The Long Wait (30 page)

I started out the door.

The blonde in the booth said, “Hello, big feller.”

She smiled and the guy she was with smiled too. A little unpleasantly. I said, “Hello, Carol.”

“Have a drink with us?”

“No, thanks. I'm pretty busy.”

She pushed out from the booth, still smiling at her companion. “I'll be right back, Howie. I have to talk business with this lug a second, mind?”

He shrugged and told her to go ahead.

The grin was impish and she backed me into a comer by the cigarette machine. “You didn't come back to see me,” she said. “I waited in every night.”

“Except tonight,” I reminded her.

She nodded. “Pride. Besides, I got lonely. We could have had fun. I like famous people.”

“My kind of famous?”

“Especially. Will you come?”

“Maybe. I was thinking about it earlier. I wanted to ask you if anything was seen of Servo's playmate.”

The grin faded. “I couldn't tell you that.”

“Then tell me something else.”

“What? Ask me anything else you want to.”

“Didn't that peroxide sting?”

The imp came back in her eyes and she pulled at the zipper on my jacket. “The peroxide didn't but the ammonia did. Want me to tell you about it?”

“Maybe I'll come up and watch you do it some day.” I pushed her hands away and stepped past her.

“Do that,” she said. “I'll let you help me.”

 

Pine Tree Gardens looked more dismal than before, if that was possible. I drove around it once and parked down a ways from the building. There weren't any lights in the place.

It was too close to the end of things to take any chances. I reached down beside the seat and pulled the gun out I had wedged there previously. I tried sticking it in my waistband but the handle caught me under the ribs. The pockets of my jacket held the thing as long as I let the handle stick up. I didn't like that either. If I bent over it would fall out and I wasn't in the mood to be putting a bullet in myself accidentally. There was some kind of a gimmick pocket on the leg of my new work pants that it fitted in snugly enough, so I tucked it down there, closed the flap over it and got out of the car.

The rain was slanting down, driven in my face by a stiff wind. The thunder was still upstairs, but there wasn't any sheet lightning left in the clouds. I walked back to the building and turned in the yard. There was a new sign stuck in the ground. Wind had torn the corner loose and it slapped against the backboard.

It read: For Sale. I. Hinnam, Realtors, Call 1402.

Somebody could get the place cheap, I thought. There was a curse on it now. A death curse. Maybe Lenny Servo would pick it up and make another joint out of it. The location wasn't bad. He could even have rooms for rent upstairs.

The door was locked. A skeleton key could have opened it but I didn't have a skeleton key and wasn't about to waste time picking it. I wrapped a handkerchief around my hand, punched a windowpane in, opened a catch and raised it. For a minute or so I stood there listening. The rain drummed against the windows and my breath made a soft whisper in the darkness. Nothing else. I crossed the room, stopped and listened again.

The house was the only thing that talked back to me.

A door banged at steady intervals, keeping time to the gusts outside. There was a faint creak of wood from upstairs, a rattle of windows as the foilage bent and scraped against them.

All the furniture was in the house, carelessly covered with sheets and wrapping paper. I crossed between the hulks of white, went out in the hall and found the steps. Every detail of that place was so plain in my mind it was as if I had studied a blueprint of the place beforehand. I tried to figure it out, but it didn't make sense. The last time I had just come in with Logan and breezed in. Hell, I didn't study the place at all.

Or did I?

What unconscious instinct did I follow if I did?

I could even remember the curious pattern in the newel post at the top. A door to one room had been warped. There was a torn spot in the carpet beside the wall as if a phone had hung there at one time.

My face worked itself into a grimace and I went on up. The post and the carpet was as I had expected. The door that made the steady slam was the warped one that wouldn't close all the way.

The room where the body had lain was closed off, but not locked and I went in half expecting to see it still there, the head cradled in the arms, face down.

But it wasn't the same. Not nearly.

