Deadly Honeymoon (17 page)

She would just have to wait.

He reached for a cigarette. There were only two left in his pack, and he didn’t have a spare. He hesitated, then shrugged and took out one of the cigarettes and lit it.

They drove up just as he was finishing the cigarette. He saw the car coming down Lorring, moving slowly toward the house, and he dropped his cigarette to the floor and covered it with his foot. He took hold of the gun, spun the cylinder to put a bullet under the hammer once again. It was their car this time. The Pontiac, and the right color, and coasting to a stop in front of the house and across the street.

He opened the window a little wider at the bottom and drew the curtains almost shut. Looking down, he could see them through the front windshield. Ruger was on the passenger side and Krause was behind the wheel. They were sitting there now, making no move to leave the car.

Come on, he thought. Both of you. Come on.

He rested the gun barrel on the windowsill. They were still in the car. They might both drive away, he thought. They might change their minds and drive away and leave him there. His grip tightened on the butt of the gun, and beads of sweat dotted his forehead. He couldn’t breathe.

A car door opened, on Ruger’s side. One of them spoke in an undertone. They both laughed. Then Ruger was coming and Krause was driving off, he thought. He was both glad and sorry. He wanted them both, right away, but one would be better than none at all.

Hurry up, dammit—

Ruger put a foot out of the car, then drew it back in again. Dave gritted his teeth. Ruger swung the foot out again, then shifted his weight and stepped out of the Pontiac. He stood with one hand on the open door and the other on the roof of the car. He was talking with Krause but Dave couldn’t hear anything.

He straightened up, then, and slammed the car door shut. Krause gunned the motor. Ruger nodded to him, and Krause pulled off, slowed down briefly for the stop sign at Forbell and continued east on Lorring. Ruger stood watching the Pontiac until it disappeared from view. He made no move to cross the street.

Dave aimed the gun at him, tentatively. He lowered it and looked at the man. For the first time, he didn’t know if he could do it. He did not know if he could shoot him.

His words to Jill: “Listen to me. It’s not fair play. Fine. We are not playing.” But it was less clear-cut when you had time to think about it, less certain when you had the man centered in your sights.

He watched Ruger. The gunman seemed stubbornly determined to wait forever before he crossed the street. He reached into his breast pocket now and drew out a stubby cigar. Dave watched as he unwrapped the cigar slowly, carefully. He dropped the cellophane wrapper. It fell to the sidewalk and the wind played with it Ruger bit off the end of the cigar, spat it out, took out a windproof lighter, thumbed it open, lit the cigar, closed the lighter, returned it to his pocket, and puffed on the cigar. He moved to the curb and glanced across the street.

Then Dave saw him glance to his right, saw the cigar drop unnoticed to the street. Ruger was staring. Dave grabbed the curtains, tugged them aside.

Jill.

She had just turned the corner. She was walking toward the rooming house, looking straight ahead. He looked at Ruger. The man had a gun in his hand, he recognized her.

He yelled, “Jill, get back!”

He saw Jill look up, then clap one hand to her mouth. Ruger shot at her, missed, spun around to look up at the window. Dave pointed the .38 and squeezed the trigger. The sound was deafening and the recoil jolted up his arm to his shoulder. Jill had not moved. He yelled at her to get back, to get the hell out of the way. She hesitated and then spun abruptly around and dashed for the corner. Ruger looked at her but did not shoot. He aimed the gun at the third-story window, steadied himself, and fired.

CHAPTER 16

R
UGER’S SHOT
went off to the left. It slammed into the house a few feet to the side of the window and the whole house seemed to rock. Dave kicked the chair back out of his way and dropped into a crouch in front of the window. He looked out. Ruger was crouching, too, trying to present the smallest possible target. He looked around for a place to hide himself but stayed where he was. The trees there were young ones, too small to hide behind, and the nearest parked cars were three doors down the street.

