The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead (17 page)

So then it fell right out of my hand and landed in the stream. That was a good light. Even the full submersion treatment didn’t do it in. I could see the glow of it under the water and when I reached down and fished it out, it was dripping but the light held steady. What it lighted made me want to vomit but I made myself not think about that. I couldn’t have vomited then, no matter how much I wanted to. My throat was hurting too badly.

The light fell on the body of that country cop who had made it down into the ravine ahead of us. I dropped down beside him and felt for breathing and heartbeat but I knew it wasn’t going to be any good. He was lying there with his head bashed in and I was remembering the rock I had seen come down on Gibby’s head. I saw right off how dead this one was and there was nothing for it but that I work my way back to Gibby as quickly as I could. Don’t ask me how, wet as I was, I could know I was sweating, but I did know. It was a part of knowing the rest of it, of knowing that it had been the same rock that had reduced this man’s head to a mash of hair and blood and skull splinter and brain. This one was dead and I had to hurry back to Gibby because I couldn’t believe anything except that he would necessarily be dying. It had been the same rock.

I rammed the flashlight back into my pocket and worked my way back to the place where I had left Gibby sitting. I brought the light out again and turned it on him. He gave me a feeble grin.

“I suppose your cigarettes are as wet as mine,” he said.

I felt for my cigarettes. Now that he had spoken of them I wanted one worse than I had ever wanted anything before in my life. I wasn’t even thinking that I could hardly have endured smoking then, the way my throat was feeling. The pack was a sodden mess. I threw it away.

“Soaked,” I said.

It was hoarse and it wasn’t more than a whisper and it did hurt getting it out, but I was speaking again and that should have made me feel better. I don’t think it did. What did make me feel better was Gibby. He was coughing as much as I was except that his sounded more like normal coughing. There wasn’t any of that hoarse croaking in it. I brought the light out and had a good look at his head.

It was bloody enough. One ear was ripped and blood crusted and above the ear he was a mess of hair and blood all matted up together, but his head looked to be the right shape and that was encouraging. That cop’s head wasn’t anywhere near being the right shape any more.

“Find the cop?” he asked.

I didn’t answer. At that moment my worry was for the living.

“Do you know what happened to you?” I asked.

“Whatever it was,” he said wryly, “I guess it’s all right because I seem to have survived it. Did that cop go off and leave us here to get our pants wet?”

“You were slugged with a rock,” I told him. “Luckily it didn’t hit you squarely. One of your ears looks half ripped off and maybe you have a little hole in your head but you look as though you could be repaired. The cop’s beyond repairing. It wasn’t any glancing blow he ran into.”

“Dead?”

“Head smashed in, but completely. He’s dead.”

“Driver of the car?”

“Look,” I said. “Somebody killed the cop. Somebody made a good try at killing you with the same rock. Somebody barely missed out on strangling me to death. There wasn’t anyone around but the driver of the car and you weren’t expecting him to hang around here mourning us.”

“Is that what’s wrong with your voice?” Gibby asked.

“Part of what’s wrong,” I said. “This coughing isn’t helping it any.”

“Then stop coughing.”

“You’re coughing as much as I am.”

“It’s because something’s burning around here somewhere. The smoke is drifting down into this gully.”

“What I can’t understand is why he didn’t kill me,” I said. “He killed the cop.”

Gibby grinned at me again. “What about me?” he asked. “Don’t I count?”

“He thought he had killed you. He slugged you the same way he had slugged the cop and you dropped face-down in the water. You were out cold and a cinch to drown.”

“And I didn’t drown,” Gibby said. “I see what you mean. I’m alive because you were under me. I was lying on your shoulder and that lifted me enough to hold my face out of the water. He slugs me and drops me. That takes care of me. I’m drowning. Then he gets his hands around your neck and strangles you. He strangles you just enough to put you out and then he lays you carefully in the stream with your head enough out of water so you won’t drown and props me on top of you so I won’t drown either. It doesn’t make sense. Nobody’s that inconsistent.”

“To hell with him,” I said. “We’re alive and it’s no thanks to him. What we need now is a doctor.”

