17

Great, I told myself; now you tell me.

Because those ugly hoods were now twice as close as they’d been before, and shooting something fierce. Shooting wildly so far, but in a trice they were going to kill me. I was dead.

No, not yet dead. In a trice I’d be dead.

But in half a trice I leaped sideways what must have been, could it ever have been measured, a full fourteen feet through the air, clunking into a gnarled tree trunk, which severely bruised an arm and leg, and did my head a lot of good when it snapped over and hit a boll, or knot, or embryo limb, or whatever those extraordinarily hard lumps on tree trunks are.

There was no point in running. Not with my head like that. Not on one leg, anyhow. Besides, I don’t run from hoods. Not if I can help it. And I could help it. So it was four-to-one, so what? Wasn’t I an ex-Marine?

Maybe there was something about the setting, too, which addled me. The darkling sky—though the sun hadn’t set yet, it was getting darker—and the thunder of those guys’ feet, the hiss of air leaking through my teeth, the yells in my ears. It was savage, blood-heating. I could feel my features contort into a savage grimace. I went swiftly into a crouchy squat; I sent my right hand flashing—flashing like lightning—up toward my holster. Oh—ack. My arm still had such a crick in it I hit my damn belt buckle.

Well, I’ll have to do better than that, I told myself. I started cricking my hand up toward my holster again—and even while yowling softly as the stretched and agonized muscles protested, I realized something else awful.

I remembered putting three slugs into Skiko. And not reloading my Colt since then. Which meant there were only three slugs in the gun—three slugs, and four guys out there. Four guys getting closer.

I’d even been able to recognize two of them by this time. One was gargantuan Fleck, farthest away but recognizable from his massive size if nothing else. Fleck, last seen at Jimmy Violet’s gate—a meaty clue if ever I’d seen one. Ahead of him was Little Phil, pumping along after a man I didn’t know. And out front, nearest me, a tall, long-legged sprinter named Harry Reil, a mobster of British descent known to the boys as English ’Arry.

English ’Arry was yelling excitedly, “Theah ’e is; theah’s the bahstad?” and pooping away at me with his heat.

Long since, of course, my hand had cricked to my holster. But I was still crouching there in my squat, and I yanked and yanked, and yanked some more. What had happened was this. I’d grabbed at my holster, and that’s what I’d got: my holster.

That was funny. Supposed to be a gun in there. A .38 Colt Special with three bullets in it; that’s what was supposed to be there. But it wasn’t. No .38 Colt Special. Not even a peashooter. How could it be?

There was a gunshot, and a slug sped past about an inch from my head. Maybe two inches. And I was standing there sort of wonderingly running a couple of fingers around inside my empty holster. Of course, very little actual time had elapsed since I’d flown through the air like a bir—like an airplane. Possibly two seconds. And I stood there for maybe one more second, during which I thought at least a couple minutes’ worth.

Dilly Pickle, I thought.

Yeah. She was a dilly, all right. And she’d sure got me into a pickle. I’d had it figured backwards. Which, probably, she’d counted on.

It was all clear as glass now. That was why she’d been loving me up, up and down, all over the place, pressing her woweewow against me, pooching her luscious wild lips at me. Turning me on temporarily had been part of her plan to turn me off permanently.

I’d been thinking it was my savage charm—have to get that idea out of my head once and for all I guessed—which had turned her juices into jelly. She hadn’t been after my savage charm. Not even my leg. Unless it was my hawgleg. It had been my gun she was after.

Fury rose up in me, interfering with my usual lightninglike mental processes, as I thought of Dilly Pickle. She was a goddamn picklepocket!

No, a pickpocket.

No, not even that. She was a pickholster.

That’s what she’d done: She’d holstered my pickle. Boy, that was a wrong one.

I made a tremendous effort and got it clear, lucid and shining and right, for once and for all: She had picked my holster.

What it boiled down to was that, regarding armament, I was outnumbered four guns to nothing. There they came at me. And here I stood, empty-handed.

Well, not quite empty-handed. I had been brilliant enough to carry for all this wearying time my sixteen-millimeter Bolex movie camera fully loaded with a hundred feet of film. Ah, fine, fine. Nothing like planning ahead, making provision for any conceivable contingency.

