I walked out to my car. People stared. The way Doc had my face wrapped up, I looked like something they’d dug out of an Egyptian tomb. Only I knew better. There was more life in any two thousand-year-old mummy than I felt right then.
I drove home, and didn’t let myself think. I undressed and fell across my bed. I slept all day. Off and on I dreamed of Naomi Hyers, Morgan’s redheaded fiancée, and of taking a trip with her someplace. But I never found the place.
The phone worked overtime, waking me.
I sat up in the darkened room. For a long time I didn’t know where I was. When I tried to move, the room spun. The luminous hands of the clock on my night table stood at seven. The darkness at the windows was deepening. I had slept all day.
I reached out for the phone and the room danced crazily. I closed my fist on the receiver, clinging to it somehow and pressed it hard against my ear.
“Mike.”
“Yes?”
“Grace. Grace Gault, I hate to bother you. Ernie was due home two hours ago. You know Ernie. Always right here. I haven’t heard from him all day. Something was troubling him when he left this morning. I don’t like to be a fool, but I’ve got a terrible feeling—I’m afraid something has happened to him.”
Her worry was contagious. I contracted it instantly. Whenever Ernie had to deviate from his normal time table, he always let Grace know. If he had failed to check in with Grace he was in trouble.
For her sake, I tried to make light of the fear we both felt. “What could happen to him? He was probably held up somewhere by the job. I’ll check. I’ll find him and cart him right home.”
“Will you, Mike?”
“I said I would. Now stop worrying.”
“I can’t help it. Two men were here at five o’clock looking for him. I told them he might be at the station. But they said they’d looked there. They worried me. I can’t help it”
I asked a few questions, got her description of the two men, and said, “Okay. So I’ll find him for you. Will you stop worrying?”
I put my feet carefully on the floor, afraid it might not be there. When I stood up, I almost fell. But I knew I had to keep going. Whether Ernie was alive or dead, time was running out.
I made it to the living room, had two long slugs of bourbon. After the first screaming rage of pain through me, I felt better.
I sat at the phone and began making calls. I didn’t ask for Ernie Gault. I said I wanted to find two guys named Getz and Rosson. I sat there in my underwear and shivered, but I found out what I wanted to know. When I got up and went back into the bedroom to get dressed, I could almost walk straight.
I parked on Halsey near Maistre’s Bar, went up the stairs in the Brick-alter Building. It was old, dry, musty, and dark.
It seemed a long way to the third floor. The room number I had been given was 308. I paused outside the door. A single dim bulb provided the sole illumination for the narrow corridor. Distantly, I could hear street noises.
I took out my gun, pushed off the safety. For a moment I listened at the door. I could hear two men inside, talking, but not what they said. I put my shoulder against the rotted, wooden door. It gave.
Getz and Rosson were sitting at a table with beer and sandwiches. They came up, moving fast. When they saw me, they hesitated for the space of a breath.
I didn’t. I shot Getz first because he was nearest me. I got him in the hip, and he went flopping back against the wall, raging with the agony of a shattered pelvis. All the fight went out of him.
I didn’t wait to check him. I had to shoot Rosson in the shoulder because he was going for his gun. He kept trying for it. I shot him again, in the same shoulder, a little lower. He spun around knocking a chair over as he hit the floor.
I collected their guns as pure precaution. They didn’t even care. Getz was yelling for a doctor and Rosson was insane with fear that I was going to kill him. I didn’t bother telling him if I’d meant to kill him, I’d have done it with the first shot.
I told them to quit crying. I found a phone, called the department and ordered a wagon. Getz screamed, wanting an ambulance, but I told him he was lucky to get a wagon and not to push his luck.
Rosson was whimpering. “We was just doing our job.”
“And I’m just doing mine,” I said. “Now it’s up to you. I can finish this— or you can stay alive for the wagon and somebody might even get you a doctor. Take your pick.”
Rosson was shaking all over by now “What do you want?”
“A cop named Ernie Gault,” I said. “And I’ve got no time to waste. Where is he?”
I brought the gun up. They couldn’t talk fast enough. The only trouble was they both tried to talk at the same time.
