Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  “Do you think we should go back to town?”

  “It wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

  Alan grimly shook his head. “That wouldn’t help. If Mattlock gets away tonight and stays in the clear, there won’t be any use trying to hide from him.”

  Hagan said again: “Well, I thought I’d tell you. Chances are he’ll never get this far, anyway, even if he does head in this direction. We ought to pick him up inside of an hour. I’ll let you know when we do.” He sounded brisk and cheerful.

  “All right,” Alan said.

  HE STOOD beside the road and watched Corporal Hagan return to the pool of light in front of the restaurant. The trooper paused beside his motorcycle and spoke a few words to the men waiting for information. Then he mounted and roared off down the highway.

  It was utterly dark down in the creek valley now, except for a few bungalow lights on the opposite bank. Alan’s place was lost in the inky blackness. Lightning rippled across the sky in a blue-white sheet of flame, then the thunder rolled in slow, ominous boomings. A sudden draft of cold air washed Alan’s lean face, and he was surprised to find himself shivering. He moved down the slope, following the ruts formed by his car which was parked beside the bungalow. When his feet swished through tall grass he knew he was off the road, and he kept direction that way.

  He didn’t know where the two men came from. They seemed to rise up out of the dark ground like noiseless ghosts and flank him. One moment he was walking alone toward the bungalow—the next moment they were there, pressing in toward him with menacing silence.

  “Hold it,” a voice growled.

  Panic seized Alan for a second. He stopped dead, began to whirl backward toward the highway. Something hard was jabbed into his back. He went numb all over with the cold shock of a gun muzzle grating against his spine.

  He stood frozen, said: “I’ll hold it, What’s up?” His voice was surprisingly calm.

  The growling voice said: “Just take it easy. See has he got a gun, Lew.”

  Alan could make them out now. A “big, fat man wearing a pale gray hat and a sloppy seersucker suit. The other was shorter and younger, with cold white slits for eyes. The younger man held the gun in Alan’s back. He swallowed, tried to control the pounding of his heart as deft hands flitted over his shirt and patted the pockets of his old white flannels.

  “He’s clean. Sure he’s Alan Graham?”

  “Sure. His wife’s in the bungalow, ain’t she?”

  A dry tongue of lightning flicked across the black sky. Thunder rolled and rumbled. In the blue-white glare Alan could make out the two with even more clarity. A large, lazy drop of rain spattered on his thin cheek.

  He took a breath and said to the fat man: “You’re Checker Moog. Your young pal is Lew Gramm. You used to be Zinzi’s lieutenants.”

  The fat one chuckled, a sound like oil pouring from a narrow-necked bottle. “Ain’t it a fact! You’re kinda clever. See can you guess some more.”

  Alan said softly: “You helped engineer Zinzi Mattlock’s escape. You’re waiting for him here.”

  “Check.”

  “Did you tell him my wife is here, too?”

  The fat man, Checker Moog, nodded his big head ponderously. He made more oily sounds, then his voice hardened suddenly. “That’s why we expect Zinzi to show up here. Take it easy, Graham. You and your wife won’t get hurt—not if you behave.”

  Alan said: “What do you want me to do? I can’t fight back; I haven’t got a gun. Does my wife know you’re here?”

  “Nope. And she need never know. You see, chum, your wife is bait. Bait for Zinzi.”

  A cold dread clutched at Alan’s throat.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Then listen. Zinzi’s free, where we want him. We got word to him that your wife was here, so after his escape he’s sure to make a bee-line for this spot. He’ll go after your wife—but he won’t get her. We’ll stop him.” The fat man’s face was shiny and blue in a lightning flash. Then it vanished into the murky darkness again. “We got Zinzi out so we could finish him. Understand?”

  Alan moistened his lips. A few more drops of rain spattered lazily down.

  “I think I get it,” he said. “You helped Zinzi Mattlock crush out so you could spot him and rub him out. I don’t know why, and I don’t care, he probably knows too much about you for you to want him to live. So you mean to kill him and shut his mouth for good. You want him to walk into a trap here when he comes for my wife.”

