Over Her Dear Body (25 page)

When I'd spliced the extra wire lengths quickly, even sloppily, to the wires already in place on the detonating cap, then bent over the fender to attach the ends of my additional wire lengths to the ignition leads, I said to her, “They'll have to come up this road. With just a little more luck I can blow some of them to hell. Stop their car and shake them up, at least. So go on, honey. Run. Run, damn it!”

She was shaking her head. I looked back toward the road and saw a glow hitting the trees; a car was coming from the direction in which Navarro and his chums had disappeared. Maybe it was a different car. I didn't believe it.

Elaine, still shaking her head, said, “You just turn the key and it will go off?”

“You bet it will go off. Get out of here.”

“How can you turn the key and throw the dynamite and all without killing yourself?”

“I'm not going to kill myself. That's up to those bast—buzzards. I just said I'd throw it. But I'll plant it in the road and come back or—I don't know. Don't worry about it.”

Everything was set, the last connection made. I stepped back from the car, the four sticks and added coil of wire in my hand.

“I'll do it,” Elaine said.

“What?”

“I'll turn the key.”

“You'll beat it, and—”

“No.” Her face was white and frightened, eyes scared. But she finished, her lips quivering. “I'll turn it. Maybe after ... you can run to them and—get a gun or something.” She gasped. “There they are! Oh, Shell, there they are.”

That car was slowing, starting to turn in toward us.

I leaned in through the Cad's window and shoved the key into the ignition. As I did, the approaching car's headlights fell full on us. The twin beams hit us like a blow.

Well, they'd seen us now. Seen us both.

Elaine was already in the Cad, sliding under the wheel.

“Okay,” I said, and my voice was tired. I felt as if my blood were running out of me, melting into the ground at my feet. “It doesn't make much difference now, I guess. All you have to do is turn the key. Don't turn it until you mean for this stuff to go off.”

The car had stopped. I guess when they'd spotted us, Navarro had braked, wondering what the score was, why we were still in sight. He might not realize that one slug had hit the Cad's gas tank; and he couldn't possibly know I was unarmed. For all those boys could know, I had half a dozen guns in the car.

They were less than a hundred yards away, and as I looked at them, they started slowly forward again. So I walked down the road to meet them, like an imbecilic Western marshal, asking for it.

I guess the apparent insanity of what I was doing puzzled them. The car came several yards closer, then stopped. The lights went out. I didn't wonder why right then; I ran forward, paying out wire from the coil in my hand. It stretched a total of twenty yards at most from the Cad. I dropped the dynamite on my right, at the edge of the road, turned and ran back toward the Cad. Maybe, I thought, maybe I could make it back there in time to do the job myself.

Then the other car's lights came on again. Much closer this time.

I suppose the shock of seeing the two of us in the glare of their headlights had worn off—and they surely knew, finally, that if I'd had a gun I would have sent half a dozen slugs at them by now.

I stopped when the lights hit me, turned my back to the Cad—and to Elaine, still a few yards behind me. As I turned, I stepped sideways toward the left of the road. Not only closer to a couple of spindly trees, but a little farther from the dynamite. I raised my right hand in the air, started lifting my left one.

“Scott!” Navarro leaned out the window on the driver's side and yelled my name.

“Yeah, Navarro. Hold it up. I—I've got something to tell you.”

He laughed. “Stay right there, Scott.” He could easily see that I didn't have a gun in my hand, and every fraction of a second I thought a bullet was going to slam into me. I couldn't quite keep my feet from moving, even though I tried to stay still. But I kept inching a little more toward the left of the road, almost as if my legs were acting on their own, without any instruction from me.

“I said stay there. Freeze.” Navarro's voice was very tough now. Masterful. He wasn't afraid of any one-armed shot-up man without a gun.

He got out of the car, said something to the men inside, then stepped toward me. As he came closer, the other men also got out. There were two of them, but the only one I could recognize so far was Navarro. Behind me, maybe fifteen feet, was my Cad and Elaine. I'd made it about forty feet or more from the dynamite before turning around. And Navarro's car was on past the dynamite at least another ten or fifteen yards. Too far away.

