Dead-Bang (22 page)

Even then the tip wasn't from among the people I'd been questioning but from a man I hadn't talked to for six months, who'd picked up word over the underworld wireless that Shell Scott was hot for certain information. All it amounted to was a couple of quick sentences from a small-time thief and small-luck gambler called Famous Brown—what he was Famous for I never knew, but that was his name—and it was the only useful bit of info developed from all the legwork and lines I'd put out. But all it takes is one.

I'd been unable to receive calls on my mobile phone, but had asked the operator to keep a record of the calls. When I checked from a phone booth at four
P
.
M
., in addition to some unimportant messages was one, received only minutes earlier, consisting simply of the word “Famous” and a phone number. The operator was puzzled by it; I wasn't.

I dropped a dime and dialed the number. A male voice said, “Gilly's.”

At first the name didn't ring a bell, but then I remembered. Gilly's was a small cafe with adjoining bar well out on Hawthorn Street in L.A., a couple of blocks from Figueroa. It was the kind of “restaurant” where a guy who ordered beer with his meal was considered a gourmet. The joint's specialties were eggs, pork chops, potatoes, and ptomaine poisoning.

I said, “Let me talk to Famous. If he hasn't eaten yet.”

“He's inna bar.” Clatter of the phone being put down, or dropped, then a few seconds later, “Yeah?”

“Shell Scott. If you're in Gilly's, you must have lost the last pot, Famous.”

“And then some. This here's the only place I can get credit. Like gettin' a bargain at the mortuary, ain't it?” He was speaking very softly.

“You come up with something for me?”

“Yeah, yeah. Lissen, s'pose I finger the dude you want, one with the white hairs in the middle of his conk. What's it worth to you, Scott?”

After four hours of nothing I'd started getting flat, a little stale, but suddenly I was wide awake. I could have told Famous to name his price and I'd pay it, but the philosophy of the thief is always to grab more than he can carry. So I said, “Name it yourself, pal. But you shouldn't have let me know you were at Gilly's.”

“Mhuh,” he grunted. “Dumb me. Didn't think of that. Dumb—well, it oughta be worth a couple C's easy, ain't it? Ain't it?”

I didn't say anything.

“Well.…” He burped hugely. It was apparent that he had not put his hand over his mouth or delicately turned away from the phone. Famous was not a delicate fellow. “There's a game I can get well in tonight,” he said. “Gimme a C and I can sit in it.” After a pause he continued, “Dumb—I
gotta
have a C. But if I come up winners, I'll give you back six—fif—forty of it. O.K.?”

“O.K. Where is this cat?”

“Right here. Out in the restaurant, I mean. Didn't sit down to eat more'n ten minutes ago, when I rung you up. Maybe fifteen, no more.”

I looked at my watch, estimated the time it would take me to reach Gilly's, getting a little uneasy. “The guy with anyone?”

“Come in alone.”

“He served yet?”

“You kidding? The dude ordered pork chops. Man, they got to cook it.”

“You make him?”

“Never seen him before.”

“You're pretty sure he's the boy I want, though?”

“Well, he's got them white hairs, and a little mole alongside of his beak, like you mentioned. How many like that is there?”

“O.K. Thanks, Famous. In case he leaves before I get there, try to glim his heap if he's in one, get the plates.”

“You mean for extra, if I foller him, don't you?”

“That's what I mean.”

I hung up.

I started to slow down on Hawthorn in front of Gilly's, looking to my right for a parking spot, then tromped on the gas. A man was stepping through the front door onto the sidewalk, and he was my man.

Not only was the streak of white running back from the middle of his hairline visible, but no more than three or four feet behind him was tall and lean Famous Brown, determined to get into that game tonight. I should have warned him not to shuffle along behind the guy, burping on his neck. No matter, it was one of the two men I'd been hunting for. And it gave me quite a jolt when I saw him.

I guess I'd almost reached the point where I believed I might never run down either of them, a feeling that they'd skipped, blown town. But there he was, looking to his left, then turning to walk briskly in the same direction I was moving in the Cad.

