Never Say No To A Killer

by Clifton Adams

  I tried to think of something to add, but I had said just about everything there was to say. I could feel the ground falling out from under me. I understood perfectly well that my story was full of holes, but I could have plugged the holes if only she had given me a chance.

  I felt completely helpless. And then, at last, she spoke. Her voice sounded as though it were coming all the way from the moon.

  “... What kind of help... do you want?”

  I almost collapsed with relief. My heart began to pump again. “A gun,” I said, before she could change her mind. “A revolver if you can find one, but this is not my day to be particular, just so it's a gun. And some cartridges to fit the gun. And a good road map of the state—a really good one, the kind they sell in drugstores for a dollar or so—and a car. I don't care what kind of a car, just so it runs and isn't hot.”

  “... Is that all?”

  Christ! I thought, what a woman she is! I ask for the sun and the moon and the stars, and she wants to know is that all! “Yes,” I said, “that's quite all. With a car and a gun and a good map to tell me where they're likely to throw up their roadblocks, a division of Marines couldn't stop me!”

  “... The map will be simple,” she said flatly. “I have a small automatic myself—.25 caliber, I believe it is—and some cartridges....”

  I wasn't exactly an amateur with a gun; you don't have to have a cannon to stop a man, if you know how to shoot. “The automatic will do fine. What about the car?”

  “I know a used car lot that will still be open. I've been shopping there for an inexpensive car for my own use—there shouldn't be any trouble.”

  Yes, I thought, with surprising bitterness, I suppose you will need a car of your own now. “The used car lot sounds right,” I said. “How long do you think it will take?”

  “... An hour, perhaps. More important is the expense-it will take a good deal of money, most of my savings....”

  I grinned and thought: By God, you were right all along, Surratt! Money's the thing that brings them around! I tried to think of a figure that would sound impressive but not ridiculous. “Don't you worry about the expense,” I said. “I told you I was ready to pay. Ten thousand dollars, that's what it will be worth to you.”

  “... Where shall I meet you?”

  “Harrison at Fourth Street, down by the tracks.”

  “In about an hour?”

  “An hour will be perfect.”

  Only then did she hang up.

  How do you like that! I thought. You'll never completely understand women, Surratt. You might as well admit it. One minute they're cold as stone, the next minute they're laying their necks on the block for you!

  But Pat Kelso was quite a woman just the same. She was my kind of woman; she had just proved it. She was beautiful, she had class; and she didn't let a few personal scruples stand in her Way when she saw a chance to pick up ten grand. But she was going to go right through the ceiling when she found out there was no ten grand!

  Well, no matter how fast you try you can take just one step at a time, so I'd worry about that problem when I got to it. Very gently, I hung the receiver back on the hook, smiling.

  At the counter I paid the waitress for the sandwich and coffee, had her put the sandwich in a bag and took it with me.

  It was beginning to get dark outside—I was glad of that. Not that it made much difference. These people had lost the knack of seeing beyond their own noses, and not one out of ten thousand would have recognized me anyway. Cops —they were the only people to worry about.

  So I was careful as I came out of the hash house and was glad to see that my blue suited friend down the block had plodded on his way. I noticed a springiness to my step that hadn't been there before. It was almost as though a heavy weight had been removed from my shoulders, and the world was once more a tolerable place to live in.

  I ate my sandwich in a fifteen cent movie house on Harrison Street. I kept my eyes on a neon lighted clock to one side of the screen and thought: Now Pat has the gun in her bag; now she has the cartridges; now she is putting on her coat—not the Balmain coat, just a plain one—to go to the drugstore; now she's at the drugstore buying the map; now she's on her way to the car lot....

  It was almost as though I could actually see her. Forty-five minutes to go. Thirty minutes to go. Christ, don't get into an argument with that car dealer! I thought. This is no time to haggle over prices. Pay the sonofabitch what he wants, but get the car!

  Fifteen minutes to go.

  I made myself sit there a few minutes longer. I was completely safe as long as I sat here in the darkness, but once I stepped out there on the street there was no way of knowing what would happen. No sense begging for trouble. Sit here and wait it out, that's the thing.

  Ten minutes to go.

  Surely, I thought, she has the car by now. The car dealer knows her and there should be a minimum of red tape. An hour she had said. Well, I had waited fifty minutes and couldn't take it any longer—I got up and walked out.

  Outside the movie house there were the usual drifters, down-at-the-heel refugees from limbo, but no cops. Where are the cops, anyway? I thought. With a killer on the loose you'd think they'd have two cops on every corner. There wasn't a cop anywhere, as far as I could see. Maybe this was the night of the Policemen's Ball, or maybe they were too busy ogling prostitutes and shaking down bookies to bother with a mere killer. No matter what the reason, there were no cops in sight and that was the important thing. I stepped out onto the sidewalk and walked casually toward Fourth Street.

