Lady Vigilante (Episodes 16 – 18) (Lady Vigilante Crime Compilations)

by Hayley Camille

  “How much do you charge to kill a child, Peter Thawnbury?” Betty grunted as she wrestled the automatic from his fingers, sending bullets spraying into the ceiling. “Or is this a first for your gruesome list?”

  “Gotta make a living, crazy bitch,” Fish-pike Pete spat. A spray of blood and teeth scattered across the concrete. “There’s a first-time for everythin’.”

  “Not this time there isn’t!” A fist grabbed Betty’s hair and jerked her backward, sending the gun flying from both their hands into the air. She felt a muzzle press between her shoulder blades. Instantly, she spun, grabbing the offending man’s forearm with both hands and dragging him down to his knees.

  Bang! The released bullet zipped past her arm.

  She chanced a glance to Nancy. She was fist deep in a tête-à-tête with Dandy Dewey and his sidekick. The girl was quick and agile, half their weight and a good head shorter, dancing between them with brutal strikes they couldn’t escape. Dewey had been disarmed. So far, Nancy was holding her own.

  On the other side of the steel laboratory bench, she saw Tin Man over by the office desk where Violet still sat, watching the proceedings as if it were her favorite theater show. Tin Man was pulling a ledger from a drawer.

  “David Grimley,” Betty growled at the man who had dragged her backwards, tearing the goon’s name from his own memories the way he tore at her hair. “Or should I call you Dollface Dave like the other boys used to?” David’s face burned red.

  “Where’d you hear that name?!” With a roar, the goon threw himself forward to grab her around the middle. Betty jumped aside, rounded on his flank and kicked his buttocks hard. He fell sprawling to the floor at Pete’s feet. “No one calls me –”

  “Dollface Dave? Why, what’s the matter, darling?” Betty chirped, turning away to uppercut a bearded goon with a golden tooth. Her fists caught his chin in rapid fire. She ducked, swerved and uppercut again. With a twist, she grabbed his hand and snapped his fingers back, sending the bearded goon’s gun spinning across the warehouse. He screamed. “Oh dear, did I hit a nerve?” she called to David. “That’s so unlike me.” David was scrambling to his feet. “Now, I don’t blame you for running away from that nickname, but what a foul road you’ve chosen to run. You should have joined the circus, darling, they could have used a clown like you.”

  “Arrgh!” Dollface Dave bashed into her and they fell together, smashing into a barrel. It wobbled, then toppled, cascading over them both with cold water and crushing them with the weight of heavy wood.

  “Twelve men,” Betty spat, kicking the huge barrel off her legs into oncoming Fish-pike Pete. She was soaked to her underclothes. “Think of how many would still be alive if you’d only learned to juggle?” She caught a punch to the face and her head snapped back.

  “Shut ya’ smart mouth, pancake!” Dave roared, losing himself entirely. “Juggle this!” He threw himself over, on top of her, leaning up on one elbow for stability as he punched with the other fist. Betty jerked her head away, letting his fist hit the concrete floor, then smashed his elbow out from under him, a touch of the maniacal in her laugh as he collapsed.

  “Perhaps juggling is a little above your skill level. Tell me, can you spell your own name or does your mother still write it in your briefs?” Betty felt the other men bristle as Dave flew into a rage. He ran at her full force, head down like a charging bull. Betty turned on her heel, raced toward the back wall and skidded to the side just before she met it. Dave hit the bricks with the crown of his head. There was a sickening crack. He dropped to the ground; his neck broken. One down.

  “His shoes!” Betty shouted across the room to Nancy. Dandy Dewey had her backed against a tower of wooden crates. His right foot was pulling back, preparing to lodge the axe-blade embedded in his two-tone into her shin bone. Nancy looked down, surprised, then sprang into the air as his foot swung forward. The axe-blade caught the crate and she landed back in the space between man and wood, straddling his stuck foot, grinning. She took the opportunity to uppercut his jaw and knee his groin before she ducked out of his way. Nancy’s face was glowing with perspiration and pride, as she spun back to the second who held a gun. It was pointed at her head.

