I saw Flint coming up off the floor, raking the back of one hand over his mouth and smearing a streak of blood over his cheek. He wasn't hurrying. He just came up off the floor, cold eyes fixed on me, and that was all I saw of him.
Somewhere in my consciousness was the thought that even though Flint was in the fight again, at least Jabber and whoever had first grabbed me from behind were out of it. So that was two down. Then wispy little Shortcake appeared in front of me trying to hit me with something in his hand, and I stepped toward him, grabbed his descending arm as I swung a hip into him and bent over hard, flipping him across my hip and into the middle of a flabby boy I recognized briefly as slobbering Whitey.
I guess I'd been hit so hard by then that although I was still on my feet I was practically out of my head, because one dizzy thought actually flashed through my addled brain: Wouldn't it be astounding if I cleaned up on all these guys?
Well, I was right. It would have been astounding.
But I had hit so many people, and it seemed there had been so many bodies besides mine on the floor, that I thought maybe I was winning. The fact was that all along I had been losing. I'd got in a few good licks, but the real bites were on the opposing side. For a moment, though, one glorious moment, I felt that I was really going to half murder all eight of these bums, throw Nick through the roof, and simply eat my way through the walls and out.
Which goes to show what happens when you get too cocky.
I spun around and all I could see was the sap descending. I didn't even see who was behind it. Just the sap. It seemed frozen in air. I could see the soiled leather and the little stitches along one side, just about like those which would probably be taken in my head. But it wasn't really frozen; it just seemed that way. I spun around with the light of battle in my eyes—and then the light went out.
But I had a wonderful moment there. From the time when I thought, Wouldn't it be astounding if I cleaned up on all these guys? until I swung around and that sap smacked me, there was a full tenth of a second during which I felt absolutely invincible. There aren't many moments in life like that, let's face it. It was a grand tenth of a second. My real regret was that it couldn't last a couple of weeks or so.
But no, just a sudden uprush of invincibility, and then: Sponk! It got me smack in the middle of the forehead, right at the hairline. And that was all of it. The lights went out, and I could feel myself falling through darkness, with things still smacking into me from all sides.
I wasn't unconscious; I only wished I was unconscious. I could still feel guys pounding on me, smacking me—and crazily and incongruously out of a television commercial came a phrase about a facial dressing that was like “a thousand busy fingers on your skin,” and that sure seemed to describe what was happening to me. This wasn't just one fist, or two, but at least a thousand busy fingers, and it wasn't such a great feeling after all. Besides, this was more of a facial undressing. With thoughts like that in my head I knew I had lost the battle, knew that even if these slobs didn't actually kill me I would probably be left permanently addled, and the worst of it was that I could still hear Nick's cement-mixer laughter.
Then there was another blow, a good one squarely on the top of my head, but it must have been cushioned by the fat up there because it felt as if somebody had patted me with a pillow. And a pillow seemed appropriate, because right then I went to sleep.
The next thing I knew, I was dreaming. It might have been a minute later, or a day later, I couldn't tell, but I was suddenly struggling, trying to get up, and there was this dream....
Chapter Ten
I swam through pain. It was like a sea, tangible and visible, and I learned that the color of pain was a darkness of black and gray and red and muddy blue. I swam through it, forcing one arm after the other through the dark colors that burned like acid. I reached the surface of that sea, and above me in a black sky huge birds soared. One came close and I saw that it was an angel with black wings and a face of unutterable loveliness, with pornographic eyes, deep dark brown eyes, a wonderful nude body gleaming in an unearthly light. Then I knew it was Coral, and with that knowledge something happened to the vision, as though in an instant everything inside her turned into nothingness, and suddenly then the smooth skin of face and body crumpled upon my hands as I reached for her.
I sat up. Dizziness swept over me, and my movement sent sudden throbbing pain into my head like blows inside my skull. Coral, I thought. What was it about Coral? I remembered the fight, the hoods pounding on me. I remembered, but I was still too filled with aches and dizziness to think clearly about it.
