In back of him Lisa still held the smoking automatic in her hand, every muscle in her body wracked with pain.
I couldn’t tell her. I had to hope she could see what had to be done. And it was her still present hatred of Big Step that made her do it before she died. She had to undo anything he had done and somehow she inched across the floor until she reached me and I felt her fingers fumble the loop from my neck. With her last remaining energy she unknotted my wrists, smiled wistfully and fell back.
“Thanks, honey,” I said, and touched her face gently. I let the feeling come back in my hands and finished untying my ankles. When it was done I knelt down beside her. “Don’t move, kid, I’ll get a doctor.”
She let her eyes come open and the drunkness was gone from them now. There was a new look in its stead. “No use, Irish. It’s better this way.”
“Lisa…”
“Kiss me goodbye, Irish?” Somehow there was no smashed nose, no scars, and she looked like she must have when she was a Broadway star. Gently, I leaned down, touched my lips to hers, then her face relaxed while I watched her and she took her last curtain call.
I found the capsule where I dropped it, wrenched it apart and made sure the microfilm was still there, then put it back together and stuck it in my pocket. Outside I heard the wail of sirens and cut for the door. I had to beat the cops out or I’d be held sure as hell and the big killer was still loose. I pulled the grill back, started up the steps when the wall powdered beside me and I heard the crack of a gun from across the street. I was pinned there with no chance of breaking out and the first squad car came to a screaming halt at the curb. I took the cap out of my pocket, dropped it in the cuff of my pants and waited.
Newbolder and Schmidt didn’t want to believe me. Five corpses were in the room and I was there alive with a .45 in my belt and to them it was all cut and dried. They had me where the hair was short and were enjoying it. But it was the move with the packets of heroin that turned the trick. When I asked Newbolder who he thought mailed them in and why, he stopped Schmidt’s impatient move to get me in a squad car and said, “Keep talking, Irish.”
“Not me. There’s no time. You just get a call through on your radio.” I gave him Shaffer’s number and said, “Your office will know who it is. If you tie me up now there will be hell to pay tomorrow.”
Schmidt grabbed my arm. “Let him do his talking downtown.”
“No, wait a minute,” Newbolder said. “This whole thing’s screwy enough right now and I don’t want to go on a chopping block when we can clear it now. You keep him here.” He looked at Shaffer’s card in his fingers thoughtfully and went outside through the crowd to his car.
He took about five minutes and when he came back his face was screwed up into a puzzled mask and he was shaking his head. “How the living hell do you do it, Ryan? How the hell do you work it?”
Schmidt said, “What’s the pitch?”
“Later, I’ll tell you later. Let him go.”
“Are you nuts?”
“No, but you will be if you don’t keep your hands off. Okay, Ryan, take off. Tomorrow we’ll get a report. A personal one. I’ll want that whole agency staff present with every document of authorization they have to make this one stand up. I want to hear this from front to end and get it in writing so I can read it every time I think there’s an angle I don’t know about. Now get your tail out of here to wherever you’re going before I change my mind and take a chance of being caught in the wringer.” He handed me the gun with a look of disgust and I walked out. Before I hit the street I got the capsule back and stuck it in my pocket.
I didn’t wait for the elevator. I went up the stairs to my floor and half ran down the corridor. Then I stopped. The door stood open an inch and when I shoved it back I could see the whole interior of the room in the bright light from the overhead, bed and all.
Karen Sinclair was gone.
I walked in slowly, stood looking at the open window that led out to the fire escape, then switched off the light. The wind had changed direction and a sheet of rain came through and whipped across the floor. I peered out into the night, swearing at the blackness for the first time. They had time and they had the room. I had been delayed long enough for the snatch to be made and there was no way in the world of telling where they had taken her.
I slumped down on the bed, my face in my hands, trying to figure it out. Somehow I had left a trail in the hotel and they picked it up. But how? Damn it, I wasn’t that sloppy. I had been the route too many times. One mistake somewhere along the line. That was all it took.
How long I sat there I couldn’t tell. The floor and end of the bed was soaked, my shoes and pants legs drenched. Then the phone rang. Unconsciously, out of habit, I picked it up. “Hello.” The voice didn’t sound like my own at all.
“Good evening,” the other one said. The voice was harsh with a curious accent, the tone inviting like it was waiting to be asked to tell a huge joke.
I sat up slowly, feeling the chill run down my back. “Manos Dekker,” I said.
“You are a hard man to kill,” he told me pleasantly. I waited, not trusting my voice. “You have something I want. I have something you want. I believe a trade is in order.”
I went to answer him and a pair of clicks, a piece of a word interrupted the connection before it was reestablished and I said, “I’ll deliver. How?” I had no choice. No choice at all.
“Ah, that is very good. Then we shall arrange it.”
