The two shadows paused, five feet away.
“What a mess,” Smith said furiously. “You let Wayne slip right by you in the parking lot. You take hours sneaking up behind him.”
“He came in another car,” Domenic said. “How could we know?”
Cappy said, “How could we sneak up on him when you couldn’t make him stay put?”
Smith growled, “What do I do, shoot him and bring a crowd, or jump him and get yells that bring a crowd?”
“Jeez,” Domenic said. “How far can a guy parlay a couple yells?”
Yeah. Bill thought, how far? You could parlay them for a few minutes, that was all. And by then maybe the few people left on the crest of Glacier Point would have wandered back to the hotel and the yells wouldn’t buy any attention. Still and all, who wanted to throw away the last ten or fifteen minutes of life? Something might happen. An earthquake might jolt Smith and Domenic and Cappy over the cliff. They might get religion. He might point his finger at them and say bang and will them dead. Anyway the important thing was to talk. Talk fast. Talk them off balance.
“What have you got to lose?” he said. “We can’t run. We know that the second we yell for help, you let us have it. Don’t sneak in on me, Cappy!”
Cappy pulled back his foot. “You don’t bluff me,” he muttered.
“One of you do some thinking, will you?” Smith said angrily.
“I’m doing some,” Domenic said. “My thinking says take it easy. I see you cooled off the sheriff.”
“Got any objections?” Smith asked.
“Yeah,” Domenic said. “This starts to get too wholesale for me. First it’s just Bill we’re after. Then his dame. Now the sheriff.”
“I had to do it,” Smith said. “The minute Wayne spills his story, our lake deal gets wrecked. I told you this afternoon you had to get Wayne before the sheriff caught him.”
“Aah, you shouldn’t have let the sheriff get wind of it at all,” Domenic growled.
“Let him?” Smith said. “There wasn’t any letting about it. The sheriff dug around all by himself and found Russ did know Ken and Frankie. That showed him I was riding a hot trail. I’d phoned him from Reno I was coming here so he knew where to find me. I couldn’t stall him off. I had to tell him I was after Wayne.”
Holly said faintly, “I’m not just imagining all this? Carson has been working with them all along?”
“Sure,” Bill said. “He’s the mystery man you tried to sell me and I wouldn’t buy it. He was the sixth man in the gang. The organizer. The guy who made all the decisions. The guy I didn’t know about. His dumb cowboy act was a fake. He sounds a lot smarter now, doesn’t he?”
He stopped. Somewhere in the distance a voice called, “Hol-lee. Hol-lee.”
“That’s one of our party,” Holly gasped. “They’re ready to go back. They—”
“Hold it,” Bill said, gripping her arm. She was working up to hysterics. She wanted to scream. But she wouldn’t get out half a scream right now. “Call back to them nice and easy,” he said. “Tell them you’ll be along in five minutes.”
Not many girls could have done it. She took a deep shuddering breath and called, “I’ll be there in five minutes.”
The distant voice called, “We’ll be at the car.” Echoes trundled the sound back and forth and let it fade away.
The sense of being in a dream was creeping over him again. That wouldn’t do. He fixed his attention on the small understandable things once more: the way starlight smeared on the barrel of Carson Smith’s revolver, the way the railing cut into his back, the glint of the ring on the sheriff’s limp right hand. They helped bring him back to reality. They… wait a minute. What glint of what ring? He peered at the sheriff’s body. There was no glint. Of course he had moved since he first noticed the ring catching starlight so probably he was in the wrong spot to see the reflection. He ought to be able to see the limp hand, though. It couldn’t have—
The shakes hit him. He leaned back hard against the railing so his legs wouldn’t fold. Nice work, Wayne. You play a cool game when there isn’t a chance of winning and you come unstitched at the seams now. The sheriff’s hand wasn’t lying limply on the rock any more. It was back in the shadow of his body. It was inching toward his holster. Get in there and pitch, Wayne.