It was dark. I didn't know where I was. I cradled my head against my arms, breathing deeply and slowly until my thoughts cleared. Then I looked around. I'd pulled myself to a sitting position, and was sitting on the cold ground. Near me the grotesque shape of a saguaro cactus raised its spiny arms toward the clear sky. Beyond it I saw the outline of an automobile, undoubtedly my Cad. I looked up.
Orion wheeled slowly up there, clear and beautiful in the black sky, perhaps the most beautiful of all the constellations. Once I had looked through a friend's telescope at the nebula in Orion's sword, and its magnificence had never left my mind. Now, sitting bruised and battered in the desert, I felt suddenly out of joint, out of place on a world out of place in the universe. I must have been beaten on every inch of my body, and my head apparently banged lopsided, because for an awful instant it seemed, as I looked at the three dim stars of Orion's belt, and the dangling sword, that I must be insane to be here, beaten by Nick's men, bloodied with killing, when there were such things as the nebula in Orion.
I got to my feet—and that brought sanity back. The ripping, tearing pain of movement brought me back from wherever I'd been. A hundred yards away a car ripped the night open with its headlights. As a guess, that would be Highway 60, the car racing toward L.A.
I thought for a moment again of that black angel in my dream, then clamped my teeth against the pain and walked toward my car. You don't really have any idea how many muscles and nerves and tendons you have until a large number of them get pounded on. I figured that I must have approximately seventeen million which had been mangled, each one screaming its small, faint cry of pain, all of it blending into one symphonic ouch. Automatically I felt under my coat for the Colt Special. Naturally the gun was not there.
I made it to the car—it was my Cadillac, all right. The keys were already in the ignition; everything was quite convenient for me. So I guessed that Nick had been telling the truth about at least one thing—that I would be free to roam around the earth a little while longer before it was time for me to leave it. At least I was still alive. Or, rather, half alive.
I got into the car, found a mashed pack of cigarettes in my pocket and lit one. Every drag of smoke into my lungs seemed merely to join smoke from the fire already down there. I had been knocked around by Lou Rio and his punk Gangrene, and then by Nick's hoodlum crew, and now there was a hot, ugly anger deep in me. It was a suppressed violence simmering in my belly, a strange, ugly kind of heat, and I didn't like it in me.
I started the car and drove to the highway; it was 60. I swung right toward Los Angeles, and stepped on the gas. At a service station I stopped and phoned Coral James, let the phone ring and ring again until I knew there would be no answer, then hung up and went back to the car.
Coral's house was bright, lights burning inside. I rang. The front door was partly open. I rang, then went inside.
“Coral,” I called. “Coral?”
There wasn't any answer. A light was on in the kitchen, and I walked to its door and inside. On the gas range sat a saucepan half filled with cold soup. A table in the kitchen had one place setting arranged on it, but there was no food on the table. It seemed evident that Coral had been preparing something to eat when she'd been forced to stop. I felt numbed and ill at the thought of what might have happened to her.
For a moment I saw Coral, not as she'd looked the last time I'd seen h
er, but as she had appeared to me when she'd stepped through Feldspen's door and I had seen her for the first time, with an amused smile on those wise warm lips and laughter in her hot brown eyes. And in the next moment I thought of what Nick's man, Dodo, had done to the kid who'd phoned me just before Coral had called, saw him again in the dirt with blood spilling from his nose and mouth.
I walked through the empty house. In an ashtray I found the thick heavy ash from a cigar. In the bedroom I got a look at myself in a mirror. The corner of my mouth was swollen and there was a nasty welt on one cheekbone. At least I didn't have any black eyes. So I looked just about as beat-up as I normally do. I also looked like a man ready to commit mayhem on practically anybody who got near me.
I left the house and went directly to the Spartan Apartment Hotel. I felt exposed, uncomfortable without the gun under my coat. And I carefully checked the area around the Spartan before getting out and starting toward the entrance.
