Mitchell Smith
Page 53
As she put her purse on the hall table, she saw a brown cardboard sign propped there. -direct from La Guardia for farewell dinner-Your Ex. P.
S. Used your shower for old time’s sake; no seduction intended.
Ellie walked down the hall to the kitchen.
“Clara?”
A big black man in a blue suit was leaning against the refrigerator.
Something was cooking in a saucepan on the stove. There were hamburgers in a frying pan, too. The big man smiled at her. ‘-Clara’s in the bathroom,” he said. “My name’s Bryant. I’m a cop. -Anderson sent me to pick up those letters. . . .”
“Where’s the cat?” Ellie said.
“She took him in to clean him up. -Little accident.”
“You look as though you had an accident, yourself,” Ellie said, and turned her head to call, “Clara … P’ “She’s in the bathroom,” the black man said, “-the cat was sick.”
“I don’t think so…. Who hit you in the face?”
“Guess,” the black man said-and came at her like a storm.
If she hadn’t ducked under his arm as he reached for her, Ellie would never have had time to draw her gun, but the big man didn’t seem to care
. He reached out again as sfie fell back against the broom closet, swatted the revolver out of her handsent it clattering, skidding under the table-received her desperate kick on his right thigh, then closed with her, got her right wrist tight-and slapped her terribly hard across the side of her head, slapped her again when she was trying to scream, and knocked the scream into a yelp and out of her. Ellie hit at him with her free hand, tried to get her fingernails in his eyes, and he said something she couldn’t hear and hit her again-with his fist this time, she was sure, because it made her float for a moment, as if she were becoming something lighter. Then, from behind, he put his open hand over her mouth and nose, and she couldn’t breathe at all.
She kicked back as hard as she could, wishing she was a horse and could kick him to death, and he lifted her up off the floor by her right wrist and the hand over her face, and slung her to one side, then the other, so when she kicked back, there was nothing there. She was feeling sick from not being able to breathe, and from the way the kitchen was spinning slowly around. He was handling her very roughly. She tried to breathe as hard as she could, and scratched at his hand with her nails, but he didn’t seem to care. She tried to bite the hand, but it pressed hard and flat against her nose, her mouth, and there was nothing to bite. She was glad it didn’t cover her eyes. -11at would have been worse than anything. Her eyes were hurting, and her chest was hurting, too. If he wasn’t careful, he would kill her. She said that to him, against his hand, but he didn’t seem to notice.
He threw her to one side and she hit against the refrigerator. She hoped that would knock his hand away, but it didn’t. “Tommy!” -She thought she was able to call Tommy right through the hand, and Tommy would be in from the living room and that would be that. . . .
The big man had set her down on the floor; she was almost sure her feet were on the floor. When she looked right in front of her, everything was becoming black in the middle; she could only see on the sides. She thought Mayo would grow huge and come and help her, and she would see his sudden head in the kitchen doorway, great as a tiger’s. She stopped trying to breathe, because all that did was hurt. -Mayo won’t come help me, she thought. -This man’s too strong. She thought he was wonderfully strong-though not as strong as the fire had been, and she’d done all right then. -I did damn well, then, she thought. Now, whirled back to the stove, trying to look to the side of that blackness, just along the edge of it, Ellie thought she saw something like the saucepan, something cooking in there. She reached down with her free hand, picked the saucepan up, and threw what was in it over her left shoulder-screaming into the hand right away as something went broiling down her back.
Then-as if she had done something perfect-the hand was gone, and Ellie lay on the kitchen floor, already feeling better, breathing deep, whooping breaths. Everything would have been wonderful, except that her neck and back were burning. That was what made her scream the way the big man was screaming, standing fiddling with his eyes. But he stopped that, and so did she, and Ellie saw him reach to a shoulder holster, bring out a semiautomatic pistol with something odd added to its muzzle.
A silencer, she supposed. Whining, stepping slowly in place-his left hand plucking at his eyes, tending the skin on his face that still popped softly, sizzled-the big man bent and turned a slow half-circle, listening …
searching blind … blistering head cocked to hear. Then thought he heard-and began to fire his strange pistol.
Ellie saw the shooting, but heard only soft, sneezing sounds. In almost silence, she crawled on her belly through scorching oil and small chunks of potato, past his feet.
He wore big black smooth-toe oxfords that stepped and shifted as he turned while she slid past. She heard only that sneezing for gunfire, but its effects were all around her, showering down in fragments as glass smashed, wood split and splintered, metal achieved sudden dark dots.
Under the kitchen table, beyond the cat-food saucer, the Smith & Wesson lay almost against the wall. She crawled in, reached for it with her right hand, but her hand lay wrong, and wouldn’t go there, so she reached again, and got it with her left-then scooted around so she could see out from under. As the big man, who apparently had heard, fired down through the tabletop above her (she felt the floor jump by her hand where the round went in) Ellie shot him once, up into his chest. The sound, a ringing crack, deafened her so that her second round-going much too high, blowing a hole through her dish cupboard-hardly sounded like-a shot at all. She paused for an instant, steadied down, and put the third into his belly. This last round apparently went through and broke his back, for his legs kicked out from under him and he sat down hard, shaking the floor-and stayed sitting there, lax in a ruined blue suit, his silenced pistol fallen free.
Still alive, though. She saw his left hand crawling by his side, trying-she supposed-to get back to his face, his eyes. He was turning his head very slowly from side to side, taking deep, snoring breaths.
She rolled out from under the table-hit her right arm on the floor, and felt a bone shift inside it. Down under her elbow. The bone was grinding on something there.
She got up on one knee, and felt nauseated, but that passed after she rested a little while. She bolstered her revolver, left-handed, then reached out to collect the man’s pistol-put her left hand, the gun in it, on the tabletop, and pulled herself up all the way, until she was standing in drifts of gunsmoke, swaying, leaning on the table. -There was shouting in the hall.
The big man sat sagging against her stove in a small spreading puddle of rich red, still heaving in his difficult breaths. He was trying to hold his head up, trying to see through ruined eyes.
“You’re under arrest,” said Officer Klein-and gave him his rights from memory.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mitchell Smith, a veteran of the U.S. Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps, has written a dozen paperback novels under various pen names.
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13