  Fourth was a dark street, an ugly ditch that someone had plowed through a cement city and had forgotten to fill up. It wasn't much to look at but it suited me fine. I turned the corner at Harrison and strolled about a quarter of the way down Fourth. The sun had died. While I had been in the movie house darkness had come down on the city.

  Darkness was a good thing. It was just what I'd ordered. I stood in the doorway of a darkened pawn shop and waited for Pat to come with a new option on my contract with destiny.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  SHE HIT THE hour-mark right on the nose, as well as I could tell waiting there in the darkness. I saw a tan Ford pull up at the corner of Harrison and Fourth and I knew it was Pat; I could feel it. I could feel the elation bubbling up inside me. It's all over but the yelling, I thought. Soon I'll be out of this town for good.

  I stepped out of the darkened doorway and waved and she saw me immediately. I felt like a million dollars. I could feel myself grinning. By God, I thought, not one man in ten thousand could bring off an escape-like this—but I will! I can feel it in my bones!

  It wasn't a new Ford, far from it, but it seemed to be running all right and that was the thing that mattered. I didn't have it in mind to outrun the police—I was going to outsmart them! Pat turned onto Fourth and I was waiting at the curb. I was inside before she had braked to a complete stop.

  “I certainly am glad to see you!” I said. “For the first time in my life I was close to admitting defeat.”

  She glanced at me but said nothing, which didn't surprise me. She seemed nervous, but who wouldn't be nervous, considering the spot she had put herself on? But she was still the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, and I had a crazy impulse to grab her right there, and to hell with everything else.

  That was one impulse that I squashed in a hurry. Another day, I thought. Another day when I've gone into business somewhere else; and then I'll really buy her that fleet of Lincolns; then we'll really begin to live, the two of us.

  She put the Ford in gear and said, “Where do you want to go?”

  “Someplace where you can get a taxi without too much trouble. You've done your share, and a fine job it was too. The rest is up to me.”

  “I know a place near Lincoln Avenue... will that be all right?”

  “Lincoln Avenue is fine. How about the gun; you brought it, didn't you?”

  “It's in my pocket. I'll give it to you in a minute.”r />
  Maybe I should have noticed that everything was not as it should have been. Maybe I should have noticed the flatness of her voice, the coldness of her beautiful face... but the fact is that I didn't notice; I was too busy congratulating myself. I was too busy devouring the beauty of her face to notice the coldness. And when I finally did notice, it was too late.

  I was hardly aware that she had braked the Ford and was pulling up to the curb. Then she looked at me and there was something in her eyes that made me look around.

  “Say, I thought Lincoln Avenue was more to the west.”

  “... It is,” she said.

  Then I saw the gun. But it was much, much too late to do me any good. It was a small gun; it looked almost like a toy, even in her small hand.

  It was no toy. A .25 caliber slug can be an awfully big piece of lead if you catch it in the right place. I stared at the gun, and the muzzle was looking me right in the belly, pointed right at the soft midsection just below the center of the rib cage, just about where my liver would be.

  “What is this?” I said. Trying not to sweat so much, trying not to see what was perfectly obvious. “If this isn't Lincoln Avenue, why did you stop?”

  “Don't you know?”

  “No, I don't know. And for Christ's sake, don't you know better than to point a gun at a person unless you mean to kill him?”

  She almost smiled, but not quite.

  Strangely, I was not scared. Certainly I was not so stupid that I did not recognize the situation for what it was. I had not convinced her of anything—that much was clear to me now. I had succeeded only in convincing myself that everything was going to be all right, because that was what I wanted to believe.

  But not Pat. I hadn't fooled her for a minute. She was just as sure as she had ever been that I had killed Alex Burton. When would I ever learn that it didn't pay to underrate women!

  Maybe I would never get a chance to learn—for Pat meant to kill me. There was no doubt about it. She didn't mean for the electric chair to do it; she was going to do it herself.

  Strangely, I was not afraid. I simply did not believe that a girl like Pat had the kind of guts it took to pull the trigger on another human being.

  I made myself smile. I made myself think that it was some kind of fantastic joke. I made myself say quite calmly, “All right, you've got something on your mind. You might as well tell me about it now.”

  For one tense moment I thought she actually was going to shoot. I shifted my glance quickly from the gun to her face and was shocked to see that she was no longer beautiful. The hand of hate had strained and drawn her face almost beyond recognition—oh, there was plenty of hate there, mere than enough to kill. But somehow I had the feeling that she was not going to pull the trigger.

  I said, “Why don't you give me that automatic? You look pretty silly, and you know you're not going to use it.”

  “... You killed him.” A voice without tone. A defeated voice, I thought. “The kindest, gentlest man I ever knew. The only man I ever loved. You killed him.”

  “But I explained all that,” I said patiently. “When I talked to you. This crazy woman, this Dorris Venci, she wrote you that letter because she was mad at me. She knew how it was with you and Burton, a lot of people did. She knew that she could make you hate me if she could convince you that I had something to do with the Burton murder. That's exactly the reason she wrote the letter. You're much too sensible a girl to swallow a story like that.”

