Judge Me Not

Chapter Fourteen

Armando lay on his belly on the floor inside the first room, the gun aimed around the edge of the doorframe toward the top of the stairs. He was propped up on his left arm so that the knife hilt wouldn’t touch the floor. Pain had grayed his face. But he grinned and his teeth were startling white in the mask of pain.

“Now, as we jolly old British say, we’re for it. Don’t show a whisker in that doorway.”

“You’re even beginning to look like Bogart.”

“I bet he never felt like this. Stage blood he uses.” Armando winced. “And he always looks so happy. I think I just killed somebody. He ran up the stairs and he had a gun in his hand, so I fired. He just flopped right down out of sight. I’m darn close to being sick to my stomach.”

A slug slammed into the doorframe. The hammer-blow impact was a distinct sound above the noise of the shot.

“Barbara is in there. Cut to hell.”

Armando’s eyes narrowed. “Dead?”

“Disfigured. Slashed across the face a few times. She told me Jake is across the way. I’m going over there.”

They listened, heard the murmur of voices on the stairs.

“O.K., Teed. Run like hell. I’ll keep them down.”

He backed up from the doorway, then started running, bursting through the doorway into the ballroom at full speed, running well up on his toes. He counted two quick-spaced shots, then a third that smashed glass, made a tinkling somewhere on his left. Without slackening speed or changing stride, he doubled his fists across his chest, turned and hit the door with his right shoulder, hitting it as close to the frame on the knob side as he could. The door exploded inwards with a rip of torn wood. He tripped and rolled over and over in the darkness, his shoulder numbed. Something metallic and angular fell across him, struck his hand painfully. He thrust it aside and stood up. The room was dark. The light from the ballroom chandelier made a pale path across the bare floor.

“Jake!” he called sharply. In the dimness he could see camera tripods, dingy velvet backdrops. It was a tripod that had fallen across him when he rolled into it.

“Jake!” he called. There was no answer. He did not know where to find the lights.

He heard a deep male groan, a stirring in the darkness. He whirled, aiming the gun. He peered into the shadows, advanced cautiously, made out the figure of a man, face down near a shapeless cot. Teed crouched by him, flicked on the lighter, rolled the man over. He had a gross face, a beard stubble, a bloody welt over one ear. Beside his head lay a small heavy camera in a leather case. Someone had swung it by the strap.

Two shots awoke the heavy echoes again, resonating through the high-ceilinged ballroom. He straightened up and called her again. One of the windows at the far end of the room was open. The sleazy curtain flickered in the night wind. He ran to the window, leaned out and looked down. There was a paleness down there, a crumpled thing that lay across the hood of one of the ranked cars. A big car. The light from one of the bar windows on the ground floor touched the figure and he saw how dark was her hair, remembered how the hair had felt between his fingers. Time stopped for him as he stared down, knowing from the position of the figures, from the utter stillness, that no one need hurry for Jake again. Ever.

The man groaned again. Teed walked woodenly back to him. He slapped the man into consciousness, put the muzzle of the automatic full against his face. He willed himself to pull the trigger, to let the slug slam the man into a ragdoll limpness. The man inched backward along the floor and whispered, “No, no, no.”

Teed tried to pull the trigger. He could not do it. He despised himself for being unable to do it. He swung the gun, using the arm motion of a softball pitcher. He held the gun flat on his palm and it smashed into the point of the chin of the whimpering man. He felt the bone go under the blow. He snatched the gun up and stood for a moment. He walked to the doorway, kicked the sagging door out of the way.

Armando yelled, “Get down, Teed. Down!”

A head appeared above floor level, ducked down again. A splinter whined off the doorframe, inches from his shoulder. As he started to walk toward the stairs, the gun held rigidly in front of him, his steps slow and steady, Teed thought of a girl who rolled from side to side with pain, her fingers scrabbling at the white rug.

He thought of another girl who had fallen through the cool night.

From somewhere far away he heard Armando shout another warning, then curse and fire toward the stairs. Now he could see down into the dark stair well. He lifted the gun to eye level and aimed carefully at the heart of the moving shadows. He fired and a man screamed. He took another step and fired again. Something hot pinched at Teed’s thigh, as though a gigantic crab claw had closed on it, the sharpness penetrating front and back. It threw him off stride. After the hard pinch came a warm wetness on his leg.

He fired with each step he took and then there was no movement on the stairs. Just some still shadows.

Someone pulled hard at his arm. He turned and pulled the trigger. The gun clicked. Armando knocked the gun aside.

“What’s the matter with you?” he screamed. “You look like a crazy man. What are you trying to do?”