  “You got it added up right,” Moog said. “And if you know what’s good for you, you’ll play ball. You can’t get back to the highway; we won’t let you. If you play it right, you can save your wife. Zinzi is fair game for anybody now; he’s an escaped con. We can kill him and get away with it. It’s up to you to string along with us and get him before he gets your wife.”

  Alan swallowed. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Put a light on in the back room. Keep your wife in the living room, with the light on. Zinzi won’t shoot through the window; he’ll walk in on you and let you know it’s him. He’s that kind of a guy. He likes to let his victims know he’s the one who’s killing ’em. So at the first sign of trouble or any kind of visitor, you put out the light in the back room. Then we’ll come in. You understand?”

  “And suppose I don’t play ball?” Alan asked.

  “You will. You like your wife that much. You wouldn’t want us to help Zinzi, would you? And you can’t get back to the highway again, like I said. So go on in and sit with your wife. And wait.”

  The shorter man, Lew Gramm, removed his gun from Alan’s back and shoved him toward the dark bulk of the bungalow. Alan walked up on the front porch without looking back. Shirley stood up with a little gasp as Alan came through the screen door into the dark living room. She clung to him with cold trembling hands.

  “Was it—was it Zinzi who got away?”

  “Yes. But they’ll catch him, honey. I was talking to Corporal Hagan. He’ll let us know the minute they round him up. There’s nothing to worry about.” His voice sounded false in his own ears. “All we’ve got to do is wait.”

  THEY waited. Alan put on the bridge lamp and went into the bedroom for a moment. When he came back he left the light on in there. Outside thunder pealed, and then rain came down in rushing, rattling torrents, shaking the windows and drumming on the roof. It was ten o’clock.

  Shirley sat huddled in silence on the studio couch beside the radio. Alan snapped it on, his brown face lean and composed, and tried to get something through the local thunderstorm. Snatches of a Tchaikovsky program from Philadelphia’s Robin Hood Dell filled the chilly room. It wasn’t raining there, twenty miles away.

  The blackness beyond the windows was thick, brooding, and impenetrable. Alan wondered what he could do. He had nothing to fight with. No gun. He picked up a heavy flashlight from the table and kept it beside him, but it was poor comfort against the knowledge of deadly guns waiting patiently outside.

  The minutes dragged. Alan remembered a dream he had often had in childhood: an ancestral racial dream, filled with primitive terror. A wild, ravening beast had him trapped and defenseless. There was no further retreat. The lion, or tiger, or whatever his childish fancy had made it, paced back and forth before the last barricade, and he was helpless behind a thin wall, filled with a choking, paralyzing terror . . .

  The rain slackened to a steady drizzle and once there were flashlights dancing far down the opposite bank of the creek, near the bend. But nothing happened, and the jittery pinpoints disappeared without coming closer. A little later Alan thought he heard sirens on the highway two hundred yards up the hill. They came and they went. He sat down beside Shirley and kept his arm around her. Gradually, painfully, the shivering within her died away and she rested comfortably within the circle of his arm.

  Somewhere in the darkness there was a man, rain-soaked and bloody, with a white mask for a face and bitter, venomous eyes. He staggered through water and mud,
a gun in his hand. He was coming down the bank of the creek. The thought of Death filled his warped and twisted mind.

  Alan got up and went into the dark kitchen. Peering through the screened door, he could make out the dark bulk of Checker Moog’s car, parked under the dripping trees. There was nothing else to see in the black shrubbery that surrounded the bungalow. He cursed softly, weighing the heavy flashlight in his hand, and considered its pitiful inadequacy as a weapon. But he couldn’t let Shirley go on being bait for a bloodthirsty killer. There must be something he could do, some way to get her up to the road and back to the city.

  He was on his way back to the living room when footsteps clattered heavily on the front porch.

  SHIRLEY was on her feet, her hand at her throat, staring at the door and swallowing soundlessly. Her face was chalk white. Her lips moved as Alan came from the kitchen, but they formed no words. He grinned and said, “It’s nothing, angel,” and went to the front door as somebody hammered on it with his fist.”

