Double in Trouble (The Shell Scott Mysteries)

by Richard S. Prather

  Every time I turned around I learned a little more about Drum. It was getting so hearing his name was like getting sapped on the ear. And this new bit was a disturbing one. No matter what else that guy might be, he was a hell of a good detective. I knew I hadn’t been tailed here Tuesday. It wasn’t likely that anybody looking for Kelly would have accidentally spotted her here, either. And as far as I knew, the only people anxious to get to her were Mink and Candy. And Ragen, of course. But Drum? Yet he’d found her. How?

  Out of nowhere it came. The napkin from the bar here, with the print of Kelly’s lips on it and the name: Garden of Allah. I remembered putting it in my pocket. But I’d left that jacket in my apartment, when I’d changed clothes there after getting out of the hospital. Drum couldn’t have found the napkin—unless he’d been in my apartment.

  I was thinking about that shambles when Kelly said, “Shell, what’s the matter?”

  “What did Drum say he wanted? He give you any trouble?”

  “No, he was rather nice. Said he was looking for you.”

  “I’ll bet he was.”

  “He also told me he was working for the Hartsell Committee.”

  “Yeah, I got that from him, too. Hartsell and Ragen, maybe. I don’t know. I’m surprised he didn’t say he was a special investigator for the President.”

  That pulse of worry was banging in me again now, slamming at my brain. I spotted the phone, put a call through to Patrick Donovan, the guy I’d asked for help in locating Ragen.

  When he answered I said, “Shell here, Pat.”

  “Where in hell you been? I tried to call you.”

  “Out of town. Anything break?”

  “Not yet. But it’s all set. There’s nearly a hundred of the union boys peeling their eyes all over town—and out of town—wherever they drive their trucks. No news of Ragen and his crumbs so far. They’re keeping out of sight.”

  “With that many guys looking, they can’t hide forever.”

  “I expected a break before now, though. We’ll keep on it. I’m staying here at the house so the boys can phone in to one location. They’ve all got my number.”

  It sounded good. I asked, “Hear anything about a guy named Drum? He’s been in town the last day or two.”

  “No. Who’s he?”

  “Private detective from D.C. He’s up to something, but I don’t know what it is. Remember the name.”

  “Right, Shell.”

  “I’m heading out of town for a few hours, Pat. I’ll call you a time or two while I’m gone, so stay with it.”

  “You think I was going somewhere?”

  We said good-by and I hung up, called Tootsie’s home phone number. She sounded glad to hear from me, and I asked her, “Anything new here, Tootsie?”

  “Haven’t seen Ragen, or Mink and Candy. But they must still be around town somewhere. For one thing, the men are still looking for Rex Marker, but there’s no news of him so far as I know. For another, Ragen moved his plane this afternoon.”

  Ragen owned a private plane—purchased with union funds—and ordinarily kept it at a private field near Pasadena. I said, “You know where it is now, Tootsie?”

  “No. I wouldn’t even have known he’d moved it except a call came in from the airport for Ragen, saying the plane was gassed and ready. I took the call. Apparently Ragen was supposed to have called them about it and hadn’t yet. They wanted to let him know. I was curious and phoned back a few minutes ago. Ragen had been there, taken the plane somewhere else.”

  “Gassed and ready, huh? Ready for what?”

  “I don’t know that. But with everything else that’s been happening, it sounds a little odd.”

  “Sounds like trouble. That guy Drum we were talking about. You see or hear from him in the last day or two?”

  “No. Never have.”

  “Well, thanks, Tootsie. I’ve got to take off.”

  “So long, Shell. You ... you gladiator.”

  I laughed and hung up. But that made me think of Chet Drum again. Prince Chet. Valiant Drum. Some meeting it was going to be if I ever caught up with the man. Him and a gladiator. If nothing else, it would be bloody.

  Kelly said to me, “Is everything all right, Shell?”

  “I wouldn’t say that, honey. But numerous things are on the fire. Something’s bound to boil before long.”

  Before leaving, I arranged for Kelly to occupy a different villa—uncontaminated by Drum—unregistered, and told her to stay inside it, with Candy’s gun. She kissed me good-by, and told me to take care.

