The Good Book taught me a lesson, sending me to my knees; but I’d learned other lessons long ago, and swung an elbow up into his groin, not once, but three times, eliciting a howl and sending him tumbling back, cushioned by the mattress on the floor, though I don’t think it did him much good.
The smaller intruder, his face white and wide-eyed with alarm, was reaching inside his suitcoat and I doubted it was for his card. I was still on my knees — the bigger guy was busy rolling around, clutching his balls and yowling in pain — and my fingers found that Bible and I flung it at the smaller bastard, and its pages fluttered like wings as it flew past him, crashing into the far wall, but startling him enough to send his fedora flying and gain me time to get to my feet, grab the nightstand lamp from the floor, and hurl it at him like a bomb.
This missed him also, smashing into, and just plain smashing, the dresser mirror, but at least it kept the bastard on his toes. The bigger one seemed to be emerging from that fetal ball he’d been rolling around in, and I stomped him in the stomach before charging toward the smaller guy, who was clawing under his suitcoat. If he wanted a gun, mine was right next to him, on the dresser, and when I reached him, I snatched the nine-millimeter in my grasp, shaking off shards of mirror making brittle rain, and whapped the barrel across his face, breaking his nose in a shower of blood, twin streams of scarlet shooting from his nostrils, and when his hand emerged from inside his suitcoat, he indeed did hold a gun, a short-barreled .38, but it didn’t last long, fumbling from his unconscious fingers as he tumbled backward, in a crumpled pile that would do his nicely pressed suit absolutely no good at all.
I turned back to the bigger intruder, who was pushing up off the mattress, a very tough man in a nice suit; his hat had flown off too, his face a mask of the rage that had overridden the pain from my elbows in the nuts and stomp to the stomach. He was digging under his suitcoat and probably wasn’t looking for his comb; I pointed the nine-millimeter at his face and said, “Let’s play Wild West and see who wins.”
Something registered in his eyes, and his hand froze within the coat, and I leaned forward and slapped him with the nine-millimeter, like he’d slapped me with the Bible, and his eyes did a slot-machine roll before he fell backward onto that mattress again.
Something was grasping at my pants leg, and I glanced over my shoulder and down where the smaller guy had crawled over — tears streaming down his face with its shattered nose and blood trailing into his mouth like a dripping scarlet Groucho mustache — and I shook him off, as if he were a dog trying to hump my leg. I pointed the gun down at him and said, “This is my best suit. Get blood on it at your own risk.”
He was breathing hard and then he started to choke on the blood in his mouth from his nose. I said, “Shit,” and stuck my gun in my belt, reached down and picked him up by the lapels and sat him on the bed’s box spring, to help him not strangle on his own blood. I’m just that kind of guy.
The bigger one, asprawl on the mattress, was still unconscious. I removed his gun from its shoulder holster, turning myself into a two-gun kid by stuffing it in my waistband next to my nine-millimeter; then I looked in his inside suitcoat pocket for his billfold. The name on his driver’s license was John Smith and he resided in Encino, California; no pictures of a wife and kids, no business cards, no nothing. The other guy, who was sitting there whimpering and snorting blood, didn’t protest when I checked out his billfold.
His name was Robert Jones, and he lived in Encino, too. He also had no wife and kids, nor any sign of being in any sort of business.
A knock came at the door. Had somebody finally noticed the slight commotion? The mild hubbub?
“Yeah?” I called.
The voice was timid, male. “Mr. Heller, are you all right? It’s the manager. Should I call the police?”
“No! No, I’m fine.”
The timid voice tried for strength. “Mr. Heller, please open the door. I’m afraid I have to insist...”
I dug in my pocket for my money clip, figuring a sawbuck ought to pave the way to a little silence. With some luck I could catch a night train to somewhere; a sleeper sounded mighty good right now. Maybe a double sawbuck...
I opened the door and William Miller’s hand holding a damp white cloth reached out and the overwhelming odor of chloroform accompanied my final thought, which was to wonder if I’d ever wake up again.
Groggy, my mouth filmed with a medicinal aftertaste and the thickness of sleep, with perhaps just a hint of Lobster Newburg, I blinked under the glare of a high overhead light, a conical shaft of brightness that singled me out in a darkened room. For the second time tonight, I was in the spotlight. If this was still tonight...
I sat slumped in a chair, a simple metal folding chair, and my hands were free; I ran one of them up over my face and felt the stubble of beard and ran my fingers into my scalp and massaged. My Florsheimed feet were roped to the legs of the chair; another rope looped my midsection, tying me to the chair. I was in the pants of my garbardine suit and in my white shirt, my suitcoat gone, my tie gone. And needless to say, the nine-millimeter and .38 I’d stuffed in my waistband were long gone.
The glare of the overhead lamp made it hard to focus, but gradually I achieved a sense of where I was. Beyond the cone of light I sat within was a vast, cool darkness, but a certain amount of light — moonlight and perhaps electrical light — came from high distant windows. The smell of gasoline and oil and wing dope wafted through the drafty structure. Gradually, dark bulky shapes within the darkness made themselves known, like beasts crouching in jungle night shadows.
A melodramatic response, perhaps, to being held captive in an airplane hangar, but justifiable. I had knocked the shit out of a couple of Miller’s cronies and now Miller had me — or someone Miller had turned me over to had me — and the only reason I had any hope of getting out of this alive was that I wasn’t dead yet.
Footsteps echoed in the cavernous room, footsteps in the darkness, hollow clops punctuated by gun-cock clicks.
Then I could make out the outline of him, moving out from between the large shapes that were parked aircraft, and finally he stepped just inside my circle of harsh light.
“Forgive the precautions,” William Miller said in that mellow balm of baritone.
Again his lanky frame was draped in a dark undertaker’s suit, navy with a red-and-white-striped tie. It was hard to see where his gray hair began and the grayish flesh left off. He stood with folded arms, his full lips pursed in an amused smile, but his eyes dark and cold under the black ridges of eyebrow.
“Stand a little closer,” I said. “I can’t hear you.”
He waved a scolding finger my way. “Don’t make me sorry I didn’t bind your hands, as well. You did quite a thorough job on Smith and Jones.”
“Are they military intelligence? Or am I contradicting myself?” My tongue felt thick and my head throbbed with a headache almost as blinding as the glare of the overhead lamp. But I was damned if I’d let him sense that.
Now his hands had moved to his hips. “Are you aware that the FBI has a file on you?”
“I’d be flattered if I gave a damn,” I said. “Is that who they were?”
He chuckled. “I understand you once spoke to Director Hoover ‘disrespectfully.’”
“I told him to go fuck himself.”
The dark unblinking eyes had fastened on me, appraisingly. “You also prevented him from being kidnapped by the Karpis and Barker gang. And I understand, from Elmer Irey, that you were helpful last year, in the ongoing IRS investigation of the late unlamented Huey Long’s confederates in Louisiana.”