Start Screaming Murder

Chapter Nine

As they closed in, I broke away momentarily, kicking at Smith and spinning from Kincaid’s reaching hands. I plunged straight into the thicket, head down, not worrying about minor things such as brambles tearing at my eyeballs.

Tough, green, fibrous vegetation slashed my scalp. Muck sucked at my feet. Added to the sounds of quick motion behind me was Kincaid’s voice, softly, “Okay, let’s see how tough you are.”

With my hands tied behind me, Smith was eager and happy, expressing his feelings with a short laugh. I broke out of the thicket, reaching a small wilderness of ankle deep water and lashing sawgrass. With civilization a few blocks away.

I glanced over my shoulder and saw them coming from different angles, making me the point in the triangle.

I dodged Smith’s charge, water showering from my feet to make a brief lace of diamonds in the moonlight. Then Kincaid’s weight hit me.

I stumbled, trying to shake him loose. Smith rammed his bulk against us. I went down, flat on my face, no hands to break my fall. Breath was crushed out of me. Swamp water shot into my nose to strangle me. My forehead came in contact with the black sand beneath the shallow water, and the sand was like a brick wall.

A period of time followed in which nothing was clear. My instincts were enraged at the indignity and desperately set against dying. A dream-like Smith hit me on the chin in a weird slow motion. I had the vague knowledge that I’d struggled to my knees and that I’d keep getting up, again and again, until I’d worn the dirty son out.

Then I was floating along, with a numbness like a poisonous sleep stealing over me, as they carried me out of the muck.

Then sensation faded.

The sounds of a rasping effort to get breath were the next thing I heard. Sounds like a stricken heart patient makes when nothing is important except one more grain of oxygen. There was no heart patient — only me.

I was lathered in smothering sweat. Blood pounded through my temples. The gag was back in my mouth, but it was not the gag that made the effort to breath such a hard job. I was stuffed, cramped, in a very small space. I discovered this when I tried to move.

I bit down on the handkerchief against the pain lancing through my chest. The smell of my prison was compounded of fresh rubber and paint. Like the trunk of a car. And then I knew that’s where I was, when I turned my head and felt the tread of a spare tire against my cheek.

Thoughts filtered through. New car. My car. Stuffed in the trunk of my car. Waterproof trunk... air proof.

I was blacking out again, dragging dead air through the handkerchief, air that had a another few seconds of life in it.

I felt the confines of the car trunk closing on me, the total darkness filling with a vibration like the beating of tiny wings.

I tried to scream. A crack on the skull brought a little sanity. I slumped, laboring for another breath. The beating wings retreated a few inches in the darkness.

I couldn’t fight the panic any further back than the edges of my consciousness, but I managed to keep it there. I began working my wrists against the necktie bond. The tie was sodden, strong. My ears were ringing with the need for air.

The tie stretched a little, slipped on my sweat-slick wrist. I curled my thumb under and kept tugging. The tie hung on my knuckles. Then I barked my elbow on metal as my hand slid free.

My fingers were numb as they fumbled with the knot of the handkerchief. Big, dead sausages that were useless while angry needles bit deeper in my chest and invisible buzz saws worked on the joints of my twisted body.

The handkerchief knot gave. The rag fell away. I sucked in mouthfuls of the darkness, but pinpoints of light began to flare in my brain. My senses were slipping, my chest caving under an enormous weight as the process of suffocation neared its end.

I called feebly for help, or imagined that I did. My fingers groped in empty air. I was losing coordination, all sense of orientation.

My head rolled on my shoulders, coming to rest against the spare tire tread.

I thought of millions of tires on millions of cars, all rolling around through open country air, or the sweet smog of cities.

Tires filled with air...

My groping fingers found direction. A valve cap. It turned.

Teeth set against the pain of the contortions, I worked my face close to the valve cap of the spare tire. My fingernail slipped off the slight protrusion of the valve stem. Then I had the stem centered. I pressed. Air hissed — and for a second I was too choked up to take full advantage of it.

I used the air in short bursts until the sizzling cooled in my lungs and the ringing eased in my ears. I developed a terrific headache, but I accepted it as a gratifying symptom. Dead heads don’t hurt.

With death a tire’s worth of air away, my fingers searched the steel prison. Besides me and the spare, the trunk held a bumper jack and lug wrench. Laboriously, between gulps of air, I worked the jack handle from its position behind the spare. It was flattened at one end.

