The Kubla Khan Caper (The Shell Scott Mysteries) Read online

  The shortest, fastest way then was, logically, along the slanting outer edge of the north wing, then to my right and across in front of the hotel, right again and down the south wing to Misty’s suite, and Misty. And whoever else was there.

  So—naturally—I ran around the corner and headed lickety-split toward the entrance of the Kubla Khan. I’d only run about fifty yards so far, less than half the distance, but already my lungs were laboring and my throat seemed torn, because I was moving like a demon—arms churning, legs swinging, head bobbing. There were even noises in my ears: slam of my heartbeat, sound of my feet thudding, blood-curdling yells from behind me.

  Yells from behind me? There seemed to be some kind of yelling going on ahead of me, too, but I whipped my head around first toward those blood-curdling ones.

  Bull.

  Of course.

  Yeah, I remembered him.

  He was tearing along after me with his mouth wide open and from it was issuing such a horrendous cacophony, you’d think it would have required at least a quartet being boiled in oil to equal its magnificence. But, more important, he carried in his left hand, fluttering from his fist like the banner of a maniacal nudist leaping joyously into battle, my keen pants with their little red stripes; and in his other hand, high overhead and glittering in the sunlight, the now unsheathed blade of that hideous scimitar which was part of his costume, or rather part of what had until very recently been his costume. It was clear as could be that Bull Harper intended to catch up with me and cut me in two or perhaps several.

  I didn’t want to shoot Bull unless I had to, but I grabbed for the .38 Colt Special in my shoulder holster. No shoulder holster. No gun. Ah, of course, my gun was in my pants. And you know where my pants were, don’t you?

  I knew. And that knowledge gave me a little more energy. Not that I really needed it. I didn’t feel pooped, but I must have been very poopily pooped, because by now there were all sorts of weird sounds in my ears. In addition to the ones I’d already become familiar with there were queer whistlings and tootlings, what sounded like lots of dandy screams, and even something almost like music. In fact, there was a tune to it, a melody, it was music. There was a whole band playing up there in my head.

  How could it be? How could there be a band playing music in my head? The thought stuck in my head with the band: music? Then I had another thought. Like, why music?

  I slipped my head back around so it was headed in the direction toward which my feet were running. Then I knew why music. I knew a hell of a lot more than why music. For example, I realized I’d heard those lots of dandy screams because about, oh, maybe ten yards away were lots of dandy people screaming from their briskly moving toes clear up to their bugging eyeballs.

  People—thousands of them. At least it looked like thousands, but I knew there were at least a couple hundred.

  As I dug in my heels and started skidding to a stop, the band faltered to a stop, there was an “oom-pah” and a cymbal clang and a “boom!” and then a “boom” and a “pah . . . “ and silence. Except, of course, for the screaming. There was plenty of that.

  It probably appeared to me that more people were present than truly there were, because so many of them were moving. Jumping, running, spinning about, clapping their eyes, and such. I could see people in costumes, men in business suits, gals in bikinis. I got a glimpse of several contestants I’d met, lots of strangers, the Mayor, appearing to be preparing to puke, several other familiar and unfamiliar and wretched-looking faces.

  Including—yes, on the steps before the Kubla Khan, clutching a microphone, looking as if he had just lost by one vote—the Governor of the sunny state of California.

  But even over the sound of yells and movement I could hear the thudding of big ugly feet behind me. When I took a very speedy look, Bull was damn near close enough to reach out and grab me—and I got moving again much faster than I’d skidded to a stop. I just plowed through the crowd; no detours; no pausing to say, “Excuse me”; just straight ahead going from low to super-high without touching second gear on the way, but not fast enough that I failed to hear Bull’s feet right behind me and to imagine I could hear the hiss of that keen—that sharp bare blade hissing through the air at my fat head. Boy, it would slice through that fat like a branding iron through butter.

  Run, you idiot! I yelled inside my noisy head. Go, you legs! Move, you feet! They heard, and obeyed—but not rapidly enough.

