Double in Trouble (The Shell Scott Mysteries)

by Richard S. Prather

  I suppose I was still chuckling sheepishly when lights splashed my rear-view mirror. The lights loomed bright and quickly got much closer. I pulled over a little. Alexis’ cab was about two blocks ahead, nearly to Olympic.

  The lights behind me left the mirror as the car swung out, and I heard the whine of its engine. And then I started getting it. My hands tightened on the wheel—and there was the high harsh screech of tires skidding on the street. The car loomed on my left, swerving slightly. Movement was a blur in the window nearest me. I ducked, jerking the steering wheel, slapping my foot toward the brake pedal. Two shots cracked in the night, hard flat blasts; flame flared in the other car’s window.

  I threw myself sideways, hanging onto the wheel with my left hand, right hand slapping my chest. The gun wasn’t there. Usually I carry it when I’m away from the apartment, but this time I’d left without it. My foot was jamming the brake pedal and the Cad was slowing, swerving. I straightened up, gripped the wheel with both hands and put my foot on the gas pedal again. If that car was still close, I meant to ram it. But they were gunning ahead, not waiting around. In the glare of my headlights I got a quick look at the car. Its right-front fender was crumpled. But it was a gray Buick sedan. I couldn’t see the license plate, but I knew there’d be mud on it.

  Not until then did I notice the Cad was pulling, angling toward the left side of the street. There was a grinding thumping noise. They’d shot out a front tire with those two shots. I pulled on the wheel, stopped at the right side of the street next to the curb.

  Far ahead, the cab carrying Alexis turned left into Olympic Boulevard, followed seconds later by the Buick. Then they were gone. I swore, got out and looked at the flat.

  Looking at it didn’t help. I opened the luggage compartment, hauled out the spare. I only swore a little more while changing the tire.

  After putting in a call to the police complaint board and reporting what had happened, I drove to Dr. Frost’s home on Harvard Boulevard. The house was obviously Dr. Frost’s—letters, his books on the wall, a framed portrait told me that. Alexis had said he was fifty-one years old, over six feet tall, and quite heavy; the face in the portrait was heavy, almost handsome, with straggly eyebrows and bushy gray hair. The place had been thoroughly searched, cushions out of place, drawers open. Alexis had told me her father owned a black Volkswagen. It wasn’t around, and the garage was empty, its doors open.

  I was beginning to feel more and more uncomfortable without my gun, so shortly after four a.m. I drove back to the Spartan. I had strapped on the gun harness, complete with snub-nosed .38 Colt Special, and was putting on my coat when the apartment phone rang. Alexis, maybe? I thought. I reached it, picked it up and said hello.

  “Shell?” It was a man’s voice.

  “Yeah.”

  “Braun. I...”

  “Braun? That’s funny, I was just thinking about—” I cut it off. He’d sounded strange. It hadn’t even resembled Braun’s brisk, pleasant voice.

  “I’m ... hurt, Shell. Finley gas station. Mile or two ... up Spring Can—Canyon.” He groaned.

  “What’s the matter? Braun, what happened?”

  “Shot. I—” Noise clattered in my ear. It sounded as if he’d dropped the receiver. I heard a soft thump, scraping noises, then nothing.

  I didn’t even hang up the phone. I dropped it and ran to the door, slammed through it. I leaped down the stairs, stumbled and almost fell. When I reached my Cad I was cold all over, and sweat was slick on my forehead. I went straight up Rossmore to Sunset and across it moments after the light turned red.

  Spring Canyon Road runs from Hollywood Boulevard up toward the Hollywood hills, winding, a quiet residential district for about half a mile, then only a few houses scattered in open brush-filled land. I slid into Spring Canyon and pushed the gas pedal to the floorboards.

  He’d sounded hurt, hurt bad. And he must have been in a bad way or he wouldn’t even have called me. He was like that. He was like a lot of things, all of them good in my book. Not tall, but strong and husky, red-haired, with a kind of pleasant homeliness and a warmth that flowed out of him and wrapped itself around you. I’d been out on the town with him, had dinners at his home with Braun and his sweet-faced younger sister, Kelly. Six years now, we’d known each other. And during all those years he’d been a member of the L.A. local of the Truckers.

