Dead-Bang (26 page)

“What the hell's—”

That wasn't Ed's voice. It was a shout from Dave Cassiday behind me. I turned, saw him running up the hallway, lined by his den and half a dozen other rooms, his feet skidding as he saw me and tried to slow down. I kept turning, swung the table around my body hip high and let it fly. Cassiday ducked, flipping both hands before his face, lost his footing, and started to fall. On my right, Ed had caught his balance and stood facing me. But his gun wasn't in his fist. There was time. Time for me to put one hand at the bottom of the window and another at its side, and hoist myself through.

But as I turned and reached toward the window my eyes fell on the television screen and a scene—brief but vivid enough to stun the cerebellum—so startling, in fact unnerving, that at almost any other moment it would have stopped me. But at this moment it didn't even slow me down. My feet slipped on the lawn, or on broken glass, and I fell. Seconds later I was up and sprinting toward the iron gate and Roxbury Drive beyond it.

My Cad was parked two blocks away, but reaching it would be a breeze if I got over the fence. I don't quite remember how I got over the thing, but it must have been at least as speedy a performance as my first attempt. Maybe practice makes perfect. Or maybe there was so much adrenalin and thyroxin and smog and steam in my blood that I could almost as easily have gone through the fence as over it.

My feet slapped the sidewalk and continued slapping to the corner and around it, and I felt very damned good except for one thing—the fact that I kept mentally repeating as I ran, with my heart pounding and the blood churning inside me, “adrenalin and thyroxin and smog and steam … and something else.”

The thought stayed with me as I drove to the freeway and headed, well over the speed limit, toward downtown L.A.

It was in my mind when I passed the Civic Center and the L.A. police building, when I turned onto the Santa Ana Freeway.

And it was still in my mind when, a mile before the turn-off to Weilton, with a thin film of sweat on my face and a strange chill tension gliding beneath my skin, I discovered I was sitting in a pool of wetness. And looked, and it was blood.

21

All during that short fast ride, with the thought of Cassiday's “juice” filling my mind, I tried to concentrate on other things. And, part of the time, succeeded.

Especially when I remembered my last glance at the color television set in Dave Cassiday's living room. And that brief but vivid sight of Lula. The shot was live and had included all, or at least most, of the girls, no longer marching in single file but gathered in a group on the grass. I'd gotten a glimpse of red-haired Dina on the screen's left and pint-sized but quart-curvy Ronnie next to her, a blur of others, but closest to the camera and facing it, dominating the foreground, had been tall and slim but shapely Lula. Lula of the chocolate skin and charcoal eyes, the wild black hair and wild breasts, breasts so remarkably eye-catching and full, so heavy and yet high, she should have sent pictures of them to soldiers, sailors, and U.S. Marines to help win, or prevent, wars—as I had briefly thought when I'd first lamped Lula.

But it occurred to me now that those goregous globes might possibly start World War Three, commence it on August Fifteenth, today; and perhaps it had already begun. For in the second or so before the picture was replaced, very speedily replaced, with a shot of the soaring Church of the Second Coming and its golden cross—and the figure of Festus Lemming, himself, before the open doors of his church, a distant and diminutive figure, but reconizable, thin and angular and as rigid as the cross above him—Lula crossed her arms, gripped the green sweater at each side, and smoothly pulled it up over her head.

Over, and probably off. “Probably,” because I and all other viewers could only guess. The scene vanished instantly, to be replaced by the much more obscene view of Festus Lemming; and Americans last sight before the guessing began was: Lula, arms stretched high, sweater turned inside out and concealing her face, a circumstance that could not have been more perfectly designed, by hiding the loveliness of her eyes and brows and smiling lips, to emphasize the startling thrust and weight and curve and jiggle—yes, for an instant they jiggled—of those astonishingly eye-catching jugs.

They were not bare. Not quite. That, I suppose, would have blown lots of fuses, in people if not television sets. They were cupped and half-covered by a lacy contraption remotely resembling two peek-a-boo doilies which, for some reason, reminded me of a pair of the slingshots used by David to slay Goliath. Though in this case, I figured Goliath was the winner in a breeze.

