Читать книгу A Gunman Close Behind - A. A. Glynn - Страница 5

CHAPTER ONE

Ever hear that old saying about massive oaks starting out as tiny acorns?

There’s a lot in it. I know.

I once brought a big ruckus down on my head simply because I gave a girl a ride during a rainstorm.

I was bringing back a neat line in suntan from Florida. Three weeks of lying on the beaches were at my back; I had been away from it all while another hand steered World Wide Investigations from its headquarters on Madison Avenue, New York City.

Now I was heading back in a roundabout way, driving through Indiana to pay a surprise call on an old buddy, Jack Kay, up in South Bend.

I remember the way I felt. Glowing and newly charged with energy. The coupe hummed along the highway as though in tune to the brassy swing number blaring out of the car radio.

The world seemed all right.

The southland, with the motels where I spent the last couple of nights, was behind me, as were the Indiana towns of Indianapolis, Westfield, Kokomo, and Peru.

The sudden summer shower started somewhere between Peru and Plymouth. There was a white flimmer of lightning off on the flat horizon. A cluster of black clouds boiled up over the highway and big drops of rain came slashing down in a deluge. I wound up the hood of the coupe quickly.

It was growing dark fast.

Twenty minutes of driving through the downpour, and I saw the girl.

She was walking towards Plymouth, humping a grip, a slight figure out on the rain-slicked highway. As I drew nearer, I could see she wore only a light summer costume, clinging to her, as sodden as if she had been capering fully clothed in the nearby swamps.

I hit the brakes a little way past her and called back through the rain:

“Want a ride?”

She came forward cautiously, and I saw her face, heart-shaped, elfin and with strands of short-cut black hair rain-plastered around it. She was somewhere around twenty-four.

I sat with the door of the coupe held open, turned about to face her.

The engine thrummed and the big drops of rain hit the car like wet bullets.

Maybe it was the scar on my face; sometimes I catch sight of myself in a mirror and realise how like a bad guy in a “B” movie it makes me appear. She came gingerly through the curtain of rain, as though I was a Grimm goblin. Then she hastened her pace and hefted the grip into the car.

“I’m going to South Bend,” I said. “Where are you making for?”

“South Bend,” she answered. Her voice was breathless and held an odd mixture of fear and thankfulness.

In my racket you get to sizing up people by their speech and actions almost by instinct. There was something on this girl’s mind for sure.

She settled herself into the seat beside me, with the grip on the floor. Before I kicked the car forward, she turned her head for a long look at the gloomy, rain-swept highway behind. I could see the scared look on her face. It was as if she expected the devil himself to come whooping along from the direction of Peru.

I wondered what she was running from, but that was no concern of mine, I was just a guy giving her a ride to South Bend.

Sneaking a look at her in the imperfect light, I saw definite signs of strain on her pretty, rain-wet features. She looked like somebody’s kid sister from anywhere at all: wet, shivery, and, above all, scared.

We made the usual, meaningless small talk about the weather as the headlights picked out a path on the glistening highway.

At one point the sound of a vehicle came purring upon us from the rear. The girl turned hastily, half ducked behind the back of the seat and looked out of the rear window. I saw fear written clear across her face as she watched the rain-distorted lights gain on us.

It was merely a bus heading for Plymouth. As she turned about again, the girl threw me a self-conscious glance which I saw but pretended not to notice. The fear, almost terror, in her face had me worried.

The bus rocketed by, its lighted windows dwindling before us in the watery darkness. A little world of people passing in the night.

I thought it was a smart idea to get to know her name, in case I heard of a young woman missing from somewhere or other, so I said:

“My name’s Mike Lantry, by the way.” I tried to make it casual.

She looked at me quickly and said: “The Investigator?” There was a tone to her voice that gave me a premonition of something other than the driving rain being in the wind.

I nodded.

“I’m Joanne Kilvert,” she said.

Right then, just as I was about to take a sudden bend in the road, she turned to look out of the rear window. I heard her give a little squeak and saw her duck down in the seat.

“It’s them,” she said urgently and huskily. “Put your foot down—they mustn’t see me!”

I could see her face, white and terror-stricken, in the glow of the dashboard. She was as scared as a kitten, and it was catching.