  Talk about screams. They’d screamed plenty at just me, but now Bull was here to scream at. Even a couple of men screamed. Bull was, believe me, something to scream at. Especially with that big scimitar waggling around and glittering in the sunlight. It was as though I ran through a solid wall of “Gaaahhh!” and “Bluuurrp” and “Yeeah#*@@!” very much resembling what Hell must sound like to new and reluctant arrivals from Alaska.

  But then I was through them, turning the corner, racing toward Misty’s suite. And just when I was convinced that good old idiot and those legs and those feet were moving fast enough to outdistance anything on two ordinary legs, a big, black, painful hand clamped itself on my shoulder and gave it a terrible yank.

  No doubt about it. Bull was the speediest creature outside of a zoo.

  I went clear off my feet, hit the ground and skidded, rolled with great presence of mind onto my neck, ear, head, side, hind end, ear again, then knees and feet. Bull had run past me, slowing, got stopped and jumped at me. I just happened to be facing him—finally—twanging like all the strings on an exploding bull fiddle, and I threw back my right arm, shot it forward forming a fist, pivoted and caught his chin just as it came within range.

  If it had hurt his chin as much as it hurt my hand and arm, it would have just about killed him. At least it knocked him down, and he went down a little loose this time. The big curved sword flipped from his grasp and skidded a few feet away. He was on his knees and one hand—in which he still clutched my keen pants—and reaching for me with the other hand when I went by him, bent and scooped up the scimitar and kept running.

  Fourteen, twelve, ten—Suite Eight. Misty’s suite.

  I didn’t slow down to find out if the door was locked. I knew if I hit it solidly with a shoulder it would open, and I hit it hard. There was a sharp grating and cracking noise and the door simply flew inward, and I stumbled inside, falling.

  But even as I fell I saw the man’s back, his extended arms, his fingers buried in the soft, white throat; saw the squeezing hands and, hanging limply from them, Misty.

  21

  I hit the floor on my side, skidded, stopped with the hand holding Bull’s sword pressed against the carpet I started trying to scramble to my feet as he turned, not very gracefully this time, not like a man walking on water but one struggling to get out of quicksand.

  He was still tall and handsome, but some of the golden blond waves on his head were in disarray, and his face wore the twisted stamp of great shock—and fright.

  As he turned he released Misty and she fell like a rag to the divan over which he’d been holding her. I couldn’t tell if she moved. I had all I could do to watch him because he was jumping toward the door—I thought.

  But he merely leaped across the room, getting farther from me, thrusting one hand into a pocket. Thrusting it there for a gun, because as I scrambled to my feet and started toward him, he turned and stood with his back to the wall, and light pouring through the open door glanced from the heavy .45-caliber revolver in his fist, probably the same gun he’d used to split my scalp last night.

  He flipped the gun’s muzzle at me, but I was moving toward him fast and couldn’t have stopped if I’d wanted to. I didn’t want to. The gun roared and the sound was so loud it felt as if the slug hit my ears, and I felt a shock rip through my body, but I was moving forward and I thrust hard with my arm as I shoved my right leg back as if trying to break through the floor with it, and the point of the scimitar entered Jerry Vail’s gut down low and the curved blade sliced into him and up through him and s
lammed into the plastered wall behind him.

  The wall hardly slowed it down. Every ounce of my strength was in the blow. I’d slammed the sword’s point at him as if trying to break him in two with my fist, and the steel went right into the wall behind him and didn’t stop until the metal guard above my hand thumped against Vail’s belly.

  His eyes and mouth snapped open and he made a high faint squeaking noise that sounded like a woman screaming ten blocks away. Then his knees bent and buckled; he sagged; and his body’s weight pressed down on the blade, and the flesh of his gut parted and spilled blood as he drooped lower until the blade’s curved top hit bone and stopped.

  He hung there, tilted slowly to his left, head dropping toward his shoulder and then down. He hung there, like a bug on a pin.

  I turned toward the divan, and Misty.

  She was lying still. I couldn’t tell if she was breathing or not. It felt as if my throat was stuck together. I stepped toward the divan—but then there was that familiar thumping and clatter behind me and I heard the big feet crash against the floor and I swung around fast, balling up my right fist and—

  Spock!

