But finding Cimarron was. So when the nice lady hesitated, I leaned closer to her, as close as I could get, and said, “Alda Cimarron. Dr. Blass. If you know where they are, the wisest thing you could possibly do is tell me. Without one goddamned microsecond of delay."
Something of my sincerity and lack of amusement got through to her. She said rapidly, “Mr. Cimarron and Dr. Bliss—it's not Blass, it's Dr.—"
“OK. Blass-Bliss, who gives a—go on."
“They left with Mr. Derabian and another man. And two patients. In wheelchairs."
“Where were they going?"
“I have no idea. They just ... left."
“How long ago?"
She turned to glance at a wall clock, then back at me. “Half an hour ago. Almost."
Then she said, “Sir—wait."
But I was ten yards away by then, huffing and grunting, but slowly picking up speed.
Chapter Twenty-One
When the nice nurse told me that Cimarron and company had left Medigenic Hospital half an hour before, the wall clock had showed the time as about a minute after five.
It was now five-forty p.m., and I still didn't know where I would go from here, what I would do. “Here” was the split-level villa Spree and I had briefly enjoyed in the Registry Resort. Only a couple of guests, who gave me curious but not astonished glances, had seen me limp from my parked car to villa 333 and inside. The door had been unlocked, slightly ajar. It didn't occur to me—not until later—that this was undoubtedly how Cimarron had left it when he exited from the room with Spree. I just opened the door and walked in, feeling it was a most natural thing to do.
The latest car on my list of stolen vehicles was parked below—in the Medigenic's parking lot I'd found a year-old Nissan Sentra with the keys in the ignition—and I had a shirt on now. Just a shirt, no jacket; I didn't have any jackets left. But I also had, in the right-hand pocket of my trousers, the Colt .45 automatic I'd left here on the closet shelf. Two fat cartridges in the clip, one in the chamber. That was all, just three; I'd settle for that.
I sat, made myself become still, as relaxed as I could get, roamed through memory and thought. Worthington. Bentley X. Worthington. I couldn't remember his office number. I looked it up, sitting in a chair by the phone, then dialed.
I was remembering the document Worthington had prepared. For Claude Romanelle. That memory had never gone away entirely, it had just been—like many other things—fuzzy, difficult to grasp except by the edges. But I was remembering that Cimarron had to get Romanelle and Spree together in order to win his game, make it work. Worthington, too; Worthington had to be there. Well, Cimarron had Romanelle now, and Spree. I didn't let myself dwell on that, tried to stay halfway relaxed, a little loose.
The phone was answered, a voice said, “Worthington, Kamen, Fisher, Wu, and Hugh. May I help you?"
“Yes. This is Shell. May I speak to..."
Damn. I couldn't remember her name. The one who had helped me before.
“Just—Shell?” the voice asked.
“I'm Shell..."
Nothing came after that. Just a little zap or glitch. It was one of the strangest, and most mind-twitching, moments of my entire life. Also horrible. Maybe it's OK. to forget a receptionist's name, a lady you've only spoken to once or twice. But —
“Is this Mr. Scott?” the lady asked.
“Yes. Yes. Shell Scott. That's who I am. Ah..."
“Oh, I'm so glad you called. This is Lucille. Lucille Weathers. You remember?"
“Yeah, sure. Swell.” Lucille? Lucille? “I have to talk to Bentley. It's important."
“I told him you phoned, Mr. Scott, and that I gave you his message."
That I remembered. Ten thousand cops were looking for me.
“He had to leave again. I'm sorry. He didn't get back from court until nearly five. But he left you a message. Again.” She laughed lightly. “You do have a difficult time getting together, don't you?"
I thought, You don't know the half of it, lady. But I said, “What's the message?"
“I'll read it to you. Like before."
“Swell. Fine. Let's go."
She read, “Mr. Claude Romanelle phoned me at five p.m. He asked me to come to his home as soon as possible, prepared to witness and notarize certain changes to be made in the document I drew up for him, which document we have discussed. I have certain reservations about this, which you will understand, but must honor the instructions of my client. I expect to be at Mr. Romanelle's home about five-thirty p.m."
