I put more anger in my voice than I felt. I said, “I’m out of reach of department regulations, Schaegan. I’ve never liked you. I hope you’re real stubborn. I hope it takes you a long, long time to make up your mind to talk. Because I’m going to get a hell of a lot of pleasure out of giving you a face that not even a mother could love.” This time my bluff had to work. If I had marked him, the department would have me filling out forms for the rest of my natural life.
He licked his lips. “You’re crazy, Burns,” he said in a loud scratchy voice. “You people aren’t allowed to get rough.”
“Maybe not in the States. But here it’s something else. Where would you like the first one? Like a nice flat nose, friend?”
I saw his eyes move, saw him look over my shoulder, saw his eyes widen with intense surprise.
I grinned. “Schaegan, you ought to know that you can’t fool me that way. That only works in the movies.”
There was a faint whisper of sound behind me, and I spun endlessly down into a black cavern where Cuban music echoed and re-echoed, faint, distant and unearthly...
It couldn’t have lasted long. Somebody had dragged me over the tile floor. My cheek felt like it was on fire. My head felt like it was made of rough bone fragments floating on the brain jelly.
When I opened my eyes, all colors were jangled and too harsh and the light was too bright.
The man I had seen at the swimming pool was inside the room. I was in a corner beyond Schaegan’s chair. The music still clicked and thumped and rattled. The man was wet. He dripped. His feet made marks on the floor.
He held a gun in his hand. I had a childish wonder that a man in swimming trunks should suddenly appear with a gun.
I sat up and the man made a quick and threatening swing of the barrel toward me. I inched over against the wall, against something that would support my head so that it wouldn’t roll off.
The music had masked the sound of the opening door. My vision seemed too intense. I could see a few dark hairs clinging to a little clot of blood near the end of the gun barrel. I knew what he’d hit me with.
Schaegan was almost yelling, his voice high and shrill. “Stevie, boy, you’ve got it figured all wrong! All wrong, Stevie. You shouldn’t have listened. Wait and let me tell you, Stevie!”
But Stevie had that flat killer-look on his face, that hard cold look of a man who has killed and who has found it to be a good feeling for him and who wants that feeling again.
The door opened behind Stevie the way it had opened behind me, and he didn’t hear it any more than I had. Beth came in that white swim suit with the big straw purse in her hand.
One hand was inside the purse. It came out and I saw the gleam of steel. Her mouth was open, the parted lips shining with wetness, her eyes wide and staring.
She lifted the gun and the little whip-cracks were almost absorbed in the riotous music. Still dulled by the blow on the head, I could only marvel that it was the same piece that had been playing when I turned the radio on.
She fired eight times. Three and three more and then two. Stevie staggered and tried to spin around. As he did so, a long red line appeared across the back of his shoulder. He stood, wavering, and his swaying body concealed the gun from my view.
When he fell he went down slow, first onto his knees and then over onto his face, trying to get his arms out to protect his face from the hard floor, but not quite succeeding.
She lowered the gun just as the music stopped. The gunfire Spanish of the announcer filled the room. I hauled myself to my feet and went to her.
Schaegan sat with his chin on his chest, his hairy arms limp on the arms of the chair. One of the little slugs had penetrated right at the part in the middle of his little mustache. Another had penetrated at the corner of his left eye. I had to kneel in front of him to see the damage. The perspiration on his heavy chest had thinned the blood so that it had spread in a wide, smooth pattern.
I slammed up the front of the portable radio and the silence was like a blow.
She made a weak sound in her throat. “Oh, Burnsie, I didn’t mean to kill Wally too! I saw you there on the floor. I thought that man had killed you. I just pointed the gun and pulled the trigger!”
She collapsed into a chair at the other end of the room.
“That your gun?” I asked.
“Yes. But it can’t be traced, and I haven’t got a license for it and I didn’t declare it. Can we say that man in the swimming trunks had it?”
“I think we can say almost anything. We’ve got a chance to fix the story.”
She stood up and clung tightly to me. She was shaking. She said, “Burnsie, Burnsie. I love you, Burnsie.”
And so we rigged it. The Acapulco police seemed willing to swallow our story. She and I had come back to the cottage to find a man with two guns robbing her husband. He had hit me over the head, and in the struggle he had dropped one gun. He had already shot Schaegan. Beth had snatched up the gun and killed the stranger. He was registered at the hotel as a Mr. Robert Stevens of Kansas City.
There were endless statements to be made to interpreters and endless papers to sign. Beth was congratulated on her quickness and her courage. The necessary arrangements were made to ship the body of Schaegan to his hometown of Lockport, New Jersey, where a maiden aunt still lived.
It took six days to get the formalities over. Enough money was found on Schaegan to pay the expenses of shipping the body. I presented my credentials and received permission to go through his things. There was no clue to the hiding places of the rest of the money stolen from the syndicate.
At the end of the six days, Beth looked considerably less flamboyant. We sat at a table for two and she said:
“I’m hungry for the States, Burnsie. Take me back with you. You’ll have to, I guess. I haven’t the money to make it on my own.”
“Glad to,” I said.
“How far will you take me, Burnsie? All the way to Alexandria? All these last years sound like a bad dream when I try to tell myself they really happened. I’m the girl you knew six years ago, Burnsie.”
“I know you are,” I said gently.
“It’ll be fun to shop in a super market, darling,” she said.
“It’ll be fun to come home to you, princess,” I said. “We’ll forget the last six years.”
There was a bit of trouble with plane connections. She had surprisingly little baggage. Two suitcases and a big floppy, fat, long-legged doll that I remembered as being on her dressing table at Zarro’s. It was thirty-two hours later that, still buzzing with vibration, we stepped out of the plane and waited to go through customs examination at San Antonio.
She held my arm and smiled up at me and said, “New beginning, Burnsie?”
I turned her around and held her hands in mine. I held that ridiculous doll of hers under my right arm. I looked down into her eyes and said softly, “Newer than you might think, princess.”
I winked over her shoulder at Fred Sarazen elbowing his way through the crowd. He saw the way I held her and he caught wise. He reached neatly around her and snapped the handcuffs onto her slim wrists with a hearty click.
She looked up at me and her eyes narrowed. I let go of her hands and stepped back, grinning. Her face twisted into animal lines and her voice was a mad harsh screech as she jumped for my eyes with curved fingers. Bill grabbed her and yanked her back.
As he did so, I ripped open the body of the fat doll. It was there, a very hefty roll of very large sized bills, plus a little collection of safety-deposit-box keys, each tagged with city, bank and signature used.
She looked at me with cold hate in her eyes.
I said, “Cheer up. Maybe you can land a job in the prison laundry. Ten years of that, or probably fifteen and, let me see, you’ll only be about forty-five. That laundry work will put some meat and muscle on you, but you’ll probably lose your tan.”