Gat Heat

by Richard S. Prather

  “O.K. Come on up to SID with me. I’ll show you a gun. Not for you to use, however—we’re testing it.”

  “When we stepped out of Sam’s office the squad room was even more crowded than before. I spotted another man from Burglary, one from Administration, a couple from Auto-Theft. Must be a slow night, I thought. Rawlins stayed behind while Samson and I went up to the fourth floor. I didn’t think anything about it. Probably that should be: Like a fool, I didn’t think anything about it.

  In the Crime Lab Sam spoke to a technician who walked to a case against the wall, unlocked a door, and took out a fairly large box and brought it over to us. Sam opened it, exposing several boxes of cartridges—new boxes to me—and the damnedest looking pistol I’d ever seen.

  It had a row of holes in each side of the barrel, an oddly-shaped grip. It appeared to have everything a pistol should have, including sights and trigger, but I couldn’t see any hammer.

  “What is it?” I asked. “A water pistol?”

  Sam grinned. “Well, it can be fired under water, but it packs more wallop than the little .38 you have—used to have, I mean. More than a Magnum, for that matter. Great semiautomatic action, too.”

  “Where’s the hammer?”

  “Up here.” He pointed. “In front of the magazine. Hammer hits the front of the cartridge—little rocket’s what it is—and bangs it back against the firing pin. That sets her off, and she whooshes down the barrel, cocking the hammer again on the way.”

  “Rocket? Yeah—a rocket pistol. I remember reading about these things. Something in True magazine a while back, wasn’t there? Called a—a Gyrojet?”

  “This is a special model we’re trying out. Who knows? They might become official equipment.” He was handling the thing like a kid with a new toy. He spent a couple more minutes explaining how the gun—or little rocket launcher—worked, and showed me some of the cartridges, all of which had four little holes in the base. The escaping gas shot out those little holes, Sam said, and pushed the whole shebang along.

  There were three or four different kinds of rounds for the gun. Some were copperplated and a little bigger than a .45 caliber slug, and another box had metal-piercing slugs in it. The prettiest, with a colored tip, were about halfway between a tracer and a midget napalm bomb, the way I got it. At least they were incendiary and hotter than hell wherever they hit, so Sam said.

  I asked him to let me fire the thing, but he shook his head and handed the box back to the lab man, commenting that he felt I had done enough shooting for one day.

  Then we went back down to the third floor and into the Homicide squad room.

  And my hour of trial, of nausea, of sheer, unadulterated misery, began.

  19

  The film still had not arrived, but I called the lab and learned it was on its way over. Learned also, to my decided satisfaction, that the film was beautifully exposed considering the failing light when I’d shot the roll. That had been the one thing I was a bit worried about.

  And I will confess to a feeling of real relief at that point, for had the pictures been of the inside of a lens cap it would have been quite anticlimactic, since the squad room was now crammed with what could have passed for a small town’s entire police force with possibly half of the fire department included. A projector was set up at one end of the room, silvered screen at the other, and apparently the word had spread that something conceivably of unusual interest was going on in Homicide.

  In fact, one of the men asked me, with obvious interest, what we were about to see, so while waiting for the film to arrive I let myself be persuaded to speak a few words of explanation, and self-praise.

  There was the usual raillery and vulgar comment—crude “man” talk, but rather stimulating nonetheless. Jolly good fellowship and all that, even though some of the raucous comments were quite blunt and, at least, uncouth. But that has to be expected on occasion from men who live on the seamy side of the day, and as some wise man said, to know all is to forgive all. Besides, I did think I gave back as good as I got. At first.

  After a brief explanation of the setting in which the film had been made—that I had been pounced upon by four huge, armed, murderous hoodlums while alone and far from aid of any kind, with nothing but my wits as weapons; I went on, “Truly, men, this film must surely be one of the investigative triumphs—”

  Somebody—I didn’t spot him immediately—said, “Nothing but your wits, Scott? You mean you were unarmed?”