I felt sick. That meant he must already be there. Maybe—maybe everything was over. I heard myself saying, “Thank you,” hanging up the phone. Then I was out the door, running. Not as speedily or gracefully as I would have liked, but, by God, running.
* * * *
I swung off Lincoln at the Camelback Inn entrance, skidded into Desert Fairways Drive, slowed as I passed Claude Romanelle's home. Last night when I first came here with Spree, we'd parked in the curving driveway before the house. Now, with the sun on the western horizon, but still bright—and hot—I could see the long strips of yellow plastic tape bearing the bold printed warning: “CRIME SCENE DO NOT ENTER."
I rolled on by, swung into the vacant lot where I'd turned around last night, but this time parked facing the Paradise Valley Country Club's green fairways, with Romanelle's backyard, pool, and landscaped patio on my left. If I was going to get into the house at all, I would probably have a better chance by approaching through the patio to the Arizona Room, rather than from the front. Or so I thought.
And that was about the size of it. No time to sneak up, reconnoiter, take an hour or two to make careful plans. From here on in it was just: do it.
I got out of the car, left the door open. About twenty yards away, near the fairway's edge, a man wearing Bermuda shorts and a purple shirt, plus an oddly shaped golf hat with a brilliant peacock feather stuck into its brim, was addressing a ball with a short iron and looking toward the green about a hundred yards away.
I started toward him, limping, maybe even staggering a mite, but making pretty fair progress. It would be a lot quicker, I thought, if I could get this guy to come to me.
“Hey,” I called. “You, there."
He'd somehow gotten himself into a horrible contortion at the top of his backswing, and he just froze in that position for several long seconds, looking very odd indeed. Slowly—without changing the rest of his posture—he cranked his head around toward me. I noticed his mouth was moving, as if he was eating his teeth. But he wasn't saying anything. Just sort of waving his mouth at me.
I kept on a-going, getting closer, first the left leg then the right leg.
“I've got a favor to ask you,” I began. Only began.
“You—you—you blithering goddamned idiot!"
He'd finally gotten his mouth to work. Or, rather, to issue intelligible sounds; it had been working for some time. That was right, though. He probably had some reason to be miffed. It is undeniable that golfers are peculiar, and get miffed—sometimes actually homicidal, if the truth be told—should you bug them even a teensy-weensy bit when they are at the top of their backswing.
But, hell, I've played golf a time or two myself, and you can take it from me, that's all a myth. It really doesn't make any difference what happens at the top of one's backswing, because you never know where the ball's going anyway, even if it's quiet as a graveyard.
I couldn't finish my thought. This man was getting abusive.
But I kept staggering onward, getting closer. A-one and a-two, and a-one—and by then he was only about three feet away. And he had stopped cursing fluently at me. Indeed, he unwound, or uncoiled, dropped the little club to his side, and sort of smiled unenthusiastically, looking at me intently.
I said, “I'll give you a hundred dollars for that club and one golf ball. And your hat. Yeah, got to cover this hair up."
“What? What?"
“GODDAMMIT—"
“OK, OK,” he sai
d, springing back a foot or so. But then he said, staring down at me—I was still kind of bent way over—"But this hat alone cost me fifty dollars. Sir. I don't mean to be—"
“OK. Two hundred."
“Well, ah ... You may not understand this, sir, but I was only thirteen over par through the first nine holes, and—"
“Three hundred. OK? GODDAMMIT—"
“Of course! You betcha! Here. Would you like the whole bag—?"
“Just the little club and a ball. And the hat."
“Betcha.” He dropped a golf ball into my outstretched hand, plopped his gorgeous hat on my white hair, and held the short iron toward me.
I grabbed at it, grunting as I reached out and up.
“Do you...” He stopped, started over. “Are you a golfer?” he asked, closely eyeing my spavined posture, bent over, still clawing for his club—an eight iron, I noticed; about right for a hundred-yard pitch, I supposed.
