Say It With Bullets

by Richard Powell

  “I had seventy-six thousand dollars?”

  “All of that. You won it nice and lost it nice. I like a man can do that.”

  “Will that picture be in the local paper?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t try to get your name to send in with it, though. Sometimes that can embarrass a winner. Well, catch yourself a good rest up here and I’ll stake you to wherever you’re heading.”

  Bill nodded weakly. When that picture got out people were likely to identify him as the man hunted for the murder earlier in the evening. He refused to get excited about it, though. He was so tired he couldn’t make it out of town now if the guy had offered to stake him to an armored car. “Thanks,” he mumbled, and went to sleep.

  Thirteen

  Somebody was shaking him. It was a dull faraway feeling and he lay quietly hoping it would stop, as an alarm clock will stop if you have patience. Whoever was shaking him had a self-winding attachment, however, and kept right on. Finally he opened his eyes. Things spun in front of them for a moment like the wheels of a slot machine, then settled click-click-click into place: ceiling, walls, pictures, desk, a face. All these objects belonged to the man who ran the joint.

  He looked at the man and said, “Sorry to take so long waking up. Sometimes a lighted match under my toes will do the trick faster.”

  “I’d have tried that,” the man said, chuckling, “except you had your shoes on. How do you feel?”

  “I’ll live,” he said automatically. Then he wondered if, considering everything, that might not be too optimistic.

  “Good. Catch yourself a shower if you want. Right in through that door beside my desk. And I left out a razor and things. Breakfast will be ready out here for you when you finish. I’ll be back in a little while.”

  Bill thanked him and went into the bathroom and took off his clothes. When he unstrapped his wrist

  Say It With Bullets 185

  watch he saw it had stopped. He shaved and dressed and went into the office and found a waiter setting the table. He asked what time it was. It was eleven A.M. He sat down and ate breakfast irritably. He felt the way a lot of people do before they have their morning coffee. He felt the same way after he had his morning coffee. He had no plans and no interest in making any. He smoked a cigarette made of old shredded boot heels and watched the door open and the owner of the joint come in.

  The guy said, “Well, I have a stake for you.”

  “Thanks a lot. You’ve been swell. I don’t want you to stake me, though.”

  The man grinned and said, “I don’t think you’ll object.”

  Through the doorway came Holly Clark. She looked as young and excited as if she were about to graduate from high school.

  The owner of the joint said, “They do come back sometimes,” and went out.

  “Hello, Bill,” she said gaily. “How are you this morning?”

  He stared at her. Seeing her took a big load off his shoulders. It took the load off his shoulders and dropped it into the pit of his stomach, where it made him feel sick. He was positively not going to analyze his feelings toward this girl to see if she meant a lot to him. He had no right to have any feelings about her except an urge to get her out of this mess and keep her out. “How am I this morning?” he repeated. “I’m sane, thank you. I needn’t ask how you are. You’re crazy.”

  “Did you think I would walk off and leave you?”

  “I figured you would be smart and run, not walk. Am I right in thinking it’s eleven in the morning?”

  “Eleven twenty-one.”

  “And the bus left at eight?”

  “Yes. Bill, do you realize that I carried away nine thousand four hundred and twenty dollars of your winnings in my handbag? Aren’t you pleased?”

  “I sure am. We can hire a good lawyer for you. I hope they have some in Reno who work on criminal cases instead of just divorces.”

  She said in a low voice, “Let’s not do a lot of talking now. We might be overheard. I’ll tell you everything later. Are you ready to leave?”

  “Do we bow pleasantly to the cops or snub them as we breeze out of town?”

  “Be quiet and come on!”

  She really was taking his hand. She was linking her fingers confidently in his hand and walking him arm-in-arm downstairs, peeking up happily into his face every few steps. The owner of the joint was at the doorway. The guy said “Good luck” and then they were crossing the sidewalk and Holly was opening the door of a car with long borzoi lines and white sidewall tires and discreet gleams of chromium and enough red leather upholstery to equip a high-class bar.

