Gat Heat (20 page)

We were pretty well out in a reasonably authentic jungle by now. Might even be eagles out here. Possibly we should be heading back, I thought. Besides, Burma had been kind of gently moving my hand once in a while, sort of sliding it around against her warmsoftness, and within the last few seconds her unconscious seemed to have taken a turn for the worse, because—how it happened I shall really never know for certain—somehow she'd gotten my hand turned around so that not its back but its front was pressed against her soft warmnest, and anybody who didn't know what was going on might have concluded I was deliberately clutching her bird in my hand. I was pretty uncomfortable.

The thing was, because of that circumstance plus the fact that Burma and I were walking side by side and still on that narrow path, in order not to dislocate my arm at the shoulder it had become necessary for me to sort of stoop forward and twist my body a bit, thus adopting a rather spastic posture not strikingly suitable for strolling along Lover's Lane.

Burma didn't seem to notice anything unusual, however, in my somewhat hobbling and sidling gait. Maybe it was the way she always walked in the woods with guys she was crazy about.

Yeah, she was crazy about me. She'd practically come right out and said it.

She had also been telling me how, when she'd heard the shots just after noon today, she had rushed from her desk—she worked downtown. She'd even told me where. It was in a big building, down there. Down there somewhere. And when she'd seen that white-haired corpse lying there in pools of blood … She choked up then.

She slowed, came to a stop.

“Shell,” she said, in a voice charged with emotion.

“Yeah?” I started straightening up. “Uhh—ack.”

“What's the matter, darling?”

“I've, uh, got a little crick in my back and arm, that's all. There—Oh—
aah!
Think that got it.”

“Shell …” She moved close. That is, even closer. Pretty damn close. “Do you see? Do you understand now?”

There were tears in her little-gray-fleck-flecked hazel eyes. She was weeping.

It was all clear now, clear as glass. Why, when she'd seen that poor old man plugged she'd thought it was Shell Scott. Me lying there in pools of blood. She'd thought
I
was dead. Dead—after all her dreams … her hungers … her scrapbooks.

“Shell …”

“Yeah?”

“You do understand?”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

“Darling I want you to—to kiss me just once. Just once before we go back.”

“Once? What's this once? We're on Lover's Lane, aren't we? Way out here in the wilds? All alone? Just us and the trees and little birds, right? What's with once? Twice, three times—maybe even a score, a gross—”

That was as far as I got.

She put both arms around my neck and flowed against me and up me like a warm flesh river, her lips finding mine, and then we came to the rapids. I felt her lips on my lips, knew her tongue and her fingertips, a hand strayed over my cheek, long fingernails sharp against my neck, the hand straying, straying …

Well, all I can say is, no matter what might have been scheduled by the Fates to follow that kiss, it was indisputably a kiss worth kissing. More than that it was to a mere kiss what one cold A and B is to the whole can of hot alphabet soup. It was as though luscious, lovelorn, Hungry Burma O'Hare had been saving up for years and years, the dear; and in one grand and imaginative moment deposited it all, plus accumulated interest compounded, on my amazed chops.

She moved away from me after a minute or two. Or three. Who counts? She sighed a big sigh and said, “Wait here, darling. I'll be right back.”

“Back? Where you going? Here we are in the trees … With the birds …”

She was a hundred feet away already. Maybe she had a weak bladder.

No,
I
was the one with the weak bladder.

So would you have been if you could have seen what I saw and heard what I heard.

What I saw was Burma O'Hare disappearing around a curve in the path; and then coming around that same curve—coming this way very speedily—four hard-looking and apparently maniacal individuals.

Individual hoods, undoubtedly; they had the look of hoods, and they had the enormous deadly ugly guns of hoods.

What I heard was a bunch of yelling from those hoods, punctuated by two or three shots. Maybe four. Who counts?

Besides, I had a lot of other things to think about.

