Dead-Bang

by Richard S. Prather

  “Dave—Dave—don’t even say things like—”

  “Well, you goddamn crud, you let him get away—”

  “I tole you, he said they was—”

  “Oh, shut up.” Silence for a couple of seconds, then Dave continued less belligerently, “We only got one shot into him, and the stuff must have broken down more than I thought it had, but I still don’t know how the bastard could’ve done all that running around. He must be the healthiest freak in the whole damned country.”

  There was silence for a few seconds. As I moved slowly toward an open door a few feet ahead on my left, the room from which the sound of voices came, I realized my name must have been mentioned on some kind of news broadcast again, and recently, or Dave and Ed wouldn’t have known about my appearance at the Church of the Second Coming. The knowledge neither astonished nor pleased me. There wasn’t time to dwell on such matters anyway, for I was only one long step from the door.

  I took that last step as Dave went on, “I still say he’s done for. Chances are he’s bleeding to death right now. If he had sense enough to get a K-one shot, or something to build up his prothrombin, he might make it. But when in hell would the bastard have had time for that? When in hell would the freak take time for a shot if there were ten naked broads lined up—”

  “Dave, I already ast you not to—”

  “Clam up. I don’t care if Scott lives on fresh blood and raw liver, I say he’s probably dead already.”

  “Not quite, Dave. But thanks for all the compliments.”

  Dave knew Ed hadn’t said that, and Ed knew Dave hadn’t, so both of them snapped their heads toward the door—and Ed began springing to his feet. Dave was seated behind a desk, his feet propped on it, facing me, and Ed was coming up out of a chair on my left, his right hand held before him with the fingers spread.

  I don’t know whether Dave was already pasty-looking from worry or if he simply paled then, almost instantly, but to me he appeared frozen and white, immobile, and he didn’t speak. Not Ed; he was roaring as soon as he started out of his chair. “You sonofabitch!”

  “Ed, hold it. You haven’t—”

  I never got to tell him all of it, that he didn’t have a chance. The cocked automatic was in my hand and the moment he moved I’d swung it to point at his broad thick chest. But he wasn’t listening. His mouth was open, chin stuck out, lips peeled from his big teeth. The butt of a gun stuck up from behind his belt buckle, and that spread hand of his slapped against it as he yelled, “You tole me they was bareass nekkid, you sonofabitch! Pants—”

  I shot him once. Ordinarily with a man yanking out a fat .45 I would have put from two to half a dozen into him. But I held my finger from the trigger after the one blast of sound, just pulled the gun down level again after it bounced in my hand. But that one was enough.

  Ed spun backward, arms flipping up and gun flying into the air. He hit the chair, toppled over it, crashed to the floor on his side. I jumped to him, put a hand on his shoulder, and started to roll him over. But Ed had started to say something to me, and with the thought stuck in that simple one-track mind of his, he finished it. He lifted his head, stared straight into my eyes, and squeezed it out in a high whistling voice like a boy’s: “… and all,” he said, then he relaxed, relaxed completely, and his head hit the floor with a thump as he died.

  I put a finger against Ed’s throat and felt for his pulse, just to be sure—but kept my eyes on Dave. There wasn’t any pulse. I straightened up, aimed the .45 at Dave’s stomach and took a step toward him.

  “You’re a real sweetheart, Cassiday. André Strang, the chunky hood there in the house with him, Ed’s buddy, and now Ed. Four men killed. A close call for Regina Winsome. Bruno and Dru were supposed to go. Not to mention the miscellaneous misery, and that crap you shot into me. I doubt you’ll be missed.”

  “Don’t.…” Dave put his left hand up in front of him and sort of pushed it toward me, then shoved the other open hand at me, shrinking back, turning his head to the side but continuing to stare wide eyed at the bore of my gun. “Don’t!”

  “Why not?”

  “Scott—I won’t give you any trouble. I knew it was all up, over, when I saw you in the doorway. Don’t shoot, for God’s sake, you wouldn’t murder a man—Scott, don’t shoot me—”

  I relaxed a little, and my heels gently hit the floor. I hadn’t realized I was standing on the balls of my feet. “You talked me out of it, Dave,” I said. “Don’t make me change my mind.”

