Everybody Had A Gun

by Richard Prather

  Like I said, I've been shot at before, but almost invariably I either knew who was doing the shooting or had an idea who it was and why. This time I knew absolutely from nothing. L.A. has its share of murders, but as far as I was concerned, Lobo Le Beau was L.A.'s quota for the day.

  There were some odd angles to that killing. Even the newspaper story describing Lobo's sudden demise had been concerned less with Lobo himself than with two other guys: Collier Breed, Lobo's fat boss, and Marty Sader, the boy who'd started me on the job that tangled me with Lobo—and that, in itself, was interesting, now that I considered it. Since that job I'd done a little checking on Marty Sader, out of curiosity, and I'd heard from some of the characters I run into in my business that Sader was a citizen with big ideas and little principles. It seemed that the night club at which I'd spent that one bibulous evening was, though profitable, only part of Sader's money-making enterprises. It seemed, further, that the club was probably the only legal enterprise.

  The newspapers had hinted that Marty was muscling in on somebody else's "territory," and without actually saying so, they'd managed to put across in a couple of well-chosen paragraphs the idea that the territory was Breed's. There was beginning to be a pattern somewhere in all this, and now Breed's boy was killed off and I smelled trouble in the morning air.

  Danny's asking me if I knew anything about Lobo's killing had started me along this line of speculation, but I shoved it out of my mind. At least I tried to. That trouble I smelled was one deal I wanted no part of. At first glance it didn't appear likely I'd get any: Boys like Breed and Sader have other methods of settling their differences than hiring private detectives. Such cute methods as bombs, cement, and sawed-off shotguns.

  But the more I thought of that "muscling-in" rumble that was spreading, and the longer I considered how soon after Lobo's murder somebody had taken two near-lethal shots at me, the less I enjoyed the skittering flights of my morbid imagination. In that little altercation with Lobo three months back, I'd been squeezed a bit between Sader and Breed; and I couldn't help wondering if somehow I'd got squeezed into the middle again. Now I was getting morbid, and I told myself the hell with it.

  I was standing at the side of the window, keeping fairly well out of sight in case people still wanted to shoot me, when I saw the girl. Or, rather the woman. By no stretch of an elastic imagination could she be honestly described as a girl I'd just about decided to shake my mood by going back to the bookcase and digging out a copy of Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn, given me by a guy named Garvey Mace to replace some Frank Harris books that a couple of Mace's goons ripped up a while back. I was going to settle down in my swivel chair, prop my Cordovans on my mahogany desk, and reread some of those liquidly flowing Miller passages. But when I saw the woman I forgot all about Miller, which may be some indication of the kind of woman she was.

  The first thing I noticed was the way she was dressed. She had on a pair of boyish, dark blue slacks and a fuzzy, light blue half sweater, and she was wearing her tummy bare in the breeze. She was on the far side of the street in the doorway of a shop, but even from that distance she caught my eyes and tugged. Her face wasn't clear, but I could see she had red hair that was worn long the way it should be: the kind of hair a man means when he speaks of woman's crowning glory. And even from there I could see she was slim, but with bold breasts that had a happy tilt, and a woman's hips in her boyish slacks.

  Even if she hadn't been such a lush gal I'd have watched her because she was acting funny. She kept looking up and down the sidewalk and keeping back in the doorway, where it would be hard for anyone on the street to see her. And at first I thought I was imagining it, but I got the impression she was looking up toward my window, toward where I was standing.

  And then I was sure of it. She looked up toward the window, took a couple of hesitant steps as if she were going to cross the street, then went back to where she'd been standing and looked up at my window again. I got so interested I forgot about keeping pretty well out of sight, stepped out right in plain view, and stared down at the gal.

  She spotted me and straightened up. Then damned if she didn't start waving at me and making gestures with her hand. My mouth must have dropped open like the people who'd gawked at me a while earlier, and it dropped even farther in the next second.

  She kept looking up at me, left her spot in the shop doorway, and started running straight across the street, jiggling like crazy. Man, it was pretty.