Navarro walked toward me. A gun gleamed in his hand. It was a big one, a .45 automatic. A slug from Navarro's .45 would do the job, even if it hit a whisker, the shape I was in. I was wobbling on my feet, fighting back dizziness again.

I ground my teeth together, not even breathing. Navarro hadn't stopped grinning. I made myself stand still while I got my left arm over my head, but I never did anything harder. The other two men walked toward me, following Navarro. They were both together, Navarro quite a bit ahead of them. Only one of the two others held a gun, and it looked as if Joe wanted to handle this job himself. I wondered why he hadn't done it already.

In a way, he told me.

“Thought you could push me around, huh? Slug me, kick hell out of me. Well, Scott, how does it look now?”

My voice wasn't a powerful bark when I answered, not at all threatening. “Not—so good.”

He was still grinning, moving gracefully forward. He walked past the dynamite. I closed my eyes, sweat coming out my pores like water from faucets. I wondered if I were going to crumple up and fall down in the road.

Navarro kept coming, stopped ten or twelve feet from me. He couldn't miss from there. And there wasn't a chance in hell that I could get to him. But the other mugs were still coming, too, though they hadn't come as fast as Joe. Half a dozen more steps and they'd be right where I wanted them. If I lasted that long. If only Elaine ... I didn't think about it.

Navarro, standing with his feet apart, said, “Yeah, you're a tough one, you bastard. But you made a mistake when you messed with me. I wanted to tell you. I wanted you to know it was coming—from me. But right now, tough man, you get it.”

He pushed the gun in his hand a couple inches toward me, and his whole face tightened.

I said the words in a rush. “Look at your feet, Navarro. At those wires. They're wired to dynamite, Joe. Dynamite.”

The others were practically alongside the four sticks when I spoke. Navarro probably didn't believe me, but he must have thought he had plenty of time. He glanced at the road, and his eyes fell on the wires. From the moment when he'd pushed the gun forward until now, only three or four seconds had passed—that was all.

Navarro's eyes stayed on the wire long enough—just long enough for me to move. While his eyes were off me, his gun wavered a little. I called on every ounce of strength in me and stepped fast to my left, bending my leg and then shoving hard. At the same moment I yelled, “
Now
, Elaine!” and leaped through the air. I could see the ground blurred before my eyes. It took only a fraction of a second, but a hundred things seemed to flicker before my mind—I wondered if Navarro was pulling the trigger, if Elaine would turn that key, and whether anything would happen even if she did.

But even before my right shoulder hit the ground, it happened.

The roar seemed to fill the world, there was a crack like hell exploding and an ugly glare swelled suddenly and died. Something grabbed my body, hurled me forward and flipped me over. Maybe I heard a scream, maybe I didn't. I hit the ground, but then felt nothing at all.

I was digging at dirt under my fingers and saying something. My ears rang, and my whole body tingled. I must have gone clear out, but it could have been for only a few seconds because dust was still swirling in the road behind me when I managed to twist my head around and look.

One of the car's headlights still glowed eerily through the boiling dust, like the eye of a locomotive, but the other had been blasted out. In that swirl of dust two men, or what was left of two men, twitched. But even as I watched, the movement stopped. Near me, Joe Navarro lay flat on his face in the dirt road, both arms stretched out in front of him. His gun lay two or three yards from him. His arms were moving, and as I looked at him, he tried to raise his head.

I got to my knees and waddled toward him, that ringing sound rising and falling in my ears like surf. I fell once, but kept going on my knees until I reached him. He moved his head, got it off the dirt and turned to stare at me when I was a yard away.

He was stunned, his face white with shock and his eyes wide, unbelieving. Fear swam in his eyes, too. On my knees, I reached him, straightened up as much as I could, raising my right arm high. He shrank back a little as I hit at the side of his neck, cutting at him with the thick edge of my palm. The blow landed, and landed where I wanted it to, but all it did to Navarro was knock him down again. He kept moving, tried to roll over.

The blow must have had all the force of a teen-age girl slapping her boy friend, but it was the best I could do. So I did it again. I still didn't know if he was out, but he stopped moving. I looked back down the road at the two other men. At bloody horror.