  “It’s yours. I mean, it’s in my name because someone had to sign the papers but I bought it with your money. Four thousand eight hundred and fifty dollars. It’s only six months old. Like it?”

  “You’re bats,” he said. “You even have the top down. I’d just as soon try to make a getaway in a diamond-studded bathtub. Everybody will be looking.”

  “Exactly. Just as they were looking at you last night and seeing a lucky gambler instead of a man on the run. It’s that same business of a magician catching your attention with one hand while he does the trick with the other. Please get in.”

  He shrugged, and slid behind the wheel. Rows of dials and gadgets gleamed at him from an instrument panel that could probably handle a B-29. “How do you start this yacht?”

  “You put a little pressure on the accelerator pedal and turn the ignition key. Then you move the lever from N, which means neutral, into D, which means drive. R is for reverse and L is for—”

  “You don’t have to spell it out like c-a-t,” he said irritably.

  “Turn right, please.” She kept giving him directions until they reached one of the parks along the river. Nobody was around, and she suggested stopping. “Now,” she said, “I suppose you want to know the

  score.”

  “I already know the score. We’re losing badly. All I want to know is how to call time out.”

  “Would you like to see your picture in the paper?”

  She reached to the back seat and brought out a newspaper and showed it to him. There he was in two columns on the front page, sitting groggily beside skyscraper piles of chips. Fenced off from his picture by a very thin column rule was a big story headlined: BLOCK ROADS, SEARCH TOWN, FOR MURDERER. Think of the trouble they could have saved by knocking out that column rule and extending the headline over his picture.

  “It’s not a very good likeness,” Holly said.

  “Let’s protest to the editor.”

  “I mean, in a way that’s lucky. I’m not sure that most people could recognize you unless they looked at you and at the picture together.”

  “Let’s make it easy for them. Let’s buy an expensive convertible and put down the top and ride around attracting attention.”

  “Oh, but we want people to recognize you as we drive out of town.”

  “This is getting a bit complicated for me,” he muttered. “Let’s start with something easy. Such as, why are you here instead of a hundred miles away in California?”

  She drew her legs up onto the seat and hugged her knees and took a deep happy breath, as if getting ready to tell him one of those stories that begin once-upon-a-time. “When I left you early this morning,” she said, “I took a taxi back to the tourist court. I meant to get your baggage and hide it where we could pick it up today. But I couldn’t.”

  “What’s that in the back seat?”

  “That’s your baggage.”

  “Good. That straightens me out. Please go on.”

  “You see, Carson Smith was prowling around the tourist court. Of course he was looking for you but he pretended he had been looking for me. I was supposed to have a date with him last night but I was out looking for you.”

  “Smith pretended he didn’t know what had happened?”

  “That’s right. So after a while, to get rid of him, I said good night and went to my cottage. But he still hung around in the shadows. So I couldn’t
do a thing. There he was this morning when everybody was getting ready to leave and I didn’t dare sneak away so I started off on the bus with the others. They were all asking about you but none of them connected you with that murder. So I pretended to be getting more and more worried about you and finally, just as we reached the last gas station in Reno on the way west, I had the bus stop and I got off with your baggage. I told everybody I thought it was my duty to make sure you weren’t sick or hurt in the hospital. I said I’d catch up with them in Yosemite. The bus driver can handle things while I’m away.”

  “Then you got a taxi back to the center of town and went to an auto dealer and bought the Queen Mary and had them put wheels on it.”

  “It’s a lovely car, isn’t it? We’re going to drive to Yosemite. There’s a back way. We go south from here and then enter the park from the east over Tioga Pass. It’s nine thousand, nine hundred and forty-one feet high. I understand it’s quite a tricky road and it’s only open a few months a year and the buses don’t dare use it. But that route is much shorter than the way our bus is going, and we can get to Yosemite Valley late this afternoon before our bus does.”

