Hit on the House (15 page)

The Fat Man was all for it. “Don't forget the money, Joe. If you want, I could send a couple a guys down to help you out.”

“To help me out? Forget it, Fat.”

Of course, Joe thought, as he drove back to Black Street, the Fat Man is uneasy about my getting to the money first. But bring in a couple of his heavies? Joe knew he'd be lucky to get out of the house alive, money or no money, if he had some of Carmine's or Mitch's bozos backing him up. If Hal didn't get him, they sure would. It was a dicey game without them. But then he was delighted to see, as he cruised by Hal's house, that the convertible was gone. Not only that, there was a light shining through the opened drapes of the living room.

OK, Joe said to himself, time for a chat. He parked up on the next street, above the park, and pulled off his sweater. On went the armpit sling and into it the .38. He donned his tweed jacket and jauntily strolled back to Hal's house. On the porch he realized that the light he'd seen was really in the kitchen, not in the front room. He pressed the doorbell and took hold of the heavy storm door. To his surprise it was unlocked.
My, my, he thought, this Hal is careless. He was about to try the front door itself when it swung open and the girl, dressed in nothing more than a man's too-large shirt, said, “Dope! It's open.”

Joe slammed her in the chest with a straight-arm, and she fell against the foot of a staircase with a squeal. He was in. He closed the door behind him, the .38 in his hand.

There was little to imagine about the girl as she sprawled before him. Before she could yell, Joe stepped between her legs and clutched her throat.

“Damn it all, anyway,” he said regretfully and gestured with the pistol for her to get up. She got to her feet shakily, her eyes and her mouth forming huge O's. He spun her around and jammed her against the door of the hall closet. Her face was mashed against the door, and she whimpered.

“Where's Hal?” Joe demanded.

“Nnngh.” She shook her head uncomprehendingly.

She didn't know what Joe was talking about, he saw. He kept her pressed there at arm's length and glanced up the stairs, then danced to his left and peeked into the darkened living room. “It's open,” she'd said. Obviously Hal had gone out. For what? More beer?

For an awful moment it occurred to Joe that he was in the wrong house. This was not Hal's house. This was some cop's house, a cop not named Hal. Could this be the cop's girlfriend, or even—pray it wasn't so—the cop's wife? What the hell had made him believe it was Hal's house?

Nothing for it now. He jammed the barrel of the pistol into the base of the girl's skull, her fine black hair flowing around his hand, and reached back to lock the front door.

“Oh-m'god-please-don't-kill-me,” she whispered woefully.

“In here,” Joe said, dragging her into the living room. He released her, and she sagged to her knees before him in a dark corner, staring up at him. “Who the hell are you?” Joe asked, trying to modulate the anger and tension in his voice.

“Kathy,” she whispered. She held her hands before her as if praying.

“Kathy.” Joe had gotten command of his voice. “OK. What's your last name, Kathy?”

“Bunse.”

“Kathy Bunse. Fine. Who lives here, Kathy?”

“Art. Art, uh . . .” She seemed stymied for a moment, then she remembered and said, “Holbrook.”

“Oh,” Joe said, sighing. He lowered the pistol until it was pointed at the floor, almost as if he'd relaxed. “Art Holbrook. Are we talking about Art Holbrook the cop?”

She shook her head. “Art's not a cop.”

“Good,” said Joe. “So, ah, Kathy, . . . where is Art?”

“He went to the little store, for cigarettes and, and beer,” she said. She lowered her hands and rested them on her thighs.

“That's good,” Joe said. He extended his left hand and helped her up. “Sit down, Kathy. Right over there.” He gestured with his gun toward a chair that was in the dark shadow of the room. “Just be quiet and let's wait for Art. OK?”

She scrambled to the chair and sat, pulling the shirt down over her pelvis to hide her crotch. She sat, wide-eyed, and watched as Joe moved back to the entry and stood with his back to the wall, next to the front door, the gun held at waist level now.

Things settled down. There was no sound. Actually there were some sounds . . . a radio, or a phonograph, was playing upstairs. Not very loud. Some kind of mood music, a mindless, vaporous hush of synthesizer and bass. The refrigerator was cycling. The gas furnace was breathing. The girl was breathing rapidly, or was it himself? She took a deep breath finally, and Joe understood that she had regained her courage and was going to talk. He shook his head at her silently. But she only paused before asking, “Are you going to kill him?”

