Say It With Bullets

by Richard Powell

  Bill lifted the automatic and said softly, “You want to shake hands with this?”

  Russ stopped as if he had walked into a wall. He

  stared at the weapon and muttered, “That’s a gun.”

  “Wonderful what Air Force training will do for a man. Yeah, you guessed it. It’s not a bunch of posies but a forty-five-caliber Government Model Colt Automatic Pistol.”

  “Whatcha doing with a gun. Bill?”

  “I’m carrying it in my right hand, Russ. You know what? It’s legal to tote a gun in Wyoming as long as it isn’t concealed. I don’t know whether it’s also legal to shoot a guy with an unconcealed gun but maybe I’ll find out.”

  Russ’s face was grimy and the sweat coming out on it looked like drippings from a crankcase. He said hoarsely, “You don’t want to shoot me, Bill.”

  “That’s odd. I thought I did. How do you suppose I got the idea?”

  “Jeez, well, maybe you had some screwy idea I was the guy plugged you back in Nanking. Don’t get sore, now. I’m not saying you’re screwy. I guess it’s a natural thing, a guy has a dust-up with his friends and starts walking away and bingo, he’s shot.”

  “You mean it’s a natural thing that, bingo, I was shot?”

  Russ wiped a sleeve across his eyes and left a white mask around them. “No, I mean it’s a natural thing that…that…now I forget what I meant. You know. Help a guy out, will you?”

  “It’s a natural thing to figure you shot me?”

  “You got me wrong, Bill! I wasn’t even there! I was going out the back door of the office and you was walking out the front and one of these dumb Nationalist soldiers was excited and didn’t know the score and told you to halt and you didn’t hear and he upped with his rifle and plugged you.”

  “You saw all that through the building?”

  “They tell me about it afterward, Bill. And we all think you’re dead and we go after this dumb soldier and—”

  “He couldn’t have been dumb, Russ. Anybody who can shoot a forty-five pistol bullet out of an Army rifle is pretty clever.”

  “Was it a forty-five? Yeah, that’s right, he plugs you with a forty-five automatic and we all run out of the office—”

  “How did you get back in the office so fast? You’d gone out the back, remember?” “You keep mixing a guy up!”

  “No, I keep trying to untangle you. Okay, so my old pal Russ got to me first and—were you first, Russ?”

  “I, uh, maybe I was second or third. So we got to where you was lying. So we got there, see? Then, uh, then…”

  “It’s tough to work this part out, isn’t it, Russ? Because nobody carried me back into the office or cut open my shirt or broke out a first-aid kit or anything. You just let me lie there on my face and beat it the hell out to the plane and took off.”

  Russ gulped. It looked as though he might be trying to swallow a piston. “Yeah,” he mumbled, “it don’t look good. Only you got to remember the whole joint was in a flap and it looked like you was dead. But you know I never shot you, Bill. We always got along good. I’m your pal, see? Ask me right now and you can have the shirt off my back.”

  “Maybe I’ll wait until it has a bullet hole in it.”

  Russ said in a cracked whisper, “You got the wrong guy. Maybe one of the others did plug you. Honest, like I said I went out the back and all I know is what they told me and things was so mixed up a guy had no time to check. Go see the other guys, Bill. You know where to find them?”

  “Sure. You all wrote very sad letters to my folks, after you got back, about how I’d been captured by the Reds. And you’ve all been swell guys and have been sending my folks Christmas cards ever since. So my addresses are pretty good. Your last Christmas card was so pretty I hate to think of shooting you.”

  “Look, Bill. You shoot me and get caught and then you’ll never find out if one of the others done it.”

  “What makes you think I’ll get caught if I shoot you?”

  “Jeez, Bill, everybody‘ll know you done it.”

  “Nobody knows I’m here except you. I’ve never told anybody what really happened to me back in Nanking. It would only have worried my folks. And as for telling the cops, hell, what could I prove? I figured that would put me in the middle when I started to settle things myself. No, Russ. There isn’t a cop in the world who’ll have any reason to suspect me if you get found shot up.”

  “The others will know. Cappy and Domenic and Ken and Frankie.”

  “Maybe they won’t hear about what happened to you before I drop in to tell them.”

