The Sweet Ride (The Shell Scott Mysteries) Read online

  “O.K.?” he asked, speaking the first letter aloud and then remembering to whisper. “Look like I told you it was?”

  I glanced over the wide cement deck ahead of me, at the wall on my left and the top of the ramp that came up from the floor below—or, reached from here to the floor below us—at gloominess straight ahead, stained-wood stairs fifteen feet away on my right. Then I moved back a step and peered along the narrow hallway toward the room we’d just come from.

  “Well ... close enough,” I said.

  I started to tell him I almost wished we’d planned the shooting for down below, in that open area, where police cars and lots of help could move in with a minimum of delay. But there was no point in mentioning it now. Besides, that would probably have been too far away anyhow, since we were counting on Hot Sauce Charlie, nearby at the top of the stairs, to be our witness. Witness, singular. One, we felt, would be enough.

  I said very softly, “Biggie.”

  He jumped. When he looked at me his eyes wobbled a little.

  “Take your time, huh?” I went on. “If I don’t transmit anything to Delcey sooner, he and the rest will pour in here at 4 p.m. sharp. And I think we’d better wait till nearly that time before we start making noise and raising hell. I’ve got a feeling—”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll lock the door before I open the box. I’ll get all the stuff I can in.”

  He hadn’t heard me. He hadn’t heard a word I said.

  “O.K.,” he said. “O.K. You’ll be right here? Like we figured it?”

  “Well, I didn’t know Crazy Mike was going to be down there.” I jerked a thumb. “That’s my way out.”

  “O.K.,” he said. “That’s good. O.K.”

  Right then I knew. Something was going to go wrong.

  From above, nearby, there was the sound of a cough. A deep, phlegm-rattling cough, then a noisy air-flapping honk.

  I said softly, “Hot Sauce Charlie’s waiting for us up there, blowing his goddamn nose. Go ahead, Biggie. Do the best you can.”

  He stood there, nodding. I had to give him an easy shove, then he turned, walked to the stairs, and moved up them out of sight.

  I looked at my watch. Twenty-two minutes till four. I walked to the stairs. They reversed direction halfway up, ending almost directly above my head. I couldn’t see anyone up there, but I heard the hoarse voice: “Where’d you go, Biggie?”

  And the reply, “Where else?” Maybe he was pulling himself together.

  I thought again about Crazy Mike. I hadn’t seen him when he’d spoken to Biggie, but his voice had sounded as if it was coming from just under the roof. I moved on ahead as quickly and silently as I could, glancing at the down-curving ramp as I passed it, then taking a fast look into the shadowy far end of the floor. At three or four dozen cars parked in even rows, several pickup trucks, a small office with no light showing behind its windows, a dead forest of square white concrete columns. Then, back to where I’d started from.

  Now, I wished I’d told Biggers I would be standing, not here where we’d agreed I would be, but near the ramp, next to the break in the wall there—the wall behind which I could duck if the need arose, the need which I feared would surely arise. But he probably wouldn’t have heard that, either. Even if he had, it might have confused him more, and more could be enough for calamity. Besides, if it should happen, as now it could happen, that eight or nine irritable hoods pounded down those stairs, it might be easier to run back the way I’d come—since only Crazy Mike would be in my way on that route. Also, out that way was where my car was....

  I made myself stop thinking about it. Told myself, from now on we do it. That’s all. Just do it, take it as it comes, let it happen, hope it’s a lucky day.

  I took the transmitter from my pocket, held it in my left hand, slipped the Colt Special from its holster. In a few more minutes Biggie would come down the stairs, wait—till I’d pressed that red button and told Delcey to move—then yell bloody murder while I shot him three times. Not forgetting to fling the small suitcase he’d brought with him. Fling it, needless to say, toward me, so I could without undue delay grab it and run.

  From above me, in the hoarse, gravelly voice: “Where you goin’ now?”

  What the hell? Only four minutes had passed; it was eighteen minutes till four.

  No answer to the question.

  Then the same voice again: “What the hell you doin’ with that suitcase?”

  “What suitcase?”