  “Mrs. Venci didn't even mention Alex Burton in her letter,” Pat said flatly.

  That stunned me.

  “What did you say!”

  “Mrs. Venci made no mention of Alex Burton. She identified you as Roy Surratt, an escaped convict, and warned me to have nothing to do with you.”

  “That was all she put in that letter!”

  “That was all.”

  Jesus! I thought, what an idiot I've been! “Look... You've got this figured all wrong. I can explain it; believe me, I can!”

  “Can you, Mr. Surratt?”

  No, I couldn't. There was no way in the world to explain my way around a blunder as momentous as this one.

  “Roy Surratt!” she said, staring right through me. “You actually believe, don't you, that you are some kind of superior being on this earth. You don't consider it necessary to answer to all us underlings for your actions, no matter what they may be. Roy Surratt! Master criminal! Philosopher!”

  She laughed then, and it was not a pretty sound. “The gall of you! The audacity! How dare you behave as though you were the only person on earth possessed of the ability to think, to analyze, to define! Your enormous ego is your greatest weakness; did you know that? How could you have believed that you could kill a man like Alex Burton and get away with it?”

  “Take it easy,” I said soothingly, watching that automatic. “Just take it easy, won't you, and please remember that in this country a person, is innocent until proven guilty.”

  “I know you are guilty,” she said tightly. “I think I've known it from the first moment I saw you.”

  “That doesn't make much sense, does it? After all, you did go out with me. You did accept that coat, and you did enjoy my company. Does that sound as though you suspected me of killing your friend.”

  Suddenly she smiled, and it was like no smile I had ever seen before. “That incredible ego! You believe what you want to believe and nothing else. Couldn't you see that the very sight of you made me sick!”

  Just keep her talking, I thought. Sooner or later she will relax and I'll grab that gun. Then we'll see whether my ego's a weakness! I said, “How about the night I gave you the coat. Are you telling me that was an act too?”

  I'd hit her with something that time. The color drained from her face and for an instant I thought she was going to collapse. But she didn't, and the automatic didn't waver.

  “... Yes,” she said quietly, almost whispered, ”... I wanted that coat. It represented something to me, it brought back memories of elegance, a way of life that I had once known.”

  I kept pushing. “And you still maintain that you suspected me all along of killing Burton?”

  “... I'm thinking of the first time we met outside the apartment,” she breathed, almost to herself. “In front of the factory office building, you were waiting there.”

  “I remember.”

  “You mentioned the night that Alex was killed. You noted the fact that Alex and I had been to the University Club and later the Crestview.”

  “Is there something wrong with that?”

  “It was the first time I had been with Alex to either of those places. We... weren't together much in public.”

  “I'll bet,” I said, still with a bit of bitterness, remembering a certain chafing dish, a certain bedroom and photograph that I had hated, even before I had known that it was of Alex Burton.

  “How did you know,” she asked, “that Alex had taken me to those particular places on that particular night?”

  “I don't know. Maybe I read it in the paper.”

  “It wasn't in the paper. No one knew, just a few club members and the police—not the kind of people you would associate with. You followed us that night, that's how you knew. You followed us, and after Alex left me at my apartment you killed him.”

  She didn't have to draw it any plainer than that. She had me pegged. She'd had me pegged from the very first. She had stuck to me, played, up to me, waiting for me to make a mistake!

  Well, I'd made the mistake.

  It was strange—but I didn't seem to care. I didn't feel smart any more. I didn't feel like a Master Criminal. I didn't feel like a wise guy, either, who knew all the answers. All I felt was the emptiness. ”... All right,” I said finally, “I killed him. Is that what you want to hear? He was a lousy, thieving, no-good bastard, and I killed him.”

  That was when she shot me.

  It was strange, but I didn't hear the explosion. That little automatic was no more than a foot away and I di
dn't even hear it. It was the shock, I suppose. The bullet went through me like a beam of light opening a path in the darkness. A very small piece of lead, not as large as your little finger. The impact knocked the breath out of me. I couldn't move my head. The entire lower part of my body was numb. My spinal column must be shattered, I thought. I wonder what's keeping me alive?

  That was the last I remembered for a long, long while. Darkness closed in, and when I opened my eyes again it was in the white glare of a hospital room with cops standing around like angry statues, glaring down at me.

  “What do you think?” someone asked.

  And another voice said, “We can patch him up well enough to walk to the chair.”

  And that was when I stopped worrying about myself; my end was certain. I was aboard a slow freight bound for oblivion, my body half dead, only my brain fully alive. It's really too bad, I kept thinking. It's really quite a shame that it has to end this way because we'd have made a hell of a pair, Pat and I.

  I didn't hate her. I no longer had the strength to support an emotion as violent as hate. The only thing left was a feeling of emptiness, a vague sort of incompleteness, a whispered fear that I had missed something somewhere along the line....

  But it didn't matter now.

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  Clifton Adams

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