“You’re out of your goddamn mind. You need to go.”
“Where you really went wrong was not taking a harder look at Carl Hall. He was another of your ex-cons, right? But he was a big talker, a dreamer who lived on a diet of booze and dope, with a blowsy girlfriend who hooked out of her house and was as big a boozer as her boyfriend. They wound up taking the young boy, not the almost-teenage girl, and the part of his plan Carl hadn’t shared with you was that he would shoot that child in the head, rather than have to deal with him. And then go after the ransom.”
“You... should... go.”
“But at least Carl did stick with the rest of the plan. He drove to St. Louis. Rented a room for his dipso sweetie and himself. And connected, as prearranged, with your cabbie, Johnny Hagan. The Coral Court was a good place to hide out for a while because Jack Carr was pliable for this kind of thing. You were not in a position to alert any cops about all this money rolling into town, except the crooked likes of Lou Shoulders. It was a pity, a goddamn shame, that boy had been killed. But that money... so much money...”
He was trembling; you could barely see it. “It... it was a pity. Killing that child. Horrible. I still picture my own son being driven into that field...”
“Don’t cry! Everybody’s been crying and it’s starting to piss me off.”
Shaking now. “I... I don’t sleep... I take pills... every night, Nate, I take pills. You’re no saint! You know how things can get out of hand. It got away from me, is all. It just... got away from me.”
They came in the door all at once, four cabbies still in their fucking caps and bow ties, like I was a car getting full service at a top-notch gas station, We are the men of Texaco, We work from Maine to Mexico. Only what was happening was they were yanking me off the chair and dragging me by the arms out through the dispatcher’s area and into the double garage. Howie was leading the way, walking backward, grinning as his buddies shoved me onto the cement floor and started working me over, the smell of oil and grease in my nostrils. Costello’s nephew-in-law was holding a bloody hand towel to the side of his face where I’d whacked him. He had a monkey grin going.
The saving grace was they were idiots. The place was filled with tools and implements designed for fixing but that could break you; only these were cabbies, ex-cons with scarred faces and cauliflower ears and assorted missing teeth, and all they knew to do right now was hit me with their fists, and bending down like that did not give them their full power, making for mostly glancing blows and the occasional bread-basket punches I could tense my muscles against. My nine mil was back there on Joe’s desk but at least, apparently, none of them had grabbed it. I protected my face and took as much of it on my arms as I could.
Finally I kicked one in the balls and he howled as if the steel-beamed ceiling was the moon and he tumbled back and took another dumb shit down with him. Then I scrambled through the hole I made like a desperate linebacker and cut around that Chevy on the hydraulic lift, almost running into a metal cart that I pushed back into the four men coming at me, hard enough to make the two in front stumble into the other two, and then something wonderful happened: one of the assholes slipped in grease and landed on his back but his head slammed into the lip of the lowered lift. He sprawled as if taking a sudden nap, either out cold or dead and I didn’t give a damn which, my only regret that I didn’t have time to laugh.
Up ahead was a wall of hammers and wrenches and I started pulling them off their pegboard hooks and flinging them, randomly at first, but targeting as the attackers slowed and began bouncing off each other as they danced in place when the tools struck home, yowling with pain appropriate where each hammer and wrench hit.
I hadn’t seen him come around the other side, but suddenly there he was, having circled the sedan on the lowered lift, Howie with my nine mil in his hand. When he aimed it, I aimed, too, flinging something as hard as I ever flung anything — a hammer that flew straight and true and sank into his forehead, so deep only the rounded peen of the ballpeen hammer showed.
And the best part was the hammer found purchase pretty much in the same spot where his shot had taken Sandy down.
I scavenged the Browning and turned on my attackers, who were already scrambling away, one dragging the guy who hit his head on the lift edge, leaving a red snail trail. Then they were gone. A few had left their caps behind.
I found Joe Costello sitting at his desk with the revolver I’d dropped into his wastebasket in his hand now, angled toward his head. Toward his temple.
He said observationally, “Well, you look like hell.”
He was right. I was bloody and my clothes were torn and splotched with grease. But unlike his cab drivers, I had all my teeth.
I kicked the chair aside — he flinched — and walked to the edge of the desk. “Where did those pricks come from?”
His smile had a crookedness. He lowered the revolver, rested his hand with it on the desktop. “You’re not so smart, Heller. You cold-cocked their dispatcher. They came to see why he wasn’t responding.” He shrugged. “Least that’s how I make it.”
“So.” I nodded toward the revolver he still held. “What’s this? You gonna kill yourself now?”
“Why? You want to watch?”
“Best offer I’ve had today. But it isn’t even dawn yet.”
His lips were trembling. “I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since September 1953. I nap, but I’m up all night. I have a son, Nate.”
“So you said.”
“How can I live with this?”
To cool things down, I said, “You didn’t mean for it to happen. You just... set the stage. It went sour because you didn’t size up that psycho Hall right.”
He raised the gun, pressed the barrel to his head and his finger was on the trigger when I lurched across the desk and yanked his hand away from his head and it went off between his shoulder and his chest. Not near enough to his heart to matter. I already knew he would live. So did he. Maybe that’s why he skipped yelling in pain as the blood bubbled and went straight to crying.
There was no getting away from tears on this fucking thing.
Chapter Eighteen
Jack Carr, trimming hedges along the curved honey-color exterior of the Coral Court office, saw me coming and put his clippers down. In a sweat-stained t-shirt and shabby jeans, he might have been the motel’s gardener at that, or maybe a drifter in a James M. Cain novel planning to help some bimbo kill her husband.
“Checking out?” he asked, not unpleasantly.
“As requested,” I reminded him.
“I’ll get you myself,” he said. “Desk girl’s on her break.”
I followed him in and he got behind the counter, that almost smile still hanging around and not turning into anything. The black-circled eyes might have indicated he’d had a rough night too, but I knew they were nothing new.
“Normally I don’t do a refund,” he said, “when somebody who pays weekly rate leaves after only a few days. But seeing as I asked you to go, you have fourteen dollars coming.”
Considering that fair, I signed the receipt he gave me, and slipped the cash in my billfold.
“Seen the papers?” he asked, leaning on the counter, looking like a friendly emissary of the undead. “Catch the TV news maybe?”