It didn't seem likely that Nick's boys would be out for my blood this evening—his reasons for letting me leave the Desert Trails in the first place still were valid ones—but there were also Rio and Gangrene roaming the night. I knew that Gangrene would toss several slugs into me if he got the chance, and it seemed likely that Rio would be right alongside him urging, “Hit him again, Ganny, shoot him in the ear this time.”
I went into the Spartan and started up the stairs. Nobody shot at me, and I was just beginning to relax a little.
“Shell.”
The voice came from behind me. I spun around—and there she was. Coral was getting up off one of the lobby divans, looking just as lovely as those black-winged angels of my dream, but warm and alive, smiling, that softly rippling hair bright as a flame around her head.
She stepped toward me. “Shell,” she said, “where have you been?”
“Where have I been? What the devil do you mean, where have I been? What happened to you? I was just at your house —”
I choked it off. Relief washed over me, and the sudden pleasure at seeing her paradoxically sharpened my tongue, made me snap at her. I could have grabbed her and shaken her, and at the same time I wanted to hold her close and tell her how happy I was that she was here, now, alive.
“I'm sorry, Coral,” I said finally. “I thought you were—I was afraid you'd been hurt. Badly, maybe.”
She'd stopped in front of me. Looking up at me she said, “What happened to your face? Why, you've been hurt. You've been in a fight.”
Somehow that remark impressed me as very funny. Maybe my relief at seeing Coral accentuated my reaction, but I laughed aloud. “Yeah,” I said, “sort of. Eight hoodlums took turns beating on my head like a drum. I think they ruptured my mentality. Lady, you have no idea how good you look to me.”
“Eight hoodlums?”
“Yeah. Come on up to my apartment and I'll show you my fish. I thought you were a black angel, bleeding.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“No, it's bruised a little. But I'm still in it. Come on up, honey, and I'll explain. We can both explain.”
“Fine. Something very odd happened to me.”
We went up to the second floor and down the hall to my apartment. I turned on the small lamp inside the door, then the lamps over the two fish tanks. Coral ohh-ed and ahh-ed appropriately at the gorgeously-finned betta splendens, the neons and other colorful tropicals, and then we were settled on the chocolate brown divan before my fake fireplace. She curled her lip at Amelia, my sensually fleshed nude with the big bazooms and the fantastic fanny, who is nearly as colorful as the tropical fish—all women curl their lip at Amelia for some reason, but I think she's wonderful.
Then I said to her, before she could tell me how disgustingly earthy Amelia was, “What happened to you? I just left your place, and something was cold on the stove —”
“Vegetable soup,” she said. “That's all I'd begun fixing when they came.”
“Who came?”
“Two men. It was really odd. You remember I called you and asked you to meet me at six?”
I nodded.
“Well, I was calling from Feldspen's office, and he told me I could go on home. There was a change in the shooting schedule, and I won't be needed until tomorrow. Anyway, I went straight to the house. Then I tried to call you again but couldn't reach you.”
About that time, I thought, I was in York Park.
She went on, “Around four o'clock I started to fix a little snack to eat. I went into the front room and saw a car go by slowly, and the man who wasn't driving was looking at the houses—for the addresses, probably. They slowed down in front of my place, then went on. I didn't think anything about it then, but a few minutes later I saw two men coming toward the house, and one of them, the taller one, was the fellow I'd seen in that car. He was a very rough-looking man, too. There was something about them both that frightened me.”
“That's understandable. They probably frighten each other.”
She looked puzzled. “You know who they were?”
“No, not yet. Just what they were—go on and finish, and then I'll explain.”
“In front of the house one of them said something to the other and they split up. The tall one went around toward the back. Well, I really started getting scared, Shell. I don't know how to explain it, but they just acted—well, menacing.”
“That's explanation enough.”
“I went to the back and the tall one came toward the door. It's all overgrown there, with trees and shrubs, so hardly anybody can see in from the neighbors’ places even if they try, and he must have felt protected enough. Anyway, he took a gun out of his coat and did something with it, then came toward the door.”