“I’m going down.”

“With an empty gun?”

“I’m going down.”

Armando’s hard palm bounced off his cheek. “Wake up! What was wrong in there?”

“Jake’s dead,” he said.

Armando whistled softly. He stared hard at Teed. “For a minute we got control. You cleared the stairs. Look. Two of them there. Who do you think you are? Bogart?”

Teed shook his head hard, to swing the mists out of his mind. He tried to smile. “All right, Armando. What do we do now?”

“I think we’re supposed to try to retain the initiative. So we both go down. Follow pretty close.”

Teed followed him. His foot scuffed a gun, knocking it from one step to the next lower one. He picked it up quickly, dropping the other. Armando went down the stairs with extreme caution, flattened against the wall. He stopped one step up from the third-floor level. Teed was behind him. Ahead was the blank wall of the other side of the corridor. To their left was the railing, the next flight going down to the second floor. To reach it without exposing themselves to anyone standing in the hall, they would have to go over the railing. Teed sensed that the knife wound had weakened Armando to the point where this would be difficult if not impossible. And his own wounded leg was growing less reliable with frightening speed.

“Morrow!” someone called, surprisingly close.

“What do you want, Raval?” Armando asked in a pleasant, conversational tone.

They both heard the grunt of surprise, the soft scuffle as people moved back quickly.

“Rogale,” Raval said, with the same casual confidence that Teed remembered from the terrace on a sunny morning, “what are we? Kids, yet? Buck Rogers, maybe? We have some hard boys here. You start shooting, they start shooting, and it makes trouble. We got Maria dead down here and one out-of-town boy, and two boys with holes in them.”

“And two dead men at the head of the stairs,” Teed said tonelessly, “and a girl with a slashed face and a dead girl.”

“Dead girl?” Raval asked uneasily.

“Miss Dennison went out the window, Raval,” Teed said.

Raval cursed softly. Then he said, “That tears it good, but we can still put a lid on it, boys. We can still stop going bang bang. I’ll give both you boys a good piece of change and then we can burn this place down. It will burn good. Tragic deaths in fire. There’ll still be a stink, but not so bad we can’t sit it out.”

“Better listen to the boss,” a new voice said.

“That’s Stratter,” Armando whispered to Teed.

A car motor roared into life. They heard the wheels skid on gravel, the sound of the car fading rapidly away.

“Well?” Raval called.

“I’m ashamed of you, Lonnie,” Armando said. “A nice country-club member like you. A guy with his daughters in a fancy school. They say you’ve got thirty suits of clothes. Is that right? Nice going for a reform-school graduate.”

Raval’s voice thickened. “Take your choice, boys. You burn with it if you don’t want to play.”

“How is that going to read?” Armando asked. “Joint burns down. A joint owned, indirectly, by Lonnie Raval. Dead in the fire are prominent young attorney, the Assistant City Manager, the daughter of the City Manager, and a choice collection of assorted muscle men. You’re licked no matter how you play it, Lonnie. It’s gone too far already. The eastern syndicate is going to be very, very annoyed with you. Don’t you follow orders? I thought the policy was to go as legitimate as possible while all this Senate committee stuff is still hot. And here you are, kidnaping people, shooting people, burning people up. Tsk, tsk.”

There was a mumbling whisper they couldn’t catch, then Stratter said, “You want it done, you do it yourself this time.”

Another car left, noisily.

Armando said, “Be smart, Stratter. The others are pulling out. Raval is through. And here’s something. We can’t get out, and neither can you. You can’t get to the stairs going down any more than we can. Slap him down, Stratter, and I’ll see that it counts in your favor.”

“Get back, Stratter,” Raval said in a colorless voice. “Get back.”

Someone ran noisily down one of the lower flights, raced across the lobby. A door slammed.

“There goes some more,” Armando called, his voice joyous.

“Ten thousand apiece,” Raval called, his voice full of shaky confidence.

Teed heard the heavy tramp of slow footsteps coming up the stairs from the second floor. Armando gave Teed a puzzled look. Teed moved over to the railing and looked down, careful not to expose himself to the men who waited down the hall to catch them as they moved off the stairs.

Mark Carboy was plodding slowly up the stairs. He was muttering to himself and he held the fantastic revolver in his hand.

He glanced up at Teed with no recognition and continued up, his heavy breath wheezing with the effort of the climb.

“Who’s coming?” Raval called nervously.