  Traffic was heavy, but she must either have forgotten about it or ignored it, because there was the squealing of brakes as a guy screeched to a stop barely short of her, and there was a bang as the car behind him slammed into his rear bumper.

  The noise startled her and she stopped suddenly and put one hand up against her face and looked around. Guys in the cars were staring; this was the nicest thing they'd seen in a long time. One vulgar lout even stuck his head out a car window and gave the whistle. I couldn't blame him.

  I might even have whistled myself, except that it suddenly occurred to me I made a beautiful target standing where I was. And it also occurred to me that just possibly I was looking in the wrong direction—out the window instead of toward the unlocked door leading into my office.

  Only I got both my bright ideas too late. I hadn't even started to turn around when trouble came in the door behind me.

  Chapter Two

  THE TROUBLE was in the person of a little skinny guy about forty years old with a great big gun in his right fist. I knew the gun—a .45-caliber automatic pistol—but I didn't know the guy. What's more, I didn't want to know him.

  He said, "Come on, Scott. We're leaving."

  "Leaving? For where? What's—"

  "Don't stall, mister," he snapped at me. "Right now. Hurry it up." He wiggled the gun a little.

  It was getting to me. Somebody was real mad at me and was going to a lot of trouble to prove it. Well, I was convinced. I didn't argue any more. I kept my hands in plain sight and moved around the desk toward him. When I was four feet from him he said, "That's close enough. Put your hands behind your head. Lace 'em tight."

  I did exactly as I was told.

  He said, "Don't try anything, Scott," then pointed the automatic at the middle of my chest and reached out easily with his left hand and slipped my gun out of its holster. Then he slipped my Colt in his pocket and stepped back away from me. He jerked his head toward the door. "O.K., out ahead of me."

  I walked to the door and stopped. He walked up on my left and said quietly, "Hurry it up. You want lumps on your head? Snap into it."

  "How about a rough idea?" I asked. "What's up? You the guy that took a shot at me?"

  He shifted the gun a little in his hand and the corners of his mouth pulled down. He was a real tough guy. He was a couple of inches over five feet high, but the gun in his hand made him nine feet tall. He was a giant while he had that gun pointed at me.

  He said softly, "You must not have heard me right, Scott. I said hurry it up. Now move!"

  I was slow this morning and it had taken a little while, but I was starting to burn. I'd have loved mashing this nasty character's face into a block of cement. He was about three feet from me, just to the left of the door. So close I could reach out and touch him. But I didn't. He was ready for anything I might pull, and I didn't know any way to distract his attention.

  He clamped his teeth together and his jaw muscles bulged. I unwound my arms from behind my head and started to reach for the doorknob, and then I heard it. We both heard it. The click-click of high heels hurrying down the hall outside.

  I let my right hand fall back to my side and looked toward the little man. He licked his lips as the click-click got louder. This might be the first hitch. He shrank about a foot.

  I said, "We'd better wait and see. . . ."

  He didn't answer me, but he kept looking at me, and the muzzle of the .45 kept looking at me.

  The click of the high heels came rapidly up to the door of the office an
d stopped. The doorknob rattled.

  There was a trick a bouncer friend of mine told me about once. He worked in one of the toughest joints in town and on occasion he'd had to fight two or three guys. He said a trick that hadn't yet failed him was to look at the first guy and sock the second, then look at the third and slug the first. If you slugged hard enough, that left you with only one guy. Of course, they weren't supposed to have large guns.

  Well, I had only one guy. I kept looking at him as the doorknob rattled and his eyes got a little wider. The door started to swing inward and I pulled my head around toward the door and at the same instant I shot my left fist up hard and hoped to Christ this wouldn't end in a Shell Scott obituary. I waited for the explosion, but the only pop was the small one my fist made on his chin.

  The door came rapidly open about twelve inches and slammed hard into the shoe on my right foot as I jerked my head back around to my left. The little guy was just folding, the automatic already dropping from his hand. He flopped to the floor against the wall and lay quietly. I felt like stepping in his face.

