The Procane Chronicle

21

It was a trap. I could see it when Procane rounded the curve of the narrow, fence-bordered exit road. About thirty feet from where the fences ended, Wiedstein had blocked the road by angling his car across the narrow strip of asphalt. The hood was up. I could see neither Wiedstein nor Janet Whistler.

The green Mustang was just skidding to a stop when we came around the curve. Its taillights glared at us for what seemed to be a long time before the car stopped some ten feet from Wiedstein’s Chevrolet. I rolled my window down. So did Procane who kept on driving slowly toward the stopped Mustang.

The doors of the Mustang flew open. A man got out on the right side. I could see the gloss of the nylon stocking that covered the back of his head beneath the brim of his hat. He yelled something. It sounded like, “Move that fuckin thing!”

Wiedstein came out from behind the raised hood of his car. He was fully illuminated by the Mustang’s headlights. He spread his hands in a gesture that seemed to say, The damned thing stopped on me and I can’t get it started. The man with the stocking mask ducked back into the Mustang and when he reappeared he was holding something in his hands. It was a sawed-off pump shotgun.

Procane switched on our bright lights. The man looked back at us, called something to the Mustang’s driver, and started walking toward Wiedstein’s stalled car. The driver of the Mustang got out and turned toward us. He waved something. It was a gun, an automatic.

“Brace yourself!” Procane snapped. He pressed down on the accelerator. I grabbed for the padded dash. We slammed into the rear of the Mustang at about fifteen miles per hour. It made a sickening, grinding kind of a crunch and crash, the kind that you know is going to cost at least four hundred dollars.

The Mustang bounced forward, but not much. It must have been in park gear. The man with the automatic pistol staggered back a step, but recovered quickly. He used his left hand to shield his eyes against the glare of our left headlight. Procane hadn’t hit the Mustang’s rear squarely. The man with the pistol fired. The gun flash and the cobwebbed hole in our windshield seemed to happen at the same time.

“Out on your side!” Procane said, barking the words.

I opened the door and tumbled out onto the asphalt, skinning my left knee. Procane followed. We knelt behind the car and its open door.

“Close it,” Procane said.

I slammed the door shut.

“Not much of a view from here,” I said.

“Just imagine it,” Procane said. He had his engraved automatic in his right hand now. He knelt next to me, trying to peer around the Mustang we’d slammed into as though he wanted to see what Wiedstein and Janet Whistler were doing.

We heard three shots. They weren’t rapid fire, but as if someone were squeezing them off carefully, counting by thousands between each pull of the trigger.

The man with the sawed-off shotgun darted out from in front of the Mustang and ran toward the right side of Wiedstein’s car. He was bent over low, trying to scuttle toward the upraised hood at the front of the car. I decided that the carefully spaced shots had been covering fire.

“Hold it right there!” Procane yelled at the man with the shotgun. I thought there was a lot of authority in Procane’s tone. So did the man with the shotgun, because he twirled around. If he’d have pulled the trigger a fraction of a second later, he would have cut us in two.

The man with the shotgun was about twenty feet from us. Procane fired at him, but missed. I had started backing toward the rear of the car. Procane fired again, but again missed. I decided that he was a lousy shot.

The man with the shotgun seemed to smile. At least I thought I saw something white through his stocking mask. He raised the shotgun to his shoulder. I was still backing crablike toward the rear of the car. Procane got off another shot, but I didn’t expect him to hit anything. He didn’t. The man with the shotgun was aiming it now. He couldn’t miss Procane. If he did, he’d hit me. Procane started backing up.

Janet Whistler stepped out from behind the raised hood of Wiedstein’s car and killed the man with the shotgun by shooting him in the back three times.

His head jerked back like in whiplash and his hands flew out at the first shot. The shotgun sailed off somewhere. He took a small, mincing step toward us and when the second bullet hit him he twitched a little, almost as if it were the second step of some new and elaborate dance. He was beginning to fall when the third bullet hit him and hammered him to the ground. He fell toward us, full length, like a toppled tree. He didn’t use his hands to break his fall. He twitched once, then twice, but after that he didn’t twitch anymore.

“I’m a rotten shot,” Procane said. I agree.

Janet Whistler looked at the dead man for a moment. She stood quite still, her arms at her side, the automatic almost dangling from her right hand. Then she turned and disappeared behind the front of Wiedstein’s car.

“This way,” Procane said. He bent over, almost double, and started to move slowly around the rear of his car. I followed him, not because I thought that he was much protection, but because I didn’t want to be alone.

