Darling, It's Death

by Richard S. Prather

  The side of my hand jarred into his cheek, robbed of part of its force, but it jerked his head around and jarred him as he reached for my wrist. He grabbed my wrist, slapped his other hand around it, and started to bend it. The thought of that black car racing away, getting farther and farther from me, flashed into my mind. It was all over, the whole show was over, if the Joker crippled me now. In an hour Torelli would have the blackmail file in his hands. And if the Joker crippled me, I knew he'd kill me.

  He was holding me tightly and I let myself crumple, threw myself backward and down toward the ground, pulling the Joker toward me and feeling the screaming pain that wrenched my shoulder. But even before my back slammed into the ground I brought my right foot up hard into the Joker's middle as the weight of his body fell on top of me. His feet left the ground and I strained backward, jerking my arm and thrusting with my foot in his belly, and he went on over my head, a grunt bursting from his lips just before he thudded heavily into the ground behind me.

  I spun toward him, unable to hold his arm, but at least free of his grip. He was scrambling around before me and I chopped wildly at his ugly face, and the thick blade of my right hand slashed into his lip, split it, and sent the blood spurting. My other hand jarred into his jaw, then again into his throat, and I jabbed with stiff fingers at his eyes, missing, but ripping his cheek as he jerked his head. He moved away from me, trying to get up, as I got my feet under me and jumped toward him.

  He was just coming up off the ground, bent over as I got close to him, and his face was inches from my knee. I drove the knee forward, cracking into his jaw. Pain ran up into my thigh. It felt as if I'd broken the kneecap. The Joker went back on his fanny and rolled to his side, groggy, but still trying to get up. I stepped forward; pain flamed in my kneecap, but the leg held me up and I reached him. I kicked him in the face. That was it. The fight went out of the Joker.

  I turned around. María still stared, her mouth hanging open. I ran toward the car and jumped into the back, yelling at her to get moving. I was barely inside the car when it hurtled forward, throwing me against the cushions. María went careening recklessly around the curves of the winding drive as I climbed into the front seat.

  I looked back once toward Gloria's cottage. The Joker was on his hands and knees, shaking his head. Perhaps he'd never been knocked completely out. He looked to be in good enough shape to reach a phone and call Torelli, at least as soon as his head cleared enough so that he'd think of it. Things were ganging up on me.

  I leaned forward and peered out the windshield, urging the car to go faster. Maybe there was time. Maybe.

  16

  MARÍA DROVE LIKE A MANIAC down to Manuel Guzmán and turned right. I said, "Honey, why didn't you beat it? I wanted you out of there."

  Her jaws clenched together as she glanced at me. She said, "I wanted to, Shell. I was scared. I wanted to get way. But I couldn't. I just couldn't leave you there when . . . when he might have killed you. I just couldn't move."

  She was quiet for a few seconds, then she said, "Where are we going?"

  "Not we. Me. You've got your neck stuck out far enough. You'd better go hide someplace." I gave her a quick rundown on what had happened: Eve, her killer on his way to Gull Islands; even at this moment, perhaps, almost there.

  She said, "You're going there? But you might get killed."

  I didn't answer her, but she had said a larger mouthful than she knew. What it boiled down to was that I should have killed the Joker. But it's one thing to kill a man in a fight or when he's trying to kill you, and another thing entirely to kill a man when he's helpless. The fact remained that I should have killed him. Now, or soon, he would certainly phone Torelli and spill the story on what had happened. Torelli had earlier been phoned by Eve's killer, who undoubtedly had told him where the blackmail stuff was, and got Torelli's OK to pick up the stuff, then headed for the islands. Torelli could easily put those two phone calls together. When he did, he'd know not only that I wasn't drowned and was very much alive, but also that I knew about Eve and might well be on my way to Gull Islands, or at least after her killer. And the papers. He'd know damned well that I wasn't just a dope who had stumbled into Gunner's room. That was bad enough, but the worst part at the moment was that Torelli's next move, without a shadow of a doubt, would be to order a flock of his men to Gull Islands—after Shell Scott. My only chance was speed, hurry, get there and away before any Torelli army arrived. What I'd do at Gull Islands I didn't know yet. But the papers were there. That was the important thing.

