Operation Whiplash (13 page)

That outright lie earned me another sneer. “You,” Colisimo snapped at Hazel, “sign these papers. Every goddam one of ‘em.”

But the slow-thinking Ricardo spoke up. “What’d he say, Bolts, about Frank shootin’—”

“Shut up!” Colisimo blared. He jabbed the extended gun toward Hazel. “Sign!”

I nodded to Hazel. Jed sat in his chair, the sick fear in his eyes again. I wanted to keep Colisimo talking. Even better, I would have preferred him moving. As long as the counter remained between us, there wasn’t much I could do that would be effective. What I needed was something to change the equation, and as long as Colisimo stayed so close to Hazel I wasn’t going to get it.

Hazel was looking at me to see if I meant it about her signing. I nodded again, and she took the pen Colisimo thrust at her. The redhead was smart enough to know I was playing for time. She stopped in the middle of her first signature and turned to the maverick
caporegime.
“What
is
all this about?” she asked in a tone of barely suppressed irritation.

“Shut your big mouth an’ sign!” Colisimo growled in a manifestation of his own natural irascibility.

One by one Hazel slowly signed the documents. I was moving sideways by alternately shifting heels and toes, inching toward the counter and Colisimo. The gate in the counter was open, and I had reached a point where I could see Colisimo’s legs. I wished I had a chair to throw against them, but the small office was too sparsely furnished.

“Now you!” Colisimo barked when Hazel handed him back his pen. He thrust it at me.

“After you let Hazel go,” I said.

His popeyes became narrowed slits. “Get your ass over to this counter an’ sign!” he roared.

I still wanted him on my side of the counter. “You heard me,” I said. “Nothing you’ve got so far is worth anything without my signature, right?” Nothing he had was worth anything without Hazel and me stone cold dead in the market, either, but I was hoping he’d overlook my knowledge of the fact. I had to separate him from Hazel somehow.

He poked Hazel with his gun. “Better convince Drake he’s a man about to have his mind changed,” he advised. When she said nothing, he pushed her roughly through the counter gate, then followed himself. “Gimme your knife,” he said curtly to Ricardo.

“Lemme do it, Bolts,” Ricardo offered eagerly. “I’ll make ‘im sing like a nightingale.”

“Shut up!” Colisimo said rudely. “He’d have the best part of you stuck up his ass before you missed anything. Even with your shiv goin’ for you.” He herded Hazel around the desk, behind Jed. “Gimme the knife,” he said again, holding out his hand to Ricardo.

I’d been afraid he’d go after Hazel with his gunbutt to force me to sign. Instead, he raised the knife toward her face. I had the bastard inside the counter now, but things weren’t a bit better than they had been previously.

“Well?” he growled, looking over his shoulder at me. His eyes showed the tension built up in him by his long series of setbacks in Hudson. They were bulging to a degree that matched them in appearance with hard-boiled eggs.

“Give me the pen,” I said.

He backed away from Hazel before he tossed the knife back to Ricardo. Then he tossed his pen to me, and I caught it. The gun was leveled at me again when I looked up. So far Colisimo hadn’t made a single mistake.

I turned toward the counter. The heavy-set gangster chief stationed himself eight feet away from me, on the inside of the counter but on the other side of the opened gate. “Don’t get fancy,” he said. He had changed his priority of gun-leveling from Hazel to me, because I was closest to the door, but even if he hadn’t, I couldn’t bolt through the counter gate and try for the door. That would leave Hazel in their hands even if I succeeded in ducking Colisimo’s bullets. He was standing between me and my automatic, which was at the far end of the counter. Colisimo was stage-managing the affair as well as I could have myself.

I turned the legal-looking documents around in my direction and began to sign. I didn’t try to read them. There was only one thing they could be: the total relinquishment by Hazel and me of all claims to her worldly goods and the chattels. I wondered fleetingly if Colisimo could be bought off by a cash offer from Hazel’s estate. I dismissed that idea immediately. Right now he thought he had it all.

