Gat Heat

by Richard S. Prather

  But did the assembled forces of the law give a hoot? They did not. Not that kind of hoot, anyhow.

  It had to end. At last, I had grabbed the camera. There was a big hand blocking out everything, then swirling earth, trees, sky. All over, at last. All over … All …

  Nope.

  The worst, in some ways, was yet to come.

  There had been that final moment when I thought I’d been shot. The simple truth was that I had merely yanked up my hands—clutching the still-filming Bolex—and clanked myself on the chin. But the last few frames had captured me—since the camera was held in my hands and the lens had been aimed, as though by Satan himself, smack up at my chops—looking down the path at those lumbering, thundering, too-speedily-approaching hoods. It was not to be expected, then, that my expression would resemble that of a man completely unconcerned.

  It didn’t.

  In the first of these final two shots my mouth was again open, though not more than nine inches, and my tongue was sticking out to what surely must have been its utmost length and a little bir more, and my eyes appeared literally to be popping from their sockets like corks from broken champagne bottles.

  The second shot of my face was the same, except that it had been taken from much closer, as I’d yanked up the camera. Naturally in the extreme close-up my image was out of focus and quite fuzzy, which helped a lot. It merely made me appear to have a long, fuzzy tongue and hairy eyeballs.

  When at last the sounds of great festivity ceased ululating from the now brightly-lighted Homicide squad room and echoing throughout the L.A. Police Building, and conceivably three-fourths of Los Angeles, Rawlins wheezed and choked and sighed a bit more, then got control of himself.

  “You want us to pick ’em up, Shell—or do you want to go get ’em yourself?”

  “I have nothing to say,” I said loftily.

  And he was off again.

  Ah, nuts, I thought. How am I going to get help from the Los Angeles Police Department when all the cops are batty? I will do it myself. That’s the ticket. Like the old saw, if you want something done yourself, do it right. I’ll do it myself, whatever it is—I didn’t remember at the moment. I was in a kind of daze.

  Even Samson, my buddy, kindly old Sam, turned against me.

  With his eyes still streaming he said, “Shell, I wanted to use your murder movie as an excuse to try tagging Violet. But I can’t do that now. Who—who—” he was choking up again.

  “I’ll do it myself,” I said. “I’ll go out and see Jimmy, and … something.”

  “Something, yeah. They’ll kill you half a dozen times.”

  “So? What have I got to live for?”

  “Well, you can’t expect the police to go there, not merely on this … this—” he started to strangle and tee-hee some more—“this evidence. Can’t show this to anybody; nobody’d believe it. Especially not in Hollywood, the film capital of the land.”

  Samson was only kidding of course. The fact is, he seized the film as evidence. Anyway, he seized it for something.

  I got up to leave. Then I sank down in my chair again, only now beginning to realize what long, lonely days lay ahead of me. In through the door had walked—or maybe wiggled is a better word—that burly, six-four police sergeant named Mac-Craig. Ordinarily, he was bald, but now he had on a woman’s wig, undoubtedly borrowed from a police woman. He had his pants on, but no shirt, and around his bare chest—in front, at least, there was a string extension in back so it would fit—was a paper-stuffed brassiere of rather remarkable dimensions. Looked like it had the whole New York Times in it. In one big hand dangled a submachine gun. In the other was a pair of white Jockey shorts.

  No initials on the shorts. No name. Nothing on the gun, either. Nothing was needed. It seemed evident that Rawlins had spilled his guts about everything he knew and some things he’d only guessed.

  I sat there, gazing in ill-concealed disgust at the disgustingly ill-concealed exhibition MacCraig was making of himself. Cops have a very crude sense of humor. They’re very crude human beings. What more can you expect when they’re all the time around slobs and jerks and crude things? Actually, they don’t have much of a sense of humor at all. They laugh at things like people getting caught in undertows and old ladies getting snagged in power mowers.

  I stood up. “Well,” I said to MacCraig. “That’s a pretty dumb exhibition.” The cops were having a screaming good time. Laughing at Mac Craig, I supposed. “What’s so funny?” I asked them. “You guys must be sick. I can’t see anything so funny—”

  I don’t know why, but that set them off as much as anything else so far. Dumb—boy, you think of a better word, use it.