As I kept a heavy foot on the gas pedal, on my way to Weilton, an unusual tension and unease began to fill me. I couldn't decide whether I was worried more about what Lula had started to do, or had done, and the possibility that those nine other lovelies had followed suit, perhaps birthday suit, or about Festus Lemming glaring at the world from the steps of his church. Festus Lemming confronted by that which he had spent his adult years—to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he had reached them—in damning and denying. Confronted by that which it was his whole purpose and passion to destroy. Confronted by ugliness, obscenity, filth—the nakedness of woman.

It was, I thought, unlikely that Festus Lemming had looked upon a woman gloriously—or shamefully—nude since his infancy. If what I feared had come to pass, then unless Lemming had covered his peepers or turned away or declined to look, he had been forced to digest with his eyes the undeniably jarring sight not merely of a female person unclothed but of
ten
peeled tomatoes, each a gorgeous and voluptuously fashioned sizzler, each stupendously sexy alone and apart; and all ten together in the altogether, the whole gang bare
en masse
naked, would surely have been a sight so severely shocking to Festus as to frazzle every nerve in his nervous nervous system.

More even than that, Festus was a man who did not care to allow people thus to cavort nakedly in groups, not merely in public but in private woods or dwellings, or even large tubs—like the dandy in the cabin where I'd left Regina Winsome. What, then, would his all-embracing righteousness demand if the worst should happen in the shadow of the Holy Church itself, on God's very own green grass?

I shuddered to think of it. I seriously doubted that he would pluck out his right eye and cast it from him, even though that wonderful procedure was recommended in the sacred Scriptures. I doubted that he would pluck out anything. Anything of his own. But I did not doubt that almost any other action conceivable was possible to the Sainted Most-Holy Pastor. And for that matter, to his flock of virtuous Lemmings, given the right time and place, the suitable circumstance and mood.

I recalled the newscaster's comment, to the effect that Festus Lemming vowed, should the representatives of Citizens FOR attempt in any way to bug him or God, if God did not Himself smite or strike the sinners, presumably dead, he would himself—with the aid of his flock—take whatever action was necessary for the defense of God.

Ordinarily the congregation would not begin arriving at the church until shortly before seven
P
.
M
. And neither in that television longshot of the girls marching toward the church nor in my one quick glimpse of Lemming had there been other people in view. I'd seen no evidence of any appalling—and, unquestionably, I felt, dangerous—massing of the flock, of Lemmings gathered to follow their leader, of Christian soldiers come to “fight and smite the foe.” But I knew within minutes after a call from Festus Lemming went out to the faithful—assuming it had not gone out long before now—the sweethearts would gather, ready and eager to do battle in the named of decency, no matter what the cost.

But … maybe I was worrying about nothing at all. Maybe Lula—who struck me as rather playful anyhow—hadn't taken her sweater
all
the way off. Maybe the girls, decently clad, had headed for their homes by now. Of course. That's what they must have done.

Thus was I thinking, talking myself out of undue concern until and unless there was unquestionably cause for concern—when I became aware of something
else
to worry about.

I had, at nearly every moment since feeling that small pain at the bend of my left arm, been chillingly aware of Cassiday's juice in my arteries and veins. But the natural fear was lessened by a hazily recalled comment—Dave's saying the stuff was “old,” and might have lost some of its strength. So I assumed, and fervently hoped, it wasn't as potent or as dangerous as the shot given to André Strang.

But that hope died, or at least got pretty sick, when I became aware at the fuzzy edge of vision of a smudge or stain on the left sleeve of my coat. I looked at the small dark splotch of wetness halfway up my sleeve and felt my hands tighten on the steering wheel. For seconds I forgot I was moving eighty miles an hour on the Santa Ana Freeway, only minutes from Weilton, because I knew what the wetness was and why it was there.

I jerked my head up, slowed, and swung sharply right to pass a Buick convertible, missing its rear bumper by inches. For a few moments I let the Cad roll, staring straight ahead while a cool moist breeze seemed to wrinkle the skin over my spine and on the back of my neck. Holding the speedometer needle at sixty, I took one hand then the other from the wheel and shrugged out of my coat.