  María suddenly pulled over to the curb and stopped. I looked at her as she put the gears in neutral and clasped her hands together. "I can't drive," she said. "After that fight back there, I feel as if I'm coming apart." She started to tremble.

  I said sharply, "Snap out of it. Don't go to pieces on me now. Get over here and let me drive." I pulled María to my side of the seat, climbed over her, and got under the wheel. I hated to sound so rough, but if I had sympathized with her she'd probably have unraveled.

  I slammed the car into gear and headed for a dock where I could rent a boat.

  I glanced behind me to the feathery wake spreading from the stern of the motorboat, then ahead to where the sleek bow cut through the waters of the sea outside Acapulco Bay. The sea was strangely calm, incredibly level and smooth, flat and brassy under the hot sun. It was almost like being on a huge lake with hardly any swell or motion of the water. There had been little change in the motion of the boat when I'd left the mouth of the bay and entered the ocean itself.

  When I got the boat, María had been practically hanging on my shirttail all the time, pleading with me to stay, pleading with her words and her soft, dark eyes. I almost had to bat her one. But God, she was a sweetheart.

  It had taken me five precious minutes after reaching the dock, and a whole fistful of pesos, but I'd got a fast boat and precise directions to Gull Islands. Gull Islands are unique in that they are uninhabited except by millions of birds, literally millions of squawking gulls. The islands sit offshore about a mile, six little dots in the blue of the sea, and always swarms of screaming gulls circle and soar above them. The birds nest there, breed there; it's a kind of sanctuary for them. There were half a dozen of the islands, and that wasn't so good, because I knew the papers I wanted were on one of them, but I didn't know which one. I had to give Eve credit; she'd picked a good hiding place.

  I could see the islands now and corrected my course a little to point me directly at them. I knew that I was headed in the right direction, but that was all. I didn't have any idea which of the islands to hit, where the papers would be, which island the man ahead of me would be on. And I knew he must be there by now. I couldn't circle each island. That would not only take too much time, but also would spotlight me for the other man, the bastard who had tortured and murdered Eve to get the information he wanted. One more murder wouldn't make any difference to him, and I didn't have a gun. I'd been in such a hurry and so charged up back there with the Joker that I'd even forgotten to take the gun he had dropped.

  I was worried, too, about the noise the motor of my boat made, and the chance that I'd be seen approaching. A man could hide, wait till I got near, then put a bullet in my brain. But I had to keep going now; once Torelli got his hands on the papers, I was out in the cold. And so were a lot of other people. I'd never get them back from him.

  I looked behind me again. I'd been keeping an eye peeled, half expecting to see that another boat or boats had already taken off after me. I hadn't seen anything yet, but I was out too far to see all the way into the bay. I was close to the islands now, and I started to cut my motor and coast toward them when I saw, on the third island ahead of me, a whole swarm of birds rising from the ground and fluttering in the sky, darting and swirling, moving in toward the center of the island from right to left like a wave. It was a shifting white cloud that none of the other islands had in such degree, and I knew what had caused it, what must have caused it.

&nb
sp; He was there.

  And this was by far the largest of the islands, a half-mile or more in diameter, and about three or four hundred yards from the small island nearest it. Eve had probably picked it because a thousand little brief cases or boxes or piles of papers could be hidden on it and a guy could search half a year for what Eve had hidden and not find it unless he knew where to look. And I didn't know where to look. I gunned toward the big island, beginning to hear the raucous cry of the gulls now, and twenty yards away I cut the motor and drifted in toward the shore.