  The door banged my shoe again but I didn't move my foot. I had a pretty good idea this was the delightful dish I'd seen starting to cross the street, but even as luscious as she was, I had more important things in hand. I'd been shot at already this morning and the little guy slightly unconscious on my carpet might be able to explain that for me.

  It was the confused doll that stopped traffic, all right. She'd pushed halfway into the room, squeezing between the wall and the door, and it was some of the nicest squeezing I'd seen in my life. She stopped there, left hand clutching a little black handbag with red drawstrings at the top, and with half of her wool sweater tilting happily at me, and when she gasped, "Oh, Mr. Scott!" I looked up at her face.

  It was nice enough to have rated first look. Her eyes were a bright blue that went with the red hair tumbling over one shoulder, and her lips were moist and shining and inviting.

  "Oh, Mr. Scott," she gasped again. "Thank God you're all right."

  Sure. I was fine. I was dandy. I was shaking like a leaf. And now I was really going around in circles.

  "Honey," I said, "I'm busy right now. I—"

  She didn't hear me. She started babbling and it got to me that she looked ready to come apart at the seams. Her lovely face was twisted and her bright blue eyes were frightened.

  She said rapidly, running the words together, "They locked me inside, but I went up the dumb-waiter to Clark's. I came here as soon—"

  "You what?" I yelped. "You went up what?"

  She still didn't hear me. She kept on going like mad: "As soon as I could. I called and called, but nobody answered. Oh, I was so glad when I saw you."

  "Baby," I said. "Take it easy. What in the hell are you talking about?"

  She looked blankly at me for a moment, then sighed heavily. "I'm sorry. I was just so scared. I—Aaah!"

  I'd been glancing down at the little guy to make sure he stayed put while the gal was spraying words at me, and she finally followed my gaze and saw him sprawled on the floor. He was lying with the right side of his face pressed into the carpet and the left side up so it was in plain view, and as soon as she spotted him she let out a squeak.

  I thought she was just startled to see a man lying on my floor. It isn't an everyday occurrence. But she surprised me some more.

  She sputtered, "What—how—he works for Sader! Oh!" And then she started squeezing back out of the door and into the hall.

  "Hey, wait a minute," I yelled. "What gives here?"

  "I don't want him to see me. He mustn't see me. He works for Sader. Get rid of him. Get rid of him!"

  "Honey, I can't toss him out the window. What's the matter?"

  "I've got to talk to you. I have to." She looked ready to start bawling.

  "Baby," I said, "get a grip on yourself. Relax. It can't be as bad as all that. Look. Downstairs, just to the right of the entrance, there's a bar called Pete's. You go down there and have a double shot. Have something. I'll be down as soon as I get rid of this." I gestured toward the man on the floor.

  She said, "All right. But hurry." She paused, then blurted rapidly, "Sader's after you and—oh, mister, you're in awful trouble. So am I. They want to kill us. They will. I know they will. And it's my fault—all my fault." She finished that up almost wailing.

  Then she slipped out the door and went click-click back down the hall and I craned my head around and stared after her and I couldn't even enjoy the delightful sway of her hips. My eyes must have looked like the crosses they put in cartoons.

  She had said, "They want to kill us." Not sue us, or call us names. Nothing simple like that. I was playing with it, and wondering where this tied in with my previous brainspins, when the guy on the floor groaned.

  I pushed the door shut, slammed the bolt, picked up the automatic, and got my gun out of the guy's pocket. Then I walked over to the fish tank. I scooped up some water in my hands, careful not to get any baby guppies, and splashed the water into the little man's face. I still felt like stepping on it.

  After another double handful of water he groaned again and blinked at me. I grabbed him under the arms, wrestled him across the room, and slammed him, urgently, down in the swivel chair behind my desk. He shook his head, looked up at me, then shifted his eyes nervously around the room.

  I bent over the little guy and said, "I'm going to tell you something, friend. And then I think I'll break your jaw. Or maybe your neck. You start right at the beginning and spill everything you know about this job. Who are you? Why'd you shove a gun at me? Who shot at me this morning?"

