Big Shots and Bullet Holes

by B David Spicer

  Chapter Thirty-One

  We spent the rest of the afternoon waiting. Brightman seemed to think that he could verify our story by simply asking Commander Holt’s superiors to examine the schedule of their training exercise. Sounds simple, but with Uncle Sam, nothing’s ever simple. So, we waited.

  Brightman had asked for a phone number where he could reach us, but this girl wasn’t born yesterday, so we cooked up a convoluted relay scheme that had the FBI calling Lou’s Diner and asking for Amelia Earhart. When that happened, Lou would call the Aristocrat, which was our cue to call Brightman’s office. I had to promise Lou a sawbuck for his trouble. Lou’s all heart.

  The call came in just as the sun started to set. Paolo crossed his fingers as I waited to be connected to Brightman. “Avery? It’s me.”

  “Miss Lisbon, I have good news, for you anyway.”

  “Do tell.”

  “Commander Holt spilled his guts about everything. It seems that you and Belvedere were right about Greene.”

  “And the bullets?”

  “Both the one we pulled out of Martingdale and the one that came out of Corporal Wills’ brain were a perfect match. Moreover, neither of them came from your .38. You might be interested to know that the bullet that came out of your pal Norman Osterhagen, also matched the other two rounds.”

  I exhaled a long, pent-up breath. “So, how about cancelling those arrest warrants you swore out on us?”

  “Already done. We’ve also issued a shiny new arrest warrant for Colonel Alfred Greene. You’re both off the hook for murder. Now, do us a favor; stay in whatever hole you’re hiding in until we have Greene in custody.”

  “What about Ponte Vedra Beach and Long Island?”

  “That’s been taken care of too. You don’t have to worry about that. We’ll nab the saboteurs before the submarine’s stink has been blown off them. You have the thanks of the FBI, Army Intelligence, and the US government, unofficially, of course. This mess can’t ever get out; it never happened. None of it ever happened. Sorry, but I doubt you’ll get a medal, Miss Lisbon.”

  “I don’t want a medal, Avery, I’m just happy I’m not taking the hotsquat in the big chair. That’s all I really need from good ole’ Uncle Sam.”

  “Consider that done. Look, I’ve gotta go. Thanks again.” He hung up before I could say anything more.

  I looked up at Paolo. “Everything checked out, we’re no longer public enemy numbers one and two. Congratulations to us.”

  “That’s great news!” He flung his arms around me in a bear-hug. He lowered his head, and I knew he meant to kiss me. I stepped out of his embrace.

  “No, Paolo.”

  He held up his hands. “Sorry. I’m just so relieved, that for a second I forgot you hate me.”

  I patted my pockets in search of my Camels. “I don’t hate you Paolo, not really.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No. But until you stop protecting Mary’s killer, I can’t be with you.”

  “It’s not him I’m protecting, Kissy. I’m protecting you. It’s always been you.”

  I found my cigarettes and set one on fire. “I don’t need your protection, Paolo. People drop dead in this town a dozen at a time, as the last few days have shown. What’s one more stiff amongst so many? I’m a clever girl, I won’t get arrested.”

  He shook his head. “That’s not it. I’m not worried about you getting arrested.” He came to within a foot of where I stood. “It’s what’ll happen in here once you’ve killed that man that worries me.” He placed his fingertips on my chest. “The Cassandra I loved wasn’t a killer, and even though you say that person is dead, I don’t believe it. I think you’ve just buried her beneath five years’ worth of liquor and cigarette ash. Mary is dead. Killing the guy who shot her won’t bring her back, and it won’t let your soul rest any easier.” He took my hands in his, cocooning them in his warmth. “Revenge is a hollow pursuit. It’s an empty promise. What do you think you’ll feel after you’ve killed him? Satisfaction?”

  “Justice. I’ll feel like I found justice.”

  “No, Kissy, you’ll be a murderer. I’ve arrested murderers and they’ve told me about the sick feeling they get in the pit of their stomach once they realize what they’ve done. Some of them call it an agony in their soul, and how it eats away at them a little every day. That’s how you’ll feel, Kissy, after you’ve killed a man.”

  I turned my back on him. “Go away, Paolo. I don’t want to see you anymore.”

