The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume Six (72 page)

I balanced the gun and wet my lips. There were two of them, but I was through running.

I cocked the gun and squared my feet, breaking a small branch in the process.

He fired, but I had been moving even as I realized I’d given away my position. I hit the dirt a half-dozen feet away. My own pistol stabbed flame and he fired back. I got a mouthful of sand and backed up hurriedly. But Pete Ravallo wasn’t happy. I heard him whispering hoarsely, and then heard a slight sound downhill from me.

I turned, and Ravallo’s gun stabbed out of the dark and something struck me a blow on the shoulder. My gun went clattering among the stones, and I knew from Ravallo’s shout that he knew what had happened.

Crouching like a trapped animal, I stared into the blackness right and left. There was no use hunting for the gun. The noise I would make would give them all they needed to shoot at, and Pete Ravallo was doing too well at shooting in the dark.

Fighting desperately for silence I backed up, then turned and worked my way cautiously back through the brush, parting it with my hands, and putting each foot down carefully so as not to scuff any stones or gravel.

I was in total darkness when I heard the sound of heavy breathing, and close by. It was a cinch this couldn’t be Pete Ravallo, so it must be the thick-necked mug. I waited, and heard a slight sound. I could barely see the dim outline of a face. Putting everything I had into it, I threw my left!

Beggar’s luck was with me and it smashed on flesh and he went sliding down the gravel bank behind him. Instantly, flame stabbed the night. One bullet whiffed close by, and then I began to run. I was lighter than Pete, and my arm was throbbing with agony that seemed to be eased by the movement even as pressure seems to ease an aching tooth. I lunged at that hill and, fighting with both feet and my one good hand, started to scramble back for the top.

Ravallo must have hesitated a moment or two, trying to locate his driver. I was uphill from him anyway, and by the time he started I had a lead of at least forty yards and was pulling away fast. He tried one more shot, then held his fire. A light came on in a distant house.

Tearing my lungs out gasping for air, I scrambled over the top into the road. The car was sitting there, with the motor running, but I’d no thought of getting away. He still had shells, probably an extra clip, too. I twisted into the driver’s seat and threw the car into gear and pointed it down the embankment. There was one sickening moment when the car teetered, and then I half jumped, half fell out of the door.

In that wild, fleeting instant as the car plunged headfirst downhill, I caught a glimpse of Pete Ravallo.

The gangster was full in the glare of the headlights, and even as I looked, he threw up his arms and screamed wildly, insanely into the night! And then all I could hear was the crashing tumble of the car going over and over to the bottom of the canyon.

For what seemed a long time I lay there in the road, then crawled to my feet. I felt weak and sick and the world was spinning around so I had to brace myself to stand. I was like that when I heard the whine of a siren and saw a car roll up and stop. There were other sirens farther off.

Reardon was in the third car to arrive. He ran to me.

“What happened? Where’s Ravallo?”

I gestured toward the canyon. “How’d you know about him?”

While several officers scrambled down into the canyon, he helped me to the car and ripped off my coat.

“Joe McCready,” Reardon said. “He knew you’d gone to Dallas, and he heard the cabbies say that Ravallo was watching the airport. So, I wired Dallas to see if they knew anything about Craine or Ravallo. The paper told me that you found a story about Giuseppe Ravallo’s body. So I had some boys watching Pete at this end while we tried to piece the thing together.

“They had gone for coffee and were just getting back when they saw Ravallo’s car pulling away. A few minutes’ checking and they found you’d come in on the plane. We thought we’d lost you until we got a report of some shooting up this way.”

Between growls at the pain of my shoulder, I explained what had happened. There were still gaps to fill in, but it seemed Ravallo had been trying to find out who killed his brother.

“He either had a hunch Craine had done it for the money Giuseppe was carrying, or just happened to see him and realized he was flush. That would be all he would need to put two and two together. However he arrived at the solution, he was right.”

Fishing in my coat pocket, I got out the snapshot. It was a picture of Giuseppe Ravallo, bearing a strong resemblance to Pete, sitting at a table with Larry Craine.

“Maybe Craine left New Orleans with Ravallo, and maybe he followed him. Anyway, when Craine left New Orleans he was broke, then he hit Dallas and soon had plenty of money. He bought a suit of clothes there, then came on here and started living high and fast. Ravallo was back behind him, dead.”

My arm was throbbing painfully, but I had to finish the story and get the thing straightened out.

