Don't Look Behind You (23 page)

“Where the hell
to
? We’re eight stories up, man!”

“The fire escape.”

Pat frowned. “There’s no fire escape out that window. It’s around the corner on the other side of the building.”

No more time for talk. I didn’t think I’d be at any risk of more gunfire coming through that door. So I kicked it open in a splintering crunch, pushed the damaged result aside, and rushed in. With .45 in hand but shedding the trenchcoat and hat, I crossed the living room of a modern apartment toward a window that yawned wide and spewed rain to discourage me.

From the doorway, Pat yelled, “Mike, what the hell…?”

“Find something useful to do,” I told him.

“I’ll call for back-up,” he said, and was gone.

I peered out around the window frame and there, through the driving sheets, was a man in a dark, already dripping suit hugging the brick, his shoes angled sideways to take advantage of the six-inch ledge of cement. He faced away from me as he moved incrementally toward the corner of the building, around which the fire escape waited.

Just barely peeking out, my face streamed with the sky’s tears, my upper clothes already soaked. I leaned out to get a better look at him, specifically to see if he’d put his gun away.

He hadn’t.

It was in his right hand, and flat against the brick. In the limited visibility of the downpour, I could tell only that it was an automatic, a nine millimeter possibly or maybe a .45.

But the gun was, no question, slowing him down. It gave him only one hand to secure purchase on the brick, and he was inching his feet along. I’d be inching along too if I carried my .45 out there. I could shoot him from the window, but Pat wanted him alive, and I owed my friend that much. Anyway, if this was the Specialist, I didn’t want to give him the easy mercy of a .45 slug in the head. He had much worse coming.

So I stuffed the .45 in my waistband and slipped out of the already sopping suitcoat. Then I leaned out into the torrent, my fingers testing the slipperiness of the narrow ledge, and it seemed more wet than slick.

Right?

Then I was on the cement tightrope myself, pressed against that building like it was the most beautiful, desirable woman in creation, my fingers clutching where brick met mortar, my feet turned sideways like a figure in an Egyptian hieroglyphic.

Out here came a rush of sudden cold, and the slanting rain whipped my back with surprising power. I was drenched now. But with both hands free, I made quicker, surer progress than my quarry, though once I got overconfident and my foot slipped off into nothing at all and I froze against the beautiful woman and clung for my life.

The barrage of rain created a pounding din that seemed like the loudest thing on earth until thunder like terrible cannon fire made something insignificant out of it.

Yet still I edged, getting closer. Only he was getting ever nearer to that corner, and if he beat me there, and made it around, then when I did the same, who could say what I might be facing?

The sky was roaring with laughter now, raucous belly laughs, as one man pursued another at the rate of an inch for every step, a snail chasing a snail. And yet finally he made it to that corner, and as he slipped around he saw me for the first time, his eyes flashing at me before he disappeared.

What could I do but keep going?

I was passing windows on other apartments, but a man on a six-inch ledge can’t kick the glass in or even hurl himself through. The former might send him toppling backward, the latter would have him bouncing off, not through, the window, tumbling back into the abyss.

And the sky laughed deep.

Then I was there, at the corner myself. I stopped to catch my breath, but taking air in through my nose, not risking letting rain in through my mouth—a coughing fit right now could be fatal. I was a sodden excuse for a human, the moisture half-blinding me now, streaming down my face, weeping for me. But I’d reached my goal.

Rounding the corner was a trick in itself, but I didn’t make the turn completely, instead froze there hugging the central sharpness of brick.

He’d made it to the fire escape.
He was on it.
He was waiting. Even in the rain I could see that this man wore the face in the LAPD wire photo. This was almost certainly the Specialist. He had said he would take me on and beat me at my own game.

And he was about to.

Maybe madness
had
taken him, as I’d speculated, because he was laughing back at the sky, laughing at me, his demented eyes blinking away rain even as he brought the automatic up to pick me off my perch. My hand fumbled for the .45 in my waistband and I waited for the gunshot…

… and it came.

