A tang of cigarette smoke floated under my nose and the red-eyed man said: “What did he tell you?”
“Little enough,” I said. “That Mona blew town the night the papers got it. Old Winslow knew it already.”
“He wouldn’t have to dig very deep for that,” Red-eyes said. “The buttons didn’t. What else?”
“He said he’d been shot at. He wanted me to ride him out of town. At the last moment he ran off alone. I don’t know why.”
“Loosen up, peeper,” Red-eyes said dryly. “It’s your only way out.”
“That’s all there is,” I said, and looked out of the window at the driving rain.
“You on the case for the old guy?”
“No. He’s tight.”
Red-eyes laughed. The gun in my shoe felt heavy and unsteady, and very far away. I said: “That might be all there is to know about O’Mara.”
The man in the front seat turned his head a little and growled: “Where the hell did you say that street was?”
“Top of Beverly Glen, stupid. Mulholland Drive.” “Oh, that. Jeeze, that ain’t paved worth a damn.” “We’ll pave it with the peeper,” Red-eyes said. The estates thinned out and scrub oak took possession of the hillsides.
“You ain’t a bad guy,” Red-eyes said. “You’re just tight, like the old man. Don’t you get the idea? We want to know everything he said, so we’ll know whether we got to blot you or no.”
“Go to hell,” I said. “You wouldn’t believe me anyway.”
“Try us. This is just a job to us. We just do it and pass on.”
“It must be nice work,” I said. “While it lasts.”
“You’ll crack wise once too often, guy.”
“I did—long ago, while you were still in Reform School. I’m still getting myself disliked.”
Red-eyes laughed again. There seemed to be very little bluster about him.
“Far as we know you’re clean with the law. Didn’t make no cracks this morning. That right?”
“If I say yes, you can blot me right now. Okay.”
“How about a grand pin money and forget the whole thing?”
“You wouldn’t believe that either.”
“Yeah, we would. Here’s the idea. We do the job and pass on. We’re an organization. But you live here, you got goodwill and a business. You’d play ball.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’d play ball.”
“We don’t,” Red-eyes said softly, “never knock off a legit. Bad for the trade.”
He leaned back in the corner, the gun on his right knee, and reached into an inner pocket. He spread a large tan wallet on his knee and fished two bills out of it, slid them folded along the seat. The wallet went back into his pocket.
“Yours,” he said gravely. “You won’t last twenty-four hours if you slip your cable.”
I picked the bills up. Two five hundreds. I tucked them in my vest. “Right,” I said. “I wouldn’t be a legit any more then, would I?”
“Think that over, dick.”
We grinned at each other, a couple of nice lads getting along in a harsh, unfriendly world. Then Red-eyes turned his head sharply.
“Okay, Louie, Forget the Mulholland stuff. Pull up.”
The car was halfway up a long bleak twist of hill. The rain drove in gray curtains down the slope. There was no ceiling, no horizon. I could see a quarter of a mile and I could see nothing outside our car that lived.
The driver edged over to the side of the bank and shut his motor off. He lit a cigarette and draped an arm on the back seat.
He smiled at me. He had a nice smile—like an alligator. “We’ll have a drink on it,” Red-eyes said. “I wish I could make me a grand that easy. Just tyin’ my nose to my chin.”
“You ain’t got no chin,” Louie said, and went on smiling. Red-eyes put the Colt down on the seat and drew a flat half-pint out of his side pocket. It looked like good stuff, green stamp, bottled in bond. He unscrewed the top with his teeth, sniffed at the liquor and smacked his lips.
“No Crow McGee in this,” he said. “This is the company spread. Tilt her.”
He reached along the seat and gave me the bottle. I could have had his wrist, but there was Louie, and I was too far from my ankle.
I breathed shallowly from the top of my lungs and held the bottle near my lips, sniffed carefully. Behind the charred smell of the bourbon there was something else, very faint, a fruity odor that would have meant nothing to me in another place. Suddenly and for no reason at all I remembered something Larry Batzel had said, something like: “East of Realito, towards the mountains, near the old cyanide plant.” Cyanide. That was the word.