Somebody had taken that room apart piece by piece and stacked all the bits in the middle. The bed, the dresser and the chair had been disassembled and a knife had made a tattered farce out of the mattress. Rayon satin ribbon from the blanket edgings were confetti unfurled on the floor.

The baseboard had been pried loose and jutted out awkwardly. I struck a match and looked in the closet. The cedar paper that lined it had been torn off and lay piled up on the floor. Dents in the plaster showed where something heavy had tapped around seeking out a hollow space.

It was a better job that I could have done. A much better job. So good that there wasn't any place left to look.

The match burned down and I lit another one.

I cursed under my breath.

At one time the answer had been here. It hadn't been too long ago. There was photographic evidence that would have pointed the finger straight at the one who counted and now it was gone.

I said, “damn it to hell!”

The voice standing in the doorway said, “That's the way we felt too. Keep your hands where they are and turn around. Do it slow. Do everything slow. That is, if you wanta keep on living.”

And there was that little bastard of an Eddie Packman with a snub-nosed rod in his fist and the pimply-faced boy from the Ship 'n Shore behind him backing the play with his automatic.

The pencil beam of the flash in the kid's hand ran up and down my body looking for bulges under my clothes. It passed close enough to Eddie's arm to be reflected off the cast he wore.

The kid said, “He looks clean, Eddie.”

“Go see, you jerk,” Eddie snarled. “You oughta know by now. Give me the light.” He took it out of the kid's hand and stuck it in the fingers that dangled out of the cast.

Trying to be casual didn't come easy to the kid. He sidled crabwise over to me, ran his hands over my pockets, patted my chest and stepped back. “I told you he was clean,” he said sneeringly. The rod in his hand gouged into the small of my back. “Go ahead, tough guy, start walking.”

So I walked. Eddie drew back in the doorway and let me go by. “You can try and run for it if you like. Don't think I won't give it to you here or anyplace else.”

His beady eyes glowed at me. They were narrow and mean and almost praying I'd do something that was excuse enough to start shooting. He looked like a rat, his face drawn out in a thin-lipped snarl that showed the uneven edges of his teeth.

Like rats, all right. That's why they were so damned quiet. They must have frozen the minute I came in and stayed that way until I had walked into their hands.

The kid poked me again and said, “We knew you'd be here. You're a sucker.”

“Shaddup, you,” Eddie spit out.

Pimples was new at being tough. He didn't like to get yelled at. “Shut your own mouth. Who the hell you think you are?”

Eddie taught him a quick lesson with the end of his rod. I heard it hit bone and the kid let out a sob that choked off in his throat. He didn't need a second lesson. He sobbed all the way down and out to Eddie's sedan where he got in under the wheel holding a bloody handkerchief to his face.

I got the place of honor. In the back seat with Eddie's gun a cold spot under my ribs. He sat facing me with his leg under him, a laugh pulling the sneer off his face. He looked at me until the car got started then before I saw what he was going to do the cast came around and smashed against the side of my head with a sickening crack that almost churned my guts up in my mouth before I lost all feeling and dropped into a black well of unconsciousness.

My head pounded with every beat of my heart. It hung forward, limply ready to fall if my hands let go of what they were holding. But the hands weren't holding anything. They were balls of meat tied together behind the back of the chair, senseless things that dangled at the end of my arms. I opened my eyes and watched the fuzzy, distorted angles under my head take shape until they were my legs. My foot twitched spasmodically and moved an inch. I was glad they weren't tied too.

Whatever lit the room had a yellow glow to it. I made my eyes travel across the rough woodwork of the floor until they met the opposite wall, then down the side to a chair, and another chair, across again to the middle and the four legs of a table.

On the table was an old-fashioned kerosene lamp. The wick was turned too high and the smoke was making a black doughnut on the dirty cracked plaster ceiling. There was a door in the wall on the other side of the room. It was a substantial-looking door that was closed tightly against the jam.

