Dead Man

by Joe Gores

  He fell silent, folded down on himself, went away from there. Dain looked down at him for a long moment, nothing showing in his face. He finally spoke.

  “Is it, Inverness? Hell, you’re dead!”

  The sky was pale, sulfur-colored. The water was a mirror. Five minutes later Inverness, stripped of keys, wallet, and money to make identification harder should he ever be found, splashed into the marsh.

  Most likely a gator would discover him before dark, thrust him deep into the mud, ripen him up…

  But hell, old Inverness would like that, wouldn’t he?

  Hadn’t he just loved this old swampland?

  V

  SHENZIE

  Don’t Call It ‘Frisco

  THE DAWNING OF THE WRATHFUL DEITIES

  O nobly-born, not having been able to recognize when the Peaceful Deities shone upon thee, thou hast come wandering thus far. Now the blood-drinking Wrathful Deities will come to shine.

  THE TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD

  33

  Eight days later Dain emerged from his room at the Imperial Motel in Lafayette, his arm in a neat black sling. It was here he and Inverness had stayed the night before going into the swamp after Vangie, and their rooms had been held for them. He crossed to his rental car parked directly in front of the room, tossed his suitcase into the open trunk, went over to the adjoining room and emerged with Inverness’s suitcase. He tossed that in also, slammed the trunk lid, and went off toward the office.

  Inside, the clerk looked up from his accounting when Dain put the keys for both rooms on his desk.

  “Mr. Inverness and I will be checking out.”

  “Certainly, sir.” The clerk got out both bills, ran them through the computer to get the final totals, handed them over. “These include all phone and laundry charges.”

  Dain was here doing this only because he didn’t want any loose ends. He wanted it finished. He didn’t want anyone coming around a week or a month or a year from now to ask him questions he couldn’t really answer. End it here and now, cleanly, so there would be no sticky strands tying it to him later.

  It had been eight days since he’d dumped Inverness’s body into the Atchafalaya. The identities of the other hitman and the man who had set up the hit had died with him. So be it. But could he just walk away from it? Could death still be looking for him though he no longer was looking for it?

  Of course he could. The dead were dead, blood had paid for blood. He would not be working for the mob any longer, would no longer be moving in those circles. He could make a new start of sorts. Let Doug Sherman go back to book-selling full-time while he became the sort of P.I. who took any and all clients through the door. Randy would help him get referrals…

  He went through the invoices item by item with the clerk fidgeting in the background, just so there would be no surprises. He hesitated for a long time over one item on Inverness’s bill, then folded them up and put them in his wallet. He felt as if he had been kicked in the heart.

  “These look in order. Put Mr. Inverness’s room charge on the signed credit card charge he left with you—I’ll pay for mine with cash.”

  From the motel, Dain drove to an auto supply store, bought a towbar, drove back to park half a block from the motel, went into the lot, got Inverness’s car without being seen by the clerk, and drove back to his own car.

  He arrived at New Orleans in midafternoon with the Inverness car on the towbar behind him, drove to the government housing developments near the Superdome, and dumped it at the curb. Driving to New Orleans International Airport to turn in his rental, he figured the abandoned car would be in a bump shop by nightfall, unrecognizable by dawn.

  He fought hard against thinking about Vangie, speculating where she might be or what she might be doing. She had brought him alive again by accepting him into her body, he had set out to save her life, she had saved his. She was involved in life, she was life.

  The urge to run to her, try to build his new life around that vitality, was almost overwhelming, but he had no right to do that. She had a new life to build, and the bonds with which to do it. A new life having nothing to do with hootch dancing in cheap strip joints.

  The sign over the clock read NEW ORLEANS INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT. The clock read 7:32. Dain had just paid with cash, and the attractive blonde in the blue uniform with little silver wings over her left breast gave him his ticket to San Francisco. She had nice dimples and bold eyes.

  “Your SFO flight boards in twenty-eight minutes, sir.”

  He went through the detectors, stopped at a bank of pay phones on his way to the gate. He was once again carrying his leather-bound Tibetan Book of the Dead, which he set on the metal shelf below the phone as he waited for his call to be picked up.

