Say It With Bullets

by Richard Powell

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said coldly. “Only one of them seems to be big. If you’ll excuse me I’ll go back and join him.”

  He watched her march into the casino. Carson Smith had a manhunt and a woman-hunt under way, and he seemed to be making progress on each. It was annoying, Bill thought, not to be able to decide which hunt was giving him more worries.

  Ten

  This was Reno. It was filled with people trying to hit jackpots on slot machines and hoping to break the bank at roulette and blackjack and faro. Compared to a character named Bill Wayne, they were betting on sure things. First he had to find Frankie Banta, which was beginning to look like one chance in a hundred. Then he had to convince Frankie he hadn’t killed Russ and Ken, which was one in a thousand. Finally he had to coax Frankie to spill everything. One chance in a million.

  The other people in Reno were merely gambling with money, and if they lost they could go back to Woonsocket or Wichita or Wenatchee and make some more. He was gambling with time: five minutes here, ten there. Any moment he might dig down for more and find he had just lost his last second.

  It was ten at night and he had been hunting Frankie for almost seven hours. At eight the next morning, the Treasure Trip bus would roll west, heading for Yosemite National Park. He didn’t like the idea of staying behind to play a lone game; he would have been sunk back in Salt Lake City if Holly hadn’t saved him. But staying behind when the bus left was a minor worry. His major worry was that things seemed to happen fast to his former pals as soon as he hit town. Frankie Banta might be running short of time, too.

  The bus had reached Reno early that afternoon. As soon as the party checked in at a tourist court, he slipped away and started hunting for Frankie. The address he had was a rooming house and it was a dud. Frankie had been kicked out months earlier for dropping behind in his rent. Five bucks bought another address from the landlady, but five bucks didn’t go far in Reno and the address was no good. He went back and bought a better address for ten bucks. This one was all right but Frankie wasn’t in his room. The second landlady said Frankie was a bellhop at one of the hotels but she wasn’t sure which. He did pick up one useful fact: the landlady said Frankie hadn’t been out of town in all the time she had known him. So that cleared Frankie of the murders.

  He went paging the guy at the Mapes and Riverside and finally, long after dinnertime, found he was employed at one of the smaller hotels. Oh no, he wasn’t there. You didn’t hit jackpots that easily. Frankie was off duty.

  For ten bucks the bell captain had some ideas. “It’s like this, mister,” he said. “Frankie is slot machine silly. All he does in his spare time is play them. That is, he plays them when he has some dough. When he doesn’t, he goes around making notes on how different machines pay off. Always trying to find a machine he can beat. He keeps saying he’s gotta make a stake. I never could figure what for. He don’t have a dame or anything.”

  No, Frankie didn’t have a dame. Frankie was in love with a chunk of gold at the bottom of a lake somewhere in the mountains. Some of his friends were going to bust up that romance, if Frankie didn’t chip in his share toward buying the land around the lake. “Doesn’t he ever win?” Bill asked.

  “Well, you know the percentages. They cut you to ribbons. He hit a thousand-dollar jackpot once, but what happened to it I don’t know. He was as broke as ever the next week.”

  There had been a list in Russ Nordhoff’s garage in Cheyenne. On it was the note: Frankie, $820. That was what happened to it. “Is he playing or watching tonight? And do you know where?”

  “He had a few bucks. So I guess he’s playing. But he could be anywhere in town.”

  Anywhere meant a corner drug store or a restaurant or Harold’s Club or a hotel or anywhere. Slot machines were all over the place. There were enough of them in town so you could play two at a time if you liked the idea, and a lot of people did. They fed one machine and pulled the lever and fed the other and pulled its lever and looked to see what the first had done and fed it and pulled its lever and looked to see what the second had done and so on. That way you didn’t lose any time, only money. He wished he knew a way not to lose any time.