I knew where the abandoned quarry was. I drove out there, pushing my old car as fast as it would go. I hit the turnpike with my horn wailing, and cars pulled over.
I was doing ninety before I reached the cut-off, stepped on the brakes and slewed into the side road. It was shell-paved, but so narrow that in order to pass, cars had to go off on the shoulders on each side.
I drove with my gun across my lap and the two I had taken from Getz and Rosson on the seat beside me.
I felt better that way.
As I drove, I felt my insides twist with contempt for these hoods, all of them, including the sweet-smelling Fred Carmichael. Carmichael claimed to be something new in racketeering power, but using this quarry showed what kind of imagination these slime had. Luxtro had used this place when he had a body he wanted to dispose of.
I heard the car ahead of me even before I saw it. And when I saw it, I knew I’d struck pay dirt. The black sedan was racing toward me, hell-bent to get away.
I felt the sickness fill my insides. If they were trying to leave, Ernie might already be dead.
I didn’t stop to think about it. I swung the Olds hard, and then backed it, parking it across the narrow strip of road. Nothing on wheels could get around it between the car and the thick trees on each side.
The car lights came racing toward me. At the last minute the driver slammed on his brakes, rolling right up against the Olds.
Three hoods came out of that sedan, guns drawn.
But I was on the far side of the Olds, in the darkness waiting for them. When they threw open the car door, the dome light flared, setting them up like animals in a shooting alley.
I took the driver first because he was nearest. I shot him as his feet struck the road. He dropped his gun and went sprawling forward on his face.
The second punk jerked his gun up to fire and I shot it out of his hand. I was already running around the Olds, going toward them as I fired.
The third goon yelled, voice high-pitched, “Don’t shoot. I’m throwing it away.”
I came around the front of the Olds and they were waiting for me.
“Where is he?” I said.
They didn’t fool around. They looked at two things, the gun in my hand and the blood-stained bandages on my head. They had pushed him off the side of the pit, and they had no objections to showing me where.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”
It was dark at the rim of the old pit. The silence out there seemed to rise from the bowels of the earth. The moon was up and the stars laid a gray mist over the quarry.
I marched them to the brink of the pit, “You’re going down there to get him.”
“He’s there,” one of them said. “He landed on a shelf. Right there. We heard your car and decided to get out of here.”
They went over the side of the pit slowly. The boy I’d shot in the wrist tried to talk his way out of it because of the pain. But when I backhanded him across the face with the side of my gun, he changed his mind. In fact, he was the first one of them to reach the shelf where Ernie was sprawled.
“All right, bring him up,” I said. “And you’d better start praying he’s still alive. Because if he’s dead, you two are joining him right here.”
“We were only doing what we were told.” This from the one who had not been shot. The other boy was already lifting Ernie, pushing his limp body up the incline of the pit toward me.
I laid the gun on the rock beside me, caught Ernie under the arms and pulled him up.
When I got him over the lip of the pit, I laid him out on the ground and picked up the gun.
The two hoods were starting to climb up. I faced them with the gun in my hand.
“Where do you two guys think you’re going?”
They stopped, promising no trouble. They were under arrest. One of them even began to yell that he’d heard Ernie breathing when he lifted him.
“I hope you’re right,” I said. “Now, both of you. Turn around on that shelf. Jump.”
They began begging, at first not really believing that I meant what I said. And that just shows you how stupid Carmichael’s new-era goons were.
“You jump,” I said. “Or I put bullets in you.”
“Dammit, copper—have a heart—”
“Sure. I’m giving you a chance. It’s a long way to the bottom of this pit, but no farther for you than for Ernie. You might break both legs—even so, somebody may find you, maybe in less than a week. But if I put bullets in you, it won’t do you any good to be found.”
They were mewling down there on that shelf, but when I put a bullet into the rock between them, they stopped that. They stared up at me, shaking all over and then they went over the side.
I only waited long enough to see that both of them jumped. Then I knelt down and lifted Ernie in my arms. I listened, but could hear no sound of his breathing and there was no time to check. I moved as fast as I could in the darkness along the narrow road to the place where I’d left the Olds.