The Sweet Ride (The Shell Scott Mysteries)

by Richard S. Prather

  I had wondered before about Hank’s death, and my subsequent race to the Newtonia Hotel. It was, in view of the events and their timing, probable that Sam Jelly had seen, or heard, me parking Bannister’s Lincoln at the curb, or running toward the hotel’s entrance, and had then hit the clerk, busied himself behind the desk. But Wykoff was already dead by then. Shot, undeniably, by Sam Jelly, before he could have seen me.

  It appeared to be one of those “stupendously fortuitous coincidences.” Fortuitous for Sam Jelly. Because Hank, dying, had told me he’d been shot by two men, Lou Wykoff and—that was all. No second name. But by the time I caught up with them the named man had been killed by the unnamed man. Which meant I couldn’t question Lou Wykoff, and perhaps from him learn who the unnamed man was.

  So, no coincidence after all. A single explanation made sense, explained everything, including the motive for Wykoff’s murder: Sam Jelly knew when he shot Wykoff that Hank Wainwright had named his partner; and the only way he could have learned that was if someone, very quickly after the shooting, had phoned and informed him. Two people were aware that I was on my way to get Hank’s killers, and that I thought I knew where to find at least one of them. The same two people who’d stood behind me when Hank said, “Lou Wykoff, and—”

  Martinique, and—Bannister again.

  I grabbed onto the space between front and back windows and squeezed enormously, because this time I saw Martinique just as she started to bend the wheel. It was a good thing I grabbed tight, because she’d barreled around the corner to her right—more accurately, our right—and was now picking up speed on Maple. It was the wrong direction. Didn’t the dumb broad realize there was now no way to avoid crossing Third Street? And it was Third Street we’d just escaped from? It was Third Street where she’d saved me?

  “Hey,” I yelled. “You’re going the wrong way. I know you don’t want to go back there, so go straight ahead next time. Or if you’ve simply got to turn, turn left. Got it? Left?”

  She just kept screeching “Yes—yes!” as if it was the answer to everything. That was O.K., just so she either went straight ahead, or turned....

  “HEY!”

  Right again. A hard skidding right.

  This time I didn’t even worry about the feeling that my arms were going to come out of their sockets or the possibility that I would fly through the air and leave my head on the curbing.

  Because I was beginning to have doubts about Martinique. Serious doubts.

  “Hey,” I said again, adding, “You aren’t still mad at me about last night, are you, Love?”

  “Yes—yes!”

  Of course, by now I knew that didn’t mean anything. It was just talk.

  We were zipping up Third Street, nearly halfway between Maple and Birch Street dead ahead, the mottled white face of “Silvano Enterprises, Inc.” flying by on my left and the gaping dark entrance rushing speedily toward us.

  And I realized either Martinique was, in her unbelievable stupidity, going to go tearing right past the goddamn garage entrance—in which I could see some hulking figures, or at least several figures that appeared to be hulking—or else she was....

  I squeezed my eyes shut—just for a moment—and peeled back my lips and clamped my teeth together and waggled my head like Ernie Biggers, and when I opened my eyes Martinique was cranking the steering wheel again. She was doing what I’d told her to do. She was turning left at last.

  This time I was pressed against the side of the car instead of being flung away from it. There was a little bump as we went up and through the gaping dark entrance, then a horrible sensation as Martinique slammed on the brakes with, I must assume, all her strength. I would so assume because the horrible sensation was what it’s like to go flying through the air as though propelled from a circus cannon aimed at a stone wall.

  When you’re in the air, flying along like that, you can’t skid or slow down or even veer. You just go. You go ahead toward wherever you’re pointed. I flew over the left fender, giving it just a little bump hardly worth mentioning, and then on. On and down with a gooey hissing sound into that same oil slick. Then skidding, starting gratingly up the very left edge of the ramp which wasn’t oiled at all, and then off even it, turning sideways and slowly onto my back like an unmanned glider preparing to crash into the Portland Cement Company. My shoulder hit something, possibly dislocating my shoulder, and turning me face down to the floor again, and that was my position when my head went bowk against one of those concrete columns which were everywhere about.