Automatically, without any questions, I gave the car the gun as we approached the bend. I took a quick glance over my shoulder to see a big sedan whirring along about a hundred and fifty yards behind, slashing the curtain of rain with powerful headlamps.

We took the bend almost on two wheels. The headlights picked out a stand of trees to our left; splitting their dark bulk was a dirt road. Without hesitation, I put the coupe into a screeching turn and headed up the dirt road. The big sedan had yet to make the turn in the highway, but it would be in sight any second.

Going up that dirt road may have been a fool thing to do, but it was the most immediate way of avoiding that sedan, and the stark terror on Joanne Kilvert’s face prompted me to make use of this one chance of keeping whoever followed us from seeing her.

I stopped over a hump in the dirt road and switched off the engine and lights. We were deep in the trees. We sat waiting, panting as though we had just run clear from Peru.

Through the trees we saw the sedan come into view. It went flashing past, a black streak on the highway, the white spears of its headlights slithering off the rain-polished boles of the trees.

Then it was gone.

“Who’s in that car?” I asked.

“Some men I want to avoid.”

I boiled over at that.

“That’s as obvious as hell,” I told her, “or have you taken it on the lam from some happy hatch?”

She made no reply but grabbed my arm.

“They’re coming back!” She breathed the words urgently, and I could just see her wide eyes in the darkness.

Back from the direction in which it had originally travelled rocketed the black sedan. The headlamps flashed almost angrily through the interstices of the trees down by the highway. It came to a sudden stop close to the opening of the dirt road, its brakes keening on a high note.

“They’ll come up here!” Joanne Kilvert’s voice was a panic-edged whisper.

“No they won’t,” I told her. “Get out and stay put.”

I flung the door of the coupe open and almost pushed her out of the car. A sharp needle of impatience jabbed at me as she began to lug the grip after her.

“Don’t bother with that.”

“I must—they mustn’t get it.”

When she was clear of the car, I slammed the engine into life, whirled the vehicle about in the narrow confines of the tree-fringed dirt road and went jouncing down towards the highway. In making the turn, my headlights picked out a picture of the girl standing up against a tree. She looked lost and frightened, and I suddenly felt desperately sorry for her.

Down at the highway, three men had issued from the sedan and were in the act of entering the dark corridor of the dirt road.

They were all of medium size and had a sameness about them, like cops—or crooks. In my headlights I saw they all wore black overcoats and fedoras.

I braked.

“Lookin’ for someone?” I called over the mingled purring of my motor and that of the sedan parked on the far side of the wet-glossed highway. I tried to make my voice sound like that of an Indiana hick.

One of the trio walked towards my coupe. Under the brim of the snappy fedora, I saw a lean, high-cheekboned face with a carefully clipped moustache curving under an Italian nose. His eyes were dark and had an odd flatness. The high contours of his face glistened wetly.

He stood close to the rolled-down window of the coupe, looking at me. The engines purred and the rain spattered on the leaves high above our heads.

“You had a girl in your car,” he said. I didn’t know whether it was a statement or a question. His two friends stood around in the background with their hands deep in their coat pockets, looking like characters in a circa 1930 gangster movie.

“Yeah, sure. My girl Beaulah,” I replied in my hick voice, jerking my thumb over my shoulder at the dirt road. I had a notion these characters weren’t fooled by the hick accent; it didn’t go well with my lightweight sharkskin suit, my car, or my general appearance. But I persevered. “She lives at a farm back up the road a piece. We just been to a movie in Peru—”

“We thought,” said the man with the moustache, cutting me off in the middle of my hick act, “that you might have picked up a girl who was walking along the highway—a girl with a grip.”

“No, we didn’t pick anybody up.”

“You put on some speed when we came behind you.”

“Yep, I guess I did at that. I had to put my foot down somewhat with it gettin’ late an’ my girl’s folks bein’ so strict on her. You fellas cops? Is somethin’ wrong?”

“Not cops. We just wondered if you saw the girl.”

The guy with the clipped moustache spoke coldly and watched me with those flat eyes. I still had a feeling he wasn’t fooled by my hick talk. I remembered passing a smaller road branching off the highway shortly before I met up with the girl, and I recalled the name painted on a signboard close to it.

