“Oh, my God, Johnny!”
“See you later, Pop.” I hung up and opened the door. The bruiser was watching the elevator and didn’t see me come out. The other guy was just getting the clerk’s attention and had the guy reaching for the registry cards when I walked up and stood beside him.
Maybe he didn’t expect anything like that at all. He was looking at the card with “John McBride” scrawled across the top line, cursing silently to himself, when I said, “I’m not hard to find, friend.”
Fingers seemed to crawl up his neck under the skin and peel the flesh back from his face. He dropped the card and I saw his hands start to come out slow and deliberately to take me apart right there and I looked down at him some and said. “You put your hands on me and I’ll knock you right on your goddamn ass.”
His hands stopped halfway to my neck and his eyes got wider and wider until there wasn’t any place else for the lids to go. The bruiser came up on the double with a billy out and ready, looked at me, then his partner while he said, “This the guy?” caught the faint nod and came back to me again.
“Well, well,” he said.
I grinned at the both of them. “Don’t let your positions go to your heads, pallies. Take me rough and I bet they carry three people out of here.” I grinned some more and kept my eyes on the billy.
The guy with the billy worked up a passable smile. “You sure sound tough. You sure do.” He made like it was all a surprise to him, but he put the billy away. The other guy was staring at me in utter fascination. His hands had dropped, but his eyes hadn’t. They were gone, completely gone. They were lifeless without being dead, yet there was death and hatred in them like I had never seen before.
Then they squinted a little bit shut and his face twisted wryly back into shape. “Move, Johnny. Stay in front of me and I hope to hell you try to run for it. I hope to hell you try so I can break your spine in half with a bullet.”
I don’t scare easy. In fact, I don’t scare worth a damn. Anything that could ever scare me had already done it and now there wasn’t anything left I’d let push me. I looked at each one of them so they’d know it and they knew it. Then I walked out front and got into the police car and let the bruiser and the other guy squeeze me in. The bruiser grunted to himself a couple of times, a sound that meant he was enjoying himself. The other one just sat and when he wasn’t staring at me, stared straight ahead.
His name was Captain Lindsey. The sign on his desk said so. The other was either Tucker somebody or somebody Tucker because that’s what the captain called him. Being in the room didn’t happen just like that. There was more to it, a kind of open-mouthed wonder about the whole thing like the janitor who let his broom drop and the desk sergeant who stopped talking in the middle of a sentence to a guy he was bawling out and the news reporter who yelled, “Gawd!” and dashed into the press room for his camera.
He didn’t get any pictures or any story because Lindsey took me into his room where there was a desk, two chairs and a filing cabinet. The two of them took the chairs and let me stand there.
When I stood there long enough Lindsey said, “You’re a nervy bastard, Johnny. I never thought I’d see it happen like that.”
I pulled out a smoke and took my time lighting it. Now it was my turn. I said, “You sure you’re not making a mistake?”
The two cops exchanged glances. Lindsey smiled and shook his head. “How could I ever forget you, Johnny?”
“Oh, lots of people make mistakes, you know.” I let the smoke stream out through my nose and decided to make it short and sweet. “If you’re holding me on a charge, name it or shut your face. I don’t like being hauled into a crummy police station and talked to.”
Lindsey must have been saving that one sneer up for a long time. “I don’t know what kind of an angle you think you’re playing, McBride, and I don’t give a damn. The charge is murder. It’s murder five years old and it’s the murder of the best friend a guy ever had. It’s a murder you’ll swing for and when you come down through the trap I’m going to be right there m the front row so I can see every goddamn twitch you make and there in the autopsy room when they carve the guts out of you and if nobody claims the body I’ll do it myself and feed you to the pigs at the county farm. That’s what the charge is. Now do you understand it?”
Now I was understanding a lot of things including the way Pop’s voice cracked over the phone. They weren’t so pretty. This game was dirtier than I thought and I didn’t know whether I was going to like it so much.
Murder. I was expected to shake in my shoes.
Like I said, I didn’t scare easy. They saw it on my face again and were wondering why. This time I leaned on Lindsey’s desk and gave him a mouthful of smoke to let him know how I felt about it. “Prove it,” I said.
His face was cold as ice. “That’s a crappy angle. That’s real crappy, McBride. The last time you didn’t stay around long enough to know what we had, did you? Don’t mind my laugh. I’m getting a charge out of this. I love every bit of it. I want to see you go right through all the stages until there’s nothing left but jelly. You didn’t know we found the gun and got the best sets of prints you ever saw, did you? Sure, Johnny, I’ll prove it. Right now. I want to watch your face change.”
He pushed himself away from the desk and nodded for Tucker to get behind me. We went down the hall where the reporter was screaming to be let in on the deal and into another room with a lot of tricky gadgets and a sign over the door that said LABORATORY. Lindsey must have looked at the card so often that he knew exactly where it was. He pulled it out of the file, stuck it in the slide of a projector and switched on the light.
They were the prettiest set of fingerprints I’d ever seen in my life. Nice and clear with some real tricky swirls in the middle. Tucker tapped me on the shoulder. “Over here, tough boy.”
Lindsey was waiting at the desk with a brand-new index card in front of him. He squeezed a quarter-inch of printer’s ink out of a tube into a glass plate and began spreading it out with a rubber roller. When it covered the plate the way he wanted it he picked up my hand and pushed the tip of my forefinger in the mess.
Maybe he thought I messed up the card purposely. He grabbed my finger and did it carefully this time.
The same thing happened again like I knew it would and he said something foul.
Instead of a print there was a solid black smudge because I didn’t have any fingerprints.
I shouldn’t have laughed, but I couldn’t help it. The back of his hand smashed into my mouth and before he could do it again I hooked him under the chin and he and the desk and the junk slammed the floor. Tucker had time to get the billy unlimbered but not enough time to place it right. The thing ripped my coat open all the way up my sleeve and went back for another try. I had him then. I had him so goddamn good I nearly took his gut off. He folded up and never felt his face get turned into a squashed ripe tomato. I had time to see him vomit all over himself before my own head burst open in a blaze of fiery streaks that sent a curse of ungodly pain down into every single little nerve fiber throughout my body and I knew that this was what it was like to die. There was a crazy, violent screaming behind me that came from Lindsey’s contorted mouth and it was the last thing I thought I’d ever hear again.
It was, for a long, long time.
Sound came back first. It was a voice that said, “You’re a fool for doing that, Lindsey.”
Then another voice that quavered slightly. “I should have killed him. Honest to God, I tried. I hope the bastard dies.”
Somebody else was there too. “Not me. I hope he lives. I’ll work him over like he’s never been worked over before, so help me!”