Find This Woman (7 page)

I took one quick look over my shoulder when I was about fifty feet from the building. The Mercury was still there, Colleen hadn't taken my advice, and halfway between it and me were two figures outlined against the brilliance behind them. I turned around again and walked slowly, but I pulled the .38 from under my coat and held it in front of me. The Special is a double-action revolver, so all I had to do was pull the trigger.

I walked slowly, as if I were going nowhere, just walking away from what was back there, and I heard the footsteps, finally, close now. They came up almost to me and then the tempo of the footsteps increased suddenly and if this was anything at all, this was it. I waited another fraction of a second and jumped to my left, spinning around at the same time, and the little bald-headed man grunted and nearly stumbled as he tried to twist around, and he almost fell against the barrel of my .38. He stopped suddenly, his right hand a little above the level of his head, and the taller man behind him bumped gently into him as he stopped, too.

There was little light, but there was enough so they could both see the gun, and I moved it slightly and said, "Move an inch and I'll kill you. Now hold it, just like that."

They froze. The little man's right hand had been slowly coming down, but he stopped moving and stood with his hand almost even with his forehead, a little bit like a man saluting. Only he'd been getting ready to salute me with a sap that hung down from his fingers and extended two or three inches farther down than the level of his chin.

"Start in talking," I told him flatly. "Who set that up back there?" I moved around them as I spoke so that what light there was came from behind me and fell full on them. I could see them plainly enough, but I doubted that anyone back at the wrecked Cad could see much, if anything, this far away.

Neither of them said a word and I pulled the barrel of the .38 over and held it two feet from Baldy's head and pointed right at his nose. He said suddenly, "Just walking. Walking back to town."

"You son of a bitch! Drop that thing. You always walk around with a sap?" He dropped it. I went on. "Both of you, stretch. Hands nine feet up. Stretch!"

They put their hands high over their heads and stretched. I looked from one to the other. "Start talking, and do it fast or I'll ruin you, so help me. Who worked the job on the car? Why are you bastards after me?"

They didn't say anything and for about ten seconds I waited for them, and every second I got hotter and sicker and the knots curled tighter inside my stomach. One or both of these guys were going to tell me what this was all about or wind up half dead, and remembering what Freddy had looked like under that blanket, I wasn't sure I'd stop at halfway measures.

They didn't speak. I lowered my gun down to the level of my hips.

"O.K.," I said. I took one step forward, slipped my finger outside the trigger guard, and slashed the gun up in a fast arc that began at my hips and ended against Baldy's chin with a shock that I felt in the tight muscles of my forearm. He let out one small gasp and started to sag, but I grabbed the front of his coat with my left hand and flipped the gun in my right hand over toward the other man. He was down off his toes, standing flat-footed, looking at me, but I said, "Up! Stretch, damnit," and he almost went clear off the ground. While he was still looking it me I let go of Baldy, and as he fell toward my feet I slashed the revolver down and across the top of his head. He crumpled up silently at my feet.

The tall guy blurted, "For crisake, you might of killed him."

"You think you'll talk to me now?" I let him hear the double click as I pulled the hammer all the way back. The metal was a little slippery and I had to press harder than usual on the checked surface of the hammer, but it clicked twice and he heard it, all right.

"Hold it, wait a minute. I don't know nothing. He got me. Him. Abel. Nils Abel. Oh, Jesus."

"Who's Nils Abel?"

"Right there. You hit him." His voice was shaking.

"Keep it going."

He kept it going. He talked a blue streak with his voice cracking once in a while, but he didn't say anything I wanted to hear. He was Joe Fine, a local handy man: handy with a gun or sap—or anything requiring little intelligence, apparently. Nils, the guy on the ground, had picked him up earlier, saying that they might go out to the airport. Nils hadn't said why, but by now Fine did know that somebody—he didn't know who—had wired the dynamite in the Cad. I thought he was telling me all he knew. About the only other thing I found out was that Nils Abel was a box man at Victor Dante's Inferno.