Coral looked at me wide-eyed, living the moment over again, her mouth partly open and red lips glistening. “I didn't know what they were after, but I knew there was something awful about them. He hadn't seen me, and I took off my shoes and carried them, and ran to the bedroom. There's a window there at the side of the house.”
Her voice rose a little as her throat tightened, thinking of it again and telling me what had happened. “The other man was ringing the bell—at the front door. I—I felt like screaming. I suppose it's silly, but I had the most frightening conviction that they were going to kill me.” She took a deep breath and managed a smile at me. “Isn't that crazy?”
I said, “No, Coral, you were probably right. I think they were going to kill you. At least that was probably one of their alternatives.”
She gasped. “But they couldn't ... kill me?”
“Either that or force you to go with them, for no telling what. Go on.”
“That's about it. He rang the bell a couple of times but then he just came in. I heard the door, heard him come inside. I had the window open by then. I crawled out and went through Mrs. Watkins’ back yard and Mrs. Fellows’ too, and then ran a couple of blocks to a phone booth and called a taxi. I came here, and I've been here ever since.”
“I'm glad you did honey. I just wish I'd been here when you arrived.” I thought about that and added with feeling, “Boy, do I wish I'd been here.” I reached up and felt the lumps on my head. It felt as if there was one big lump with several smaller ones on it, and the big lump was my head.
Coral said, “I thought you'd know what to do, Shell. And I was scared.” The way she said it, and the way she looked at me when she said it, combined to make me feel at least eight or nine feet tall.
“Ah, well...” I said.
“Why would those men want to kill me? And what happened to your face?”
“The whole thing started with your call, honey—or just before it. A guy named Nick Colossus had a tap on my line.” I paused. “All this is making me thirsty. I have been lying out in the desert, under Orion, and I do need a drink. How about you?”
“Orion? Shell, you've said so many strange things since you got here—yes, I'll have a drink. And then you must explain about the —” she frowned delicately as she thought bac
k—“the eight hoodlums, the black angel, and Orion. What do you have to drink?”
“All the standard items, and if I don't have your choice I'll get it, even if you drink fermented cherimoya juice with cocktail pickles.”
She bent forward chuckling throatily. “Now I know what it is I like about you. You're unintelligible. Do you have Scotch? And water?”
“Coming up.”
While I mixed the drinks and gave her one I explained what I'd been doing—and having done to me—this afternoon and evening. And why the two men undoubtedly had called on her. “They'd have been more careful,” I added, “except that they didn't think you were there. You weren't supposed to be home till five or later.”
“Then if I hadn't come home early, they'd have been there ... waiting.”
“That's the way it would have been.”
She shivered and swallowed some of her highball.
“I still don't know why you called me in the first place, Coral.”
“Oh, of course. It hardly seems important now.” She sighed heavily and smiled at me. “It's just so good to relax, Shell. Finally. I was all keyed up until you arrived.”
“Kick off your shoes. Do anything you feel like doing. I can't think of anybody in the world I'd rather relax with.”
She didn't say anything, but her smile got momentarily wider, and deep in her eyes a flame flickered. Then she said, “The reason I phoned you was because of what you told me about Ted early this morning. His suicide. I wanted to think about it, but then I knew I had to tell you—I promised you I would when I was more sure, remember?”
“I remember.”
“I told you, too, that somebody tried to blackmail me once. Well, I think it was Ted.”
“You think? Don't you know?”
She shook her head, her hair flowing like a pale red wine under the lights. “Several months ago Ted called me to his office and talked to me about a big publicity campaign Magna was planning for me. This was just before Sins of Pompadour, and I didn't have any big credits. He said that while I was virtually unknown, by the time Magna completed their publicity barrage I'd be a star—and hundreds of reporters and columnists would be digging into my past. He stressed the fact that if there was anything in my past that I wouldn't want made the common knowledge of a hundred million newspaper readers, now was the time to try to bury it, to hide it some way.”
Slab Happy (The Shell Scott Mysteries) Page 11