I swung around the corner, gunned halfway up the block and pulled left into an alley littered with paper, boxes, dented trash cans behind the sagging houses. Half a block down the alley, on my left, a dark blue sedan was parked. There wasn't time to check it, but I backed into the street and straightened out facing Hawthorn, waited to see if the man turned and came this way.

He didn't. He crossed the intersection and kept walking straight ahead, moving speedily. A bit too speedily for his determined tail, or else Famous had, unaided, come to the conclusion that he might have been pressing a little. By the time Famous crossed the street and started to step onto the curb I'd rolled to the corner and stopped close enough to his heels that he cranked his head around and gave me a very dirty look.

Then he recognized me and opened his mouth, and I winced, but he didn't yell. Instead he stepped up to the right side of the Cad as I let the window down. I had seven twenty-dollar bills folded in my hand and I held them toward him.

As he took the money I said, “Forty back if you win, remember.”

“Man, I always lose, you know that—”

“Beat it. I'll talk to you later.”

He faded around the back of the car. I could see my man thirty yards down the sidewalk, moving ahead—but suddenly turning to his right. There was a sagging two-story frame building on the corner near me, with a sign “Hotel Adams” in peeling gray paint over its entrance. The other buildings in the block beyond it were all smaller, ramshackle houses even more ancient and dilapidated than the hotel. The man had turned toward one of them, stepping over a strip of sidewalk bisecting patches of yellow weeds that might once have been a lawn.

I pulled around the corner, let the Cad move slowly forward while I eyed the house. As I looked at it the front door opened and a big man appeared, his bulk filling the doorway. Big and, unless I imagined it, not unfamiliar. But because he was there, waiting, I had no doubt he was the ape whose broad back I'd glimpsed as he climbed into a blue sedan—after he and his buddy had taken those several shots at me.

His buddy? Not exactly.

The man I'd followed was less than ten feet from the house when the big guy placed his left hand against the doorframe, steadied himself, lifted his right arm. Light gleamed dully on the gun in his fist. When it was levelled he didn't wait.

My man was in midstride, one leg swinging, when the big guy squeezed off two shots and slammed both slugs into his buddy's chest. The bullets hit him while he was moving forward and threw him violently back toward the street, spinning him, the lifted leg jerking crazily and bending at the knee, his foot flipping upward.

The blast of sound was familiar, too, the deep heavy crack of a .45-caliber handgun, and it was as if the crashing noise itself struck the man, whirled him, shoved him down, killed him. When the shots rang out I kicked the accelerator and the cushion behind me rammed against my back, then my foot hit the brake pedal hard and muscles lumped in my arms as I squeezed my hands around the steering wheel, holding my weight away from it.

I slapped the gearshift up, slid over the seat. When I shoved the Cad's door open the man had already fallen onto the brittle yellow grass. As I jumped out he lay with his mouth and nose pressed against the ground, but he wasn't dead yet, not quite dead. He lifted his right arm into the air, the hand dangling loosely, held it up for a fraction of a second, then arm and hand fell like a stick, like something not really part of him. The big man was still in the doorway, head turning left, from the body before the house to me.

I had my hand on the Colt's butt, was yanking it from under my coat, but the big guy didn't swing his gun toward me. Instead he half-stepped, half-jumped, backward, started to slam the door.

I sprinted past the limp body, trying to reach the door before it closed completely. But when still eight or ten feet away I knew I wasn't going to make it unless I managed to move just a
little
faster, so I left my feet in a marvelous bound and sailed the last few feet through the air. Why? How do I know why?

Maybe at that moment I felt I could go faster through the air. Maybe at that moment I keenly calculated my speed and the door's speed, and wind resistance, and drag of gravity, and concluded that if I gave a marvelous bound I could hit that door a split second before it closed and locked. Maybe, maybe not; who knows now?

If I had done it, the door would have sprung open lightly, it would have offered very little resistance to me, I would hardly have noticed the impact as I sailed past it and on into the little house.

Yes, if I had done it.

