“Look at this poor devil. Hey, Joe! Look at this poor devil. His own mother won’t know him no more.”
“Is he ‘live, Herbert?”
“How the hell do I know? Sure looks dead.”
“Somebody get a ambulance!” the woman wailed. “Somebody should get a ambulance!”
“Get the police, too. They’ll have to haul that car up from down there.”
“A sure wonder it didn’t burn.”
“A real miracle. Hey, Joe! You want to help me with this poor guy?”
“Shouldn’t oughta touch him. I don’t think you’re supposed to touch ‘em until the cops get here.”
“My God, Joe. The poor guy might bleed to death.”
“Yeah. He sure might.”
“Somebody go for ambulance?”
“Yeah. Guy in the green Chewy. Said he’d call from the Filling Station down there.”
“Geez, this poor guy’s a mess, ain’t he, Joe?”
“Never saw one like it. Wonder if he’s breathing?”
“Don’t know whether I’d rather be this guy, or whoever is down there in that car. Don’t know which way I’d rather get it.”
I kept trying to get up. But nothing responded to my will. I lay there. I could hear the sirens from way down the side of the mountain. The wailing came up through the voices of the people crowding around me.
I never realized before how helpless people are at accidents. They stooped over me, and sniffed at me, the way a strange dog does. One of them even poked me with his finger. But nobody offered to do anything, but stand in so close I couldn’t get a breath of fresh air.
Everything got kind of hazy then. The next thing I knew there were cops bending over me, and somebody said I was still alive.
“Shove’im in the ambulance, Doc. Ain’t no use waitin’ for the guy from down there. They just yelled up — he’s deader’n seventeen pounds of mackerel.”
It was very quiet in the ambulance. I opened my eyes. The pain was horrible.
A guy was grinning at me. He was all in white. His face wasn’t more than three inches above mine. He seemed to be enjoying the way I looked.
He’d go away to take a drag on his cigarette, then he’d inhale and come back close and blow his smoke across my face. That’s what made me open my eyes.
I tried to turn my face away.
“Where you think you’re going, cute boy?”
I stared at him. His smile made me sick.
“What’s your name?” I said.
“You can call me Buster. My friends do.”
“I don’t like that name,” I said. “I know a guy that name. I don’t like him.”
“Then you may call me Wilmer.”
“You’d make somebody a nice wife, wouldn’t you, Wilmer?”
“Oh, so you’re tough, too, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, it’s going to be a long time before you get tough with anybody. And brother, you just look like a mess.”
“Never mind how I look,” I said. “I want to get out of here.”
“You’ll get out. When we get to the hospital.”
“Is that where you’re taking me?”
“That’s right.”
I thought real hard. My legs moved. I swung them off the bed. I sat up.
“Tough guy,” he said sarcastically. “They just can’t kill you, can they?”
“It takes time,” I said.
“Look,” he said. “I’ll tell you something. Maybe you’re acting from some kind of nervous tension. You’re sitting up. I would have sworn you couldn’t. But it won’t last. Be a good boy and take a nice ride with me to the hospital. We’ll fix you all up.”
“I don’t like the way you blow cigarette smoke in my face.”
“Oh, I’m sorry about that. Goodness, I thought you were out cold. I didn’t think you’d ever even know it.”
“I’m getting out, Wilmer, first time he takes a corner. Don’t try to stop me.”
“The cops won’t like it, tough boy. The hospital won’t like it. I won’t like it.”
I slid down near the exit.
“So long, Wilmer,” I said.
He kept waiting for me to fall over. He kept smiling at me. “If you try it,” he said, “I’ll have to restrain you.”
I felt the ambulance slowing for a turn. I hit down on the door handle. As the ambulance started around the corner, I was thrown off balance.
When Wilmer saw that I was going to jump, he yelled at the driver. As I went out of the door, the driver slammed on his brakes. I had to take great long strides to keep from falling.
Over my shoulder, I saw fat Wilmer piling out of the rear of the ambulance as the driver came around the side of it.