  Alexis and I headed for Blue Jay.

  CHESTER DRUM STRINGS ALONG THE BRASS

  Los Angeles, 8:32 P.M., Friday, December 18

  As he stood in the motel doorway, Rex Marker’s eyes looked mean and confused. His automatic was six inches from my chest. The Magnum was six inches from his. I shut the door with my left elbow. Behind him, the woman stood cowering.

  “I’ll kill you,” he said. “I swear to God.”

  “Ragen didn’t send me. I’m from the Hartsell Committee.”

  He didn’t hear the words. His mind was cornered by fear and pinned down by an idea: Ragen had found him, and I was Ragen’s goon. The knuckle of his index finger was white inside the trigger guard.

  “Drop the gun and beat it,” he said. Sweat stood out like blisters on his high forehead. “I never killed a man, so don’t make me do it now.”

  “You put a good man in the hospital,” I said. “Dan Moody.”

  He blinked. “What? What you say? I didn’t touch Moody. Roe Mink and Candy, they ... who the hell are you?”

  “I’m with the Hartsell Committee,” I said slowly and clearly. “Put the gun away and we’ll talk, Marker.”

  The woman cried out, “I saw him with the cops this afternoon, honey. He ain’t from Ragen!”

  Marker pawed at the sweat on his forehead with a wide, blunt hand. “I’m a dead man if I make any deals,” he said. “Don’t you think I know that now?”

  “If you make a deal with the Committee, we can put you in protective custody.”

  “Protection?” He sneered. “Who the hell protected Moody, tell me that. I got a fast car. They’ll never take me alive.”

  “What makes you think they care if they take you alive or not? You’re expendable, Marker. They tried to get you once.”

  “Leave me alone. I got nothing to say.”

  “Where’s Gideon Frost?”

  “Rex,” the woman urged. “Please, Rex. I’d kill myself if anything happened to you.”

  His fear-widened eyes darted to her for a moment. I reached out for his gun-hand, deflecting the muzzle of his automatic upwards as it went off. Powder seared my cheek, and Marker’s eyes blinked blindly shut. He clawed at my jacket, ripping the lapel. The woman screamed. Then Marker hit me in the belly with his left fist. He could throw a punch—it felt like an enormous elephant stomping me.

  I dropped the Magnum and got both hands on his right wrist. With his left fist he went to work on my side, but slowly I swung him, and then I had his right hand behind his back. I shoved it up between his shoulders in a hammerlock. His fingers opened and the automatic thudded to the floor. He tried to find my instep with his stamping heel. When I shoved the arm higher he bent his head and lowered his shoulders. I ran him that way against the wall. His head struck hard. A lithograph of surfboarders hanging there came down on top of him. I let go and he slid to the floor.

  But by then the woman had both guns. “You hurt him,” she said. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “Did you have any other ideas?”

  “You didn’t have to hurt him.”

  “Give me those guns.”

  She shook her head, but suddenly she was crying. She didn’t fight me as I took both guns away from her. Groaning, Marker sat up.

  “Where’s Frost?”

  “...Blue Jay. A town near Lake Arrowhead. He has a cabin there.”

  “And Ragen?”

  “Happy Jack figu
red how maybe he could reason with the guy. Otherwise...” Marker shook his head. “You can’t reason with a guy like Frost.”

  Whether I could reason with Marker or not didn’t matter. All the fight had gone out of him. I went to the door, called the taxi driver and told him to phone the sheriff’s substation. A prowl car must have been cruising nearby, because it came inside of ten minutes. A tall deputy wearing a buff-colored whipcord uniform made his way through the small crowd. I showed him my identification and gave him the setup as quickly as I could.

  “Then we take Marker into custody for you?”

  “Right. And call Blue Jay. Send a man up there. Hell, send a riot squad. There’s liable to be trouble—if it hasn’t happened already.”

  He shook his head. “We’re pretty short-handed in the county, Mr. Drum. Early Christmas furloughs, a couple of forest fires down south. We’ll send a prowl car from Arrowhead, though.”