It was when already in the air that I realized for sure I wasn't going to do it. It was the wrong place to be. I was in flight and still a couple of feet from the door when I heard it slam with a great crash and even heard the metallic clicking of the spring lock snapping into its slot. But that was only an instant before the much greater crash, the truly astonishing smack and thud and crack and horrible yell.

I knew I couldn't have been sitting sort of sprawled out, with my head propped against the door, which had gotten behind me somehow, for very long. It couldn't have been long, because I could still hear the car's engine whining, hear the squeal of its tires as it skidded out of the alley. I wondered why the big guy hadn't shot me instead of slamming the door and racing away. Probably he was another dumb one. Like Famous.

I also wondered why anyone would have such a remarkable door in such a beat-up and dilapidated old house. The way I'd hit it, the whole wall should have caved in. The house should have crumpled about my head, instead of vice-versa. But the house was still standing, even if I was not.

After a little while I got to my feet. I held my head in both hands for a little while longer, then hunted around until I located my gun, and my car. After that I went through the back door, the usual way, and checked the house. Nothing was in it except rummage-sale furniture. A few minutes later I was many blocks from the scene. Some things were still unclear to me, in fact quite a lot of things, so I pulled over and parked at the curb.

Twenty minutes later I'd smoked three cigarettes and come to a firm conclusion: I was going to have to quit reading the warning printed on cigarette packs, or I might get lung cancer. I had also come to another conclusion. Though I hadn't realized it until now, the kidnapper, blood-spiller, hell-raiser, killer, the guy I'd been after all along, was—had to be—Dave Cassiday.

This time I did not pull into the drive and use the handy little phone. I parked a couple of blocks from Cassiday's home in Beverly Hills, cased the area and found a spot behind the house where shrubs and the bulk of an old silk oak tree would conceal me from anyone inside while I negotiated the wrought-iron fence.

Getting past the eight-feet-high barrier was surprisingly easy. I grabbed one of the upright bars near its top, put my left hand lower on the bar next to it, jumped up, pulling hard, swung my legs alongside the fence and over its top like a pole-vaulter going over the mark, and landed inside on my feet. I'd come down with my back to the house, so I turned around, waited, but there was no sound and nothing moved.

It was a small thing, perhaps. Nonetheless, I felt quite pleased with myself. Instead of cracking into the bars, or impaling myself on their tops, I had soared over them as lightly and gracefully as a bird. After my recent difficulties with the door, overcoming this first new hurdle with such ease gave me something I sorely needed: confidence.

I stepped to the trunk of that silk oak tree and confidently looked for other cover that might hide me as I moved to the back door. There wasn't any. No cars were parked on the lawn now. And neither here nor anywhere nearby had I spotted a dark blue sedan.

All the cars were gone; thus all the Citizens FOR—and the ten gorgeous tomatoes—were gone. Maybe Dave had taken off, too, and I was preparing to sneak up on an empty house. I checked my watch. Just after five
P
.
M
. In another half hour, or close to it, those lovelies would be marching along Filbert Street carrying their signs and banners, on their way to picket the Church of the Second Coming, to make their statement for and protest against while trying to grab newspaper space and time on T.V.

I'm not much of a guy for pickets and picketing, whether by unions on sympathy strike or students in unsympathetic revolt, by hot-eyed militants of the left or right or middle, spokesmen for the poor or rich, vegetarians or meat eaters, whoremongers or chastemongers, or even lovely ladies greatly exercised about Erovite or whatever else lovely ladies might become exercised about.

Still, I suppose there are times when a public “demonstration” serves a purpose and even has positive value—so long as it is benign, so long as the insistence upon “my” rights doesn't limit or deny you yours, or break your head. But the more I thought about—I reached back a few hours into memory for the names, and the faces, bodies, eyes and lips, voices and warmth that went with them—Lula and Britt and Silvia, Yumiko and Emilie and Leonore, Thérèse and Ronnie and Margarita and Dina, the more a kind of chillness of worry grew in my middle. It had grown from a mere cool twinge of concern to a small gut-clench of cold, as if a single icy cell of fear had split, again and again, dividing and multiplying like a virus in my blood.