  I heard him sigh, then open the door. “Goodbye, Kissy.”

  “Goodbye.” I couldn’t watch him leave. Once he had, the room suddenly felt cavernously empty. Maybe it wasn’t just the room. I kicked off my shoes and sat smoking cigarettes as the moon rose. The sounds of a city falling asleep drifted through the open window, honking cars, wailing sirens, barking dogs and the full symphony of noise that only a big town can produce.

  A soft tapping knocked the sleep out of me. I stabbed a squint through the gloom, but I didn’t see anything. Another knock. “Miss Kissy? It’s Mikey.”

  I slipped my feet into my shoes but didn’t bother to tie the laces. I yawned until I thought I might swallow my own head, but luckily, I didn’t. “Coming, Mikey.” I unlocked the door and pulled it open. A balled-up fist about the size of a charging rhino slammed into my guts. My wind hissed out of me in one titanic huff, and it felt like my lungs wouldn’t inflate again. I looked up into Colonel Greene’s sharklike eyes. He held Mikey by the scruff of his uniform jacket, hurled him to the floor and slammed shut the door shut.

  “Lisbon, you filthy whore. You’re through gumming the works.”

  My bellows tried to find enough breeze to work my voice-box, the best I could manage amounted to one choked word. “Greene ...”

  “I’ve been out looking for you, Lisbon. Imagine my surprise when I saw your boyfriend strolling out the front door of this hotel! I knew wherever he was, your wretched hide wouldn’t be far away. The dwarf was very reluctant to bring me to you. Are you bedding him too?” He aimed a kick at me, but my legs caught most of it. “It wouldn’t surprise me. You’re a dirty traitor, you know that? You don’t have a clue what you’ve done, do you?”

  “What ...”

  “Roosevelt’s gonna shut down my counterespionage unit. He says the Feds can handle that job! The Feds are a bunch of bumbling idiots! We can’t leave the security of our country in the hands of a bunch of civilians!” He wiped the contempt off his chin. “Civilians! Civilians! Civilians!” He punctuated each repetition of the word with another attack on my bones with his boot.

  He stroked the iron gray stubble on his head. His hand came away wet. “If the saboteurs had managed to blow something up, kill a few red-blooded Americans, well, maybe then that crippled-up old man would understand. He’d be forced to understand! We’d force him to declare martial law until the war was over! The Army would run the show, guarantee obedience from every citizen!”

  I finally wrestled some air into my lungs and pulled myself onto my knees. I held my innards together with my left arm. “Sounds a lot like Nazi Germany to me, Colonel.”

  He grinned. “The Germans pushed the Allies off the edge of Europe. How many Brit corpses are bloating in the North Atlantic? Hitler’s won every battle, overcome every obstacle, and why? Because he understands that obedience and security are essential during war. Berlin’s thousands of miles away, and it’s us, here in America, who are worrying about sabotage! Not the Germans, no, they understand the need for national security.” His eyes grew distant for a moment, and for a second, I could almost see the swastikas in his eyes.

  “You should have been in the Bund. You’re more of a Nazi than any Bund member I met.”

  He drew back his fist and walloped me a good one across the chops. I fell backward onto the floor and tasted blood. I brought my hand to my face but found a wet mess instead. My hand came away bloody from my lips, nose, or both.

  “I am not a Nazi!” He glared at me. �
�What I am is a fugitive from the government that I’ve served for three decades.” He stuck his bulldog mug at mine. “Because of you. A stupid, interfering bitch!” He shook his head like he couldn’t understand how I’d managed to stop darning socks long enough to muck up his grand scheme.

  He pulled himself up to his full height, but kept his scorn pouring down over me. He pulled a snub-nose .38 out of his pocket. I’d seen it before, and I knew what he liked to do with it. He held it up, putting it on display for me. “Know what this is, Lisbon?”

  “A gun.”

  “Wrong. This is your death. It’s been the death of many men over the years, but you’ll be the first woman it’s put a hole in. Of course, after I kill you with it, I’ll have to retire it. It won’t be a weapon fit to kill a man with anymore.” He put on a sad face. “Won’t be worth using on a sick cat, really. It’d be an insult to the cat. You understand? Killing you with it will disgrace this fine weapon. It’ll forever after be unclean, tainted by your filthy blood. Your traitorous, female blood.”

