Everybody Had A Gun (18 page)

Shenandoah piped up. He'd seemed the mildest and most nervous of the crew all along. Now he said "Shouldn't we be getting outta here?" He glanced toward Sader's body and added, "I don't like this."

Harry rubbed a hand along the black bristles on his chin and boomed, "Maybe we should dump this guy in the sticks someplace. What you think?"

These guys were full of ideas. As far as I was concerned, that's not all they were full of.

Flick spoke again. He turned to Lonely, who seemed to be in charge, and spoke earnestly. "Lonely, listen to me. You and all the boys is friends of mine. We been pretty thick. But this bastard turned you on me. He even got the boss thinking' I'm a fink. He's mine, Lonely."

They were treating me like the last pork chop. But I could see Flick was going to have his way. He said, "You heard me back at the office, Lonely. I swore I'd get the bastard in the gut. Another thing. Breed himself said if Scott was pulling one, he was all mine. You heard him."

Lonely made a casual decision—casual, again, in the way you look at it. "Sure, Flick. Take him up Benedict Canyon?"

Flick shook his head, grinning. "Uh-uh. I got it figured. I got it all figured." He stepped toward me, then stopped and turned to Shenandoah on his left. "Gimme your gun, Shen."

Shenandoah bobbed his head and handed over the gun as if he were glad to get rid of it. It was one of the Colt .45 automatics, and Flick pressed the magazine catch and expertly slipped out the magazine, loaded fully with its seven metal-jacketed cartridges, then snapped the clip back into the handle of the gun and, holding the gun in his left hand, jerked the slide back and let it snap forward. Then he transferred the gun to his right hand, cocked and ready to go, with the hammer laid back like an angry horse's ear and a 230-grain slug in the barrel chamber. He looked at me while he talked. "Scott comes in here, see, and he plugs Sader. Scott gets shot in the stomach."

He lingered lovingly over the word. "Shot in the stomach, and he drags himself out of the room here and dies. After a little while he dies."

My voice came out thick and a little hoarse. "That doesn't make sense, Flick. How would I shoot Sader in the back of the head, then get shot in the stomach and crawl around? That wouldn't make sense." My mouth was dry as a Texas prairie and I was cold as the night outside.

Flick snickered. "Who cares if it makes sense, Scott? You don't care, do you?" More of the damned cat and mouse. He didn't care what anybody thought, or if the deal was logical. He'd had enough of my logic. So had I; what had it got me? And Flick was simply getting a sadistic kick out of baiting me. He wasn't through, either; not quite.

"How you like that, Lonely? It looks like he crawls out of the room. Maybe we stick him out on the dance floor. Have him dancin'." He laughed. "We'll sprinkle a little of his blood around so it looks good."

My blood? So it looks good? I glanced out the door on my right, thinking it would be better to run than just stand here. But there wasn't any place to run.

I must have looked scared, and Flick was eating it up. He jerked his head toward the door and said, "Go on, Scott. Get ready."

I didn't know for sure whether he wanted me to move or not, but I took a couple of slow steps toward the door leading out of the office, my leg muscles so tight they were trembling.

Then Flick said, "Hold it a minute. Maybe I should pull it here. Huh?"

I saw Shenandoah hunch his shoulders a little, then wave a hand at Flick, and Flick said, "Go on, Scott. This is all mine. Slow, now. Awful slow. You can have it in the back if you want it like that."

I went through the door with Flick right behind me. He jabbed me with the gun and shoved me to the left outside the door. He told me to keep going. I took a couple of steps with my back crawling, which was just what he wanted. Then he said, "Hold it."

He stepped up behind me and all the banter had gone out of his voice. He jabbed the gun into my back and growled, "This is for you, baby. This is for playing me for a sucker, you black son of a bitch."

But he jabbed the gun into my back and left it there.

The idea had been burrowing in my head all day—from the moment I poked my gun into Flick's back in this room hours before—and now I didn't even think about what I was doing. Some of that old Marine training slammed into my keyed-up brain and went racing down the channels of a built-in conditioned reflex, and I spun around to my right with my right arm bent and tense and my left hand raising fast, thumb up, fingers straight out, and my whole hand stiffened into quivering rigidity.