  It was a big man, in the gray tunic and whipcord breeches of a state trooper. A flood of relief left Alan’s legs feeling curiously weak. The man’s Stetson was soggy with rain, and his uniform was smeared with mud and ripped by brambles. Light thrust from the doorway and shone on a strong official chin and a thin, grim mouth. The trooper didn’t come in from the shadows on the porch. His voice was a hasty growl.

  “You folks’ll have to get out of here. We’ve located that escaped con somewhere on this bank, within a mile of here. We’ve got him closed in.”

  “But—”

  Alan felt Shirley come up and stand behind him, her hand oh his shoulder.

  “We’ll be glad to go,” she said. Her voice was thin over the drumming of rain on the porch roof. “We’ll leave right now.”

  “I’ve got orders to escort you people to the city: We can go in your car.”

  “I’ll get my raincoat,” Alan said helplessly.

  He went back into the living room and crossed to the lighted bedroom. His hands shook as he shrugged into the thin tan coat. He paused, slipped the flashlight into a side pocket, and glanced around the room where he and Shirley had spent the last week fighting demons of fear. He could hear Shirley’s voice, full of relief, talking to the trooper on the porch. He picked up a coat for her and went back to the front door.

  “All set,” he said.

  “Then let’s go. It’s too dangerous to let you folks stick around here tonight.”

  “I understand,” Alan nodded. He wondered where Checker Moog and Lew Gramm were, and what they would do about this trooper.

  His car, a battered little sedan, was parked a dozen feet from the front porch, under some gnarled and twisted elms. The blackness was absolute, save for the sharply defined beam of the cop’s flashlight that guided their steps. Rain blinded them and formed a white, hissing wall around them.

  The trooper said: “You and the missus can sit in front. I’ll get in the back.”

  Alan nodded again. Shirley sat close beside him, and he could feel the shivers wracking her body as she pressed against him. The sedan started without any trouble. He reversed, looked back through the window as he eased the car around. The trooper sat squarely in the middle of the seat behind him, his shoulders bulkily outlined against the rear window, his face a dim block beneath his Stetson. Alan thought the man was grinning, but he couldn’t be sure.

  The headlights cut a wide bright swath through the downpour and finally settled on the rutted road leading up through the wooded hill to the highway. Alan’s fingers were tight on the wheel. There was pressure in his chest, and he could feel the blood pounding through every artery in his body.

  It happened when they were a third of the way up the hill. The other car hurtled soundlessly out of the blackness, the roar of its motor hidden behind the thrumming of the sedan and the tattoo of rain on the metal roof. Its headlights weren’t on. It appeared as a sudden black bulk, lurching straight toward them at a breakneck speed over the rough ground.

  Shirley gasped.

  “Alan, look out—”

  ALAN twisted the wheel savagely.

  The trooper in the back seat straightened with a sudden curse. There came a rending crash of twisting metal and tinkling glass as the two cars collided head on. A split second before the impact Alan threw his weight sidewise against Shirley. The door on her side was loosely closed, deliberately left unlatched when he had helped her in. It gave under the jolt and Shirley slipped sidewise, fell from the car to the ground.

  Something crashed deafeningly in Alan’s ear and the windshield shattered before him. Reeking cordite filled the inside of the car. He heard the trooper grunt and curse and thrust the back door of the car open. From somewhere came an answering shot, then another, followed by a high-pitched yell. It was Checker Moog’s voice. In the twisting glare of the headlights Alan saw the fat gunman jump from his car and run toward them, gun in hand.

  The trooper crouched on the running board, lips drawn back in a soundless snarl. His heavy gun crashed again, and Moog’s advance was abruptly halted. There came a sudden repetitive burst of shots from the other side of the gunman’s car as Lew Gramm, the younger hood, swung into action.

  A bullet whined past Alan’s head and smashed through a back window. He ducked low, slithering sidewise, and tumbled from the car onto the ground. He felt Shirley crouching behind the car. Her face was white and scared in the dimness.

  “Alan, what is it? What happened?”