  “—of the century. A film, a real …”

  I paused, looking about. “Unarmed?” I said. “Well, um, ah …” I’d skipped over that part about losing my gun quite neatly, I thought. But …

  I spotted Rawlins, laughing behind his hand. Lots of other guys were laughing behind their hands. Some weren’t even using their hands.

  “Why, you sadist,” I said to Rawlins.

  There was a little more amusement, and some comments which do not bear repeating.

  I went on, “Yes, unarmed. Only my wits—”

  I paused, scowling. Probably I should have got that tasteless crack a bit sooner. But, hell, I’d had a pretty wearing day. Even been shot in the head. These jolly good fellows should make allowances. They, of course, would not.

  “So, thinking like lightning,” I said, and went on to explain what the men would see. “This unique document, then,” I said, “at the birth of which you are privileged to be midwives, is a film, a real moving-picture film of four hoods smack in the act of attempted murder!”

  It didn’t go over with the impact I’d hoped it would have. But at least some of the men were nodding as though in approval.

  I continued, “It required a bit of daring, of course, but also luck. I was simply lucky enough that it was I, instead of, say, J. Edgar Hoover, who managed to bring this coup off.”

  I went on for a bit, telling them how dangerous the men were, especially huge Fleck and English ’Arry, and perhaps I got a bit carried away.

  At any rate, one of the officers, a lieutenant from Burglary, said, “Scott, if you really do have those guys on film—especially the ones you named—I got to hand it to you. But letting them shoot at you is one of the dumbest things I ever heard of.”

  “Dumb?” I said. “Where is the line between magnificent courage and stupidity? Can you tell me that?”

  “No—and now we know you can’t, either.” He grinned.

  “Well … It’s not as though I invited them to shoot at me. They were bound and determined to shoot at me. In fact, that’s all they were there for.” I paused. “I merely took advantage of the opportunity.”

  Fortunately the delivery boy came in then, bearing the film in a tin case.

  I threaded it through the projector with some satisfaction, thinking this would silence the Burglary lieutenant, and the rest of these guys, for that matter. As the Chinese say, one picture worth ten thou, and so on. I mentally savored my approaching moment of triumph. Such moments don’t come along very often. Then with everything ready I moved my wooden chair near the table on which the projector sat, put a finger on the starting switch.

  I had already dwelt at some length on the four men, stressing that two of them, at least, were truly big sonsoguns, veritable behemoths, and that Fleck alone was the size of two, three big guys. Bigger than English ’Arry, who himself was huge and all over muscle. After explaining that because I’d started escaping away from the camera and would not be seen until completing one lap of the track, I finished setting the stage.

  “So the first person you’ll see will be Fleck, or Gargantua, whom I’m sure you all know by reputation, if not sight.”

  I nodded to Rawlins, who was standing by the light switch, and he flicked the lights out. Then he picked his way through policemen sitting on folding chairs, which had been brought in, and others sitting on the floor, and plopped down in a vacant chair next to me.

  “This better be good,” he said. “Kind of crowded here—maybe we should have run it downstairs in the audi
torium.”

  “Perhaps we will next time, Bill,” I said airily. “Probably SID and the Intelligence Division will—”

  There was a sudden, explosive roar. It sounded like—laughter? Yes, I was looking at Bill Rawlins and he was bellowing at the top of his lungs.

  I turned my head toward my movie. “What’s so fu …”

  On the screen was a little boy. No mistaking it.

  He was about four years old, running over a white sand beach toward the camera, fat little legs going like windmills. In his right hand he held one of those little celluloid propeller things on the end of a stick. It was spinning around and around in the wind as he ran, and when he neared the camera the little boy smiled slobberishly and pointed the stick at it.

  Some clown in the room yelled, “Bang! Bang!”

  There was already so much stupid noise I shouldn’t have been able to hear the guy. But I heard him—and, of course, so did the others in here.

  Rawlins actually slid off his chair. He was down on the floor on his fanny, beating both palms on the floor and making ridiculous snorting noises.