“A golfer?” I repeated. “Yeah, sure. Sort of. But—oh, you mean this?” I tried to look pleasant, indicating with a waggle of my head, or at least my ears, the rest of me. “Nothing,” I continued. “A doctor is treating me for a skin rash with some miracle drugs."
“Want me to stick this in your belt?” he asked, moving the eight iron closer.
“Hell, no, I'll get it ... ah, got it? Nnnguummp.” The last was me, straightening up. “OK, do you have a card?"
“A what? Card?"
“Yeah. With your name on it."
He looked puzzled, but found a business card in his wallet and stuck it into my shirt pocket. “Why ... do you want my card?"
“So I can pay you. Later. If I live. I'm a little short of cash at the moment. In fact, I don't have any."
He put on one of those frownish smiles again, held it rather rigidly in place, while saying, “Sure. Certainly. Quite all right. Could happen to anybody."
I turned, got one leg going, stayed there grunting for a couple of seconds until I could get the other leg going. That's it, Scott, I told myself. Now just concentrate on a-one, and a-two —
Behind me the golfer, sounding choked up, called, “Good luck, old man. Hang—hang in there."
The closer I got to Romanelle's patio, which looked out onto the fairway I was just leaving, the more I learned about the condition I was in. What I had was some new kind of disease. I'd started moving slowly, but by the time I reached the fence enclosing the patio I was moving along at a very good clip. The thing was, the more I moved the easier it became, just had to get the oil pumping around and lubricating the parts and I was practically a gazelle. It was when I slowed down, or worst of all stopped, that the oil congealed and everything stiffened and started petrifying. The thing was, then, to keep moving.
I had to slow down a little, unfortunately, before finding a small wooden gate that let me into the back patio. I went through, walked around some oleanders and the base of a palm tree, moving speedily toward the Arizona Room and sliding glass doors in which, only last night, I'd seen the reflection of Romanelle ... no, of Fred Keats ... getting ready to kill me.
I remembered vividly the red snake of blood writhing from Keats's throat. But that wasn't the kind of picture to have in mind at this moment. Shove the pictures out; keep it going; just do it.
First problem: As I neared the cement deck outside those patio doors I saw a dark swarthy man with a long drooping mustache seated in a canvas-backed chair. I let the golf ball drop from my hand and it rolled past the guy's shoes. He eyed it briefly, then turned, looked up and saw me, and got suddenly to his feet.
“Sorry,” I said, “I'm just learning,” and really creamed him with the eight iron. It was like a jerky ballet, he looked up, got up, went down. I stepped over him, six feet from the sliding glass door.
At that moment the door slid open. I stopped, grabbing for the gun in its holster at my left armpit. No gun. No holster. I wasn't entirely sure about the armpit. Then I remembered the gun was in my pants pocket. I was trying to get the damned thing out when I realized that the man who'd come outside and was looking back into the room was Bentley X. Worthington.
He said, “I'll be going, then. If there's anything else, call me at my office tomorrow."
Then he slid the door closed, turned around, and saw me. I was moving again—shouldn't have stopped, I knew better—in a kind of limping-wobbling-stumbling gait, and Bentley just looked at me and said, “No.” That's all he said. Just “No.” Over and over.
I brushed past him, leaned forward, got a couple of fingers on the projecting handle of the glass door, pushed at it, pushed again.
“Let me get that for you, old man,” Worthington said.
“Thanks. Appreciate it.” He pulled the door open, stepped back, saying his word again.
I stepped forward, wobbled determinedly inside, cricking my head around. I knew it was important to figure out who was here, and where who was. The next second, or maybe even minute, was going to be crucial, and it would not do to be wondering about where everyone was at.
I shouldn't have been so worried. All I had to do was listen.
“SHEE-IT!” I knew who that was, way over on my left by a large desk. He was standing in front of the desk, looking quite a bit like an elephant holding a sheaf of white papers in one hoof.
“Scott!"
“Shell—Shell!"
That told me one thing: My disguise wasn't working. Those last comments had come from Claude Romanelle, seated behind the desk with a pen still in his hand, and from Spree—lovely Spree—seated next to him, wearing a buttoned-up yellow jacket that covered the torn blouse and bra that must still have been beneath it.