  Brightman had taken away the .38 I took from Braun’s man, and my Colt Ace slumbered in my jacket pocket across the room on the sofa, either fifteen feet away or fifteen-thousand miles away. Once Greene finished his philosophy lecture, he’d use some lead to plow a few holes through me, that much I knew, but there wasn’t a way to get to my gun.

  He hitched a great sigh. “Are you a religious woman, Lisbon? I’ll let you say a prayer if you want. Just make it quick.”

  “Just pull the damned trigger, Greene. You’re putting me to sleep with all the hot air.”

  He chuckled. “You got guts, for a woman. Too bad they’ll be strewn all over the floor in a minute.” He jabbed the barrel at my head. “Such a shame. About what this’ll do to the gun, I mean.”

  I swore I wouldn’t look away, and I didn’t. I stared right up the barrel and waited. I saw his fingers tense and I wondered if I’d hear the blast, or would everything just go dark, like switching off a lamp? I’d figured I’d ask the Grim Reaper when he showed up.

  Colonel Greene and I shared a moment of complete surprise. Mikey hadn’t moved since he’d hit the floor, except that he had, and we’d just both missed him scavenging the letter-opener from the desk and jab it into the colonel’s calf. He pulled it out, with a sadistic twist that excavated a crimson trench through Greene’s leg, and jabbed it into his leg again. Greene bellowed like a bull and aimed a kick at Mikey’s head. This time when he hit the floor, Mikey really didn’t move.

  I leapt to my feet, but Greene saw me and swung his gat in my direction. I rushed at him, slamming my head into his abdomen, which felt like I’d just hit a concrete barricade. He lost his balance and fell to the carpet. The .38 skittered across the floor, out of our reach.

  I snatched a handful of his collar and pulled myself onto him. I straddled his chest and went at his face like a well-greased piston, ramming my coiled fist into his snoot. I felt my knuckles crackling like twigs, but his nose crumpled and spouted the red stuff like a spigot. He swung a rogue backhand and caught me on the chin. The room convulsed, danced the jitterbug and narrowed into a tiny point of red-hot agony that twirled through my skull and oozed out my ears. He fired another salvo at my face and I buckled, becoming nothing more than a reeling sack of turnips. He shoved me from his legs and struggled to stand.

  As he drew his legs under him, I saw the letter-opener still lodged in his calf. I shot my foot out and crunched into it. The blade came out the far side of his leg and he shrieked like a burning banshee. I scrambled away from him, managing to get onto my knees. I saw my jacket, neatly folded on the sofa, neatly concealing my Colt Ace automatic. I lurched forward on my hands and knees until I could snatch the jacket. It fell on the floor with a thump, and I dragged it toward me.

  I fumbled through the pockets until I found it. I pulled it out and rolled onto my back. Greene had made it to his feet by using the desk chair as a crutch. I pointed the gun at his clockwork and pulled the trigger. Nothing. I hadn’t cocked the slide to rack the first round!

  Greene grinned, his teeth pink, which made him look like a shark that had just gnawed through a school of fish. I frantically tried to cock my Colt, but with my bloodied and broken fingers, I couldn’t get a good enough grip. He lifted the chair over his head and staggered toward me. I had just enough time to tuck into a fetal ball before he smashed the hardwood into my bones. The pain lit me up, and I gasped from the impact, equal parts misery and outrage. The chair, one of those annoyingly well-crafted things that hotels sometimes had, cracked but didn’t break. He lifted it for another assault, but when he did, he left his breadbasket unguarded. I found my feet and launched myself headfirst into him.

  He grunted and staggered back, dropping the chair and embracing the meat below his ribcage. Moving with every droplet of speed I could find, I seized the chair and swung it in a swift arc that terminated at the side of his head. He kept to his feet somehow; some demon lent him enough fortitude to remain standing, but the chair had sprouted claws which tore his face open, and he bled. I swung the chair again, but its days as a weapon had passed into memory, so it just disintegrated against his body. He did take another step back though, pressed against the window.

  I bent to pick up his .38 from the floor, wiggled my broken finger through the guard and cocked the hammer with my thumb. “It’s over, Greene. It’s over and you lost.” My words sounded thick and muffled because of my swollen lips.