  Russ backed away a few steps. He licked his lips with a gray tongue, glanced at the workbench beside him. He seemed to study the position of a tire iron King on the bench. His right hand, close to the tire iron, twitched.

  Bill said, “I’m following right along, chum. Yeah, that works both ways, doesn’t it? If nobody knows why I’m here and if you get a chance to knock me off and drop me out in some gully, you’re in the clear. But if I were you I wouldn’t bet a tire iron against a forty-five.”

  The big hand near the tire iron stopped twitching and began to shake. “There’s a guy coming to see me,” Russ said. “He might be here any sec. Maybe he’s right outside listening. So you couldn’t get away with it, see? He’d put the cops onto you.”

  “A guy named Jimmy Smith?” Bill asked gently. “From the Bar 4 ranch?”

  “Yeah! That’s the guy. It’s the straight dope. He wants to sell me a car. You don’t have to believe me but—”

  “He won it off a guy and you can have it for a couple hundred bucks.”

  “Yeah, that’s it, and he’ll be here any second and…and—” An idea hit him like a punch in the stomach. After a moment he said faintly, “You was the guy that called.”

  “Uh-huh. So I don’t think we’ll be disturbed.”

  “Now look, Bill, don’t be hasty. Let’s talk this over. I’m getting an idea.”

  “What kind of an idea?”

  “Give me a couple seconds, will you? I got to wrassle with it.”

  Russ was wrestling with an idea, all right, and there seemed to be some question who would win. That didn’t necessarily mean it was a big idea. Sometimes even a little one could throw Russ. This one seemed to be rocking him with forearm blows and body slams. Russ was looking as pained as a wrestler in a television bout, except that in this case the match was on the level.

  “Hurry up,” Bill said. “I can’t wait all night. I have a date with an alibi.”

  “Now look,” Russ said with a great effort, “how about if I tell you how you can cut yourself a nice hunk of change? Maybe a quarter million bucks. Only you got to be sensible about this shooting business.”

  “First let’s be sensible about the quarter million. That’s a lot of money to talk about. You don’t look like you have a speaking acquaintance with more than a couple hundred.”

  “Yeah? Well, I got a speaking acquaintance with half a million bucks. In gold, too.”

  “Sure. You have an ancient map to the Lost Dutchman Mine or Montezuma’s treasure. An old prospector gave it to you on his deathbed. We look for a mountain that throws the shadow of a skull on a valley just as the full moon comes up in August.”

  “The map I have,” Russ said doggedly, “is a nice modern oil company road map. And we don’t look for no mountains. We look for a C-47 plane that crashed.”

  “This is getting to be quite a yarn. Is this supposed to be our C-47 you’re talking about?”

  “Don’t be like that, Bill. I’m leveling with you. Sure, it’s our C-47. It was carrying half a million bucks in gold. The stuff was in boxes marked with Chinese writing saying they held medical supplies. You sure ought to remember them boxes. Don’t you?”

  Russ could no more make up a yarn like this than he could do a toe dance in the ballet. “Yes,” Bill said thoughtfully, “I remember those boxes. I wanted them thrown off the plane. I begin to see why everybody got so upset.”

  “I said we o
ught to tell you what was in them boxes. But no, the other guys said it wouldn’t make no difference to you. So bingo, there’s got to be a shooting.”

  “You’re giving up that yarn about the soldier potting me by mistake, are you?”

  “All right. You’re too smart to buy that. But it still wasn’t me that did it.”

  “Who did?”

  Russ set his jaw stubbornly. “I don’t know. You want to talk about this dough or don’t you?”

  “Okay, Russ. What happened to the Chinese black market guy who owned those boxes?”

  “Oh, him? You know how the starboard door on that plane didn’t latch good? We hit an air pocket and that door flipped open and he fell out. He was standing too close to it.”

  “He was standing too close to one of you guys.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Russ said, without interest. “I was up on the flight deck at the time.”

  “Natch. Then what happened?”