“Okay,” he said when I finished. I still hadn’t been able to come up with a reasonable course of action. “You sign now as a witness,” he said to Ricardo. “Then we’ll take this pair out into the swamp an’ lose ‘em.” He grinned at me savagely.

“Three,” Ricardo reminded him, pointing at Jed still tied in his chair.

“Yeah, sure,” Colisimo agreed.

“I got chains in the trunk of my car that’ll guarantee it’s permanent,” Ricardo said. He went to the counter and picked up the pen I had left on top of the documents. He was close enough to me so I could have jumped him. The trouble was, a pro like Colisimo wouldn’t panic. He’d get back to Hazel and threaten to pistol-whip her until I turned his man loose.

Ricardo was signing busily, a self-satisfied smirk on his face, when from the corner of my eye I saw a dark shadow drift through the shattered outer door. It was close to the floor. I had time for no more than one exultant heartbeat before a bleeding Kaiser rushed through the counter gate and skidded to a stop.

The dog was closest to Ricardo, and I didn’t hesitate. “Take him!” I exclaimed, pointing. Kaiser launched himself with a gut-chilling growl, and Ricardo’s panic-stricken backward step availed him nothing against the receipt of 110 pounds of shepherd on his chest. He went over backward, screaming shrilly, hand-fighting Kaiser to keep the snapping fangs from his throat. They landed on the floor with Kaiser on top.

Colisimo’s reaction had been instantaneous. He started toward the desk and Hazel who was still standing behind it. “Don’t move, Drake, or I’ll kill the broad!” his voice rapped at me.

For a second I thought Colisimo had recovered the advantage. He was charging toward Hazel while keeping one eye on me and the other on the man-dog imbroglio on the floor. But that left him vulnerable from a direction he didn’t expect. Hazel took a single step toward him and sank her fist, with all her hundred-fifty pounds behind it, just above his belt buckle. Colisimo doubled over with a gasping “Oooff!” Hazel kicked the gun out of his slackened hand, then darted toward the Ricardo-Kaiser melee where the knifeman was trying to roll over on top of the dog.

I thought we were home free.

I streaked for the end of the counter where Colisimo had shoved my automatic.

Every pitcher goes to the well too often.

A gun went off behind me, and a bolt of lightning struck the back of my left arm between elbow and shoulder. It slammed me into the counter, but my hand closed around the butt of my automatic. Colisimo had showed me how his reputation had been acquired, and that I wasn’t the only man who carried two guns. I whirled toward him and fired in the same movement. The.22 in his hand jumped up into the air as my bullet caught him in the wrist. He sank to his knees, face screwed up in shock and pain.

My arm felt as if it were on fire. I straightened up from the counter against which I had been supporting myself with my right elbow. My knees felt marrowless. Hazel was on the floor beside Ricardo, pounding his head with the heel of her shoe while Kaiser remained locked onto his throat.

I held my automatic on the shrunken-looking Colisimo while I wobbled toward the furiously convulsed rough-and-tumble on the floor. One look was enough to tell me that Hazel and Kaiser were wasting their time. “Hold it!” I tried to say. It came out like a schoolgirl’s soprano. I had to punch Hazel on the shoulder to get her attention. I waved her away. “He’s—finished.”

“You’re hit!” she exclaimed sharply when she looked up.

I kneed Kaiser away from Ricardo. The big dog unclenched his powerful jaws reluctantly. I pointed to Ricardo’s knife on the floor. “Cut Jed—loose,” I said to Hazel.

“Let me fix your arm, Earl. We—”

“Cut—Jed loose!” I repeated.

She picked up the knife and scrambled to her feet, then went swiftly to Jed in his swivel chair. I walked unsteadily toward Colisimo, who was trying to get up off his knees. “The rest of the party’s—on you, man,” I told him. I put my foot against his chest and kicked him onto his back.