“Pete must have tailed him to Sue’s apartment, maybe one of those goons down there in the canyon was with him. He probably didn’t know where he was going and cared less. He saw his chance and took it. Pete seems the vendetta type. He would think first of revenge, and the money would come second. Her car evidently drove up before he had the money. Or maybe he didn’t even try to get it.”

Reardon nodded. “That’s a place for us to start. I don’t think you’ll have to worry about the D.A.” He grinned at me. “But when you took off to Dallas, you had me sweating!”

A
LL THE WAY
back to town, I nursed my shoulder and was glad to get to the hospital. The painkillers put me under and I dreamed that I was dying in a dark canyon under the crushing weight of a car.

When I fought my way back to life after a long sleep, it was morning and Sue Shannon was sitting there by the bed. I looked up at her thoughtfully.

“What?” she asked.

“I thought I was dying in a dream…and then I woke up and thought I’d gone to heaven.”

She smiled.

“I was wondering if I’d have to wait until you found another corpse before I saw you again?” I asked.

“Not if you like a good meal and know of a quiet restaurant where we can get one.”

My eyes absorbed her beauty again and I thought heaven could wait, living would do for now.

The Sucker Switch

W
hen Jake Brusa got out of the car, he spotted me waiting for him and his eyes went hard. Jake and I never cared for each other.

“Hi, Copper!” he said. “Loafing again, or are you here on business?”

“Would I come to see you for fun?” I asked. “It’s a question or two; like where were you last night?”

“At the Roadside Club. In fact,” he said, grinning at me, “I ran into your boss out there. Even talked with him for a while.”

“Just asking,” I told him. “But you’ll need an alibi. Somebody knocked off the Moffit Storage and Transit Company for fifty grand in furs.”

“Nice haul. Luck to ’em!” Jake grinned again and, sided by Al Huber and Frank Lincoff, went on into the Sporting Center.

The place was a combination bowling alley and billiard parlor. It was Jake Brusa’s front for a lot of illegal activities. Jake had been operating, ever since his release from Joliet, but nobody was able to put a finger on him.

If James Briggs, my boss, had been with him the night before, then Jake might be in the clear, but in my own mind, I was positive this had been a Brusa job.

O
LD
M
AN
M
OFFIT
had been plenty sore when I’d showed up at his office earlier that morning. His little blue eyes glinted angrily in his fat red face.

“About time you got here!” he snapped at me. “What does Briggs think he’s running, anyway? We pay your firm for security and this is the third time in five months we’ve taken a loss from thieves or holdup men.”

“Take it easy,” I said. “Let me have a look around first.” I dug into my pocket for chewing gum and peeled three sticks. He had reason to complain. The robberies were covered by insurance, but his contracts to handle merchandise would never be renewed if he couldn’t deliver the goods. Not that he was the only one suffering from burglary or stickups. The two rival firms in town had suffered a couple of losses each, and the police had failed to pin anything on anybody. All three of the companies had been clients of my boss’s detective agency.

Moffit’s face purpled. “I lose fifty thousand dollars’ worth of furs and you tell me to take it easy!” he shouted. “I’ve got a good mind to call—”

“It wouldn’t do you any good,” I said. “Briggs only told me somebody knocked over the joint. Suppose you give me the details.”

Moffit toned down, but his jaw jutted, and it was obvious that Briggs stood to lose a valuable client unless we recovered those furs or pinned this on somebody.

“My night watchman, a man investigated by your firm and pronounced reliable, is missing,” Moffit told me. “With him went one of our armored trucks and the furs.”

That watchman was Pete Burgeson and I’d investigated him myself. “And then what?” I asked. “Give me the whole setup.”

“The furs were stored in the vault last night,” he continued a little more mildly, “but when we opened it this morning, it was empty. The burglar alarm on the vault door failed to go off. The vault door and the door to the outer room were both locked this morning. So was the warehouse door.

“Our schedule called for the furs to be delivered to Pentecost and Martin the first thing this morning. The furs are gone and the truck is gone and Burgeson is gone, too!”

N
ATURALLY
, after I’d heard Moffit’s story, I thought of Brusa and went down to see him. In his youth there had been no tougher mobster; he had a record as long as your arm in the Midwest and East. After his release from Joliet, he had come west to Lucaston and opened the Sporting Center.

