Джо Горес: Gone, No Forwarding

Without any need, because out in the hall the killer had, on coming from the hearing room, happened to look the wrong way first. He looked to his left, up toward the elevators, instead of to his right, over toward the stairwell. He saw a very bulky Benny Nicoletti dragging that goddamned screw-up Hawkley with him, and he saw a Police Positive in Benny Nicoletti’s right hand, pointed up the hall right at him.

And at Giselle, but he didn’t think of that. Being a killer, he would have fired instantly if the roles had been reversed. He didn’t know Nicoletti would not shoot as long as Giselle was endangered. There was no way he could comprehend such softness. When he pointed a gun at someone who also had a gun pointed at him, his gun went off.

So he whirled toward Nicoletti to blow him away, but in so doing jerked his gun away from Giselle’s face.

Which meant that Bart Heslip, crossing the hall silently from the stairwell in desperate preparation for an attempt to wrest the gun from his hand, could attack without endangering Giselle.

Bart Heslip hit the gunman in the kidneys with the hardest punch he had ever thrown in his life. He’d won thirty-nine out of forty professional fights, almost all of them by knockouts, and this was the hardest punch he’d ever thrown. Because he knew all about kidney punches. He’d suffered one in the fight he had lost. He’d finished the fight — and lost it by a split decision — and had gone home and urinated blood for a week afterwards.

The killer of eight men, struck in the kidneys as Heslip had been, screamed and fell on the floor. As he did, Larry Ballard came down on his gun arm with both feet, crushing his wrist and pulverizing his fingers so he wouldn’t be shooting any guns with that hand anymore once he got out of prison. If the men he was going to spill his guts about to stay out of the gas chamber would let him live long enough to get out of prison.

Heslip and Ballard said in unison to Giselle, “You okay?”

“He almost tore my hair out by the roots,” she said crossly. And then, remembering that Dan Kearny had been shot, fainted. Both men caught her before she could hit the floor.

As Nicoletti, still dragging counselor Hawkley with him, came up with a pleased look on his face. “I don’t know what happened in there, but it must have been dynamite.”

“A girl happened,” said Heslip. “She is dynamite.”

And he thought of Corinne, and knew there was one who was even more dynamite than Verna, at the same time Ballard thought the same thing about Yana, the gypsy girl.

Nicoletti nodded, still grinning, and slapped the cuffs around the elegant wrists of Wayne Hawkley — until a few moments before, the rich and brilliant counsel for the mob.