  I groaned. It had been Biggie’s voice, which was high and reedy to begin with, but now so thin and faint I barely heard it, like a trickle of breeze sighing past my ear, w-h-a-a-t s-uit-caa-se....

  Then, “Leggo!” That was Biggie, louder.

  “What the—HEY! Sam—Powpow—HEY!”

  I guessed Powpow was another of the boys. Probably nicknamed because of his predilection for shooting guys, pow—pow! I know a lot about how hoods get their monickers. Unfortunately such information is useless.

  I didn’t see it coming. I just heard it land on the steps, bounce and clatter. And then there it was, Biggie’s suitcase, coming to rest on the bottom step of the stairs, stopping at an angle.

  So there it was. Only without Biggie.

  For a moment—maybe a second or two, maybe less or more—I didn’t know what to do, couldn’t get a thought started. But I knew if I grabbed that suitcase and ran I could get away, make it; but Biggie couldn’t get away, Biggie wouldn’t make it.

  Then there was a hoarse, sharp yell, more of a bark, from up above. Immediately it was followed by the clatter of feet, clackety-clack like a stick on a picket fence, and Ernie Biggers appeared, moving swiftly.

  He must have taken off from at least three or four steps up because when he came into view I had to lift my eyes to see him. He sailed through the air from my right to left, in a swiftly down-curving arc, so that his feet hit the concrete floor just before the rest of him hit the concrete wall.

  “Gah-HAAH!” came out of him. His knees buckled. But he didn’t go down. Not all the way, only halfway down, then up, but up much slower than he’d gone down.

  Overhead, faint, then distressingly loud, the slap of feet. Many feet. No, not slap—thunder. A titanic rumbling and pounding—to my petrilized ears, at least—as of buffalo hordes stampeding o’er the plains. And that hoarse voice, now with as much pain as phlegm in it: “He hit me in the nuts! The little bastard busted my nuts!”

  Then more clatter of feet on the nearby stairs, but much slower than Biggie’s clatter had been, and only one pair of feet. I hoped it was Hot Sauce Charlie, taking it pretty easy.

  Biggie, erect now, turned toward me. He looked straight at me, his eyes like teacups. “HALP!” he yelled. “It’s Shell Scott! He’s gonna shoot me!”

  I was mumbling aloud, I knew it, but I couldn’t stop it. I lifted the Colt, aimed carefully. I thought I was moving pretty fast, but I guess it wasn’t fast enough for Biggie.

  “Yes, he’s gonna shoot me! Shoot me! GODDAMMIT, SHOOT ME.”

  The Colt was cocked, and I squeezed the shot off. Bouncing from concrete, the blast sounded more like a souped-up .45 than a .38, but as my eardrums bent inward I was vastly relieved to see a splash of red appear on Biggie’s white shirt at about the third button down, dead center.

  “Gaah ... damn!” Biggie shrieked. “That hurts!”

  Then he collected his wits, or about half of them, and yelled, “Aaahk, he got me! He finally got me!”

  I hurt him again, taking great pleasure in doing it this time, squeezing off the second shot, and even though I was not thinking with unprecedented clarity, I was pleased to note the second red splash was right next to the first one.

  I started to pump the third slug into—or onto—him, but a big head was poked past the wall’s edge, just this side of those stairs, and there was a great BANG I knew couldn’t have come out of the guy’s mouth, and the bullet whipped past me and went smack-zing-smack as it bounced from one concrete wall into another, a
nd then I saw the gun a foot below the guy’s chin.

  I ducked, flipping my Colt toward him, but he moved, too, jerking back out of sight.

  Out of sight, but not out of mind. And while I was wondering if I could make it past him before all those thundering hooves above started down the stairs I became aware of what sounded like a large two-legged animal galloping nearer along the hallway behind me. Galloping and bellowing, “WHUDDUHELL? WHUDDUHELL?”

  Crazy Mike. Yeah. Either him, or the front half of a dying unicorn, I wasn’t sure of anything at that moment, and at least part of the reason was Ernie Biggers. Dumb damn idiot-child Ernie Biggers.

  He wasn’t dead yet.