There seemed nothing whatever left to do except to turn and run. Run and run and run. So I did.

I got a break at that—and about time, I thought.

Dilly had miscalculated in at least one small area. Two, if we include the fact that I can run like a startled antelope when necessary. But her first miscalculation had been in choosing the spot where we’d stopped.

True, there was a long straight stretch of the path—down which those guys had been and were running—which was fine for target practice; but no more than ten feet from me the path curved sharply to the right for several yards and then curved left again with equal suddenness. So when I got to that first turn, which was hardly any time at all once I’d decided that was the way to go, I was largely concealed by numerous tree trunks long enough for me to get going. I mean, really get going.

Every once in a while a shot cracked out, but I hadn’t been hit or even nicked yet; and along with the sensation as of getting hit with ax handles atop the head was a thought: Maybe I’ll actually make it. And I started wondering where I was at.

The rate I was going, I would have passed Duesenbergs speeding in the fast lane on the Freeway, but where was I going?

A separate path branched off to the left at one point, but by the time I saw the turnoff I was going past it. That did remind me, though, that when Dilly and I had been strolling along it, the path had curved both left and right, but continued primarily curving to our right; and that the path here at the Hidden Valley Lodge was an irregular circle extending through the woods for approximately a mile; and that I had just passed the hunk of path which led back to the Lodge.

By then I was either dizzy from lack of sufficient oxygen in my lungs or not yet thinking with admirable clarity, because I had stopped worrying about whether I would get away from those men behind me and begun wondering what I’d do once I had. And, how I could fix their wagons.

Along with the thought was realization that it’s getting tougher and tougher to pin their jobs on hoods, tougher to make a rap stick. For good or ill, that’s the way it is. You damn near have to catch them in the act of dismembering the body …

And I had it.

I was lugging my damned camera. Maybe there’d been a reason—besides the fact that I had some splendidly provocative shots of Tootsie in the exposed footage—for my hanging onto the Bolex. The next best thing to actually catching hoods in the commission of a crime should be a movie of them in the middle of it.

A shot of them chasing after me, shooting at me, should be enough for any court in the land, temporarily. That meant I would have to get into the film somehow, myself, while taking care that the action was merely of the boys shooting at me, not in me.

So, for one, I couldn’t stand holding the camera, filming them while they ran down on top of me. And for another, I was going to have to run at least another mile.

But I was quite a bit ahead of them now—though a shot still rang out from time to time—so I sprinted as hard as I could for a hundred yards, the last thirty of which were quite straight, and then skidded to a stop. The Bolex was battery-operated and, once started, would function unaided until the film ran out, if I locked the shutter release down. But there was only one hundred feet of film, and that would run past the lens in four minutes. I didn’t think I could be sure of running another mile in four minutes—not after what I’d recently been through. In fact, I was pretty sure I couldn’t.

But there was still a way.

If I set the camera speed to expose not the normal sixteen frames a second but only eight, which I could do merely by turning a little knob on the side of the camera, the thing would run twice as long, or for eight minutes. True, when projected it would be in fast motion, the action speeded up, but that didn’t matter. The faces—and guns—of those lobs would be identifiable.

The only ticklish part, actually, after adjusting the lens aperture and frames-per-second setting, was spotting a limb in the right place and at the right angle to hold the camera firmly. But I found one suitable, jammed the Bolex into place pointing back down the path, depressed and locked the shutter release to start it whirring and moved out of there. Moved not quite as rapidly this time. In part because I was coming more than a bit undone already; and in part because—now—I wanted my pursuers to get a glimpse of me. One really good glimpse to charge them up enough so they’d run that extra mile. The extra mile; that’s the one that counts.

“Theah ’e is, theah’s the bahstad?” Crack!

The slug whistled past me and ripped bark from a tree trunk yards ahead. That was enough glimpse.

A mile is not a fixed and constant length. In order to get once more around that mile-long path I ran at least forty furlongs. Fortunately I’m in excellent condition, much better condition than were those unhealthy hoods, I assumed. Thus I figured I could loaf part of the way while they dragged along behind me.

I would have been right, except for Gargantua.

I should have known. I already knew he wasn’t human.