  He wiped some blood off his face and spat a thick red gobbet at my feet. “You don’t have the guts and we both know it. You’re not fooling anyone, Lisbon.”

  I glanced at the gun I held in my hand. “You shot Norman with this gun, didn’t you?”

  He didn’t answer, but he did offer up another pink grin.

  “The way I see it, Colonel, some men dishonor themselves, and when they do, they stop being men and become dogs. Rabid dogs, and where I come from, we put down rabid dogs.” I took a step toward him. “You’re a dog, Greene, a filthy Nazi dog that somebody needs to put down.”

  He laughed then. “Then do it! You think you’re a tough guy? You’re a woman, not much of one, but that’s still all you are. You’re pathetic. A little girl trying to play the part of a tough guy, but you did what women always do: stick their noses in the business of their betters. You aren’t anything more than a gossiping bitch. If you had any guts at all, you’d pull the trigger, and have it done.”

  “You know what? You’re right.” I squeezed the trigger and drove a round past his head, which shattered the glass behind him. He clutched at his chest, an expression of complete surprise on his face. I took another shot and put a hole through the window to his right. He didn’t like my apparent willingness to hurl lead at him, so he charged across the ten feet between us and wrapped his meathooks around my hands and the gun. I got my shoulder into him and forced him to take a step back, but I couldn’t wrestle the gun out of his hands, nor could I let it go. He had my fingers pinned and the more I fought, the more trapped I got.

  He roared an inarticulate syllable and gave my hands a jerk, in one last attempt to tear my fingers off so he could get the gat away from me. Something popped, which I felt more than I heard, and Green let go of me. He clawed at his face, part of which didn’t exist anymore. The scorching blast of the .38 had caught him at the jawline and blown apart the opposite cheek. He tried to hold his face together, but ichor ran between his fingers in thick red rivers as he staggered away from me. When the backs of his legs met the windowsill he leaned back, lost his balance, and tumbled out the window. He didn’t scream on the way down, but I clearly heard the meaty squelch of his sudden arrival on the sidewalk below.

  I dropped the gun and dragged myself over to the phone and asked the operator to connect me to the only voice in the world I wanted to hear. As the bell rang, I lit a cigarette and sucked a painful gust of tobacco into my lungs.

  Paolo sounded sleepy when he answered the telephone. “Hello?”

&nbs
p; “Paolo?”

  “Kissy? Are you all right?”

  “Greene’s dead. You were wrong, I didn’t feel a goddam thing.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Norman rode in his wheelchair like a triumphant Roman emperor. Why shouldn’t he? He got gut-shot but pulled through, which I think would legitimately cause anyone to celebrate. He waved to the other patients in their rooms as he rolled down the hallway. “Goodbye, Helen! Goodbye, Bill! Goodbye Lester!”

  I marched along behind him, having had my own wheelchair ride only two days earlier, just a floor or two below where he spent the last two weeks. I spent a few days of my own in Christ Hospital, mostly because I didn’t have the energy to put up a fight. They stitched, bandaged, splinted, or casted seemingly every inch of my body. A week after Greene’s beating, the swelling had gone down, but my skin could pass for some impressionist’s painting of midnight. My bruises had migrated from purple, to black, to blue, to a stomach-curdling welter of browns, yellows, greens, and a particularly nauseating shade of ocher. Four of the soldiers on my right hand still walked with crutches, while my left arm and the cast that embraced it slept in a hammock that dangled from my neck. My nose had to be set, which they did with a pair of chopsticks. The less said about that, the better. All told, I looked like I’d gone twenty rounds with Joe Louis, but I never went down for the count.

  I fetched my car, while Norman sat in his chair, chatting with the candy-striper who’d been pushing it. I pulled up to the curb and opened the door for him. He made a big production out of getting into the car, and I’d burned through half a cigarette before he managed it. He waved goodbye to the hospital as I pulled away. “So, what do we do now, Kissy?”

  “I thought I’d take you home for a while, then I have something to show you.”

  “What is it?”

  “A surprise.” I smiled. “One I think you’ll like.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  I nodded. “I hope so, anyway.” I drove toward downtown. I looked over at him and saw his frown. “What’s wrong?”