Like more thunder, but sharper, only I felt nothing—
he’d missed!
My eyes struggled open under their cargo of raindrops and saw him tottering at the edge of the fire escape. He hadn’t missed, someone else had fired, and the bullet caught him in the shoulder but the shock of it sent the automatic in now loose fingers dropping harmlessly into the maw of the storm.

Then he fell into it, too.

Screaming, but the gods laughing thunderously at him made it sound small even before it receded with him to the pavement where he splattered like a tomato flung at a wall.

Down on the street, a barely visible figure in a trenchcoat pointed up. Maybe a gun was in its hand. And I was pretty sure it was Pat. Then from behind me a voice called over the rain, “Get back here, mister!
Careful!
I’ll help you in…”

Somehow I managed, and a frumpy woman about forty, as plain as a paint can, helped me in, and I never saw a female who looked better.

I was sitting on the floor in a puddle, some of which I may have made myself, near the now-closed window, still breathing hard, when somebody knocked on the door. My hostess went and answered it and Pat came quickly in and right over to me.

He kneeled down, face taut with concern, hat shedding water. Put a hand on my shoulder.

“You okay, buddy?” he said.

“I thought you wanted him alive.”

He gave me what they call a rueful grin. “Yeah, well, priorities. Somebody’s ass needed saving.”

The woman came over and said her husband was about my size, and brought me fresh underwear and a suit they were planning to give to Goodwill. I accepted the offering. Frankly, the suit looked decent enough that I might keep it.

In a nice warm bathroom, I toweled off and got into the threads, then gave the gal a kiss on the cheek and went down the hall to see Pat, where he was in Dennis Clark’s apartment.

The place was very modern in a sterile kind of way, with not a picture on the wall or book on a shelf, though it had a nice twenty-four inch TV and an impressive sound system with a record collection running to Mingus and Davis. There were clothes, including some expensive conservative suits, and food in the fridge, import beer, deli cold cuts, milk and so on. But no bills or other correspondence, the stuff that lives are made of.

Pat did find two things of interest. One was a little black book, the kind a guy keeps the names and numbers of his favorite females in. Only this little black book had the names of men, and just a handful—a very specific handful.

“The three assassins,” Pat said, “who came after you. Names, phone numbers, addresses.”

“It’s impressive, watching your detecting skills at work.”

A few minutes later he came up with a bank book from under some clothes in a dresser drawer.

He thumbed through it, then whistled slow. “Dennis Clark has a hundred grand and change in savings, Mike.”

“Yeah, well, you can’t take it with you.”

Outside the storm was dissipating. The machine-gunning was tap-dancing now, and the view out the window was gray, not black. Distant sirens announced the cavalry coming, just as late as in the movies.

“Doesn’t it feel a little convenient, Pat? A little easy?”

He made a face. “It’s the guy, Mike. Don’t be a sore loser.”

“Sore loser, how?”

He grinned at me. “Because for once I beat you to it.”

Several days later, we were having coffee after lunch at the Blue Ribbon, seated at the corner table in the niche of celebrity photos—Velda and me and Hy Gardner, who was heading back to Florida later this afternoon.

“Things are pretty much back to normal,” Velda was saying to Hy. She was in a light blue silk blouse today and a dark blue pencil skirt, and looked sexier than Ann Corio at the end of her act.

The columnist looked at her skeptically over the glasses halfway down his droopy nose. “‘Normal’ being a relative term where Mike Hammer is concerned.”

“Normal,” I said, patting my partner’s hand, “is having Velda back at her desk, where she belongs.”

She smirked at me. “That’s your version of barefoot and pregnant, right?”

I raised my hands in surrender. Some battles just aren’t worth fighting.

“You know, Mike,” Hy said, that naturally dour puss of his at odds with the laughter in his eyes, “you’re really slipping.”

“Am I?”

Velda said, “Oh, I don’t know, Hy. If he was slipping, then the other day he’d have been splashed all over the sidewalk like our hitman friend.”

Hy sipped coffee, then said to me, “What I mean is—the biggest contract killing ring since Murder, Incorporated, and you let
Pat
take it to the finish line? It’s not like you, Mike.”