  Right in the middle of the forehead.

  All I saw was something like a black meteorite looming before my eyes and then it suddenly turned into a comet with colorful satellites swirling around it an instant before some other flying object out here in darkest space hit me on the behind. Then another one got the back of my head. My vision wobbled, settled down, and I could see Bull Harper looming over me and realized the last two blows had been my seat hitting the floor and my head clunking back against the wall.

  I gave my head a little rattle and yelled, “Bull, you damned idiot—” but he was bending down, reaching for me.

  I rolled to my right, hooked my heel behind his ankle and kicked the inside of his kneecap with my left foot. His leg twisted, bent. Down he went with an impact that made the floor and walls shiver. I jumped to my feet, tried to sidestep him as he came up off the carpet, but I wasn’t fast enough. He charged into me, shoulder slamming my side and his thick arms going around my waist.

  We sailed across the room, my back hit the side of the open door and we fell outside, rolling, swinging, pushing, trying to use knees, elbows, anything handy. I got a thumb in the corner of his nose and a finger in his eye and tried to push his head off, and finally his hold broke and he rolled away from me.

  I scrambled back, away from him, got to my knees as he turned his head to face me.

  “Bull, you damned fool,” I yelled. “Listen to me. I just shoved that damned shiv of yours through Jerry Vail and he’s hanging inside Suite Eight like a coat back from the cleaners. He was choking hell out of Misty Lombard.”

  Bull climbed to his feet as I got up off my knees. As he started toward me again, I bent my legs and stretched both hands open, ready to ruin him permanently if I had to.

  But I kept yelling. “Damn it, Jerry Vail’s the guy who killed your boss, killed Sardis! And Jeanne Jax, too—that’s what started it all, when Jeanne showed up here and spotted—”

  He just wasn’t listening. He didn’t come in like a boxer. He dived at me like a pro tackle and I could feel the wind go out of me as though headed for the far horizon. Before we broke free of each other I’d hit him or whacked him with the edge of my palm half a dozen times and he hadn’t clubbed me more than twice as often.

  We were standing four or five feet apart. I could feel warm blood streaming from my nose. My lower lip was split and it felt as if my head was puffing. But Bull’s brow over one eye was laid open and bloody, and the rest of his face did not look like sculptured perfection. He didn’t appear tired, however, and he was edging toward me, fists held ready before him.

  “Will you for Pete’s sake listen to me?” I yelled. “And forget about Lyssa. I didn’t do anything. Well . . . not much. Look, the only way this mess makes sense is that Jeanne was married to Jerry Vail—only he didn’t use that name then. He called himself Maurice Boutelle, and maybe something else before that. But when Jeanne saw him here, supposedly married to Neyra Vail, she knew—”

  It was no use. Bull was in close and feinted with a left and started to thunder that big right hand at me, but he was a fraction too slow this time. I took a chance the left was just a feint, had time to set myself and gave him everything I could put into a straight, jolting right.

  It caught him on the point of the chin and snapped his head back. He swayed off balance, leaned, then toppled like a big tree. He shook his head for a moment, started snarling, his face took on some of those expressions which were still living in my memory, and he pressed both hands against the ground, starting to push himself up.

  I was next to him by that time and I shoved down on his shoulder with one hand and said, “Bull, will you please, will you please, put your—my—pants on?”

  “Hoo-hoo,” he yodeled, “so you admits they is your pants.”

  “My pants, your pants—who cares whose pants? Put them on, will you?”

  I was starting to get darting reflections of color from all over the area. I’d noticed it moments before, but had figured it must be blood. But now I realized it was people. People all over the place, all around us. The crowd—not unnaturally, at that—had followed the commotion, followed Bull and me here.

  Bull was beginning to get it, too. Slowly it seeped in, all the way in. He looked around, down at himself, blinked in peculiar fashion at me, looked around again, all the way around.

  Then he put on a shy, an almost winsome smile, which was actually about all he could put on at the moment, raised his head high and said something marvelous. At least I thought it was marvelous.

  “Folks,” he said seriously, “I hope you don’t believe this.”