When we were on the other side of Procane’s car we started edging toward the Mustang. Its left door was open. The left headlight of Procane’s car was still on bright and it bathed that side of the Mustang in harsh yellow light.

When we had crept almost even with the front wheels of the Chevrolet, Procane called, “There’re four of us and we’re armed. Your partner’s dead. You’d better give up.”

We waited, but there was no reply. Procane rose. I was next to him now and I rose too. Slowly.

“Put your hands on your head and step out where we can see you,” Procane called. I glanced at him. His eyes sparkled and there was a tight grin beneath his ginger moustache. The moustache fairly bristled. Procane seemed to be enjoying his work.

The man stepped out from behind the Mustang’s open door into the glare of our single headlight, but his hands weren’t on top of his head. Instead the right one was wrapped around the grip of his automatic and the left one was bracing his right wrist. He was in a half-crouch. It was a thoroughly professional stance, the kind that expert pistol shooters go into when they want to make sure that they’ll hit what they’re aiming at. The automatic pistol was aimed right at me.

It all fell into place then, of course, just as I was about to die. It was partly intuitive leap, but mostly it was remembering small things that happened when they shouldn’t have happened. If I hadn’t been going to die so soon, I could have told someone all about my wonderful memory and the brilliant deductive process that was my mind. I could also have told them who killed Bobby Boykins and who threw Jimmy Peskoe out of an eighth-story window.

Procane tried, of course. He pulled the trigger of his Walther, the one with all the fancy engraving on its slide. Something made a dry little click that had a disparaging sound to it, like the “tch-tch” you make with your teeth and tongue when something that’s of minor importance goes wrong.

I was going to die, of course, and I didn’t think that that was anything minor, but there was nothing I could do about it except stare at the gun that was leveled at me with rock-steady aim. I was just beginning to wonder about why he didn’t go ahead and get it over with when a man’s voice called, “Behind you, friend!”

The man whirled, still in his gunfighter’s crouch. He was nearly all the way around before the first bullet smashed into him. He fired back, but his aim was off and I don’t think he even came close to Miles Wiedstein who walked toward him now, firing as he came. Wiedstein shot the man in the stocking mask three times before he hit the ground. The first shot seemed to double him over, the second one straightened him up, and the third sent him staggering backward toward Procane and me.

He fell before he reached us. His arms were flung out carelessly at his sides. His unbuttoned jacket and topcoat gaped open. I could have placed a small saucer over the three red-black holes in the white shirt that gleamed up at the sky. I wondered who had taught Wiedstein how to shoot; it couldn’t have been Procane.

Procane turned to me, his eyes fixed on the Walther that he held gingerly in his right hand as if it were some kind of a rare bug. “It misfired,” he said.

“So I noticed.”

“Yes. I imagine you did. I suppose I should have thrown it at him.”

“It doesn’t matter now.”

He looked at the dead man. “No, it doesn’t, does it?”

Wiedstein came up to us followed by Janet Whistler. I thought both of them looked pale and then I wondered how I looked to them.

“He was pretty good,” Wiedstein said, touching the dead man’s shoulder with his toe.”

“Both of them were,” Procane said.

“They weren’t supposed to be that good,” Wiedstein said. “Maybe we’d better find out who they were.” He looked at Procane.

Procane started to kneel by the dead man to take off the stocking mask. Janet Whistler turned away. Wiedstein decided to look up at the sky to see what the clouds were like.

“You don’t have to do that,” I said to Procane.

He looked up at me. “Why?”

“I know who they are,” I said and tried not to make my voice sound smug. I think I succeeded because I didn’t feel smug.

“Who?”

“That one’s Frank Deal. The one with the shotgun was Carl Oller.”

“The detectives,” Procane said. “They talked to me. Yesterday.” He didn’t sound as though he believed me.

“All right,” I said. “Go ahead. Take it off his face.”

Procane grimaced but peeled the stocking from the dead man’s face. Frank Deal’s cold gray eyes were open. They seemed to be staring at me.

“You want to take a look at the other one?” I said.

“No,” Procane said. “That won’t be necessary.”

He rose and brushed his hands together as though they were covered with dirt. “Why did they do it?” he said, but not as if he expected an answer.

“Two reasons,” I said.

“What?”

“The first was a million dollars.”

“What was the second one?”

“Today is Wednesday.”

“So?”

“Wednesday was their day off.”