Джо Горес - Dead skip

He checked his watch. It was 2:17. He had been inside less than fifteen minutes. It seemed like fifteen hours.

These stairs creaked, so he took his time on them, tried to stay on the outside edge, against the wall. The treads were not hardwood, uncarpeted, unswept. Not a place the cleaning lady was allowed to come, which quickened Ballard’s pulse and made him move with great caution. Jimmying the door had made some noise, even if not much.

The door at the top of the stairs was closed but unlocked. When he eased it open, enough light came through the filmy curtains on the narrow curved windows to show him the place was empty. He went in, saw it was a photo gallery. He crossed the room to the wall, suddenly stopped dead when he realized what the big blow-up photos were of.

He had found Cheri’s kinky cat with the flashlight.

Ballard risked his own flashlight for about thirty seconds. They gave him a queasy feeling, just because there were so many of them. All of the walls, floor to ceiling, scores of them colored, these probably cut from Swedish or German porno magazines, and hundreds of black-and-whites, developed and enlarged in the darkroom downstairs.

Good old Kinky: on these naked girls he had used a camera and a flashbulb instead of a flashlight. Blow-ups, cropped so that only the essential female flesh was left, starkly, crudely exposed.

Kinky indeed. Ballard pulled the door shut behind him, went right down the front stairs to the ground floor. He was glad to be out of the turret room. If only there had been a breast or two depicted, a full nude, above all a face. Even an ugly face, even a Gloria Rouse face. But no. Not for Kinky. For him, the apparently numerous chicks who weren’t as selective as buxom, lusty Cheri Tart.

As Ballard opened the cellar door, lights swept the front of the house. He froze. He waited. A car door slammed. He waited some more.

No horn blast from Giselle.

Someone going to a different house, then. It would be a bitch to get trapped in the basement, but the house was empty, and with Giselle on watch he would get at least some warning. But he was glad to have the tire iron in his hand. He turned on the flashlight and went down the steep narrow stairs.

The basement was a mess, the floor loaded with the sort of junk that always seems to accumulate in basements. In one of the front corners a wooden bin which once would have held coal. Above it, a small high window to which the coal chute would have been fitted. An old house indeed. Coal abandoned long ago, of course, for the big natural-gas furnace which dominated the corner of the basement under the kitchen.

Ballard’s light jumped nervously about, went by and then suddenly returned to and steadied on a washtub leaned on edge against the wall. There was dried concrete around the edges of the washtub, as if it had been used to mix up a small amount of mortar. The light moved again, this time laid its white O on a full bag of Portland cement, with a half-bag set on top of it, upright, with the top scrunched down. Ballard realized that he had not really believed he would find anything down here. Of course, he hadn’t found a new section of concrete, but...

He found it five minutes later.

It was under some old homemade wooden shelves with two-by-two framing and triple widths of one-by-eight pine planking for shelves. Unpainted, crowded with ranks of antique Mason jars, empty and waiting under their coating of thick dust for the home canning that would never be done again. What had caught his eye were the scuff marks made on the floor by the stubby vertical two-by-two legs, as if the shelves had been walked end-for-end out from the wall not too long ago.

Ballard got down on his belly and shone the light under the bottom shelf sagging six inches off the floor. The light, laid flat across the concrete that way, easily picked out the rough join of a rectangle of new concrete with the older, smoother, more professional floor.

Seven feet long. Two feet wide.

Stupid? No. Why would he ever have been suspected? Who would ever come down here to look? And after a few years it wouldn’t have looked so raw, so new... So here he was, Chuck Griffin, a pretty nice guy by all accounts. He hadn’t walked out on Cheri after all. He hadn’t embezzled and been murdered for it, either. Murdered, thought Ballard erroneously, to disguise an embezzlement he had discovered.

Ballard followed his dancing circle of light up the dusty stairs to the closed door at the top. Time to get out before...

Closed door.

He switched off the flashlight abruptly, stood on the stairs in the total blackness, breathing with his mouth open. He had left the door standing open when he had come down, on the theory that it would make it a little easier to hear if Giselle had sounded the horn. But she hadn’t. And he’d had the house to himself when he’d come down here. Therefore, he still did. So cool the nerves.

He switched on the light, gingerly climbed the rest of the way. Sure. The door wasn’t closed tight, actually; it merely had drifted shut by itself. But it still took a conscious act of will to gently push it open enough to edge an eye out for a quick look down to the front door.

The hall was empty, of course.

Ballard went the rest of the way out of the cellar, started down the hall and froze after two steps.

The front door was ajar.

He could see the thin line of light from the narrow crack, laid across the floor at an angle and standing a few inches up the wall.

The door had been locked when he had tried it from the outside.

But that meant...

He heard the grunt of effort and at the same instant his body arched and he yelled in pure agony as he was slammed in the kidney. The floor came up at him as his mind screamed, through the pain, He got Giselle first ...

Things went away.

Not entirely away: it had been the sudden intensity of the pain that had made reality go mushy. He realized he was on his hands and knees against the wall. His head hurt as well as his back; must have rammed headfirst into the wall on the way down.

“Blood,” he got out. It was the first thing that came to mind. “I’ll be pissing blood for a week.” He’d read that about kidney injuries in a detective story once.

“Not for a week,” said Rodney Elkin in an almost apologetic voice. “I want you to go into the dining room ahead of me. The light switch is to the left of the door.”

“I don’t know if I can get up,” said Ballard. His mind had started to work again, a little. The kidney pain had lessened.

“You’ll get up.”

He got up. He hiked himself upright against the wall. His eyes were coming back into focus; he could see Elkin standing well away from him, wearing a topcoat. Tall, physically strong, decisive, good-looking, kinky. Especially kinky. Use that some way? The big revolver from the kitchen drawer now in his left hand. Of course. With shells in it now.

Heslip, facing his attacker, had been struck on the right side of his head. Elkin, talking on the phone at JRS Garage, had switched the receiver to his right hand to write notes of the conversation.

“Move it!” snapped Elkin.

Ballard moved it. The gun was shaking in Elkin’s hand. Panic again. Panic might make the gun go off. He used the wall to get to the dining room, leaning against it and sliding along. Go in fast, slam the door, dive out the still-open window...

It wasn’t like TV, not at all. Away from the wall, he tottered. He hurt. Moving, he had to clench his teeth to keep from throwing up. He couldn’t have moved fast if his life depended on it. Christ, his life did depend on it!

He still couldn’t move fast. He sat down on one of the oak dining chairs, gingerly. Jee zuz, that back!