  “Douglas Sherman here,” said the phone.

  “Dougie! It’s Dain.”

  “Dain?” He paused. “My God, I was starting to wonder—”

  “I’ll be getting in tonight, going to the loft.”

  “Did… everything go smoothly?” Sherman asked cautiously.

  “Not really,” he said. “I found the fugitives and I found the bonds, but… I don’t believe we’ll be collecting our fee from Mr. Maxton.”

  There was a long pause. “Maxton is—”

  “Not going to pay our fee,” said Dain firmly. “I also ran into one of the gentlemen from Point Reyes. I’ll tell you all about it at the bookstore in the morning.”

  He started away, then looped back to the phone. He had realized he didn’t want to take the shuttle bus from SFO back to the city when he got home. And he wanted to tell Shenzie all about it. Cats understood things like revenge very well indeed.

  The call was a short one.

  “Randy? This is—”

  “Hey, Hoss, where the hell are you?” demanded Solomon’s big voice. “Why the hell haven’t you—”

  “Still in New Orleans, catching a flight home in…” Dain checked his watch. “Eleven minutes—”

  “I’ll be waiting at the airport.”

  Dain gave him flight number and arrival time, then added, “Can you bring Shenzie, too? I really—”

  “Sho nuff,” said Randy with his big booming laugh. “He’s right here with me on the couch, watching TV.”

  Dain’s window seat looked out at moon-silvered clouds far below the plane. His face was exhausted and drawn. He thought he was too keyed-up to sleep, but then he was dreaming.

  He was in a strange apartment in a hot steaming tropical land, using his computer to identify those he sought. He was nude, sweat-drenched. In thirty seconds he would have them, their identities and locations would leap from the screen at him…

  He heard voices, as if through steel wool.

  They…they all… dead?

  Yeah. We’ll check if he has any notes here, a computer…then we’ll burn the place down…

  There was a loud pop! and a flash of light, and the computer blew up with an acrid puff of electrical smoke. One leg of the computer table collapsed, the whole setup slid to the floor. He had spent hours in the intricate tracery of their tracks, now it was gone, all gone in a puff of smoke.

  Dain threw himself on the bed, arms and legs flung wide. On the opposite wall was a familiar Magritte. The door of the bathroom opened. Vangie emerged, like him nude in the blanketing heat. Suddenly he had a massive hard-on, the biggest erection of his life.

  She stepped up on the bed astride him, looking down at him in anticipation as his exciting view of her dark sexual nest made his hard-on even more distended. She lowered herself onto him with exquisite slowness, impaling herself on that enormous organ. Her body accepted all of it, she immediately began fucking him frenziedly, immediately reared back in ecstasy, immediately collapsed shuddering against him, all within a few seconds and long before he could come himself.

  Then she lifted herself off his still-erect member, planted a kiss on its engorged tip as if kissing a rose, winked bawdily at him, and was gone.

  Randy was waiti
ng by the loading gate at SFO, his face a huge grin as passengers streamed around them off the plane. He examined Dain keenly and gave his big laugh.

  “You look like you got a tale to tell, Hoss.”

  He told it on the way into the city, Randy behind the wheel, Dain beside him, Shenzie in his carry case on the backseat, meowing in his pissed-off way at being cooped up so long.

  “Hell, if Inverness was a cop, I oughta be able to find out who he saw when he came to town—”

  “Five years ago? And he wouldn’t have come as a cop.”

  Shenzie meowed yet again, insistent for attention. Dain started to reach over the back of the seat with his good arm to open the case and stick his hand in.

  “Hey, man, don’t let him out in the car!” Solomon said in alarm. “I did driving down, he like to took my ear off.”

  Dain nodded and took his hand from the case. To their left the lights of the tough little town of Brisbane were scattered like children’s jacks down the eastern slope of San Bruno Mountain; ahead and to their right beyond an arm of the bay was the pale unlit mass of Candlestick Park.

  “Only thing you ain’t told me, what happened to the bonds?”

