Take a Murder, Darling (The Shell Scott Mysteries)

by Richard S. Prather

  It was like running into a mountain, or maybe a volcano exploding. Each of us saw the other only a moment before we crashed together, but he had time enough to pull the trigger of his already-cocked automatic. The slug missed me, but the bang of the explosion jarred me almost as much as its suddenness, as did the impact with Ark's approximately 260 pounds. He let out a hoarse bellow, but then my feet went out from under me and I sprawled face down in the dirt.

  As soon as I hit I rolled over, got to my feet again, the Colt tight in my hand. Trees and shrubs blurred before my eyes but even so I saw the figure of a third man about ten yards away. He was visible through a gap in the trees and brush, but I couldn't identify him. A splash of fire jumped from his hand, and a slug jerked at the cloth of my trousers.

  I snapped a quick shot in his direction. Every second I expected to hear the boom of Ark's gun and feel the pile-driver impact of a .45 slug. I could see Ark's bulk looming at my left, but I had to keep my eyes on the other man.

  That third man still had his gun raised and pointed at me. His feet were spread wide and he fired again. The bullet smacked sharply into the trunk of a tree inches from me. I steadied myself, swung the Colt back toward him, aiming for his chest. When you've got to hit a man, you don't aim at his head. And I had to hit this one.

  I forced myself to aim with care, and to squeeze off the shot, not to jerk the trigger. Because an automatic counter in my brain had ticked off four shots already from my Colt, and the snub-nosed revolver had been loaded with only five cartridges when this little war started. So this was my last shot and I meant to make it good.

  I did.

  As the gun bucked slightly in my hand the man's left shoulder jerked back. He cried out and kept turning. He didn't go down, but jumped aside and ran out of sight. Ark's big body was looming on my left, close, almost on top of me. As I pulled my head around toward him the gleam of light on metal a few feet away told me why Ark hadn't shot me. His gun was on the ground nearby; the impact when we'd collided had knocked the automatic from his hand.

  Ark landed on me like a cement mixer. It was a sensation like getting sprained everywhere at once. Like having a building jump on you, or lightning hit you. The empty gun flew out of my fingers, and my hand felt as if it were going to leave my arm, but I managed to stay on my feet. A big fist came out of the air and bounced off the side of my head. Dizziness unfocused my eyes and rang bells inside my ears. The light dimmed and shadows got darker.

  I brought up a knee and ground it hard into him, slashed out with my open left hand and felt its thick side crack against flesh. My vision cleared a little and I saw his contorted features close to mine, his eyes glaring wildly, and I slammed my right hand at his face, extended fingers cutting at his eyes. Ark roared in pain and anger, throwing an arm up and rolling to the side just far enough so I could bounce a hard balled fist off his cheek.

  The blow didn't knock him down, but he stumbled—and fell, sprawling. Before I could reach him Ark recovered and got to his knees, one hand reaching toward my throat. I went back one step to place my feet solidly, then swung toward him, dropping my right shoulder and leaning my body into the blow, driving with my right leg at the same time that I slammed my right hand into his face.

  I was aiming for his chin but my fist cracked against his high, bony forehead and snapped his head back. Pain exploded in my knuckles, flamed through my hand and wrist all the way up my arm. Ark's small eyes glazed but he just shook his head and let an unintelligible sound roar from his mouth.

  The blow should have knocked him flat on his back. It should have damn near torn off the top of his head. It should have pounded him unconscious, but it didn't. It addled him all right, but he'd been pretty well addled before I'd ever hit him, and I got the frightening feeling that maybe nothing less than a bullet in the head would put him out, that you could hit him and hit him again and he'd just keep shaking his head and coming at you.

  He was still on his knees in front of and below me, slumped a little, with his long arms dangling at his sides now, one of them touching the ground, and he looked as much like a great ape as anything I'd seen outside of a zoo. He grunted with a kind of short, coughing sound and jerked his hands up before his face. Then he started to get up fast, arms straightening as he reached for me.