  He shook his head slowly back and forth, his face white as a halibut’s belly. “I was just thinking,” I said to him. “If one of those Lemmings—by the way, did you hear about the excitement at the church on television?” He shook his head. “Radio?” He nodded. “Anyhow, if one of those dandies had got close enough to bite me, I’d either have died of rabies or bled to death—and you still might have made it all the way. Right?”

  He ran his tongue over his lips without moistening them, then shrugged silently. Dave didn’t have much to say at the moment. But I assumed he would make up later for his silence—later, with several teams of police officers. Not, however, if I keeled over and followed Ed to wherever he’d gone.

  A phone rested on Cassiday’s desk. I lifted it off the hook, dialed, not using my gun hand. When I got the LAPD I asked for Samson in Homicide, and took several slow deep breaths while waiting for him to come on.

  When he answered, I said rapidly, “Sam, this is Shell. Now, please shut up just for a—”

  I didn’t say it fast enough. I know he didn’t hear me say “shut up,” and there was a good chance he hadn’t heard the “please.” I had been chewed out unbelievably by the captain of Homicide on other occasions, but for at least thirty seconds Samson achieved a peak of violent invective and magnificence of thundering condemnation unique even in my experience.

  After he’d promised personally to expedite my indictment, arraignment, trial, conviction, and incarceration at San Quentin if not Devil’s Island on a wondrous array of charges—including, assaulting a police officer, being a public nuisance on purpose, and most recently, transporting naked sexpots openly within the city limits—and had begun to concentrate with undiminished sarcasm on my unforgivable insults and affronts to the Church of the Second Coming, Lemming and Lemmings, Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Scientologists, and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, I wearied.

  I had tried several times without success to interrupt him, so I held the Colt .45 a foot from the phone’s mouthpiece and fired a bullet into the ceiling.

  “What—Shell, was that a shot? Shell, are you all right?”

  He sounded a little more human. Sam got very, very bugged with me at times, but I knew he’d hate it if I got killed. “Afraid not, Sam,” I said. “While I was trying to squeeze a word in edgewise, a hundred-and-twelve-year-old mafioso crawled in here and pooped me. I never thought I’d get it from the world’s oldest hoodlum—”

  He was off again.

  But this time he stopped the harangue himself, and after a brief but pregnant silence said, “All right. Well?”

  “I’m at the Cassiday and Quince offices in west L.A. With Dave Cassiday. He hired three hoods, Monk, Billy Hickel, and Ed Loeffler—all now deceased—snatched Bruno, planned the whole caper. He also supplied some kind of blood-thinner that was injected into André Strang before they killed him. I called so you could have some cops take this creep off my hands. Please don’t send the officer I slugged, though—”

  It was a very short outburst this time. I went on, “The other reason I called, old buddy, Cassiday shot a dollop of that same crud into me a couple hours ago, and it is doing some strange and—I hate to complain, Sam—unpleasant things to me. I thought you might care to send along an ambulance—”

  “The same injection given Strang?”

  “Yeah. Obviously a weaker brew, but I think I’m leaking in a couple places, anyhow. Probably need a shot of—just a minute.” I pulled the phone from my ear and looked at Dave. “Wha
t do I need, pal?”

  He ran that dry tongue over his lips again, but said, “K-one, it’s a vitamin, vitamin K. Tell him Mephyton, administered intravenously, or any other good preparation designed to reverse anticoagulant-induced prothrombin deficiency.” Dave was being very cooperative now.

  So, apparently, was Samson. I guessed he’d heard Dave’s words, because when I stuck the phone alongside my head again, I could hear him yelling—out his office door into the squad room, undoubtedly—and I caught his last words, “Code Three. Jump!”

  “Code Three” means with red light and siren, or very speedy. Which gave me some comfort.

  “Shell?”

