The Black Hearts Murder (18 page)

“Lean against the top of the car with both hands. Get your feet way back. Spread your legs.”

The man's left hand did a clumsy body search. No police or paramilitary training, then. Or not likely. Funny how the brain kept ticking away like a computer, trying to figure it out. With death seconds away.

“I don't carry a weapon,” McCall said. “I'm beginning to think that was a mistake.”

“Shut up. Now drag out that stuff on the floor of the back seat. The chains first.”

So it was to be murder. The whispering—a precaution.

McCall pulled his legs up, pushed away from the car, moved over to the open door at the rear. Lying on the floor, where the gunman had had his feet during the ride, was a set of rusty tire chains and a thin roll of piano wire.

“If this means you're intending to shoot me,” McCall said, “you're out of your everloving skull. Do you know what Governor Holland will do if I'm murdered? On official business for him? The combined law enforcement agencies of the state will go to work on the case. You wouldn't have a chance. Sam Holland will see to that.”

“They'll have to find you first,” the black man whispered.

“What are you whispering about? Dead men can't identify a voice.”

“You ain't dead yet,” the man said with an intensity that startled McCall. He was still whispering. “If you don't drag them chains out of there fast, I'll put a slug in your back on the spot.”

McCall stooped to the chains. He half turned toward his captor as he dragged the chains out of the car, hoping for a chance either to swing the chains like a weapon or make a grab for the pistol. But the masked man had backed just far enough off to make either attempt suicidal. The muzzle was unwaveringly leveled at McCall's head.

The light from the car illluminated the face. From his stooped-position McCall could see up a bit under the mask. The nostrils were wholly unlike those of LeRoy Rawlings, Jerome Duncan, or any other black man he had seen in Banbury.

He had seen newspaper photographs of Harlan James, the Black Hearts leader who had gone underground, and while news photos were usually unreliable reflections of reality McCall was certain these nostrils did not belong to James. In the photos he had seen, the Black Hearts president had a rather long nose.

McCall dropped the tire chains to the ground and straightened up. The pistol remained steady. It was trained now on his middle.

“Now toss me that roll of wire.” The man held out his left palm. In the dim light from the car it glistened like black patent leather with sweat.
He's
nervous, McCall thought, and almost laughed.

He could not recall a time when his brain had worked harder, or faster, or to such little purpose. “Toss me the wire.” If I could hurl it at his face and make a quick dive to one side at the same moment … The trouble was that the wire was too light to make an effective weapon. Even if it struck the gunman it would not stop him from squeezing the trigger. He could pull it at this range and be sure of putting a bullet into his captive's belly.

So McCall reached back into the car, got hold of the roll of piano wire, backed out, straightened up, and tossed the wire at the waiting hand as delicately as an operating room nurse handing a surgical instrument to the surgeon.

“Now shut the doors.”

McCall slammed both open doors of the car.

“Won't do you no good making noise,” the black man said. He was still whispering. “You could holler your head off out here and nobody'd hear you but the crows.”

They stood in darkness now. Almost darkness. There was some moonlight, not much. Maybe I can use that …

“Tote the chains over to the pool.”

McCall said, “If you're going to shoot me anyway, why should I do your work for you?”

“All right, if you want it now,” the black man said. The muzzle came up again, steadied.

“Hold it!” McCall hurriedly stooped. He grabbed a tire chain with each hand and began to drag them toward the bank, going so fast, that the black man shouted, “Stop or I shoot!”

McCall was within three feet of the bank. He dropped the chains and dived into the black water. Behind him the pistol cracked; he felt a sting in his right shoulder. Then the water closed over him.

It was cold. It was wonderful. My friend the water, he thought.

He struck out with powerful underwater strokes for the far bank. Naked or in swimming trunks he could have made the fifty yards without surfacing, but his clothes hampered him. He had to come up for air.

The pistol cracked again; there was a splash near McCall's head. The shot had come from the east side of the pool, not the south, where McCall had dived in. The gunman was circling the pool to be on the north side when he came out.