  He licked his lips and looked at me from nervous eyes, but he didn't say anything.

  I remembered the girl had said something about this lug's working for Sader. The more I thought about the girl, the more anxious I was to see her, find out what had been eating her and what she'd started to tell me. And some damn thing about her visit—besides what she'd said—was worrying me, but I couldn't pin down what it was. Seemed like I was forgetting something. I shook the feeling off and grabbed the little man by the lapels of his coat and rattled him. I shook him so hard his head bobbed around as if he had rubber vertebrae; then I dropped him back into the chair.

  "Buster, start talking, and fast. Who put you up to this deal?"

  He breathed a little faster and his eyes darted back and forth more rapidly, but he didn't say anything. I wanted to paste him one, but I couldn't quite make myself do it. When he'd been jabbing a gun at me it was easy, or if he hadn't been so obviously helpless now or had been a little bigger maybe I could have. High on the list of my pet peeves are guys who point guns at me. Maybe I couldn't quite make myself hit him while he sat there refusing to look at me, but I sure came close.

  I balled up my right fist and held it in front of his small face, practically blotting it out. I said, "Five seconds, beetle, and you spill or I start busting your teeth."

  It wasn't any good. He let out a couple of little wheezes but he didn't spill anything. He was more afraid of talking than he was of me. I had a creepy feeling I'd spent enough time with this guy for the moment; I wanted to talk to the jiggling redhead. I grabbed the phone off my desk, dialed police headquarters, and reported a man with a gun to the policeman at the complaint board. I reported the guy as at my office, hung up, and waited.

  The little joe was still not talking when the radio car arrived with two patrolmen, and right behind them came Detective Sergeant Danny Russo. I unlocked the door and let everybody in.

  Danny frowned at me. "No peace," he said. "No peace at all around you. What the hell now?"

  I jerked my head toward the desk. "This little guy wanted to take me for a walk. Or a ride." I handed Danny the .45 automatic. "He used this to persuade me. Know him?"

  Danny looked past me and spotted the little man hunched over behind my desk. "Uh-huh. Ex-con. Ozzie York, one of Marty Sader's boys. What's Sader got against you, Shell?"

  Sader. The girl hadn't bee
n kidding when she'd said, "He works for Sader." I wondered if she'd been kidding about any of the rest of it. I told Danny, "You got me. I'm starting to wish the hell I knew. And I've never even met this punk. Take him away, will you?"

  Danny raised an eyebrow at me, then walked over to the desk. "What is this, Ozzie?"

  No answer.

  "Make it easy on yourself, Ozzie," Danny said.

  I butted in. "He won't say anything, Danny. Wouldn't open his yap for me anyway."

  Danny looked over his shoulder at me, then back at Ozzie. "We'll see," he said quietly.

  I hurried the boys up and Danny slipped the handcuffs on Ozzie's small wrist. Danny said, "Well, come on, Shell," and started out.

  "Uh, Danny. You go ahead. I'll come down to Homicide later. O.K.?"

  He frowned. "Look here, Shell. You're the guy that called in on this—"

  "I've got urgent business, Danny. I'll come down and make the crime report soon as I can. What difference does it make whether I give you the report now or later? I'll be down."

  He sighed. "O. K. But don't wait all day. Room Forty-two, pal."

  "I'll be there. Thanks, Danny."

  When they'd gone I checked my .38 Colt Special, released the catch and pushed the cylinder out and made sure all the chambers were loaded, then pressed the cylinder back in place. Me and my gun were ready to go. I locked the office door and took off to see if the double shot had calmed my hysterical redhead.

  And I wanted her calm. I'd been a bit too busy to concentrate on what she'd been saying when she'd squeezed into the office, but now I remembered the words she'd forced past her fright: something about Sader's being after me for something or other, people dying to kill me, and everything was all her fault—the whole thing gasped out as if the world were coming to an end. It looked as if the nervous lady might, once she got a grip on herself, be able to explain who had been aiming at me this morning.