to Harry Madrid?”

  “Back in ’42. The mess that night in Jersey, when we saw the fireworks. I thought Max was coming, I knew he was meeting a bunch of gangsters … I … went to Harry Madrid. Made a deal with him. I told him about the meeting, I asked him to take Max for me, and he knew what I meant. I didn’t care if he arrested him for whatever he was doing with Rocco, I didn’t know—and if he killed him, well, I’d be free completely … Harry was going to kill him … and then Max didn’t go …”

  “Jesus. It was you … you set Max up to get killed—and the poor bastard loved you, Cindy!”

  “So he’s a poor bastard now, dear old Max! Lew, I was a prisoner. There was no other way out. And Harry Madrid was the right man. He’d have done it.”

  “You and Harry Madrid. He said he had somebody close to Max. Terry thought it was Bennie … Max thought maybe Terry had betrayed him. That’s how deep it bit.”

  “And now it’s all gone wrong again. Max is never going to die, Lew. He’ll see me in my grave, all of us, Lew, unless, unless …”

  “But you don’t know about Max,” he said. “You’re gonna be all right. Max—he’s already dying …”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Max has a malignant brain tumor. His time’s just about up. Don’t ask me how I know, I just know.”

  The silence went on for a long time. All he could hear was the storm.

  “Did you know that?” he said.

  “No, I didn’t.” She seemed to be speaking from far away. “How can you be sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “That’s bad. If he’s running out of time, don’t you see? He’s got to get me right. He’ll do anything to get me. Oh, hold me, Lew.”

  She was trembling uncontrollably. He gathered her to him. “I love you, Cindy. None of it makes any difference … it should but it doesn’t. I love you.”

  She clung to him for dear life and later said, “Does anyone know where we are? Exactly?”

  “Terry,” he said.

  He woke later, sensing that she was no longer beside him. He was stiff and ached from head to toe. The wind was rattling the windows again. The fire had burned low. He coughed, called her name.

  “I’m here.” Her voice came from the shadows.

  “Come back to me.”

  “I heard something outside.” She sounded about six years old. “I was frightened.” His eyes adjusted, brought her into focus. She was standing beside a window. “I went to look. I thought I heard voices on the wind.”

  “Impossible,” Cassidy said.

  “No, it’s not impossible, Lew, my love. I saw them. They’re out there. They’re here. They’ve come for me …”

  Chapter Seventeen

  NO MATTER HOW DARK THE night, there is light in it somewhere. And when there is snow in the night, that light is reflected in each flake. Standing beside her, he saw the shapes of the men, the shadows they cast, darker than the night, like ghosts or premonitions, flickering. They stood under a huge, leafless oak tree in the front yard. The tree’s shadow clawed its way toward the house. They paced in and out of the shadows. Max had his hands thrust deep in his overcoat pockets. They had had to pass Cassidy’s car, rammed down into the snowbank. Max’s big Chrysler would have made short work of the snow, the chains grinding toward the house. And now … Cassidy took a deep breath. It would all be over soon.

  He watched them for several minutes while Cindy got into slacks and a heavy sweater, which belonged to her unsuspecting hostess. She brought him his clothes. They’d dried out before the fire.

  Bennie was out there, kicking snow as he walked. He was wearing a bowler hat and it made the top of his head look like a planetarium rising from the crown of a mountain. Then there was Bob Erickson, who looked less like a banker in the middle of the night with a tommy gun cradled through one arm. There was a fourth man, tall and thin, a lanky black shadow Cassidy took to be a longtime favorite iceman of Max’s, Cookie Candioli, strictly muscle with a sense of humor you could have found with Madame Curie’s microscope. Of course, he hadn’t come to laugh.