  I wasn’t moving very fast, fortunately, when I hit the column of concrete. But, afterward, I wasn’t moving at all. I just stayed like that for a spell, with my nose pushing against the cement, while a strange realization staggered through my mind.

  Nearly every time before this, when I’d been about to get killed, my sense of time, if anything happened to it at all, slowed. Slowed down and stretched out. So that I saw with unusual clarity while seconds dragged by like minutes. So that whatever grisly catastrophe was occurring seemed to occupy half of forever.

  But not this time. This time it was the opposite, everything speeded up into a blur, just Martinique turning left and then—zoop-bump-ssss-scckkk-bowk and here I was, all in about one one-thousandth of a second.

  I was conscious, though. And time was back to normal. Because I could hear normal voices—to stretch a point and refer to those banshee whoops and gibberish howlings as normal—producing things like: “Attagirl, Martinique!” and “Baby, you duh nuts, you—yeah!” and Martinique, doll, hon, you done it, I knowed you wooden lettuce down,” or so it struck me.

  There were scraping sounds near me, big feet stopping, hands on my arms. I didn’t really need help to get onto my feet—my head wasn’t a thing of beauty, or anything I wanted to dwell on a lot, but I was thinking clearly enough. Certainly more clearly than during my ride around the block.

  So, on my feet, with a ferocious looking character on each side of me, I said to them, “Let go,” waited while they kept holding on, and added, “Let go, or so help me I’ll club you. Maybe I’ll get shot, but I’ll club the hell—”

  One of the guys dropped his hand and said, “Give’m his last wish, like they give guys dinners.”

  And the other one said, “Yuh, he’s not goan noplace.”

  This was a marvelous group. I wondered who kept the books. I wondered how some of them could find their noses if they wanted to pick them. I wondered if they were any smarter than I was.

  I walked, of my own accord—the man was right that I wasn’t goan noplace, not with seven individuals, most of them quite large, four of them with large guns in hand, in my immediate vicinity—over to the car in which still sat Martinique.

  Martinique Monet. Whom I well remembered. Whom, to say it true, I would never completely forget.

  I smiled at her. Wearily, yes. With some inner tumult, and even a kind of sickness, yes. And with something like a thin keen blade of sadness in my gut.

  “You’re good, Love,” I said. “Very good.”

  She started to speak, didn’t.

  “Just tell me one thing, Martinique. You kept me—you know where.”

  I’m not sure why I didn’t want to yak about her bedroom, her bed, her lovemaking, with these guys listening. I sure didn’t owe Martinique a thing.

  But I left it there and went on: “Till you could make a call on the phone in your front room—no phone where we were, I remember. Probably a call to Grimson. Could, I suppose, have been to Sam. And you tried to keep me there with you. But not for the reason I supposed. Just tell me.”

  Still no reply. She wasn’t even looking at me any longer.

  “Look,” I said. “What’s the difference now? Sam Jelly was picked up last night a block from the Rigoletto. With a loaded gun very close by. A block or more north of the Rigoletto, or to say it the way it really was, on Sixteenth Street, less than a block from the Lasker Towers. Wherein is your apartment. That gun was for me, right, Love?�
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  She spoke finally. Not much. Just, “I’m sorry.”

  I’d like to think she meant it.

  There was some milling around, grunting. The men seemed to be waiting for something. One of them had left earlier, and in another minute came back. With Sam Jelly. So that was the something they’d been waiting for.

  I guess he was the boss, in Grimson’s absence at least. He acted like the boss. No surprise, no congratulations, all business.

  “Who got his heat?” he asked.

  Appraising the blank looks and shaking heads he swore mildly, reaching under my coat, and yanked out the .38 Special.

  And right then Martinique blurted, as if she’d just thought of it, “Sam, he threw something into the back of the car.”

  Sam didn’t move to do the manual labor. He jerked his big square head and another man moved to the car, opened the back door, leaned in, and brought out the suitcase.

