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.”
Chapter Sixteen
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.”