  “Yeah. Still here.” Cassiday clasped his hands together on the desk top and leaned forward slightly. Probably he was merely shifting to a more comfortable position, since he’d been almost rigid for some time. So I went on, “If you hear another shot, it will be because I got dizzy and shot Dave Cassiday, just to make sure he wouldn’t get away if I passed out.”

  I didn’t think Cassiday could get any paler, but he did. Samson asked me, “How do you feel? No wisecracks now, give it to me straight.”

  “I’m still on my feet. But I might be bleeding a little somewhere in my innards—” I chopped it off with a grunt, involuntarily. One of the tearing aches that had been grabbing me every couple of minutes ripped through my gut and right side. There was dead silence at the other end of the line for a few seconds, and I supposed Sam had put his big paw over the mouthpiece. Then he was on again, saying, “You’re in the company’s office building?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who else is there?”

  “Cassiday and Ed Loeffler. The only dead one is Loeffler. So far. Incidentally, Cassiday set up the try to knock off Regina Winsome, the girl nicked at the church last night He’s also the busy boy who hauled the bodies of Strang and Monk from the house on Fifty-eighth Street there in Weilton.” I paused. “That’s about it for now, Sam. I’m going to concentrate on our chum here. Get the word about Cassiday to Emmanuel Bruno, will you?”

  “I will. Hang in there, Shell. I’m sending a doctor out right away.”

  “Could you—” That griping pain squeezed me again, and I grunted, then went on “—make it a nurse?”

  He hung up on me and hurt my ear. Sam has no really deep feelings at all.

  Dave was looking at me as I put the phone back on the hook. He said quietly, “You knew I moved those bodies?”

  “It had to be you. Once I got to thinking about it—and about you—some things I’d soaked up, but hadn’t paid enough attention to, then appeared in a different light.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’m tired, Dave. You really want to know?”

  “Yeah. I guess I did make … yeah, I’d like to know.”

  “For one thing, when you came racing down Heavenly Lane last night after picking up your car, you turned right, toward Weilton, before you backed up alongside my Cad.”

  “You noticed that, huh?”

  “Noticed it, sure. But it didn’t mean anything to me until a little while before I dropped in on you earlier this afternoon. By that time it fit in with your big sweat to get out of the house where those stiffs were. The sweat wasn’t just because your car and the Doc’s were parked in the church lot, but because you knew very soon after eleven P.M. there’d be a try by your heavy boys to kill Regina Winsome at the church. Naturally you didn’t want Bruno and me around when it happened.”

  I picked up the chair Ed Loeffler had knocked over on his way down, sat in it facing Cassiday. My legs were tired, and the ache in them was worse, becoming constant now. “Well, you backed up next to my Cad there on Filbert Street,” I said. “And after we jawed for a few seconds, Doc and I took off. I didn’t pay any attention to whether you turned around and followed us or not, but of course you didn’t. By then you’d heard me phone the law and knew police were on their way, so you went straight ahead into Weilton and back to the house on Fifty-eighth Street. Obviously you contacted your two heavies afterward, but you had to be the guy who moved the bodies of Monk and Strang. Your boys didn’t do it, they were busy till at least eleven-sixteen when they took those shots at the girl. The way it worked out, you had maybe five or six minutes to get there and do the job, so you must’ve moved pretty fast.”

  “Not fast enough. I guess … I did make some mistakes, after all.”

  “One big one.”

  “Oh? What was that?”

  I looked at recently ebullient and bouncing Dave Cassiday, now appearing somewhat shrunken and as tired as I felt, and thought of what he’d bought: almost certain arrest, trial, conviction; exposure for—well, for what he was; the loss of his solidly based and potentially immensely profitable business; years, maybe endless years, behind high walls and solid bars, with a lot of other losers.

  “Trying to get something for nothing,” I said.

  Samson had pulled out all the stops. It wasn’t an ambulance but a police helicopter that came for me and settled down in a whirlwind of noise and smog twenty feet from the back door of the offices wherein Dave and I sat.

  Homicide detectives took care of Dave. A doctor—a very nice, capable, helpful, charming efficient, and welcome medical doctor, and loyal member of the AMA, by the way—took care of me.

