“That rotten son of a bitch! Stop the car!”
She was out before it stopped moving, leaving her door hanging open and Louise gaping after her, open-mouthed, as she ran across the grass strip toward the phone where Taps was just saying, “Okay, that be cool...”
Grace snatched the receiver out of his hand and slammed it back onto the hooks. He backhanded her across the face, yelping in astonishment, “You crazy, woman? Whuffo you—”
Grace was yelling, “He saved your life! You owe him!”
He grabbed her by the arms and started shaking her, barely aware of Louise’s pale shocked face framed in the open car door a few yards away.
“We got the bonds, all of ’em!” Seeing some of the wildness fading from her eyes, he gingerly released his grip on Grace’s arms. In a quieter voice, he said, “Wasn’t no way we could do that except make sure he couldn’t ever come back at us.”
“You did it ’cause he saved your ass in prison,” said Grace in a low, intense voice. “There ain’t a livin’ soul in this world you’d do that for, an’ you can’t stand thinkin’ about it.” She gave a harsh laugh. “And now Brother Blood’s gonna take you down, nigger.”
Taps hesitated when, in the background, their car suddenly fishtailed away, so abruptly that Grace’s open door slammed shut. He felt sudden fear. Grace wasn’t hardly ever wrong; and now the white bitch Runyan had brought along had cut out with their car, stranding them. But he said, “You... you’re crazy, woman.”
“Don’t you see it yet?” she asked in an almost tired voice. “Brother Blood, he’s gonna start wonderin’, How that man know to call me at the dealer’s unless he was in on it an’ just chicken out at the last minute?” Over his protestations, she continued, “It’s what you’d think, was you. Ain’t Brother Blood gonna be any different.” She shook her head and turned away from him. “I ain’t hangin’ around to die with no boot dumb as you.”
Taps let her get almost to the sidewalk before he called after her, “But I got the bonds, baby!”
She turned to look at him almost with pity. “You got shit. Taps. You think Runyan didn’t know you planned to cross him when you asked he th’ow those bonds down to you?”
She trudged away, her steps tapping out a jaunty staccato in marked contrast to the slump of her shoulders. Taps wanted to run after her, grab her, make it right. But he had to know about this first. He ripped open the black stuff bag with his switchblade in a frenzy of anticipation and dread. It was full of newspapers folded to the approximate size of bearer bonds.
Runyan stepped into Brother Blood’s private elevator and pushed the GARAGE button next to the LOBBY and PENTHOUSE buttons. Tight security. He touched the bulky oblong under his sweater. If Taps was waiting for him across the street from the garage entrance, then everything was straight; if not, yet another friend had betrayed him. He was running out of people who hadn’t tried it, one way or another. Even Louise...
Ashcan that. It was all in the past. They were together now for the long run; they could depend on each other for anything. In five minutes it would all be over.
Taps Turner had a terminal case of the stupids, thought Brother Blood. Planning to steal the bond stash — with a white dude, yet! — and then chickening out and thinking he’d be dumb enough to swallow the con about stumbling across the robbery! No, Taps was dog meat right now; he just didn’t know it yet.
Brother Blood was a tall lean bald hollow-eyed man, impeccably dressed in a three-piece midnight blue suit and mirror-shined black oxfords. He leaned forward to peer out of the windshield past the beefy shoulder of his bodyguard as the black stretch limo was whispering down the deserted street beside his apartment building.
They turned the corner. The driver pushed the remote electronic-eye activator. Fifty yards away, the heavy steel-mesh gate was rattling upward. As it did, a lean dark-haired white man in black slacks and black sweater emerged from the garage, walking quickly. His hands were empty, but Brother Blood’s practiced, suspicious eyes picked out the ex-con.
“That’s him,” he said to his driver. “Run him down.”
Much too late, Runyan heard the almost silent rush of the limo coming at him. Even as he hurled himself desperately to the side, he knew he would be dead before he hit the concrete.
That was when Louise, seat-belted in and with the accelerator floored, rammed her car into the rear fender of the limo. The impact knocked its rear sideways just enough to jerk its nose aside the necessary fraction to miss Runyan as he landed, tucked, rolled, and came up running.
Not away. At. He was aware with an edge of his consciousness that Louise’s car, slewed around by the impact, had spun broadside into a power pole on the other side of the still-deserted street. No fire, no explosion, and she was trying to open her sprung door: probably unhurt. She had not only saved his life; she had bought him just enough time.
Since the windshield was bulletproof glass, the bodyguard, a thickset black gorilla with wary eyes, already had his door open and his head and arm stuck out to fire at Runyan. But Runyan was high in the air; a piston-drive snap of both legs kicked the door shut again.
The bodyguard slumped down halfway out of the car, his skull creased on one side by the edge of the door, on the other by the edge of the frame. Brother Blood, halfway out of the back door, looked up into the black eye of his bodyguard’s gun in Runyan’s hand. He threw his arms up and wide; Brother Blood was a survivor too. Runyan gestured him away from the car and up against the wall of the building with movements of the heavy-caliber automatic.
“I won’t forget this,” he said in a soft, deadly voice.
“Don’t,” said Runyan as if he didn’t care one way or the other. He swung the gun toward the chauffeur, who was trying to fit himself under the dash like a stereo.
“I... I just drive, sir,” the chauffeur said quickly.
Runyan gestured again. “Not anymore. Not tonight.”
The chauffeur opened the door on his side and scuttled out on his hands and knees, then came erect and backed away into the center of the street, arms high, face gleaming with an earnest sweat of nonviolent intentions.
Louise had managed to kick open her car door. She ran across the street to the limo and slid in under the steering wheel. Runyan heaved the unconscious bodyguard out of the way so he could get in beside her.
“I think we probably could leave,” he said mildly.
Michael Collins
A Reason to Die
Michael Collins’s first Dan Fortune novel. Act of Fear, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America for the best first mystery novel of 1967. In the eleven Dan Fortune novels since, Collins has developed his one-armed private detective into a highly original series character who tests the limits of genre fiction. “Over the last years my genre and mainstream work has been growing together rather rapidly,” Collins writes. “This story, some years in the writing, is another jump in that direction.”
Michael Collins is one of five pseudonyms of novelist Dennis Lynds, who presently lives in southern California. His most recent Dan Fortune novel. Harlot’s Cry, is seeking a publisher, and his Mark Sadler novel, Deadly Innocents, will be published early in 1986 by Walker.
There are many kinds of courage. Maybe the hardest is doing what you have to do. No matter how it looks to other people or what happens in the end.