He dived again before the man could fire a third shot. Would he continue around the pool? Or would he anticipate that the swimmer would return to the starting point, and so be waiting there when McCall surfaced?

There was no time to engage in a long debate. The one thing he could be reasonably sure of was that the black man would not remain where he was. McCall struck out for the spot from which the man had last fired.

He knew there would be no time for a look around when he got to the bank. If he had guessed wrong and the gunman had remained where he was, it was curtains. There was no point in worrying about it.

The side of the pool was solid granite where McCall came up; it was cut as square as the edge of a swimming pool. His hands gripped the flat top of the bank and he heaved himself out of the water in one fluid maneuver. He bounced to his feet and was running a zigzag course for the nearby woods before the shot went off behind him.

From the direction of the report he realized that the gunman had done what he had anticipated: he had returned to McCall's starting point. Score one for your boy, Governor … He sprinted, squirting water at every step, almost enjoying the squishy sounds. Then he was under the protection of the trees.

McCall hugged a massive elm, gulping air. He peered around the bole in the direction of the pool. The cloudy moonlight showed him that the gunman had moved to the southeast corner of the pool and was staring his way, no doubt trying to figure out in which direction his victim was fleeing. McCall stayed where he was, getting his breath back, waiting for the hunter's next move.

It might have occurred to the gunman that if he went blindly after McCall, the advantage of having the gun would be offset by McCall's being able to watch his approach, creating a possibly dangerous stalemate. It certainly occurred to McCall. He was just about to search for a piece of deadwood suitable for use as a club—the idea of lying in wait behind a tree until the gunman went past, then braining him from behind had its charm—when the black man solved everything.

He thrust the pistol under his waistband, dragged the tire chains back to McCall's car, picked up the piano wire, threw wire and chains into the rear, jumped behind the wheel, and drove off.

McCall waited for some time.

When he knew he was safe he left the sheltering tree and walked out into the clearing. He was suddenly aware of his right shoulder; it was stinging again, or at least he was conscious again of its sting. He probed gingerly. There was a rip in his coat and the pressure shot a jolt of pain into his neck and down his right arm. He decided that it was a mere graze. The cloth about the rip was not sticky; the wound had hardly bled.

He bent his attention to the problem of getting back to town.

The rutted lane back to Telegraph Road was risky; too much danger of walking into an ambush. The black man might have driven off with just that plan in mind—making McCall think he had given up, only to pull into the bushes somewhere along the dirt road, get out, and wait for the target.

McCall decided to stick to the woods.

It was mostly second-growth timber, with hot much underbrush, so that walking would not have been difficult if he had been able to see. But visibility was near zero. The canopy of foliage shut out the moon's radiance as effectively in the woods as above the dirt road itself; McCall had to make his squishy progress in almost total darkness. He had always had an excellent sense of direction—he kept reassuring himself—and he set his course roughly parallel to the lane, or where his memory told him the lane lay. He was helped by the fortunate circumstance that it had been a straight road, hewn directly through the woods to the quarry.

He kept his arms before him, like a blind man, as a protection against low-hanging branches. Half a dozen times he fell over dead tree trunks and storm-pruned branches.

When at last he crouched behind a tall thick bush at the edge of Telegraph Road, he could not believe his good luck. He had struck it only about a hundred yards east of the entrance of the quarry road; he could see the big
NO TRESPASSING
sign glistening under the moon from where he was crouching.

If the black man had parked to ambush him, he was on the dirt road; McCall's Ford was nowhere in sight. Headlights were approaching from the direction of Banbury; there were no other vehicles on Telegraph Road.

He waited until the car passed, then darted across the road to the woods on the other side. He kept just inside the treeline, so that he had the road in sight, until the trees thinned out and finally gave way to open country, with no place to take cover except a ditch alongside the road. McCall dropped flat in it whenever headlights appeared from either direction.

