It shocked her a little, but I'd wanted it to. If we were going to get out of here alive I couldn't have her throwing herself all over me. She made men forget things, especially other men, of whom there were plenty still conscious in the house.
“Where's that desk you mentioned?” I asked her. “The one with the safe."
She swallowed, looked at Garr's still body. “Down the hall,” she said.
“Let's go."
She licked her lips, glanced at the window I'd looked through a few minutes ago. “Can't we ... I'm scared, Shell."
“So there's two of us. Forget the window; they set off gongs and skyrockets. We've got to leave by the front door. My car's down the road, anyway. So let's hit that safe."
She hesitated, face tense. I said, “Look, baby, it makes more sense than you realize. We're dead, you for sure, if we don't put Blake clear the hell out of circulation. Eight to five the stuff to do it with is in that desk of his. Or do you want to run for the rest of your life?"
She walked to the door. I followed her out, turned left, caught up with her. “This is it,” she said. The first key on my ring opened the door; I shut it behind us, turned on the light. Lorry gasped, but I told her, “We can't fool around in the dark, so let's just pretend we live here."
This was Blake's den. The desk's lower left drawer, Lorry told me. I hauled the metal jimmy out from under my coat and said, “Hang on, honey. Let's hope Blake put so many alarms on the house he figured he didn't need a buzzer on this thing. You remember that combination?"
She gasped, put both hands to her cheeks, then smiled weakly, “Yes,” she said, sighing.
There weren't any wires in sight, or bumps in the carpet, but I didn't breathe easily until I'd worked on the door for a full minute without anything disastrous happening. While I pried at the metal plate, using the small iron block under my Jimmy for leverage, Lorry talked in a steady whisper, as if too tense to keep quiet.
Part of her words were very pleasant things about me, but part were what Blake had done to her, and said to her. Lorry said that last night, Garr, who hung around Lorry whenever he could, had hung around the Ambassador, suspicious after dropping Robb off there. When Robb came down drunker than seven skunks, which is pretty drunk, Garr made him admit he'd seen Lorry. After that, the combination of Garr's big hands and fists, plus Lorry's Martinis, soon got out of Robb the admission that he'd spilled the story of their breaking into Hershey's place. Garr took Robb to Blake, told his tale, and within half an hour Stu Robb was in his ditch. Garr handled that job himself, but a couple other boys, Dee and a guy named Grant, had killed Willie Fein.
Garr's showing up at the Starlight had been the result of Blake's telling him to keep an eye on Lorry, tail her, but his disgusting arrival at my apartment hadn't been. Blake had, after the Starlight episode, told him merely, “Find Lorry Weston,” and knowing I'd been at the Starlight when I'd given her my jacket, Garr had come up with one of his own extremely rare ideas, dropped in on me, and dropped me. He'd then brought her here, to Blake, who wanted to know how much Robb had told her, how much she'd spilled to Hershey.
In another minute I'd sprung the lock on the steel plate before the safe swung the plate out. “Do it fast,” I said, and stepped aside. I was getting twitchy, and Lorry's face was whiter than paste. Her lips were parted and dry, but she dropped to her knees, twirled the safe's dial, leaned close to it.
A door slammed and I jerked upright. Lorry snatched her hand from the safe. “Go on,” I said sharply. She was breathing rapidly through her open mouth, and her hand shook as she put it on the safe's dial again. She pressed her teeth tightly together, turned the knob slowly, then grasped the small chrome handle and looked up.
Looking at me, she pulled the handle. The door swung open. I pushed her out of the way, pawed inside, slid a pile of papers onto the floor. There was a mass of stuff, letters and photos and photostats, typed documents and sealed envelopes. I pawed at them, found two familiar manila envelopes. One I recognized as mine and didn't look inside, but I tore the other open, made sure it contained Hershey's letters, the stuff he'd been worried about. But the statements were gone. I hadn't expected to find them.
There was noise in the hall. I heard a man yelling, “Joe!” The voice was Garr's. That character had a thicker skull than mine. I started grabbing papers and envelopes, stuffing them into my coat and pants, shoved some at Lorry. I stuck the last thick envelope under my belt and swung toward the door as Garr's feet thumped in the hall, but the sound went away from us, toward the room where Blake and Martita were.
