The Mike Hammer Collection, Volume 2 (56 page)

“Where’re you going?”

“New York.”

“All right, I’ll go there.”

“It’s a big city, kid. Name the spot and I’ll take you there.”

Her eyes got cold. The frozen expression came back in her face. “Make it a subway station. The first one you come to will do.”

Her tone wiped my grin away. I eased the car around another turn and settled down to a straightway, jamming hard on the gas. “Damn rape-happy dame. You think all guys are the same?”

“I ...”

“Shut up.”

I could feel her watching me. I knew when she dropped her eyes in her lap and knew when she looked back at me again. She started to say something and closed her mouth over the words. She turned to stare out of the window into the blackness of the night and one hand wiped her eyes. Let her bawl. Maybe she’d learn how to be a little polite.

Another car was coming up behind us. She saw it first and pressed back into the seat until it was past. It went on down the long incline ahead of us until its taillights merged and disappeared into the maze of neons that were part of the town below.

The tires whined on a turn and the force of it made her lean across the seat until our shoulders touched. She pulled away at the contact, braced herself until the car rocked back to level and edged into the corner. I looked at her, but she was staring out of the window, her face still cold.

I slowed to fifty coming into the town, then to thirty-five and held it. The sign along the road said HANAFIELD, POP. 3600, SPEED LIMIT 25. A quarter mile up the highway a flashing red light winked in our direction and I got on the brakes. There was a police car in the middle of the road and two uniformed cops stood alongside it checking the cars as they came by. The car that had passed us further back was just getting the okay to go on through and the flashlight was waving at me to make a full stop.

Trouble. Like the smoke over a cake of dry ice. You can’t smell it but you can see it and watch it boil and seep around things and know that soon something’s going to crack and shatter under the force of the horrible contraction. I looked at the dame and she was stiffly immobile, her lips held so tight her teeth showed, a scream held in her throat ready to let go.

I leaned out the car before I reached the cop and took the beam of his flash in the face before he lowered it. “Trouble, officer?”

His hat was pushed back on his head and a cigarette drooped from his mouth. The gun he wore hung cowboy style and for effect he draped his hand on its butt. “Where’d you come from, bud?”

A real cop, this guy. I wondered how much he paid for his appointment. “Coming down from Albany, officer. What’s up?”

“See anybody along the road? Anybody hitchhiking?”

I felt her hand close over mine before I answered him. It closed and squeezed with a sudden warmth and urgency and in a quick movement she had taken my hand in hers and slid it under the trench coat and I felt the bare flesh of her thigh there, smooth and round, and when my fingers stiffened at the touch she thought I was hesitating and with a fluid motion moved her grip up my forearm and pulled my hand against her body where there was no doubting her meaning, then amplified it by squeezing her legs together gently to keep it there.

I said, “Not a thing, officer. My wife or me have been awake all the way and if anybody was there we sure would know about it. Maybe they came on ahead.”

“Nobody came ahead, bud.”

“Who were you looking for?”

“A dame. She escaped from some sanitarium upstate and hitched a ride down to a diner with a truck. When they started broadcasting a description she beat it outside and disappeared.”

“Say, that’s pretty serious. I wouldn’t want to be the guy who picks her up. Is she dangerous?”

“All loonies are dangerous.”

“What does she look like?”

“Tall blonde. That’s about all we got on her. Nobody seems to remember what she was wearing.”

“Oh. Well, okay for me to go?”

“Yeah, go on, beat it.”

He walked back to the patrol car and I let out the clutch. I took my hand away slowly, keeping my eyes on the road. The town went by in a hurry, and on the other side I stepped on it again.

This time her hand crept up my arm and she slid across the seat until she was beside me. I said, “Get back where you came from sister. You didn’t have to pull a stunt like that.”

“I meant it.”

“Thanks. It just wasn’t necessary.”

“You don’t have to drop me at a subway station if you don’t want to.”

“I want to.”

