One Lonely Night (21 page)

I signaled an okay with my lights and gripped the wheel. The lights came closer.

I didn’t watch the mirror. I had my eyes going between the road and the lightbeams on the outside lane that got brighter as they came closer when all of a sudden the beams swerved and weren’t there any more. When I looked they were going in a crazy rolling pattern end over end into the field alongside the road.

I half whispered, “Cripes!” and slammed on the brakes. A handful of cars shot by the accident and began to pull in to a stop in front of me.

Ethel was rigid in her seat, her hands pushing her away from the windshield where the quick stop had thrown her. “Mike! What ...”

I yanked the emergency up. “Stay here. A car went over behind us.”

She gasped and said something I didn’t catch because I was out and running back toward the car. It was upside down and both doors were open. The horn blasted, a man screamed and the lights still punched holes in the night. I was the first one there, a hundred yards ahead of anyone else.

I had time to see the tommy gun on the grass and the wallet inside the car. So that was it. That was how it was to be pulled off. One quick blast from a chatter gun that would sweep my car and it was all over. Somebody groaned in the darkness and I didn’t bother to see who it was. They deserved everything they got. I grabbed that tommy gun and the wallet and ducked behind the car in the darkness and ran back down the road. The others had just reached the wreck and were hollering for somebody to get a doctor.

Ethel screamed when I threw the trunk open and I yelled for her to shut up. I tossed the tommy gun on the spare tire and shut the lid. There were more cars coasting up, threading through the jam along the road. A siren screamed its way up and two state cops started the procession moving again. I joined the line and got away from there.

“Who was it, Mike? What happened back there?”

“Just an accident,” I grinned. “A couple of guys were going too fast and they rolled over.”

“Were they ... hurt?”

“I didn’t stay to look. They weren’t dead ... yet.” I grinned again and her face tightened. She looked at me with an intense loathing and the tears started again.

“Don’t worry, baby. Don’t be so damn soft-hearted. You know what the Party policies are. You have to be cold and hard. You aren’t forgetting, are you?”

The “no” came through her teeth.

“Hell, the ground was soft and the car wasn’t banged up much. They were probably just knocked out. You know, you have to get over being squeamish about such things.”

Ethel shifted in her seat and wouldn’t look at me again. We came to the drive and the trees that hung over it. We pulled up to the front of the cabin that nestled on the bluff atop the river and sat there in the dark watching the lights of the river boats.

Red and green eyes. No, they were boats. From far away came a dull booming, like a giant kettledrum. I had heard it once before, calling that way. It was only a channel marker, only a steel bell on a float that clanged when the tide and the waves swung it. I felt a shudder cross my shoulders and I said, “Shall we go in?”

She answered by opening the door. I went into the cabin behind her.

I closed the door and reached behind my back and turned the key in the lock. Ethel heard the ominous click and stopped. She looked over her shoulder at me once, smiled and went on. I watched her throw her mink on the sofa then put a match to the tapers in the holders.

She thought it was a love nest. We were locked in against the world where we could practice the human frailties without interruption. She thought I didn’t know and was going to give her all for the party so as not to arouse my suspicions. She was crying softly as if the sudden passion was too much for her.

I put the key in my pocket and crossed the room to where she was and put my hands on her shoulders. She spun around, her hands locking behind my waist, her mouth reaching up for mine. I kissed her with a brutal force she’d remember and while I kissed her my fingers hooked in the fabric of her dress.

She ripped her mouth away from mine and pressed it against my cheek. She was crying hard and she said, “I love you, Mike. I never wanted to love again and I did. I love you.” It was so low I hardly heard it.

My teeth were showing in a grin. I raised my hand until it was against her breast and pushed. Ethel staggered back a step and I yanked with the hand that held her dress and it came off in one piece with a quick loud tear, leaving her gasping and hurt with vivid red marks on her skin where the fabric had twisted and caught.

She gasped, pressed the back of her hand to her mouth and looked at me through eyes wide with fear. “Mike ... you didn’t have to ...”