  “Then I rejoin the tour and if Carson Smith shows up I tell him he can’t tag me because I’m on home base?”

  “Oh, stop worrying so far ahead. We aren’t even out of Reno yet. Isn’t that enough of a worry for you?”

  “No. I’ve had that one so long I’m getting sick of it.”

  “Our Miss Clark will handle the matter,” she said cheerfully, starting to get out of the car. “Just sit there and bite your nails quietly.” She went to the rear of the car and lifted the lid of the luggage compartment and busied herself with something mysterious. Then she came back and gave him a very odd smile. For some reason her face was bright pink. “I don’t think you’re going to like this,” she said, and tossed a handful of rice an3 confetti all over the car. “We’re pretending we were just married.”

  You might think the girl had suddenly gone out of her mind, but actually she had not been in it lately.

  “Now I’ve had it,” he said. “When you decide to break the camel’s back, you don’t bother with a last straw. You use a haystack.”

  He got out of the car and walked around to the rear. She had festooned the rear bumpers with white paper streamers. He didn’t know how she had restrained herself from scrawling a JUST MARRIED sign. He marched back to where she was standing. She faced him regally, chin tilted, gray eyes clear and scornful. In some way she managed to give the impression that he was a small and grubby boy whom she had caught throwing spitballs in her classroom.

  “Well?” she said.

  What she did was bad enough, but her attitude made him want to burn down her school. “You win,” he said. “But you’re going to have to live up to this. Let’s see how you like it.”

  He grabbed her wrists and shoved them behind her back and jerked her up close. She gasped, tried to pull away. He locked both wrists in his right hand and slid his left hand up her back and laced his fingers through the soft ponytail of hair. It made a nice handle. It let him force her head into exactly the right position. Not that he was going to kiss her. He was merely going to hold her locked this way, with her mouth a fraction of an inch from his, and let her sweat it out for a minute. Then maybe she would realize that girls who played with fire sometimes came out done to a turn.

  Her breath came in warm puffs and her body quivered all along his like a flame. There was really no use doing this halfway. Her mouth crumpled softly against his and her trapped body moved in little delicious attempts to get away. Her heart seemed to be clanging like a big gong against his chest. That ought to teach her a lesson. He released her, stepped back. He had been wrong about that gong effect. It was inside his own chest.

  Holly covered her face with her hands and climbed blindly into the car.

  “I see you don’t like living up to it,” he said.

  She took her hands down and said, spacing out the words like slaps in the face, “I don’t like living down to it.”

  “Isn’t that a shame? I always kiss the bride. Especially my own.”

  He climbed in the car and started the engine. Holly stared straight ahead, giving him curt directions where to turn. They came out on U.S. 395 heading south and drove about a mile and suddenly he saw the State cops. Their car was parked a hundred yards ahead and one of the cops was in the middle of the road signaling a stop. Bill stretched out an arm and swept Holly close to him.

  She tried to pull away, and he said, “Cops ahead. We got married, not divorced, remember?”

  “I-I forgot. I was so busy thinking about—Bill, I’m scared. Let’s turn around. I may give us away by showing how scared I am.”

  “Lots of brides get scared. The cops will think it’s that. Here we go.” He stopped the car beside the State trooper.

  “License, please,” the trooper said, watching him carefully.

  He got out his wallet and handed over the license. The trooper took it in his left hand, keeping his right free, and gave it a glance. Up ahead the trooper’s partner lounged beside the police car, a hand resting on the butt of his revolver.

  “Owner’s card, please,” the trooper said.

  “You have that, Holly,” Bill said casually.

  She had been sitting beside him as rigidly as a totem pole. She moved perkily and opened her handbag and brought out the license.

  “You just bought this car?” the trooper asked.

  Bill waited for Holly to say something, but apparently she couldn’t. She didn’t realize that the time to get scared had been hours ago, when she was skipping around a murder case as if it were a Maypole. “My girl bought it this morning,” he said. Then he chuckled and added, “I don’t mean my girl. I mean my wife. We were married this morning, too.”