Then light splashed full upon us. Headlights. I risked a quick look, then swung back to Fine, wondering what the hell I did now. It could be Colleen, or somebody of the curious, or the law. At first the law seemed one hell of a good idea, but out of the back of my brain I remembered Freddy saying something about Dante's influence: "Political and police." I wasn't in my own back yard now and there was no Captain Samson on my side or anyone else I could be sure about. Right now there was just me.

I didn't have time to stop and add up all the pros and cons, think it out logically, because while we stood there full in the glare of the headlights—Joe Fine with his hands over his head and me holding a gun on him, and Baldy crumpled on the ground—somebody back at the airport yelled loudly and a bright spotlight on one of the sheriff's cars swung over and outlined us even better than before.

The first car slid to a stop alongside me. It was Colleen, and I made up my mind. I called to her, "Wait there," then swung the big guy around, eased the hammer of the .38 down, and reversed the gun, then smashed the butt against his skull. I was climbing into the Mercury before he hit the ground, and I looked out the rear window as a patrol car behind a screen of people backed away from the building.

I looked at Colleen and her face was frightened. "Baby," I said, "you can either sit here and wait, or get me the hell out of here."

She'd already had the gears in low and she let out the clutch with a snap that threw my head back onto the cushions. Then she skidded around to the right and hit the road leading out to Highway 91.

I said, "That's a police car back there. If you don't stop, you're in trouble."

She didn't say anything. She bent over the wheel, staring straight ahead, and had the gears in high and the accelerator jammed to the floor boards, and I heard that sound which is like a power saw slowing when it cuts through too heavy timbers, as the siren behind us shivered high at its nerve-scraping peak and began whining down the scale.

Chapter Seven

COLLEEN raced to Highway 91, skidded to the right, and flew down the road, past the Flamingo and the Inferno and the Desert Inn, entering the traffic that was heavier now back on the main part of the Strip. We'd picked up a good head start on the sheriff's car, because the deputies had to wait for some of the people to get out of their way or else run over them, and then had paused momentarily by the two men who might have been dying for all they knew. But they'd come after us.

I asked Colleen, "The cops know your car?"

"No."

"From back there at the airport, then? Think they'd remember it?"

"I don't think so. There were other cars there. I doubt that they could have noticed the license number; all that was so fast."

The Thunderbird was up ahead on the right. I said, "Slow down. Pull into the Thunderbird and park on the left. Douse the lights."

She zoomed into the drive and parked as cars on the road began pulling over and stopping in obedience to the siren. All the clubs on the Strip have a lot of parking space, and there were probably two hundred cars or more around us. Even if the deputies had seen us turn in here, which was doubtful, it would be like looking for the proverbial needle. A few seconds after Colleen turned off the lights and killed the engine, the black car raced past on the road toward downtown Las Vegas.

We sat quietly for a while, then Colleen said, "What's it all about, Shell?"

She deserved some kind of explanation, but I kept it short and told her, "Honey, I'm on a case; I'm working. Somebody up here is anxious to kill me. It must have something to do with the case I'm on now, or it doesn't make sense. But that was my car back there at the airport. I left it there this afternoon, and Freddy must have gone out to pick it up for me, though I told him to stay the hell away from it. He just saw a chance to do me a little favor, and. . . That's the kind of guy he was."

She didn't say anything for a moment, then she said, "I thought from—what you said—that it must have been Freddy. When you told me to leave I just sat there a while. I didn't know what to think, then I decided to follow you. I thought maybe you were walking back. Then my lights shined on you." She paused a moment. "Shell, that man on the ground. Was he dead?"

"I don't know. He might have been."

"I saw you hit the other man. That was pretty horrible."

I turned and looked at her. "Maybe so, Colleen. But what they or their friends did back there was pretty horrible, too."

"Oh," she said, and was quiet.

No official cars came in after us. Nothing much happened except that we sat quietly for seconds or minutes. I looked back toward the Thunderbird Hotel, on my right. Above the entrance the great neon bird glowed garishly, with its round red eye blinking, and fifteen or twenty people moved around in front of the lobby entrance, some of them going inside and some coming out to head for other spots on the Strip. There were half a dozen Western costumes in sight, and one couple in evening clothes.