  Cassidy went to the gun rack hung on the knotty-pine wall and took down two Purdeys, both with chased stock and metalwork. Bobby Vanderlipp had had them made in London after the Great War. Bobby was rich and therefore somebody was going to die at the business end of the best goddamn shotgun money could buy. The first was a side-by-side double barrel, the other an over-and-under. They were probably worth five grand apiece. In the top drawer of the chest beneath the rack he found neatly stacked boxes of shells. He loaded both shotguns and dropped some extra shells into his shirt pocket. He handed the side-by-side to Cindy.

  “Can you use this if you have to?”

  She hefted the gun, which looked absurdly large and brutal in her delicate hands.

  “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “Stiff upper lip, there’ll always be an England. Greer Garson. I can do whatever needs doing … to get out of here alive. Damn, it is heavy, isn’t it?”

  He went back to the window. They were coming across the deep snow, sinking in almost to their knees, closing in on the house. They stopped before the porch and conferred among themselves. They weren’t worried. They had two sitting ducks in a country house, unwarned and helpless.

  “How could they find out?” she whispered.

  “Terry’s the only one … They must have torn it out of him with pliers. You can bet he’s dead, Cindy. Old Terry’s dead.”

  Adiós, amigo …

  “Max wouldn’t, never. Not Terry. He thought of Terry as a son.”

  “That’s the old Max,” he reminded her. “Not this character. I’d say they tortured him until he talked. That would have been the only way to stop the pain. Tell them so they’d end it with a bullet … Max’d end it with a bullet if he loved Terry so much.”

  “I want to kill them,” she whispered tonelessly.

  He smiled at her in the darkness. “Speaking for myself, I’m sure as hell gonna enjoy it.”

  There were footsteps—only one man—on the porch. The snow squeaked as he walked slowly toward the door. There was no point in taking chances even if your prey was helpless, asleep.

  “Cindy. Go to the light switch and flick it on just for an instant once he comes into the room. He’ll be blinded, frozen in his tracks. I’ll take him out.”

  She navigated in the darkness while he knelt and rested the bottom barrel on the back of the couch, pointed directly at the doorway. He saw his watch glowing in the dark. It was four o’clock.

  The first guy through the door was going to pay one hell of a price.

  The footsteps stopped.

  The storm door was pulled back, wheezing on its hinges. The doorknob began to turn, rattling ever so slightly. The door was easing open, inch by inch by inch …

  Cassidy heard the footfalls in the darkness, one, two steps into the room, the shape black on black, too hard for him to center the barrels on. Snow blew noisily along the porch.

  Now, now, he willed her to do it …

  She hit the wall switch and all the lamps in the room came on in a blinding flash.

  The man stopped dead, threw an arm across his eyes.

  Just as suddenly the darkness engulfed them again, like the hood dropped over a parrot’s cage, but the afterimage of the man hung suspended before him as he adjusted
the barrels.

  The man with the long pistol in one hand, wearing a black-and-red-plaid parka, a matching hat with the earflaps turned down …

  Cassidy centered on the memory of the man imprinted on his eyeballs and squeezed off both barrels and took the kick.

  The shell casings ejected onto the floor and he slid two more into the chambers while the man was being sprayed back out into the night. Wood splintered, glass exploded, and he heard the corpse smack heavily onto the porch, slide across the slippery snow dusting, and crash off the edge, through the thick crust. The door had been blown off the hinges. It banged noisily, clattered off a wooden pillar, and pitched off into the snow. A blast of cold air poured in and the sound of the blast echoed and slammed off the walls and then after a while it was silent again.

  She came and knelt beside him.

  “They’ve got to come inside to get us,” he said. “It’ll be a war. We’ve got to dig in.”

  They pushed the couch over to the stairwell and got in behind it, hunkered down in the nook below the stairs. They sat with their backs to the wall and she shivered against him. He kissed her hair and wondered if he’d ever see her face again.

  He looked around the room, trying to get a clear picture of where they could get in. There was the front door from the porch. Four windows in the room they were in, God only knew how many other windows on the ground floor. They’d have to break them, however, which was noisy. They were bound to be frozen shut even if not locked. Also, the back door into the kitchen. They were going to have to make noise and the misfortunes of Candioli had impressed upon them that they were in a fight. The night’s prey wasn’t going to die quietly in bed.