Jed appeared beside me, rubbing his reddened wrists. He was breathing heavily. He was so white in the face he looked one degree removed from an outright faint. I didn’t give him a chance to say anything. “People—heard this,” I said. “Get out of that shirt—and down on the street and pretend—you’re looking for the source of the noise, too. Tell them you were asleep—at your desk when you heard it.”

Jed stripped off his slashed shirt. He shrugged into a jacket he took from a hook on the reverse side of the broken door, then hurried down the outside stairs. I was watching Colisimo, but he should be no immediate problem. He was no more interested in inviting police intervention than I was.

Hazel came over and looked at my arm. The bullet had passed right through, and it was bleeding front and back. It throbbed like an aching tooth. “At least I can stop the bleeding,” she said after her examination. She was careful not to step into the line of fire between Colisimo and me.

She reached under the neckline of her dress and snapped the shoulder-straps of her slip one after the other. She wriggled the slip down her body until it collapsed around her ankles, then stepped out of it, picked it up, and tore it into strips. I could hear my own breathing as she bandaged the wound. There’s nothing like a bullet wound to remind a man of his mortality.

I could hear sounds from the street. I could see that Hazel was listening, too. A murmur of voices increased steadily, and then an individual spokesman could be heard. “Y’ reckon all that was a truck backfirin’, Jed?” someone called from a little distance away.

“Damned if I know,” Jed’s voice replied.

“Didn’t sound like no backfirin’ to me,” another voice said.

There was the sound of the squeal of brakes. “Anyone know what’s goin’ on?” an official-sounding voice inquired.

Again there was the blended sound of several voices.

“Some drunk celebratin’, maybe.”

“With a gun?”

“Maybe it only sounded like a gun,” Jed’s voice said.

“We’ll take a look around,” the official-sounding voice stated. I heard the sound of the cruiser pulling away. Then there was the squeak of brakes again and the whine of a car in reverse. “Little party upstairs, Jed?” the official voice called. “These cars—”

“A little party, sure,” Jed answered.

“Everything’s all right?”

“Fine.”

“Jed’s parties are always all right,” another voice said. A loud laugh followed, and the police car drove off. I could hear Jed speaking to a couple of men, but even from the second floor it was obvious the group below was breaking up. Hazel had finished her nearly-professional bandaging job when Jed reclimbed the stairs and entered the office.

“They’re gone,” he said unnecessarily. He passed a shaky hand over his face before coming over to me and extending the hand. “Anything I said before—”

“Forget it,” I said. I knew he was humiliated by his almost total collapse, but there was almost nothing in his background that would have predicated a more hard-nosed response.

Kaiser was still sitting beside Ricardo’s body, occasionally nosing it tentatively. I snapped my fingers at the dog, and he looked up at me alertly. I pointed to Colisimo. “Watch him,” I said. The shepherd rose and glided across the floor. He sat again within six feet of the gangster. There was fresh blood on the shepherd’s muzzle as well as the dried blood on his head. Colisimo shrank away from the dog’s proximity, but Kaiser moved forward and maintained the same distance between them.

“Kaiser must have slipped through the car’s broken window after he regained consciousness,” Hazel observed.

“And a damn good thing,” I said fervently. It was probably psychological, but Hazel’s bandage seemed to restore some of my strength that had been sapped by Colisimo’s bullet. “He certainly turned things around when he got here.” I turned around so Hazel could reach my left hand pocket where I’d put the car keys. I didn’t feel like bending my arm. “Give the car keys to Jed and have him back our car down the street in front here.”

Jed left the office again. Colisimo was still sitting on the floor. He was cradling his right wrist in his left hand. He looked like a miniature of the man who had entered the office pushing Hazel ahead of him with his gun. Only the incongruous-looking white carnation in his lapel seemed unchanged. Colisimo’s fat face was greasy-looking with perspiration.