  That thought came into my mind suddenly and stuck there. Stuck there with the thought of Alexis, the case I’d just been hired for. Why tonight? Why would Braun call me tonight of all nights?

  Then, off on the road on my right, I saw movement. Something moving in the glare of my headlights. A square building, a small gas station, white in my headlights beam, and silhouetted against it the figure of a man. Bent, twisted; it looked like a sagging misshapen scarecrow. I hit the brakes, slid to a stop at the side of the road, went out of the car at a run.

  The ground was lumpy, uneven, and as I neared the man I stumbled, staggered and caught myself. I came to a sudden stop a few yards from him, stayed motionless for seconds, looking at him.

  It wasn’t Braun. It couldn’t be Braun. The face was lumpy, swollen, torn. The face was red and white ugliness, not a face at all. He moved toward me slowly, his body bent forward, twisted. He walked like a man moving through thick mud, awkwardly and stiffly like a man trying out artificial legs, like something in a nightmare. In the beam of my headlights his mouth hung slack, his eyes stared.

  Then I snapped out of it, jumped toward him. When I reached for him he fell suddenly, as if a cord holding him up had been cut. He brushed my fingers and I grabbed his arms convulsively, grabbed them tight and hung on. He went down, pulling me to one knee, but I held him, tried to pull him toward me.

  His head flopped back loosely as if his neck were flesh emptied of bone and muscle, almost as though it were a hollow tube of skin without strength or life in it. But he was still alive. I put one hand behind his head, lifted it And he stared at me, his eyes aware. It was Braun, all right, Braun Thorn. What was left of him.

  His mouth was open. He was straining to speak. Sound sighed from his throat—one clear word, ending in a whisper. Blood bubbled from his mouth. Still he tried to speak, strained to force out the words. He tried to smile. He actually tried to smile. He died like that.

  He just stopped straining. His features smoothed a little. Only a little. And then he was dead. He sagged against my hands. I held his arms tight. I didn’t want to let him go. I didn’t want to let him down onto the earth. While I held him, it almost seemed in a crazy way that maybe he was still alive; but if I let him crumple on the ground he’d be gone. I held him until my arms started to ache. Then I put him down.

  His face was bruised and cut, puffed, his lips mashed and split. There were cuts over both eyes. Two teeth had been broken, blood was on his face and mouth. One of his arms was broken, white bone sticking through the flesh like a snapped white stick. Something had torn through his neck. A bullet, probably. The flesh there lay peeled open in an ugly furrow, dark red in the dim light. A long strip of tape was sticking to one of his wrists.

  I turned him over. He’d been shot in the back. There, and also through the neck. Powder burns peppered the neck wound. I stood up. Ten yards away a car raced past on Spring Canyon Road, headlights brushing us. I walked to the small gas station. A window in one of the metal walls was broken. Inside, bits of shattered glass lay on the top of a scarred desk. On the desk was a phone’s base, cord leading from it through the window and to the receiver dangling outside. There was blood on the receiver.

  At my feet the ground was furrowed, as if fingers had pulled at it. Braun lay, like a lump of earth on the ground, a few yards away. Between his body and where I stood there were other, deeper furrows in the ground, where he had fallen or crawled over it.

  I looked at him, thought about him. About him—and, for a moment, about Kelly Thorn. Braun’s sister. Sweet, lovely Kelly. Somebody would have to tell her. I hoped I wouldn’t have to be
the one. I thought about Alexis Frost, and her missing father, Dr. Gideon Frost. And I thought about that one clear word Braun had forced from his torn mouth.

  The word had been, “Frost.”

  Then I picked up the phone, Braun’s blood sticky against my palm, and put in the call to Homicide.

  THE NAME’S CHESTER DRUM

  Washington, D.C., 7:00 P.M., Monday, December 14

  I’m a private eye, operating out of Washington and points east, and I will pack a suitcase at the drop of a hat or a client’s retainer or a blonde’s smile. I’ve chased international gangsters across the sunny piazzas of Rome and through the Iron Curtain to Berlin, tangled with Moslem fanatics—and belly-dancers—in Arabia and professional assassins in India, battled revolutionists south of the border and gunmen on skis in Canada’s mountains.