Her foot nudged mine off the gas pedal and the car lost headway. “Look,” she said, and I turned my head. She had the coat wide open and was smiling at me. The coat, that’s all, all the rest was sleekly naked. A Viking in satin skin. An invitation to explore the curves and valleys that lay nestled in the shadows and moved with her breathing. She squirmed in the seat and her legs made a beautifully obscene gesture and she smiled again.

She was familiar then. Not so much the person, but the smile. It was a forced, professional smile that looks warm as fire and really isn’t anything at all. I reached over and flipped the coat closed. “You’ll get cold,” I said.

The smile twisted crookedly on her mouth. “Or is it that you’re afraid because you think I’m not quite sane?”

“That doesn’t bother me. Now shut up.”

“No. Why didn’t you tell him then?”

“Once when I was a kid I saw a dogcatcher about to net a dog. I kicked him in the shins, grabbed the pup and ran. The damn mutt bit me and got away, but I was still glad I did it.”

“I see. But you believed what the man said.”

“Anybody who jumps in front of a car isn’t too bright. Now shut up.”

The smile twisted a little more as if it weren’t being forced: I looked at her, grinned at what had happened and shook my head. “I sure get some dillies,” I said.

“What?”

“Nothing.” I pulled the car off the road into the dull glare of the service-station sign and coasted up to the pumps. A guy came out of the building wiping his eyes and I told him to fill it up. I had to get out to unlock the gas cap and I heard the door open, then slam shut. The blonde went up to the building, walked inside and didn’t come back until I was counting the money into the guy’s hand.

When she got back in the car there was something there that hadn’t been there before. Her face had softened and the frost had thawed until she seemed almost relaxed. Another car came by as we rolled off the gravel to the road only this time she didn’t pay any attention to it at all. The coat was belted again, the flicker of a smile she gave me was real, and she put her head back against the seat and closed her eyes.

I didn’t get it at all. All I knew was that when I hit the city I was going to pull up to the first subway station I saw, open the door, say good-by, then check on the papers until I found where somebody had put her back on the shelf again. I thought that. I wished I could mean it. All I felt was the trouble like the smoke over dry ice and it was seeping all over me.

For five minutes she sat and watched the edge of the road, then said, “Cigarette?” I shook one into her hand and shoved the dashboard lighter in. When it was lit she dragged in deeply and watched the gray haze swirl off the windows. “Are you wondering what it’s all about?” she asked me.

“Not particularly.”

“I was ...” she hesitated, “in a sanitarium.” The second pull on the butt nearly dragged the lit end down to her fingers. “They forced me to go there. They took away my clothes to make me stay there.”

I nodded as if I understood.

She shook her head slowly, getting the meaning of my gesture. “Maybe I’ll find somebody who will understand. I thought maybe ... you would.”

I went to say something. It never came out. The moon that had been hidden behind the clouds came out long enough to bathe the earth in a quick shower of pale yellow light that threw startlingly long shadows across the road and among those dark fingers was one that seemed darker still and moved with a series of jerks and a roar of sound that evolved into a dark sedan cutting in front of us. For the second time I heard the scream of tires on pavement and with it another scream not from the tires as metal tore into metal with a nasty tearing sound as splintering glass made little incongruous musical highlights above it all.

I kicked the door open and came out of the car in time to see the men piling out of the sedan. The trouble was all around us and you couldn’t walk away from it. But I didn’t expect it to be as bad as that. The gun in the guy’s hand spit out a tongue of flame that lanced into the night and the bullet’s banshee scream matched the one that was still going on behind me.

He never got another shot out because my fist split his face open. I went into the one behind him as something hissed through the air behind my head then hissed again and thudded against my shoulders. My arm went on that one and I spun around to get him with my foot. It was just a little too late. There was another hiss of something whipping through the air and whatever it was, it caught me across the forehead and for a second before all time and distance went I thought I was going to be sick and the hate for those bastards oozed out of my skin like sweat.

I didn’t lie there for long. The pain that pounded across my head was too sharp, too damn deep. It was a hard, biting pain that burst in my ears with every heartbeat, sending a blinding white light flashing into my eyes even though they were squeezed shut.