Four sticks of dynamite, that close to men, doesn't just poke neat holes in them. They both were dead, but there wasn't anything neat about it. Dynamite rips and rends, tears off limbs and shatters skulls, blasts out eyes, hurls flesh from bone.

As I turned toward Navarro again I saw Elaine get out of the car and start toward me.

“Go back!” I yelled. “Don't come down here.”

“Is it—are you all right?”

“Yes. Get back in the car.”

She turned, took two steps toward the Cad and stopped. Slowly, not as if she fell, but as if she couldn't go farther, she sank to the road. She sat there, her back to me, and bent her head forward into her hands.

I looked Navarro over. Something had been driven into his hip, gashing through cloth and flesh, but otherwise he seemed unhurt—except for shock and the buffeting from the explosion and compressed wall of air that had slammed into him. But he didn't look like a man who was going to die. Not, at least, from dynamite.

I rolled him onto his back. Blood had run from his nose. He groaned. In a minute he'd be coming to. And it occurred to me that even Navarro, if he thought he was dying, might talk as long as he could, getting the crimes off his conscience, trying to wash the darkness from his soul.

I smeared that red-stained ugliness from his nose all over his face, the front of his shirt, onto his hands. Then I got his automatic, and waited.

His eyelids fluttered. He moaned, licked his lips, and then stopped the movement of his tongue, horror and sickness mingling on his face as his eyes opened wide. I gave him plenty of time.

Then I said, “Too bad, Joe.”

“Get—me a doctor.”

“A doctor, huh? Aren't you the guy who just started to shoot me with this?” I waved the cocked .45. “The guy who was so happy about the chance to kill me?” I tried to make it sound tough, but my voice was thick.

“I wouldn't have done it. I just—” He stopped speaking, rolled his eyes down to the front of his shirt, looked wild-eyed at the blood covering him. He raised both his hands and stared in horror at their wet redness.

Then his head flopped back onto the dirt, his hands fell limply. I thought he'd fainted, but he was still conscious. “Doctor,” he whispered. “Please. Doctor.”

“It's too late for that, Joe.”

“You mean ... I'm gonna die?”

I didn't tell him what I meant.

He said, “Don't let me die. Don't, don't...”

“Get the whole thing off your chest, Joe. From the beginning.”

He kept asking for a doctor, his voice growing weaker. I was afraid he'd really kick off on me. Men have died when there was nothing wrong with them—when their fraternity brothers, for example, “cut” their arms with ice and dripped water into a pan, telling them their blood was pouring from them. They've died with all the symptoms of actually bleeding to death—and Joe was getting weaker and weaker.

So I said, “I'll see that you get a doctor, Joe. Just as soon as you spill everything you know.”

His head slowly rolled from side to side. “Too late—for a doc. I'm goin'—”

I slapped my hand across his face. “You'll last long enough to spill, unless I kill you right now, friend. Talk faster than you ever talked before.”

Maybe the slap got him started; that or the hope that he might live until a doctor could give him a miracle drug of some kind—if he talked fast enough.

Whatever the reason, there wasn't another bit of trouble from Joe Navarro. When I asked him why he'd been on the
Srinagar
that first night, and what the other three men had been doing aboard, he said, “Silverman and Goss were the two top ones in the business. I handled muscle, any rough stuff for them, mostly through Brandt and the boys of his that hung out at the
showcase
—Brandt runs the
Red Rooster
, too, so I could take off any time I wanted. I think Belden was scared, ready to rat. So I was aboard in case he had to be taken care of. When I had that beef with you, I went down to the stateroom to tell them you were aboard and that it probably meant trouble. Then you busted in. After I come around from you slugging me, Goss told me they'd had Belden take a fast powder, and you were already gone. So he sent me ashore to set it up for Brandt's boys to take care of Belden and you both.”

“Why me?”

“Goss told me if you noised it around Silverman was aboard, and with Belden there too, there'd be hell to pay. They'd just made up their minds to poop Belden. So you had to be taken care of that night, before you could mess things up.”