  True, probably only three or four seconds had elapsed since my last shot at him, but there weren’t one hell of a lot of seconds to play around with, and the idiot was just spinning around, clunking against the wall, letting out a high blood-curdling yammer. He was dying like ambitious extras in those Western movies—you know, they fall down, get up, run in one place for a while, knock over a table, wave, kick, groan, and then crawl twenty-five yards, getting stronger all the time. At least that is how it then impressed me.

  Clearly, it was time for me to make a speedy decision.

  Biggie was still sliding down the wall.

  I made up my mind.

  Or perhaps it should be said that I moved, though perhaps my mind was not exactly made up. As the sound above grew to fearful proportions and the thumping in the hall behind me got even nearer, I went into action.

  I jammed the Colt back in its holster and leaped forward, bent over and made one more jump, reached for the handle of the suitcase and grabbed it, straightened up, and bounded literally yards through the air, landed with my legs driving, eyes fixed on the ramp, because once I got there the cement wall at its edge would stop the bullets sure to be flying soon —

  Correction. Flying.

  That wall would stop the flying bullets—flying from Hot Sauce Charlie, I dimly perceived, though I was not looking at him. But there was much other noise, thumpings and clatterings and such, at the top of the stairs and apparently farther down, along with a lot of dirty words and yelling, but the shots were so spaced that they could be coming only from a single gun —

  Correction. Two guns.

  I perceived—even more dimly at this point, still one huge bound from the ramp—that Crazy Mike must have pitched in with Hot Sauce Charlie, because the bullets from the new gun did not smack-zing as they bounced from the side wall but merely made a distant splutt far down at the end of the long hallway, and therefore they were being fired straight at me; or, rather, almost straight at me, from where Crazy must be, rather than at an angle from Hot Sauce; not that it made a great deal of difference, though even achieving this simple deduction under such stress would have made me proud if I’d realized that’s what I was doing.

  Then I was skidding, turning, suddenly going down the curving ramp with those concrete blocks between the guns and me, at least temporarily between the guns and me, and probably permanently because I was moving at what I estimated to be forty, maybe forty-five, miles an hour.

  I roared down the ramp, thinking if it was built on a slant like the Indianapolis Speedway it was possible I could crank up to fifty or more easy, and thus it was that, filled with my sudden and tremendously speedy feeling of invincibility, when I reached the bottom of the ramp and bounded over the level floor into a great pool of oil and my feet went every which way and I fell down and skidded with my head bumping at fairly regular intervals against the concrete floor, I couldn’t believe it.

  It wasn’t that I refused to accept what had happened, I was simply incapable of comprehending the possibility. Had I not been flying along at a speed never before achieved by a human being? Had I not miraculously escaped unscathed from eight, nine, maybe ten hoods? Apparently, I had not done either of those things.

  I was slowed down to possibly half a mile an hour before I stopped making huge bounds with my feet, and admitted to myself, honestly, that I wasn’t getting anyplace. And that there was no point in kidding myself about it.

  And then, BLAM. A slug zinged off the floor near me.

  It was instinct that had made me cling to both the little transmitter and the suitcase. It was another shot of the same instinct that got me to my feet and sent me staggering and sliding this way and that way and finally onto unoily concrete and toward the gaping door ahead.

  I don’t really know what happened then. I assume that my numerous pursuers, racing pell-mell after me, must also have hit that slick oil and suffered the same humiliation as had I. All I know is that though there were a few more shots I wasn’t hit, and sun glared against my eyes as I went through the door of Silvano’s Garage, and there ahead of me was Third Street again, maybe not freedom yet, but a road leading to it.

  I started to veer left, in my mind at least part of the thought that I might be able to run the half-block to Birch Street and from there it was only a block and a bit to my car parked around the corner on Fourth. But my left hip and knee were starting to give me hell and my head was pounding with almost audible noises, and I wasn’t sure I could outdistance the men behind me if they kept after me, and I knew they would keep after me.

  Then I changed my mind, changed my thought.