  But I never knew what trouble was really like until I crossed the path of that West Coast shamus who calls himself Shell Scott.

  When I finally bumped heads with the man with the stand-up white hair and devilish grin, fifty-seven different varieties of hell broke loose.

  It all started at Washington National Airport....

  When dusk closes in on Washington National Airport, they turn on the blinkers along the sandspit of land on the Potomac known as Gravelly Point. From the air the blinkers look like two red streaks shooting towards the runways. From the ground they zip like tracer bullets lighting up the gloom in a war between man and nature.

  I had watched them from the air and now I drove past them on the big super-highway that bisects Gravelly Point. Off on a two day wrap-up of a case in Richmond, I’d left my car parked at the airport.

  When I’d driven half the distance from the airport to the bridge that crosses the Potomac to the Tidal Basin, the taxi passed me. It was going very fast—doing at least seventy, I thought.

  A second car came roaring up even faster. I gave him all the room he wanted in the fast lane, and he passed in a rush that whiplashed wind against my car.

  Then I heard the double protest of abused brake linings and scorched tire rubber up ahead. The car that had passed me, swerving and braking suddenly, had forced the taxi onto the shoulder of the road. My headlights caught two figures moving from the car to the taxi. Maybe I would have passed them anyway, but just then a Greyhound bus pulled out behind me to do some passing of its own.

  I braked, and the two figures from the car dragged someone out of the taxi. The quick glimpse I had made me think it was a woman. The car door opened, they all got in front, the door slammed. By then I had pulled to a stop. The car lurched, sped away. The taxi remained on the shoulder of the road.

  Leaning across the seat, I rolled down the right-hand front window and called, “What’s the trouble there?”

  The taxi driver calmly lit a cigarette and said, “Did I do okay, mac?”

  “Did you what?”

  “I said, did I do okay?” He sounded perplexed. “What’s the beef, mister? You got a beef, spill it. I done just like they told me. So when do I get the do-re-mi?”

  Maybe it wasn’t my night for deep thinking. All I could come up with was a snatch that the taxi driver had been clued in on it in advance.

  I stepped on the gas, and the car shot forward. Call it curiosity, call it habit or compulsion or anything you want. Other people’s troubles are my line of work. I was doing sixty when I passed the Greyhound bus a second time, and close to eighty before I spotted the other car and pulled even with it under the railroad bridge that carries the Atlantic Coast Line trains across the Potomac into Washington.

  A freight roared above us, shattering the night with sound. When my rear fender was in line with their front fender, I gave the wheel a turn in their direction. The noise their burning rubber made in the echo chamber under the bridge was like a scream of terror.

  A hundred yards beyond the bridge abutment I rode them off the highway. Behind us the freight train on the bridge rattled the dark sky.

  I thumbed open the glove compartment, took out my .357 Magnum and stepped out of my car into the night. “Come out of there with your hands up,” I said.

  A few seconds of waiting, then a voice answered me. “Hey, is this a stickup or something?”

  “Or something,” I said. “Get out of there and in front of your headlights where I can see you. You’re covered.”

  I heard footsteps on the gravel of the road shoulder. Their car door slammed.

  “In front of the headlights. Hands high. Get going.”

  “This a stickup?” the same voice asked me. It was a whining voice and it sounded scared, so I began to wonder if maybe I hadn’t made one hell of a stupid mistake.

  They were standing obediently in front of their headlights, a small man in a tweed topcoat, a big man in a trench-coat. Both of them had their hands raised. The small man was hatless and wore glasses. The big man—and he was very big—wore a snapbrim hat with the brim turned down low over his eyes.

  “Are you all right, miss?” I called.

  At first there was no answer, then just a word in the night. “Yes.”

  “You can get in my car now.”

  Her answer surprised me. “Who are you? Did Mike send you? No one was waiting for me at the airport.”