There was a swift tightness in my temples as I put the bottle to my mouth. I could feel my skin crawling, and the air was suddenly cold on it. I held the bottle high up around the liquor level and took a long gurgling drag at it. Very hearty and relaxing. About half a teaspoonful went into my mouth and none of that stayed there.
I coughed sharply and lurched forward gagging. Red-eyes laughed.
“Don’t say you’re sick from just one drink, pal.”
I dropped the bottle and sagged far down in the seat, gagging violently. My legs slid way to the left, the left one underneath. I sprawled down on top of them, my arms limp. I had the gun.
I shot him under my left arm, almost without looking. He never touched the Colt except to knock it off the seat. The one shot was enough. I heard him lurch. I snapped a shot upward towards where Louie would be.
Louie wasn’t there. He was down behind the front seat. He was silent. The whole car, the whole landscape was silent. Even the rain seemed for a moment to be utterly silent rain.
I still didn’t have time to look at Red-eyes, but he wasn’t doing anything. I dropped the Luger and yanked the tommy gun out from under the rug, got my left hand on the front grip, got it set against my shoulder low down. Louie hadn’t made a sound.
“Listen, Louie,” I said softly, “I’ve got the stutter gun. How’s about it?”
A shot came through the seat, a shot that Louie knew wasn’t going to do any good. It starred a frame of unbreakable glass. There was more silence. Louie said thickly: “I got a pineapple here. Want it?”
“Pull the pin and hold it,” I said. “It will take care of both of us.”
“Hell!” Louie said violently. “Is he croaked? I ain’t got no pineapple.”
I looked at Red-eyes then. He looked very comfortable in the corner of the seat, leaning back. He seemed to have three eyes, one of them redder even than the other two. For under-arm shooting that was something to be almost bashful about. It was too good.
“Yeah, Louie, he’s croaked,” I said. “How do we get together?”
I could hear his hard breathing now, and the rain had stopped being silent. “Get out of the heap,” he growled. “I’ll blow.”
“You get out, Louie. I’ll blow.”
“Jeeze, I can’t walk home from here, pal.”
“You won’t have to, Louie. I’ll send a car for you.”
“Jeeze, I ain’t done nothing. All I done was drive.”
“Then reckless driving will be the charge, Louie. You can fix that—you and your organization. Get out before I uncork this popgun.”
A door latch clicked and feet thumped on the running board, then on the roadway. I straightened up suddenly with the chopper. Louie was in the road in the rain, his hands empty and the alligator smile still on his face.
I got out past the dead man’s neatly shod feet, got my Colt and the Luger off the floor, laid the heavy twelve-pound tommy gun back on the car floor. I got handcuffs off my hip, motioned to Louie. He turned around sulkily and put his hands behind him.
“You got nothing on me,” he complained. “I got protection.”
I clicked the cuffs on him and went over him for guns, much more carefully than he had gone over me. He had one besides the one he had left in the car.
I dragged Red-eyes out of the car and let him arrange himself
on the wet roadway. He began to bleed again, but he was quite dead. Louie eyed him bitterly.
“He was a smart guy,” he said. “Different. He liked tricks. Hello, smart guy.”
I got my handcuff key out and unlocked one cuff, dragged it down and locked it to the dead man’s lifted wrist.
Louie’s eyes got round and horrified and at last his smile went away.
“Jeeze,” he whined. “Holy——! Jeeze. You ain’t going to leave me like this, pal?”
“Goodbye, Louie,” I said. “That was a friend of mine you cut down this morning.”
“Holy——!” Louie whined.
I got into the sedan and started it, drove on to a place where I could turn, drove back down the hill past him. He stood stiffly as a scorched tree, his face as white as snow, with the dead man at his feet, one linked hand reaching up to Louie’s hand. There was the horror of a thousand nightmares in his eyes.
I left him there in the rain.
It was getting dark early. I left the sedan a couple of blocks from my own car and locked it up, put the keys in the oil strainer. I walked back to my roadster and drove downtown.