Supposedly, he had been following a straight path since then, but I had my own ideas about that. Years ago, he had been a highly skilled loft burglar. Huber had been arrested several times on the same charge. Lincoff had been up for armed robbery and assault. The Sporting Center was the hangout for at least three other men with records.

Lucaston, while not a great metropolis, was a thriving and busy city near the coast and we had several select residential areas loaded with money. Such a place is sure to be a target for crooks, and I don’t believe it was any accident that Jake Brusa had located there.

Well, I had seen Brusa and heard his alibi, and when I called my boss, Briggs told me that Brusa was right. He had talked with Briggs at the Roadside Club, and not only he but Huber and Lincoff had been there all evening. Their alibi was rockbound. But if they hadn’t done it, who had?…

The warehouse itself offered little. It was a concrete structure, built like a blockhouse and almost as impregnable. A glance at it would defeat an amateur burglar, and the place was fairly loaded with alarms that we had installed ourselves and checked regularly. The fact that they hadn’t gone off seemed to imply an inside job, but I knew that a skillful burglar can always manage to locate such alarms and put them out of action. Two doors and the vault had been opened, however, and there was no evidence of violence and no unidentified fingerprints.

During the war, an annex of sheet metal had been added to the warehouse. In this annex was the loading platform and the garage for the ten trucks employed by Moffit’s firm. Two of these trucks were armored. This annex also housed the small office used by the night watchman. In one corner of the annex a window had been found broken, a window that opened on the alley.

Glass lay on the floor below the window, and a few fragments lay on a workbench that was partly under the window. The dust on the sill was disturbed, indicating that someone had entered by that means, and the glass on the floor implied the window had been broken from the outside. On the head of a nail on the edge of the window, I found a few threads of material resembling sharkskin. I put them in an envelope in my pocket.

Under the bench were a couple of folded tarps and some sacks. I flashed my light over them. At one end, those at the bottom of the pile were somewhat damp, yet there was no way for rain to have reached them despite the heavy fall the previous night. The outer door through which the truck would have to be driven was undamaged. It was then I started to get mad. Nobody goes through three doors, one with a combination lock, unless they are opened for him.

M
OFFIT LOOKED UP
, glaring, when I returned from my examination. “Well?” he demanded.

“Ghosts,” I told him solemnly. “Spirits who walk through walls, or maybe Mandrake the Magician waved those furs out of the vault with a wand.”

Hudspeth, Moffit’s chief clerk, looked up at me as I came out of Moffit’s office. “He’s pretty worked up,” he said, “he had a lot of faith in Burgeson.”

I walked over to the water cooler. “Didn’t you?”

“You can’t be sure. I never trusted him too much. He was always asking questions that didn’t concern him.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, where we got our furs, what different coats cost, and such things.” Hudspeth seemed nervous, like he was worried that I might not suspect the watchman.

When I got in my car, I sat there a few minutes, then started it up and swung out on the main drag, heading for the center of town. Then I heard a police siren, and the car slowed and swung over to me. Briggs was with them. He stuck his head out.

“Found that armored car,” he called. “Come along.”

T
HERE WAS A FARMER
standing alongside the road when we got there, and he flagged us down. It was on the Mill Road, outside of town. The car was sitting among some trees and the door had been pried off with a chisel and crowbar. It was empty.

They had picked a good place. Only lovers or hikers ever stopped there. About a hundred yards back from the road was the old mill that gave the road its name. It was one of the first flour mills built west of the Sierras.

While Briggs and the cops were looking the car over, I walked around. There had been another car here and several men. The grass had been pressed down and had that gray look grass has when it’s been walked through after a heavy dew. The trail looked interesting, and I followed it. It headed for the old mill. Skirting the mill, I walked out on the stone dock along the millpond. Even before I looked, I had a hunch what I’d find and I knew it wouldn’t be nice. He was there, all right, floating facedown in the water, and even before I called the cops, I knew who it was.

When Pete Burgeson was hauled out of the water, we saw his head was smashed in. There was wire around him and you could see that somebody had bungled the job of anchoring him to whatever weight had been used.

“Burgeson was no crook,” I said unnecessarily. “I knew the guy was straight.”

For a private dick, I am very touchy about bodies. I don’t like to hold hands with dead men, or women, for that matter. I walked away from this one and went back to the car. The cops would be busy so it gave me a chance to look around.

Backtracking from the car to the road, I found the place where it had left the pavement. There was a deep imprint of the tire, and I saw a place where the tread had picked up mud. Putting my hand down, I felt what looked like dry earth. It was dirt, just dry dirt. That brought me standing, for that car had been run in here after the rain ended!