  “I never heard of Mike.”

  “Then who are you?”

  “What difference does it make? Get in my car.”

  “All right.”

  Just as the car door opened, the Greyhound bus came out from under the railroad bridge in a rushing surge of sound. It startled me for a moment. Not long, but long enough for the big guy in the trench-coat to move swiftly out of the glare of the headlights and take a swing at me. I did a bullfighter step to one side. His fist ended its short, savage flight against the fender of my car. Surprise and pain drew a yipping shout, almost like a dog barking, from his lips.

  “What the goddam hell’s the matter with you?” he whispered hoarsely. “I would of pulled my punch. I would of made it look good. You nuts or something? You want me to break my goddam hand? That good it don’t hafta look.”

  Add what he had said to the taxi driver’s demand for money and you could come up with only one thing—not a snatch, but a phony snatch. For the girl’s benefit? Then was someone supposed to rescue her and earn her undying gratitude? If so, he was running behind schedule. The highway was deserted.

  “How good does it have to look?” I asked the big man in the trench-coat.

  “Who are you. Jack?” he asked right back at me, suddenly becoming suspicious. “I ain’t seen you around before. Where’s Mr. Holt? I thought Mr. Holt—”

  I grabbed the collar of his trench-coat and shoved him away from me, because the one with glasses had come up with a gun. Trench-coat stumbled back against him and the gun went off, stabbing flame at the night.

  “Drop it or I’ll shoot,” I said.

  The big guy barked, “Drop it, Glasses.”

  Reluctantly Glasses dropped his gun. I took two steps toward him and kicked it out of his reach. The girl came up and stood alongside me.

  “It was a phony setup from the word go,” I told her. “A man named Holt was supposed to come on his white charger and rescue the maiden in distress. Meaning you.”

  Her laughter was on the thin edge of hysteria as she said, “You have an amusing way of putting it.”

  “Do we all wait for Mr. Holt’s tardy arrival,” I asked her, “or do we go for a ride to the State Police barracks?”

  For the second time she surprised me. “Neither.”

  Glasses laughed phlegmily.

  “Neither?” I said. “Why?”

  “I can’t, that’s all. I’m not supposed to be in Washington.”

  The big guy was nursing his hurt hand. I gave him a quick, hard frisk. He wasn’t heeled.

  “Open the hood,” I said.

  He blinked at me.

  “Open the hood. Move.”

  He unfastened and opened the hood of their car.

  “You know wher
e to find the distributor cap?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Yank it off.”

  “We’ll get you, you sonofabitch.”

  “Get me in the morning. Yank off that cap now.”

  He reached under the hood, grunting. The distributor cap came loose, trailing wires. I took it in my left hand.

  “Get over near your friend. Now sit down, both of you. Back to back.”

  They sat down on the gravel of the road shoulder. “Stay that way till we start rolling.”

  “We’re gonna get you. Jack,” the big guy said. Glasses didn’t say anything.

  “Give our regards to Mr. Holt,” I told them. The girl laughed again.

  We both got into my car. She was a tall girl, wearing a white trench-coat with big round leather buttons and white crew-hat. What I could see of her hair was almost platinum blonde. The coat was belted tight at her trim waist, emphasizing the rounded thrust of her breasts against the lapels.

  “Who’s Holt?” I asked her.

  “I’m sorry, I’d rather not say.”

  “You’re sure about the cops?”

  “Yes, I’m quite sure. Please, just drive me into Washington. Any place downtown will do nicely.”

  “Okay.” I dropped the distributor cap on the floor and started driving.

  Twenty minutes later we sat in a booth in a diner on D Street just on the other side of the Potomac bridge.

  “There wasn’t any reason to stop here,” the girl said. “They gave me a little scare, but I’m all right now.”

  A waitress shuffled over. “What’ll it be?”

  “Coffee, I guess,” the girl said. I told the waitress to make it two.

  “What would this Holt have conned you into if he popped up instead of me?” I asked the girl.

  Silence.

  “Look,” I said, trying another tack. “You’re frustrating my professional instincts. I’m a private detective.”