Have Gat—Will Travel

by Richard S. Prather

  All the other male punks stood across the room looking at me. One of them tossed something shiny from one hand to another. At first I couldn't tell what it was, but then I saw it was a set of homemade knuckles probably made from a garbage can handle, with sharp pieces of steel projecting from it, steel slivers that could slice a man's face into shreds. A few other kids, including Ratface's short chunky friend, had their hands in their pockets.

  "Beat it," Ratface said. "Now, Lumphead. I mean it."

  I was getting awfully tired of this little punk telling me what I was going to do. "Listen, you pint-sized hood," I said, "quit flapping that nasty tongue of yours at me or —"

  He interrupted, "Or what? Hey" — he turned and looked at the guys behind him — "he don't wanna leave." He motioned with his hand and the whole bunch of them walked toward me. They came slowly; the one kid had his knucks on his right fist, others still had hands in their pockets.

  I put my hand under my coat, but hesitated; I didn't pull the gun out. You can shoot an Al Capone when he's big Al, but it's not considered proper when he's still Little Al. I remembered Sampson warning me that I'd be in plenty of trouble if I started slapping "kids" around. I was reaching the point, though, where I soon wouldn't give a damn; and if any kid came at me with a knife or knucks, it was quite likely I'd shoot him in the head.

  I wrapped my fingers around the gun butt and pressed my back against the wall. "Hold it right there," I said. My voice had tightened up on me a little. "So help me, you punks get any closer I'll forget that you're children."

  They kept coming. I started to slide the gun out — and right then I heard a car outside screech around the corner with its horn blaring. The car slid to a stop in front, still honking. The atmosphere in the room changed. The dozen or so punks stopped a couple of yards from me, some grinning and poking each other. Ratface trotted toward the door and was joined on the way by Shorty, the chunky kid who seemed to be his pal. They both hurried out. It seemed the boss had arrived.

  In a minute the kids came back in, cocky expressions on their faces. Ratface winked at the others. Chuck was here; he'd fix me. I heard footsteps coming up the walk; that would be Chuck, but there was the fast tap-tap of high heels, too. Chuck came through the door first, and if there was a woman behind him, I couldn't see her. If there had been a diesel locomotive behind him I wouldn't have seen it.

  As Samson had said, the guy was big.

  The group of punks near me started milling around, paying less attention to me now, and as Chuck waved at everybody he got a chorus of "Hi, Chuck," and "Where ya' been, Chuck?" And "Hey, Chuck, this big lug's givin' us a hard time."

  He looked at the knucks on the kid's hand, and at another kid with something metallic half out of his pocket. "Put that hardware away," he said. Then he walked across the room and stopped in front of me.

  "What's the trouble?" he asked.

  He was about half an inch taller than I, but he was so broad-shouldered and slim-waisted that he'd looked even taller in the doorway. His shoulders must have been three or four inches wider than mine, and his arms were long, too long. Wiry black hairs stuck up from the back of his hands and wrists and sprouted over the neck of the white T-shirt he wore under a brown coat. He wasn't a bad-looking guy — not what I'd expected at all.

  "No trouble," I told him. "Not yet. Just asking questions."

  He grinned. His voice was soft, pleasant, as he said, "Who asked you to ask questions?"

  "Mr. Franklin."

  "Franklin?" he said steadily. "Don't know him. So you better go right out the front door, and right back where you came from." The voice was still pleasant, but the grin was a little tight. Something was bothering me, about this guy; I thought I knew him from somewhere, but I couldn't place him.

  "We ever meet before?" I asked him.

  "Nope. We probably don't run in the same crowd."

  I looked around at the kids and I said, "Apparently not."

  And because I looked around I saw the girl — or rather the woman, because by no stretch of imagination could she be classed as a teen-ager. Looking at her suddenly like that was almost the same as getting kicked in the head.

  She was a tall, platinum-haired dish with a hard, brassy-but-pretty face that seemed to have half a pound of paint on it, and she had no modesty at all. She could have lost half of her curves and still have been shapely, and I knew the curves were hers because she was wearing a pale blue off-the-shoulder blouse and a tight skirt. She walked across the room toward us. The strap of a big, brown leather bag was looped over her right shoulder, pulling the blouse out of line.