Jed returned for the second time and handed the car keys to Hazel. She looked at me inquiringly. “We’ve got to clean up here now so Jed won’t have questions to answer afterwards,” I told her. I nodded at Carlie’s body behind the desk. “We’ll carry him downstairs and load him into the back seat of his own car—” I had to pause because of shortness of breath “—carrying him upright so if anyone’s watching it’ll look like we’re supporting a drunk.”

“Jed and I will do it,” Hazel said at once. “You can’t do any carrying with that arm. Besides, if anyone’s watching it will look better if they see a woman. Jed said it was a party, didn’t he?”

Her logic was flawless.

I went behind the desk with them and helped one handedly while Charlie’s body was hauled onto its feet. Jed and Hazel took an arm each and marched the corpse to the open door. They maneuvered their awkward burden down the narrow outside stairway with scraping and bumping sounds. I heard a car door open.

Kaiser’s brown eyes were fixed unwaveringly upon the sweating Bolts Colisimo.

I turned my left arm gingerly until I could see my wrist-watch.

From the time I had parked the car and started back to Jed’s office, a total of thirteen minutes had elapsed.

Hazel and Jed came back into the office after depositing their burden in the back seat of the gangster car. Jed was breathing more heavily than Hazel from the effort required. I helped them stand Ricardo’s floppy-limbed body erect. The torn-out throat had leaked crimson through more holes than a colander.

“Just a minute,” I said.

I picked up an unused strip from Hazel’s slip and wrapped it around the throat in case they ran into anyone on the sidewalk. Jed avoided watching what I was doing. The knife-point wound on his cheek glowed redly.

The pair made their second trip down the stairs while I gathered up the documents Hazel and I had signed. I ripped them up into small pieces before consigning them to a metal wastebasket, then set fire to the fragments. I was stirring the ashes with a ruler I took from Jed’s desk when Colisimo spoke unexpectedly from behind me.

“Look, we can do business,” he said hoarsely. “You know I got money. What kind of deal d’you want t’ make?”

Never let a rat know it’s cornered.

That knowledge prevents the blindly instinctive, self-preservatory lashing-out of the final moment; instead, the rat will give full concentration to its predicament.

“We’ll talk,” I said easily. “But right now we’ve got some housecleaning to do.”

Colisimo subsided, satisfied.

I knew his type. His cunning brain was devising and discarding multiples of possible means of turning the tables. Meantime he would talk peace while planning all-out war. And if none of his plans came to anything, he would make peace. Colisimo would make a deal to save himself, no matter how unpalatable that bitter pill was to him.

But Bolts Colisimo wasn’t going to have the chance to make a deal.

I couldn’t afford to have him alive.

There was no one left now to deny any stories he chose to tell Family groups about interference from Hazel and me. His stories would connect us with Family enterprises, not his own private projects, and this would result in continuing Family searches for us. Only Colisimo’s silence could prevent such searches from taking place.

I spoke directly to Hazel when she again returned with Jed. “You’re going to need someone here to pull your affairs together,” I said. “Why don’t you give Jed a power of attorney?”

“That’s a
wonderful
idea!” she exclaimed warmly. “He can look after things like Nate did. Do you have a form, Jed?”

Kindhearted Hazel was all in favor of doing something nice for Jed, whose life we had inadvertently almost ruined. My own purpose was less altruistic. Jed Raymond was a nice boy, but under pressure he was a broken reed. I wanted him with a financial interest in keeping silent about recent events in case he was asked any questions by the authorities.

“I could type one up,” Jed was saying. I hustled him to his desk. He sat down at his typewriter, then looked at his shaking hands as though wondering what they were for.

“You dictate and I’ll type,” Hazel said tactfully. They changed places, and Hazel rattled the keys rapidly while Jed dictated. Hazel pulled an original and carbon from the typewriter, signed the original quickly, and handed it to Jed. He stood with it in his hand as though he didn’t know what to do with it. He was a long way from being over his state of shock.

“So long,” I said to him, extending my hand.

He shook it bewilderedly. “But—but what’s going to happen now?” he wanted to know.