That lumbering hulk could have run all day and into the night, I think, scratching his armpits. From way back in the pack he had somehow caught up with and thudded past all three of the others, for when I imagined I sensed the earth shaking as in tumult or cataclysm, I looked back and saw, about where I’d expected him, rangy English ’Arry.

But saw also, between ’Arry and me—no more than twenty yards off and gaining lickety-split—Fleck. He would damn sure have killed me if he’d stopped, taken aim, and shot at me. But either he’d used up all his ammunition, or cherished the hope of getting close enough to clamp his paws upon me, which would ensure that my demise would be slower, and more fun.

I used up a lot of soup stretching the distance out to what I considered relative safety, but then I had to slow down for a while. Excellent condition, yeah. So who’s supposed to run a couple of miles after an experience like Dilly?

I sprinted around the last curve in the path—maybe a bit sloppily, I confess, since I ran into a little tree and broke it smack off—then got straightened out and determinedly put one much-abused foot down after another until I spotted the white scar where ’Arry’s slug had ripped bark from that tree trunk. Short of that tree I spotted my Bolex, and leaped toward it.

Well, maybe it wasn’t much of a leap. I felt that I was soaring, soaring through the air; but I must have stumbled slightly since I skidded in the air a bit, on my mangled knees, before succeeding in reaching up and clutching the camera. It was a happy moment.

Before taking off like an antelope again I glanced back along the path. How could it be?

There was Fleck, and ’Arry, and even the guy I hadn’t met, but whom I would meet pretty quick if I didn’t get a wiggle on. Why, I’d sped down that path—so it seemed to me—and clutched my camera in a jiffy. How’d those out-of-condition hoods get so close so quickly?

Crack! Blam!

They had not used up all their ammunition.

I was really startled by their unexpected proximity. And I suppose I was also, and naturally enough, a bit disturbed by the certainty that I was, at last, plugged in the gizzard. Not the gizzard, actually; the chin, actually. Yes, there was a moment when I felt I’d been shot in the chin.

All that really happened was that I jerked my hands up for some reason. Why? How would I know why? Maybe to hide my eyes so I wouldn’t see the horrible thing that was going to happen to me. And since the camera was in my hands when I jerked my hands up, the Bolex came along and the lens cracked me smartly in the chin.

But that was the only moment of … well, of real dismay. By the time I was running again, lickety-split down the path, I realized my chin hadn’t been shot off.

I began thinking again that maybe I’d make it.

I grew sure of it.

And I did.

I sat in my Cadillac trying to get the key into the ignition. Now that I had outwitted everybody, including myself, I wanted to get the hell away from quiet, peaceful Hidden Valley.

I’d had a brief rest when I staggered and stumbled off the path and involuntarily flopped under a little bush with long evil spines sticking from it. But the speedy reverse route up the path and then along the turnoff leading to the Lodge—after my four apparently dying pursuers had passed wheezing and honking by my hiding place—had left me with a bone-weary exhaustion approximating rigor mortis.

I was not about to go back to the Lodge, even had I been certain Fleck and ’Arry and Little Phil and the fourth murderer would continue running stupidly around in circles—as I had done for a couple of circuits—until the sun rose in splendor. Dilly alone could have licked me in a fair fight and she didn’t fight fair anyhow.

So I kept wobbling my key around until I got it into the ignition, started the car and zoomed away, a center of peril not only to myself but to every other living thing in the area.

But, as I headed once more for Mrs. Halstead’s home, I felt pretty good. Despite the ache in my lungs, the misery in my head, the charley horses in my legs, and the pain in my—well, a real and abiding pain—I felt pretty good.

Because it was over now.

At least the whole thing was clear, the picture developed, all the bits of the mosaic in place, crimes pegged, cases solved. That is to say, the thinking part was over.

The only thing left was the wrap-up part, the denouement, the concluding scenes of the drama. Only the part requiring strong limbs and stout heart, vigor and energy, and zip and zing. Only the action part.

Yes, I thought, as I wobbled and careened down the highway, that was all.

But even though I felt as if each of my individual muscles had been opened up and gutted like fish in the market, if what I had just been accomplishing was the thinking part, I could hardly help but look forward to the action.