The Lime Pit (20 page)

"It isn't up to us," she said. "I
mean, not entirely."

"You mean you'll have to consult your partner.
That's all right. Newport's only an hour away."

She flinched and pushed back from the table. "I'll
have to talk this over with Lance."

She looked me up and down and sighed. "How 'bout
buying me a drink? I need something to do with my mouth, as long as
we're not taking that little ride up to Mt. Storm together."

I grinned at her. "O.K. One for the road."
 
 

19

WE HAD our drink, Laurie and I. And another. And
another. And around a quarter of eight she glanced at her gold
Cartier watch and said, "I better be getting back."

She gave me one sweet, lingering smile and murmured,
"Too bad."

"Like you once said, another lifetime, maybe."

"I guess so." She stirred the drink with
her fingertips. "You know it's funny how people's lives turn
out. A few home-town pageants. A couple of rugged years trying to
crack the big-time. Some photo spreads and ..." Her voice
trailed off and she frowned.

It was one of those revealing moments when you can
see the sixty-five-year-old woman in the twenty-five-year-old
girl--the mouth drawn down and wrinkled at the tips, and the skin
stretched grimly across the model's high cheekbones, and the bones
themselves poking through like things imprisoned in the flesh. I
understood suddenly why she smiled all the time, even when the rest
of her face was joyless. It was to keep her from looking as old as
she felt. I probably would have felt sorry for her, if she'd had
better reasons to frown.

She got up from the chair. "See ya," she
said. Her mouth opened up and the smile popped back on like a
refrigerator bulb. "In that other life."

She walked out of the Bee and I settled back in the
booth seat, switched off the tape recorder, which had run out long
before, and toyed with the rest of my Scotch. Down the track, I could
see some powerful trouble coming. I didn't know who, yet. But it was
coming. And that third partner--the one with the final word--was the
engineer.

Because it was starting to fall apart between the
Jellicoes. Two people were dead. What had begun as a profitable
scheme was turning into a nightmare. Given enough time and a little
pressure from me, the two of them would be at each other's throats.
And whoever that third partner was, if he had any brains at all, he
wasn't going to sit around and get eaten alive. No, he'd come after
me. And, maybe, after the Jellicoes, too. Of course, the bright side
was that, if I survived it, I'd have the whole vile crew where I
wanted them--filled with murderous hate and ready to sell each other
out for the price of immunity. If I survived.

Jo sauntered up to the table and gave me a peaked
grin. "I see little Miss Muffett is gone."

"Just now."

"Leaving the reek of sulphur behind her."
Jo sat down across from me. "About what I said this morning ..."
She prodded my fist with a finger. "I take it back."

"You don't love me?"

"Not that part. The other. I guess people do
what they have to do, and there's no explaining it. I started to
think about why I work here at the Bee, about the hundreds of reasons
that led me to this place. And the best one I could come up with was
that I do what I do because it answers some sense of obligation
inside me. I guess your job means the same thing to you?"

"I've always been good at finding things for
other people," I said, poking her finger with one of my own.
"That's the best I've been able to come up with."

We stared wryly at each other.

"Did she make a pass at you?" Jo said.

"Pass is probably the wrong word. She showed a
certain interest."

"The bitch."

"She had some kind words for you, too. What did
you say to her?"

"Something about the way she was dressed,"
Jo said tartly. "I would have liked to have torn her eyes out.
She's the one who's responsible for what happened to that little
girl, you know."

I hadn't forgotten. I hadn't forgotten that, for a
second.

Two very respectable Cincinnatians walked through the
door of the Bee and Jo got to her feet. "See you later?"
she said hopefully.

"I'll be here,"
I told her.

***

The Bee shut down at half past nine. I sat alone in
the dining room while the waitresses cleared the tables and smoked
and joked and toasted each other with empty Coke glasses. A
restaurant is a far cheerier place after the customers have gone.
Everyone is loose and clubby. Leftovers are eaten. Drinks are poured.
No one wants to go home. It's like leaving a warm, friendly kitchen.

Jo and I spent half an hour chatting with Hank and
the bar girls. And, at ten, we sneaked out through the kitchen door.
The night air was mild and romantic. And I could feel it like a soft,
warm hand on my face. I'd been sorely tempted three times that day,
so I wasted no time in driving back to the Delores. I looked so
intensely preoccupied that, at first, Jo thought something had gone
wrong on the case. I played up to her, putting a tight, maniacal grin
on my face and staring madly at the roadbed. But, about halfway home,
she caught on. And, by the time I pulled into the lot at the rear of
the building, we were both a little drunk and breathless.

We walked, arm in arm, around to the front of the
building. And I had just unlocked the framed-glass front door and was
pushing it open with my left hand and pulling Jo with my right when I
saw him peer around the bannister of the first landing. I didn't see
much of his face. Just that nose like a letter opener and a tuft of
coal black hair. He was wearing a blue sweater cap and a light blue
windbreaker over a plaid shirt and jeans.

He couldn't have caught me at a better moment--of
course, that was the way it had been planned. And, while I remember
what happened next in minute detail, like a slow motion sequence in a
Peckinpah film, it only took thirty seconds of actual clock time.

As soon as I spotted him, I whirled around to face
Jo. She was smiling, expecting a joke, because that was the mood we'd
been in. When she saw my face, her own face knitted in confusion and
she started to say something. I pushed her, with all my strength,
back out of the hall light. She let out a little yell, as she lost
her footing, and went crashing backward into a prickly rose bush. I
dove to the opposite side of the stoop just as the first shot went
off behind me.