“Shut up.” I took a step forward and she backed off, slowly, slowly, until the wall was at her back and she could retreat no more. “Am I going to rip ’em right off your hide, Ethel?”

Her head shook, unbelieving what was happening to her. It only lasted a moment, and her hands that trembled so bent up behind her back and the bra fell away and landed at her feet. Her eyes were on mine as she slid her hands inside the fragile silk of the shorts and pushed them down.

When she stepped out of them I slid my belt off and let it dangle from my hand. I watched her face. I saw the gamut of emotions flash by in swift succession, leaving a startled expression of pure animal terror.

“Maybe you should know why you’re getting this, Ethel. It’s something you should have gotten a long time ago. Your father should have given it to you when you started fooling around one of those Commie bastards who was after the dough you could throw his way instead of yourself. I’m going to lace the hell out of you and you can scream all you want, and nobody will be around to hear you but me and that’s what I want to hear.

“You put the finger on me twice now. You fingered me when you saw the badge inside my wallet and the party put a man on my back. They put a lot of men, I guess. Two of ’em are dead already. It didn’t go so good and you saw a chance to finger me again in the lobby back there. What did you expect for it, a promotion or something?”

I started to swing the belt back and forth very gently. Ethel pressed against the wall, her face a pale oval. “Mike ... it wasn’t ...”

“Keep quiet,” I said.

A naked woman and a leather belt. I looked at her, so bare and so pretty, hands pressed for support against the paneling, legs spread apart to hold a precarious balance, a flat stomach hollowed under the fear that burned her body a faint pink, lovely smooth breasts, firm with terrible excitement, rising and falling with every gasping breath. A gorgeous woman who had been touched by the hand of the devil.

I raised the belt and swung it and heard the sharp crack of the leather against her thighs and her scream and that horrible blasting roar all at once. Her body twisted and fell while I was running for the window with the .45 in my hand pumping slugs into the night and shouting at the top of my voice.

And there in the darkness I heard a body crashing through the brush, running for the road. I ran to the door that I had locked myself and cursed my own stupidity while I fumbled for the key in my pocket.

The door came open, but there was only silence outside, a dead, empty silence. I jammed a fresh clip into the gun and held it steady, deliberately standing outlined in the light of the door asking to be made a target.

I heard it again, the heavy pounding of feet going away. They were too far to catch. When they stopped a motor roared into life and he was gone. My hands had the shakes again and I had to drop the rod back in the sling. The prints of his feet were in the grass, winding around the house. I followed them to the window and bent over to pick up the hat.

A pork-pie hat. It had a U-shaped nick taken out of the crown. The boy in the blue Chewy. Mr. MVD himself, a guy who looked like a schoolboy and could pass in a crowd for anything but what he was. I grinned because he was one thing he shouldn’t have been, a lousy shot. I was duck soup there in that room with my back toward him and he missed. Maybe I was supposed to he his first corpse and he got nervous. Yeah. I turned and looked in the window.

Ethel was still on the floor and a trickle of red drained from her body.

I ran back to her, stumbling over things in the darkness. I turned her over and saw the hole under her shoulder, a tiny blue thing that oozed blood slowly and was beginning to swell at the edges.

I said, “Ethel ... Ethel honey!”

Her eyes came open and she looked tired, so tired. “It ... doesn’t hurt, Mike.”

“I know. It won’t for a while. Ethel ... I’m sorry. God, I feel awful.”

“Mike ... don’t.”

She closed her eyes when I ran my hand over her cheek. “You said ... a badge, Mike. You’re not one of them, are you?”

“No. I’m a cop.”

“I’m ... glad. After ... I met you I saw ... the truth, Mike. I knew ... I had been a fool.”

“No more talking, Ethel. I’m going for a doctor. Don’t talk.”

She found my hand and hung on. “Let me, Mike ... please. Will I die?”

“I don’t know, Ethel. Let me go for a doctor.”

“No ... I want to tell you ... I loved you. I’m glad it happened. I had to love somebody ... else.”