When he reached the city limits he knew he was less than two miles from Laurel Tate's Ralston Road apartment. He headed for it, keeping to sidestreets and avoiding pedestrians as well as motorists. His appearance, if he were spotted, could only arouse curiosity or alarm, either of which could lead to a call for the police. He was not ready for that yet.

He cased Laurel's lobby from behind a box hedge; when he was sure it was empty, he slipped in. His waterproof watch told him it was ten past eleven.

Laurel was wearing a pink terry cloth robe that ended halfway between her knees and her hips; she was barefoot.

“Mike!” Her eyes widened.

“Do you always open the door at anybody's ring?” McCall asked.

“My God, Mike, what happened to you?”

“Latch that door.” McCall stood in her tiny foyer dripping an occasional drop; his trek had evaporated most of the water.

“Is this the way you keep a date?”

“Sorry I'm late, but I've had a swim in an abandoned quarry, I've dodged a number of bullets, I've tripped over a number of dead branches, and I've just had myself a walk of about nine hundred miles in shoes full of water.”

“I must say,” Laurel said, “I've never heard a phonier excuse for standing a girl up, or it would be if I didn't have twenty-twenty vision. You get into that bathroom and take these filthy, sodden clothes off.”

“Don't tell me you've got a man's complete wardrobe here for just such emergencies.”

“I haven't even a robe that would fit you. But 111 fix you up with a blanket. Now git, before you have pneumonia all over my best rug!”

TWENTY-ONE

As he stepped out of the shower stall, McCall suddenly recalled the time he had had a like experience in the apartment of a girl in Tisquanto, the college town upstate. His substitute for a dressing gown on that occasion had been an oversized bath towel. It was now a pink blanket, but otherwise the circumstances were pleasantly similar. In Tisquanto he had arrived late for a date after a beating by a gang of stoned, naked juveniles. Tonight it was because of an attempt on his, life. In both cases the girls had taken his clothes to launder and press while he was showering.

Remembering what had followed with the girl in Tisquanto, McCall found himself wondering if the aftermath of this shower would be equally enjoyable.

When he emerged from the bathroom bundled up in the pink blanket, Laurel had a board set up in her living room and was working away at his suit with an electric steam iron.

“I've pressed your tie,” she said, pointing to where it hung over the back of a chair. “Your other things are in the washer. I set your shoes in the dryer, turned it on low and not tumbling, with newspapers stuffed in them.”

“I can't complain about the valet service,” McCall said. “Say, you're pretty handy with that iron.”

“Your wallet and stuff are on the sink in the kitchenette. Maybe you'd like to spread the contents of the wallet out on the drainboard to dry.”

“Practical girl.” He headed for the kitchenette.

“Hey, big chief.”

He halted in the archway. “If you're going to make bad jokes about my blanket, I'll take it off.”

She wrinkled her nose at him. “I was just trying to attract your attention. You could mix a couple of drinks while you're out there. The liquor's in the cabinet under the sink and the mix is in the refrigerator. I'm bourbon and soda. What are you?”

“Strictly anything,” McCall said, and continued his journey.

He was lying. For whatever reason—he had never attempted to probe the underlying cause—hard liquor held no allure for him. He liked neither the taste nor what it did to him, a sort of dehumanization, a pervasion of cold unemotionalism, that made him afraid of himself, of what he might do or not do under its influence. Consequently he drank as little as he could conveniently get away with. His work sometimes compelled him to keep up with a lush; in such cases he found no difficulty in doing so, always being astonished at his capacity. But he was relieved when it was over. He accepted moderate social drinking, as at present, as one of the minor irritations of life. It was always easier to share a couple of drinks with someone than to have to explain that he did not care for the stuff; people looked at him as if he were a freak or, worse, not altogether a man.

His change and pen were on the drainboard with his wallet. He tore several pieces of paper toweling off the roll above the sink and spread the contents of his wallet on them to dry. He wiped out the wallet itself and hung it over the dishtowel rack.