Burma baby, I was thinking. You must have known, huh? Sure, you must have. But how could you? Why? What about those hungry nights and all? And your scrapboo …

Of course. No scrapbooks. She didn't really think I was the nuts after all. She had been pulling my leg. She'd pulled it clear off, and was running like sixty, probably 3,000 yards away by now, carrying the dismembered organ with her. All she'd ever wanted was my leg. So, now she had it. Well—if I lived, of course, which didn't seem very likely at the moment—I intended to give her the foot that went with it.

It didn't seem likely I was going to live, because those enormous deadly ugly hoods were thundering this way, shooting at me, and in a trice were going to kill me.

But I stood there thinking a little bit more. There was something I had to get clear. I have a very independent mind. Which is to say, sometimes I have no control over it at all.

Burma, I thought, Burma O'Hare. She'd brought me here deliberately, inveigled me into the wilds, and—somehow … how?—managed to tip the hoods so they could come out here and shoot me a lot. Which, assuredly, they were going to do. But that means—sure. It meant a lot of things, many of them of more than passing interest.

But prime among them—corroboration of previous thought, capstone to logic, the big, fat, sick, sad one—was the thought I had thought before.

Thought before and now thought again, but this time for good and all, for ever and ever, unchangeable through all eternity:

Dilly Pickle
was
a girl.

17

Great, I told myself; now you tell me.

Because those ugly hoods were now twice as close as they'd been before, and shooting something fierce. Shooting wildly so far, but in a trice they were going to kill me. I was dead.

No, not yet dead. In a trice I'd be dead.

But in half a trice I leaped sideways what must have been, could it ever have been measured, a full fourteen feet through the air, clunking into a gnarled tree trunk, which severely bruised an arm and leg, and did my head a lot of good when it snapped over and hit a boll, or knot, or embryo limb, or whatever those extraordinarily hard lumps on tree trunks are.

There was no point in running. Not with my head like that. Not on one leg, anyhow. Besides, I don't run from hoods. Not if I can help it. And I could help it. So it was four-to-one, so what? Wasn't I an ex-Marine?

Maybe there was something about the setting, too, which addled me. The darkling sky—though the sun hadn't set yet, it was getting darker—and the thunder of those guys' feet, the hiss of air leaking through my teeth, the yells in my ears. It was savage, blood-heating. I could feel my features contort into a savage grimace. I went swiftly into a crouchy squat; I sent my right hand flashing—flashing like lightning—up toward my holster. Oh—ack. My arm still had such a crick in it I hit my damn belt buckle.

Well, I'll have to do better than
that,
I told myself. I started cricking my hand up toward my holster again—and even while yowling softly as the stretched and agonized muscles protested, I realized something else awful.

I remembered putting three slugs into Skiko. And not reloading my Colt since then. Which meant there were only three slugs in the gun—three slugs, and four guys out there. Four guys getting closer.

I'd even been able to recognize two of them by this time. One was gargantuan Fleck, farthest away but recognizable from his massive size if nothing else. Fleck, last seen at Jimmy Violet's gate—a meaty clue if ever I'd seen one. Ahead of him was Little Phil, pumping along after a man I didn't know. And out front, nearest me, a tall, long-legged sprinter named Harry Reil, a mobster of British descent known to the boys as English 'Arry.

English 'Arry was yelling excitedly, “Theah 'e is; theah's the bahstad?” and pooping away at me with his heat.

Long since, of course, my hand had cricked to my holster. But I was still crouching there in my squat, and I yanked and yanked, and yanked some more. What had happened was this. I'd grabbed at my holster, and that's what I'd got: my holster.

That was funny. Supposed to be a gun in there. A .38 Colt Special with three bullets in it; that's what was supposed to be there. But it wasn't. No .38 Colt Special. Not even a peashooter. How could it be?

There was a gunshot, and a slug sped past about an inch from my head. Maybe two inches. And I was standing there sort of wonderingly running a couple of fingers around inside my empty holster. Of course, very little actual time had elapsed since I'd flown through the air like a bir—like an airplane. Possibly two seconds. And I stood there for maybe one more second, during which I thought at least a couple minutes' worth.

Dilly Pickle, I thought.

Yeah. She was a dilly, all right. And she'd sure got me into a pickle. I'd had it figured backwards. Which, probably, she'd counted on.