The whole length of my forearm was wet and red. I rubbed my coat over my arm, pressing the cloth up over my bicep. From the tiny hole where the hypodermic needle had entered, above the faint blueness of vein, blood oozed, began to move in a crooked line like a small red worm wriggling on my skin.

My heart was beating too fast, pounding in my stomach and against the inside of my skull. And then I became aware of the wetness beneath me, dropped a hand to thrust it between the car seat and my thigh, felt the stickiness. Looked at my hand, saw redness on my fingertips. My fingers were trembling. I started to swing the wheel right, caught myself, and checked the rearview mirror. When the lane was clear, I angled across it, slowing, pulled to a stop at the far right of the freeway.

I cut the ignition, pulled off my gun harness, and started to use its strap as a tourniquet around my arm—changed my mind. I grabbed the keys and climbed out of the Cad. My knees felt weak, but that didn't have to be caused by the junk circulating inside me. It could be the natural result of shock, tension, stress—and the uncertainty, not knowing what might happen to me in the next minutes or hours. But I still didn't waste any time.

I unlocked the trunk, pawed in the gear there, found the first-aid kit, and opened it, then yanked off my pants. There was redness upon the backs of both my thighs, but after a fast scrub with a handful of gauze the only spot that bled, continued to bleed, was a small cut high on the back of my left thigh.

Even though immediately after I wiped it away blood streamed from the little gash again, I felt an almost dizzying sense of relief. Because I must have got the cut from broken glass when I slipped and fell after jumping through Dave Cassiday's window, and in my leg and hip there could have been half a dozen deep gashes. But there was only the one, not more than a quarter of an inch long. It would hardly have been worth patching—if it hadn't kept on bleeding.

I found a box of .38 cartridges, wrapped one of them in cotton, and pressed it over the cut. Then I strapped it tightly to my thigh with gauze and held the makeshift pressure bandage in place with strips of adhesive tape. A smaller ball of compressed cotton held with tape plugged the needle hole in my arm.

I used another handful of gauze to finish cleaning up my thighs and arm, then straightened, breathing deeply, and reached for the trunk lid. As I slammed it shut, a car whizzed past on my left and I heard the poppoppop of a motorcycle engine near, slowing. The sound ended with a
pprmph
, close behind me. I turned with the keys in my hand to look at the guy climbing off his motorcycle and stepping—somewhat warily, was the impression I got—toward me.

“Guy” isn't quite the right word. He was a uniformed patrolman, a bike cop. His right hand rested on the holster against his hip, and as I looked at him he pushed his helmet up slightly with the thumb of his left hand, and at the same time, with the fingers of his other hand, pulled open the holster's flap.

It struck me that his attitude, his approach, his expression, and—particularly—his unflapped holster, were not encouraging signs. So many other things had been occupying my mind recently that there'd been no room for worry about my last conversation with Captain Samson and what Sam might have done when I failed to appear at the LAPD. No doubt he'd taken some sort of vigorous action by now, but precisely what I didn't know. Maybe the officer knew.

He stopped about six feet away, squinting at me, let his eyes drop to my feet, raised them slowly. He glanced at my car, then let his gaze rest on my face, his expression a strange one. His mouth opened.

I'd have bet ten to one he was going to say, “Shell Scott, I have a warrant for your arrest on several misdemeanors and a felony or two, so please come along quietly,” and so forth. But that wasn't it. That wasn't anywhere near it. He didn't even know who I was, or he would have used my name. But instead he called me “Sir.”

He said pleasantly, showing a thin strip of his upper front teeth, “Nice day for strolling along the freeway without—”

I started to put the car keys into my trousers pocket and sort of rubbed them against the hair on my leg, so if I'd thought fast enough I could have guessed while he was still speaking what the officer was going to say. But I didn't think fast enough, and it really startled me when he finished:

“—any pants on, isn't it, sir?”

“Oh, brother.” I glanced down, then up. “Man, I forgot I had 'em off,” I said.