“First one that comes swimming down this brook,” Gibby said, “I’ll flag him.”

I had a better idea. “I think I can make it up to the house,” I said. “I’ll telephone from there and get us help.”

“I’m getting tired of the sitzbath,” Gibby said. “We’ll both try to make it.”

I wasn’t sure that was a good idea. “Do you think you should even try to move?” I said. “You could have some fracture.”

“I don’t feel fractured.” Gibby made another try at standing and this time he made it. “I’m coming back fast,” he said. “I’ve even figured out why he didn’t kill you. He thought he’d killed you but when he quit on you, you were only blacking out and you had enough left to prop me against your shoulder and save me before you finally did black out.”

“So I’m a hero,” I said. “Do we both have to be heroes all in one night? Can’t you take it easy now till I get a doctor to look at you?”

“I feel fine now,” Gibby answered. “Nothing like a cold dip to put the zip back in a man. Don’t you want to know how he managed to miss killing you?”

“I’m not uninterested,” I said.

“The answer’s cute,” Gibby said. “He’s had no experience with victims who have their clothes on. When it was the Bell-Bannerman girl, he worked on her naked throat and it was the same with Harry. With you he put on the same pressure for quite as long a time but he wasn’t taking into account your collar and necktie. They made the difference. He thought he was squeezing hard enough because it had been plenty hard enough for the others but it was just not hard enough for an insulated throat.”

“It was plenty hard enough to suit me,” I said.

“Sure,” said Gibby. “Let’s have a look at the cop.”

“He’s dead,” I protested. “Also he’s across the state line. This is Connecticut and we don’t have the first bit of jurisdiction. We can’t do a thing for him and a doctor could do a lot for us.”

“What’ll a doctor do? Give us cough drops maybe?”

He was hanging on to the car and working his way around to the side where I’d found the body. I went along after him. I’d come back enough so that I could have done it no hands if the footing hadn’t been so bad. I was managing very well holding on with only one hand. I had the other for the light.

Gibby came on the dead cop. I held the light while he examined the body. I saw his hand go to the side of his own head. He is human, after all, and I’ll defy anyone to take a crack in the head and then look at what he was looking at and not have that reflex that would make him put a hand up to check on whether his was the way it ought to be, with the hair on the outside and the brain on the inside.

He didn’t say a word but, reaching for my hand, he moved the beam of the light so that it shone up into the overturned car. The car had hurtled over and landed with its hood propped up against the far bank. The hard top had held. It was somewhat bent but it hadn’t crushed in appreciably. One door hung open and half torn from its hinges.

“He had just gotten out and was about to go away from here when we came down on him,” I said. “A man can have an accident. Why was he so bent on killing the three of us?”

“Back door,” Gibby muttered. “Why would he get out by the back door? That would be doing it the hard way.” He moved my hand some more so that the light shone right into the driver’s seat. “No,” he said. “He never got out.”

I didn’t have to ask him how he knew. I was seeing it for myself. It lay in a huddle against the locked door and it was all too obviously dead. Gibby took the light out of my hand and wormed his way far enough in the open door to lean over and make a close examination. He shone the light full on the face and it was a face we knew. It was Jellicoe’s self-appointed guardian. It was the redoubtable George who had liked to call himself after Presidents. When Gibby held the light close, my hand went to my throat just as his earlier had gone to his head. I’m human too. I could see the purpling marks of strangulation on the man’s throat just above his collar and in the very same place at the edge of my own collar I could feel the welts of just such marks.

“Then it wasn’t an accident?” I said.

“It wasn’t an accident,” Gibby said. “George had someone in the car with him and he made the mistake of letting that someone ride behind him. That someone reached forward, got a good grip on George’s throat and strangled George. Remember how we heard the squeal of brakes and then some time later we heard the crash? George struggled under the strangler’s hands but he managed to stop the car. The strangler hung on till George went limp. Then the strangler opened the back door, perfectly natural for someone in the back of the car, and got out. The car didn’t run over the edge into this ravine. It was pushed over with George in it and the strangler came down after it to make sure George was finished. There’s one funny thing about it. Just a little bit of quite incidental accident, Mac, but that bit of accident saved your life and gave you the chance to save mine.”