“We’ll dump the garbage and take off. Keep your nose clean and the home fires burning.”

Hazel kissed him on the cheek, and his lips moved soundlessly.

“Take the Ford,” I told Hazel. “Drive east on Main about two miles until you see two signs that say
BAIT AND TACKLE FOR HIRE
and
AIRBOAT FOR HIRE
. Stop at the first one. I’ll bring him along.” I jerked a thumb over my shoulder at Colisimo. “With Kaiser on the seat between us so I can concentrate on the driving. Hit it, baby. Daylight’s gaining on us.”

She went to the door. On the landing I could see her stiffen. “Earl!” she said tensely from the corner of her mouth. “There’s a police cruiser with its light off parked across the street.”

“Wave to us,” I directed her. “Smile. Then do what I told you.”

She waved.

She smiled.

I could hear her descending the stairs.

I breathed more easily when I heard the Ford start up and drive away. I looked at Colisimo. “Parole violation’s the least of what you’ll go up for if you call attention to us,” I said. “If you live long enough to go up for anything.”

“I don’t wanna talk to no cops,” he protested.

We were in complete agreement on that score.

“Car keys,” I said. He tossed them to me. I started him down the stairway ahead of me with Kaiser on his heels. I followed, but I stopped halfway down. “Hell of a party, man!” I shouted to Jed. “Let’s do it again real soon over at my place!”

I could see no movement in the police cruiser when I reached the sidewalk. The gangster car was a long and expensive Lincoln limousine. In the corners of the back seat Carlie and Ricardo seemingly embraced drunken slumber. I opened the front door and Kaiser flowed effortlessly onto the seat. The shepherd seemed to have fully recovered from his double head-knock. I motioned to Colisimo, and he got in gingerly, his eyes on the dog. I walked around the car, got in, and started the engine. It purred with quiet power.

Hazel and the Ford were nowhere in sight. I started off slowly toward the traffic light, then watched in the rear-view mirror as the cruiser’s lights came on and swung in a big arc as it turned to follow us.

Jed Raymond was a local businessman and entitled to some latitude, but in the view of the cops in the cruiser, they’d be negligent if they didn’t ask politely for a look at my license. Probably only the presence of Hazel and Kaiser, unlikely adjuncts to criminal enterprise, had kept us from an outright stand-and-frisk.

The condition of my back-seat passengers ruled against any cooperation with the law. I mashed down on the accelerator. The Lincoln almost jumped out from under us. I was under the traffic light before the cruiser had completed its turn-around. I drove straight ahead. Twenty yards beyond the light I punched the switch that turned off the limousine’s lights, then turned and bumped across the sidewalk into the first opening I saw between two buildings.

We sat in silence while the police cruiser roared by on the highway. Away from Hudson. Away from Hazel.

Colisimo sighed heavily. “How’d a citizen like you ever get to be such an operator?” he asked.

I didn’t try to answer him.

It had been a long time and many ventures ago that I had been a citizen in the nonparticipatory straight world that Bolts Colisimo meant.

I backed out of the space between the buildings, turned left at the light, and drove two miles. The Ford was parked at the
bait and tackle for rent
sign, fifty yards from Casey Deakin’s old shack with its crumbling dock. Hazel got out and approached me. The dawn light was dirty gray. “Hide the Ford the best place you can find on the other side of the road,” I told her. Sooner or later the cops in the cruiser were going to backtrack and cast a wider net.

I drove the Lincoln off the road, down a gentle incline, out of sight of the highway. Water lapped quietly at the edge of the swamp. Fifty yards away three airboats danced gently, moored to stakes sunk in muddy-looking water.

“Watch him!” I said to Kaiser
re
Colisimo before I left the car. And to Colisimo, I added: “He knows who hit him on the head.”

I walked to the airboats, waded out, pulled up the stake of the nearest one, and began to tow it silently along the curving, swampy water’s edge. I kept at it until I had it in front of the old dock near Deakins’ place.