  I nodded and went to the cab. “I heard what you told him,” the cabbie said. “About Blue Jay and the truckers and all. You going up there? It’s forty miles from here.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So a couple of years ago the Brotherhood tried to organize us hackies. We got a pretty good union of our own going, see, but does that bother them? Like hell it does. It was pretty rough for a while. I got me a busted nose.” He showed me the memento of the union jurisdictional dispute proudly. “What I’m trying to say, I’ll drive you up there. Okay? Anybody who wants to clobber them Brotherhood guys is all right in my book.”

  “You,” I said, “have got yourself a passenger.”

  As we climbed into the taxi, the deputy was talking into the prowl car radio.

  To get there you take the Freeway to Berdoo, then State Highway 18 north. The State Highway twists and climbs and switches back on itself. It is called the Rim of the World Drive and maybe by daylight you could see why, or even on a clear night with the Berdoo lights spread out far below you as you climb into the San Bernadino Mountains. But as we reached Berdoo we left the clear night behind us. It was cold in Berdoo, and raining—a hard, pelting, icy rain that followed us higher into the mountains.

  We stopped at an all-night gas station in Blue Jay. A freckle-faced kid was reading a movie magazine inside, his knee-boots propped on a battered desk.

  “Be right with you, pal,” he said. “You didn’t have to get wet.”

  “What I want is information. A man named Gideon Frost has a cabin up here, right?”

  He scowled. “Yeah, I think so. Half a mile back toward Berdoo, mister. Dirt road on the left side. It’s the only cabin up that way.”

  I thanked him and ran back through the rain to the cab. We turned around and backtracked half a mile, then found the unpaved side road that led to Gideon Frost’s cabin. The cab sideslipped and floundered in the mud as we made our turn. The road was narrow and very steep. It ended at a boulder the size of a four-story building. There was a turning circle with two cars parked close to the boulder and two a little way off. One of those near the boulder was a black and white county cruiser, the other a black Volkswagen. Figure if Dr. Frost was here the VW belonged to him. The other two cars were a Caddy sedan and a Merc. And the Merc might have been the one the cops followed away from the boarding house in downtown L.A.

  “Am I going up there with you?” the cabbie asked me.

  “You’re staying put.” I gave him Rex Marker’s automatic, keeping the Magnum for myself.

  “I never shot one of those things in my life,” he said. But he took the gun.

  “Got a flashlight?”

  He thumbed open the glove compartment and produced one. I took it, flicked it on and went out into the rain.

  A flight of rickety redwood steps ascended the side of the boulder. Even with the flashlight I couldn’t see the top. I started climbing. The boulder jutted out of a steeply sloping hillside, and when I climbed high enough I could see the underside of a redwood porch looming precariously over it.

  But I never reached the top because I saw something else too.

  A dark figure huddled on the rickety redwood stairs.

  It was a man. He wore the buff whipcord uniform of the sheriff’s office. He’d been slugged. He had a lump almost the size of a tennis ball behind his left ear. Blood was trickling from the ear itself. I dug fingers into his wrist and felt a weak, fluttery pulse.

  Then, down below, I heard another car.

  I thumbed off the flashlight and waited in the absolute darkness. I couldn’t carry the unconscious deputy up the rest of the way. The flashlight was slippery in my left hand, the .357 slippery in my right. I waited.

  SCOTT TAKES THE HIGH ROAD

  San Bernardino, 9:20 P.M., Friday, December 18

  It took me forty minutes, driving fast on the San Bernardino Freeway, to reach Berdoo. It was raining by then, heavy drops splatting on the Cad’s hood and plastic top. By that time the gas gauge was pushing the empty mark and I pulled into a service station. While the tank was being filled I left Alexis in the car and used the station’s phone to call Pat again.

  I barely got, “Hi, Pat, Shell here—” out of my mouth when he said, “Hold it. We’ve spotted Ragen.”

  “Where?”

  “All those boys looking for the crumbs finally paid off. A driver for Coast Transport called me. Ragen’s big Cad passed him on Eighteen out of Berdoo. In a hell of a hurry.”

  I could feel the sweat start out on my forehead. “He see him?”