“Maybe we can make a deal,” he said huskily. “What’s the sense of a lot of killing?”
Domenic spat. “Look who’s talking,” he said. “Killer Wayne himself. The guy who’s been going around knocking off my pals.”
“The funny thing is,” Bill said carefully, “you got the wrong guy. Am I gonna make you sore if I talk a little, Smith?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Smith said. He backed away a few steps.
“It shouldn’t make you sore that I finally figured out what a smart guy you are,” Bill said. “You were in China, weren’t you? And you were in Nanking when the Nationalists started pulling out. At a guess, you’d been working with that Chinese black market guy who was in our plane that day. Anyway you knew the guy had a lot of gold in those medical supply boxes, and you sold my bunch the idea of grabbing it. When I threw a wrench in the works, you threw a slug into me. Right?”
Cappy said, “It took you a long time to catch on.”
“I admit it. But nobody ever tipped me off that Smith had been in China.”
Holly said weakly, “I could have told you that. But I never realized it meant anything. That first afternoon I met Carson, we happened to get talking about chop suey and he said he didn’t think it was a real Chinese dish because he had never been able to get it over there. I forgot all about it until now. I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right,” Bill said. “You couldn’t know. Did you ever sweat about that little mistake, Smith?”
“I don’t do much sweating,” Smith said.
“Not even when you shot at me in Philadelphia and merely nicked my side?”
Domenic said, “What’s this about a shooting in Philly?”
“You have a lot to learn,” Bill said. “Russ got a newspaper clipping about me being alive and back home, and probably showed it to Smith. So Smith came to Philadelphia to get me. But he missed. Then he did some good detective work and found I was heading west on a tour through Cheyenne and Salt Lake City and Reno and Frisco and L.A. So he went back to Cheyenne to wait for me.”
“Look, Carse,” Domenic said. “Is that on the level?”
Smith had backed off about ten feet now. He crouched, balancing carefully. “What difference does it make?”
Bill glanced at the sheriff. He couldn’t see the hand at all now. The sheriff’s body had changed position slightly. Things were going to crack open fast. He hoped the sheriff had the word. “The difference,” he said, “is Smith saw what a swell chance that was to get rid of five guys named Russ and Ken and Frankie and Cappy and Domenic. He thought I’d do the job for him and take the rap. But I didn’t do the job and so he stepped in. That left me still taking the rap.”
Cappy said harshly, “You better tell this guy off, Carse.”
“He’s waiting for me to finish telling you how smart he’s been,” Bill said. He gripped the girl’s arm, got ready to spin her out of the way. “He phoned you guys from Salt Lake City or maybe Winnemucca, told you I’d killed Russ and Ken and was heading for Frankie in Reno. I’m guessing this but I’ll bet it’s close to what happened. He said meet him in Reno to knock me off. But what he was going to do was knock me off and then shoot you two. How close am I, Smith?”
Smith said softly, “You’re close to a drop of three thousand feet.”
“Answer him, will you?” Cappy said. “I don’t like the sound of that. I—”
“How do you like the sound of this?” Smith said.
Flame split the night. Short ugly squirts of flame jabbing at Cappy and Domenic. Bill spun the girl around and off to the side and turned to lunge at Smith. It wasn’t going to work. Cappy and Domenic were down in a heap and Smith was waiting for him.
Waiting in a crouch, grinning, taking a second to enjoy this. Flame gushed again. Not from where he expected. Not from the gun in Smith’s right hand. It came from the sheriff. And all of a sudden there wasn’t a gun in Smith’s right hand and the guy’s arm flopped limp and he let out a sound you couldn’t hear in the tumbling echoes and leaped forward.
Bill threw a right. It splashed on the guy’s face, rocked him. He chopped quick hooks and battered the guy backward. Smith slammed him against the railing with a wild left swing and then came charging in fast. Bill ducked, jerked aside. The big lunging body crashed into the railing and went toppling over it. A scream rushed away into blackness. It went away fast. It ended far away in just a few seconds, but for quite a while you could hear one mountain peak whispering to another about it.