  She stopped alongside Chuck, looking at me. Seeing her this close, hazel eyes with thickly mascaraed lashes, and all the rest, I was starting to think that if she'd scrape off most of the gooky paint, relax a little, and wear another shoulder bag on the other side she might not be half bad — but then she opened her mouth and spoiled any favorable impression I might have been getting.

  "Chuckie," she said, "who's the creep?"

  All she needed was chewing gum she could pull out of her mouth between thumb and index finger. It was that kind of a voice. High, scratchy, twangy, and if a voice all by itself can be stupid, that voice was stupid.

  "Yeah," said Chuck. "Before you leave, who are you?"

  I went through the wallet routine, pulling my coat open so he couldn't help seeing the .38. The license photostat didn't impress him any more than it had impressed the kids. He spotted the gun, raised an eyebrow and said, "Detective Special, huh? Real big man's gun." He glanced again at my license. "Well, what do you know? A slewfoot. An April-fool copper."

  The platinum blonde giggled nasally. "Oh, Chuckie!" He was slaying her.

  And I guess he got carried away by her stupid admiration, because he said, "Let's see the heater," and reached toward my shoulder for it. I let his finger touch the gun before I swung my open right hand and chopped him just under the bicep with its edge. I knew it hurt him and almost paralyzed his arm. He got so mad I thought his eyes were going to pop out.

  That was okay. I wanted him mad. I wanted him boiling. I said, "I don't show the gun to people unless I mean to shoot them." I reached into my pocket and pulled out a picture of Pam and handed it to him before he could slug me. "I just dropped in to see if you know this girl," I said. "Do you?"

  His jaw muscles were jumping and he was trying to work the fingers of his right hand, but he took the picture. He didn't look at it immediately, though. He stared at me, wiggling his jaw muscles till he'd worked the anger out of his face. He said huskily, sarcastically, "Glad to cooperate with a slewfoot."

  He got his face nice and composed, glanced at the picture, and his face uncomposed all over again. He sort of jerked and his lips twisted, then he looked at me with anger flushing his face. "You rat," he said. "What you showing me her mugg for? I read the papers, Slewfoot. What you been doing, bothering those kids about it? So that's the Franklin who told you to snoop, huh?" He tossed the picture away, angrily. "I think I'll bust you one. What you come here for?"

  "You don't know her, huh?"

  "No, you —"

  "Never saw her?"

  "No."

  "Go ahead," the brassy blonde said. "Hit the snooper, Chuckie."

  Too bad, I thought; I could have liked her. Chuck had his fists balled up, and when they were balled they were lethal weapons.

  "Listen, Slewfoot," he said. "I'll count up to ten. Be out of here when I finish or you'll get carried out."

  I almost gave him an argument, but when I looked around I saw the dozen or so young cannibals ready to eat me alive. I'm pretty big, and I'm an ex-Marine crammed full of judo and the gamut of unarmed defense, but it was small consolation to know that if they all ganged up on me, I might get half a dozen before they massacred me. Maybe Chuck alone could massacre me.

  He started counting. What the hell, I thought, I'd stirred them up. I shrugged and took a step toward the door. That brought me up right alongside the blonde. />
  "Some moxie," she said in the twangy voice. "Some tough muzzler you are."

  "Oh, shut up," I said.

  Wham! She had less control than Chuck. She brought a hand up and really clobbered me with it. She actually knocked me backward, but it might have been all right even then except that my foot banged into something. I landed on the end of my spine with a crash that jarred the whole house.

  Then I saw what had tripped me. Or rather, the two things. Somehow, Ratface's short pal had got behind me and was down on all fours, and Chuck still had his leg poked out and was laughing fit to kill. For a second I sprawled on the floor with a big hot gripe growing bigger, then I planted my foot on Shorty's behind and shoved. He skidded forward and his face banged the carpet as I jumped to my feet, burning. The blonde and all the kids were laughing right along with Chuck, and as I got to my feet the laughter subsided slightly.