  “Vangie kept ‘em. She paid enough for them.” He added, “I also didn’t tell you, I think I might know who brokered the hit.”

  Randy shot a look over at him, eyes gleaming ferally. “Let’s go get the fucker.”

  Dain shook his head. “I don’t want to do anything about it, Randy. I’m just so goddamned tired of it all…”

  “There you go again, goddammit! Didn’t you learn nothin’ five years ago? Right now you don’t look in good enough shape to handle a can opener for the cat food, but that fucker, whoever he is, he’ll just keep coming at you, Eddie. He’ll figure he’s got no choice. Why don’t you tell me who he is and where he is, and go home and get some sleep. When you wake up—”

  “I can’t do it that way, Randy. Hell, I’m not even sure of my facts. It’s just a maybe. I can’t stomach any more killing on just maybes.”

  Randy’s face was taut, his skin and eyes were glistening.

  “You lemme talk to the fucker, we’ll get sure. Remember what happened last time you tried it alone.”

  “It happened because I wouldn’t let go of an investigation. This time I’m letting go before it gets started.”

  Randy sighed in exasperation. “Where’ve I heard that one before? Look, Hoss, all I’m saying, you’re pretty beat up right now. Things’ll look different in a few days after you’ve had some rest. Then you and I’ll get together—”

  “I’m not going to move on it, Randy. That’s final.”

  And there it remained as Randy left the freeway for Bryant Street, ran down through the night-quiet South of Market streets to the Embarcadero. He pulled up in front of Dain’s darkened, dilapidated pier.

  “I’m probably wrong about him anyway,” said Dain.

  “Meanin’ you think you’re right about him.”

  Randy shook his head, got out to pull the suitcase off the backseat as Dain got Shenzie in his carrying case. When Randy’s taillights had winked out of sight, Dain used a key on the small door beside the loading door, went in, entered the open freight elevator, left Shenzie there to go back outside for his suitcase.

  The creaking, swaying lift clanked to the top floor. Dain hit the hallway light switch, then opened the fuse box to unscrew one of them. All his actions were rendered more difficult, more deliberate, by the fact that he had only one arm to use. And by the fact he was reluctant to do them at all.

  Two trips to get suitcase, cat, and Tibetan Book of the Dead to the big steel door of his loft. He balanced the book on top of the suitcase, got out his keys, paused.

  “What are the odds, cat?” he asked softly.

  Shenzie meowed, also softly.

  “That bad, huh?”

  Dain silently unlocked the door, opened it a scant half-inch on the blackness within. Took a deep breath. Then jerked the door wide and went through in a knee-high dive, obliquely so he would pass instantly out of the light.

  Three shots exploded almost together from the darkness.

  Dain’s voice said, “I was hoping you wouldn’t be here, but… just in case…”

  Two more shots at where his voice seemed to come from sang and ricocheted. The light switch was clicked in a frenzy.

  “I took out the fuse, Dougie-baby,” said Dain.

  There was a long pause, then Sherman’s voice said, “How… did you know that… I…”

  “Your unlisted phone number was on Inverness’s phone bill at the motel in Lafayette.”

  A flashlight stabbed the darkness where it seemed Dain’s voice had come from. It picked up only weight-lifting apparatus. A five-pound weight spun right up its beam like a Frisbee. There was a crunch, a cry, the light hit the floor and went out.

  Dain’s voice, now cold and inexorable, said, “I looked because he had to call somebody who was also in touch with Maxton for Maxton to have followed us into the swamp. I didn’t think it could be someone local in New Orleans, but I didn’t expect it to be you. Once I knew, and thought about it, of course then it all made sense. But if you’d just left it alone tonight…”

  Another muzzle flash, another bullet whining ineffectually. Sherman was a silhouette against the light, jerking first one way, then another, gun extended, trying to pin down Dain’s voice.

  “Who better than you to keep tabs on me, down through the years—hell, I begged you to. My go-between! Just as you’d been Pucci’s go-between, down through the years. You even kept in touch with Inverness—you’re a very careful man, Dougie…”

  There was another shot. Dain laughed from elsewhere.