  “That’s pretty dumb,” I said again, unable to think of a better word. “We need men like you, MacCraig. In the Sanitation Department. Or possibly you could give enemas in the zoo, or to restaurant oysters.”

  I couldn’t win. Just didn’t have it any more. I had lost, lost, I thought, sourness bubbling in my bubblers.

  I gathered up all the dignity I could find to gather, which was approximately as much as you could insert into a gnat’s—oh, a gnat’s ear. I walked to the door, turned and, smiling like a man with rabies, surveyed the howling loonies whom I now thought of as the L.A. Fuzz Department.

  A fuzz near me, still chuckling, said, “Ah, Scott, I don’t know what we’d do without you.”

  “That’s splendid,” I said, in splendid control of myself. “It’s splendid to know I’m splendid for your morale.”

  I’m not sure anybody heard my brilliant exit line.

  As I left they were starting to run the film again.

  I stalked down the hall, moving much as had that fellow I’d seen hit the tree. A hot plan was forming in my mind.

  And all around the plan, splendid words were dancing:

  “Kill! Kill! Kill!”

  20

  I was still in a sort of daze as I walked down the hall from the Homicide squad room.

  Dizzy trauma was going to be with me for a good hour, and when I finally concluded that my hot plan was a not-so-hot plan, why the bullets and arrows and heat and lead were flying, and it was too late to do much about it.

  Until then, however, everything went swimmingly.

  Like the first step.

  I walked into SID with the laughter and bubble from Homicide faintly audible clear up here a floor above. I was laughing and slapping my thigh.

  When I caught sight of the lab technician who’d gotten the rocket pistol for Sam, I said, “Gimme that crazy heater, will you?”

  “The Captain wants it?”

  “I—ha, hoo!” I broke up again.

  “What the hell’s going on down there?” he asked me. “That in Homicide?”

  “Yeah—hey, that rocket gun, quick. Man, there’s not much time.”

  Shaking his head, he went to the case and unlocked it and brought the box to me. I took it, turned and started out, then stopped and went back. Just as he’d started to say something, I think.

  I leaned forward, opened my mouth, but then broke up again. Then I left while he stared after me, still shaking his head.

  It wouldn’t be more than a minute or two before he stopped shaking his head and began wondering. But by then I expected to be long gone. And I was.

  I was wetter than hell.

  Covered with a bunch of muck, too.

  I wasn’t in the best mood of my life, either.

  But I was inside the fence and about to crawl up out of the lake onto the fairly spacious grounds surrounding Jimmy Violet’s house.

  I had my crossbow. And arrows in a homemade quiver dangling from the crossbow. And my Buck Rogers rocket gat. And little rockets with the four holes in back. I’d brought everything I needed except a kayak.

  Getting over the fence—which, to my surprise, didn’t electrocute me, and didn’t even set off any clangorous alarms—and then across the lake to the slanting bank where I now lay gasping and full of swamp water, had been very ea
sy, pecuilar to say. I’d expected guys armed to the teeth, lightning shooting through the fence, that sort of thing.

  But there hadn’t even been anybody guarding the gate when I’d checked it after getting inside. As for getting inside, I had merely climbed over the fence, ripping my ankle and my butt, and then fallen into the water and begun to drown. It bothered me: It was too easy.

  Perhaps there’d been no guard at the gate because Jimmy assumed nobody would come over that high fence tonight and swim through the lake, which maybe was full of piranhas, and then attack the house when there were nine or ten criminals in it. If so, that just shows how wrong he could be.

  I felt like throwing up.

  Everything seemed sort of dippy around here, as if the air was thick like muck, clogging my ears, eyes, nose, all kinds of clogging. I opened my mouth and spit out some muck, which I began to consider a clue.

  I crawled up onto the bank, got onto level ground with grass on it. Then I put down my bow and arrow and pistol and bullets and dug into my ears and nose and got the muck out.