  “Say, that’s what I seen Little Biggie carrying out!” This in the gravelly voice of Hot Sauce Charlie, a short round man with an enormous belly and wattles of fat wiggling under his chin.

  Naturally the suitcase was open in about ten seconds. Jelly swore some more, not quite so mildly this time, closed the bag, and held it gripped in his big left fist.

  He looked at Martinique, moved next to the car. He spoke softly, but I was able to make out most of the words. I don’t think he really cared if I overheard, under the circumstances.

  “Couldn’t ... boss on the phone. You ... see him?”

  “Right away. As soon as I leave.”

  “Tell ... call me. Make it fast, huh?”

  She nodded, started the car, backed out to the street. Jelly pointed to the ramp. I shrugged, walked toward it. So it was back up there again. Really going around in circles; or maybe this was more like carefully winding something up and watching it unwind.

  Only then did I wonder how Biggie was doing.

  Even more amazing, only then did I wonder how—and what—Sergeant Delcey was doing. And I remembered the transmitter, felt for it in all my pockets. Nothing. It was gone. I’d lost it.

  I managed a glance at my watch. Must have stopped, I thought. It said nine minutes of four. But it was still ticking. Could it have been only nine minutes since that suitcase came tumbling down the stairs? Sure. Of course. I’d merely run a little way, faster than the eye can see, then been centrifuged around the block, and spent a few more minutes playing around with the old gang here. Nine minutes. One would have been a happier number. But—nine didn’t have to be sad. A lot could happen in nine.

  I thought the very same thing again a minute or so later—alone with Sam Jelly and mountainous-bellied Hot Sauce Charlie, in a room on the top floor of Silvano’s Garage near the back of the building—when Jelly placed the recovered suitcase at the side of a large walnut desk, then opened one of its drawers and took from it a bulky, odd-looking glove.

  I wondered what it was, and what it was for, until he slipped it onto his big left hand.

  Then I knew very well not only what it was for, but another fact of much greater importance: this thick-bodied square-headed sonofabitch would have to kill me before he pounded on me even once. Or, as the phrase goes, before he could lay a glove on me.

  I was not going to stand here like a dummy while he thudded that leather-and-buckshot hammer against me and softened me up before hauling my mush into the woods to put a bullet or two into what was left. No way. Not under any conceivable circumstances, but especially not now.

  I knew Jelly carried a Colt .45 automatic—or had carried one. The police were now holding the heat he’d disposed of last night on Sixteenth Street. Could be he’d picked up another gun since then, perhaps not. But in the right-hand pocket of his coat was the .38 Special he’d taken from me.

  Before even lifting his hand to get the fun started he was going to have to blast me, shoot me and kill me.

  Which gave me a chance.

  Maybe he’d do it with my gun.

  20

  I assumed we were in Sam Jelly’s top-floor office, because he’d gotten his special glove from the expensive-looking walnut desk in here. Atop the desk was a phone, large ashtray, square flat basket overflowing with papers. A high-backed leather chair was behind the desk, a couple of wooden chairs on this side of it.

  On our way up here I had walked within a yard of something under a blanket on the cement floor. It was at the base of the wall down which I’d last seen Ernie Biggers sliding, and sliding, so I assumed it might well be the living, breathing mass of jelly that must now be Ernie Biggers. If, that is, he was as I’d left him, with two gobs of dark red blood on his light pink shirt. For all I knew, there could be another gob or two there by now, or his heart might have stopped long ago—what, at least, seemed long ago.

  Jelly had left one man on ground level, to keep an eye open at the Garage entrance, and told another man to “glom around” and see if he could find my car.

  “He’s been driving Bannister’s limo,” Jelly had said.

  “Make sure there’s nobody else was with him.” Then he told the rest to just hang around upstairs here till he heard from the boss, and with Hot Sauce Charlie to help keep an eye on me he brought me into his office.

  Jelly got the glove snug on his hamlike left hand, curled it into a fist the size of a California grapefruit, and smacked it—gently—into his right palm. Then he started to step out from behind his desk.

  I wanted that desk between him and me, so I waited no longer. I didn’t really hurry. At least it didn’t seem to me I was hurrying.