  “Well, we come in to Hong Kong and we figure we better not try cashing in the gold there. So we headed Stateside by way of the Philippines and Japan and the Aleutians and Alaska and Canada. That’s when things went wrong. We didn’t know if some customs guy in the U.S. might get nosy about them boxes so we figured on not landing at any regular field. We figured on setting down way out in the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah and hiding the boxes. Only what with trying not to make too many stops we stretched the gas too far. So there we are with the tanks running dry and nothing under us but a lot of lousy mountaintops.”

  “With guys like you I don’t know how we ever flew the Hump.”

  “You should talk!” Russ cried. “All right, so if you had been running things it wouldn’t have happened.

  And why weren’t you running things? Because you’d turned chaplain on us. So who was dumb first?”

  “I won’t argue. I was dumb first. What did you do when you ran out of gas? Bail out?”

  “With all that dough aboard? Jeez, we’d have ridden it down right into a mountain. But Ken spotted a lake. He ditched the plane on the lake right nice. But all we had time to do was break out a rubber raft and shove off before she sank. So all that dough is just waiting there to be brought up.”

  “That was a long time ago. I’d have expected you guys to grow fins and gills diving for it.”

  “All right, wise guy. There’s a hundred feet of water over the plane.”

  “That’s nothing for a trained diver in a suit. None of you felt like learning?”

  “Sure, we felt like learning. Cappy and Domenic out on the coast have both learned. Trouble is, that ain’t no deserted lake. It has a dozen cabins where guys come up for vacations and weekends. Any time the roads are open so we could truck in a good-sized boat and an air pump and diving suits, somebody’s there fishing or lying around. It’s not a big lake. Anybody on shore can see most of it. We don’t dare go after that stuff with people watching. An hour after we started diving, we’d have to shoot some curious dope.”

  “Times have changed. Now nobody wants to shoot anybody.”

  “Who likes to shoot people?” Russ said in a hurt voice. “There’s another way to handle it. We been buying up the lousy lake. We got all the land now except around six of the cabins. A couple years more and we can afford to buy those. Then we block off the road and go to work. It’s taken a lot of dough and we sure been sweating to earn it.”

  This was good. You could call it poetic justice. The five of them started out to make a fast buck and ended by earning slow pennies. Sometimes fate showed a nice sense of humor. “You mentioned me getting a quarter million bucks,” he said. “With six guys cutting into half a million, how does one come out with a quarter million? Did the five of you talk it over and decide you’d better pay me off big?”

  “We ain’t talked it over.”

  “Well then, what happened when you told them about that newspaper clipping saying I was back?” “I didn’t tell them you was back.” “That’s queer. Why not?”

  Russ looked embarrassed. “I figgered maybe you’d want to surprise them. How did I know you would drop in on me first?”

  “Was that friendly? I might have hurt one of them.”

  “Let ‘em get hurt,” Russ said bitterly. “Crashing that plane because they couldn’t figure the fuel right! Taking it easy while I sweat my eyes out here! I been putting in more toward buying that lousy lake than any two of them. I ain’t had a day off from this joint in two years.”

  “What about that little trip you took to Philadelphia last month? Didn’t that count as time off?”

  Russ peered out from under heavy eyebrows as if his eyes were small wary animals. “I didn’t take no trip.”

  “Somebody took a shot at me last month in Philadelphia.”

  “One of the others did, then. I was here. I can prove it.”

  “But if they didn’t know I was back and you did—” “Maybe somebody sent them a clipping too!” Russ

  cried. “All I know is I was here and you can ask

  anybody.”

  The guy seemed to mean it. “We haven’t settled this angle of how I rate half the money, with five others cutting in.”

  “Who said anything about five others?”

  “Oh.”

  “After all,” Russ said, “one of the others shot you. If you only knocked off one of them you might not get the right guy. So after you finish making sure you got the right guy, that leaves me and you.”

  “Or if I wasn’t careful it might leave just you.”

  “What a nasty mind you got,” Russ said virtuously.

  He wasn’t doing very well at making Russ say who shot him. Maybe if he could find out where the lake was, he could make Russ talk by threatening to spill everything to the customs authorities. And if Russ still wouldn’t talk, the same threat might make one of the others come across. He said casually, “Where is this lake, Russ?”

  “I’m holding that out for a while. It’s all I have to sell, and you ain’t made no offer.”