He wanted to lean over the railing and look down into that soft black comfortable space but a girl and a tired old guy wearing a badge hauled him back.
Seventeen
He drove slowly back down the twisting road from Glacier Point. For the last five miles he had been telling himself not to be a fool but he didn’t seem to have an attentive audience. He had just managed to get rid of one load of trouble and now he seemed to want to go shopping for more. This time it wasn’t killer trouble. It was girl trouble. He had suddenly realized that he didn’t want Holly Clark to go skipping out of his life.
If he had been smart he could have seen this thing sneaking up on him all during the past week. Of course it was against his principles to be smart. Instead of making a careful play for the girl he had been scrapping with her. The two of them had been getting along like a dull razor meeting a tough beard. This was going to be the kind of romance that would need a referee more than a minister.
He glanced at Holly, sitting over at the far side of the front seat. Most people looked older when they were tired but Holly looked younger. Right now, she looked as if her parents ought to tuck her in bed with her favorite doll. He ought to say something to cheer her up.
“Tired?” he asked. She nodded.
He was really at his best tonight. He wanted to cheer up a girl who had just seen three men killed and who had almost been killed too and so he asked if she was tired. He said, “You’ve had a tough time.” That was good, too.
Holly said, “Do you suppose we’ll have to stay around long for the inquest or whatever they have?”
“It shouldn’t take very long. They have a U.S. Commissioner here who can handle it. And the sheriff makes a good witness to what happened.”
“Bill, it was wonderful the way you figured everything out.”
“Wonderful? I was stupid not to figure things out sooner, especially with you telling me to look for a sixth man. Smith was always hanging around, keeping an eye on me to make sure nothing went wrong. That should have made me start thinking. I should have got suspicious over the little tricks he kept pulling to make me sweat. He got a kick out of it. That’s the mark of a real killer.”
“Why didn’t you give up the whole thing in Salt Lake City, when you realized that somebody was using you as his license for murder?”
“I’ve forgotten. That seems years ago. Maybe I just figured I could outsmart the guy.”
“Did it have anything to do with a girl named Holly Clark? Who had managed to get herself all tangled up in the case? And who might get in trouble if you didn’t stay around?”
He wished he could say yes. It would be a nice cheap way of playing hero and making a little time with her. But to be honest, he didn’t know. His ideas about the girl had been very confused back in Salt Lake City. “It’s hard to remember,” he muttered. “Probably I was only thinking about myself.”
“Oh, naturally. And of course you were only thinking about yourself when you tricked me into walking out on you, yesterday afternoon. And when you hung around the hotel keeping an eye on me. And when you came roaring up to Glacier Point tonight to stop them from throwing me over the edge.”
“Well, I—”
“It was very nice of you and now we’re all even and you don’t owe me a thing,” she said rapidly.
She talked too fast for him. About the time he was ready to say hello she had reached goodbye. This was going to be a very difficult project. “When we get through with the inquest,” he said, “I’d like to—”
“I know. You’ll be off to dive for that gold.”
“Please let me finish my sentences.”
“Yes, of course, Bill. But that’s what you will do, isn’t it?”
“After this story gets printed and they locate that lake, anybody visiting the place will have to bring along his own water if he wants room to swim. The hell with it. I couldn’t get there first and it isn’t mine anyway. Besides, I have a job lined up with an airline and I’d like to get started on it.”
“Oh. Then what were you going to say?”
The car rolled into the long Wawona Tunnel just then, and the noise of tires and engine built up to a loud steady throb. He didn’t think he would start making his pitch yet. There were a lot of echoes in the tunnel and when she said no he didn’t want to keep hearing it for the next half-mile. He reached the end of the tunnel and drove into the parking space just beyond. Spread out before them was Yosemite Valley with its cliffs rearing up like surf. A last-quarter moon was lifting over the Sierras and plating the valley with black and silver.