I located the trunk catch with my fingers and inserted the flat end of the jack handle. The trunk creaked as I pried. I kept at it, resting, getting a squirt of air, levering at the latch.

The latch weakened. When it snapped, it surrendered almost effortlessly.

The handle slipped from my fingers. I crawled over the rim of the trunk and fell on the ground.

I was too weak to get up. I rolled to my back and took a fresh look at open sky while I dragged breath deep in my lungs. The moon was gone. A deep, pre-dawn hush lay over the earth. A few tendrils of mist writhed off the swampy water beyond the unused, sandy back street.

I reached for the bumper, pulled myself up, finally got my feet under me. I hung on against the blinding pain in my head and the tired, hard beating of my heart.

The TV cowboys can take a dozen punches to the chin and wreck a saloon without mussing their hair. Not me.

For the time being, I’d had it.

I woke in early afternoon, the sweat-soaked daybed in my apartment as comfortable as a pot of lumpy, hot paste. My eyes were swollen from hard, exhausted sleep. Stiff and sore, I bit back a groan as I swung to a sitting position on the edge of the bed.

I pushed myself upright, padded to the bathroom, and started cold water in the tub. I toweled off some of the sweat from my face, neck, brown mat of chest, draped the towel across my naked shoulder and headed for the kitchenette.

While I waited for coffee to perk, I sat down at the kitchenette table, opened a cold pint of beer and tried to get my thoughts in order.

Memory of the drive home was vague. I’d used the spare key wired under the hood to put the car in service. I’d crawled up to the apartment, swallowed three headache pills, stripped to my shorts, and fallen on the bed.

For awhile I’d died. The rest of the world hadn’t. People like Kincaid and Smith had been out and doing. The beer tasted like poison at the thought of that pair.

They’d told me more than is told to a man who is expected to live. They’d intended for me to die, after they got what they wanted.

Score one. Score one where it will never be forgotten.

They’d told me that an Item had been aboard the Sprite. Bucks Jordan had taken Tina La Flor out to the schooner. The Item had disappeared.

Following this disappearance, Bucks had been hell-set on getting his hands on Tina. Instead, he had got himself killed.

It seemed reasonable that the Sprite, once the Item was recovered, would go as she had come, into the vastness of the sea. With her would go my chance of proving to the Tampa police that I had not beat Bucks Jordan to death.

I had no way of knowing how many hours were left to me. Kincaid and Smith were diligent, and Kincaid was smart.

On my other flank was Lieutenant Steve Ivey. You don’t staff a cosmopolitan city with dumb country sheriffs who are wise only in the realm of dirty, crooked politics. You use scientists in the labs and put men in the unmarked cars who have FBI Academy training in their background. It was a simple question of time until that kind of organization linked me with Bucks Jordan.

And maybe a shorter time before the Sprite started her auxiliaries to take her to deep water where she’d belly her sails.

Thumbnail the next two hours: I dunked in cold water, braced with coffee, Cuban sausage and eggs. Wiped up an old gun, my spare. Made a mental note to go by the office for the duplicate set of keys and have that set duplicated.

Killed a second pint of icy beer while I made with the telephone.

I wanted a lead on Tina, and I wanted it bad. She could identify the Item — and it was the Item that was worth murder.

I talked with personages white, tan and black. People who knew where the skeletons were closeted.

I got a result, in a negative way. Tina had pulled it off. She was unbelievably well hidden. Or far away from Tampa.

Or dead.

When I got over to the ramshackle frame house and knocked on the door, little Miguel Cardezas told me that ma-ma was in the backyard.

I went around the house. A flop-eared stray dog regarded me from the cool underside, scratched his ribs against one of the concrete block pillars on which the house stood, and tagged behind me.

Mrs. Cardezas was anchored in a cane-bottomed chair in the middle of the small, bare yard. The sun shone on the jet coils of her hair. The chair creaked under the weight of her ample body as she bent forward to dip a chicken in a small tub of hot water on the ground before her. She withdrew the headless fowl, and feathers started vanishing from the carcass.

“Good afternoon,” I said.

She paused in her chicken-picking, brushed a wisp of hair from her forehead with the back of her hand, careful not to transfer any of the small feathers sticking to her hand.

“Como esta?”

“Not so good.”