Lorry was saying, very softly, “Oh, oh, oh,” her hands, for some reason, pressed over her eyes. “Hang on, honey,” I said. “Come on, quick.” I grabbed her wrist and pulled her toward the door. “If we're lucky we can make it. It'll take them a little time—"
But already feet were thudding in the hall again, coming this way. It sounded like two men, then one of them stopped and in moments a door slammed. The other guy kept coming closer. They were checking the rooms. Somebody yelled again. It sounded like Blake. “Outside. Get outside! Find that punk's car."
“It has to be the window,” I said to Lorry. “Get ready to run. And, honey, there's going to be a lot of noise and commotion, so be ready for it.” By the time I'd finished I was at the window, but facing the door, gun pointed at it. Lorry was beside me and I could hear her shallow breathing. She'd kicked her shoes off. The pounding footsteps reached the door; it started to move inward. I fired twice through the wood and heard a man cry out. As the door swung open I saw him reel but he didn't fall. Arms wrapped around his stomach, he staggered out of sight.
I didn't see an inside latch on the window and I didn't waste time looking for one but kicked out the glass, raked the barrel of my gun across jagged shards at the window's base while I jerked Lorry close with the other hand. Everything let loose at once.
14
A clanging erupted from half a dozen places, from alarms both inside and outside the house—and brilliant light blazed beyond the window, flooding the grounds. Somebody else in the hall was running this way as I took a fast look at the grounds; they were still empty. I pushed Lorry at the window and she began scrambling through as the footsteps in the hall, practically at the doorway, stopped.
I fired once and chipped wood from a spot halfway down the door frame, then turned and dove through the window, hit the ground hard. Lorry was running with a woman's awkward, knock-kneed leg swing. I snapped one more shot back through the window and ran after her.
She disappeared around the corner of the house, heading for its front, scared, not thinking—but I couldn't blame her. I wasn't doing much thinking myself, but I was doing a lot of running. A heavy gun boomed behind me as I sprinted around the corner, caught sight of Lorry racing toward that long dirt road, staggering now, already winded. She was heading toward the car. I yelled at her, but she didn't pay any attention to me, and kept on. Then, thirty yards beyond the house, she stumbled and fell sprawling.
A split second after she fell a gun cracked. A spray of dirt geysered into the air yards to her left and I heard the slug ricochet, whining, and smack into one of the trees. The shot had come from my right at the front of the house. I kept running as hard as I could, raising the gun. Then I saw him, standing on the grass past the drive, right arm extended toward Lorry's sprawled body.
I didn't even aim the first one, just squeezed the trigger, then jerked the gun toward him and tried to hold it on him, firing as I went past. The next time I pulled the trigger the hammer fell on an empty cartridge, and that one half-aimed shot missed him by plenty, but it scared him. He jerked as the gun at the end of his extended right arm blasted again, then he dropped to the grass and rolled. I'd been close enough to see his face. It was Dee Tolman.
Lorry was getting off the ground when I reached her. I snapped out the revolver's cylinder, digging into my coat pocket for cartridges, ejected the empty cases and started jamming shells into the chambers while I
yelled at Lorry. She was only a foot from me, but the way I was yelling she might have been a mile off in the hills.
“Run, baby, but stay away from the car. Blake sent a man there. Don't—"
She was running, but straight down the road. Straight for the car. I flopped to the ground, snapped the gun's cylinder shut and squirmed around to face the house. Dee was sprinting toward the open front door. He was almost at the steps, but I had time to aim. I shot him in the back. His arms flew out straight from his sides like springs, the gun arcing through the air, and he fell, got up and fell again. He crawled to the first step, then stopped with one hand reaching forward. His legs kicked.
A man trotted around the rear of the house at the spot where I'd been half a minute ago. He was more than thirty yards away but both of us were brilliantly outlined in the light. He yanked his gun hand up and fired three times, rapidly, the slugs kicking up dirt yards from me. I snapped two shots at him, another as he jumped back around the corner. The glass of an upstairs window shattered, fell tinkling onto the drive. I fired twice at somebody up there, then scrambled to my knees, turning to run.