  Then he cocked his head on one side, as though thinking maybe that hadn’t been the precise phrase he was after. Then, zip, he was gone.

  Not far. Just into Suite Eight. But gone. The door slammed, started creaking open on bent hinges. I went in right after him.

  And straight to the divan.

  One of Misty’s hands trembled. Her breasts rose and fell; she was breathing. Her long lashes began quivering. Thank God, I thought; she’s alive, still alive.

  So, incredibly, was Jerry Vail.

  He wasn’t moving—wasn’t even conscious—but froth bubbled on his lips. There was still some breath in him. The scimitar’s top edge was pressed against ribs at the right side of his stomach; it hadn’t torn open his heart, but enough of his insides were sliced open that I couldn’t imagine him living more than minutes longer. I was surprised he wasn’t dead already.

  Ormand Monaco stepped inside the room. He looked pale, disheveled, but in control.

  I didn’t say anything, just pointed to the bed, then at Jerry Vail stuck on the wall. “He’s not dead yet,” I said. “Is there a doctor in that bunch out there?” I sighed. “I guess we’ll need a few sheriffs, too.”

  Monaco stepped to the doorway and called something, barked an order or two, then stepped back inside. He shut the door, put a chair against it to keep it closed, then said, “Is there anything you would like to add, Mr. Scott?”

  “Add? To what?”

  “To what you said outside. To Mr. Harper.”

  “Oh. You heard that, huh?”

  A bleak, somewhat sad, sort of the-hell-wifh-it expression flickered over his thin-featured face. “I imagine, he said dully, “they heard it on top of the mountains. Perhaps it escaped your attention, but you were not speaking in a normal speaking voice. You were not, for that matter, shouting in a normal shout—”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I remember now. Well, it seems logical enough to me that—to continue what I was shouting—when Jeanne saw Jerry Vail here she must have recognized him as her husband. Not ex-husband, since they never got divorced. He merely skipped out on her. You told me yourself she asked about Neyra when she first got here and seemed quite taken aback when you told her Neyra was with her husband. If I recall what you t
old me, she said, ‘She’s his wife?’ Which would have been natural enough if Jeanne knew she was his wife.”

  Monaco nodded, pressed a thin hand against the gray hair swelling at his temple. “So the rest of Miss Jax’s questions were to gain further information and, eventually, to learn what she could about Ephrim.”

  “Exactly. When she found out he was loaded with dough, she started thinking she might unload some. If Jeanne was married to Jerry—who thus, of course, was not legally married to Sardis’ daughter—she was on top of a situation she could use to build up her bank account. Through a little blackmail. Especially since Neyra Vail was going to have Jerry’s baby.”

  “I’ll accept that as logical enough, Mr. Scott. But have you any proof, any physical evidence—”

  “Yeah. I pinned it to the wall over there.”

  Monaco glanced “over there” and grimaced, then turned back to me.

  I went on, “There’ll be plenty more, like the information from a marriage certificate, tracing both Vail and Jeanne back a few years, pinning down where Vail was at the time of the murders—when I first arrived at the Khan he wasn’t around, and he didn’t show up in the Seraglio for a while. We’ll also see what Misty has to tell us, when she can talk. So now it’s your turn.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. If Jeanne approached Sardis with her story—she did see him yesterday afternoon—and told him she was still married to his daughter’s presumed hubby, the first thing Sardis would have done after that would be to call in his daughter’s hubby.”

  “So?”

  “Well, unless you knocked off your old buddy Ephrim yourself, it almost had to be Jerry. It isn’t likely Jeanne did it. First, she apparently was paid off by Sardis with crisp hundred-dollar bills, so she got what she was after. Second, the call to the sheriff reporting a gunshot at the Sardis estate was from a man. But mainly, from Vail’s point of view, once Sardis told him what he’d learned, Jerry had to suffer the consequences—kaput with Neyra, loss of some of the Sardis millions, possibly including the Kubla Khan, not to mention scandal and prison—or else kill Sardis. So, Mr. Monaco, what were you doing out at the Sardis estate? You’ll never convince me you didn’t know he was dead. It’s my guess Vail phoned you—”