“She could’ve gotten a ride on a car or truck that turned off on the Logansport road, or maybe took the bus into Plymouth,” I offered.

“Maybe she did at that.”

As though that was the curtain-line at the close of some play, they turned on their heels and walked towards the sedan. I sat there in the purring coupe, watched the sedan start up and move off around the bend in the direction of Peru. Maybe they were going to scout along that Logansport road.

That, it seemed, was that; so I climbed out and hoofed it up the dirt road, leaving the motor of the coupe running.

Joanne Kilvert was still standing against the tree. The darkness and the rain made her only half-distinguishable, but I could see she held the grip, clinging to it as if it was her rich uncle.

I’m a hard man: the life I’ve led has made me so. Kicking around with a gun in one pocket and a dollar to keep you from the poorhouse in the other—the way I was before the agency got to be a big thing—and Mike Lantry was just another shamus with a shiny pants’ seat. It’s a good way to acquire a hard shell. But there are chinks in the armour. I still have feelings, and I felt sorry as hell for the lost kid standing against that tree.

I began to regret that crack about her being an escapee from a happy hatch; though, for all I knew, she could have been.

“They’ve gone,” I said. “I’m sorry I lost my temper there a couple of minutes ago.”

“Have they really gone? Are you sure?”

My grudging apology seemed to go unheeded. The fear of the men in the sedan was uppermost in her mind.

“Sure. Let’s get back to the car.”

The rain slackened as we walked down the dirt road to the highway. Joanne Kilvert kept close to me as we approached the wet banner of asphalt. Belatedly, I took the grip from her to hump it down to the coupe.

We made no conversation as I kicked the car into action and swung out of the side-road, turning for Plymouth.

The snort of an engine sounded behind us, and the sedan reappeared, humming around the bend again like a beast lunging out of ambush.

Joanne Kilvert turned about in her seat, terror mirrored on her face, and her mouth quivering.

“They’re coming after us,” she gasped. “They didn’t go away, they only went around the bend and waited for a glimpse of me. They saw me get into the car.” She seemed almost paralysed with fear. Whoever the guys in the black coats and fedoras were, they had the dark-haired girl about as scared as any human being I had seen—and frightened people were no novelty to me.

I hit the accelerator hard enough to come within a fraction of slamming the pedal through the floor. The car zoomed up the wet highway, running from the sedan like an alley-cat beating it from the toughest dog in the neighbourhood. The premonition I felt a short time before came back and rankled. I was getting mixed up in something. I didn’t know what it was, and I was growing sore as hell.

“Who are they?” I asked the girl.

She didn’t answer, she was still twisted about in the seat, watching the big sedan chasing us maybe a hundred yards behind. I grew real mean and snarled. “Look, I’m nobody’s fall guy. When I’m chased, I like to know who’s after me. Maybe that’s kind of old-fashioned to you, but that’s the way I was brought up. Are those guys cops or hoods? Sometimes the resemblance between the two species is so close you can’t tell one from the other.”

The sedan was gaining on us. I gave the coupe the gun again and felt I was the biggest patsy of all time. I could hold my own in the concrete jungle of New York, but someone was making a chump of me out in the Indiana sticks. The girl still did not answer.

Mean is not the word for how I felt right then.

“Who the hell are those guys?” I demanded in the tones they use in the back rooms of police stations when they have a firm grip on the rubber persuaders.

The sedan growled after us, swallowing up the miles.

“They’re Athelstan Shelmerdine’s men,” she replied in a voice little more than a whisper.

That rocked me from the roots of my hair to the cuticles of my toenails. I crouched over the wheel like an eager jockey and watched the blurred, headlamp-whitened highway ribboning out of the blackness and flashing under the car.

Athelstan Shelmerdine! Hell!

Shelmerdine, the big-time racketeer who had his fingers in every illegal enterprise within who-knew-how-big a radius of Chicago. Shelmerdine, who sat behind a façade of respectable businesses and pulled strings that made all sorts of things happen on various levels of the underworld and upperworld. Shelmerdine, who graduated from being a booze-runner in the prohibition days to the new style in gang-moguls. Shelmerdine, who owned people outright, who waxed fat on super thievery, and on whom nobody could pin anything.

And a bunch of his mugs were tailing us.