  “What would you consider a fair offer?”

  “You got something on me but I don’t have anything on you. When I hear that Frankie or Domenic or Cappy or Ken has been knocked off, that will give me something on you. Then I’ll tell you where the lake is.”

  His hand tightened on the .45. “I’ll make you an offer. Either give me your map of that lake, or I’ll give you thirty seconds to live.”

  Russ seemed to shrink inside the coveralls. His left shoulder hunched forward: a ring-wise fighter covering his jaw. “And after I give you the map,” he said thickly, “you’ll give me one second to live.”

  “You just wasted eight seconds. Give me the map and you’re okay.”

  “Why should I trust you?”

  “Because you don’t have a better choice. Call it a gamble if you want. Maybe you’ll lose. But you’ll lose anyway if you don’t gamble. You’d better not let me talk because it’s running out the clock on you. Now we only have ten seconds to go.”

  “I wasn’t the guy shot you.”

  “It’s been nice knowing you.”

  “You’re kicking away a quarter million bucks.”

  “Five…four…three…”

  Russ took a deep breath “Two, one, out,” he said.

  He aimed at the third button from the top of the coveralls and took up the trigger slack and squeezed slowly and waited for the crash and the upward flip of the muzzle. It seemed to take a long time.

  Russ said hoarsely, “I’m betting you won’t shoot.”

  He glanced down. It wasn’t the fault of the safety catch. The thing was all ready to shoot. He felt sweat coming out on his body like heat rash. He squeezed again. Nothing happened.

  Russ said, “I’m betting you can’t shoot.”

  He looked down at his hand. Muscles twitched in it and tendons made white streaks against the skin, but nothing happened. There was a short circuit somewhere in the nerves between his head and hand. When he told his hand to squeeze the trigge
r it went into a deep freeze, without budging. The frozen feeling crept up his arm and into his body and left a chunk of ice in his stomach.

  “All right, Russ,” he muttered. “You’ve got a good bet.”

  He felt suddenly very weak and silly. His right hand started to ache, as if it had been in a numbing vise. “You wouldn’t care to make a sudden move and help me out?”

  “Listen, pal, after a gamble like that, the only move I want to make is to lie down.”

  “What gave you the idea, Russ?”

  “Aah, you always did have a lot of chaplain in you. Then you talked too much. Guys who shoot off their mouths don’t shoot off many guns. Why don’t you put that thing away now?”

  “I’ll keep it handy. I might find myself at a loss for words.”

  “Here’s a hot tip for you, kid. Don’t go walking in on Ken or Cappy or Domenic waving a rod you ain’t gonna use. You’ll end up catching a shovelful of dirt in your face.”

  This was great. You come two thousand miles to make a guy talk or to shoot him, and lose your nerve and then let him tell you to be a good boy and to quit playing with dangerous things like loaded guns. What did you do now? Thank him humbly and walk out? Lacking any better ideas, it looked as if you did.

  He snapped on the safety catch of the .45 and started turning toward the door.

  His move set off a chain reaction. As he began turning, his eyes flashed a series of action photos to his brain: Russ grabbing a tire iron…lifting the thing… throwing it. The action came fast but his brain was right in there catching it all and telling him exactly how to duck and wheel and flick off the safety and let Russ have a slug. His brain did a real jet-propelled job. Unfortunately his body was heavy with inertia and kept turning away from Russ the whole time this was going on. Trying to change its course was like wrestling with a car skidding on ice.

  A dull shock exploded up his right arm. The tire iron caromed off and went clanging over concrete.

  The .45 dropped to the floor. Now that it was much too late his body came out of the skid. He wheeled, saw Russ charging in. There was no time to throw a punch. He ducked under the blurred streaks of heavy fists, lunged forward. It was like being a kid again and catching the tackling dummy with a solid shoulder block. Russ folded across his shoulder like a sack of sand. He tried to keep his feet moving, to keep charging and slam Russ into a wall or bench or car. It didn’t work. His shoes couldn’t dig into concrete the way cleats would dig into turf. He slipped and lost power and felt Russ starting to claw at his body. That was no good. In another second Russ would have his breath back and begin making a pretzel out of him.