  That covered his head and face pretty well. But it left his stomach wide open. I kicked him right in the middle of his gut, the toe of my shoe going into his flesh like a leather spear, and breath and spit gushed from his mouth. He hung in the air for a moment, wide open. And I really leaned into him then, while I had the chance, while I was still alive and able to swing at him, and I brought my left fist up from all the way down and quite a distance behind me, and when it landed on his chin it made a sound like the crack a felled tree makes as it breaks loose and starts to plunge to earth. Or maybe like the crack of Doom. Because that's what it was for Ark.

  It was a helluva blow, and he must have been out then, but as he toppled back and sideways I stepped forward and spread my right hand open, fingers together and thumb pulled tightly away from them, and then slashed it like a flesh cleaver hard against the corner of his jaw. The side of my hand bounced off his face and he fell soundlessly. He hit and lay motionless. I damn near kicked him in the head.

  I left him on his face and scooped up his gun, then trotted toward the first guy I'd shot. I was thinking less about him, though, than about where the third guy was, the egg who'd pumped those two or three shots at me. Then the sound of a car's engine catching answered the question.

  I changed direction and ran forward, Ark's automatic ready in my right hand. I burst out of the trees near the gate just as the car, a cream-and-gray Buick with white sidewall tires flashed by. I got a quick look at the driver's face. He was a punk named Lemmy, the kind of vicious, demented hoodlum who would sprinkle his bullets with salt. I got off one shot at him, but I missed even the car. It didn't bother me; I wasn't kicking about anything.

  Then I went back and looked at the dead man. I had already identified him in the split second before pumping a .38 slug into his chest. His name was—or had been—Flavin, and he, like Ark and Lemmy, worked for Roy Toby, the man I was going to see very soon now. Within minutes if I could get to him that fast. Because these guys just worked for Toby, carried out his orders, acted like an extension of the gun he carried. He was really the man who pulled the trigger, and he was the guy I should have kicked in the teeth. Or shot in the head. Well, maybe in a little while I would get the chance to do one or the other.

  Because if Toby were following his usual routine, he would be in the room he used for an office in Jason Fleece's gym.

  And that's where I was going.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I got my empty Colt and put it back in its holster, then trotted to my Cad and backed it up closer to the bulk of the unconscious Ark. I figured that I would personally deliver to the police one hood for their jail and one for their morgue. Besides, I wanted to hear what Ark would have to say in one of the Police Building's interrogation rooms.

  It took me a good five minutes to wrestle him over to the car, dump him into the back seat of the coupe and bind his hands, mouth, and feet with friction tape from the trunk. Then I hauled the dead man over and flopped him in alongside Ark. Ark looked even worse than Flavin did.

  But I felt worse, I figured, than either of them. Neither of them was feeling any pain, but I seemed to have aches on top of sprains compounded of contusions. I felt sprained and bent and mashed and raw and nearly squashed, and I was all those things. So it was natural that I was learning to resent Toby with a resentment beautiful in its perfection.

  I tramped on the accelerator and headed for Hollywood. As I drove, I got a box of .38 caliber shells from the glove compartment and loaded my gun again. Unless I've got reason to expect to use the revolver, I keep an empty chamber under the hammer as a safety measure. Now, though, I filled all six chambers in the cylinder.

  The gym was on the ground floo
r of the Planet Building at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Edgemont, out of the high rent district, as the saying goes. I pushed open the heavy plate-glass doors and walked into a small reception room. A door in the far wall was open and through it I could see men exercising, working out with heavy equipment. At a desk near the open door a young broad-shouldered guy sat, laboriously making marks in a ledger.

  I stopped by his desk and said, “Where's Roy Toby?”

  For maybe three seconds I thought he was going to give me some trouble. But he looked up at my face, then said, “You can see his office from here. That brown door in the wall clear across the gym.”

  “He in there?”

  “Yeah.”

  I got about halfway through the big gym when it dawned on me that a large number of guys in here had stopped whatever they'd been doing and were giving me a lot of attention. I looked around more carefully.

  This gym was a big open room like the one at Mamzel's, but there the resemblance ended. Where Mamzel's was soft and curving and scented, this joint was hard and bulgy and smelly. Muscles were everywhere I looked; I was in a sea of muscles, a sea in which a guy could drown horribly.