Dave shot at him. This time his arm anticipated the recoil and the gun stayed steady. He missed; the bullet dug into the pavement a few feet in front of Ruger. Ruger snapped off a shot in reply. It shattered the window and glass flew.

Down the street a car stopped with a screech of brakes, spun in a ragged U-turn that took it a few feet over the curb, and sped off in the opposite direction. Somewhere a woman screamed. Ruger ran halfway across the lawn behind him, stopped, crouched, fired. His shot wasn’t even close.

Ruger was up again, running in a crouch, zigzagging toward the side of the house behind him. Dave followed him with the gun, his elbows braced on the windowsill, holding the .38 with both hands now. Ruger stopped, and as he started to spin once more around he was no longer a moving target. Dave gave the trigger a gentle squeeze.

He had not really believed the shot would be on target. But the bullet tore into Ruger’s arm above the elbow and sent his gun flying. The impact of the shot spun Ruger halfway around and knocked him to the ground. He moved awkwardly there, using his good arm to push himself to his feet. The bad arm hung like deadweight.

He got up and turned toward Dave, then away from him. His arm was leaking blood. He had lost his bearings and looked this way and that like a nearsighted man searching for his eyeglasses.

Dave aimed again and fired again, and the bullet took Ruger in the small of the back. He shrieked like a girl and went down flat on his face and didn’t move.

Now the whole house was awake. Dave yanked the door open, tore out of the room. A woman across the hallway was looking at him from her door. He glanced at her and she drew back in terror, slamming the door shut after her. He raced down the stairs. At the second floor, a burly man in his undershirt stepped into his path. Dave hit him across the face with the barrel of the gun, shoved him and sent him flying.

On the ground floor, a woman was shouting. There was nobody in sight. The front door was wide open. He ran through it, down the steps, along the path to the street. Across the street Ruger lay bleeding. Dave ran over to him. Ruger lay on his face, his body twitching spasmodically, a low moan issuing from his lips. Dave knelt momentarily and put the muzzle of the gun to the back of Lee Ruger’s head. He barely heard the roar of the gun as his last bullet tore into Ruger’s brain.

The neighborhood screamed with excitement. Doors slammed, windows opened. A police siren sounded in the distance. He was running now, not thinking, just running at top speed. His heart pounded violently and there was a constant roaring in his ears, like wind in a tunnel. He turned at the corner and kept running. Jill was up ahead, staring openmouthed at him. He ran to her.

“Dave, I didn’t know. Are you all right? Are you all right?”

He couldn’t answer her. He turned her around and grabbed her arm and they ran.

CHAPTER 17

I
N THE CAB
he moved the gun from one pocket to the other. He could smell powder burns on his hands and it seemed to him that the whole back seat of the taxi reeked of the smell, that the driver couldn’t help noticing it. He sat stiffly in his seat, trying not to look over his shoulder for policemen. They had caught the cab on Linden Boulevard, and they were already approaching the Manhattan Bridge, so they seemed to be in the clear, but he couldn’t shake off the feeling that carloads of police were hot on their trail.

They crossed over into Manhattan. He waited for guilt to claim him, waited to be moved once again by a feeling of having crossed a great moral boundary. But this did not happen. He felt that he had been a very lucky bungler. He had very nearly gotten Jill killed, and had watched a prospective one-sided ambush turn into a gun battle. Good shooting and good position had won the battle, and pure blind luck had let them get out uncaught from the mess he had created. He was ashamed of the bungling and grateful for the luck. But the confused guilt that had come over him after he had killed the bodyguard in Lublin’s house—this did not come now. He wondered why.

They got out of the cab at Forty-second Street and ducked into a cafeteria. He went to the counter to get coffee and stood in line just long enough to decide that he didn’t want coffee. He left the line and took Jill around the corner. There was a bar there, and it was open already. They sat at a table. He had a straight shot of bar rye with a beer chaser. She didn’t want anything.

