A drawer opened in the kitchen. Barbara darted hack into the room carrying a butcher knife. She was panting. "I slammed the back door and ducked into the broom closet. He ran right past me," she said as she cut me loose.
I grabbed the knife from her and cut the ropes that bound my ankles. I picked up the other gun with the silencer on it and sprinted through the kitchen to the stairs.
Rossi had reached the street and ducked back inside when he failed to see the girl. He looked up as I appeared on the second-floor landing.
His bullet knocked splinters off the side of the open door behind me. Mine tore die sleeve on his coat.
He opened the door that led to the street and sprang through it. By the time I got down to street level, he had vanished around the corner of the house.
Eleven
Barbara was kneeling at her father's side when I got back to the apartment. Pain lined her pale face.
"This is going to demand a lot of you, I know, but I need your help. I have to find Rossi fast," I said.
"What do you think hell do?"
"He isn't going to give up his position and run. He'll make up another story to tell the Organization. For example, that you betrayed your father and joined forces with me."
She stood up. "Then we have to stop him before he can get in touch with them."
"Exactly."
She was driving a little Fiat. As we sped away from the apartment house, she said, "Rossi has an estate in the suburbs. I guess he'll go there."
I directed her to the street where I'd left my rented car the night before. The car was still there, with a ticket for illegal parking on the windshield.
"You drive," I ordered. I sat alongside her, putting together the rifle I'd checked out at the AXE base in South Carolina.
Rossi's house sat on a hill. Iron gates guarded the entrance and a high fence surrounded the grounds.
"An alarm goes off if the gates are forced," Barbara said. "You have to call the house and ask to be admitted."
I slid under the steering wheel and took her place. Then I drove through the gates, popping the lock and knocking them apart. The car shot up the paved drive with one of the gates still hanging onto the hood. A bent fender scraped a tire, sounding like a buzzsaw.
A man in a gardener's clothing yelled at us as we passed him. A second man came running through the shrubbery with a gun in his hand. I picked up the rifle with one hand, crossed my arm over my chest and thrust the barrel out the window. I pulled the trigger and the running man swerved and pitched sideways into a fishpond.
"That's Rossi's car," Barbara yelled, pointing at the Cadillac in the driveway. "He's here, all right."
I jumped out of the car and fired a shot into the Cadillac's gas tank. 1 pumped in two more bullets, then pulled out my AXE lighter and tossed it into the gas that had started to seep from the tank.
"What are you doing?" the girl asked in a bewildered voice.
"Making sure he can't get away," I said.
Flames burst up the body of the Cadillac and then the tank exploded. A man in a chauffeur's uniform appeared on a flight of stairs running down from an apartment above the garage.
"Nick!" the girl cried, pointing at him.
I leaned against the hood of my car, dropped the rifle into position and put a bullet in the chauffeur's chest while he was still trying to get the revolver from inside his jacket.
A slug whined off the fender near me. Someone inside the house was shooting at me. I dropped into a crouch and ran around to the other side of the car where Barbara was already squatting. Another gun started up. There were at least two men inside the house.
Holding the rifle across my knee I looked at the girl. She was breathing hard and the color had returned to her face.
"Barbara," I said, "you're all right."
"So are you, Nick."
"I want you to roll away from the car and hide among those rose bushes," I told her. "Can you fire a gun?"
"Sure, I can."
I pressed my Luger into her hand. "Shoot at the house. You don't have to have a target. Just shoot. I want some cover."
Then I wormed through the open door of the car and turned the key. I got the motor started while lying on my side on the seat, pressing down the accelerator with my hand. I reached up and pushed the gear and the car lumbered up the walk to the front of the house.
I rolled out on the lawn and squirmed through some shrubbery so that I was against the wall. I crawled under a row of windows to the corner of the house. There was a patio and a glass-enclosed porch at the back. Lew Rossi lived in style.
Picking up a small stone bench, I hurled it through the glass. A man came running out, looking for me. I waited, standing with my back against the wall. He finally ventured into the yard. As he passed me, I stepped out and hit him with the butt of the rifle.
I entered the house through the broken glass doors and found a woman in a red dress crouched in a corner. She was in her thirties and so scared she was shaking all over.
"Who in the devil are you?" she said in a quavering voice.
"I'm Nick Carter. Are you Rossi's wife or his mistress?"
"Neither one. I'm visiting from Vegas. And if I ever get out of here, I won't come back."
I walked into a larger room and a man bobbed out of a hallway and took a shot at me. I fired the rifle from my hip and my bullet hit a vase on a long table to the mans right. He jumped back. Turning the long table over, I pushed it out to block the entrance to the hallway. Then I used it for a shield.
The man put two bullets through it, near my shoulder. I lay on my side and moaned. I counted to ten before he took the bait. Then I heard him moving toward me. I waited until he reached the table and leaned over it to look for my body. Then I swung the rifle and knocked the revolver out of his hand.
He grabbed me by the hair, which was the best thing handy. My howl was not as phony as my moan had been. I thought he was going to pull my hair out by the roots. Rising up, I hit him under the chin with the rifle stock. Then I stepped over him and moved down the hallway, which was lined with doors.
"Rossi," I yelled. "Are you too yellow to come out?"
No answer.
I kicked open a door of an empty bedroom, then moved on.
"Rossi," I yelled. "You have to catch a man from behind like you did Joe?"
Silence.
I tried another door. A bathroom. A woman in a maid's uniform was cowering in the bathtub.
"You've got a fine place here, Rossi," I yelled. "Tell you what I'm going to do to it. I'm going to set it on fire if you don't come out."
He came out. He sprang out of a linen closet, hit me with the door and knocked me sprawling, then jumped on me.
The knife flashed as he thrust it up for my throat. I jerked aside and caught his wrist in two hands and started bending his arm backward. He fell away and pulled free, driving a fist into my ribs. Then he slashed with the knife again, cutting a long rent down my trousers leg as I rolled away.
We faced each other in the hallway, both of us panting. He was on his knees and I was on mine and the rifle I had dropped lay on the floor between us.
"Pick it up, Carter," he said. "Try to pick it up and I'll slice off your hand."
I had retrieved Hugo before I left Barbara's apartment. I slid the knife down into my palm and when Rossi saw it, he raised his arm to throw his own knife.
Barbara shot him. She had come into the house and was standing at the end of the hallway. She raised the Luger and held it firmly in both hands and blew the back of his head off. She walked slowly toward us and stood looking down at the dead man. Finally she turned to me with an abstracted expression on her face and said, "The code... he broke the code of the Brotherhood... the bastard."