It was still raining outside. It made a drumming noise someplace overhead, occasionally slashing in waves against the side of the building. I sat there letting my head clear, listening to the outside trying to get in and above it all heard a faint slap-slap of water licking at something that held it back. I could smell it too. The river.

Me and the river. We were both alone.

I tried my legs, starting to stand up. The chair rose with me an inch or so but no further. The rope that tied my hands tied the chair to something too. For no reason at all I wondered what time it was. Suddenly not being able to see my watch was more important than anything else. I sat down again and strained against the ropes, and when that didn't work wiggled them enough to get the circulation started again.

That made it worse than before. They weren't senseless chunks of meat any longer. They were raw, screaming nerve ends that pulsated with pure agony. I cursed and clamped down on my lip until the taste of blood was in my mouth. I could feel the sweat rolling down my face until it dripped off my chin. The drops made patterns between my feet.

After ten minutes or maybe thirty it passed and became a dull, throbbing ache, but at least there was some feeling in the ends of my fingers. They were wet with blood from where the ropes bit into the skin.

Every position hurt. The best I could do was lean forward like I was when I came awake and stare at the floor. I got tired of watching the floor and looked at my legs. The underside of my right thigh was pretty damn sore. I moved and it stopped hurting some.

But I moved it back where it was in case somebody came in and decided to search me again. The last time they hadn't noticed the gun in that out-of-place pocket.

Me and the rod. We would have made a good combination if my hands weren't useless lumps behind me. Great. Useless. Me, I was useless to. I walked head-on into it. I should have known as soon as I saw that room. I should have flattened myself on the floor with the rod cocked and waited for them to come in. I should have done a lot of things.

Now look.

So I sat and thought how nice they had me trapped. Now nobody would ever know. I'd know, but I'd be dead. A few other people would know, but they were the ones who wanted me dead.

Five years, a thousand miles. I had come a long way to wind up in a chair with my hands strapped together and the river close enough to smell. Soon they'd be coming in and they'd look at me and I'd look at them, but they'd be the ones to laugh. I'd just sit here until I was dead.

Maybe somebody would find my body and figure out how it happened. Unlikely. Very unlikely. I wished I could know the whole story before I died. I'd like that. I'd sure like to know how close I was.

I could see the angles now.

Before Lyncastle there was Lenny Servo and a girl named Gracie Harlan. She was a show girl until the breaks got rough, then she tied in with Lenny. They played tricks with the money boys and picked up an income with the con game. Con with sex thrown in. No matter how smart they are it always works. That is, always until somebody has sense enough to squawk.

For that she served time, but it didn't keep her from wanting to go back in business. Lenny found the heat on in the East and looked around for a spot to operate in. He was a clever character, he was. He found Lyncastle. But he was broke when he found it and didn't have the connections that could put up big money fast.

Hell, that wasn't any trouble for Lenny. He put the squeeze on a kid named Johnny McBride. He must have been pretty cute about it. Harlan sexed Johnny into a spot that would have ruined him, then Lenny came across with the suggestion that he lift some funds from the bank for the purpose of financing his operations.

The son of a bitch even had some insurance. He must have been big-time-Charlying Vera West in the meantime until she was on his side and when the bust came Johnny ran to save her neck, not his own!

That Bob Minnow must have been a sharp article too. With Lenny paying off the police and bribing the town into liking the whole setup he had to be. In fact, everybody was on their toes. Harlan, she played it real cute. She found out in a hurry that when Lenny got to be top dog she was deadwood. She was the weak link that could spoil his pretty chain.

So Harlan took out some insurance too. She wrote Bob Minnow a letter and he filed it away. That was the catch. He wasn't to open it until she died, but at one point in his investigation of Lenny Servo he learned that he was connected with Harlan.

Maybe he suspected the truth. He went ahead and opened the letter anyway and found out he was right. He went out and had it photostated in case something happened to the original. He wasn't taking any chances on his safe being cracked again.