And then I remembered that wham, and I knew I hadn’t been slugged. Somebody had taken a shot at me. I tried to raise my hand to feel my head, but I couldn’t move it.
“Are you okay, kid?” Kenny babbled. “Gene, are you okay?”
I looked at him, and thought of that .38 he packed, and how gone he was on Lura Sloan. “‘Go to hell,” I said.
“Thank God you’re okay,” he said, and did he sound phony!
He helped me up. I was bleeding a little, but the bullet had just glanced off my thick skull. He put on a big act about helping me into the house to fix me up, but every time I looked in his face, he looked some place else.
“What happened, kid?” he kept asking. “What happened? You trip over something?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I fell down.”
He banged on the kitchen door, but there was no answer. I didn’t bother watching him put on his act. I felt dizzy and sick and leaned against the house.
I heard the door splinter when he kicked it in. He helped me inside, but by this time I had my own gun in my side pocket. He switched on the light.
There was Lura, stretched out on the floor with a bruise the size of an ashtray on her forehead. He went down on his knees beside her and felt all around the bruise with his fingertips to see if the bone had been splintered. I thought he was going to faint, the way he looked while he was crouched over her.
I looked around, and there was a coke bottle on the floor against the refrigerator. That would just about be it. I looked back and Kenny had Lura half in his arms. She was mumbling and he held her tighter.
“What, darling?” he begged. “What’d you say, honey? What, what?”
She opened her eyes. Her jaw was dropped. “Lew,” she mumbled, “Lew...”
“What about Lew, darling?”
“No, Lew, no... no... nononono!”
She screamed and grabbed him and he held her against him and rocked her, telling her that everything was okay, everything was okay, and what about Lew?
“He hit me,” she whispered, “he hit me with a bottle.”
“He was here?”
“He hit me...” she began to cry, and then she got hysterical, and finally Kenny carried her into the living room and laid her on the sofa and covered her with a blanket and sat there and patted her hand,
I didn’t know what to think. She’ had been smacked all right, and she thought it was Lew. I just plain didn’t know what to think.
“Oh, Kenny, Kenny,” she said. “He hit me—”
“You’re all right now, honey.”
“Hold me tight, Kenny. I’m so scared!”
“All right, honey, all right, all right...”
I just couldn’t watch them doing that, and something went cold and hard inside me. I looked around again and spotted the cellar door off the kitchen. I went down. It was the usual kind of cellar. There was a furnace and a coal bin next to it. On one wall was the gas and electric meters, and on the side wall was a work bench with a little vise and a rack of tools where Sloan must have worked on his guns.
There was a long poker- leaning against the furnace and I took it and thrust it into the coal pile from all angles. If there was a body there, I would have hit it, but there wasn’t. I looked at the furnace. It was a little house and the furnace was little, too, and the door was just about wide enough for the coal shovel. She would have had to cut Sloan up in pieces to get him in there, but I looked all the same, even holding a match inside.
The grates were clean and there weren’t even any ashes. I went over the cellar floor, inch by inch. It was cement, and if anybody had chopped it up for any reason, you would have spotted it a mile off. There wasn’t even a patch on it, and you could have spotted that, too.
So I stood there with a splitting headache, trying to figure it out.
I went upstairs. I looked in the living room and Lura had her arms around Kenny. He saw me and his lips went back from his teeth.
“Get lost!” he said.
“It’ll take me longer than you,” I said, and walked out.
I had a pocket flash, and I went over the grounds outside from front to back and side to side. It was all grass and nobody had dug a hole in it for a long time. I was up the block going through the empty lots the same way when I saw Kenny come out of the house and get in his car and drive away.
It was four in the morning when I got home myself, but by that time I was absolutely positive that Sloan hadn’t been put in the ground anyplace around that neighborhood.
I didn’t sleep a wink. I just couldn’t see Kenny taking a shot at me, but on the other hand, Lura Sloan was a dame some guys would have shot their grandmother for. I mean, she was so damn sexy that you couldn’t be in the same room with her two minutes without wanting to do something about it.
I hated her on account of what she was doing to Kenny, but even me — all I had to do was look at her, and something turned over inside. Don’t think I didn’t feel hypocritical and plain rotten about it. She just did something to you, and you couldn’t help yourself. I said I couldn’t see Kenny taking a shot at me. That’s a lie. I didn’t want to admit it to myself, and that was the whole thing. I could see Kenny, or anybody else, taking a shot at me, if it was a choice between me and her. He knew I’d crucify her in a minute if I had the chance.
I went down to Headquarters around nine the next morning. I must have looked a wreck because the desk sergeant said, “You ought to lay off that stuff, Gene.”
I told him to stick it, and went upstairs. I had some paperwork to do, and the print kept swimming in front of my eyes like guppies. I must have dropped off for a minute because all of a sudden there was Kenny shaking me by the shoulder.
“Here’s the break, kid,” he said. “She just heard from Sloan.” He sounded all wound up.
I said, “Huh?” only half-awake.
“She heard from Sloan. She knows where he’s hiding out, so come on, let’s go! This is it.”
My heart started to bump. His face looked so sharp and hard and I had the feeling he was saying one thing and meaning another. I got up and felt in my pocket to make sure I had my gun, and then we went downstairs to the car. I drove and he sat next to me with his lips pressed together.
The tension was building up in me and I asked, “Did she tell you where he’s hiding out?”
He said, “Out in the country some place,” and [could tell from the way he said it his mind was on something else entirely.
She was waiting for us at the house. She had on a skirt and a sweater and just looking at her, you had to breathe twice to catch one breath. Her face was white, but that only made her mouth look more like something you’d never satisfy even if you spent the rest of your life on it.
She came down the walk to the car. Her skirt was tight and every step she took told you just exactly what she was underneath and inside. I turned my head and stared straight ahead through the windshield, so I wouldn’t have to look at her. I didn’t want to feel any different about her than I did.
She sat between us, and it wasn’t me she leaned against. She had a big straw pocketbook and she thrust it down into the pocket on the door next to Kenny.
“What’d he say on the phone?” he asked her.
“He needs money.”
“Do you know where he is exactly?”
“Yes, but it’s kind of hard to explain. It’s up in the mountains the other side of Boonton. We used to go there on picnics. You can’t get in with a car. You have to walk about a mile.”
“Can we get in there without being seen?”
“Oh yes. The woods are very thick.”
They both sounded all tensed up, and you could tell from the way they talked that if I hadn’t been there, things would have been a lot different. A couple times I caught her looking at me from the side of her eyes, and each time she looked right away, and it gave me a cold feeling. Her and Kenny were holding hands where they thought I couldn’t see them.