  As soon as the noise of the motor died I could hear the thousand-voiced cry of the gulls piercing my ears. I drifted closer and the bow of the boat slid up on the shore. A wave of white loomed up in front of my face as what looked like thousands of birds whirled into the air in a white explosion. The noise was almost deafening, and I knew now that I hadn't been heard approaching—or seen, either. I could see no more than twenty yards ahead of me except for brief moments when the shifting pattern of feathery bodies left a hole through which I could see for a brief moment. There were a few rocks and some small, twisted trees and bushes, but little other vegetation. Everything on the ground was buried under the droppings of the gulls. And everywhere was that living cloud of bird life, incessantly and raucously crying. I felt as if I had been suddenly transported from the calm, flat sea into a small, eerie world out of a nightmare.

  I had fixed in my mind the position of the first flurry of white, the flurry I'd seen from out on the sea, and I knew it was close, on my right now. The excitement in the bird colony had traveled in a nearly straight line toward the center of the island, so the other man had probably been headed there. He wasn't what I wanted though; not at first. First I wanted to find the boat he'd come in. I circled around to my right, following the shoreline and stirring up more clouds of gulls, and in two minutes I found the boat. It was about like the one I'd come in, except that it was smaller. It was empty. I walked fifteen yards from it and waited. He'd soon be coming back to the boat. And I knew he'd be carrying papers that might be worth, to Vincente Torelli, five million dollars or many, many lives. Something that I wanted, that Joe wanted desperately, that the FBI and the War Department had to have, something that a number of union chiefs and Communists would give almost anything for. The unreal island was a strange setting for what was soon to happen, and yet the outcome of whatever did happen, would affect hundreds, perhaps even thousands and millions of people.

  Fifteen minutes dragged by. I knew the man would come back with a gun at his shoulder, and I was sure, even now, that only one of us would leave here alive. I felt strangely calm. I'd known this was coming for quite a while, and I was glad it was finally here. On my side I had surprise, and that's usually half the battle.

  It was eerie and almost frightening waiting in the now slowly surging mass of birds. They flew between me and the sun, light flickering and alternating with the shadows on me and around me, shadows that sometimes persisted for long seconds. Feathers drifted down near me, and once in a while a great gull would sweep past my face. The screams and cries and shrieks drowned the sound of the sea and all other sounds.

  I never did hear him. But it seemed as if the shrieks and screams of birds got even louder, and movement rippled even more rapidly through the white cloud around me, and I knew he was coming back, getting nearer. I felt ready for him, and I noticed with surprise that I was standing with my feet spread wide and my hands clenched, and that my mouth was bone dry, my heart racing in my chest.

  And then I saw him.

  At first I got just a glimpse of him thirty yards away as white bodies fluttered up before him, but it was his face, George Madison's face. I had known that it would almost surely be Madison, doing his "negotiations" for Torelli, maybe trying to get back in Torelli's good graces, but I was glad to see his face and know for sure. Because I'd wanted it to be George Madison; we'd had a showdown coming, and knowing him, I'd been pretty sure it would probably have ended with a bullet in my back. Here, now, it was just George and me alone, and with that first brief glimpse of his face the anger and humiliation and hate suddenly boiled up inside me, spreading from my stomach into my chest and brain, and through some strange trick of my senses the smell of burning flesh was in my nostrils again, just as real and vivid and biting as when I'd first stepped into Eve's bedroom.

  I waited only a second after I first saw him, then moved forward slowly, straining my eyes for the next flash of his face or body, because I knew I'd have to be fast. I couldn't give him a chance to get ready for me; I had to take him by surprise, get close to him before he realized what was happening, realized that he wasn't alone.

  I saw him again, sixty feet away, a short twenty yards, and I leaped forward, digging my feet into the soft footing beneath me and leaping toward him with all my strength. I cut the sixty feet in half before he spotted me, and I saw the black case he was carrying in his right hand—the black case I had seen before in Eve Wilson's hand.