  But Shorty rolled over and stood up, rubbed his face — and then laughed loudly at me, a noise with no mirth or merriment in it, just a rhythmic ha-ha-ha at the top of his lungs. Other kids caught on, picked it up. In seconds they were all looking at me, chanting their laughter in unison. It was strange, frightening, to look at the now unsmiling faces, hear the perversion of laughter from twenty throats. It was a savage sound, like the grunting of animals; a twisted, stupid exhibition that sent a shiver up my spine.

  The blonde was still getting a large charge out of me. I was good for lots of laughs. But only her laughter seemed to have honest merriment in it. I suppose I did look a bit quaint standing there slobbering at them. She bent over and laughed so hard that the bag slipped from her shoulder and hit the floor, making as loud a noise when it landed as I had. She either carried a chunk of lead in there or a gun. Chuck had sweet playmates.

  Chuck tapped me on the shoulder. I looked at him, and he wasn't smiling. "Eight," he said.

  I started to crack wise, but when he got to nine I walked toward the door. The punks were massed in front of me, and if they hadn't moved I was mad enough to throw a few of them through the ceiling, even if it wouldn't have been wise. But they stepped slowly aside, still going ha-ha, and I walked past them trying to look everywhere at once. I thought I was going to make it to the door without any trouble, but suddenly somebody planted a foot on my behind and shoved hard.

  It sent me stumbling up against the door and I spun around as I reached it. It had been Shorty, naturally, getting even. He didn't know it, but we were a long way from being even. I stared at the kids as the laughter slowed and stopped, and it took all my self-control and what little sense I had left to keep from jumping them and making pulp out of a few of them. I had already taken more from these little hoodlums than I'd have taken from an equal number of big thugs, and the longer I stared at them the bigger they looked. Just before they looked big enough for me to pull out my gun and shoot five of them, I made myself open the door and go outside.

  A crescent moon was hidden behind scudding clouds and it looked like rain, but the chill air did little to cool me off. I tried to calm myself, thinking, as I walked back to the Cad. I hadn't actually learned a hell of a lot — except that the kids weren't just punks, but dangerous punks. Chuck's face had jumped around when I showed him Pam's picture, but he could hardly be blamed for looking a bit sick. I'd wanted to push him off balance, so I'd played a dirty trick on him; I'd handed him the morgue shot.

  And right then I remembered where I'd seen him before. Maybe it was because I was thinking about him and Pam at the same time, but I remembered seeing him in a picture in the album Mr. Franklin had shown me. It had been on one of the last pages of the book; a group snapshot taken when Pam had gone to a picnic — in Elysian Park. Half a block up the street past my car was a small cocktail lounge. I went inside, found a phone booth in back and dialed Mr. Franklin's number. He answered.

  "Mr. Franklin, this is Shell Scott. Do you know the names of the fellows your daughter went out with?"

  "Why . . . yes, most all of them. Have you learned anything?"

  "Not for sure. Did Pam ever mention a Chuck Dorr?"

  "No. I've never heard the name."

  "Look in the back of the photograph album for a snap taken at Elysian Park on a picnic. What's the date under it?"

  He was gone for half a minute, then he said, "That was on the sixteenth of last month. She —" His voice broke.

  I said quickly. "She know all these people?"

  "She went there with her boy friend and another couple; they were to meet some others. She didn't know them all."

  I told him I was just guessing, stabbing around, but I'd let him know if anything came up. Then I called Samson.

  "Sam, the Franklin girl's diary still on your desk?"

  "Yeah. What you want? And how's it going?"

  I gave him a rundown on the party. "They're a mean bunch all right. That diary — what does it say for the night of the sixteenth, last month?"

  In a minute he had read two or three lines that didn't interest me, the words Pam had written sounding strange in his gruff voice, then, "Divine time at the park. Both OW and JM asked me to the Junior-Senior Prom. Who'll I go with? OW, I think. He's a dream! But I don't think I'd even have gone to the picnic if I'd known anybody like CD would be there. I finally had to just ignore him, he was so fresh. I don't like older men anyway — and he's so hairy. Tomorrow I'll see OW and tell him I'll go with him." Sam paused. "That's all of it."

  "The OW must be Orin West. CD is Chuck Dorr."