  A number of these bulgy boys, I knew, worked for Toby; consequently they would be happy to work on me for Toby. I told myself: Under all those muscles, they're just weaklings. But it didn't help much.

  I kept walking toward the brown door. Over on my right was a guy who, in a quick, blurry glance, appeared about eight feet tall. I took a better look at him and decided he must be about six feet, six inches tall. He was big and he was strong, beautifully proportioned and wearing only a pair of gym shorts. He was raising and lowering a barbell that looked to me as if it weighed several tons, and his biceps and pectorals and latissimus dorsi and several odd ones seemed to be writhing in anguish. I was getting sick of muscles.

  The big guy kept eyeing me. He was nearly as blond as I am, but unlike my short-cropped stubble, his hair was long and almost passionately waved. As I continued toward the door he gently deposited the barbell on the floor and walked catlike to intercept me.

  He caught me a couple yards from the door and clamped his fingers around my right arm like five little boa constrictors. High on the list of things which I dislike intensely is for guys to latch onto me with steely fingers. Or any kind of fingers. So I stopped suddenly, looked down at the hand wrinkling my blue gabardine coat and then at the guy's face. Then I set my feet and drew back my balled left fist.

  I was simply going to haul off and bust him one on the jaw, but he let go of my arm. Maybe he saw the smoke in my eyes. Maybe he had a change of heart. Anyway, he stepped back a pace and said, “Where in hell you goin’ in such a hurry, pal?”

  “What makes it your business?”

  “I'm Fleece. Jason Fleece.” He waved an arm that was like a series of graduated hams placed end to end. “I own this place.”

  So this was the Golden Boy himself. His real name was Joe Yoicks or something like that, but in a muscle-man contest here a couple of years ago after he'd been runner-up in the Mr. Universe competition, he'd won the top title, “Hollywood's Golden Boy”—Hollywood is like that—and subsequently changed his name to Jason Fleece. Hollywood is like that, too.

  I said, “The hell you own it. You and Roy Toby.”

  He shrugged, then grinned easily. “So I own forty percent. What's it to you?”

  “In a couple more minutes you may own a hundred percent again.” I took a step toward the door.

  “Wait a second, pal,” Fleece said. “You seem kind of worked up. Who are you, anyway?”

  “Shell Scott.”

  He squinted. “Would you be the guy that got Toby panned on the Randolph broadcast?”

  “I had a hand in it.”

  He grinned. “More like a fist. I enjoyed that broadcast. Maybe we're on the same team.”

  “You can prove it. Answer one question for me. I remember when you won the Golden Boy title and started this gym. It looked pretty good for you. So how did you happen to get tied up with a complete bum like Toby?”

  He shrugged. After a moment's hesitation he said, “Toby wanted to buy in while the price was right. And he said he'd kill me if the price wasn't right.”

  “What did he actually pay you?”

  “Nothing. Oh, it's all legal. Now.” He paused. “Take it back. His bums did pay me —” Fleece touched a thin scar bordering his left eyebrow and another alongside his nose—“with these. And scared off three of the men I'd planned to have working with me.”

  I looked around. Four big sweaty guys seemed to be paying more attention to me than seemed natural, or even nice. I said to Fleece, “Under the circumstances, you should be almost as anxious for me to keep my health as I am. Seeing how sincerely I hate Toby's flabby guts.”

  “When you speak, it's like hearing music.”

  “Toby's in his office, isn't he?” I nodded toward the door.

  “He is.”

  “Any other way out of there?”

  “Another door leads into the alley behind the gym.”

  “Anybody been in to see Toby in the last fifteen minutes or so?” Fleece shook his head and I asked him, “You know one of his punks named Lemmy?”

  “Sure. Haven't seen him around this morning though.”

  “Well, some guys I assume are Toby's men are out in the gym now, and they just might follow me inside—and I would not feel at ease in there with Toby if they did.”

  He smiled. “Toby doesn't like us to bother him unnecessarily. So I'll just have to try to keep people out.” He grinned. “Wait till I turn my back.”