Then, “JESUS H. CHRIST. KILL HIM, SHOOT HIM, SOMEBODY KILL HIM” and “What the gahdamn—” and “Shell!” and “SHEE-IT” and “No."
That's when I got confused.
I knew there was a man leaning against the wall beyond Cimarron—Derabian, it looked like—and another man dropping to the floor, scuttling behind a chair. The scuttler was, I felt pretty sure, Dr. Bliss. At last, I had his name right.
By the time I'd taken all that in on my left, I realized it would be wise to check the remainder of the room on my right. So I started to. I turned that way just in time to see the Cowbody almost against the far wall, right hand moving up fast, and with a gun in it. No, it wasn't Cowbody, but ... Hell, Cowbody was close enough.
I had the Colt .45 out of my pocket, but Cowbody fired first. He missed me by a mile, or at least a yard, but something jerked me, turned me sideways. I still had my arm extended, gun gripped in my fist, and all I had to do was keep the arm swinging until I saw Cowbody's chest beyond the gun's muzzle and squeeze the trigger.
It was as though the blast of sound, enormous blast in the confined space of the room, hurled him back against the wall, sent him sliding down it. The gun was falling from his fingers as I turned left, holding the Colt shoulder-high. Cimarron had moved from his position before the desk, was jumping toward me. But his hands were empty, and beyond him the man standing there held a gun. He not only held it, he had it pointed at me.
I went into a crouch, not as swift as are my usual crouches, and accompanied by another “nnnguummp,” and then the man fired. The slug flicked the hat on my head, even touched the short-cropped hair, snapped by and smacked into something on the wall behind me, something that shattered and fell tinkling.
But even before it tinkled I'd fired at the man and missed, fired one more time and drilled him. As he went down I fired at Cimarron—several times. Silently. The automatic's slide had stayed open after my last shot; clip empty, gun useless now. I remembered: three slugs, three shots I'd fired.
So I threw the empty gun at Cimarron's head, saw it bounce off his ear as he reached out for me, felt the golf club in my hand—still there, forgotten but tightly clutched all the while—got both hands on the eight iron's grip and pivoted, in reverse, from my left to my right, clubhead accelerating as the wrists pronated—which, according to many PGA instructors, they are
supposed to do, whatever that actually means—and the heavy blade glistened through the air like a singing sword and nearly buried itself in Alda Cimarron's jaw, then bounced off, taking a good divot.
But it didn't stop him. It didn't slow him down. That three-hundred-pound body slammed into me like a stampeding elephant and we both lurched and spun, tangled together, all the way to that far wall. I hit the wall with one shoulder, and Cimarron landed hard against it with his big butt and then his head snapped back and thudded with a very meaty sound against the wood.
While he was still splayed out, slightly dazed, I got set and hit him on the chin. Right, left, right again. Three times, three good ones—as good, at least, as I was capable of at the moment. He didn't go down. Yeah, I remembered this guy in the Medigenic hallway, India rubber, a bouncing hall, three hundred pounds of unbelievable.
He shook his head back and forth rapidly, swung his right hand and caught me alongside the head as I ducked and rolled with the blow. Or tried to roll. If it was a glancing blow, it nonetheless was enough to glance me six or seven feet away and start a great silent bell swinging and tolling inside my head. The room got darker briefly, then brightened to normal—what I hoped was normal—once more. I was almost to the patio door again, damn near outside, and I could see Cimarron leaping for me, hands gouging for my chops, his thick round face a twisted mask of rage as he dived at me.
It was a good target, the natural target, that face. And I had time to pull my legs up close to my body and then unwind them with all the strength I had left in me, driving both feet forward through his hands like a bowling ball through glass and solidly against the point of his chin. The shock of that impact, my legs driving forward and Cimarron's awesome bulk descending toward me, slammed all the way through my knees and hips and up to the top of my head. It stunned me temporarily, ripped everything out of my mind except a shifting gray blankness. No thought, no wonder, no sensation at all for ... Probably for a second or two, no way to tell, no way for me to know.
Shellshock (The Shell Scott Mysteries) Page 34