And my Browning was packed away in my grip which, in turn, was locked away in the trunk.

I said nothing for a long time, I just concentrated on putting distance between the sedan and my own car. But the black overcoats and fedora hats were no slouches when it came to getting life out of a car. The sedan stuck to us too close for comfort.

“How the blazes did you fall foul of Shelmerdine?” I asked Joanne Kilvert.

She was crouching low in her seat, tensed and frightened.

“It’s a long story,” she said. She never took her wide eyes from the driving mirror, in which the pursuing sedan was reflected, as she spoke. “It’s a long story, but have you heard of Arthur Kilvert?”

I watched the highway racing up out of the night with one eye and with the other watched the gleaming headlights of the car behind us in the driving mirror.

I remembered the name Arthur Kilvert and went riffling through a mental card-index for the connection. Over the years I’ve developed a faculty for stowing away data inside my skull. It becomes almost second nature after a while, like the photographic eye some cops develop so they can spot a face or a way of walking, or even the special way a guy lights a cigarette or flips back his hat, though a number of years have passed since they first noted the mannerism.

The Arthur Kilvert connection was not a matter of years away, only months. I jockeyed the coupe, watched that black beast of a sedan roaring along behind us, and the story came seeping to the surface.

“Yes, I remember,” I told the girl. “Arthur Kilvert was an official in a trade union in Chicago. Seemed to be a right guy and resented the racketeers who began to shove their noses in, trying to pull the strings of his union as they did in so many others. Kilvert didn’t care for the new style of protection racket, and said so loud and clear and wrote so in black and white. He began crusading and got to be a regular bug in the hair with the racket-boys.…”

I tailed off and got to thinking about the rest of the Arthur Kilvert story. It was ugly.

I only knew the case from newspaper reports, black words on pulp paper telling of a man who tried to play it square and what became of him. Telling of a car screeching to a stop close to the front lawn of a house in a Chicago suburb where a man, his wife, and child romped in the warmth of a summer afternoon—Sunday afternoon.

Sunday afternoon shattered by the screech of brakes, rent by the hard stutter of a sub-machine gun with the snort and growl of a hastily started car as an anti-climax.

That had been the way of it. Arthur Kilvert paid off for being a straight citizen, paid off prohibition-day fashion. Only this was Chicago in the nineteen-fifties, not the twenties.

“You’re Kilvert’s widow?” I asked.

I was concentrating on keeping an even distance between the coupe and Shelmerdine’s hoods and, so far, I was doing fine. I was watching the highway, but I could see the girl’s features reflected in the windshield. A hardness had taken possession of them now, the kind of hardness you see in a woman’s face after all the tears have been cried away.

“No, not his wife, his sister. My sister-in-law survived the shooting, but she’s worse off than Arthur. She walks on crutches now because she doesn’t have a left leg any more, but they injured her mind worse than her body. She saw Arthur shot down before her eyes, and the baby was killed in her arms. She’s twenty-four-years old.”

Nothing about crookdom surprises or disgusts me anymore; I know it from the soles of its stinking feet to the roots of its lousy hair. There was a time when a thing like the shooting at the Kilvert home would have made me spit—or maybe vomit. But I know the ways of the big-time thieves too well now. A man, his wife, his baby are as nothing to them in their climb towards dirty riches. Nothing at all, not even the ashes and dust the Book says they are.

There was no more time or opportunity for philosophy. Joanne Kilvert was turned about in her seat again, she suddenly clutched my arm in alarmed urgency.

“They’re going to shoot!” she cried. “Get down!”

The little world of the car was an enclosed box, thrumming to the pulse of the engine, rocking to the whirr of the wheels. Outside, the growl of the pursuing sedan was sounding loud. I saw the car in the mirror, pulling out into the centre of the highway, positioning itself with one of the overcoats and fedoras leaning from a window with something in his hand.

Joanne Kilvert crouched down to the floor, close to the grip that seemed so important to her. I pressed the accelerator down to the floor boards, and the outside world was a liquid blur of racing shadows.

The mobster with the gun seemed to wait a hell of a time before opening up. But he did eventually.

Three shots bellowed out, and I put the coupe into a zigzag. One slug spanged into the bodywork of the car somewhere at the back, one ripped the fabric of the hood, and the third must have been a complete miss. Maybe the Shelmerdine hoods were just trying to scare us into stopping, maybe they were trying to hit our tyres.