I was running stiff legged, arms hanging loosely at my sides. The street was brightly lighted. I hurled a glance at a marker. I was on Mission Street. I haven’t any idea how far out.
The ambulance men were howling at the few people in the street to stop me. But I must have been a frightful sight, of gashes and blood and torn clothing. People got out of the way.
The drivers decided to play it smart and run me down with their ambulance. They stopped running and went back to the white car. I felt the headlights stab at me as I reached the end of the block.
There was a taxi on a side street just out of the light. One of my legs buckled as I ran toward it. There was no driver in the cab.
Slapping open the rear door, I jumped into it. As I slammed the door shut after me and crouched over in the darkness, the ambulance screamed around the corner into the side street and raced by the cab.
I knew I had less than a minute to get out of there. I got out in the street and stared at the ambulance that was already slowing in the middle of the block.
Limping, I ran across the street and on down Mission. I kept looking for taxis, but there were none at that hour out there.
• • •
AT LAST I stopped running. Whatever had kept me moving was beginning to wear off. I kept in close to the buildings, stepping into doorways every time a car approached.
I just kept plodding. I don’t even know how far I walked before I came to a huge intersection of streets where Mission made a curve and two streets crossed it. I turned left here, and crossed Market Street. Two sailors were arguing loudly with a civilian. I limped past them. They didn’t even look at me.
Market Street, I thought. I know where I am. This wide street is Van Ness. There were no cabs in sight. I kept walking on the left side of the street to the Fox Theatre.
Then I found out about the streets of San Francisco. When the cab driver brought me to the Ramona Hotel on Ellis Street, it was two blocks off Market Street. So I started North on Polk Street and found myself in the dimly lighted Civic Center.
I didn’t have any idea where I was then. I walked slowly through it, down past the library and the Federal building. I was two blocks from Market Street now, and tired enough to drop. I found a street marker. I was on Golden Gate and Leavenworth.
I was breathing through my mouth now. I walked east on Golden Gate for three or four blocks and found myself back on Market Street.
I went two blocks up hill on Taylor and found Ellis Street. I didn’t even know what I was doing any more. I was just putting one aching leg out in front of the other.
From somewhere in the distance I could hear sirens. But I was walking down hill on Ellis, moving swiftly, bent forward a little.
A woman stepped out of a doorway directly in my path. She started to speak to me. When she saw my gashed, blood clotted face, she gasped, “My God!” and leaped away from me.
Several taxis passed me now, and even tapped their horns. But I didn’t even look up. I passed a sailor with his arms tightly about a girl. She was giggling and it seemed I could hear her giggle along with the sounds of my feet as they struck the pavement.
I passed a movie theatre. The last stragglers were just leaving. I crossed an alley and looked up. I almost laughed
. There was the Ramona Hotel.
A siren screamed up Mason Street.
“Some poor devil,” I told myself sagely as I marched into the automatic elevator, “is in trouble. This late at night, too!”
• • •
I EXPECTED Sarah Hentzler, the ship’s nurse and Patsy to be asleep. I didn’t knock. I fumbled in my pocket until I found the key to my room. I opened the door on bedlam!
The shade was pulled, and ripped. Light from the parking lot neon below winked through the rip. The bureau was overturned, the mirror smashed. Pictures were torn from the walls, and even the mattress had been thrown from the bed.
The room was empty.
I heard something from the narrow bathroom at my left. Snapping on the light, I saw Sarah Hentzler, bound and gagged and stuffed down in the bathtub.
I lifted her out and removed the gag.
She just stared at me as I ripped the ropes from her wrists and ankles.
“Who did it?” I said. “Where is the baby?”
“A woman and a man,” she gasped out. “They took the baby with them.”
“A red headed man?” I snapped at her. “A big red headed man?”
She shook her head. “He was small, and looked like a hoodlum. The woman was a blonde. She said — she said to tell you that Patsy was all right, that she was being returned to her father.”
