P. J. ducked into the van. He put his load down near the front, his back to me, and though that big ass of his made a damn tempting target, I had something better in mind. There’s a streak of revenge in the best of us, you know, and I swung that shaft of iron into his side, into his ribcage, and at the same time covered his mouth with my left hand, a hand now holding that greasy rag. Once I had the rag stuffed in his mouth, I let him turn himself around, still doubled over with pain; he took one look at the tire iron and, out of reflex action, stood up straight.
Which is something you don’t want to do inside a van, especially when you’re Hulk’s size. But he did it anyway and, in doing so, banged his head into the roof of the van like a hammer driving in a nail, making a thunk sound that echoed hollowly in the small compartment. He fell to his knees, then on his face. He couldn’t have been out colder if I had bashed him in the head with the tire iron.
I used the rope to tie his hands and feet together behind him, in one big package. He was breathing well, despite the greasy rag crammed in his mouth, and as long as he didn’t choke to death on the taste of the thing, he’d be okay; besides, he wouldn’t be waking up for a while anyway.
After I locked the van’s rear doors, I tossed the keys over into a hedge in the neighbors’ yard. I figured that was as good a place as any for them. Then the tire iron and I walked back around the van, entered the house, and crept up the stairs to the landing, cracking open the door to see what was beyond, ready to cave in the first unfriendly skull that presented itself.
Fortunately, what was beyond the door was the kitchen, with not an unfriendly skull in sight. It was big, a high-ceilinged ballroom of a kitchen, with light pine cabinets surrounding the room and gleaming white walls showing beneath them. Two of the walls were lined with ancient but well-preserved appliances: multiple-burner gas range, big round-shouldered Westinghouse, long horizontal freezer you could store a buffalo in, with an electric dishwasher the only apparent recent addition. Otherwise the room was empty, with the exception of the small, square pine table and its chairs in the center of the room. Sitting at the table, tied to one of those chairs and gagged, was Mrs. Fox.
She was wearing what she’d worn that first evening I’d brought her hot supper around-a blue cotton dress with white cameo brooch-and was maintaining her usual quiet dignity. She seemed to be waiting, with patience, and with some irritation, for these intruders to be done with their sacking of her home and leave her alone.
Her eyes smiled when she saw me, and when I took the gag off, I saw the corresponding smile below. But she was a smart old gal and didn’t say a word as I untied her. I whispered, “Go out the side here, and go over to the house next door. The police are on their way.”
And she whispered back at me, “You’ll have to help me to the door. My cane is in the living room, and I’ll never make it without support.”
“What about after you get outside?”
“Then I’ll crawl if I have to. I just don’t feel that my falling down in here and causing a commotion would be ideal, do you?”
I walked her over to the door and helped her on down the steps and out of the house, as carefully as an usher at a wedding seating the mother of the bride. Once outside, however, I realized she’d had an ulterior motive in asking for my aid. She said, still whispering, “Now listen here, young man, you just come along with me; you’re not going back inside that house.”
“I have to.”
“You said the police are coming,” she said. “Let them take care of this. You stay away from those people in there. Don’t go in that house.”
“I have to.”
That was when the old guy from next door appeared and took Mrs. Fox by the arm and began walking her over to his place. She kept her eyes on me, however, her expression making it clear she didn’t approve of my going back in.
But I did anyway, of course, and my first action was to kick over the chair Mrs. Fox had been sitting tied-up in. It clattered to the floor, and the noise brought on the hoped-for response; I heard movement out in the other part of the house and positioned myself to the right of the swinging kitchen door, and when somebody pushed through, I cut him in half with the tire iron.
“Sh… i… i… it,” he gushed, the air emptying out of him.
His was a voice from this afternoon, the voice of the guy who had seemed second-in-command to the as-yet-unseen Frank Petersen. He was short, dark-haired, and lean, and he wore dark green gardener’s coveralls with a conspicuous lump in the right pocket. The lump was shaped like a small automatic. He was pale and had a more than superficial resemblance to the girl I’d seen at Tony’s. This, then, was Chet Richards, friend and accomplice of Pat Nelson, pimp and brother of Felicia Richards.
“You!” he said. “Mallory! You son of a….”
He didn’t finish, because I raised the tire iron as if to strike, and he covered his head and cowered.
“Nice meeting you, Chet,” I said. “But then we’ve met before, right?”
“Where’s the old lady? Where’s P. J.?”
“P. J. wanted to be here, but he got all tied up. And I sent the old lady someplace where no one’s trying to kill her.”
“Listen, nobody meant to kill that other old broad.”
“Shut up. I don’t think I want to hear that line of bullshit when I don’t have to. You just keep quiet, Chet.”
“What… what are you going to do?”
“Wait. I’m going to wait for just a few minutes for the cops to get here.”
“Cops?”
“That’s right. I already called them. It’s all over.”
Something got going in his eyes. Thoughts of the gun in his coverall pocket, most likely.
“Don’t even think about it, Chet. As close as I am anyway to opening you up with this tire iron, you just don’t want to push me.”
And the door behind me swung open hard, knocking me over, sending the tire iron pitching from my hand. I reached out after it, but the guy kicked the iron across the room, then came back and stepped on my hand, grinding my fingers like they were grapes and he was making wine.
“Well, look who the hell it is,” Pat Nelson said.
His voice sounded different than it had the other night in the stairwell when he was doing his Dean Martin parody. But it was a voice I recognized; I’d heard it back at Tony’s, and at Mrs. Jonsen’s, and one night outside my trailer. Pat had been the third party-the whiner-the guy who’d stayed behind at the garage before the Cooper job. But evidently, when Chet and P. J. went back to the garage after that fell through, they’d talked Pat into coming along to Mrs. Fox’s. That was something else I should’ve figured, damnit! After all, Felicia Richards had been alone when Brennan and the cops had raided Tony’s; there’d been no sign of the whiner. I should’ve considered the possibility of his being here. Damn.
“Mallory,” Pat said, “I tell you, you got to be the craziest goddamn bastard I ever run across, you know that? Why do you cause so much goddamn misery for you and everybody else?” He too was in green coveralls, but his gun was in hand, not in pocket. It was a little thing, an automatic sized to fit a woman’s purse, and it was ridiculous that it scared me as much as it did.
“Never mind that, Pat,” Chet said, scrambling onto his feet. “The cops are on the way; we got to get the hell out of here.”
Pat’s face narrowed, and he came over and called me a bastard again and kicked me in the ribs. Not a very forceful kick, really, but it didn’t take much; pain shot through me like a flare, and I blacked out for a moment.
When I came to, I pushed up on one elbow and looked around. They were gone. I wondered for how long.
Then Pat told me. His voice, from outside, was saying: “Where are the goddamn keys! What did he do with the goddamn car keys!”