They lit cigarettes, and she said, “I’m so stupid, I almost ruined everything. I thought I was being so good at all this. And then like an idiot—”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. I kept waiting and waiting and you didn’t come. I didn’t know what was happening. I couldn’t stand it.”

“It’s all right now.”

“I know.” She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them. “I’m okay. It was the waiting. I thought I was very brave. When I went to Lublin’s—”

“You were a little too brave then.”

“But it was easy. I was doing something, I could see what was going on. This time all I could do was stand around and find things to worry about. I had to see what was going on. I picked a hell of a time, didn’t I?”

“It was a bad arrangement. Forget it”

“I m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. We’re out of it”

“Are you sure he’s—”

“Yes, he’s dead.” The coup de grace, the bullet in the back of the skull. Yes, Lee was dead.

“Did anyone see you?”

“Half the world saw me.”

“Will they find us?”

“I don’t think so.” He sipped beer. “They’ll know what we look like, but they won’t know where to look for us, or who to look for. The big worry was that we might have been picked up on the spot. They would have had us then, and cold. A dozen different people could have identified me. But I think we’re out of it now.”

“What now?”

“Now we check out of the Royalton,” he said. “I was going to call them and tell them to hold our room. But that’s silly. If we’re not going to stay there, we might as well clear out altogether. And there are things there that we need.”

“What?”

“Our clothes and all. And the rest of the bullets.”

“I forgot that.”

“For Krause,” he said.

There was no problem at the Royalton. They went to their room and packed, and he called the desk and told them to make out the bill and to get the car ready. He packed everything and took the suitcases downstairs himself. The hotel took his check. The doorman brought the Ford around, and Dave gave him a dollar and loaded the suitcases into the back seat. They got into the car. He drove around until he found a Kinney garage on Thirty-sixth Street between Eighth and Ninth and left the car there. They carried the suitcases back to the Moorehead and walked upstairs to their room there instead of waiting for the ancient elevator.

Around four in the afternoon he went around the corner and came back with a deck of cards, a six-pack of ginger-ale and a bottle of V.O. They played a few hands of gin rummy and drank their drinks out of water tumblers. There was no ice. At six he found a delicatessen and brought back sandwiches. They ate in the room and drank more of the ginger ale, plain this time. He brought back a paper, but they couldn’t find anything about Ruger.

“You never did get those Scranton papers,” she said.

“So we’re out a dollar.”

Later he felt like talking about the shooting. He told her how he had sat at the window watching Ruger with the cigar, how he had pointed the gun at him, how he had felt.

“I don’t think I could have shot him just like that,” he said.

“But you did.”

“Because all hell broke loose. There was no time to debate the morality of it, not with the bastard shooting at us.”

“You would have killed him anyway.”

“I don’t know. I don’t feel bad about it. Not even uneasy.”

“How do you feel?”

“I don’t know.”

“I feel relieved,” she said.

“Relieved?”

“That we’re both alive. And that he’s not, too. We came here to do something, and we’ve done part of it, and we’re still safe and all right, and I feel relieved about that.”

They went to sleep early. They had both gotten a little drunk. She didn’t get sick, just sleepy. They got undressed and into bed, and the liquor made sleep come easily. And there was no attempt at lovemaking to complicate things, not this time. He held her and kissed her and they were close, and then he rolled aside and they slept.

In the morning she asked what they were going to do now, about Dago Krause.

“Lie low for a little while,” he said.

“Here at the hotel?”

“It’s as good a place as any. If we let things cool down, we’ll be in a better position. There’s the cops to think about, for one thing. With Ruger’s murder so fresh, they’ll be on their toes. If they have a little time to relax they’ll just let it ride in the books as another gang killing. They won’t break their necks looking for us or keeping a watch on Krause. You remember the amount of attention they paid to Corelli’s death. Everybody was delighted to find an excuse not to try finding Corelli’s murderers. It’ll be the same here. They’ll decide Ruger was killed by a professional, and they’ll bury the whole thing in the files.