You could barely hear her voice. "Mr. Simpson wanted . . . something special. On different nights . . . he'd take one of us. He made us undress . . . and he had whips. He said . . . it wouldn't hurt." She almost choked, remembering. "I screamed and tried to get away, but I couldn't!" She buried her face in her hands.
"You went back, Ruth?"
"I . . . had to. The money. It was always there. Then there was Lennie. Then I had to because . . . my supply was gone . . . I needed a shot bad. I . . . what's going to happen to me?"
"You'll be taken care of, Ruth. Tell me something . . . are any girls up there now?"
"Yes . . . yes. The ones who are usually there. But there will be more. Mr. Simpson likes . . . new ones. Please . . . you'll have to let me go back."
The voices were miles away now. Sleep was pressing down on me and I couldn't fight it off.
It was daylight. I cursed and yelled for somebody and the door opened and McKeever was trying to push me back on the cot. Behind him was Sonny Holmes.
I managed to sit up against the pressure of McKeever's hand. My mouth was dry and cottony, my head pounding. A tight band of wide tape was wound around my torso and the pain in my side was a dull throbbing, but it was worse than the hole in the fleshy part of my arm.
"I haven't seen anything like you since the war," McKeever said.
From the door Cox said, "Can he talk?"
Before McKeever could stop me I said, "I can talk, Captain. Come on in."
Cox's arrogant smile was gone now. Like everybody else in Pinewood, he had a nervous mouth.
I said, "I made you big trouble, boy, didn't I?"
"You had no right . . ."
"Tough. You checked my prints through, didn't you?"
He couldn't hide the fear in his eyes. McKeever was watching me too now. "I'm a federal agent, laddie, and you know it. At any time my department has authority to operate anywhere and by now you know with what cooperation, don't you?"
Cox didn't answer. He was watching his whole little world come tumbling down around him.
"You let a town run dirty, Cox. You let a worm get in a long time ago and eat itself into a monster. The worm got too big, so you tried to ignore it and you played a mutual game of Let Alone. It outgrew you, buddy. I bet you've known that for a long, long time. Me happening along was just an accident, but it would have caught up to you before long anyway."
Cox still wouldn't put his head down. "What should I do," he asked.
I got up on the edge of the bed, reached for my pants, and pulled them on. Somebody had washed my shirt. Luckily, I could slide my feet into my moccasins without bending down.
I looked hard at the big cop. "You'll do nothing," I said. "You'll go back to your office and wait there until I call and tell you what to do. Now get out of here."
We both watched Cox shuffle out. His head was down a little now. McKeever said, "Can you tell me?"
I nodded. "I have to. If anything happens to me, you'll have to pass it on. Now I'm going to guess, but it won't be wild. That big house on the hill is a front, a meeting place for the grand brotherhood of the poppy."
"It isn't the only one they have . . . it's probably just a local chapter. It's existed, operated, and been successful for . . . is it ten years now? Down here, the people maybe even suspected. But who wants to play with mob boys? It wouldn't take much to shut mouths up down here. To make it even better, that bunch spread the loot around. Even the dolls could be hooked into the action and nobody would really beef. Fear and money were a powerful deterrent. Besides, who could they beef to? A cop scared to lose his job? And other cops scared of him?"
"But one day the situation changed. Overseas imports of narcotics had been belted by our agencies and the brotherhood was hurting. But timed just right was the Cuban deal and those slobs on the hill got taken in by the Reds who saw a way of injecting a poison into this country while they built up their own machine. So Cuba became a collection point for China-grown narcotics. There's a supposedly clean businessman up there on the hill who owns an airline in Florida. The connection clear?"
I grinned, my teeth tight. "There's an even bigger one there, a Russian attaché. He'll be the one who knows where and when the big delivery will be made. There's a rallying of key personnel who have to come out of hiding in order to attend a conclave of big wheels and determine short-range policy."
"It's a chance they have to take. You can't be in the business they're in without expecting to take a chance sooner or later. Lack of coincidence can eliminate chance. Coincidence can provide it. I was the coincidence. Only there was another element involved . . . a Mr. Simpson and his peculiar pleasures. If he had forgone those, chance never would have occurred."
It was a lot of talk. It took too damn much out of me. I said, "Where's Dari?"
The doctor was hesitant until I grabbed his arm. When he looked up his face was drained of color. "She went after Ruth."
My fingers tightened and he winced. "I put Ruth . . . to bed. What I gave her didn't hold. She got up and left. The next morning, Dari left too."
"What are you talking about . . . the next morning?"
"You took a big dosage, son. That was yesterday. You've been out all this time."
It was like being hit in the stomach. I stood up and pulled on my jacket. The doctor said, "They're all over town. They're waiting for you."
"Good," I said. "Where's Sonny Holmes?"
"In the kitchen."
From Sonny's face, I knew he had heard everything we had said. I asked him, "You know how to get to the lake without going through town?"
Sonny had changed. He seemed older. "There's a way. We can take the old ice-cart trail to the lake."
I grinned at the doctor and handed him a card. "Call that number and ask for Artie. You tell him the whole thing, but tell him to get his tail up here in a hurry. I'm going to cut Dari out of this deal, doc." The look on his face stopped me.
"She's gone," he said. "She went up there as guest. . . . She said something about Ruth Gleason saying they wanted girls. She had a gun in her pocketbook. She said it was yours. Kelly . . . she went up there to kill Simpson! She went alone. She said she knew how she could do it. . ."
And that was a whole day ago.
Sonny was waiting. We used his car. My rented truck was gone. Ruth Gleason had taken it and the silenced gun I had used was in it.
Mort Steiger said, "I was waiting for you."
"No fishing, pop," I told him.
"I know what you're going to do. I knew it all along. Somebody had to. You looked like the only one who could and who wanted to."
I turned to Sonny. "Call the doc, kid. See if he got through to my friend."
Mort held out his hand and stopped him. "No use trying. The phones are all out. The jeep from the hill run into a pole down by the station and it'll be two days before a repair crew gets here."
"Sonny," I said, "you get back to Captain Cox. You tell him I'm going inside and to get there with all he has. Tell him they're my orders."
Mort spit out the stub of a cigar. "I figured you right, I did. You're a cop, ain't you?"
I looked at him and grinned. My boat was still there where I had left it. The sun was sinking.
The guy on the dock died easily and quietly. He tried to go for his gun when he saw me and I took him with one sudden stroke. The one at the end in the neat gray suit who looked so incongruous holding a shotgun went just as easily.
An eighth of a mile ahead, the roof of the house showed above the trees. When I reached the main building I went in through the back. It was dark enough now so that I could take advantage of shadows. Above me the house was brilliantly lit. There was noise and laughter and the sound of music and women's voices and the heavier voices of men.
There could only be a single direct line to the target. I nailed a girl in toreador pants trying to get ice out of the freezer. She had been around a long time, maybe not in years, but in time you can't measure on a calendar. She knew she was standing an inch from dying and when I said, "Where is Simpson?" she didn't try to cry out or lie or anything else.