  He went from place to place and his head got dizzy with the sound of silver dollars chinking and levers clacking and croupiers droning and girl attendants calling jackpots. Those sounds didn’t leave him much chance to listen for really important noises. Like, for example, the tap of footsteps following him down Virginia Street. Or the rustle of somebody trailing him through the crowds in one of the big gambling joints. Maybe he wouldn’t have heard any noises like that even if there had been no chinking and clacking and droning. Maybe nobody was trailing him. And maybe nobody was waiting, somewhere near Frankie, for Bill Wayne to come along and take the rap for another killing. Maybe not. He didn’t want to bet on it, though.

  He walked among the joints looking for Frankie. You had to look carefully because most of the faces seemed as blank and similar as if they had been stamped out like silver dollars. For example, there was a guy with dull blue eyes who didn’t look quite as human as the machine he was playing. He—

  His heart gave an odd whirring quiver like a machine getting ready to pay off.

  “Hello, Frankie,” he said quietly. As he spoke he shoved a hand into a pocket and made like a gun. “Just take it easy,” he said. “Don’t start yelling how glad you are to see me.”

  Frankie was thin and pale and his hairline was backing away from his forehead. He didn’t move. He stood there and watched the wheels of the machine click to a stop. Two plums and an orange. Nothing came out of the machine. A little sweat came out of Frankie.

  With his free hand Bill brought out a quarter and put it in the slot. Frankie’s hand came up mechanically, jerked the lever. Two cherries and an orange. Five quarters clattered cheerily into the cup. “See,” Bill said, “I’m bringing luck.”

  “I knew it must be you,” Frankie said, in a voice with no more ring in it than a lead quarter.

  “That’s interesting, Frankie. What does it mean?”

  “I’m talking about Cheyenne and Salt Lake City.”

  “You have some ideas about what happened there?”

  “Look, Bill, I don’t want to get you sore. But maybe you’re sore enough already so what I say don’t matter. Yeah, I got ideas. I can read the papers, can’t I?”

  “All right. You read about Russ and Ken. Why do you add that up and get me? Did you even know I was alive and back in the States?”

  Frankie’s hand reached slowly into the cup of the machine and collected the five quarters and put one in the slot. “You probably won’t believe this,” he muttered. “I never wanted you shot. In my book you were a good guy. I wasn’t the best radio operator in the world but you always gave me a break. I didn’t know you would get shot and I felt bad when you bought that slug in the back. I’m the only guy in the bunch knew it didn’t kill you. All of us was gathered around where you was lying and I got down and felt under you. I could feel your heart sort of fluttering and yet it wasn’t pumping out any big stream of blood and I figured you had a chance. I said you was dead and let’s get the hell out of there. I thought that might give you a break, like you used to give me. You don’t have to buy this.”

  “I might put a down payment on it for a few minutes. Keep playing the machine, will you? It looks better that way.”

  Frankie hauled down the lever. Two cherries and a lemon. Three quarters rattled down. Frankie began feeding them slowly back into the machine as he talked. “So I figured you might pull through and get back here some day.”

  “Nobody told you I was back?”

  “In this bunch of ours,” Frankie said, “nobody gives out nothing for free. If any of the others knew, they didn’t tell me.” He gave the handle an angry yank. The wheels spun and stopped on a collection of fruit salad.

  “You think I shot Russ and Ken?”

  “Who else could have?”

  “You guys don’t w
aste much love on each other. What’s wrong with somebody else in the bunch knocking off Russ and Ken?”

  “Look, Bill,” Frankie said in a tired voice. “I ain’t blaming you. They had it coming to them. But none of the others did it for two reasons. The first is we been back in the States for over four years. If anybody in the bunch had wanted to knock off any of the rest, that’s a long time to wait. The second reason ought to give you a laugh. None of the others would have started by knocking off Russ and Ken. They’d have chopped me down first.”

  “I wouldn’t want to make you feel bad, Frankie. But you don’t look that dangerous to me.”

  “So I’m not dangerous. But I’m a drag on them, see? The bunch of us have a big deal on. We’re each supposed to ante up a lot of coin. I don’t ever make any real coin. I make a little and feed it into these machines trying to latch onto some big money and end up bumming a buck for breakfast. The other guys in our bunch get pretty sore at me for not coming across. If anybody knocked me off they’d give him a medal.”

  “This is the lake deal you’re talking about?”