  He looked at me sorrowfully, and shook his head in the way those fellows sometimes do, and for a moment I wondered if he was an undertaker. But then he gave me a shot in the—put it this way: by then I was wearing Ed Loeffler’s pants, and as though my tailor-made curse had struck again, I had to take Ed’s pants off, or at least down. It was a large shot of very suspicious-looking gunk from a huge and deadly syringe, and half an hour later instead of dying from whatever FDA-approved embalming fluid he’d preserved me with I was feeling better. Quite a bit better. The pains were much diminished. I had stopped grunting. Which probably meant I was going to live.

  Perhaps the shot affected my disposition, or mental balance, as well. Because I began to have a warm feeling—not merely for the good doctor, but for Organized Medicine, the AMA even, but especially for my pal, the MD.

  For after all, had he not—well, almost—made a house call?

  26

  Captain Phil Samson rubbed his sledgehammer jaw, shook his head, and said again—we’d been talking in his office for half an hour—“I don’t know. I just don’t know. I’m beginning to understand why you had to commit mayhem on a police officer. Nonetheless, a judge is going to rule on the wisdom of that act. I will even admit if you’d been brought in we’d have kept you at least a week, if not forever, and probably I would personally have beaten you with a stick. And I realize that from your unique point of view—you had to avoid being jugged at all costs.”

  “Not jugged, Sam. Jailed, yes. But a jug—”

  “Jesus, can’t you think of anything else? Tell me, why in hell did you go to that church, and … Shell, now with hindsight, it can’t be denied those ten Citizens FOR protesters were in a bad spot, might have been seriously injured. Or worse—I’ve had more experience with mobs even than you. But you couldn’t have known before the fact—”

  “I had a hunch, Sam. I mean, a real zinger—”

  “Very scientific. Let me finish.” He got one of his black cigars from the desk drawer, stuck it into his wide mouth, and growled around it. “I’m really trying to be fair, to understand. If it was a lovely day and you had nothing else to do and decided to visit the church and say hi to the marchers, that I can understand. But full of the stuff Cassiday shot into you, with your blood dissolving, the LAPD, the FBI, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police looking for you, what possessed you under those circumstances to think you and only you had to help those people?”

  “Why, they were girls, Sam—”

  “I know they were girls! Even girls in some danger. Good lookers. No clothes on. I’m sure you took all that into consideration. But what other weighty factors influenced you? What else?”

  “What d
o you mean, what else?”

  He flipped his hands into the air. “I don’t know,” he repeated yet again. “What the hell am I going to do with you?”

  “I’ve told you a dozen times. Just sympathize with my delicate condition, thank me for all my good works, and let me—”

  “Will you shut up? I’ll jail you for littering the air. And don’t give me any more of that bleeder baloney—ah, I’ll admit you were in serious difficulty for a while. But I talked to Frank Killem and he told me you’ve got to be one of the most amazing physical specimens he’s ever seen. An hour under observation in Central Receiving and you were almost back to normal, which for you must be abnormal. He said you’ve got hyperactive glands or something—”

  “I had a hunch. Why, I was telling Dru.… Who’s this Killem?”

  “Dr. Frank Killem. He’s the man I sent in the helicopter to save your miserable—”

  “Killem? Sam, you sent me a doctor named Killem? Now I see you in your true colors—black and blue. You can’t get me legally, so—”

  “Will you shut—”

  “Keerist, what must happen to Frank’s patients in hospitals? Guy’s waiting for an operation, shot full of various cruds, half dead, nurse says, ‘Is Dr. Baranowski going to operate on this dying man?’ and a cold voice replies, ‘No. Killem.’ Why, the guy could kick the bucket. Reminds me of the sad case of Dr. Curtin. Patient was being given the usual formaldehyde before surgery and somebody asked, ‘Is Dr. Baranowski going to operate on this hopeless case?’ and a cold voice said, ‘No. It’s Curtin’s.’ Patient let out a little squeak and expired right …”

  Samson was wiggling a finger at somebody in the outer office. A plainclothes lieutenant came inside. Sam looked at him, then pointed a thick rigid finger at me.