The redhead must have loved him because she was holding his hand while her finger kept fiddling with the brilliant hunk-of ice enviously. I could have sat there and watched for one minute or thirty. Time didn’t make a bit of difference any more. All I knew was that when he paid his bill and walked out I was right behind him.
What I wanted most of all was to see the kind of car he was driving. In my mind I could still see the black hulk of the sedan with the winking red eye sticking out the front window. I wanted to see if they were the same before I tore his arms and legs off.
The car was big and it was a sedan. It wasn’t black, but the color was close enough. In the dark there isn’t any difference in colors to talk about anyway. I said, “Hello, Eddie,” good and slow and watched him turn around. He almost said hello, but it never came out. His narrow eyes looked propped open momentarily then came down to meet the sneer that was twisting his mouth out of shape.
And you know what the little bastard did? He came for me! He didn’t wait. Hell no. He shoved the redhead away, took a jerky little step forward and winged his right at me without even bothering to make a fist of his hand. The lousy little punk tried to slap me across the jaw and damn near did it, too.
Not quite.
I grabbed that open palm, twisted him right off his feet, watched him come up off the ground screaming until my fist smashed the yell right back down his throat again. He lay there face down in his own blood and I was just going to give him another taste of it when I felt my skull get parted down the middle. It didn’t even hurt. It was just a big blanket of noise that rolled in like thunder. The animal reflexes a man is born with kept me standing and seeing long enough to catch the shine of polished brass buttons and see the barrel of a gun come down again and make another sharp crack across the top of my head.
Things weren’t all white this time. There was a funny smell in the air, but it wasn’t antiseptic. No mummy, either. Everything was painted an ugly efficient green and the light that streaked in the windows seemed to be slatted. After five minutes of looking at it I realized why. There were horizontal steel bars built right into the frames.
The cop said, “Awake, eh?”
I grunted and touched my head. It would have been better if I hadn’t. The top of my skull was soft and squashy, held together by strips of tape that went down to my ears. My body seemed to throb all over, trying to explode.
“Want something to eat?”
My stomach started to heave at the word. I said no, but he brought in a tray anyhow so I managed to get some of the coffee down. It helped things enough so I could swallow some limp toast.
Then a doctor came in and probed around, checking what he found against a pair of X-ray pictures. I said, “Look good?”
“Looks lucky.”
“That’s what the last doctor said.”
“If either one of those blows had landed a half-inch on either side you’d be dead.”
“That’s nice. I saw brass buttons behind the gun that nailed me.”
The cop in the corner lowered his paper. “You was disturbing the peace. You committed assault with intent to kill.”
“You should live to be a hundred, but right away,” I said. “I want a lawyer.”
“The court’ll assign one.”
“The hell it will. I’ll pick my own. Who’s in charge of this rattrap?”
The doctor shook out some pills on the table-top beside the bed. “I don’t think you’re in condition to be excited at this moment. You’re going to have to stay quiet a few days.”
“Nuts. I’ll pick my own doctor too if I want to and you know damn well I can. I want out of this trap.”
I saw the doctor look at the cop and shrug. “It’s up to him,” he said. The cop put down the paper and walked to the door. Five minutes later he came back and he wasn’t alone. Lindsey was with him. The guy looked happy again. Real happy. I called him a son of a bitch and tried to kick him in the stomach. He leered at me and stayed out of range. All I did was make my head hurt worse.
“You know why you’re here, don’t you?” Lindsey grinned.
The cop muttered. “He knows. I told him. He thinks he’s pretty wise.”
“Yeah, I know,” Lindsey agreed. He pulled a pad out of his pocket, leaned back against a chair and waited for me to say something.
He’d still be waiting if the press didn’t walk in as nice as you please. The cop at the door looked at Lindsey kind of puzzled-like waiting to see if Logan would get tossed out or not.
My boy handed an envelope to Lindsey and said tonelessly, “It’s a writ. Very legal and all that. McBride’s free on bail so you can put your pad away, copper.”
Remember how I told you Lindsey looked the first day I saw him at the hotel desk? How his eyes went all the way up and the red came into his face? He looked like that again. Maybe a little worse.
But you’d never know how mad he was by the way he spoke. His voice was calm as still-frozen water and just as cold. He said, “I heard you were mixed up with him, Logan. I didn’t want to think so because you used to be a nice guy.”
“So did you, Lindsey.” Logan had ice of his own.
The chief’s head made a slow turn until his face was pointed at me. “Now you got friends, Johnny. Now you got friends who can pull writs out of a hat early in the morning because a judge is afraid of getting in wrong with the press. Somebody even went to the trouble of putting up ten-grand bail, so you have some very powerful friends all of a sudden.” His eyes shifted to Logan a moment before coming back to me. “You’re going to need them, feller, but they’ll never be able to help you enough.”
The doctor and the other cop edged out the room and closed the door. I went to sit up, managed it after the second try and perched on the edge of the bed. Lindsey took a step closer to Logan, the hate oozing out of every pore. “Don’t ever come near me, Logan. Never again, understand?” Then he swung on his heel and reached for the doorknob.
Logan said, “Lindsey...”
The cop barely looked back.
“We used to be friends,” Logan said.
“No more.”
“You used to be a good cop, too.”
“No more,” I put in, and Lindsey looked all the way back, his hand still on the door.
“When you finally realize that it’s possible for even a brain like you to be wrong, maybe we can be friends again. You’re not much smarter than me in police business and I say McBride never killed Minnow. Think about it sometime.”
He thought about it. For at least three seconds. Then he opened the door and slammed it behind him so hard it almost came off the hinges.
Logan shrugged sadly and turned back to my remains. “Feeling well enough to clear this place?”
“I certainly don’t feel bad enough to stay. Give me a lift, will you?”
He came over and hooked his hand under my arm, half dragging me upright. When he was sure I wasn’t going to topple over he got my clothes out of the closet and helped me into them. The whole operation took awhile, but I was fairly presentable except for the patch over my skull. The boys at the desk downstairs handed me a Manila envelope with my personal effects and that was the end of that. Logan had his Chevvy outside and got me into the seat next to him, then lit up a brace of smokes and handed me one.
He had to say it sometime. I was waiting for it and he said it. “Of all the lame-brain stupes you take the cake. How much trouble can a guy get into anyway?”
“A lot more than this.”
“Feel like talking?”
“Not especially, but if you’re curious, what would you like to know?”
“A few things the cops don’t seem to know. First about a dead man outside of town. He was a very special kind of dead man. He and two friends were part of an out-of-town team who specialize in rough stuff. The other two were found very nicely killed.”