The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (49 page)

And she did. She came in looking flustered. The minute we were in a booth, she leaned across to me and said:

“I’ve almost gone crazy. Haven’t you heard a thing about him?”

“You might as well get ready to take it on the chin, kid. I’m afraid there’s no news as yet. And this time no news is bad news.”

“I thought about that. I mean about George maybe being kidnapped.”

“That racket’s been out since the government men took over, Miss Bryce. I don’t mean that he was kidnapped. It’s worse than that, I’m afraid.”

The girl got white and asked me if I meant he was killed. I said that was it exactly, waiting for her to break down all over the place, but she did exactly the opposite.

She said: “But why?”

Her face was so white that the makeup stood out on it in patches. But her voice was even and no louder than it had been.

I said: “I don’t know. Did he have much money on him?”

“Very little. He just had an allowance, you know, and he was careless with money.”

“Then I can’t tell you, though I’m beginning to get an idea. It’s nothing I can go to the cops with.”

Then she said something that made me so mad I could hardly talk.

“If it’s more money you want, Mr Shannon, I can pay it.”

“There’s been a girl killed over this mess,” I said. “On top of that I’ve killed a man and spent the last couple of days in jail over it, even if I’m loose now. I damn near got killed myself, and a man who was working with me almost got the same. I’ve been beaten up and shot up and chivvied around by the cops, and you talk to me about money. Will your money bring back that girl?”

“I’m sorry,” said Miss Bryce. “What should I do?”

“If you’ve got any pull at all, or know anybody who has, you can find out who put that blind ad in the paper. The ad that started this. They’re not supposed to give out that information, but maybe you could get it for me. And if you’ve got the nerve you can go down to the morgue with me and look at all the unidentified bodies of men around the age of this George Harper.

“If he was killed and all marks cut out of his clothes, or if he’d been stripped, that’s where he’d be. If I knew him by sight I wouldn’t need you. Unless you want to tell his people the story.”

“Why break it to them that way?” she asked. “And, besides, we’re not sure yet. George had two little moles on his chest, and he weighed one hundred and sixty-two pounds. He was twenty-two. His hair was blond and his eyes were blue.”

“That won’t be enough.”

She didn’t change the expression on her face a bit as she said: “He had a birthmark – a strawberry mark I think you call it, on his left thigh. It was very large. As big as that.”

She made a big circle on the table.

I said: “Okay, I’ll go down and look while you try and find who put that ad in the paper. I’ll phone you back in two hours, say. At your house. And listen! If I go through with this and get into trouble, will you tell the cops about it? I mean if I fix it so there’s nothing to kick back on you or on the boy?”

“Why of course,” she said, looking surprised. “It’s only that I don’t want to make trouble for my people and his.”

We left it that way.

There was nothing doing at the morgue except that I damn near passed out while looking for the Harper boy’s body. I’d told the cop in charge that my brother was missing and that I was worried. I gave a vague description that tallied a little with the one the girl gave me. The attendant took me around and showed me every man they’d taken into the place during the last three days.

On the third tray they pulled out of the wall was Maury Cullen – the man I’d shot. They’d done a P. M. on him and sewed him up with a swell cross-stitch, but I could see what my slug had done to him. He’d probably been dead before the elevator got to the ground floor.

The attendant said: “I don’t suppose this one would be your brother, Mister, but to make sure you’d better look. He’s a little older than the way you say it, but it could be.”

I said: “No, but the guy looks a little familiar.”

He looked at me and said: “It gets you, looking at these stiffs. That is, at first. I’m sort of used to it. But at that I don’t eat my lunch in here.”

The place didn’t smell like any lunch room to me and I said so. It smelled of iodine and chloride of lime and formaldehyde, but all that wasn’t enough to kill the other smells. The attendant explained it with: “Some of these guys are taken out of the river after they’ve been in too long. Some of the others are found a little late. We freeze ’em and all that, but you can’t kill all of it.”

I got out of the place just in time to keep from being sick.

Miss Bryce said: “If he wasn’t there that means there’s still a chance, doesn’t it, Mr Shannon?”