Velda said, “Oh, my fearless leader’s not satisfied. He’s still snooping around the edges of the case, like a dog looking for the right tree.”

“With the bad guy in the morgue?” Hy said. Right now there was something pixie-ish in the middle-aged man’s expression. “Since when did you care about loose ends, Mike?”

“This whole thing has been about loose ends,” I said. “Maybe you shouldn’t head home to the beach and the sunshine just yet. I might have a story for you that’ll put you back on the front page.”

Hy waved that away. “It’s been a long time since I worked the crime beat, Mike. Those two Broadway musicals I covered this trip were criminal enough.”

“Well,” Velda said, “maybe Gwen Foster’s new one will make your next trip worthwhile.”

“Oh?”

I said, “Yeah, she called this morning. She’s going to back the production herself that her late father and the unlamented Leif were going to mount.”

“That girl’s going places,” Hy said. He checked his watch. “And so am I. I need to get back to the Plaza to pack and check out before heading to LaGuardia.”

He grabbed the check and gave Velda a kiss on the cheek, and headed out.

She and I had another cup of coffee.

“Mike,” she said softly, “why aren’t you satisfied that this thing is over? Pat seems to be.”

“It’s those damn loose ends, kitten.”

“Too many of them.”

“No. Not enough.”

She frowned, but didn’t ask for an explanation, which was fine, because I wasn’t sure I had one.

I flagged a cab and we took a ride to a certain corner on Lexington. It wasn’t on the way to the office, but my excuse was that I wanted to pick up the magazines that Billy regularly held for me.

He was back at the old stand, literally, a small, distinctive figure in his old plaid cap and new padded jacket, replacing the one that got shot up. Colorful comic-book covers were on racks at right and left, and the best newsstand selection of papers, paperbacks, and periodicals in Manhattan was on festive display under the little roof.

The tallest Singer Midget gave me the stack of magazines with
Saga
on top and
Playboy
hidden half-way down, out of respect to Velda.

I said, “You don’t look much the worse for wear, kiddo.”

“Hey, Mike, I feel like a million bucks and change. It’s like I took a rest cure!” Billy grinned at Velda on my arm, and there was a hint of lechery in it. “And best of all, I had me a real babe of a nurse.”

She gave him a kiss on the forehead that must have made at least his day and probably his week. Then we caught another cab and headed back to our home base at the Hackard Building.

The afternoon went quickly. I had some insurance company paperwork to deal with that had piled up. Velda had stacks of mail to go through, and now and then she’d come into my office with a question or a menial task—sign this, check that.

“Hey, you got something today from that Dr. Beech,” she said, waving an envelope at me.

“Wonder what this is,” I said, taking it. “Pat should be dealing with him by now, going after those contract-kill donors. I don’t see where I’d have anything to do with Dr. Beech at this point.”

She shrugged and went out, moving in that liquid way, like her bottom was operating on pistons. I took time out to watch. Some views you can’t ever see too many times.

The letter from Beech did include a paragraph about cooperating with Pat, but mostly it was something else. Something that made me really smile. I tucked the letter away and tossed it on the desk and had a big old laugh that damn near rattled the blinds.

Velda stuck her head in. “What’s so darn funny?”

“Nothing, doll. I just have a sick sense of humor.”

She smirked. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

I reached for the phone and soon had Pat on the line.

“What is it, Mike? Kind of busy here.”

“Why, is there a line of cops going out your door wanting to pat you on the back? Or maybe you have to see the Commissioner to hear about a medal or commendation for service above the—”

“Or maybe I’m just trying to live down saving Mike Hammer’s tail. You think there aren’t guys on the force who wouldn’t have liked to see you fall off that ledge? That would’ve been the splat heard round the department.”

He had a point.

“Just a couple of things I’d like to go over,” I said. “Some things aren’t tracking for me.”

“Okay.” Slight impatience in it.

“The other day, I got a look at that bank book you found. That hundred grand was deposited in a new account, just a few days before. Doesn’t that make your antennae tingle?”

There was a shrug in his voice. “Not particularly. I’m sure guys in Clark’s business move money around all the time. Is that all, Mike?”