  I felt better instantly. But only for a moment. Then I started feeling worse again. I really didn’t feel well at all even though I could now see and smell and hear again, which was an improvement. Hadn’t felt splendid for at least the last hour. During that time I’d made my preparations.

  I knew where there was a roll of thick soft-lead sheeting in the Spartan Apartment Hotel’s garage, so I’d taken it, along with the crossbow and arrows from the Cad’s trunk and some nuts and bolts, up to my rooms.

  There, after feeding the fish and raising the water temperature some more—it takes lots of heat to knock that Ick—I cut part of the lead sheeting into twelve sizeable rectangles. Twelve, because that was the number of arrows I had. Then I wrapped the soft lead around the front ends of my arrows, molding a big lead gob enclosing a few assorted nuts and bolts over their sharp, lethal points. Already that “Kill! Kill!” idea was losing favor with me.

  I suppose the idea had occurred to me because earlier, remembering Stub Corey’s slug banging my skull, I’d thought of it as not lethal but merely a long-distance sap. So it had seemed to me a crossbow and weighted lead-pointed arrows might, while even less lethal, serve equally as well for my purpose.

  I’d soon know.

  In the faint light from a crescent moon I could see the bulky shadows of cars in and on this side of the garage, which was on the lake’s edge and beyond the front of the house. With the gun in my right-hand coat pocket and rocket clips in the left, and carrying the bow and quivered arrows, I moved over there as silently as I could, most of the noise produced by my shoes squishing. There were two cars in the garage, two more parked outside of it.

  I took the lead sheeting from one of the arrows, poked two holes in each car’s gasoline tank, then put the foil and nuts and bolts back over the arrow’s sharp point as the fuel began glug-glugging out onto the ground and the cement floor of the wooden garage.

  I had them all trapped here now.

  But that’s not why I did it.

  A tiny point of light glowed back at the far corner of the house. Then another brightened and dimmed near it. Two guys smoking cigarettes, maybe out merely for a breath of air, or perhaps on guard. The reason wasn’t important; they were the two guys I could start on.

  I pulled back the bowstring to the string’s notch and locked it into place, trigger beneath the bulky weapon cocked, placed an arrow-sap into its groove atop the crossbow. All I had to do was put the stock against my shoulder, aim, and pull the trigger. And then maybe run. Run and swim. Because I’d only fired the thing a couple of times before, and then not with these much heavier—front-end-heavy—missiles. Consequently I hadn’t the faintest idea how much extra elevation I should plan on when aiming. I hadn’t ever anticipated doing this.

  I took my time, plenty of time, moving closer to the men. First I went over near the front door of the house, made sure nobody was there. Lights were on in two of the front rooms, but the curtains were drawn and not much spilled out here.

  So I turned my back to the entrance, and, hugging the wall, edged closer to the two men. I could see the glow of only one cigarette now, but I could hear the mumble of voices.

  I figured I could be reasonably sure of hitting a man in the head from a distance of thirty feet. My targets were still fifteen yards away, so I moved forward with the crossbow held ready, butt of the stock against my shoulder, finger on the trigger. Ten yards. I could see their bulk, shadowy, not distinct. But I could tell where their heads were, which I supposed was all I needed, really.

  Well, they hadn’t noticed me yet. Might as well make sure. I moved closer, an inch at a time. My heart started thudding more heavily, and I could feel the steady pulse in my throat. Enough. I couldn’t miss from here.

  Not much.

  I aimed just above the hairline of the man farthest away, facing me and talking to the other guy who had his back to me. The one looking my way was about six inches taller, and if I had to choose between them I preferred to get the bigger guy out of the way first. Especially since I was fairly sure, because of his size, that he had to be Fleck.

  I sighted, squeezed the trigger.

  There was a soft, kind of velvety spung.

  I’d failed to consider the sound the bowstring would make snapping forward. But I was worrying more about getting a second arrow out of the quiver and into place on the bow.

  By the time I did, several things had happened.

