Max Allan Collins
No Cure for Death
PART ONE
ONE
He had the kind of face that said “hate me,” and I wasn’t arguing.
Let’s just say he made a bad first impression, and I don’t really think his being black had anything to do with it, though the missing eye and jagged stitched scar running above and below the empty socket sure did. His head was totally hairless-not just bald, but no eyebrows, either-and his mouth was frozen open, a down-slanting hole showing only the lower row of crooked yellow teeth, and the overall effect of his formidable visage was that of an eightball come to life-and a very mean, very ugly eightball at that-on the lookout for a white cueball to knock around.
The body below the face was equally menacing and seemed to have trouble just squeezing through the doorway of Port City’s cubicle-size bus terminal. He was huge, an exaggeration, more a cartoon than a man, like that guy in the leopard skin who tags along with Mandrake the Magician, or Daddy Warbucks’s jinni strongarm Punjab. He turned one bloodshot eye loose on the room, and I worked at making myself inconspicuous, though I felt like I was in a closet trying to convince a murder-intent cuckold I was a coat hanger.
The guy was a stranger to me, but I had the paranoid feeling that he’d been sent by somebody somewhere to make up for some nameless forgotten foul deed I’d once done, maybe in another life. Not that I was alone in the tiny waiting room, although Meyer, the depot man, was out for coffee. There was a young woman next to me on the bench, a young blonde with a tired but attractive face. But she looked innocent enough, hardly the type who’d have somebody like this out to get her.
I’d been trying, incidentally, for the previous half hour to strike up a conversation with her, as she was slender and well-formed and appealed to me as much as Punjab didn’t. Besides, I’ve always been partial to blondes, even with roots. But I hadn’t got nerve up to make my move; too shy, I guess-and too shy, too, to go rushing over to Punjab when he rolled in to express my instinctual dislike for him.
It didn’t take long, not as long as it seemed anyway, for that one eye to pick out which of us it was looking for. He drove his truck body over to where the blonde and I were sitting and planted himself in front of her, a big paw nervously smoothing the coat of his surprisingly well-tailored, well-pressed suit-custom-cut from a houndstooth tent, no doubt. A noise came rumbling up out of the depths of his throat and became something that sounded vaguely like “Bitch.”
My ears discounted that, and I looked away. He seemed to know her, after all, and who was I to get involved in an argument between friends?
But it must have been “Bitch” after all, because the noise came out again, and this time was distinctly “Bitch,” and louder, and part of a sentence: “Get on your damn feet, bitch, we got business.”
There was terror in her face, which didn’t surprise me, but there was also an unmistakable lack of recognition, which did. She’d obviously never seen her one-eyed “business” partner before-he’d been just as much a black bolt-from-the-blue for her as for me.
And he was impatient.
He grabbed up a bunch of fuzzy blue sweater in a bulky fist and lifted her off the bench, and I hit him in the throat.
He did three things.
He released the girl.
He touched, lightly, his Adam’s apple.
He knocked me across the room into an upright Pepsi machine, with a fly-swat backhand.
My hands groped behind me, feeling the cold metal of the soft drink machine, searching for something to grip to push to my feet. I got off my knees and started up and watched his huge body come slowly toward me in a sway reminiscent of the Frankenstein monster, and I ducked and his hamhock fist put a dent in the Pepsi machine big enough to hold a political rally in.
But that was only one of his hands, and it left him another to give me a second fly-swat, and then I was on the floor again, waiting for whatever was coming, my hands scrambling aimlessly across the surface of anything.
Where the empty Pepsi bottle came from I couldn’t say, but it was in one of my hands now, and that was good enough for me. I got my eyes working and saw him barreling toward me with that reflecting skull lowered and charging and I laid the bottle across it.
He went down.
And out.
I covered my mouth with my hand and then took the hand away and looked at it. Some blood, but not too bad. I jiggled some teeth with a finger and found them safe, if not sound. My feet were under me, shaky but under me, and I leaned against the machine. Punjab lay on his stomach like a tree I had chopped down.
The young woman was sitting back on the bench, almost as though nothing had happened, although she’d turned very, very white. She was looking directly at me. “Are you all right?” she said.
I nodded and went over to the pay phone hanging on the wall by the Pepsi machine and dropped a dime in.
“Sheriff Brennan, please,” I said.
“Who’s calling…”
“Tell him Mallory.”
A few moments later Brennan was on the line, saying, “Mallory, it’s nearly seven o’clock. You and John should’ve been here fifteen, twenty minutes ago. What’s the holdup?”
“John’s bus is late.”
“Well, come on over to the jailhouse when he gets in. Been too damn long since I seen the boy.”
“John’s bus being a few minutes late isn’t exactly why I called.” Down on the floor nearby, Punjab was stirring, just starting to shake himself out of it. “Just a second, Brennan.”
“What…?”
I let the phone hang loose and reached down for the bottle I’d used on Punjab, broke it against the edge of the Pepsi machine and stood there with the jagged half that was left in my hand, like a tough guy in an old B-movie. The rousing bear pushing up from the floor with his hands took it all in with that single penetrating eye of his.
That eye followed me back over to the phone, which I spoke into, the makeshift weapon in my free hand.
“Sheriff,” I said, with some dramatic emphasis on the word, “suppose I told you a guy bigger than a bus rolled into the terminal and tried to run me over?”
Brennan’s voice said, “What the hell…?”
And Punjab was up and gone. Like maybe he’d borrowed one of his namesake’s flying carpets.
Brennan’s voice was saying, “What the hell’s going on there?”
“Easy, Sheriff, just kidding around. Stay put and I’ll bring your stepson around soon as his bus pulls in.”
“Listen you spaced-out creep, if this is your idea of a joke…”
I put the receiver back and walked over to a wooden empty bottles case and stuck my half-a-one gently in a hole.
Meyer, who’s a runty guy of twenty-six or so whom I play poker with occasionally, shuffled quickly in from his hourly coffee break at the cafe next door. His eyes were portholes. “Did you see the size of that guy?” he wanted to know.
I touched my still bleeding mouth with the tip of my sweat shirt. “What guy?” I said.
Meyer gave me the same sort of look he gives me when he wonders if I’m bluffing (I usually am, but don’t tell Meyer) and got behind his desk and started reading the new Penthouse.
I glanced over at the bench and took a look at the stakes of the fight in which I’d played feeble knight to Punjab’s heavyweight dragon.
She was still looking white, very, and she was shivering, rubbing her arms as if the steaming hot pipes next to her were an air conditioner, and as though her arms were bare and not in the long sleeves of her sweater.
I walked over to her.
TWO
And sat back down next to her on the bench.
I said, “Mallory.”
Her eyes went from half-lidded to round, and I saw that they were blue and rather glazed. She said: “Pardon?”