“No,” Joe said. “Shut up.”

His ears picked up something. Something had happened. A door? No. A car. A car had slowed, then driven by.

Joe stood in the little alcove of the entry for about ten minutes before asking the staring girl, “How far is this little store?”

Before she could answer, a man's upper body appeared at the floor
level of the entryway between the living room and the dining room, and his extended arm held a pistol. The head craned for a fatal second, looking for a target.

Joe did not hesitate. He fired three times as rapidly as he could squeeze the trigger, a horrendous flash and crash filling the room. The man managed one wild, evidently convulsive squeeze, and the thin pop of a .22 was lost in the reverberations of the .38. Then he rolled sideways with a groan and lay still. The gun fell from his hand.

This time the girl did scream, and Joe backhanded her as he skipped by. She crumpled into the corner, sobbing, as Joe kicked the fallen pistol away from the outstretched hand and knelt over the man.

He turned the man's head. His eyes were glazing and he gasped. A froth of bubbly blood issued from his mouth. All of Joe's shots had struck the man: one in the upper chest, a lung shot; another in the left shoulder; and a third in the face, tearing away most of the left cheek and left ear and laying bare the maxilla. Blood was spattered up the jamb of the entry and now began to ooze sluggishly from the facial wound.

“Damn, damn, damn,” Joe muttered, cursing the man for a stupid son of a bitch. He wheeled to the girl. “Get a towel, anything . . . hurry!”

The girl scrambled up and raced into the kitchen. Joe realized suddenly how idiotic that command had been, and he bolted after her, slipping on the spreading blood. She was halfway through the back door when he caught her. He grabbed her by the hair and hauled her to her butt on the kitchen tiles, kicking the door shut as he did so.

“Aagh!” she screamed, and he had to clutch her throat again to silence her. He stuck the gun in her face and somehow levered her upright. “Get the goddamn towel,” he rasped.

They both looked wildly about the kitchen. Then as one they snatched at a dish towel hooked through the refrigerator door handle. Joe let her take it, and they moved swiftly back to the dying man. The girl knelt and tentatively reached for the man's head, but it looked so ruined and painful that she couldn't touch him. She looked up at Joe, weeping, and said, “We've got to get help.”

“Nothing can help him now,” Joe said flatly. “He's dead.”

The man clawed agonizingly at his shirt, ripping the buttons off
and revealing the oozing hole where the most serious blow had hit. His face looked atrocious, but it was nothing. He'd taken a bad hit in the lungs, and it must have severed some vital artery or vein. He was drowning.

He arched his back, and his eyes focused briefly on Joe, bending over him. “Gol—” he gurgled. He shook his head as if trying to clear it. Then he lost it.

He relaxed utterly. He didn't die right away. It took a long time. Perhaps three minutes.

The girl was hysterical, sobbing and lying curled up on the dining room carpet. Her head was pressed against a heavy carved leg of the massive dining room table. Joe sat back on his heels and watched them both. He observed her buttocks. They were round and smooth, but there was a pimple or some reddish thing on the left cheek. He noticed the abandoned disposition of Hal's body. Joe cocked his head, listening. There were no external sounds of doors slamming, of voices, of sirens. Only the sudden cessation of the furnace's respiration. The refrigerator had quit cycling. The mindless music still trickled down from upstairs, now with a deep, hushed, resolving electronic bass. The hair around the girl's vagina was coarse and clotted with a dried whitish substance. It caught the kitchen light, which fell across her buttocks and her lover's ruined face in a yellow swath.

There was a final little burbling rush, then an issue of bright blood from the man's mouth. His feet twitched. He collapsed into the deep relaxation of death.

J
oe pulled the girl upright and embraced her, smoothing her hair with his free hand. She hugged him desperately, sobbing, until she finally took a huge breath that pressed her breasts against his chest and he sensed a certain tension take command of her body. She drew away from him. Without a word Joe took her by the hand and led her up the stairs to the bedroom. He made her lie down on the bed and covered her with a quilt. She lay there passively, staring up into the light while Joe moved methodically about the room, opening drawers, looking.

Finally he sat down on the bed and looked at the girl. She continued to stare at the ceiling. She was indeed a teenager, he saw, not more than eighteen, if that. Her face was deadly calm, though tears leaked from the corners of her eyes.