It was all clear as glass now.
That
was why she'd been loving me up, up and down, all over the place, pressing her woweewow against me, pooching her luscious wild lips at me. Turning me on temporarily had been part of her plan to turn me off permanently.

I'd been thinking it was my savage charm—have to get
that
idea out of my head once and for all I guessed—which had turned her juices into jelly. She hadn't been after my savage charm. Not even my leg. Unless it was my hawgleg. It had been my
gun
she was after.

Fury rose up in me, interfering with my usual lightninglike mental processes, as I thought of Dilly Pickle. She was a goddamn picklepocket!

No, a
pick
pocket.

No, not even that. She was a pickholster.

That's what she'd done: She'd holstered my pickle. Boy,
that
was a wrong one.

I made a tremendous effort and got it clear, lucid and shining and
right,
for once and for all:
She had picked my holster
.

What it boiled down to was that, regarding armament, I was outnumbered four guns to nothing. There they came at me. And here I stood, empty-handed.

Well, not quite empty-handed. I had been brilliant enough to carry for all this wearying time my sixteen-millimeter Bolex movie camera fully loaded with a hundred feet of film. Ah, fine, fine. Nothing like planning ahead, making provision for any conceivable contingency.

There seemed nothing whatever left to do except to turn and run. Run and run and
run
. So I did.

I got a break at that—and about time, I thought.

Dilly had miscalculated in at least one small area. Two, if we include the fact that I can run like a startled antelope when necessary. But her first miscalculation had been in choosing the spot where we'd stopped.

True, there was a long straight stretch of the path—down which those guys had been and were running—which was fine for target practice; but no more than ten feet from me the path curved sharply to the right for several yards and then curved left again with equal suddenness. So when I got to that first turn, which was hardly any time at all once I'd decided that was the way to go, I was largely concealed by numerous tree trunks long enough for me to get going. I mean,
really
get going.

Every once in a while a shot cracked out, but I hadn't been hit or even nicked yet; and along with the sensation as of getting hit with ax handles atop the head was a thought: Maybe I'll actually make it. And I started wondering where I was at.

The rate I was going, I would have passed Duesenbergs speeding in the fast lane on the Freeway, but
where
was I going?

A separate path branched off to the left at one point, but by the time I saw the turnoff I was going past it. That did remind me, though, that when Dilly and I had been strolling along it, the path had curved both left and right, but continued primarily curving to our right; and that the path here at the Hidden Valley Lodge was an irregular circle extending through the woods for approximately a mile; and that I had just passed the hunk of path which led back to the Lodge.

By then I was either dizzy from lack of sufficient oxygen in my lungs or not yet thinking with admirable clarity, because I had stopped worrying about
whether
I would get away from those men behind me and begun wondering what I'd do once I had. And, how I could fix their wagons.

Along with the thought was realization that it's getting tougher and tougher to pin their jobs on hoods, tougher to make a rap stick. For good or ill, that's the way it is. You damn near have to catch them in the act of dismembering the body …

And I had it.

I was lugging my damned camera. Maybe there'd been a reason—besides the fact that I had some splendidly provocative shots of Tootsie in the exposed footage—for my hanging onto the Bolex. The next best thing to actually catching hoods in the commission of a crime should be a movie of them in the middle of it.

A shot of them chasing after me, shooting at me, should be enough for any court in the land, temporarily. That meant I would have to get into the film somehow, myself, while taking care that the action was merely of the boys shooting
at
me, not in me.

So, for one, I couldn't stand holding the camera, filming them while they ran down on top of me. And for another, I was going to have to run at least another mile.

But I was quite a bit ahead of them now—though a shot still rang out from time to time—so I sprinted as hard as I could for a hundred yards, the last thirty of which were quite straight, and then skidded to a stop. The Bolex was battery-operated and, once started, would function unaided until the film ran out, if I locked the shutter release down. But there was only one hundred feet of film, and that would run past the lens in four minutes. I didn't think I could be sure of running another mile in four minutes—not after what I'd recently been through. In fact, I was pretty sure I couldn't.