I forced her fingers off my hand and pushed her arm away gently. There was a phone on the bar and I lifted it to my ear. I dialed the operator and had a hard time keeping my voice level. I said I wanted a doctor and wanted one quick. She told me to wait and connected me with a crisp voice that sounded steady and alert. I told him where we were and to get here fast. He said he would hurry and broke the connection.

I knelt beside her and stroked her hair until her eyes came open, silently protesting the pain that had started. Her shoulder twitched once and the blood started again. I tried to be gentle. I got my arms under her and carried her to the couch. The wound was a deeper blue and I prayed that there was no internal hemmorrhage.

I sat beside her holding her hand. I cursed everything and everybody. I prayed a little and I swore again. I had thoughts that tried to drive me mad.

It was a long while before I realized that she was looking at me. She struggled to find words, her mind clouding from the shock of the bullet. I let her talk and heard her say, “I’m not ... one of them any more. I told ... everything ... I told ...”

Her eyes had a glazed look. “Please don’t try to talk, kid, please.”

She never heard me. Her lips parted, moved. “I never ... told them about you ... Mike. I never saw ... your badge. Tonight ... those men ...” It was too much for her. She closed her eyes and was still, only the cover I had thrown over her moved enough to tell that she was still alive.

I never heard the doctor come in. He was a tall man with a face that had looked on much of the world. He stepped past me and leaned over her, his hand opening the bag he carried. I sat and waited, smoking one cigarette after another. The air reeked with a sharp chemical smell and the doctor was a tall shadow passing back and forth across my line of vision, doing things I wasn’t aware of, desperate in his haste.

His voice came at me several times before I answered him. He said, “She will need an ambulance.”

I came out of the chair and went to the phone. The operator said she would call and I hung up. I turned around. “How is she, doc?”

“We won’t know for a while yet. There’s a slight chance that she’ll pull through.” His whole body expressed what he felt. Disgust. Anger. His voice had a demanding, exasperated tone. “What happened?”

Perhaps it was the sharpness of his question that startled me into a logical line of reasoning. There was a sudden clarity about the whole thing I hadn’t noticed before I heard Ethel telling me that she had pulled out of the party and it left me with an answer that said this time it wasn’t me they were after ... it was her ... and Pork Pie had been a good shot. He would have been a dead shot, only Ethel had twisted when I laid the strap across her and the bullet that was intended for her heart had missed by a fraction and might give her life back to her.

The soft kill-music that I always hear at the wrong times took up a beat and was joined by a multitude of ghostly instruments that plucked at my mind to drive away any reason that I had left.

I walked to the doctor and stared at his eyes so he could see that I had looked on the world too, and could see the despair, the lust, the same dirty thoughts that he had seen in so many others and said, “Do you know who I am, doctor?”

He looked long this time, searching me. “Your face is familiar.”

“It should be, doctor. You’ve seen it in the papers. You’ve read about it many times. It’s been described a hundred different ways and there’s always that reference to a certain kill-look that I have. My name is Mike Hammer. I’m a private detective. I’ve killed a lot of people.”

He knew me then; his eyes asked if I were trying to buy his silence with the price of death. “Did you do that to her too?”

“No, doctor. Somebody else did that, and for it that somebody is going to die a thousand times. It wasn’t just one person who wanted that girl dead. One person ordered it, but many demanded it. I’m not going to tell you the story of what lies behind this, but I will tell you one thing. It’s so damned important that it touches your life and mine and the lives of everyone in this country and unless you want to see the same thing happen again and again you’ll have to hold up your report.

“You know who I am and I can show you my papers so there will never be any trouble in finding me if you think it should be done. But listen ... if ever you believed anything, believe this ... if I get connected with this I’ll be tied up in that crazy web of police detail and a lot of other people will die. Do you understand me?”

“No.” Just like that, no. I tried to keep from grabbing his neck in my hands and forcing my words down his throat. My face went wild and I couldn’t control it. The doctor didn’t scare, he just stood there and watched me make myself keep from killing him too.