CHAPTER TEN
“WHAT HAPPENED to you?” Sarah Hentzler said. “You look like they ran you through a meat chopper.”
“Never mind me,” I said. I pained all over. I went back into the sacked bedroom. I reached up behind the mirror and pulled out the envelope with my plane reservations.
I fumbled in the thing and removed a hundred dollar bill. “This is for your troubles,” I said to Sarah. When I turned to face her, she had the telephone. “What are you doing?”
She took the hundred dollar bill from me. “I’m getting some medical supplies,” she said. “I’m going to try to fix you up, although you need a doctor for that arm.”
“I haven’t time,” I said. “I’ve got to catch a plane in Oakland at seven.”
“We’ll hurry,” she said evenly. She began to speak rapidly into the telephone. She ordered what sounded like enough surgical supplies to last a month.
But she used almost all of them on me when they arrived a few minutes later. As we waited, she straightened up the room. I tried to help her replace the mattress on the bed, but it was too much for me. Anyway, she knew how to handle it so smoothly that I was only in her way.
She began on me then. It was almost five thirty before the room and I were in order.
“Look,” I said. “Will you do me one last favor, Hentzler? I want you to ride to Oakland with me. I want you to walk out to the plane with me. But I warn you. If they’re waiting for me, if they recognize me and try to shoot me, you may be hit. But I’m counting on my arriving, a swathed up invalid, with a woman, I might be able to get on that plane alive. I’ll give you another hundred. Will you do it?”
She smiled. “I love the way you talk,” she said. “In hundreds.”
We arrived at the airport with minutes to spare. That was the way I wanted it. Sarah went into the coffee shop while I wrote out a wire.
“Sally,” I wrote, and addressed it to Ray’s wife in Brooksville, Florida. “On my way home. Little something to do first. Try to see you and Donnie, then. Love, Dan.”
Sarah walked out on the field with me when my flight was called. Everybody looked sleepy at that time of the day. There was no sign of any of Nelson’s hoodlums. The sudden death of Phillips Clark must have left everything at loose ends. I smiled grimly. That meant only one thing: Nelson and Eddington would be thinking up a swell reception for me.
I remember sitting down in the plane. My head went back and suddenly I was asleep. The stewardess woke me up at Memphis and I moved in a sleep-drugged stupor from the East-West plane to the South-Eastern ship for the last lap of the flight.
The day was gray and overcast when we left Memphis. I must have gone to sleep again at once. I tried to plan ahead to the moment I would leave the plane at the Tampa International airport. But I couldn’t concentrate. This sleeping I needed too badly. It was like dying, something you did whether you were ready or not.
• • •
SALLY WAS THE first person I saw when I stepped off the plane at Tampa’s air field which had been Drew Field air base during the war. Sally. She ran out toward me with her arms outstretched. Immediately behind her I saw Flaherty and Frobush, detectives who had worked with Ray in the County Prosecutor’s office.
I held Sally close a moment. I didn’t realize I was shaken, and not ready for what was ahead, until I saw Sally.
But seeing her, beautiful and good, brought it all back to me. The things Ray had died for, and the way he had died. And looking at her, I knew why I had fought my way through every barrier Henry Nelson could throw in my path back here to Tampa.
“We’ve a taxi, Dan,” Sally said. “I came from Brooksville as soon as I got your wire. Frobush and Mr. Flaherty have promised to help me get you out of Tampa.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to get out of Tampa,” I said. “I’ve something to do first.”
“My advice is to get out with your sister-in-law,” Frobush said. “We’ve been hearing a lot of things, Dan. None of it good. We just got word that Phillips Clark was killed in an auto accident in San Francisco. There’s no telling what Nelson is planning to do. Some of the political bigshots have been talking about dumping Nelson. They figure to let him take the rap for all the scandal. And without Phillips Clark to steer him, Old Nelson will be lost. If that’s true, Big Mike Rafferty will take over. But either way you stand to lose if you stay in this town.”
“Thanks,” I said as we started across the brightly lighted field to the parking lot.