  George Madison swung his head up, unbelieving at first, shocked into a stillness as he saw me charging out of nowhere at him through a screaming flurry of whirling white and gray bodies and beating wings, with my hands already up and reaching toward him. God knows what went through his brain in that moment; maybe he wondered if I'd risen dripping out of the sea to kill him, and maybe his stupid brain just saw me, identified me, and then slowly forced him into action.

  But the surprise was enough. I almost reached him before he hurled the box at me in a kind of reflex motion and swept his hand in the same movement toward the gun under his coat. The box cracked into my face but I didn't even feel it, and then I was on him. My body slammed into his, with all my weight and speed adding to the impact, and it was like the sound of an ax pounding into a tree trunk as our bodies met. He went stumbling away from me, falling on his back and rolling, and I staggered, then took one more step and left my feet in a dive toward him.

  He was dazed, but he knew now that this was for keeps, for one of us, and he rolled partially away as I crashed into him. Then his hand chopped across my cheek, the jar shuddering down into my spine. I felt that one, and saw his hand rise as he squirmed from beneath me and jabbed at my throat with stiff fingers. I jerked my head aside and clutched for his arm, trying to snap it, pull him off balance so I could get to him, and then he scrambled to his knees, right hand streaking for his gun.

  I clutched at his arm, and caught the sleeve of his coat, jerked desperately even as the knowledge grew in me that this wasn't like a brawl with the Joker, who depended only on his strength. George was the same kind of fighter I was. His open hand crashing across my cheek, the stiff-fingered jab at my throat had told me he could kill me in a second with his hands, just as I could kill him with mine.

  I jerked at his sleeve, yanking his hand away from the butt of the gun, then threw my other hand at his face, aiming for the bridge of his nose as I had with the Joker. We were both still on our knees, sinking inches into the slime beneath us, and George ducked toward me rather than away from me, getting in close as my hand clipped his head a glancing blow at the hairline, his own hand driving for my solar plexus with the fingers extended stiffly so they would burst my heart inside me when the blow landed.

  I twisted frantically away from those stiff fingers, completely on the defensive, with my right arm still swinging above him as it had glanced from his head, my body wide open and unprotected. I threw myself forward, twisting to my left in the fraction of a second before the blow landed. I turned barely enough and the fingers knifed into my ribs, missing the vital spot but flooding my side with a sharp, agonizing pain.

  He might have had me then, with a little luck, but again he slapped his hand to his chest for the gun. As it slid from beneath his coat I rolled toward him, on my knees now and almost falling upon him, chopping with my hand at his arm as the gun swung toward me. I felt the thud as I hit flesh, and the gun fell from his grip.

  Neither of us reached for the gun, a heavy .45 automatic,
though it lay between us. No more false moves for him or for me. We'd measured each other now, knew what the next wrong move would mean. On our knees in the filth, only a yard apart, we stared at each other for a breath of time, looking like two men from another age battling in primeval ooze while the gulls screamed and swirled around us.

  He backed away on his knees, hoping I'd try for the gun and leave myself unprotected for another moment. I got my feet under me and stood up as he did the same. We moved toward each other simultaneously; slowly, warily, circling like jungle animals, waiting for an opening.

  Suddenly he feinted with one hand. I watched him as I stepped back on my right foot, confidence returning to me after the scare that one blow of his had given me—and sharp pain ripped through my knee, the knee with which I'd kicked the Joker, and I felt my leg giving under the sudden weight of my body on it. As it gave, more of my weight pressed on the strained tendons and ligaments and my foot twisted and slipped from under me and I fell, landing on the knee but managing to stay upright, not even feeling the pain now as my eyes filled with the sight of George's body almost upon me and the blur of his sweeping arm and hand slashing upward from his thighs toward my face. I thrust my left hand up, blocked his arm, and grabbed it. He drove forward, his body banging into me, but I kept the grip on his wrist, tightened my fingers. He grabbed my right wrist with his free hand as we rolled on the ground. Then suddenly his hand left my wrist and I rose on one knee again, shaking my head to clear my vision. Something crashed into the side of my head, stunning me, dimming my sight, and I fell backward.