I was cursing loudly because my Browning was packed up with my T-shirts in the trunk.

“These mugs must want you awful bad,” I told Joanne Kilvert.

Then I doused all the lights and drove blind. I wondered, with a detached and cynical part of my mind, why a police highway patrol was never around when you needed one. Right now, a couple of motorcycle cops would be useful, even if I was overreaching the speed limit and driving without lights.

Another couple of shots sounded from behind, and the slugs went zipping past the coupe.

Then I saw the twist in the road, only just in time. Travelling at the rate the coupe was hitting and without lights, that bend came at me out of the blackness. I whirled the wheel to the right quickly, heard the huddled girl squeal as the car lurched and saw a big billboard go flashing past the window on her side of the coupe. We must have been within inches of hitting that wooden billboard.

I didn’t wait to give my heart a chance to settle down after turning the bend, but kept my foot hard on the gas and burned up the highway.

Maybe the girl and I had been extra good during the immediate past; we must have done something, one or the other of us, to deserve the break we were given at that moment.

In the blackness at our backs, something ear-splitting happened. An edgy keening of brakes merged into a splintering crash. Then a silence more frightening than the noise.

Joanne Kilvert and I turned about to look out of the rear window.

“They crashed,” she whispered. “They hit the bill-board on the turning.”

A vivid little cameo was dwindling away into the darkness behind us. The sedan piled up against the billboard, a flicker of flames starting into life at its hood. Figures were scuttling out of the wrecked car. The headlamps were still on, and their light, combined with the erratic glow of the flames, showed the mocking face of the ten-times-larger-than-life wench who grinned from the billboard to advertise somebody’s toothpaste.

Like a little world of people drifting away into the depths of space, Athelstan Shelmerdine’s torpedo-men and their burning car floated off into the night as I kept my foot down and zoomed up the highway like a high school kid determined to kill himself or somebody else with his first hot-rod.

We didn’t speak for a good five minutes. Then I put the headlights on again, and Joanne Kilvert said: “That’s Plymouth ahead.”

She was pointing to a string of lights on the horizon. The observation came in a matter-of-fact and deadpan way on the heels of what had just happened. She spoke like a guide pointing out the scenery rather than in the way of a woman who had lately been shot at.

I told myself that this slight, rain-bedraggled kid had guts. At that time I didn’t know the half of it.

“That long story you mentioned, let me hear it,” I said. “Those mugs are out of commission. You can tell me as we carry on to South Bend.”

She sat up in her seat, settled herself in with admirable coolness, considering what had just occurred, and began to preen rebel strands of hair with her fingers.

“I’m sorry I got you into this,” she began, and I marvelled in silence at the composure that now settled on her. No more trembling, in spite of her sodden clothes, no wide eyes and quivering mouth. She had self-control and guts all right, now that the immediate danger of the black coats and fedoras was over.

“Trouble is what I like, Miss Kilvert,” I said. “Unfortunately, this is one time trouble caught me on the hop. I’m returning from a vacation, and my heater is with my sport clothes in the trunk. I didn’t figure I’d need it passing through Indiana.”

She smiled, vanquishing those hard lines that had shown on her face. I was glad they could be washed off with a single application of a smile. Hard lines on the face are for guys who live within smelling distance of the grubbier side of our civilisation—guys like me—for pretty girls still young enough to have voted in only one Presidential Election.

“Perhaps it was fate, meeting up with you,” Joanne Kilvert went on. “I mean, I might have been given a ride by anybody who wouldn’t have a notion what to do when those men showed up.” She was talking like a comic-strip heroine who was used to being chased and fired on as a matter of course.

I wasn’t kidded. I remembered a scared little girl, anybody’s kid-sister from anywhere at all, standing under a tree.

“They had you scared, girlie,” I remarked. “I give you credit for having guts; many a woman would still be in hysterics after that experience, and many another would keep ’em up clear to South Bend. Give with the story.”

“I’ve had to have guts, the way I’ve been living for the past three months, Mr. Lantry.” The hint of those hard lines crept into her soft features again.

The lights of Plymouth grew bigger before us.

She gave with the story.