  “You know about it, huh? You got it out of Russ or Ken?”

  “Yeah. If you figured you were next on my list, why didn’t you skip town?”

  Frankie gave a laugh that blended perfectly with the clack and clank of slot machine levers. “Skip to where?” he said. “On what? I come here tonight with six bucks and I owe everybody around Reno I could borrow from. And if I do skip, so what? You’re still looking for me. And maybe the other guys start looking for me. They’d figure if I’m scared enough to run I’m scared enough to talk. I’m tired. I’m ready to quit. What are you fixing to do, take me for a walk somewhere?”

  He studied Frankie’s thin profile. The guy looked as if he had been feeding his blood as well as his money into the machines. Maybe he could take a chance with Frankie. “You know what I have in this pocket next to you?” he asked.

  A quiet shudder went through Frankie. “Sure. A gun.”

  “It’s a hand with five fingers on it. That’s all. Take a look.” He pulled out the hand and extended it, palm up.

  Frankie looked at the hand like a kid trying to figure how a magician had done a trick. “I don’t get it,” he said.

  “I don’t have a gun on me. I didn’t come to Reno to take a shot at you.”

  A little color seeped back into the thin face. “Ain’t you taking a chance on me, Bill?”

  “I have to take a chance on somebody. I need help.”

  “Like maybe to find that lake up in Oregon and a few other things?”

  “Yeah. And a few other things.”

  Frankie began to laugh. He jammed a quarter into the machine and yanked the lever and hit three oranges. “This is getting to be my lucky night,” he said, scooping up a handful of silver. “I was trying you out on that one, Bill. That lake ain’t in Oregon. You don’t really know where it is, huh? I see why you’re taking a chance on me. I see why you need help. Listen, you came to the right guy.”

  “You may be the right guy but you have some wrong ideas. It’s like this, Frankie—”

  “I get it, I get it,” Frankie said impatiently. His face was fever-pink and his hands trembled as he yanked away at the lever. “The two of us can do business, see? You can’t trust none of the others and I don’t blame you. And none of the others would trust you. But you can trust me, see? And I know you’re a good Joe. We each got something the other hasn’t. You have guts, see? You can handle the others. I can tell you where the lake is and everything else. And we split fifty-fifty. Right?”

  All the guy could see was a slot machine that was ready to pay off. You put a little information in the slot and pulled the lever and out came half a million bucks. “It doesn’t work like that, Frankie. The deal is—”

  “I’ll listen to reason,” Frankie said in a whining tone. “Okay, you get fifty-five and I get forty-five.”

  “The forty-five you’ll get is a bullet.”

  Frankie jerked. “Don’t scare a guy like that!”

  “It’s time you got scared. I didn’t kill Russ and Ken.”

  Frankie played several quarters slowly and frowned when none of the right combinations hit. “Could you prove it?”

  “No. And if you get knocked off I probably won’t be in the clear, either. But it will be somebody else doing the job, all the same. One of the others has turned killer. I’ve got to find out which.”

  “This is where I came in,” Frankie said disgustedly.

  “We went over this before. I told you why I can’t go for it. Why would the guy have waited years to start shooting? Why didn’t he start on me?”

  “Because he didn’t have an alibi until I came back. Because he had to have a stooge he could blame it on. He didn’t start on you because you weren’t the first one on my visiting list. Now do you see?”

  “Sure. Sure, Bill, anything you say.”

  “You don’t believe me, though.”

  “You tell me what to believe and I’ll believe it.”

  Frankie’s mind worked in one groove, like a slot machine lever. “I need some questions answered,” Bill said.

  “First the deal.”

  Bill said angrily, “Don’t be so dumb! The deal is you don’t get killed.”

  The color in Frankie’s face had gathered in two burning patches on his cheekbones. He was feeding the machine and yanking the lever viciously and not even looking to see if anything came out. Nothing did, though. “I might just as well be dead,” he snarled. “What kind of life have I got? Toting luggage for quarter tips. This window don’t work, boy. Get me some ice water, boy. What’s good for a hangover, boy? I’ll buy any story you want to peddle. I don’t care who knocked off Russ and Ken. If it was somebody else he saved you trouble. All I want is to be cut in on the deal and cut in right. It’s the only chance I have, see? Make me a good offer and I’m your boy. Don’t make it and the hell with you. All I want is your word, see? Do we do business?”