“You’ve been ill?” She looked up at me with concern. Her round, generous face was misty with fine perspiration.

“I nearly got killed,” I said, “fighting Tina La Flor’s fight.”

“Oh, Señor Rivers...”

“Never mind that,” I said. “Think about Tina.”

“Si.”

“Do you know where she is?”

Her hand moved. I had the feeling that she was about to cross herself. “No, señor.”

“Mrs. Cardezas...”

She stood up, imploring with her hands before her, the dangling chicken detracting none from her expression. “Señor Rivers, I asked you to help Tina. Now I am sorry. I don’t want you harmed. Neither would she. Get out of it, señor. Forget that you know of it. It will work out, and she will be safe.”

The happy hound whipped my leg with his wagging tail. “It isn’t that simple, Mrs. Cardezas.”

“Don’t be unwise, señor! There are others...” She broke off.

“Others? Who?”

“I ask you...”

“Who, Mrs. Cardezas?”

“He was concerned for her also, the little fellow who called himself Gaspar.”

“Little fellow?”

“A dwarf, señor. A most sympathetic little man with bowed legs.”

“When was he here?”

“Señor... please...”

“Today?”

“Si. Yes,” she sighed. “This morning. But he saw the folly of increasing the danger to Tina.”

I caught the implication in her tone, the accusation in the large, dark eyes. “You think that I’m increasing the danger to her?”

“Now I do,” she stated. “If you are being watched, followed, and you should find her...”

“I’m going to find her, Mrs. Cardezas.”

I turned and started away. She followed me to the corner of the house, calling my name once. I glanced back when I reached the sidewalk. She was standing in the narrow driveway, the chicken in her hand. Both she and the chicken looked tired and wilted from the heat.

Gaspar the Great was an Ybor City character. I didn’t think I’d have much trouble finding him.

I started the rounds with a two-fold request, talking with bartenders, restaurant operators, hackies at their stands, characters in back rooms who had an aversion to daylight.

First I said, Rivers wants two newcomers to the local scene named Kincaid and Smith.

Second I said, where is Gaspar the Great?

Two hours and thirty minutes later I walked into a neighborhood tavern. There were two male customers down the bar talking quietly. The bartender was a supple man of Spanish descent in his mid-forties. He had a patrician face, high forehead, thin nose and likewise a patrician bearing.

“Hi, Ed.” His voice was much more democratic than his looks.

I let him have the first question, adding the description of the pair that I was scattering all over Ybor City.

He shook his head. “Don’t know them.”

“Keep an eye out?”

“Sure.”

“Seen Gaspar the Great recently?”

The bartender jerked a thumb toward the back of the place. “I believe he’s in the gentleman’s lounge.”

I walked down the bar. The tavern’s rear area was a long ell adjacent to the bar. A television set, tuned to a regatta across the bay at St. Petersburg, was mounted on a high shelf facing the length of the room.

On one of the round tables were a cluttered ashtray, a half-full glass of beer, and small, moisture-beaded pitcher with an inch of beer left at the bottom.

I helped myself to a chair at the table and watched the televising of the roaring hydroplanes trying to tear themselves free of the water.

I heard the scrape of small footsteps, and turned the chair.

On his bowed legs, Gaspar rolled his way to the table. He was no midget. He was a dwarf, with arms, legs and lower torso that had failed to mature. His head, face and upper torso were of normal size. Misshapen as he was, he had the agility of a monkey, and something of the monkey in the appearance of his face, which was swarthy and deeply wrinkled. He had dark, bushy hair that grew low on his forehead.

He reached up to grasp the back of the chair and edge of the table. He seemed to bounce from the floor to the chair. He sat on the edge of the table and smiled a greeting at me.

“Long time no see, Ed.”

“How’ve things been?”

He shrugged, made a vague gesture toward his clothing. He was wearing a tropical weight that had cost him plenty, but he’d paid that bill a long time ago. Neatly pressed, the suit showed its age in its high shine and threadbare edges.

I’d heard that in the old days Gaspar the Great had gone in for silk shirts, shoes by an English shoemaker. He’d headlined, with two other dwarfs, a trapeze act that had earned fabulous amounts. He’d carried a personal valet with him and had a penchant for walking into a place and buying champagne for the house.

But there was gray in his mop of wiry, unruly hair now, and the decline of the carny and circus circuits was old, bitter history.