  “Since we can pick them off, they’ll create a diversion while they come in somewhere else.” He felt around for the blackthorn stick, picked up the Purdey. He got up and hit his head on the bottom of the staircase and pulled the couch closer. The wind from the blasted doorway scoured the room, left it cold and trembling.

  The tommy gun began its unmistakable burping and suddenly there was flying glass everywhere. Bullets chewing at the wall, slivers of wood spraying like tiny swords, splintering the knotty pine. He could see the flash of muzzle fire, like live electricity darting out, in the darkness beyond the holes in the wall where the windows had been. Slugs were thudding into the couch. He pulled her down on the floor. Slugs were ricocheting off the stone fireplace. It sounded like a Panzer division rolling through the house. They hunkered down, trying to pull the world over their heads. The gun kept chattering. Cindy was grabbing at his hand, her fingers ice cold, frantic. The blasting just kept on. The Fighting 69th could have marched past them up the stairs without fear of detection but in fact nobody charged through the doorway where Cookie had made his final exit.

  Suddenly silence, nearly as oppressive as the noise, broke out. He thought he’d heard some extra creaking and glass breaking upstairs and maybe he had, but now it was quiet. An occasional bit of plaster or wood made a noise as it dropped to the floor, an afterthought.

  They waited and nothing happened.

  The chattering of the tommy gun came again, spraying the room from the doorway. He tried to get himself in front of Cindy and caught his bad leg on the sharp corner of something. He went sprawling into the darkness from behind the couch, the tongues of flame skittering across the room as the gun kept firing. As he hit the floor, bits of broken glass ground into his palms.

  He felt the rush and thump of heavy shoes brushing past. He’d lost the shotgun, lost the sense of where he was in the room. It was like floating in an ocean.

  He couldn’t find Cindy but he heard the heavy snorting of the man who’d just come in, rushed past him. Bennie wouldn’t leave Max for anything, so it had to be Bob Erickson, who had definitely laid to rest all ideas that he was a banker. Cassidy lay still, trying to hold his breath.

  Cindy sneezed from all the plaster dust in the air. She was behind him. He heard Erickson shift his weight as he turned. He pulled the trigger and stitched the wall with another long burst.

  Cindy yelled something and hit the floor. Cassidy made a dive across an armchair, reaching for those jabbing orange and red tongues where the gun had gone off.

  Cindy was yelling a blue streak, throwing ashtrays and vases and picture frames. Everything was breaking and smashing in the dark while he came down hard on Erickson. He went over bellowing with surprise.

  A good deal of the air in his lungs whooshed out past Cassidy’s ear. He smelled Erickson’s Yardley. He rammed his head into the middle of the Yardley smell. Erickson grunted hard and fell back against something hard and howled with his finger jammed in the trigger guard. Half the ceiling fell down, plaster everywhere. The tommy gun was jumping between them. Cassidy stuck a finger in his eye. Erickson tried to twist the gun away but his arm didn’t want to bend that way. Another burst of fire went bouncing around the room and then, whack, it jammed.

  He was a resourceful son of a bitch. He turned the gun into a club and was swinging at Cassidy like Mel Ott going for the short fence at the Polo Grounds. The butt bounced off his forehead a couple of times, long foul balls, two strikes, and he rolled away with plaster chips in his eyes, fumbling with the blackthorn stick, reaching for the little button. He found it and felt the heavy knob pop into his palm, working the bits of glass deeper into the flesh. Erickson was struggling trying to get some leverage to have another swing but Cassidy knew where he was, had his sleeve in his left hand, and had a pretty fair idea of where the center of his body might be.