Carboy reached the hallway, turned to the right, toward Raval and Stratter. He lifted the revolver and fired. The explosion in the confined place seemed to lift them into the air. Teed was deafened. There was a hard, persistent ringing in his ears. Carboy sat down like a fat baby, spraddle-legged. Teed saw two little puffs of dust leap out from the front of his dark overcoat. He held the gun with the muzzle resting against the floor. His face was bland, unalarmed. He bit his lip and tried to lift the gun. He got it up a few inches, but the muzzle sagged back. He grasped it with both hands. As he tried to lift again, a round black dot appeared on his forehead, above his left eye. He leaned slowly forward, both hands still on the gun. The muzzle slid along the rug.

Raval vaulted the body, dived down the stairs. He managed to keep his feet. They heard his hand slap hard against the wall at the landing and then he was gone. Teed had been too frozen to fire at him.

Armando moved cautiously into the hall. He turned back at once. “Scratch one Stratter, Teed. Christ, what a cannon!” He pulled it out of Carboy’s dead hands. “There’s still three in it.”

They went down the stairs. Castle Ann seemed to be deserted. A starter began to whine. The motor churned over and over and over, but didn’t catch. The sound stopped. A wide-eyed girl bounced into the hall, stared at them, darted back into her room and slammed the door.

Teed’s leg had begun to grow weaker. He began to limp as he went down the stairs. A lot of blood had been lost. The world seemed to rush toward him for a moment of sparkling, incredible clarity, and then recede again into remoteness.

Armando sat down suddenly on the stairs and coughed. Bright blood spilled over his lips, splatted on the bare wood.

“I think it touched a lung,” he gasped. “My breathing has been sounding funny.” Again he touched the dark haft of the knife with his fingertips, almost tenderly.

Teed left him behind. He walked across the lobby. The starter of the car whined again, fruitlessly. A car door slammed and there were hurrying footsteps on the gravel. Raval, full in the lights from the bar window, came trotting around the corner of the building on Teed’s right. He no longer looked bold and confident and overpowering. He was a frightened man who ran with hunched shoulders, underlip pulled grotesquely down.

In the distance the high wild sweet song of a siren drifted across the night fields. Trees had begun to stand out against a hard metal grayness in the east.

Raval tried to stop too quickly, and fell to his hands and knees, dark metal skittering out of his hand, whispering along the gravel. He pounced toward the gun. He was a tiny figure, a thousand miles away. He was a bug under a thick gray lense that was full of wavering imperfections. The gun in Teed’s hand recoiled twice and Teed did not hear the shots. A giant reached down from the gray sky and swung a flabby finger against Teed’s shoulder. It spun him around and dropped him on his face, gravel smashing his lips and grinding against his teeth. After a long time he got up onto his hands and knees. The night was full of a screaming that he could not identify. The corner of the building was at the other end of the world. He crawled there. He shut his eyes and rammed his head into the side of the building. He sat back stupidly, corrected the course.

She lay against the side of the building where she had been roughly tumbled off the hood of the big car. The impact had dished it deeply, sprung the front of the hood up. She lay on her side, the sleazy yellow satin house coat balled in the small of her back.

He grunted busily to himself as he spread the house coat out. He rolled her onto it and pulled it around her. The zipper started at the bottom hem. It was hard to get it started. He clucked and muttered and finally the small metal teeth meshed. It made a purring sound as he pulled it up to her throat, covering the whiteness that was not smashed, not bleeding — just subtly wrong, obscurely out of proportion.

He wormed around on his haunches until his back was against the thick front bumper, against the bug-dotted sparkle of the chrome, and then he eased her head into his lap.

When the spotlights centered on him, he squinted into them, lips drawn back in an uncomprehending, death-head grin. His tongue fumbled loosely and heavily with the words as they bent over him. “Top floor. Girl.”

In some bright place, much later, Leighton’s cadaverous face slid down from a blazing sky of a dozen suns and loomed over him. The thin lips wormed and the words all leaned wetly against each other so that there was no meaning. “WasRavalshot? Washehurt?”

“Later, later, later,” a shiny voice said.

“Was Raval hurt?”

“Don’t know,” Teed said. “Don’t know. Don’t know.” He stopped saying it, but it went on and on in his mind until the words had no meaning. Where Leighton’s face had been there was a tunnel. It slid down and sucked against his lips. In the tunnel the unspoken words whined emptily off the sides, echoing into forever: “Don’t know. Don’t Know. DON’T KNOW!”

And then, running down toward him, down the slant of the tunnel toward him, she came running, running, gladness in her throat and in her eyes a joyousness too great to be born. He stood arms outstretched for her to run into his arms. And she ran against him and he shuddered because she was formed of cold stone and she wore Barbara’s face on her broken body.