I called the homicide detail from a phone booth, asked for a man named Grinnell, told him quickly what had happened and where to find Louie and the sedan. I told him I thought they were the thugs that machine-gunned Larry Batzel. I didn’t tell him anything about Dud O’Mara.
“Nice work,” Grinnell said in a queer voice. “But you better come in fast. There’s a tag out for you, account of what some milk driver phoned in an hour ago.”
“I’m all in,” I said. “I’ve got to eat. Keep me off the air and I’ll come in after a while.”
“You better come in, boy. I’m sorry, but you better.”
“Well, okay,” I said.
I hung up and left the neighborhood without hanging around. I had to break it now. I had to, or get broken myself.
I had a meal down near the Plaza and started for Realito.
6
At about eight o’clock two yellow vapor lamps glowed high up in the rain and a dim stencil sign strung across the highway read: “Welcome to Realito.”
Frame houses on the main street, a sudden knot of stores, the lights of the corner drugstore behind fogged glass, a flying cluster of cars in front of a tiny movie palace, and a dark bank on another corner, with a knot of men standing in front of it in the rain. That was Realito. I went on. Empty fields closed in again.
This was past the orange country; nothing but the empty fields and the crouched foothills, and the rain.
It was a smart mile, more like three, before I spotted a side road and a faint light on it, as if from behind drawn blinds in a house. Just at that moment my left front tire let go with an angry hiss. That was cute. Then the right rear let go the same way.
I stopped almost exactly at the intersection. Very cute indeed. I got out, turned my raincoat up a little higher, unshipped a flash, and looked at a flock of heavy galvanized tacks with heads as big as dimes. The flat shiny butt of one of them blinked at me from my tire.
Two flats and one spare. I tucked my chin down and started towards the faint light up the side road.
It was the place all right. The light came from the tilted skylight on the garage roof. Big double doors in front were shut tight, but light showed at the cracks, strong white light. I tossed the beam of the flash up and read: “Art Huck—Auto Repairs and Refinishing.”
Beyond the garage a house sat back from the muddy road behind a thin clump of trees. That had light too. I saw a small buttoned-up coupe in front of the wooden porch.
The first thing was the tires, if it could be worked, and they didn’t know me. It was a wet night for walking.
I snapped the flash out and rapped on the doors with it. The light inside went out. I stood there licking rain off my upper lip, the flash in my left hand, my right inside my coat. I had the Luger back under my arm again.
A voice spoke through the door, and didn’t sound pleased.
“What you want? Who are you?”
“Open up,” I said. “I’ve got two flat tires on the highway and only one spare. I need help.”
“We’re closed up, mister. Realito’s a mile west of here.”
I started to kick the door. There was swearing inside, then another, much softer voice.
“A wise guy, huh? Open up, Art.”
A bolt squealed and half of the door sagged inward. I snapped the flash again and it hit a gaunt face. Then an arm swept and knocked it out of my hand. A gun had just peeked at me from the flailing hand.
I dropped low, felt around for the flash and was still. I just didn’t pull a gun.
“Kill the spot, mister. Guys get hurt that way.”
The flash was burning down in the mud. I snapped it off, stood up with it. Light went on inside the garage, outlined a tall man in coveralls. He backed inward and his gun held on me.
“Come on in and shut the door.”
I did that. “Tacks all over the end of your street,” I said. “I thought you wanted the business.”
“Ain’t you got any sense? A bank job was pulled at Realito this afternoon.”
“I’m a stranger here,” I said, remembering the knot of men in front of the bank in the rain.
“Okay, okay. Well there was and the punks are hid out somewhere in the hills, they say. You stepped on their tacks, huh?”
“So it seems.” I looked at the other man in the garage.
He was short, heavy-set, with a cool brown face and cool brown eyes. He wore a belted raincoat of brown leather. His brown hat had the usual rakish tilt and was dry. His hands were in his pockets and he looked bored.