In back of it all was the muffled screaming, the choked-off sobs, the cadence of harsh, angry voices biting out words that were indistinguishable at first. The motor of a car chewed into the sounds and there was more jangling of metal against metal. I tried to get up, but it was only my mind that could move. The rest of me was limp and dead. When the sense of movement did happen it wasn’t by command but because arms had me around the waist and my feet and hands scraped cold concrete. Somewhere during those seconds the screaming had been chopped off, the voices had ceased and a certain pattern of action had begun to form.

You don’t think at a time like that. You try to remember first, to collect events that led up to the end, to get things relatively assorted in their proper places so you can look at and study them with a bewildered sort of wonder that is saturated with pain, to find a beginning and an end. But nothing makes sense, all you feel is a madness and hate that rises and grows into a terrible frenzy that even wipes out the pain and you want to kill something so bad your brain is on fire. Then you realize that you can’t even do that and the fire explodes into consciousness because of it and you can see once more.

They had left me on the floor. There were my feet and my hands, immobile lumps jutting in front of my body. The backs of the hands and the sleeves were red and sticky. The taste of the stickiness was in my mouth too. Something moved and a pair of shoes shuffled into sight so I knew I wasn’t alone. The floor in front of my feet stretched out into other shoes and the lower halves of legs. Shiny shoes marred with a film of dust. One with a jagged scratch across the toe. Four separate pairs of feet all pointing toward the same direction and when my eyes followed them I saw her in the chair and saw what they were doing to her.

She had no coat on now and her skin had an unholy whiteness about it, splotched with deeper colors. She was sprawled in the chair, her mouth making uncontrollable mewing sounds. The hand with the pliers did something horrible to her and the mouth opened without screaming.

A voice said, “Enough. That’s enough.”

“She can still talk,” the other one answered.

“No, she’s past it. I’ve seen it happen before. We were silly to go this far, but we had no choice.”

“Listen ...”

“I’ll give the orders. You listen.”

The feet moved back a little. “All right, go ahead. But so far we don’t know any more than we did before.”

“That’s satisfactory. What we do know is still more than anyone else. There are other ways and at least she won’t be talking to the wrong ones. She’ll have to go now. Everything is ready?”

“Yeah.” It was a disgusted acknowledgment. “The guy too?”

“Naturally. Take them out to the road.”

“It’s a shame to dress her.”

“You pig. Do what you’re told. You two, help carry them out. We’ve spent enough time on this operation.”

I could feel my mouth working to get some words out. Every filthy name I could think of for them was stuck in my throat. I couldn’t even raise my eyes above their knees to see their faces and all I could do was hear them, hear everything they said and keep the sound of their voices spilling over in my ears so that when I heard them again I wouldn’t need to look at their faces to know I was killing the right ones. The bastards, the dirty lousy bastards!

Hands went under my knees and shoulders and for a second I thought I would see what I wanted to see, but the hate inside me sent the blood beating to my head, bringing back the pain, and it was like a black curtain being pulled closed across my mind. Once it drew back hesitatingly and I saw my car on the side of the road, the rear end lifted with a jack and red flares set in front and in back of it.

Clever, I thought. Very clever of them. If anybody passed they’d see a car in trouble with warning signals properly placed and the driver obviously gone into town for help. Nobody would stop to investigate. Then the thought passed into the darkness as quickly as it came.

It was like a sleep that you awaken from because you had been sleeping cramped up. It was a forced awakening that hurts and you hear yourself groan as you try to straighten out.
Then suddenly there’s an immediate sharpness to the awakening as you realize that it hadn’t been a bad dream after all, but something alive and terrifying instead.

She was there beside me in the car, the open coat framing her nakedness. Her head lolled against the window, the eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling. She jerked and fell against me.

But not because she was alive! The car was moving ahead as something rammed into the rear of it!

Somehow I got myself up, looked over the wheel into the splash of light ahead of me and saw the edge of the cliff a few short feet away and even as I reached for the door the wheels went over the edge through the ready-made gap in the retaining wall and the nose dipped down into an incredible void.