“What accident?” I asked.

Gibby told me. George’s head had that oddly twisted look that heads just can’t have unless the neck has been broken. The killer had strangled George and had come down after him to make certain he was dead. The killer had found George quite dead but hadn’t known that in the overturning of the car George’s neck had been broken. Gibby was betting that the actual cause of death was the broken neck. Legally nothing could have mattered less since the broken neck was the result of the tumble into the stream bed and that was the result of the strangling and of the killer’s pushing the car over the edge. As Gibby was seeing it, however, the killer knew nothing of broken necks. The killer had found George dead, had assumed that he’d died of strangulation and had therefore not learned that more pressure would be needed to do the job on a man who was wearing collar and necktie. I was the lucky man. The killer had still not learned that when my turn had come.

“Last seen leaving Grand Central Station in the company of Joan Loomis,” I said.

“Followed by Milton Bannerman,” Gibby added. “Our girl is still knocking them dead. We’d better go up to the house and do some telephoning.”

I haven’t the first idea of how long it took us. It wasn’t that it was so long a way to go or that, except for the first scramble up out of that gully, it was anything but the easiest sort of going. It was rather that we weren’t up to much. On that little climb up to the road I had to give Gibby a hand, and when we reached the top he was completely done in. He had to flop in the grass and rest awhile. I kept telling myself that I should leave him there resting and go on to the house myself, but I couldn’t whip myself up to the point of actually doing it. I needed some rest myself.

We lay there for a few minutes, and when Gibby asked me for my light, I thought for a moment that the old boy was looking for an excuse to prolong the rest period. I handed over the light but I was thinking that he needed no excuses for me. I was happy enough to postpone indefinitely the agony of making any further effort. A brisk little wind had come up and I found myself shivering in my wet clothes. I could feel Gibby beside me. He was shivering, too, and I marveled at the fact that we had both stopped coughing. It did seem as though cold should have made our coughing worse but the smoke was gone and that helped.

“We’re right about how George died,” Gibby said.

He was playing the light on the road. I didn’t have to ask any questions. I’d already had the theory from Gibby. Now we had the evidence to back up the theory. The skid marks were as plain as they could be. You could see just where the tires had bitten against the road. It would have been at the time when we heard the squealing of the brakes that they would have been doing that, and, just as there had been a gap of time between the brake squeal and the crash, there was a corresponding gap of space to be seen on the road surface. George had brought the car to that screaming stop, but he had kept it squarely on the road. There was a good three feet of space between the end of the skid marks and the road rim, where the gully lay beyond. Gibby couldn’t have had it more exactly. The car had been pushed to the road edge and pushed over the edge to crash in the stream bed below.

Gibby got to his feet and stood over me, swaying. If he could make it, I had to try. I made it more easily than I’d expected and I didn’t sway. We headed for the house. We’d go a bit of the way and then we’d rest again, but bit by bit we did make it. Gibby fell into a chair and let me do the telephoning. I called the locals and while I was at it I also called the State Police. I thought I knew what I was telling them but I won’t take any oaths on it. Among other things, I knew that I had asked one or the other to bring a doctor along and after I’d finished on the phone and Gibby insisted that I’d pulled the doctor bit on both sets of police, I didn’t believe him. I still don’t know whether I did or I didn’t. In any event, we did get two doctors. It wasn’t too many. The spare one looked me over while the other worked on Gibby. I didn’t need anything but checking and a slug of the brandy the doc had in his bag. The brandy was painful in my throat but it was worth the pain.

The boy that was working on Gibby had rather more to do. He had stitches to take in the scalp and a couple more to take in the torn ear. Gibby did better than I had in the brandy department. He didn’t have a sore throat.

Both doctors were of the opinion that we should be taken to the local hospital and tucked into bed so we could be watched. I found the idea more than a little seductive, but Gibby would have none of it. Since they were more concerned about his condition than they were about mine, they took his refusal as going for the two of us and I was stuck with it.