He had prepared quite a speech but he forgot it and said angrily, “The way you’ve been acting since that hassle up on Glacier Point, you might think I was the one planning to push you over.”
“That’s interesting. How should I have acted?”
He had started off wrong and he might as well stumble ahead. “According to the books,” he growled, “you should have flung yourself into my arms or something.”
She laughed: a tiny waterfall of sound. “I can just see little Holly flinging herself at Bill Wayne and Mr. Wayne dodging cleverly and little Holly going out over the valley in a swan dive.”
He said in a burst of irritation, “I don’t get it. I didn’t have the slightest trouble making passes at you, when I was doing it to make you walk out on me. But now I don’t know how to go about it. This time I don’t want you to walk out, see?”
“Oh dear. Do I have to start bobbing and weaving again? Should I tell you that Half Dome is eight thousand eight hundred and fifty-two feet high and—”
“What a life this is going to be,” he muttered. “Every time I have a romantic thought, she’ll read me a back issue of the National Geographic.”
“Bill, are you trying to say what I think you’re trying to say?”
“You’ve been tagging around after me for years. Now I want to start tagging around after you.”
She stared at him for a moment and then said quickly, “I think you have the wrong idea about me. I am not helplessly in love with you. I told you once that you were just a challenge to me, like a jigsaw puzzle that’s hard to work but that you can’t leave alone. I told you when I finished it I’d want to kick the thing into a million pieces.”
“Go ahead and lack. I don’t break up easily.”
“Bill, be sensible. You’ve been out of the country for years. I’m the first American girl you’ve spent any time with, so naturally you’re sort of attracted. On top of that you feel I helped you and you’re grateful. That’s all very nice but it doesn’t add up to love.”
“Your reasoning is brilliant. Only trouble is, it’s wrong.”
“See how we argue all the time? That’s no basis for marriage.”
“You’re so right. But we can solve that easily. You can stop arguing.”
She patted his cheek and said, “Be a good boy and go back to Philadelphia and take that airline job. Get that gorgeous car repaired and polished, and go around visiting your friends and looking lonely and you’ll be startled at what will happen. Girls will pop up from nowhere. Take your time and pick out the nicest one and marry her. What do you think of that program?”
“It’s too s
ensible for me.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” she said. “Excuse me from having a grateful man around. When the gratitude wore off it would be awful.”
“I am not one bit grateful,” he snapped. “From the time you were a kid I’ve resented the way you tagged along. I resented the help you’ve been giving me. It’s beyond me how I end up thinking you’re wonderful. Go on. Play hard to get. I’ve just had a lot of practice chasing people.”
“Of all the boastful statements! If you make as many mistakes chasing me as you did chasing Carson Smith, you won’t get far. And don’t forget, this time I won’t be helping you.”
“I won’t make as many mistakes,” he said grimly. “This time I know who I’m chasing.”
He slid an arm around her and began pulling her close. She put up a struggle. Not as much as he would have expected, though. He grinned. It was quite possible that, if he started making too many mistakes, she would give him a little help this time too.
EVER WONDER WHY THEY CALL IT
THE WILD WEST?
Bill Wayne told his beautiful tour guide that he took the bus trip through the West to relax. But who can relax with dead bodies turning up at every stop?
From Cheyenne to Salt Lake City, from Reno to Yosemite, Bill’s secretly on a mission to discover which of his former army buddies shot him four years ago and left him for dead. But with all the lead that’s flying around, Bill will be lucky to make it to the end of the tour in one piece…
Praise for the Work of RICHARD POWELL:
“LIGHT WIT AND HARD ACTION.”
— Anthony Boucher, The New York Times
“EXCEPTIONALLY ADEPT… RELENTLESS.”
— The New Herald Tribune
“RAMPAGING EXCITEMENT.”
— Chicago Tribune
Original cover painting by MICHAEL KOELSCH for HARD CASE CRIME
Say It With Bullets Page 18