There was a hot sweetish smell of pyroxylin paint on the air. A big sedan over in the corner had a paint gun lying on its fender. It was a Buick, almost new. It didn’t need the paint it was getting.
The man in coveralls tucked his gun out of sight through a flap in the side of his clothes. He looked at the brown man. The brown man looked at me and said gently: “Where you from, stranger?”
“Seattle,” I said.
“Going west—to the big city?” He had a soft voice, soft and dry, like the rustle of well-worn leather.
“Yes. How far is it?”
“About forty miles. Seems farther in this weather. Come the long way, didn’t you? By Tahoe and Lone Pine?”
“Not Tahoe,” I said. “Reno and Carson City.”
“Still the long way.” A fleeting smile touched the brown lips.
“Take a jack and get his flats, Art.”
“Now, listen, Lash—” the man in the coveralls growled, and stopped as though his throat had been cut from ear to ear.
I could have sworn that he shivered. There was dead silence. The brown man didn’t move a muscle. Something looked out of his eyes, and then his eyes lowered, almost shyly. His voice was the same soft, dry rustle of sound.
“Take two jacks, Art. He’s got two flats.”
The gaunt man swallowed. Then he went over to a corner and put a coat on, and a cap. He grabbed up a socket wrench and a handjack and wheeled a dolly jack over to the doors.
“Back on the highway, is it?” he asked me almost tenderly.
“Yeah. You can use the spare for one spot, if you’re busy,” I said.
“He’s not busy,” the brown man said and looked at his fingernails.
Art went out with his tools. The door shut again. I looked at the Buick. I didn’t look at Lash Yeager. I knew it was Lash Yeager. There wouldn’t be two men called Lash that came to that garage. I didn’t look at him because I would be looking across the sprawled body of Larry Batzel, and it would show in my face. For a moment, anyway.
He glanced towards the Buick himself. “Just a panel job to start with,” he drawled. “But the guy that owns it has dough and his driver needed a few bucks. You know the racket.”
“Sure,” I said.
The minutes passed on tiptoe. Long, sluggish minutes. Then feet crunched outsi
de and the door was pushed open. The light hit pencils of rain and made silver wires of them. Art trundled two muddy flats in sulkily, kicked the door shut, let one of the flats fall on its side. The rain and fresh air had given him his nerve back. He looked at me savagely.
“Seattle,” he snarled. “Seattle, my eye!”
The brown man lit a cigarette as if he hadn’t heard. Art peeled his coat off and yanked my tire up on a rim spreader, tore it loose viciously, had the tube out and cold-patched in nothing flat. He strode scowling over to the wall near me and grabbed an air hose, let enough air into the tube to give it body, and hefted it in both hands to dip it in a washtub of water.
I was a sap, but their teamwork was very good. Neither had looked at the other since Art came back with my tires.
Art tossed the air-stiffened tube up casually, caught it with both hands wide, looked it over sourly beside the washtub of water, took one short easy step and slammed it down over my head and shoulders.
He jumped behind me in a flash, leaned his weight down on the rubber, dragged it tight against my chest and arms. I could move my hands, but I couldn’t get near my gun.
The brown man brought his right hand out of his pocket and tossed a wrapped cylinder of nickels up and down on his palm as he stepped lithely across the floor.
I heaved back hard, then suddenly threw all my weight forward. Just as suddenly Art let go of the tube, and kneed me from behind.
I sprawled, but I never knew when I reached the floor. The fist with the weighted tube of nickels met me in mid-flight. Perfectly timed, perfectly weighted, and with my own weight to help it out.
I went out like a puff of dust in a draft.
7
It seemed there was a woman and she was sitting beside a lamp. Light shone on my face, so I shut my eyes again and tried to look at her through my eyelashes. She was so platinumed that her head shone like a silver fruit bowl.
She wore a green traveling dress with a mannish cut to it and a broad white collar falling over the lapels. A sharp-angled glossy bag stood at her feet. She was smoking, and a drink was tall and pale at her elbow.
Collected Stories (Everyman's Library) Page 53