“I’m afraid it’s slight,” I told her. “What about that ad?”

“I got a friend of mine who knows a columnist down there to ask about it. It was a girl named Mary Ames who put it in. Does that help you any?”

“Quite a bit!” Then I told her that I’d keep in touch with her.

I hung up the phone, feeling even sicker than I had at the morgue. I remembered what the girl had said when I’d mentioned the twenty dollars I was going to give her for the information. She’d said she wasn’t telling me anything because of the twenty, and I’d asked her why she was talking then. She’d said I wouldn’t understand – and I hadn’t then.

Finding about the ad gave me the answer. The kid had been sticking around and she’d seen he was going to get into trouble. She had tried to get him out of there without telling him anything that would hurt the place too much.

I didn’t understand this last – but I had a notion I would in a very short time. In fact, just after Darnell’s closed after that night’s business.

That’s when I planned on crashing the place.

We went in at half-past four. Just Whitey and I. We waited until the band boys had packed up and left and until most of the stragglers were gone. But we didn’t wait long enough for any of the help to leave. I mean kitchen help and waiters and bar men. I didn’t know who was wrong and who was right in the place. And I didn’t want any of the wrong ones to get away.

The doors were locked, of course, so we went in through a window we opened on the dressing-room side of the place. I went in first. Then Whitey passed me the gun I’d made for him during the afternoon and followed it.

It was a good gun, but not handy for housebreaking. I’d gone into a second-hand shop and picked up one of the best guns the Winchester people ever made – an 1897 model twelve-gauge shotgun. That’s the one with the hammer.

The new hammerless pumps are quieter and maybe they work a little smoother. But those old hammer guns never hung up and there was never a question about ’em being ready for action. All you have to do is pull the hammer back and pull the trigger.

I’d taken a hacksaw and cut the barrel off just in front of the pump grip. There were five shells in the barrel and another in the chamber, and all loaded with number one buck shot. That’s the size that loads sixteen in a shell, and for close-range work that’s just dandy. They’re big enough to blow a man to hell and back, and there’s enough of them to spread out and take in a lot of territory.

It was the logical weapon for Whitey, because he didn’t know any more about a pistol than a cat knows about heaven. And he’d shot a rifle and shotgun a few times.

And he was out for blood. It wasn’t that he’d been roughed up in my room at the time I killed Maury Cullen – because that didn’t bother him. That was just a piece of hard luck to him. When I’d been knocked out and my gun taken from me no doubt the barman had rolled me and found my address and had remembered it.

Whitey had just happened to be calling when they came after me. It wasn’t that. It was the girl being killed that was getting him crazy. And he was getting crazy, no mistake. He was a little punchy anyway, from a few too many fights, and when he got excited it hit him.

I whispered: “Now remember! I make the play, if there’s one made. Wait for me and back me up. Don’t start it.”

He mumbled: “The dirty skunks!”

I went out to the front and peeked through the curtain shutting off the hall from the main room. There were still a few people finishing up their last drinks. But the lights had been cut and the bar was closed, and only one waiter was in evidence.

Quite a lot of noise came from the kitchen, and I figured they’d be following the usual roadhouse custom of eating after the guests had left. So I went back to where I’d left Whitey and his shotgun.

“We’re getting a break!” I said. “I think they’ll all be together in the kitchen. Let’s find the door.”

Somebody found it for us. We were going down the hall toward the back of the place when a door opened just ahead of us and somebody stepped out. I could hear dishes rattle and heard somebody laugh. The man who’d opened the door turned away from us without seeing us, letting the door slam shut behind him.

He didn’t get far. I didn’t know who he was or whether he was right or wrong, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I caught him just as he started to open another door. When he turned his head to see who was running up to him I slammed him across the jaw with the side of my gun. It’s no trick – you just palm it and swing.

Down he went and I took a look in the room. It was empty and I went back to Whitey, who was just outside the kitchen door. Whitey was breathing through his nose, like he used to do in the ring.

I said: “Let’s go!” and opened the door into the kitchen.

