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 easy, 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.

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.

That’s what I’d been waiting for.

The rocket gun was thrust under my belt—where I could reach it in a hurry—because I knew soon I’d be using it again. But at the moment I had the crossbow ready once more.

Another man charged through the door and then let out a shout, skidding to a stop ten feet away. It was tall, rangy English ’Arry. The guy who’d come outside first and was now running forward waving his arms and yelling was the man whose name I didn’t know, the fourth guy from my movie. He was wearing a gaudy sport shirt now, but he was one of the s.o.b.’s who’d chased me all that way, occasionally tossing unfriendly pills at me.

He stopped ten or fifteen yards from me, near the lake’s edge, holding both hands before his face to ward off heat from the blaze, heat I could feel clear over here by the door. There was a fluttering boom and flare of red as a car’s gas tank exploded.

I aimed the crossbow at ’Arry’s head, held my breath, started to squeeze the trigger, then waited as feet pounded inside on my right. This time it was a man I didn’t know who raced out, ran past ’Arry and stopped, staring at the garage. I didn’t recognize him, didn’t know him, but it was enough for me that he was one of Jimmy Violet’s chums.

I’d held my aim and let out my breath as the third man came outside, then sucked it in and held it again. I let the arrow fly.

Fourth bull’s-eye in a row. Cross off English ’Arry.

But that was the last chance I had to use my trusty crossbow. It was fine when guys would stand still and let me leisurely sap them from afar; but it wasn’t worth a damn for fast action or a moving target. And from now on, it appeared incontrovertible, the action was going to be speedy and the targets moving. Yesterday’s weapon had had its day; now it was time for tomorrow’s.

I dropped the bow, grabbed for the gun under my belt as two things happened simultaneously. The lob in the gaudy shirt, one of my movie stars, turned and spotted me. There was plenty of reddish light, enough so he lost no time coming to the conclusion that I didn’t belong here—and, presumably, was responsible for the fire. As his eyes fell on me a fourth man came running to the door but stopped barely outside, staring to his right at the blaze—and, fortunately, away from me. Immediately he turned and ran back inside yelling something I didn’t understand.

Maybe I understood it with part of my mind, but it just didn’t penetrate because the gaudy-shirted lob was jumping aside, crouching, grabbing for a gun at his hip. I flipped the rocket gun toward him, fired and missed. But missed by not more than an inch—I could see the slug fly past barely to the left of his neck.

The nearer man had turned, was looking at me. But he didn’t have a gun in his hand and gaudy-shirt did, so I kept the gun on him and fired a second time—and the second one wasn’t wide. It hit him dead center as he triggered his gun.

The boom of his gun and crack of the bullet into the side of the house near me came at the same time. But that was the last slug he was going to toss. The impact of the small rocket in his chest threw him backward and spun him, as if he’d been clipped by a car. His gun arced high into the air. I didn’t watch it start to fall.

I slapped the gun left, toward the man near me—but he wasn’t near me long.

He’d been staring at me, staring at the gun in my hand, and he had seen the slug’s fiery glow as it sped from me to the man even now spinning in the air, not yet on the grass.

He let out a yell of sheer panic, spun and raced away from me. I can’t be sure, but I do believe he thought my strange little gun with its hot pills had caused that large conflagration all by itself. Whatever he thought, he wanted no part of it, not desiring to be cremated. He raced toward the lake and left his feet in a very ungraceful dive, hit, splashed, and disappeared in the water.

I stood there for no more than two seconds longer, then slammed the door open and jumped inside the house. But those two seconds were long enough for me to note a few things I’d been unaware of during the just-concluded action. Things like the sudden, almost painful dryness and tightness of my throat, the too-rapid hammering of my pulse, queer cooling of skin, throbbing of temples, and the thudding ache in my entire head, as if my brain was alive and trying to escape to a less agonized place.

Then I was in the carpeted hallway which stretched ahead of me to the back of the house. On my left, a door stood open. Light poured from the room into the hall. I jumped to the door, but the room was empty.

Light spilled through another open door down near the end of the hall—that room where I’d been with Jimmy Violet and his men yesterday. I ran toward it, gun gripped tight in my right hand, head feeling as if it were going to split open.

But it was no time to stop or even slow down now. Maybe he who hesitates isn’t always lost; but he sure would be this time. So I ran full tilt down the hall, slowed skidding, and jumped through the wide double doors, catching the whole scene with one quick swing of my eyes around the room.

I let my knees bend, crouching as low as I could, gun held forward and parallel to the floor, swinging my body left.

There, on my left, was Bingo. And of the four men in the room he was the only one with a gun already in his hand. It was either the same gun he’d held on me in my Cad this morning outside the Beverly Hills Hotel, or one just like it, a .45 caliber automatic. Shock bloomed on his thin pockmarked face.