“Come with me,” Sally pleaded. “I’ve promised Donnie I would bring you back with me. He’s looking for you, Dan.”
I looked at her. Her eyes were shining. Even at night there was a kind of halo about her dark head. Like there was goodness there because she didn’t know anything but goodness inside.
We reached the edge of the darkened parking lot. Rafferty stepped out in front of us. His face was still swollen and marked with blue bruises. There was a strip of white tape closing half his right eye. But there was something about him now, he’d regained whatever stature he’d lost three thousand miles from home. There was arrogance and strength in the way he barred the walk. The three dark-skinned gun uglies at his side added to his appearance of superiority. He was Big Mike Rafferty in a land where he was boss.
He ignored me for the moment. His gaze raked across the detectives, Frobush and Flaherty. Poor devils, you could see them shrink under their coats.
“I hope you two have good jobs somewhere else,” he said quietly. He gestured with his right arm in its sling. “You’re through in Tampa. Both of you.”
“Why?” Flaherty said. His voice quavered.
Sally stared at him. Her eyes glistened. “Because they dared to help me?” she whispered at him.
Rafferty answered Flaherty grimly. “You just threw in with the wrong side, Flaherty. That’s all. Nelson is finished. Washed up in Tampa. Guarding one of his rats for him will get you nowhere with me.”
“Don’t be a fool,” Sally said sharply. “These men are here because I asked them to come with me. I believe Henry Nelson ordered my husband killed. Is it likely I would ever join him in anything? We’re trying to get Dan away from Henry Nelson — not to him.”
Rafferty looked at Sally. For the first time, the set lines about his wide mouth softened.
“You’re mixed up, Sally,” he said. “You believe in this punk the way I did. What you don’t know is that Nelson sent Dan Henderson out to find Connice Nelson and kill her for him. And he didn’t. He killed the only woman I ever loved. Oh, I heard the news on the boat. A tramp confessed in Honolulu. Don’t think that fooled me. I know H
enry Nelson’s tricks to cover up for his hoodlums. You’ve got to understand, Sally. I loved Connice for twenty years — the way your Ray loved you, Sally — only without hope. I was a bad boy twenty years ago. A rough, Irish Mick. I took what I wanted the hard way, with my fists if I had to. Connice wouldn’t marry such a tough — even though we both knew she loved me. And only me, do you see? Instead, she married the biggest rat of them all. She married the great Nelson. Well, she loved me, but I was broke and in trouble all the time twenty years ago, and Nelson was all covered with perfume.”
I stood there, looking at him. At the lights glinting in the unshed tears in Big Mike Rafferty’s eyes. I saw the way his mouth worked with the grief that spilled out of him, like water that breaks over a dam and cannot be halted. All the twenty years of loving Connice Nelson, of needing her and wanting her, and knowing he could never have her was in his face, and in his hoarse, hollow voice. The gun slicks stood there, looking at nobody, hearing about a love they couldn’t even understand, listening to the tragic man pour out his insides.
But my mind was racing back to that first night on the ship. I had thought Rafferty deranged then, and I had no idea what was behind it. But now I knew: for if I had hated Nelson for killing Connice, think of the depths of grief and rage into which Big Mike Rafferty had been plunged. Undoubtedly, Connice had been afraid even to write to Big Mike to let him know where she was. She was terrified lest somehow Nelson might intercept the letter, or at least find out its postmark. Big Mike must have followed me across the country as soon as word got to his mob that Nelson had hired me to find Nelson’s runaway wife. I shook my head. Connice, running. I, hunting. In the darkness behind me, Lungs Garcia, stalking. And always trailing, Big Mike Rafferty, praying I’d lead him to happiness delayed twenty years, and now forever lost.
I began to shiver. It had nothing to do with fear. It had nothing to do with the hatred for Henry Nelson. It was just agony. I never felt so speechlessly sorry for anybody in all my life. But looking at him, I knew there was nothing I could say. He hated me only slightly less than he hated Henry Nelson.
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