  “When I told you I was going to New Orleans, you panicked and called him. Hoped he’d kill me but you tossed in Maxton just to make sure. Know what happened to Maxton, Doug? I boiled him alive in a vat of hot tar.”

  Sherman’s gun hand was silhouetted against the doorway light. The knife edge of Dain’s hand broke his wrist in a karate chop. Sherman screamed, dropped the gun. Bent, clutching his shattered wrist, panicked as a fire-trapped horse, he ducked back out of the light.

  “Inverness died of snakebite… Not a good way to go. Those last minutes of agony, knowing it’s coming…”

  “Can’t you understand, I… I was frightened when you went to New Orleans…”

  “Yes, Dougie,” said Dain softly, “be frightened.”

  There were running steps, Sherman burst out of the darkness and through the doorway and away down the hall, holding his splintered wrist. How had he ever thought it would be amusing to tweak the tail of his own tame tiger? He’d told himself it was only smart to know Dain’s every move in case he got close to the truth in one of his investigations.

  Then he had, and…

  At the elevator, Sherman had just seized the rope that would draw the bottom door up and the top one down, when Dain’s foot was planted on the bottom one. He had grabbed up his leather-bound Tibetan Book of the Dead from on top of his suitcase in passing.

  Sherman backed away, face stricken, absolute terror in his heart, until he ran out of room at the rear of the elevator.

  Dain stood in the doorway, planted, solid, somehow more menacing because of his black sling than he would have been with the use of both arms. He held his leather-bound book in his left hand, spine out.

  “Dain… please… after all these years…”

  “You put a hitman on me in New Orleans—after all these years. You sent Maxton and his goons after me from Chicago—after all these years. You were waiting here in the dark to kill me—after all these years.”

  “Money…”

  “Yeah, money. Inverness said it always came down to money. That’s what it was always about, wasn’t it? You had original Magritte paintings, for Chrissake! You don’t make that sort of money selling books. I really was naive and stupid. You were Pucci’s drug distributor for all of Northern California, weren’t you? All alon
g?”

  “Dain, you have to believe me—”

  “It wasn’t Pucci ordered the hit on me—it was you!” Dain was advancing on him now. “He wasn’t at risk—you were! Did he even know about me?”

  “Of course he did, he… he ordered…”

  “You ordered.”

  “I didn’t… I never expected Marie and the baby…”

  A sudden shriek, “Inverness said his orders were to kill everybody in the cabin!”

  Sherman also shrieked. “Dain!”

  But Dain was upon him, towering over him, all the more terrifying because he was speaking in a rational, almost quiet voice totally at odds with the tension in his face and body.

  “You knew only the three of us would be out there in that cabin, Doug. And you told them to slaughter us all.”

  “Please! Dain! For God’s sake, man, pity…”

  Dain brought his arm back and across his body like an ancient warrior with a broadsword, then swung the hard narrow spine of the book like that warrior’s blade. Not at Sherman. In martial arts he had been trained to think of striking something a foot beyond his real target.

  The edge of the book struck the side of Sherman’s neck with a rending sound. Dain, panting, turned away from the carrion huddled in the corner of the elevator.

  “There’s your pity, Doug,” he said.

  Shenzie started to meow, and some of the shock left Dain’s face. He screwed the fuse back in tight and shut the fuse box door before going back down the hall.

  “Let’s get you out of that box, Shenz.”

  He carried Shenzie into the loft, turned on the lights—and scattered words and images from the last few hours came clamoring unbidden through his brain. Questions. Answers. Probabilities. Inevitabilities.

  A coherent whole.

  He sat on the bed for a long time with the carry case unopened beside him. A vast shudder ran through him.

  Of course. If the middleman had come after him, why would the hitman be any slower off the mark?

  Finally he shook himself, reached into the cat carry case for Shenzie. Fondled his furry little head. Chucked him under the chin, scratched him under the collar. Still no purr, of course, but at least he withdrew his hand to vocal protest.