  First of all, I missed the big guy entirely. Also I learned something new about this weapon. The arrow—perhaps due to wind whistling around the not-very-smoothly-wrapped lead sheeting—hummed a little as it flew through the air and over the heads of the two men. It wasn’t so much a hum as a faint, sighing psoo. Whatever it was, I didn’t see how those guys could miss it.

  They didn’t.

  The big guy said, “You hear that, Tooth? Kind of a fong and psoo? What kind of thing makes a psoo?”

  It was Fleck, all right. He had the psoo pretty close, but the fong was way off. It had definitely been a spung.

  Tooth said, “Why do you ask me dumb questions?”

  I had my second arrow in the groove, string taut and in its notch. Fleck had turned around and was looking toward wherever that thing had gone.

  I was getting pretty nervous. Especially after that clean miss. So I took a big step forward and then aimed at the back of the smaller guy’s head, partly because Fleck had called him “Tooth” which meant he was Billy DeKay, but mainly because he was two feet nearer. I was losing much of my confidence in this weapon. Actually, I’d never really had a whole lot.

  I fired.

  Sung-psoo-clonk.

  Just about like that. Got him right in the back of the head, and he went straight down. Didn’t wobble or stagger or let out a peep or anything. Just straight down. Which took care of Tooth DeKay for a while. Try to kill me at the Hamilton Building, would he?

  Fleck heard that, all right. Only a totally deaf man would have failed to hear it.

  “What wazzat?” he said.

  Then he turned around, saying, “What’s goin’ on? I swear I heard a clonk. You hear it, Tooth? Tooth?”

  He was staring right at the airspace where his buddy’s head had been. “Where’d you go, Tooth?”

  While he was staring I got another arrow ready, string cocked, all that.

  Fleck looked down at his feet. “Tooth?” he said.

  Clonk.

  Straight down, just like the other one. Got him smack on top of the head.

  I walked past them, around to the rear of the house, waited silently for a few seconds, listening. Just as I started to move forward again, the back door opened. A man stepped outside not more than ten feet away, and the door slammed shut behind him.

  I reached for the gun in my pocket—already loaded with the color-tipped incendiary rockets—but changed my mind. The noise would bring others out here, and I wasn’t prepared for that. Not yet.
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  The crossbow was ready for action again. Readier than I was. But I lifted it, tried to sight over the arrow at the man’s shadowy bulk.

  Then a light flared. He had a cigarette in his mouth, was holding a lighter to it, the flame clearly illumining his features. It was the man who’d met me at the door on my first trip here earlier this day, a tall guy, sharp chin, ledges of bone over his eyes.

  Clonk.

  I was getting pretty good with this thing. One miss, then three bull’s-eyes. And that meant three down. I couldn’t know how many of the enemy might be here, but whatever the number, there were three less in action now.

  I continued on around the house to its front without seeing anybody else, then took up a position to the right of the door, my back to the wall. Another arrow was ready to go on the bow, but this time I pulled the lightweight rocket gun from my pocket, aimed at the garage.

  Samson had explained how to fire the gun, and it was simple enough: Just point and pull the trigger. But this would be the first time I’d fired the thing, and I was glad the initial target was something as large as a garage.

  I aimed, pulled the trigger.

  There was a solid flat crack. Hot gases shot out both sides of the gun above my hand. The sound didn’t come from the gun itself, but from a few feet in front of it. According to Sam, that was when the little rocket broke the sound barrier. A ripple of mild heat washed back against my face. There was hardly any recoil at all.

  But there were sure a lot of results.

  I could see the incendiary projectile zip through the air like a supersonic firefly, and when it hit the gasoline-filled garage there was a great whoom as the fluid ignited, fire rising toward the garage’s roof and belching from the open door.

  Suddenly there were flames over that entire area. The gas had spilled all over the cement floor, onto the driveway beneath and near the parked cars, into the grass near the drive, and some had even spilled into the lake. As I watched, the thin film on the water caught, and fire spread in a blunt tongue of wavering red over the lake’s surface. The wood of the garage caught almost immediately in the intense heat and was crackling angrily—as the first man burst through the door near me and started yelling.