“If my knee... wasn’t fucked up...”
“It is, Docker.” Rizzato had begun his gradual deadly circling as he moved in for the kill. He was doing what he lived for. He hissed, “It’s the fear that does it, Docker, knowing it’s coming. The piss’ll be running down your leg before I put it into you.”
“Can’t we... deal? The briefcase... for... for my...”
“For your life? I’ve already got that, Docker.” Rizzato made a quick thrusting feint, playing with his man, then leapt back laughing from Docker’s clumsy attempt to parry. “Once or twice in the belly, Docker, to soften you up. Then the eyes. Then...”
Peeler Rizzato went in low, crouched and terrible and deadly, an exceptional knife-fighter carrying darkness with him like a man come to steal corpses. His face was murderous with delight. He was poised on the balls of his feet, balanced for move and feint and thrust as a boxer is, his vital areas well protected by the outthrust, always weaving blade. He moved it in short, swift slashes, ready now to disable Docker’s protective arms.
But that too was a feint. He jabbed instead, suddenly deadly, for the stomach. Somehow Docker, with a quick left-hand sweep and going up on his toes like a matador, was lucky enough to turn arm and blade clumsily aside. The steel rang against the car door.
Frustrated, Peeler sprang back. He weaved, crouched, feinted.
Light gleamed on Docker’s long blond hair. He was in a crouch himself now. Rizzato lunged. But somehow Docker was not there, was circling his opponent with his jerky, lopsided step. Able to put full weight on the right knee which, though it still made him limp, seemed to have miraculously recovered its full strength.
Rizzato gave a pattering uneasy step or two.
And Docker laughed. “It’s the fear,” he said mockingly.
Their circling had carried them away from the cars, out into the open. The garage was deserted. Sudden, almost blind fury flooded across Peeler Rizzato’s face. He came bolt upright for a moment, his eyes wild. He sputtered, “You... it’s... you fucker!”
On the last word, he lunged.
As he did, Docker gave a tremendous screeching bellow that checked the knifeman’s flow of movement for a millisecond of time. In that briefest of instants, Docker’s left hand snapped forward so steel fingers could slam shut around Peeler’s wrist like a jail sentence. The hand went in and up and around, carrying Peeler’s arm with it; Docker’s shoulder jolted up under Peeler’s elbow but Docker’s left hand kept right on going down.
Peeler’s elbow was dislocated with a sound like a housewife ripping a dustcloth. The knife rattled on the concrete. The imprisoning hand kept moving, so Peeler perforce followed it screeching with pain.
This brought his face forward and down, into the path of the calloused, awful edge of Docker’s other hand, being driven out and up in a backhand lash.
Peeler saw it coming; he died squealing his terror. The knife edge of the hand entered his face just under the nose. Front teeth, violently separated roots and all from the gums, flew out from the little killer’s face like popping corn; needles of splintered nasal bone were rammed up into the jelly-like substance of his brain’s frontal lobes.
Docker sprang nimbly back, let the dying husk go down face forward. Blood poured across the concrete, spattering the tips of Docker’s well-polished shoes. Docker turned and limped blindly away, stood with his bare palm resting on the polished fender of somebody’s car. His color was that of a spent distance runner just before he collapses of mild shock and vomits on the cinders.
“He had to die,” Docker said aloud.
No one answered him. From behind him came the echoing mechanized voice intoning PLEASE WALK ON AND OFF RAMP.
“HE HAD TO DIE!” Docker shouted at the voice.
The voice continued its mindless litany of instruction. Docker seemed to be coming out of it a little. He took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes. He bent, peered at himself in the car’s side-mirror. It gave him back a pair of staring, terrified eyes in a dread-filled face.
“Too much blood,” he said to the face. “Too many dead.” Then he found a hollow laugh. “The little wop took it out of you, didn’t he, Docker?”
His image mouthed his own words but did not respond. He nodded solemnly, put back on his glasses, shot a quick look around the garage. Far down the aisle he could see three people walking.
Docker toed the insignificant corpse under the nearest car, wiping his shoe-tips on it in the process, recovered attaché case and car keys. Somewhere a car motor started, throbbed. He saw a car beginning to back out, down by the escalator shaft.
He slipped on his gloves as he got into the Montego, then slid down so the top of his head did not show above the window line. He waited. His precautions were unnecessary. The car turned up one of the aisles leading to the exit ramp before getting down to his end of the garage.
Before leaving, Docker got back out, went over to the car he had leaned upon after killing Rizzato, and with the elbow of his topcoat carefully wiped his palm print from the fender.
Docker presented his ticket to the pimple-faced woman at the exit gate one floor above, entered the traffic stream which would take him up over the freeway and then down into the south-bound lanes. It was completely dark now, except for the blare of whizzing headlights.
“Somebody could be back there,” Docker muttered aloud. He kicked it up to seventy-five, though the Millbrae exit he intended to take was only a long mile south, weaved through slower traffic as if with a release of terrific tension.
At the last possible moment, he jammed the wheel hard enough over so he screamed almost sideways right across three lanes of cars and whipped into the off-ramp in a yelp of scorching rubber and the thunder of serrated, crosswise warning curbs under his tires. Horns blared and brakes shrieked, but nobody hit him; and then the Montego was at a decorous exit-ramp twenty-five that would keep the CHP off its tail.
At El Camino Real, main artery of the Peninsula’s tightly-packed suburban clutter, he went south again. Docker’s fingers drummed the wheel. The mathemetical possibility of a tail still existed: somebody could have been behind him who had anticipated such an exit and had lain far enough back not to be caught napping.
Therefore, a squealing right into Trousdale from the left lane, in front of a station wagon being stood on its nose by its outraged woman driver. Left into Marco Polo, seconds later right into the spacious grounds of Peninsula Hospital, twist the wheel again to shoot into a DOCTORS ONLY slot in a small courtyard beyond the arched ambulance entrance, killing lights, motor, and sliding down in the seat all in one motion.
Nothing. No green Plymouth or any other car thrust a questing nose into the courtyard; none passed in the blacktop beyond the arch.
Docker got out of there, for fifteen minutes played around in the curved residential streets lacing the subdivisions rising up the flank of the hills between Burlingame and the sea. Nobody stuck to his mirror for more than a block. Adeline Drive carried him into Hillside, and Hillside soon found the old Skyline which Interstate 280 had rendered obsolete.
Here Docker turned the big car north, back toward the city from which he just had escaped. Thirty feet short of a lonely phone booth, he pulled off on the shoulder. He got out a large flashlight, went over the car quickly and competently for electronic bleepers which might have been placed on the unguarded machine in the airport parking garage. It was clean, but Docker still seemed set on preparing for some final action; he got the long-armed lug wrench from the trunk and put it on the front seat beside the attaché case.
He limped to the phone booth, shut the door long enough to dial, then opened it so he would be in darkness. The car lights were off. He was only a shadow listening to the electronic bleeps and chuckles which would carry him through to his number. As he waited, he stared unseeingly at the great gleaming castles of the airport far below and a couple of miles away.