Squatting down again, looking at that tread, I could see how it had picked up the thin surfacing of mud and left dry earth behind. If it had rained after the car turned off the road, that track would not be dry! Things began to click into place…at least a few things.

Without waiting for Briggs, I got into my car and drove away. As I rounded the curve, I glanced back and saw Briggs staring after me. He knew I had something.

My first stop was Pete Burgeson’s rooming house. Then I went on, mulling things over as I drove. It was just a hunch I had after all, a hunch based on three things: a broken window, dampness on a tarp, and a dry track on the edge of a wet road. At least, I knew how the job had been done. All I needed was to fill in a couple of blank spaces and tie it all together with a ribbon of evidence.

A stop at a phone booth got me Moffit. “What’s the name of the driver of the armored truck that was stolen?”

“Mat Bryan. One of my best men. Why do you ask?”

“Just want to talk to him. Put him on the phone, will you?”

“I can’t,” Moffit explained. “He’s getting married…he’s got the day off but promised to make some morning deliveries for me. When his truck was missing we told him not to bother coming in.”

It took me a half hour in that phone booth to get what I wanted, but by that time I was feeling sharper than a razor. Two things I had to do at once, but I dialed the chief. He was back in the office, and sounded skeptical.

“Why not take a chance?” I said finally. “If I’m right, we’ve got these crooks where we want them. I don’t know what this bird looks like, how tall or short, but he’s wearing a gray sharkskin suit, and it’s been rained on. Try the parks, the cheap poolrooms, and the bars.”

When I hung up, I hit the street and piled into my car. As I got into it, I got a glimpse of Huber coming down the sidewalk. He stopped to stare at me, and it was a long look that gave me cold chills.

W
HEN
I
REACHED
the warehouse, I headed right for the night watchman’s office. Hudspeth was standing on the loading platform when I came in.

“Anyone been in Burgeson’s office?” I asked him.

“No.” He looked puzzled. “He always locked it when he came out, even for a few minutes, and it’s still locked. I have the key here. Mr. Moffit wanted me to see if there was anything there that would help you.”

“Let’s look,” I suggested, and then as he was bending over the lock, I gave it to him. “They found Burgeson’s body. He was murdered.”

The key jerked sharply, rattling on the lock. Finally, Hudspeth got it into the keyhole and opened the door. When he straightened up his face was gray.

Burgeson’s leather-topped chair was where it always had been. The windows in the office allowed him to see all over the annex. His lunch box was open on the desk, and there was nothing in it but crumbs.

My eyes went over every inch of the desk, and at last I found what I had been looking for. On the side across from where Burgeson always sat, were a few cake crumbs. I looked at them, then squatted down and studied the floor. In front of the chair at that end of the desk was a spot of dampness. I got up. Hudspeth must have seen me grinning.

“You—you found something?”

“Uh huh.” I looked right at him. “You can tell Moffit I’ll be breaking this case in a few hours. Funny thing about crooks,” I told him. “All of them suffer from overconfidence. This bunch had been pretty smart, but we’ve got them now. For burglary, and”—I looked right into his eyes—“murder!”

Then I went out of there on a run because when I’d said the last word, I had a hunch that scared me. I hit the door and got into my car, wheeled it around, and headed for the church. If I was right, and I knew I was, the phone from Moffit and Company would be busy right now, or some phone nearby.

There were a lot of cars at the church when I got there, and a bunch of people standing around as they always do for a funeral or a wedding.

“Where’s Mat Bryan?” I demanded.

“We’re waiting for him!” the nearest man told me. “He’s late for his wedding!”

“Better break it to the bride that he probably won’t make it today,” I advised. “I’ll go look for him.” Without explanation, I swung my car into traffic and took off.

W
HEN
I
PULLED UP
in front of his rooming house, I could see an old lady answering the telephone in the hallway.

As I walked up to her I heard her saying, “He should be there now! Some men drove up ten or fifteen minutes ago and took him away in a car!”

Taking the phone from her, I hung it up. “What did those men look like?” I demanded. “Tell me quick!”

She was neither bothered nor confused. “Who are you?” she demanded.

“The police,” I lied. “Those men will kill Mat if I don’t prevent them.”

“They were in a blue car,” she told me. “There were three of them—a big man in a plaid suit, and—”