  “Just recognized the Cad. Two or three men in it—and a Merc filled with more guys right behind.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Called me ten minutes ago, no more than that. And Ragen’s Cad had just passed him. I didn’t know how to reach you, Shell. Just about to take off myself. Hell of it is, I don’t know where they were heading.”

  “Up Eighteen, you said?”

  “Yeah.”

  Highway Eighteen goes straight north from San Bernardino, into Rim of the World Drive which rises high into the mountains. To Lake Arrowhead—and Blue Jay.

  “I know where they were going,” I said, and hung up.

  The gas station attendant had finished filling the tank when I ran back to the Cad. I threw him a ten-dollar bill, jumped in and pulled out with the tires shrieking.

  Alexis let out a little yelp. “What’s the matter?”

  “Ragen’s on his way to Blue Jay. He must have found out Dr. Frost is there. How, I don’t know. But the word is, he was moving fast.”

  She let out a soft sound, almost a whimper then she said, “Oh, hurry ... hurry,” over and over.

  She didn’t have to tell me. We hit Eighteen and I let the Cad go. And when I let it go, you just hang on and moan. But I had to make as much time as I could on the straight stretches. In the San Bernardino mountains the highway twists and turns, swoops around corners, rising higher and higher as it climbs toward Arrowhead. In some places you can glance off the road and look down thousands of feet—on the way down them if you’re not careful.

  That was a ride. I’ll never think of it without getting cold and sweaty. The most I hit was eighty but eighty on a twisting turning mountain road is about like a hundred and fifty on an ordinary highway. And it was raining even harder now. At two thousand feet you can usually see the lights of San Bernardino miles away, spread out below, and at least half a dozen times I thought we were going to be spread out below, I’ll give Alexis this: She only screamed twice.

  When we hit the Blue Jay turnoff I hadn’t even caught sight of Ragen’s Cad. So he was still ahead of us. I swung off Rim of the World into the road leading to the small, quiet village of Blue Jay, tromped on the gas again. Snow had recently fallen here, but it was light, melting in the rain. The roads were slick, slushy and dangerous.

  “About half a mile.” Alexis stopped, gulped some air and went on shakily, “On the right. I’ll tell you where. It’s a narrow dirt road, sharp turn.”

  In a few seconds I started slowing and soon Alexis pointed.
“There. Slow down. You’re going too fast!”

  I hit the brakes and released them, tapped them again. The Cad swerved, slid on the rain-slicked road and angled toward big pines at the road’s left, right again. We slid into the turnoff, came almost to a stop, and I fed a little gas to the engine. The road went up, curving and narrow, muddy and rutted. It was slow going. Alexis said, her voice catching in her throat, “Right around this next bend. The road ends there, that’s where the cabin is.” As I swung slowly left again she gasped and pointed. “That’s Dad’s car!”

  My headlights had fallen on a huge boulder looming up out of the darkness, disappearing over our heads where the headlights failed to reach. Before it was a cleared space with room for several cars. And several cars were there. I saw the little black Volkswagen, but four other cars were there, too—Ragen’s big Cad, plus a black-and-white sheriff’s car, a Mercury and a taxicab. Even while the tension started to build up in me and my heartbeat swelled harder and heavier in my chest, I wondered what the hell was going on. And why the prowl car?

  I swung left, tires slipping in the mud, came to a stop behind the Volkswagen and doused my headlights. “Stay here,” I said to Alexis, pulled the .38 from its holster and stepped out of the car. Cold rain sliced through pine limbs overhead and pelted me, soaked my hair and ran down my neck.

  On the way here, Alexis had described the cabin and surrounding area for me. I knew the cabin was well above me on the slanting hillside, and that a flight of wooden steps led from the boulder’s base up along its side and to the cabin’s deck. I moved forward momentarily blind in the almost complete darkness. Under the bandage on my head, pain throbbed dully and continually.

  I found the steps, felt for the handrail. It wobbled slightly under my touch. I started up slowly, hand on the rail to guide me. There was a small landing and the steps went off at right angles from it, ascending steeply. As I turned there, started up again, a horn honked below. It had come from the clearing where the cars were parked, but it wasn’t the Cad’s blast. I hadn’t seen anybody in the other cars; but someone had been there. Just the one short sound. Then silence. I didn’t like it.