The entire front door flew outward off its hinges,
spewing glass and splinters for a good thirty feet up the pathway and
leaving a ragged hole where the frame had been. I knew at once that
I'd been hit in the back by some of the pellets. But I didn't feel
any pain. Just a wetness and a warmth, as if someone had thrown hot
broth on my coat.

I landed in the brambles on the left side of the
front walkway, face down in the dirt. I could hear Jo crying my name.
I reached inside my coat and pulled out the pistol. My hand came away
red and slippery. But I wasn't thinking of the pain yet. Or the
seriousness of the wound. Gun in hand, I rolled left into the light
of the hallway and looked up toward the landing. He was slipping two
more shells into the breech. I watched him for a split second. His
hands seemed to move with incredible dexterity and yet there was
nothing rushed about his movements.

I braced my right arm with my left, just as he was
snapping the breech closed. He looked up and spotted me there on the
sidewalk, but the shotgun was still facing toward the stairwell. I
pulled the trigger of the Colt four times. The gun jumped wildly,
leaping completely out of my hand on the fourth shot and skittering
across the concrete. God knows where the other three shots went, but
one of them slammed into Abel Jones's chest and out his neck. I could
see the yellow wall behind him turn red, as if some invisible hand
had splashed bright red paint on it. He pitched forward; his head
nodded down, so that all I could see were the eyes, bulging whitely
from the compression of the bullet he'd taken in the throat.

Then the shotgun in his hands went off with a
terrific, smoky blast--straight down into the staircase. The
explosion was like a small grenade going off. It bit a huge chunk out
of the first three stairs, whirling tile and stone and metal about
the hallway like shrapnel, and sent Jones flying backward against the
bloodstained wall of the landing, as if he had been jerked on a taut
rope. He slumped to his ass and lolled forward, his legs stretched
out in front of him, the shotgun lying at the foot of the stairs.

And then there was a terrific silence. With him just
sitting there in all that plaster dust and blood. And me, stretched
out on the pavement with my gun five feet away from me and a sharp
pain beginning to form in my left side.

And then there was noise. Lots of it.

People inside the building were yelling. And Jo was
crying "Oh, my God, Harry," in a shrill, broken voice. And
lights went on all over the building, so that the little courtyard
was lit up like day. Then I could see some man on the landing,
looking in horror at the dead gunman. And a woman shrieked from the
stairwell. The man on the landing told her to "Shut up!"
and stepping over the dead man's legs, worked his way down the broken
staircase and out into the yard. He came running over to me and
stooped down.

Before he could say anything, I said, "The girl.
See about the girl."

He looked over to the rosebush and back at me. "She's
all right." He looked at my back and said, "You're
wounded." Good thinking, I said to myself.

Then Jo appeared.

Her face was bleeding at the hairline and the blood
had run down one cheek. The rest of it was chalk white and so twisted
with emotion that it didn't look like Jo's face.

"Do something!" she shrieked at the man.

"I'm doing my best, lady. There's an ambulance
coming." He looked down at me and said, "How does it feel?"

"It hurts," I said.

"Oh, God!" Jo stamped her feet furiously.

"I'm O.K., honey," I said to her. "Really.
I'm O.K."

She looked down at me and started to cry.

"I've taken a few pellets in my left side,"
I said to her. "It's not serious. I've been shot before, so I
know. Unless I go into shock, I'll be O.K. The fact that it hurts is
good. If it were a more serious wound, I wouldn't feel anything for
an hour or so."

"How can you be so calm?" Jo screamed at
me.

"What do you want me to do? Get hysterical? I'd
get up, but I'm not sure I haven't broken some ribs."

"Just stay there," the man said, urging me
back with his hands.

For some reason, Jo thought that that gesture was
funny. She laughed and wiped a little blood off her face. Then she
kneeled down and kissed me on the lips.

"I love you," she said, wiping the hair
from my forehead. "And I love you."

She glanced back over her shoulder at the stairwell
and got a sick look on her face. "Oh, my God," she said
quietly.

I touched her hand. "Don't look at him."

"He wanted to kill you."

"He damn near succeeded."

She looked back down at me. "He's dead."

Sirens and flashing blue lights filled the street.
Two white-clad ambulance attendants lifted me onto a stretcher and
put a blanket over me. With Jo holding my hand, they carried me out
to the ambulance.

"Did you see the guy in the hallway?" I
heard one say to the other.

"Yeah," he said. "Sweet Jesus, what a
mess."
 
 

20

THREE PELLETS were embedded in my back, in an
ellipsis that stretched from below my left arm pit to about an inch
from the spine. The shot hadn't entered deeply enough to do any more
than tear the
latissimus dorsi
.
The biggest problem, the intern explained, as I was being wheeled
into surgery at Cincinnati General, was the chance of blood
poisoning.

"That and the police," he said gravely. "I
understand you killed a man tonight."

"What would you do if someone pointed a
sawed-off shotgun at you and pulled the trigger?"

He didn't answer.

It took about ten minutes of probing with forceps to
get the pellets out. I didn't feel any pain; they'd given me a shot
of Xylocaine. But I could hear the sound the pellets made as he
dropped each one into a metal tray and could feel the dull purchase
of the suturing needle as it passed through my flesh. When the intern
was through, a nurse put me on a bottle of glucose and wrapped some
gauze and an ace bandage around my middle. Then she and the intern
wheeled me up to the second floor for observation.

"How long will I be in?" I asked the
intern.

"A day or so. There could be some edema or
residual shock.

We want to keep an eye on you until morning." He
took a look at the bandage and said, "You're very lucky. An inch
or so to the right and those pellets could have fractured your spine.
As it is, you'll have a sore back for a few weeks. And you won't be
using your left arm for awhile. At least, not for heavy lifting. But,
aside from that, you should be as good as new."