  He held her hand tightly. “That trooper—he’s Zinzi Mattlock.” He felt her stiffen. “Easy does it, honey. Those other two are his former lieutenants—Checker Moog and Lew Gramm. You remember them. They’re out to get him.”

  “But how did you know the trooper—”

  “Never mind now. Come on.”

  He pulled her away from the car, keeping the solid bulk of the sedan between them and the gun battle raging in the rain. The wet muddy ground was slippery under their feet. Shirley stumbled and Alan caught her up and hurried her forward. He moved in a wide circle and in a matter of minutes came up behind the other car.

  There was nobody in it. There was no sound but the hissing patter of rain in the darkness. Nothing was visible. Alan opened the back door of the strange sedan and cautiously groped in the side pockets. His searching fingers found what they sought. A spare gun, a heavy thirty-eight. He pulled it free of the pocket and stepped back.

  A man suddenly screamed in the bushes a few yards to his right. In the blackness Alan could see nothing. There came a flat, savage report, a moan, a crashing sound in the shrubbery, as if a body had fallen. Out of the darkness loomed a man’s figure, lurching toward them.

  Shirley whispered: “It’s Zinzi Mattlock—in a trooper’s uniform. He got both of them, Alan!”

  Alan called out: “Hold it, Zinzi! I’ve got a gun!”

  The other’s voice was thick with savage satisfaction. “At least you know it’s me. That’s what I wanted. I want you should know who’s gettin’ you in the end. I said I’d finish off your wife, Graham. I’m doin’ it now. Nothin’ can stop me.”

  ALAN raised the thirty-eight and fired twice at the dim bulk moving toward them. The unfamiliar gun jumped and bucked in his hand. He heard Shirley gasp again in the echoing roar, and squinted through the blackness. Zinzi Mattlock was still coming on.

  Alan whispered harshly: “Stay here, angel.”

  He stepped forward. With a sudden desperate movement he dove toward the hulking figure approaching them. His shoulders slammed against Mattlock’s chest, drove the killer back with a grunt of surprise. The other’s gun barrel smashed down on his shoulder, sent numbing pain through his left arm. Mattlock tripped, went down on the muddy ground. His gun exploded with a roar, slapping a bullet into the turf. Alan kicked at his wrist, felt his leg suddenly yanked from under him, and piled down on top of the man. His fists drove smashing blows into the other’s face. Mattlock cursed and writhed away like a snake. Alan scrambled after him, sudde
nly found himself free to swing, and uncorked a wild, looping left that caught the other’s jaw. The blow cracked loudly in the darkness. He felt Zinzi Mattlock twitch under his weight, then lady still.

  Alan rolled off him, panting, and stood up. Shirley’s figure was running toward him. He stooped painfully and groped for Mattlock’s gun, then became aware of crashing sounds in the underbrush and sharp, rapping commands.

  The rutted road was suddenly filled with troopers. The first to reach him was a queer figure in a makeshift coat. It was Corporal Hagan, minus his uniform. The trooper’s face was a dim anxious circle as he came up to Alan.

  “You all right?”

  Alan nodded and took a deep breath of rain-swept air into his aching lungs.

  “We’re both okay—Shirley and I. There should be two more men around here, dead or alive. Checker Moog and Hew Gramm. They’re the ones that helped Zinzi crush out. They wanted to knock him off. They let him know my wife was here so that he’d make for this spot, and then they forced me to keep Shirley here as bait.”

  “But Alan,” Shirley said, “how did you know the trooper was really Zinzi?”

  “He was wearing Corporal Hagan’s uniform.” Alan managed a lopsided grin. “I recognized Hagan’s badge number, although Zinzi was careful not to let us see his face very clearly. Moog and Gramm had told me to turn out the light in the back room if Zinzi showed up; so when I went after my raincoat I snapped it off. It was a gamble that Moog could keep Zinzi busy long enough for us to break away and get clear of the fight. It worked out fine.”

  Hagan said slowly: “The dirty killer jumped me down by the creek. I was hanging around just on a hunch. He knocked me out and took my uniform. I guess he was figuring on making you people drive him through our net and then he’d have the satisfaction of having forced you to help him escape before knocking you off.”