  A car was approaching on my right, coming this way on Third, close enough now so that I was able to reach it simply by veering a little right instead of left. It was a sedan, with both the front and back windows down on the driver’s side, and when I was close enough I simply shoved the suitcase through the rear window, banged against the car, bounced away, and managed to stumble alongside it reaching for some place to grab on.

  I wouldn’t have made it except that she—yes, she—had started to slow down, possibly astonished by the oily individual apparently determined to collide with her. But she had slowed enough, and when I managed to wrap both arms around the post between front and back doors, yelling, “Go! Go! Those guys are gonna kill me—GO!” she hit the gas so hard the jerk nearly pulled my arms free and left me behind in the street.

  So speed was what I got, but speed was what I wanted, and I yelled, “That’s it, wonderful, go, lady, go!”

  And I heard her cry, “Yes—yes!”

  It was difficult to concentrate, with my arms wrapped around a hunk of metal biting into muscle and possibly even bone, and with keen awareness of the asphalt flowing past beneath my pulled-up feet, but the sound of that voice struck me in a most peculiar way.

  It was, of course, a woman’s voice, since the driver of my getaway car was a woman. But it had, I thought, a familiar sound.

  How could that possibly be? It wasn’t the least bit logical, and I am a firm believer in the logic of events, a man instantly and determinedly suspicious of the stupendously fortuitous coincidence.

  I damn near flew off the car again as the driver made a sort of quick S-turn which was mostly right, into Birch Street. I tightened my arm-grip, tried to squeeze up closer to the car.

  “Great,” I called to the driver, “keep it going. Only warn me next time you turn like that.”

  “Yes—yes!”

  There it was again. And it struck me, again, in a most peculiar way. It couldn’t be, could it?

  But now that we were zooming away from hoods and danger, toward safety and freedom, there was time for me to crank my head around, bend my neck, and take a look.

  It could be, after all. Yes, it could.

  How about that?

  19

  “Martinique!” I whooped. “Baby, I don’t know how it happened, but I’m glad it happened. You living doll, you!”

  She didn’t say anything. She was staring ahead with her mouth open. Well, actually, she was sort of shrieking very quietly, but not saying anything that could be considered intelligent communication.

  Inevitably, this on top of everything else—waiting for Biggie, gunshots and running, near capture and miraculous last-minute escape—had charged me up to ju
st about the maximum voltage I’m capable of achieving without being plugged into a socket. So even while I clung to the side of Martinique’s car my brain was probably as active as it can get, and in only moments, in the time it took us to reach Second Street, perhaps a hundred separate thoughts zigzagged inside my skull—Fowler, Grimson, Kitty-Melinda, Hank, Lou Wykoff and Sam Jelly, and more—and a few of them lingered.

  And I began thinking, or at least half-thinking, that there was someone I’d taken at face value, hadn’t really questioned, someone who could have been screwing me up almost since I arrived here in Newton.

  David Bannister.

  Obviously Hugh Grimson had learned about me from Mayor Fowler’s initial phone call. But, after first meeting and conning me—and then, as was now obvious looking back on it, leaving Fowler’s house for somewhere else—how had he known I would be at the mayor’s home again? How had he even learned I was then still in Newton?

  Only three people knew not only that I was in Newton but that I was going to pay a second call upon the “mayor.” Hank Wainwright for one. Not him; automatically out, even if he hadn’t remained with me for a while after the luncheon in the Sherwood. Which left? Martinique—and Bannister.

  I almost sailed through the air again, caught off guard as Martinique whipped right once more. Let’s see, that would put us on Second Street, parallel to Third where we’d been a few seconds ago. I would have preferred to go zooming straight ahead, but it was O.K. Martinique knew what she was doing. She’d saved me, hadn’t she?

  For a moment I allowed myself the pleasure of dwelling upon the thought that first Canada Southern—ah, luscious, lovely Canada Southern—had saved me. Well, in a way; at least she’d hauled me back to town after my wreck on Mulberry Drive. And now, saved again! By gorgeous, surprisingly wanton, Martinique Monet, by hot ice and cold fire and cool lips flambé and all that good stuff, and more. What would I do, I wondered, where would I be—without women?

  Then, back to the serious thinking.