  All Frankie thought of was the big jackpot. And what Frankie didn’t see was that the percentages were against him worse than they were on the slot machines. Frankie was betting his life on this gamble and the percentages said he didn’t look healthy.

  Bill shrugged and said, “Okay. We do business. You can have half of what’s coming to me.”

  “That’s great!” Frankie cried. “We’ll be a team, Bill. We—”

  “Give me one answer right now, will you? Who was the guy who shot me?”

  “Good old Bill,” Frankie said, chuckling. “The answer to that is gonna surprise you. Let’s go somewhere and have some food and talk. You know what? We made this deal just in time. Here’s my last quarter.” He put it in the slot and yanked the handle and watched the wheels click into place. “Lemons,” he said, and gave the handle a final disgusted yank.

  Something paid off on that yank. It paid off in a crash of sound that kicked in your eardrums. Frankie lurched forward. He grabbed the slot machine and for a second hung there, face blank, clinging to the machine as if he were in love with it. Then he slid down it like wax on a candle and melted into a quiet heap on the floor.

  An object came through the air in a lazy arc and hit Frankie’s body and clattered against the machine. A big gray automatic. Bill stared at it and thought numbly: guess whose?

  It seemed like an age before he snapped out of the coma. Probably it was only a split-second, though, because everything else around him was moving slowly too. For instance a girl way down the line of machines past Frankie was opening her mouth to scream and Bill had time to spot the gun as a forty-five and figure it was his before the girl’s shriek jabbed his ears. He jerked around to see where the shot had come from. Nobody stood behind him. Nothing was there except a row of slot machines. One of them was tired of being mauled by Frankie and had shot him in the back with three lemons.

  Wait a minute, Wayne. Walk, do not run, to the nearest insane asylum.

  The rows of machines were doubl
e, with each machine backed up against another. Between each set of back-to-back machines was a space of several inches. Somebody had lounged behind that double row of machines and reached into the opening and aimed the forty-five and waited until Frankie’s back came into line and let him have it and then flipped the gun through the opening so a guy named Bill Wayne could claim it. What would you bet the killer used a glove or handkerchief to avoid fingerprints?

  Right after the roar of the shot faded there hadn’t been a sound. Then the girl’s scream cracked the silence and now a wave of sound was cresting. He couldn’t think in all that racket. Anyway what good was thinking? He bent and grabbed the forty-five and yanked the slide and saw a fat cartridge tumble out. Thanks for leaving me some, bud. He ran fast, jaw set, eyes glaring, down the row and around the end. Now he could see down the aisle where the killer was. He crouched, balancing on his toes. Come on, Domenic. Come on, Cappy. Come and get it.

  Signals off. Try thinking again, Wayne. That guy trying to dig a foxhole in the floor isn’t Domenic. The one trying to climb over the machines to get away isn’t Cappy. If either of them was there, he was hidden in that traffic jam down at the far end of the aisle. Nobody wants to meet you, Wayne.

  The big curving double stairway to the ground floor was right behind him. He waved the gun at a couple of men who were sneaking in on him from the side and watched them go over backward like pins in a bowling alley. He turned and started down the stairs. Before making the turn that would bring him into view of the first-floor crowd he jammed the gun in a pocket. He rattled around the curve in the staircase and saw a polka-dot pattern of faces staring up at him and heard a bell begin clanging like mad.

  He stopped, screamed at them, “Up there! Up there, quick!” He pointed up at the second floor.

  Four guys charged out of the crowd below and went up the stairs two at a time past him, yanking at things in hip pockets. The crowd yelled. Ordinary guys with nothing but wallets and handkerchiefs in their hip pockets caught the fever and rushed up the stairs too. Behind him the place went crazy. Guys charging up the stairs crashed into guys charging down. It looked as if somebody had pulled the lever on a slot machine as big as a house and the thing had paid off with a tumble of angry men.