And I was in, with Whitey and the shotgun right on my heels, before anybody even looked around.

It wasn’t the way I’d have put ’em if I’d had the placing. There were two guys in white aprons over in front of a big range. One man in a waiter’s uniform was just in back of them. The barman who’d first slugged me was sitting at a kitchen table, alongside the one the dead girl had pointed out as being the boss.

Another waiter was leaning across the table and telling them something they were laughing over. One other waiter was right in back of them, and two men were sitting at the same table with their backs to us.

They didn’t stay that way. The waiter saw by the look on the tough barman’s face that something was behind him, and he swung. So did the two men by him.

The odds were all wrong and I was glad the shotgun idea had occurred to me. Nine of them and two of us – but the shotgun evened it a bit.

I said: “Everybody over against the wall. Jump!”

I moved the muzzle of my gun a little, and Whitey croaked: “Move!”

The two cooks and two of the waiters started to move. But they never had time to get to the wall. All hell broke loose – like I was hoping it would. The big barman stood up and brought a gun up from where he’d pulled it under the protection of the table. I shot him as near centre as I could. When he didn’t fall I did it again.

He tottered and looked at his boss, just in time to see the front of the man’s face go out the back of his neck. I swear it looked like that. Whitey’s shotgun just blew his face off at that distance. One of the men who’d been sitting with their backs to us fell off his chair. He started to crawl under the table, but the other one stood up, dragging at a gun he must have been carrying in a hip pocket holster.

I took time and did it right. I lined the sights of my gun on the pit of his stomach and let go. Then he doubled up and fell straight toward me. He landed on his face, without even putting his hands out to break his fall.

Whitey’s shotgun blasted out again. The waiter on our side of the table went back through the air at least three feet. It was as if there’d been a rope around his middle and somebody had yanked. Then the man who’d ducked under the table shot. I sat down on the floor without knowing how I got there. Whitey shot twice. There was a lot of thumping noise coming from under the table and no more shooting.

The two cooks and the waiters who were left were against the wall, but only two of them were standing with their hands up. The other two were sitting on the floor holding their hands on their legs and howling blue murder.

Whitey said: “You hurt bad, Joe?”

The slug I’d taken had gone through the fleshy part of my leg. I didn’t think it had touched the bone because I could move my foot and not hear anything grate.

I said: “I don’t think so. Tell those guys over against the wall to come over to me one at a time. I’ll shake ’em down and you watch it.”

Whitey said: “To hell with it. They’re in this, too. They get the same.”

I don’t know yet whether he was bluffing or meant it, or was just a little crazy with excitement and didn’t realize what he was doing. Anyway, he raised the shotgun and the men by the wall screamed at him not to do it. I shouted the same thing.

“Go out in front and collect everybody,” I said. “Bring ’em in, customers and all. They see that shotgun and they’ll mind you.”

Whitey went out of the service door. He came back in a moment with a puzzled look and a bottle of whisky.

“There’s nobody there and the front door’s wide open,” he said. “I thought you could use a drink.”

I had the bottle up to my mouth when the big barman – the one I’d first shot – started to move. He’d fallen ahead, so that his head and upper body were across the table. Now he raised his head and looked at me, saying: “I
knew
I should have taken you and that girl out of the way that first time you came in. My name’s Ames – I was married to Mary.”

Then he put his head down again, but it didn’t stay there. He slipped down on the floor, moving gradually at first, then hitting the floor with a bang.

Whitey said to the four men by the wall: “Well, you guys going to talk, or do I turn loose on you?”

They talked with that, and I didn’t blame them. A dumb man would have found speech if he’d looked at Whitey and that shotgun, because Whitey certainly looked as though he wanted to use it.

I heard all about it in the hospital. It was a good hospital, too, and I had a private room. With the Bryce girl’s father footing the bills.

Whitey said: “Yeah, the state cops found Harper’s body back in the woods. One of them damn waiters showed ’em where to look. The kid got looping drunk and kept wandering around the place. Finally he walked into Maury Cullen and his two pals who were hiding out.