My elbow banged into the gun as it went off with a roar that hammered my ears and the fire from the blast licked along my sleeve, but my open left hand was slamming down in a hard fast arc that ended against the taut muscles of Flick's right forearm. The gun dropped from his paralyzed fingers and a squawk started bursting out of his throat.

As soon as the edge of my left palm slugged into his flesh, I grabbed his arm. I could have snapped it in two, but I couldn't let that surprised yell get out of him. Off balance, I jabbed with the rigid fingers of my right hand and they cut into his throat as the yell died in a gurgle and I wrapped my fingers around his neck, squeezed till my arm muscles bulged, then pulled him toward me and threw my left fist into his face.

My fist landed high on his cheekbone, a glancing blow without the power I wanted behind it, but he went limp and folded forward. I dropped to one knee, scooped up the automatic from the carpet, and waited for trouble. The shot that had ripped past my sleeve had also raised a terrific racket inside the club. The boys inside would have heard it, and I waited for them to burst out the door.

I knelt there, tense, for long seconds before I woke up and realized they'd have been expecting a shot. A shot when a bullet was supposed to have ripped into my stomach. That was only temporary help, though I wanted out of here in the worst way, and I hadn't a prayer. Even if the idea of the dumb-waiter hadn't been idiotic, I couldn't get to it without passing the open door of the office—and I couldn't get to the too-slow-moving elevator without walking in bright light past the other open door.

"Flick? Hey, Flick?" somebody called from inside. "O. K., Flick?" It was Harry's rumbling voice.

I couldn't answer him. I tried to think what Flick might have done, and I laughed softly and as nastily as I could. It came out like the bleat of a starving lamb.

They'd be coming out in a minute. I couldn't get away, so there was only one thing left for me. If I stayed where I was, I might as well blow my brains out to speed it up. The only thing I had was a little element of surprise. I was supposed to be dead or dying, even if the boys were already starting to wonder. I knew what I had to do.

I was going back in there.

I was going back in with Flick's automatic in my fist, and I was going to go in there pulling the trigger and trying to kill all of those murdering bastards before they killed me. It was brutal, maybe, and it was going to be damn near murder, but it wasn't as brutal as their shooting me in the stomach, and I didn't have a second choice.

My hand was sweating so much I wondered if I'd drop the automatic, but I stood up straight, grabbed the gun tight in my hand, and started walking toward the open door of the office, clumping my feet heavily and carelessly on the carpet as if I didn't have a care in the world.

Chapter Sixteen

I WALKED close to the wall so I'd step out into the doorway suddenly. I stopped for a second, six inches inside the door's edge, and right then and there, with a kind of sickening rage at myself, I knew I couldn't start shooting and killing as soon as I went in. I've shot men before and maybe I'll shoot them again, but not in cold blood. I couldn't murder a man, shoot one in the back or the side of the head when he wasn't looking at me or expecting a shot.

And even if I could make myself do it, common sense screamed I'd never get away with jumping four men. Hell, not even Sam Spade could do that. But wait a minute—there weren't four to worry about; the gun in my hand was Shenandoah's, so he was unarmed.

I heard Harry's voice again, and his footsteps moving toward the door, as the thought raced through my mind that this cut it down a little, dropped the impossible odds, and if Harry. . .

For one fragmentary, detached moment of indecision I stood there. Then, as Harry's heavy foot fell just inside the door, I flipped the automatic's safety lock up and stepped the last six inches forward, raising the heavy gun high over my head, gripping trigger guard and barrel, the butt extending down beneath my hand. As Harry looked out the door I slammed thirty-nine ounces of gun down hard onto the middle of his skull.

My weighted arm must have traveled three feet before it cracked sickeningly against Harry's head, and even before he fell I pushed the safety down, slipped the butt of the gun back into my palm, and leaped past the falling man into the room.

"Hold it!" I yelled. "Don't move!" I caught a glimpse of Lonely at the desk with his hands full of phone starting to dial a number, just as a swirl of movement danced in the corner of my eye. Joe-Joe was on my right looking toward the door, with a gun in his hand swinging up toward me as a yell burst out of his lips.