  Nancy leapt at him, fearless, and grabbed the gun with both hands, obstructing the hammer with her grip as she ducked her head to the side. He fought back, forcing the trigger and a bullet rang past her ear, ricocheting off the concrete ceiling. She fought like a flea on a dog. The girl leapt up, bringing her weight and impressive brute strength down on his arm and twisted it behind his back. She pushed him from behind as she ran for the locker, uncurling the gun from his fingers and tossing it aside. The man was swallowed by the metal cage, and Nancy slammed the door shut on him. She bent the thin metal latch back on itself. She turned, laughing as she ran, leaving him rattling the door of his tiny prison.

  With a collective shout, Fish-pike Pete and his two backers charged for Betty. One was still armed and shooting. Betty sprang up. Found a set of shelves. Grabbed a ceramic bowl. She flung it sideways and it whisked across the space between them, slicing the gun from his hand and leaving him gasping as his fingers dropped to the floor.

  “You should all consider a change of career, boys.” Betty puffed as she grabbed Pete by his oversized collar and began to spin, around and around in a circle, until the man’s feet were skidding on the floor and sending crates and shelves of glass jars crashing to the floor. A sharp odor hit the room as soon as the jars smashed, and their colorless liquid soaked the floor.

  As she spun, another man leapt onto her back, throwing her off balance. He squeezed remorseless fingers against her throat. As she rounded one last time, she let go of Pete. He flew a few yards, crashing into what was left of the shelves and bringing the whole set down. The fumes from the chemicals were intense. “Then again, perhaps that ship has sailed,” Betty choked out, struggling to pull the man off her own back as a second goon rounded in front.

  Slam!

  Betty’s Oxford shot out again, catching the front man, Roland, under the chin. Rounds skimmed Betty’s hair as his hands flew back. She thrust her head forward and down, then smashed it backward into her choker’s face, breaking his nose. She stumbled backward. The double doors hit her back and Betty bashed backward against it over and again, struggling to dislodge her rider. Finally, his arms gave way and he fell to the ground.

  She straightened up, heaving oxygen, to find a barrel in her chest and a finger on the trigger. “Honestly!” she groaned, and grabbed the automatic with her right hand, dropped her left knee to a deep bend and twisted around, dragging her opponent’s arm with her. The shot rang out burning the fabric on her left shoulder. The lilac day dress had been a favorite.

  “Bad career move!” Betty wrestled the gun from Roland’s hand and lodged it under his chin.

  Bang! Two down.

  Across the room, Vladimir was shouting at the two lab rats now, forcing them to gather up the bricks of morphine base that were stored throughout the room. The cook with the broken arm, Nasir, was struggling as he dragged sacks out of tea chests that had been piled atop with old newspaper to hide them. The narcotic still had the consistency of dense modelling clay, smuggled unrefined from Colombia. Betty had been in enough clandestine drug dens to know the scents of ether and acetic anhydride in the air. This was a dangerous business. There were already smashed jars throughout the room, and up on the steel bench, the open flame of a Bunsen burner was slowly boiling a ceramic bowl of morphine and acetic anhydride through the first stage of the process. The concentration of gas in the room increased as it burned. To say the chemicals were volatile was an understatement. The smallest spark or heat or friction could ignite the oxygen and ether laden room, exploding the laboratory into a ball of flames. The acetic anhydride alone could combust on a splash of boiling water. The drug den was a time bomb.

  Betty turned back to the task at hand. Fish-pike Pete.

  “Barely out of high school befor
e you bloodied your hands, Peter Maguire,” she called to him. The gun-for-hire was writhing in pain as he struggled to rise from a bed of broken glass jars, still trapped under the weight of metal shelves. Raw skin was peeling from his face and hands. The liquid chemical from the jars was burning his flesh. Betty looked at a label. Hydrochloric acid. One of the ingredients used to purify the drug. “Such a waste of potential for an enterprising chap like you. You could have filled that gruesome list of yours with far more impressive deeds to perform for your fellow man, Peter.” His bright green eyes flashed in horror as he saw the gun in her hand and cold dispassion on her face.

  Bang!

  Fish-pike Pete fell back, dead. Three down.

  Betty threw the empty pistol into the mess and ran for her daughter.