  I reached numbly for the switch and shut off the projector. “Well—” I said in the darkness, using a word I rarely use unless under titanic stress. “Well—” I said again. I waited to speak further until there was relative quiet—for quite some time afterwards any quiet was only relative.

  “Friends,” I said icily. “Idiot friends. I merely forgot that I had exposed a few feet of the film in my camera on another day, before taking the rest of this movie which—if you can contain yourselves long enough to watch it—will impress you, I have little doubt, as a high point in the entire field of criminalistics. And perhaps even in the history of Hollywood, the film capital of the land.”

  I was laying it on too much now—and maybe earlier as well—but I couldn’t stop. A kind of verbal diarrhea was afflicting me, and besides, I couldn’t backtrack after laying it on my jolly friends so heavily. Jolly friends—they were certainly jolly now.

  “Come on, Shell,” Rawlins said, getting back onto his chair. “Let’s see the rest. Maybe we’ll enjoy the main feature more now we’ve had the short subject. Get it—short subject—”

  I quickly flipped the projector on again before my moment of triumph could become a shambles. I’d forgotten shooting that brief bit of the little kid. I should have remembered taking a shot or two that day at Laguna Beach, when Tootsie and I had …

  Ye Gods! Tootsie!

  But once again I was in the midst of howling, hoots, and whistles. Tootsie was already on the screen, doing a little dance for the camera. Behind her, as in the poem, the lone and level sands stretched far away. There wasn’t even a seagull in sight, not another living thing.

  But Tootsie was a living thing. She was five-feet-eight living inches tall, with a thirty-eight bust, twenty-four waist, and thirty-seven hips, not a little girl. No, there was a lot of Tootsie, and she was wearing a striped bikini over only a little of it.

  That is, she would be for about another three seconds. But then—

  I lunged for the projector.

  Too late.

  Rawlins grabbed my right wrist, yelping with glee, and as I pulled back my left to sock him somebody on the other side got that one. Pretty quick two more thugs had me in several viselike grips. Don’t let any of this contemporary jazz about cops fool you. There’s a lot of bad in some of them.

  Helplessly, I watched the dancing tomato dance, first in the top and bottom of her bikini, and then only in her bikini bottom, realizing once again that there was much less bikini than bottom.

  But nobody had grabbed my mouth, and just before the top half of the bikini came off I yelled, “Listen, you—you fuzz. This isn’t what you want to see. We want to see hoods. That’s only Titsie—Titty—Tootsie!”

  Hell, it could have happened to anybody. I was watching the screen and it was right after I yelled “hoods” that the bikini bra flew off. Anybody might have got a little tongue-tied.

  I felt sick.

  But not these slobs. If laughter is good for the health, none of these guys was going to be sick for a couple years.

  My swell film of the four hoods was on the screen now, but even though they truly did look quite fierce—and jerky because of the two-times-normal speed of the action—and you could see the guns, and there was even one fine shot of English ’Arry firing at something unseen up ahead, the impact of their initial appearance was lost entirely.

  Because guys in the room were still whooping and yelling things like: “Yoo-hoo, Titty!” and, “Ba-haybee, be my Titsie Titty Tootsie!” and, “Oh, my hotsy-totsy Tootsie,” and a lot of other dumb junk.

  I just waited, sourness gathering in my bloodstream. It was awful. I had to live with these guys, and this was ruining me. But there was plenty of time for the men to calm down, because there was quite a while after the hoods went by the camera when nothing happened.

  Absolutely nothing.

  We performers were all running around in a circle, to be sure, but all the camera caught was a bunch of trees growing. You could not, of course, tell they were growing. Nothing stirred. There wasn’t even one of those little birds hopping from branch to twig.

  It was excruciatingly boring. But the men did quiet down except for an occasional chuckle.

  And there was, as well, time enough for me to sort of gather my strength again, to spring back. I realize, crude fun or not, the salient—and actually reasonably important—part of the film was yet to come. And certainly there could be nothing funny in four guys trying to kill another guy. Especially when I was the other guy. I even began looking forward to my own appearance on the screen.