That movement kept me from getting my head squashed. I was halfway up and turned around when I saw the man's legs. They were no more than four or five feet away and moving fast toward me; the guy's arms were over his head, something big gripped in his hands. His arms started down as I dived at him, slammed into muscled thighs hard as tree trunks, knocked him sprawling. Something thudded against the ground where I'd been. As he fell backward I kept shoving against him, jammed the gun's barrel into his body and pulled the trigger. The hammer fell with a dull click as a big hand hit my wrist, knocked the gun from my fingers. The thing he'd held, a big jagged boulder, rolled a few feet away and stopped.
He grunted and reached for my throat with one hand and I saw that it was Ed Garr. He was the guy Blake had yelled at, telling him to find my car—and I wondered even as I clubbed his arm away if Lorry had run into him. I rolled, tried to get my feet under me and was on my knees when he lunged at me, hands reaching—and empty. He must have run out of the house without a gun, so we were even. Even except that he had about sixty pounds on me, several friends who would soon be joining him, and I was a hell of a long way from downtown, a hell of a long way from cops.
A lot of big men are fast, but Garr wasn't one of them. He was just brute strength, muscle piled on muscle, and before his reaching hands touched me I dug my toes into the dirt, shoved myself forward, skidding, twisted over and started getting to my feet on the other side of him as he swung around. Papers spilled from me all over the ground, but I wasn't worried now about those papers. Ordinarily Garr's size and strength wouldn't have worried me too much, either, not with the Marine training and judo and brawling I'd had, but I could see three or four points of movement at the house beyond Garr and I didn't have time to play around to try to set Garr up. Whatever happened had to happen fast; whether Garr slowed me down himself, or I took too much time, the outcome would be the same.
15
I caught a blurred glimpse of a man and woman running toward the maroon Lincoln. That would be Blake and Martita, and I didn't get it, couldn't understand why they'd be taking off. But another guy was coming out the front door and a third man raced this way alongside the house. Garr was looming over me as I straightened up, his big right fist balled and drawn back.
I knew if I tried to turn and run Garr might get a paw on me and it would be over for me, and Lorry, and Hershey—for all of it. So I left myself wide open, didn't even try to block Garr's blow, let him launch that big fist at my face. But I moved in toward him, left hand stretched open, palm up and stiff, swinging my head a little to the right. His fist scraped my chin, thudded into my neck and spun me, but my left hand dug into his gut, fingers driving deep. My neck and the whole side of my jaw were suddenly numb; I couldn't breathe; but I swung back close to Garr, ripping my open right hand up toward his face. His mouth was open and the edge of my palm caught him under the nose and jarred his head back.
His face went blank. His knees buckled and he might have been dead even then, but I didn't take any chances. I crushed the bridge of his nose with the edge of my right hand, then kicked him in the head as he fell. Light slammed into my eyes and I heard the sound of the Lincoln's motor, saw it swerving across the grass, heading toward the road and me; it cut off the closest man, forced him to dig his heels into the driveway. I turned and ran.
Behind me the sound of the motor grew louder—but I thought that over it I heard the thin, high sound of a siren. That didn't fit; nobody out here would have called cops, not with papers that would ruin Blake scattered all over the road and even flying from me as I ran. There was another sound behind me, an ugly thud and then the skidding of tires. I knew what that one was: Ed Garr. Blake had run into his body, or over it.
I tossed a fast glance over my shoulder to see the car skidding, stopping. But the Lincoln was already past Garr. I jerked my head around—and stopped running. Far down the narrow road were the headlights of another car, a red light pulsing on its top. And the sound was definite now, a siren wailing high and dropping.
Actually seeing the radio car, cops on their way, made me understand, suddenly, how it happened that they were here, why Blake and Martita had started running long before the siren could have been heard.
It was obvious; I should have known that a man with as much pull and power as Blake would have his alarm system channeled straight into police headquarters, just like many other men or business concerns with plenty to protect. Or to hide. What Blake had wanted to hide, however, was now scattered over a hundred yards or so.