  The final two hatchet-men were throwing their weight into Nancy, whose retaliation had not tired. As she ran, Betty slipped her fingers under her clinging dress, sodden against her thighs. Her fingers found the comfort of cold steel as she calculated the movement of men. Betty whipped out her favorite paring knife and flung it directly at Nancy. In flawless motion, it flew straight, and lodged hard between the shoulder blades of Dewey Dandy as he stepped in to strike her daughter. A second knife found his heart, embedding at the perfect angle between his fourth and fifth ribs as he fell. Four down.

  “How are you this evening, Manuel Ramirez?” Betty purred, turning to the final triggerman that had Nancy cornered. “I bet it took a lot of squeeze to get you out of retirement for this. You’ve always had a distaste for Peter’s style of business.”

  “How’d ya know, that?” Manuel shook his head. “It don’t matter. You’re all a bunch of freaks here, aren’t you? You and that mind-controlling psycho over there.” His eyes shot a glance at Violet, who was watching them from across the room, her eyes suddenly narrowed. She couldn’t hear their exchange but was clearly suspicious at the sudden lull in action. Manuel lowered his voice. “Yeah, I got a distaste for it,” he spat. He looked toward the back of the room, where he’d last seen Fish-pike Pete disappear beneath a wall of metal and glass. “Pete is mad as a March hare. And that Tin Man fella,” Manuel spat, “there’s somethin’ cuckoo about ‘im too. I got a distaste for the whole business, that’s why I got out, isn’t it?”

  “So why the little réunion d'affaires, then? Keeping up appearances?”

  “I’m here because I owed Pete. He took my last job. I couldn’t do it. I wanted out.” Manuel Ramirez held up his hands. His mouth was turned down. His weathered hands shaking. “I want out,” he repeated. “This is not my fight.”

  “A lifetime of blood and you just ‘want out?’” Betty asked, scornfully. “You don’t think that’s too little, too late?” She dragged through his mind, probing past sins that were better left buried. “There are nine souls on your conscience, Manuel. Not all of them deserved what you were paid to give them.”

  “I know, alright.” Manuel Ramirez sneered as he looked around the smashed-up laboratory. “I’m no saint, and I bet you aren’t either. But ain’t none of this crap worth my time anymore. I’ve got grandkids for God’s sake. I want out.”

  Betty considered him for a moment. For the first time, she was stumped. She’d been confronted with plenty of piteous surrender in her time, but never honest regret beneath it.

  “It’s a shame you stepped out tonight,” she said, quietly. “If you hadn’t been here, you might’ve lived a little longer.”

  Let him go, Nancy urged her silently. He didn’t hurt me.

  He would have.

  No, he wasn’t trying hard enough. I can tell. Let him go.

  Betty hesitated.

  She almost missed the change in Manuel’s eyes. The way they transformed from clear and conscious to vacant as he watched her.

  She almost missed the distant flare of malice, building in Violet across the room. The exultant thrill in the other woman’s chest as she forced her will on the reluctant hitman’s muscles.

  Betty almost missed the smooth movement of the man in front of her. The reach and bend as he stripped Dewey’s ribs of the knife they embraced.

  Betty almost missed the lunge that brought his blade within a finger’s width of Nancy’s throat.

  In her pity for him, Betty almost missed it all.

  But she didn’t.

  Her fist caught Manuel’s wrist. Twisted down. Crack. His face registered no pain. The break didn’t slow him. He threw himself at her. Fought back. Hard. Manuel Ramirez was a man possessed; with the practiced instincts of the killer he had always been. Muscles hard. Reflexes quick. Eyes empty. As his blade teased the skin of Betty’s throat, she had no choice. She whipped another out from under her skirt. She ended his lifetime of regret. Five down.

  Betty turned to Violet as Manuel collapsed to his knees, blood streaming from his throat. Her face was thunderous. A choice had been taken from them both.

  Violet was moving now, edging toward the front door.

  “Running short of puppets, Violet?” Betty yelled.

  Tin Man had his two lab rats by the back door, shifting bodies and fallen shelves to force it open. Sacks of morphine base and cash were at their feet. Tin Man first, Betty thought. He and his contraband were too close to escape.