He must have started toward the door after Harry, and he wasn't stopping now unless I stopped him. I snapped the gun toward him as I spun right and squeezed hard, almost convulsively, on the trigger. He was too close to miss. Flame leaped from the automatic, almost touching his chest, and I heard the heavy .45 slug smack into his body as it slammed him backward clear across the room, twisting him around as his own gun bucked in his hand. He squeezed down on the trigger of his gun again, but it was pointing toward the floor now. Then the gun fell from his hand as he hit the wall. He didn't go down right away, just spread his hands behind him against the wall, but I jerked my eyes away from him. I'd heard the phone clatter from Lonely's hands to the desk top and thud to the floor as he dug for his revolver, and he got it out just as I wheeled toward him.

I jumped to my left, leaning toward him, flipped a shot at him, and missed as he raised the .38 and fired almost point-blank. The slug smashed into my chest or shoulder somewhere high on the left side and spun me up against the left side of the door as I triggered the gun again. I was hardly conscious of the pain yet; my right arm extended toward Lonely with the gun at my arm's end blazing. There was a frozen moment while we faced each other across the room, and I saw the red blink from the muzzle of his gun and then I saw the bridge of his nose grow dark as a bullet slammed through it and into his brain, thrusting his head back suddenly and hurling the back of his skull against the wall behind him. He staggered heavily, then fell backward away from the desk.

Shenandoah was standing to the left of the desk, facing me, and without even thinking, my heart pounding so hard it seemed almost to shake my body, I twisted the gun toward him and stopped myself a fraction of a second before I pulled the trigger.

He stood there without moving a muscle, scared stiff. I'd almost forgotten that it was his gun Flick had taken and that was in my hand now. I'd almost shot an unarmed man, but if he'd had a gun, I'd have been dead for sure. I stepped toward him and he stood rooted in his tracks. He didn't look as if he intended giving me any trouble, so I kept the gun on him while I kicked the automatic Joe-Joe had dropped across the room, then fumbled in the drawers of Sader's desk. I remembered Iris had been taped up when I was here before, and I kept looking till I found a white roll of adhesive tape. Shenandoah didn't let out a peep while I wrapped him up like a Christmas package.

I looked around me then, reaction starting to set in. I still couldn't believe it, and I was suddenly almost sick, my stomach churning.

The place looked like a Roman amphitheater after a tag match. At my feet Shenandoah rested quietly like a partially wrapped mummy. Harry was sprawled face down in the doorway, and over against the wall Joe-Joe breathed raggedly through his open mouth. He'd slid down the wall to the floor and sat there with his eyes open and swimming with shock, his hands pressed against the right side of his chest. He flinched away from me as I looked at him, a faint noise squeezing out of his throat as a little red froth spilled over his lips and bubbled from his nose. I hated to think what the inside of his chest was like.

Lonely wasn't breathing. He was all through breathing, and he didn't have a back to his head. And Marty Sader kept on staring out the open door behind me.

In the sudden flurry of guns, and among all these damn bodies, I'd forgotten about Marty. Come to think of it, he'd started all this; he'd wanted some extra bucks, some extra power, something—I wouldn't ever know what he'd really wanted. A full meal, maybe. Maybe just some more weight to throw around. "What can I do for you, Mr. Scott?" he'd said, calm as hell, unruffled. Well, he'd finally lost his poise. I couldn't feel sorry.

I sighed and transferred the automatic to my left hand, then ran my right hand under my coat. Pain jumped through my nerves as my fingers gouged the spot where Lonely's bullet had hit me. I'd been crouched a bit, leaning toward him, and the bullet had struck high on my chest near the armpit and torn through the flesh and out under my arm, burning a separate, short furrow under my left arm itself. Another couple of inches, I thought. As it was, I'd carry the scar for the rest of my life—but there was going to be a rest of my life. At least the prospects were better.

Surprisingly there wasn't much bleeding, and I thanked my luck that Lonely had carried a .38. The bullet apparently hadn't hit anything important—nothing important, that is, except me—and there was just a little blood and a lot of burning where the slug had sliced through.

I did what I could to stop the bleeding, using two handkerchiefs—the pretty one from my coat and the other one from my hip pocket—clamped my arm to my side, and walked over to the desk.

I could use my left arm, although it burned and hurt when I moved it, so I dropped the automatic into my coat pocket, bent and picked up the fallen phone, shifted the receiver to my left hand, and jiggled the hook with my right. I got the buzz in my ear and dialed City Hall and Police Headquarters. I had a long, lousy-story I was finally ready to tell the boys at Homicide.