Gears ground and grated behind me as Blake tried to gun his car back and forth in the narrow road, turning around. Near the house men were still running—but away from me and off into the countryside. I grinned, happy to chase somebody else for a change, and ran toward the Lincoln. There was nothing to the rest of it.
Blake stalled the motor and was grinding the starter when I slammed into the door on his side of the car, reached in and grabbed his hair in one hand and his neck in the other. He screamed like a woman as I pulled him out through the open window, and he must have thought Gargantua had him and was going to eat him alive.
The frenzy of the last few minutes had finally caught up with me, and the odds had changed so suddenly and happily that I was practically giddy, chuckling joyfully and shaking Blake like a maracca. After Ed Garr, it was almost a shame to slug this one, but Blake was pounding me, or at least slapping at me, so I clobbered him one in the chops, splitting two of my knuckles and ruining his chops, and he had barely hit the ground when the prowl car slid to a stop alongside us.
16
Cops swarmed out of that buggy like bees out of a hive. There were only four of them, but they came at me so fast that it looked like the whole Hollywood Division. Luckily it was the Hollywood Division, because two of the boys knew me and gaped upon me while saying such things as, “Well, Scott, what the so-and-so is this?"
That was right; they'd come out here to protect Blake.
I said, “Gather up these scattered hunks of paper and you won't have to come out here any more. If you want to see Blake you can see him at Quentin. There's a couple dead guys around here, too.” Martita was still in the car, quiet as a mouse, looking straight ahead at a tree. “The girl can tell you plenty if she will—and hoods are still running like madmen out there.” I pointed.
Blake's lips flapped slightly as he breathed through them. A little puff of dust eddied around his mouth. For the first time I noticed that he'd left in such a hurry, he hadn't even changed clothes, was still wearing his robe. Man, I thought, what a night. What crazy clothes these characters are wearing. A top-bracket hood flying about in white robe and scarf, and a beautiful babe trotting ...
I started running toward the Cad.
A cop yelled, “Hey!” and another yelled, “Stop!” but I wasn't about to stop. At the Cad I yanked on the door handle, but it
was locked. I banged on the car and yelled, “Lorry! Lorry, you all right? You in there?"
Like a Jack-in-the-box, from somewhere down on the floorboards behind the seat, up popped a mass of blonde hair, a forehead, and two bugging eyes, which I knew were green. Almost as quickly they were gone. Relief swept over me. Then, slowly, up came the eyes, not quite so bugging. Recognition grew in them, and Lorry let out some kind of yip and I thought she was coming through the door at me.
A second or two later she'd opened the door and I immediately sprang through it and stopped her frantic chatter, about running from Garr and locking the Cad, by kissing her thoroughly. Well, you know about those kisses. The next thing I knew, a gruff, booming voice filled with authority was saying, “Hey. Hey, none of that."
I stared at the cop, horrified, and said, “You get out of here!"
He was looking at a star. “Clint wants to see you.” He walked back up the road. Clint was Lieutenant Clint Boyles, one of my friends from the Hollywood Division. Yeah, I thought, I guess he would want to see me. I told Lorry to say in the Cad, and lock the doors again, then went to see Clint.
He was talking to Martita. Blake sat in the dirt, leaning against the Lincoln's front wheel. Clint said to me, “What's the score with this gal?"
I said to Martita, “Haven't you told him yet, honey? Hell, you haven't got a gag on now.” She had the grace to blush and lower her eyes.
“I ... I'm sorry, Shell. I didn't know what all was going to happen."
“I'll bet. But I guess nobody knew what all was going to happen."
“What are you talking about?” Clint asked me.
“She'll tell you.” I looked at Martita. “You are going to tell him, aren't you, baby? It's the only chance you've got. Maybe you knew all the hell you were starting, maybe you didn't, but tell it all or you're out of circulation."
She didn't say anything. Blake struggled to his feet. “Keep your mouth shut.” He lisped.
Three's a Shroud (The Shell Scott Mysteries) Page 5