Near him, two men were throwing papers, books, something into what looked like a big hole in the wall, a big square hole. It was a safe—or rather a vault; the heavy door swung open and back against the wall. It had obviously been concealed by paneling when I’d been in this room before, but it was open now—already open, open for me, if I lived through the next few seconds.

One of the men before the vault was Little Phil, the short but meaty-faced and hook-nosed hood who’d been driving the car for Stub Corey this morning, and, later, chasing me in the woods. And next to him, hands full, was my buddy, cadaverous, with his usual air of ghastliness accentuated by his sprained expression as he swung his head toward me, and by the size of his swollen discolored nose. Jimmy Violet. Whom I had recently popped on the beak. Who had been doing his level best to get me killed.

One more man was present. He was on my right, seated in a chair near the bar. Tall, round-shouldered, potbellied Gippo Crane. He was seated, but moving, leaning forward and coming out of the chair.

Bingo fired before I did, but he missed and I didn’t. There was so little kick to the gun that it wavered hardly at all when fired, didn’t pull the gun off target; and I squeezed the trigger twice, both slugs slamming into his chest high and on the right. The double impact knocked him clear back to the wall.

Jimmy Violet and Little Phil had dropped whatever they were holding and their right hands were moving, Jimmy’s to his shoulder and Phil’s to his belt; but I could see Gippo Crane, up out of that chair now, see the gleam of light as his hand moved, the glitter of light on metal.

There wasn’t time to turn, to swing my body toward him, so I just snapped my head right as I swung arm and gun around, still balanced on the balls of my feet but facing away from Gippo.

The gun was still moving when I squeezed the trigger, but I hit him. Low, down around his hip, but he hadn’t been able to get his gun on me yet He flopped back onto the front edge of the cushion in the chair behind him, but the snub-nosed .38 was still in his hand, and I had my own gun steady on him now. I put a second shot into his chest.

Remembering that he, along with Tooth outside, had left white-haired Porter flat on his face on Broadway—I felt like putting one or two more into him. But I didn’t. Even while the thought spun briefly in my mind I threw my fist back toward Phil and Jimmy Violet, finger heavy on the trigger.

But that was all.

All the shooting.

All of it.

Jimmy’s hand was still not out from under his coat. Little Phil’s gun was in his hand, still moving, but he simply let go of it—much as Jimmy Violet had dropped his shiny little pistol when I’d been in this room before. Phil threw his arms up over his head, stiffening them, fingers splayed and thrusting toward the ceiling.

I glanced at Gippo Crane. The snub-nosed revolver had fallen to the seat cushion by his leg. His head had dropped down and turned sideways, chin on his chest. He was still moving, bending forward.

I looked at Jimmy Violet. “Go ahead, Jimmy. Do something. Pull that heat out the rest of the way. Cough, sneeze—do something.”

I straightened up, lifted the gun higher, sighted over it, carefully aiming at a spot between his dull, dark eyes.

“Go ahead, Jimmy,” I said.

He always looked sick, but he looked sick unto death at the moment. Those cupid fat lips grew slack, turned down at the corners. He didn’t say anything, but he licked his dry lips and held his left hand toward me, palm out, then—slowly, slowly—used it to pull back his coat so I could see his other hand on the butt of his chrome-plated pretty. Continuing to move very slowly, he lowered his right hand, let the gun drop from it. Without being told he nudged it toward me with his foot.

I backed toward the corner of the room, stood near the wall. Gippo slid forward that last fraction of an inch, and his weight pulled him out of the chair and onto the floor. He hit with a thump. That was the last time he moved.

I carefully aimed the gun again, between Jimmy Violet’s eyes. “How many men here, Jimmy? It could be I already know. In which case, if you lie, I’ll have to kill you, I guess. How many all told, including you, Jimmy?”

He swallowed. But he didn’t hesitate in answering. “Ten,” he said. “That’s all.”

“Name them.”

He named them. I did a little mathematics in my aching head. Usually I can take addition and subtraction or leave them alone; but this time the mathematical labor was a pleasing thing, so pleasing it seemed even to help the ache in my head. The addition came to ten, all right; but the really rewarding part was the subtraction.

Four here. Fleck and Tooth cold in front and the doorman cold in back from my first tour outside the house. That was seven. English ’Arry with a lump on his head, and gaudy-shirt the movie star, shot. That was nine. And the tenth man was either still running, or still swimming, or drowned by now.

For the first time I relaxed a little. But when a man is wound as tightly as I had apparently been wound, it is difficult to relax just a little. When I sort of let go, my knees actually bent. I sank down about an inch, gun wavering. But then I tightened my leg muscles, straightening up, but feeling those muscles beginning to tremble.

I wasn’t so tired or weak, however, that I couldn’t handle the little remaining to be done.

I sighed, took a deep breath, and said, “Well, let’s see what we’ve got.”