  He drove the sword home, felt it enter something solid. Erickson sucked in a terrible gasp compounded of surprise and pain and Cassidy yanked it out as he grabbed the blade, closed his hand around it. Cassidy pushed hard again and Erickson grunted. Cassidy tried to get it back out but the dying man toppled sideways and the sword went with him, twisting out of Cassidy’s hand.

  Bob Erickson of Saint Louis was making gagging noises and his heels beat a sad little tattoo on the floor as he fought a lonely, losing battle with the blade hacksawing its way through the contents of his chest. The flapping lessened and his breathing got wetter and sibilant as he blew bubbles, his life expanding like a membrane and bursting on his lips, and then Bob Erickson was still.

  Cassidy lay there trying to get his breath back, trying to wipe the plaster out of his eyes, trying to figure out which end was up. He couldn’t get the sword back. Erickson had somehow rolled over on it, like a man ritualistically embracing his killer. He curled around it, then flattened out on top of it. Cassidy felt around and found the point. It had gone all the way through him and was sticking up out of his back like a steeple.

  The tommy gun was useless. The shotgun he’d used on Candioli was somewhere in the wreckage, among the broken glass and flaked chunks of walls and ceiling and the smears of blood and the chewed-up furniture. Where the hell was Cindy?

  He straightened his bad leg and began to realize just how much it hurt. He pulled himself up to his knees, fighting the illusion that they were somehow out of the woods. He felt like he’d bagged his limit, two bad guys per night. But he was only half the way home.

  He realized Cindy wouldn’t know which one of them was alive. He had to say something. He couldn’t have her using that Purdey on him by mistake. She’d never forgive herself.

  “Cindy?” he whispered. “It’s me. I’m okay.”

  Something moved. He crawled toward it, smelled her perfume. She was shaking. He felt the tremors across the space between them. “Are you okay?”

  “Why not? I haven’t done anything yet but scream like a dumb girl.” She was trying to be tough.

  He found the gun he’d dropped and picked it up.

  “They’re upstairs,” she said. “I heard them clumping around like a comedy team. There must have been an outside stairway … I don’t know. What’ll we do?”

  “Beats hell outa me. I’m not in much of a mood to go get them. They’ll have to come downstairs to get us. Let’s just wait. We g
ot ’em right where we want ’em.”

  They sat down in the rubble.

  The house made so much noise as it withstood the wind and blowing snow, it was impossible to tell what was going on above. An hour must have passed, maybe more, and his heart went back to beating like God had intended. He tried to figure it out. Bennie and Max were upstairs. They’d outfoxed themselves. Now they were trapped. They’d have to make a move.

  As usual he hadn’t considered all the possibilities.

  Cindy was leaning against the couch which was losing its stuffing, dribbling it out through the bullet holes. They kept calm by touching hands. He kissed her and held her head to his chest and told her it would be all right. Not for Terry, not for everyone … Terry. He shook the thought out of his mind and faced the stairway and the balcony. The darkness of night began to fade almost imperceptibly and the grayness tinged with pink began to seep across the void. Snow blew past the window holes. The room had gotten colder with the door gone and the windows blown out. The fire was dead.

  “Drop the hardware, Lew.”

  The voice came from behind him. He hadn’t thought of everything. He never did.

  Bennie the Brute was standing where there had once been a door. Now, as he swiveled to look, Cassidy saw his huge shape in the long black overcoat with the bowler on top. The polka-dot bow tie peeked out from behind the scarf. He was holding a Luger.

  “Oh, shit, Bennie,” he said.

  “Ain’t it the nuts, Lew?” A ghost of a smile played across his face. It was the same face Cassidy had seen out there on the corner selling funny toys to the kids. A big sweet psychopath and you could get Ed Murrow on the plate in his head, “I don’t like this any more than you do, Lew. Let’s face it. It’s an imp-p-perfect world.”

  In the old days when Bennie was at his best he might have had some kind of chance. It would have been closer, anyway.

  As it was, he was talking to Cassidy with this kind of sad, nostalgic look on his face, when Cindy turned toward him and fired the Purdey.