  I grabbed the nearest chair in front of the desk, swung it up from the floor as I turned—not toward Jelly but toward Hot Sauce Charlie who was standing on my left and about a yard behind me.

  He let out a hoarse coughing honk at the same moment Jelly yelled, “Watch it!” but I shoved my left foot forward to move me nearer Charlie, still swinging, and the wooden edge of the chair seat cracked him solidly on his left ear.

  He let out a howl of pain and anger, staggered back toward the wall. I swung around, hanging onto the chair but off balance from its weight and my movement. I suppose if Jelly had been closer to me he would have rushed me and clobbered me with his personal conk-crusher, but with the big desk between us he’d done the natural thing and shoved his right hand into his coat pocket.

  But he hadn’t got the Colt—I hoped to God it was my Colt—out yet, and I managed to regain my balance, tighten my grip on the chair, get ready to leap toward him.

  I was ready. But Jelly was still groping around in that pocket, yanking and yanking to no avail. He must have got the hammer caught on something. I couldn’t just stand here, all ready, so I raised the chair over my head and lunged a step forward—as he finally yanked the gun clear and flipped it toward me.

  I knew it was my own Colt Special the moment it came glittering into view and a kind of panicky exhilaration leaped up in me, and then leaped right back down again. Because as my foot slammed against the carpet next to that big desk I was remembering how splendidly those two “bullet holes” and the two impressive bloodstains had blossomed on Biggie’s chest, but because of all the excitement, and the undeniable strain I’d been under for some time, I experienced a moment of confusion about a question of speedily growing concern to me, and found myself involuntarily asking myself.

  “Two?”

  Was it two slugs I’d popped at Biggie? It was very clear in my mind that I’d put three toy pills into my Colt, and then three superdeadly Super Vels. But had I shot Biggie twice, or thrice? Twice, I was pretty sure. Two times. Two. Wonderful But....

  There’d been that head—Hot Sauce Charlie’s head—poking itself past the wall and shooting at me. I remembered flipping up my revolver, but....

  Had I let one go at him? If I had, one at him plus two at Biggie, why, that added up to —

  I was thinking like lightning. Let’s admit that. But even thinking like lightning, I wasn’t through yet. I had some more
thinking to go. It was important to know if Jelly was going to shoot me with a harmless toy, or with a harmful Super Vel. So, still speedily wrestling with the problem, when my right foot slammed like lightning against the carpet it stuck there. I did lean forward, yelling or snarling menacingly, shoving my head toward Jelly and working my jaws and all, but I had only got up to:

  “Three?”

  And then Sam Jelly pulled the trigger, fired, and got me.

  Boy, I mean, he got me.

  I guess I’d made it easy for him, sticking my head out like that, but even so something else must have been working for me because I got exactly what I wanted. Well, not exactly. Put it this way: I couldn’t have asked for more. Because it had to be either a miracle or pure dumb luck that caused the toy pill to smack me on the forehead precisely at the hairline above my left eye. It should look, I thought—from outside there—very lethal. Bloody. Gory. Awesome. Wonderful.

  There is no doubt that I thought all these things in a mere fraction of an instant after the pill smacked me, because the last word in my mind trailed off into something like “werflndll” as I became aware of a sensation I can only compare to getting drilled by a flaming arrow invented by an Indian genius to scalp palefaces without leaving the teepee. Probably had a string on it, and he’d just lie there smoking while his squaw reeled my hair in. What a werflndll weapon, even if the guy lived he’d be bald.

  All that, too, required only another mere fraction of an instant, for even as I reached up to pluck the arrow from the front of my head there was a little bop on top of it, and I dimly—oh, so dimly—realized it must have been the chair falling down and bouncing off me, but it was of negligible importance just then.

  Of more interest was my realization that there must have been four lights on in the room, because three of them went out. One odd thing did happen, though. A lot of fog rolled in, undoubtedly from San Francisco, making everything blurry and muffling all sounds. I was barely able to hear someone yelling, “Gaah damn!”