  I knew, naturally, that it wasn’t going to be quite as dramatic as my build-up. But, still, it was bound to be fairly gripping, especially to these men who knew Fleck and Little Phil and the others, knew them and their records of thievery, violence, and mayhem.

  I was almost smiling in anticipation, feeling pretty good again and certainly less down-in-the-mouth than when it started. Because I remembered, because I had been there, and because it began so suddenly, the start of it damn near lifted me up off my seat.

  There I came! Yes, there I was! This was keen.

  I came speeding around the curve in the path, way up ahead there, turning and sprinting …

  No, I wasn’t turning.

  What was happening? Who was that creep? Whoever he was, he looked even from way off like those cartoons of guys lost in parched deserts.

  He wasn’t turning; he was just running—well, sort of lunging staggeringly—right off into the woods. Wait—there was a pretty-good-sized tree smack in front of him, and the imbecile was staggering lungingly straight at it.

  This wasn’t the way I remembered it.

  Yeah, I did recall smacking into a tree about there. But it had been just a little tree, more of a branch, as I recalled; I’d snapped it right in two. But that thing on the screen looked maybe six inches—oh!

  He—I—some idiot—smacked right into it with a tremendous wallop. The tree bent over, and maybe cracked, but didn’t go down. The guy did, though. Only not immediately.

  He sort of reeled back into the path and stood there, arms held rigidly out and angled down from his sides at about a forty-five-degree angle. Then his legs began moving stiffly and jerkily as he moved right, left, forward a bit, left, right. He looked like nothing so much as those comics who do imitations of Frankenstein’s monster.

  It was bad enough any way you looked at it, but since the film had been taken at only eight frames a second the action was speeded up tremendously. Somehow that made it quite a lot worse.

  Then—there he went.

  He flopped down onto the ground and lay as one dead. No, he was still twitching. Ah, there, he was getting up. Crawling forward. Staggering to his feet. Flopping as one dead again. Up, on his feet, running, weaving. Close to the camera now.

  Close enough for individual features to be seen—and now behind h
im came the first hood. Big Fleck. Tearing along like a goddamn machine. Didn’t look like he was even breathing hard. But the other one, the guy now reaching out with one hand toward the camera, he was breathing hard.

  His mouth was stretched into a caricature of the theater’s mask of tragedy, with his tongue projecting astonishingly from the middle of it. He was reaching, reaching, for the camera. Reaching while still at least fifteen feet away from it. Then he disappeared. Just fell down out of sight.

  That at least left the field of vision clear—and, mercifully, removed that contorted face from view—and now behind Fleck could be seen two more men, then another, the last of the four pursuers. It was evident that one or two of them were shooting at something near the camera. Something—there he was. I had to face it: There I was.

  Now, this was pretty serious business, make no mistake about it. Those were real hoods out there, with real guns, and they were shooting those real guns at me. But from the noises and near-screams these dumb cops all around me were making, would you have thought it pretty serious business? No, you would not.

  The dump cops were cracking up, laughing and howling and hammering on their thighs and heads and even on other dumb cops.

  Part of it, surely, was the fast-action, the jerky Keystone-Kops-pursuing-the-bandits effect. But, to tell it true, another part had to be the not entirely dashing and devil-may-care picture which I myself presented. I, and the rather astonishing—and all horrified—expressions playing over my chops.

  I was up again, heading for the camera, bound and determined to get that bloody camera, chin stuck forward so far it appeared to be sliding out from under my face like the drawer in a cash register, lower lip peeled down to expose lots of teeth and even gums. Every once in a while my eyes squeezed shut and simultaneously my tongue stuck out and then popped back inside. If I’d been a lizard you’d have sworn I was catching flies.

  The Homicide squad room was in an uproar; it was bedlam; it was a goddamn lunatic asylum. It was now clear as could be that those four hoods were Fleck, English ’Arry, Little Phil, and another creep who now could easily be identified, that each of them carried a pistol, and that two of them were at the moment employing their pistols feloniously in an attempted assassination.