  A sudden crash and clatter of metal instruments reminded Betty there was still another fly in the ointment. The fingerless goon she had struck with a flying bowl was now bolting for the front door, leaving a trail of blood where his digits should have been. His eyeballs were slick with adrenaline and fright. He had sprung from hiding, taking his chance. He leapt and skidded across the steel table only meters from Betty, taking a clatter of tubes and glass and metal spoons with him. A row of ceramic bowls sitting atop metal stands caught his leg as he fell to the floor. The pasty brown morphine base splattered across the concrete in its acetic anhydride bath, a thousand-dollar mudslide.

  “What’s the matter Felipe?” Betty taunted, as he zipped past. “Lost your trigger finger?” She was going to let him go. For now. She had a bigger prize in sight.

  Felipe was nearly at the door, nearly to freedom, when suddenly he stopped stock-still, just as Betty was about to turn away. He spun back. His eyes, blank. Betty looked to Violet, who was now at the front door, watching the scene unfold with dark amusement.

  “Who is the bigger coward, Violet?” Betty called. “The man who runs from death, or the woman who uses him to kill for her?”

  “I’m no coward,” Violet said. “The coward is the woman who steals another’s child because she hasn’t got one of her own!”

  The fingerless thug, Felipe, abruptly jerked around, as if compelled by some force that could not be seen. His body moved like a marionette as he changed direction, past Violet toward the short corridor that led to a side door. It was the side door that Betty had once knocked on to surprise Marco Pinzolo. Felipe disappeared for a moment, then returned, dragging a screaming woman into the room. Violet, the mad puppeteer, laughed malevolently. It was not Betty that Violet was after now. But someone else. Someone who had been hiding, watching everything that had transpired since Betty had entered the warehouse.

  Adina.

  Her eyes were wide, her face deathly pale as she was hauled, kicking and scratching toward the closed front door, where Violet stood, ready to receive her. Felipe dropped Adina at Violet’s feet. The pearl-handled Lady Derringer was raised. One bullet. Close range.

  “You lied to me, librarian. And I was being so nice.”

  “You’ll never get Teddy,” Adina choked out, clambering to her feet. “You don’t deserve him.”

  “I’m his mother,” Violet spat back.

  “You’re a murderer!”

  “And you are nothing!” Violet cocked the revolver. “What right do you think you have to keep him from me? I’ve spent five years searching for him. And now that I’ve found him you think you can stop me?” Violet laughed, derisively. “You’re very naïve for a woman who spends all her
time with the murderer next door.”

  Adina turned, but couldn’t meet Betty’s eyes. “I didn’t believe him,” she choked out.

  “I did ask you to wait in the car, darling.” Betty said, matter-of-factly. “You’ve made my job here a little more difficult.” She looked at the back door. It was open now, and Tin Man was hauling his sacks into a black Mercury parked in the alley behind. She was nearly out of time. She would have to choose. Save Adina or kill the Tin Man.

  “Didn’t believe who?” Violet asked, delighted. “That arm-candy detective who’s so hung up on your better half here? Don’t tell me you don’t know what they get up to under cover of darkness. You poor sap, I almost feel sorry for you. Why, the last time I saw them together, she was dressed like a hooker and he was falling all over her in the gutter.”

  Adina took the jibe like a physical blow.

  “Enough of your lies, Violet,” Betty said. “Keep the mind games for your puppets. Adina knows the truth about me now and it was Jacob who told her first. She knows why he did.” Betty met Adina’s eyes, trying to force some of her own confidence on her friend. As she spoke, Betty moved toward the bench separating her from them. “Surely you can’t expect us to hand a five-year-old boy over to a woman who has orchestrated dozens of murders. Those gang-leaders may have had blood on their hands, but the call-girls were clean. They didn’t deserve the insanity you forced on them with your mind-control. The murders you made them commit in your name. The bullets you ordered when they’d done the job. You must be mad to think we’ll send Teddy into your waiting arms, mother or not.”

  “It’s not your decision to make!” Violet spat, “He’s my child! I will take him back!”

  Adina straightened up. She was still only inches from Violet’s pistol, which was pointed at her heart. Felipe’s fist was tight around her upper arm. She had no escape. Despite it, Adina’s face was set, her voice hard.