“Do you want to live, Kathy?” Joe asked in a cool voice.

She nodded, tears staining her cheeks.

“Tell me what you know about Art.”

She knew very little. She spoke in a quiet, almost dreamy voice. Art was a lawyer, she said. He'd picked her up at a bar near campus a few days ago. She was a freshman at the University of Iowa. She came from Nebraska. She was going into journalism, she thought. Art came into the bar a lot, she said. Another girl she knew, Merilou, had gone out with him. Merilou had said that Art was rich and cool. He didn't try to feel you up right away, and he took his girlfriends to concerts and good dinners. A real nice guy. The convertible belonged to Art. She had spent the last two nights with him. He wasn't a cop, but she thought he had a lot of cop friends.

While she talked, Joe looked through a wallet he'd found on the dresser. It contained a driver's license for an Arthur H. Holbrook. There was an identification card from the Iowa Bar Association in the same name, along with a card made out to Art Holbrook as an auxiliary deputy sheriff of Johnson County. Joe had no idea what an auxiliary deputy might be. Perhaps it was nothing more than the kind of unofficial status that some law-enforcement groups confer on contributors to the Policemen's Benevolent Fund, or something. On the other hand, it could be a legal deputization, he supposed.

In the closet Joe found a shoe box. The girl fell silent as Joe emptied it of some fifty thousand dollars in old bills. Also in the box were three large plastic pill tubes filled with a white, powdery substance. Joe assumed this was cocaine, possibly heroin. He had never used either substance, but he thought he recognized it as cocaine. This would be a hell of a lot of cocaine, he thought. There were also two handsome briefcases in the closet, both of them containing .22-caliber Smith & Wesson marksman's pistols and ammunition. Joe set the shoe box and the briefcases on the dresser.

“Get up, Kathy,” he said quietly.

She stood there, shivering with fright, her hands clenched at her groin. She was spattered with blood, and her hair was tangled, but she was a pretty girl even as she blubbered and her features were blurred by weeping and terror.

“Take the shirt off, Kathy.”

Trembling, she slowly unbuttoned the shirt and let it fall about her heels. She looked at him hopelessly.

“Get dressed,” Joe said, gesturing at her clothes, which were scattered about the bed.

She quickly pulled on the panties and jeans and a colorful sweatshirt that had two gaudy toucans emblazoned on it. She didn't bother with the brassiere. While she slipped on her running shoes, Joe quietly explained that he had to lock her in the closet for a little while, but that if she kept quiet and didn't try anything foolish, he wouldn't harm her, and someone would come in an hour or so to let her out. Joe would be in the house for at least another hour, he told her, “cleaning up.”

She thanked him for not hurting her, and she went docilely into the closet after Joe had carefully searched it. He handed her a pillow and a blanket from the bed and closed the door. He jammed a chair under the doorknob. Then he went downstairs.

Joe looked at the dead man with casual interest. He had not wanted to kill, or even hurt, the man, but then he had to admit he had entered the man's house with a loaded pistol. What should he have expected? Still, there was no way he was going to confront Hal Good without a pistol in hand. He was determined, nonetheless, to feel no remorse, nor to allow himself to be affected at all—at least for now. Perhaps later, when he was sitting somewhere in security—he envisioned suite A/B of Amtrak's Zephyr—he could afford to reflect and expose himself to the emotional consequences of killing this man. He reckoned he would do that, but not now.

He didn't move the body, or even touch it, but peered at the face, distorted as it was. Joe didn't recognize him and didn't expect to. There wasn't anything to see. Just an ordinary-looking guy who had somehow got into a business that had made him a lot of money and had no doubt brought a good deal of excitement into his life, which was now prematurely ended.

For the next hour Joe carefully searched the house and turned up only one thing of additional interest. A telephone book with the number of the California answering service, next to which was written
Hal Good.
A little reminder. Another number, in Chicago, had the name Carl Stevens written by it. There were also numbers in Detroit, New York, Miami, and other large American cities. Often names were written out clearly, with addresses, such as “Sid, 3716 Fairlawn, Detroit,” or “Lande, 29970 Kelly Rd., Apt. 1, Detroit,” or “Tupman, 4200 Conner Towers,” and so on. It was amazing. Joe didn't like to take the book—it could be damning evidence if he were stopped—but he felt he had to, to show the Fat Man. And it might be worth something.