  He said slowly, "You sure?"

  "Positive." I told him about the photo in the album.

  He said, "We haven't gone over it that close yet. It's getting tighter around Dorr, isn't it? How'd he impress you?"

  "He's a rough baby. Doesn't seem like a dim brain, though. If he's psycho, he acts pretty normal."

  "So did the mad killers Heirens and Robert Irwin. Looks as if we'll have to keep after the bunch, Shell. Do it the hard way."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Orin West just died. Never opened his mouth."

  It wasn't just Pam now, I was thinking; it was two nice kids. Sam interrupted my thoughts by saying almost the same thing, then, "Nobody knows yet if there were others before this. And there'll be more if we don't get him. This one worries me."

  That was the worst part, the frightening part. Even worse than the thought of Pam in the morgue was the thought of her killer, and others like him, walking the streets, meeting more Pams. They look like anybody else when they sit across from you in a restaurant or next to you in a darkened theater; they look like anybody else when they pass you on the street. You can't look behind their normal eyes into their abnormal minds to see the twisted desires, the strange, savage hungers.

  "We've got to get this one," Samson said. "And we haven't got enough. You know the rules of evidence, Shell. We've got to get him good or they dismiss the case."

  He talked a little longer. I knew what he wanted; he just didn't want to ask me, I could feel the hair move at the back of my neck, and my throat was a little drier when I said, "I like Dorr for it, too, Sam. He's either in it or knows about it. I'll try it again. I'll work on Dorr, and this time I'll really let him have it."

  "Well . . . go ahead, Shell. Tell him anything. If he's the one, he'll be like jelly inside by now. But it's got to be right, boy. He's got to bust wide open or we lose him — and he won't bust easy."

  "Yeah, Sam." My throat was good and dry. "I'll tell you the truth, pal. I'd like about a dozen big cops along."

  He chuckled softly. "You'll be all right, Shell."

  "Yeah," I said. "Sure." I hung up and walked back to the clubhouse.

  I really didn't want to go back in there at all. I stopped in front of the door, put the .38 into my coat pocket, and kept my hand on it as I rang the bell.

  Ratface looked out at me; I brushed past him and stopped just inside the room. Heads jerked around, eyes narrowed and I heard voices, "Well, he's askin' for it." Ratface started the ha-ha and the others took it up auto
matically.

  I grabbed Ratface and yanked him to me, damn near lifting him off his feet. I put my face close to his. "Listen, you little fleeper, bag your head. Chop it! I've had all of you I can take."

  His face got red and he put his hand on his hip.

  "Go ahead," I said. "I'll lay you over my knee and let your punk friends laugh at that."

  The door of the side room opened and Chuck was glaring at me. Even from where I stood I could see his jaw muscles bouncing around. The room got quiet. I shoved Ratface away from me hard enough to send him halfway across the room, then walked to Chuck, stopped near him where I could watch him and the kids at the same time.

  He said coldly, slowly, "I told you to blow, Slewfoot."

  "You told me a lot of things, friend."

  His eyes narrowed. Lipstick stained his mouth. In the room behind him I could see the blonde sitting on a divan. I'd half expected a naked woman running around in there, but she was fully clothed — as fully clothed as she could be in that dress. Her lipstick was smeared, that was all.

  Most of the kids were on their feet now, near me. They looked at me, then watched Chuck, waiting for the word. Chuck stepped toward me with his hand curling into a fist.

  "I wouldn't," I said. My hand was still on the gun in my coat pocket, and with the other hand I flipped back the lapel of my coat, let him see the empty holster.

  He stopped fast, glanced at my pocket, then at the kids. Finally he jerked his head toward the room behind him and said to me, "Get in here." He backed into the room and I followed him, slamming the door shut behind me.

  He asked me, "What's this chatter?"

  "You know what it is. The Franklin girl — Pam. You said you didn't know her. I know you did."

  He looked at the blonde, "Beat it, Lucille."

  "Chuckie! Well, I like that. I sure like that! Ain't I your girl? Huh, Chuckie?" This gal made me slightly ill, but a jealous blonde might help. She kept going, "You got nothin' you don't want me to hear, do you?"