“Let me speak to her first. I’m not paying for a dead body.”
I knew she’d be alive. He’d know I’d insist upon it. He called out, speaking away from the phone and once again the connection was interrupted for a split second, then I heard her voice saying, “Don’t do it, Irish.”
Manos Dekker laughed softly to himself. “Oh, he will do it all right. He is a very decent American. He is like all the others of his kind. Very sentimental.”
“Okay, Dekker, you call it.”
“Yes, I will,” he laughed again. “I will call you back within minutes and tell you what it is you have to do. I wouldn’t advise any interference in the matter. You understand, of course?”
“I understand,” I said, my voice cold with the fear in it. He hung up before I did and I put the receiver back slowly.
There was a flaw somewhere. I could feel it. I had it in my hand if I could figure it out. I took it apart piece by piece, bit by bit, going over the picture from the minute I met Karen, remembering every detail of the action.
It took a while, but I got it.
Now I knew where she was and how I was going to work it.
I jacked a load into the breech of the .45, thumbed the hammer back and went out to the elevator and took it down to the lobby. The little fag at the desk had his back to me answering a call on the PBX board when I reached him. I went around the counter and put the gun against his spine and watched him stiffen. He turned around, his face a ghastly gray, his lips quivering as he saw my face.
“You Commie bastard,” I said.
“Please…” he lifted his hands defensively.
“How’d they get you in… use sex appeal? Or was it your hate for everybody in the world in general.”
“I… I’m not…”
“Shut up. I saw a photo of you in a special file the Feds have on all Commie sympathizers. It was taken a while ago and you weren’t in half-drag and without the usual makeup you didn’t quite look the same, but I put it together. You even helped. You cut in on my talk with Dekker because you were scared stiff and loused up your connections at the switchboard there. When Lennie Ames mentioned my name you reported in like a good stoolie. They told you I was hot and where I stood and you were the pipeline. You saw me bring the girl in and got to them right away and they set the deal up right here on the premises. Cute, kiddo, real cute.”
I let him see my best grin, all the teeth. I let him look at the snout of the rod and said, “She’s in the hotel, buddy-boy, buddy-boy. I’m
guessing she’s in your room. Am I right?”
The look he gave me told me I was. I reached in his pocket, found the key. Number 309.
“Let’s go,” I said.
I wasn’t in a hurry now. I was going to do this one easy and my way. We got out of the elevator, walked down the hall nice and slowly, the queer’s knees dancing with fright. He was as bad as the worst of them in his own way and he was paying for it. I was willing to bet this wasn’t the first operation he had been on and when he was checked out all the way he’d wind up with a dossier an inch thick and loaded with names. Too many people in the striped pants departments of Washington agencies played games with these types and wound up being patsies for a blackmail racket worked by the Soviets.
When we reached the door I eased the key in, the gun in his back telling the guy not to make a sound. I turned it, felt the latch go back and took the chance the chain was strung in place. Then I turned the knob, shoved the door open and rammed the desk clerk into the room with the flat of my hand.
He was quick, all right. The gun seemed to jump into his hand and the first shot took the clerk through the chest. And I had the time I needed. Manos Dekker saw the play and knew he couldn’t make it and in a desperate attempt to wash it out the most horrible way he knew he whipped the gun in his hand toward the bed but before he could pull the trigger my .45 roared and blew the thing out of his hand, fingers and all. He looked at the bloody mess on the end of his wrist, no longer the killer he was, a fanatic with a political drive that matched his own lusts and made him a big cog in a big machine. He looked back at me, knew what was coming and tried to open his mouth to scream or plead or do anything to stop it. He opened his mouth wide and I shot him right through that gaping hole in his face and he slammed head first into the wall splattering his blood and brains all over the place.
Karen Sinclair looked up at me from the bed and smiled, her eyes bright and shiny. He hadn’t done anything to her. He would have, but he hadn’t. My luck ran just a little too good. I took out the capsule from my pocket and held it out. She opened her hand and I let it fall into her palm.
The way she looked at me and I knew I was looking at her said that it was just the beginning for the both of us. There was a long road to be walked and we’d be doing it together. The hood was gone because my own would never let me back again when the story came out and I had to walk the other side of the street whether I liked it or not. Shaffer didn’t realize what he had gotten himself into.
Karen looked at the capsule in her hand as I bent down to kiss her. Her mouth was a full, wetly warm blossom that tried to envelop me, her tongue tasting me, one finger tracing a line along my face. I stood up and reached for the phone to dial Shaffer’s number.
She said, “How many people are in New York, Irish?”
“Many millions, doll.”
Karen looked at the capsule, then smiled at me, the beauty of her like starlight on a clear night.
“I knew I gave it to the right one,” she said.
Me, Hood! Page 16