I went back to the Lincoln and backed it around the curve until its rear wheels were in the water at the dock. I didn’t have to tell Colisimo what came next. No one knew better than he did that the first order of business was getting rid of the bodies in the back seat. We worked at it together, hampered by the fact we each had only one good arm. Fortunately it was my right and his left which made the heavy-duty work possible. Colisimo worked as hard as I did, because he still thought he was going to make a deal.

We dragged the bodies from the car to the airboat and then thumped them down into the scooped-out space in front of the huge propeller in its wire cage. Colisimo kept looking down at his suit to see if he had any blood on it. Kaiser paced beside us every step of both trips.

I left him with Colisimo while I went back to the Lincoln. I opened the trunk and found half a dozen lengths of heavy chain. I carried three of them, one-handed, to the airboat and dumped them on top of the bodies.

Hazel came down the bank and watched silently while I drove the Lincoln up out of the water to make sure it hadn’t become mired. I gave her the keys. “Drive this thing down the road half a mile and leave it with the key in it,” I told her. “Then let’s hope someone comes along with larceny in his heart. I’ll be back in half an hour.”

I waited while she drove the Lincoln up the incline onto the highway. Then I loaded Colisimo and Kaiser onto the square bow of the airboat’s platform, scant inches above the water. Kaiser would be between me and Colisimo while I was operating the craft. I still had the derringer in its spectacles-case holster on my shin. It gave me the complacent feeling of a poker player who draws the fourth ace.

The last bit of luck I felt I needed was for the airboat engine to start. It started with an ear-shattering roar sure to draw the attention of the owner from whom I’d liberated it. But nothing could stop me now. I eased in the throttle and experimented with the tiller as we moved slowly away from the dock into the winding waterway that led into the depths of the thirty-acre swamp. The boat handled nicely.

I knew where I was going.

I’d been there before, via the same method, and for the same purpose.

The airboat glided over an occasional tussock of swamp grass as I navigated the channel. The air was dank and heavy amidst the gnarled mangroves and cypresses. The boat had a headlight, but natural light had increased to the point I didn’t need it.

I made a right turn into a branch channel, a left, and another right. I cut the engine then, and the boat drifted up to a greasy-looking patch of antediluvian swamp mud in which oily bubbles constantly appeared and disappeared.

Colisimo turned to look at me in the sudden silence. I stepped up on the rear platform, keeping the engine between us. “Wrap them and dump them,” I told him. I whistled to Kaiser, who otherwise wouldn’t have let the squat man past him.

Colisimo shrugged and came to the stern. He wrapped the first body in a length of chain and heaved it over the side with a grunt. It hit in the ooze and began to sink at once. It was already out of sight when Colisimo repeated the performance with his second henchman.

“Now let’s talk a little business,” he said then in the manner of a man who has just taken care of all the unimportant details before arriving at the main transaction.

When he turned around, I didn’t have to say anything.

He saw it in my face before he saw the automatic in my hand.

Blind rage suffused his dark features a choleric gentian hue. Gun or no gun, he started around the engine casing after me. There was nothing else he could do, of course. I had him in the front sight when he stumbled unseeingly over Kaiser. Arms flailing, Colisimo’s squat body failed in its attempt to right itself. He pitched heavily from the airboat platform into the mud.

The sounds from the mucky ooze didn’t last long.

When they stopped, there was only a white carnation floating on the deceptively watery-looking surface.

I threw the remaining chain on top of the carnation.

Kaiser and I rode the airboat back through the swamp to a spot a little distance away from where its irate owner might be awaiting its return. We walked along the bank below the surface of the road until we came to Casey Deakin’s shack.

We climbed up on the highway then.

It was almost full sunrise when Hazel drove up in the Ford.

We made one more stop in Hudson, Florida, and that was at Jed Raymond’s back door where I left Kaiser. I told the dog to stay. He whined, but he made no move to follow when I got back in the car.

I leaned back and tried to relax while Hazel wheeled us out of there.