  He turned, walked over to his barbell and bent to pick it up. He straightened, lifting the bar, and flesh molehills became muscle mountains on his back and shoulders. I walked to the brown door, turned the knob and went in.

  Roy Toby sat before a scarred pine desk at the right of the room. His right side was toward me and he was putting a large sheaf of currency into a metal box on the desk before him. As I slammed the door behind me he looked up, face showing sudden anger.

  “I told you jerks to knock —”

  He saw me and his jaw slumped, then slowly he closed it and swallowed. But along with the concern showing on his face now, there was still the anger.

  There was always anger on Toby's fat features. It was an unhealthy, unhappy, unpleasant face, a face that would always bear a grudge, a fat, floppy, red face, now getting redder. His hair was fine, reddish and wispy, his nose was large and pitted, and he had big, slightly protruding eyes with fat lids stretched over them midway down their surfaces, like flesh blobs from an unfinished operation dangling near his pupils. He was a fat man, but he was not a jolly fat man.

  Toby blinked at me, winced at the sound of the door slamming behind me, then grabbed at a drawer of his desk and shoved his hand into it. But by that time I was alongside him. Before he could get his hand out I leaned over and slammed my own hand hard against the drawer's side, crashing it shut on his wrist.

  Toby let out a gasp of pain, slowly pulled his right hand up against his chest, wrapped the fingers of his left hand around his wrist. I reached into the drawer and wrapped my own fingers around an Army Colt .45 automatic there—the pistol that is almost standard equipment for mobsters and hoodlums.

  I squeezed my fingers around the gun's stock and brought it up in a tight arc and laid the barrel on the angle of Toby's chin. He had started suddenly up out of his swivel chair, but he just as suddenly flopped back down into it, letting out a roar this time, a roar of pain and rage.

  I said, “Surprised to see me alive, Toby?” I hauled the gun back again and said, “I ought to bust you wide open.”

  He must have thought I was going to splinter his teeth because he shoved himself backward so hard that his chair toppled over and he went with it, crashing heavily onto his back. He grunted and gasped, started to pull his bulk up again.

  “Just stay there,” I said. “Flat on your back. And thanks for grabbing thi
s heater, chump. Since you're still on parole, that—added to attempted murder—should be plenty for the police to hold you on.”

  He stopped moving but spoke finally, the words, forced through his teeth and his anger, so distorted as to be almost unintelligible. “Scott, get out of here. Quit messing with me, or I swear I'll have you killed.”

  “Yeah, I was right. With that temper of yours, you'd better be locked up. And I'll personally feel better with you out of circulation.”

  “If the cops picked me up, I'd be out in an hour, you jerk. And a half hour later you'd be dead in an alley, you lousy —”

  “Shut up, Toby. Watch that slimy mouth of yours or I'll open your skull.” He'd spoken the truth for a change, though. Even if I hauled him to the can, he'd be sprung fast by his gang of smart lawyers.

  I took a different tack. “Your boys missed me, Toby, though they tried, and hard. But you'd be a damn fool to keep on trying to kill me.”

  He looked as if he were trying to pop. His face got redder and redder, but he lay quietly, not even trying to speak. He was more menacing than when he'd been snarling at me. I went on, “What you'd better get through your fat head is that Randolph only quoted a small part of my report last Sunday. If anything happened to me so soon after that telecast, ninety thousand people would be sure you were responsible. You'd practically be reserving the gas chamber in your own name.”

  He said, “Nuts.”

  “It's your funeral, Toby. Here's something else you can chew on. I'm working for Mamzel's. One of the reasons I was hired was to stop your muscling in there the same way you did here. If we have to hire a whole army, we'll do it—but I've got a hunch I can stop you just by proving you're responsible for Zoe Avilla's murder.”

  “Who?” He didn't even blink.

  “Zoe Avilla. You heard me.”

  “So I heard you. But I never heard of her.”

  “Susan Roeder, then.”

  “Same thing to me. Nothing.”

  “Ark heard of her. Tell me you don't know Ark.”