  The trooper looked at the confetti and rice. He started to grin, then switched to a slight frown. “Hey, Arch,” he called to his partner. “Come here. These two say they just got married.”

  The second trooper walked toward them, and Bill wondered if one of the pair would ask to see the marriage license. That would wreck things.

  The first trooper said to his partner, “What do you think? Anything familiar about this guy? What about that description?”

  “I guess you saw today’s paper,” Bill said. “Man, was I all over it! Look here.” He reached to the back seat and grabbed the newspaper and spread it out for them to see.

  The first trooper looked at it. He studied the photo, showed it to his partner. You could see him relax: a beautiful sight, like sunset over the Pacific or a baby’s first smile. The trooper whistled softly. “You won all that?” he asked.

  “They tell me I was seventy-six thousand bucks ahead at one time. But I didn’t know. And of course I didn’t hang onto it either. But my girl was smart and sneaked away with about ten thousand while I was playing and didn’t know the difference. So that staked us to this car and getting married. Wonderful car, huh?”

  “Wonderful car?” the second trooper said. “Look, Mac, you mean wonderful girl.”

  “It’s a gorgeous car, though,” the first trooper said wistfully. “Do you think we could catch a job like this if we had to chase it, Arch?”

  “I wouldn’t bet on it,” the second trooper said. Then he looked at Holly and said, “You look worried. Is anything wrong?”

  Holly tried to speak a few times and finally gasped, “I’m scared about being married,” and huddled against Bill and began to cry.

  The first trooper put a hand up to his face and tried to smooth away a grin. “You’ll be all right,” he said soothingly. He leaned close to Bill and whispered, “Lots of them get like that. The kid I married, hell, I almost had to drag her down from the ceiling.” Then he straightened and said in a normal tone. “Here are your licenses. Good luck. Take care of this swell car.”

  “Take care of that swell girl, too,” the second trooper said, still voting for love over horsepower.

 
; “Thanks,” Bill said. He shoved the licenses in his pocket and waved and sent the car sedately down U.S. 395.

  Holly remained crumpled against him for about a mile. Finally she lifted a tear-streaked face and said, “I’m so ashamed. I wasn’t a bit of help. And I almost ruined things.”

  “Ruined things? That was the perfect touch you added.”

  “But I didn’t even think of it myself. It was something you said, and it just happened to pop out at the right moment.”

  “Remind me to take you along when I want to rob a bank,” he said. “I’ll send you in first, weeping, to say you’re afraid your savings aren’t safe. The bank staff will spread out every nickel in the joint to console you, and then I’ll walk in and scoop it up.”

  “I don’t think I’m a good criminal.”

  “I’d hate to see you get any better. You just engineered the perfect getaway. I owe you an apology for sneering at your plan.”

  “You owe me an apology for something else, too.”

  “If you’re talking about the way I grabbed you, I did it because I disliked that just-married gag. I wanted to teach you a lesson.”

  “You enjoyed doing it,” she said accusingly.

  “I wouldn’t want to insult you by saying it was a chore.”

  “I do not need to be taught any more lessons.” He grinned at her. “Okay. School dismissed.” “Very well,” she said primly. “And now I think I will take a nap.”

  Holly awoke as they finished the thirty-mile run to Carson City, and informed him that it was the smallest capital city in the United States and that she would like a sandwich and coffee. After a brief stop they headed south again. Holly wasn’t feeling talkative and the halt in Carson City had for some reason shattered his peace-pipe mood. Besides, he saw a gray sedan in the rear-view mirror. It seemed to adjust its speed to his. Of course that wasn’t unusual; on long drives-lots of people tended to let the car ahead set the pace. He didn’t want company, though. He nudged the accelerator and heard the kittens under the hood grow up into cats. The convertible streaked down the deserted road, banking nicely on turns and whooshing up the rises as if begging him to ease back on the wheel and take off.