Colleen said softly, "Like to ride out a little way, Shell?"

"O.K."

She drove downtown and turned left off Fifth Street into East Fremont Street. Up ahead was what most people think of when Las Vegas is mentioned. It was a blaze of lights and color and neon: gambling halls jammed up against each other on both sides of Fremont from Second on up to Main, for two solid blocks. Overshadowing all the rest was the big sign above the Golden Nugget on the left, and beyond that the huge mechanical cowboy pointed the way to the Pioneer Club with his animated hand and thumb. And the Las Vegas Club, the Monte Carlo, the Frontier Club, and all the rest. Colleen drove through slowly because the place was full of men and women and cowboys. A guy blew a bugle at us as we crossed First Street, and we had to wait a few seconds for a man on a horse to get out of our way at Main, where Colleen turned right and then swung back to head out of town. Then she drove like the wind all the way to Hoover Dam.

We got out and looked at the dam, and looked down at the water and the reflection of the moonlight. Colleen didn't bother me with questions or idle chatter; she slipped her hand in mine and we spent fifteen or twenty minutes out there before we started back. It was a bright moonlight night and the stars were clear; it was peaceful and beautiful. Neither of us mentioned Freddy again.

On the way back in I made up my mind about what I was going to do, and when we were back on the Strip I asked Colleen to let me off at the Inferno. She cut into the curving drive that all the Strip clubs have and stopped in front of the entrance.

She asked me, "Do I come in, too?"

"Not this trip. Maybe another night."

"I didn't think so. Shell, see me tomorrow?"

I got out of the car. "I'll do my best. I'm not sure just where I'll be. Maybe lunch or dinner—if I'm not chasing around somewhere."

"Swell. 'By, then."

She drove on out and down the Strip. I watched her go. I'd met her only a few hours before, and I'd never kissed her, hardly touched her except to hold her hand, but I could tell: This Colleen was getting under my skin, getting to me. Even after all that had happened this afternoon and tonight, sitting beside her in the car driving back from Lake Mead I couldn't keep her purely physical attraction, and her beauty, from crowding up in my mind.

I watched her go, then I turned around and took my first really good look at Dante's Inferno.

The Inferno was the newest and most fabulous of all the fabulous luxury hotels and casinos in what the home folks themselves refer to as Fabulous Las Vegas. The word when applied to the Inferno was no Hollywood superlative; it was an apt description. It was between the Desert Inn and the Flamingo on the desert end of the Strip, and the building was huge, surrounded by twenty acres of landscaped grounds and parking space, and fronted with ten thousand square feet of velvety green lawn.

Equally distant from the two sides of the lawn and out close to the street, a statue of Satan stood, forty feet high and bathed in a wash of crimson from spotlights at its base. The arms were bent at the elbows and raised out toward the street, the right arm higher than the head, the left at waist level, all ten fingers rigidly extended. The figure itself was slightly crouched, the evil head bent forward as if peering into the cars that passed all day and all night in front of it.

The front of the club was an intricate network of neon tubing, most of it glowing redly, and so fashioned that as the current was directed from one set of tubing to another, the entire face of the building seemed to be covered with leaping flames that occasionally shot higher than the roof.

The entrance was rectangular, but above and around it was painted, on the face of the building and under the neon flames, the same face as that of the Satan peering down at the highway: a monstrous face with the gaping door for its mouth. And through the mouth a steady stream of chattering and laughing people walked, some coming out but more going in. The Inferno was getting a big play.

The facade was impressive, but it was like the frosting on a cake: there was more, and better, inside. I went in. This was another multimillion-dollar hotel, little different from the others except for the trimmings. And except for the casino: the gambling room called the Devil's Room. The main lobby was jammed with people milling around, and I headed through the crowd for the entrance, just off the main lobby, into the casino. The Devil's Room was larger by far than the lobby, and it contained, in addition to what looked like close to a thousand people, a hundred or so slot machines, roulette and crap tables, and a long bar parallel to the left wall. I made my way to the bar and ordered a bourbon and water, not only because I needed it, but because I wanted to look the place over and get the lay of the land before I tackled Dante in his den.