Ed McBain: Puss in Boots

She thought she heard a sound.

She looked up sharply from the flatbed, listening.

The palm fronds outside the studio rattled with a fierce November wind. A bird called inanely to the night.

Nothing more.

She kept listening.

Lots of expensive photographic and sound equipment in here, you had to be afraid of junkies breaking in. The heavier stuff like the Bell & Howell projector, synced to the mag recorders and dubbers, would be difficult to haul away unless you backed a truck in. But all the lenses and all the smaller cameras like the Nikons and the Hasselblads, even the Pageant projector could be packed easily into the back of a car, driven up to Tampa or St. Pete, sold there in a minute.

Kept listening.

The wind again, palm fronds whispering.

A car going by, tires hissing on asphalt.

Hardly any traffic, this time of night. This was cattle country, or used to be. The studio was set back some three hundred yards from what was still called Rancher Road, surrounded on either side by acres of land already yielding to the developers’ bulldozers. Ten o’clock at night, you’d think it was two in the morning, everything as still as death except for the bird again, calling, calling, and the wind, and the clicking whisper of the palms.

She shook a cigarette free from the package of Benson & Hedges on the blue Formica surface of the flatbed editing machine. The Steenbeck was worth at least twenty thousand, but nothing a junkie could pack in a duffel bag. She picked up a plastic lighter the color of the cigarette package, and thumbed it into flame. She took several puffs on the cigarette, and then immediately stubbed it out. There was work to be done.

She’d shot a bit more than nineteen thousand feet of film in twenty-eight days, figuring a burn ratio of six-to-one in order to get the ninety-minute finished film she was going for. The dailies came back from the lab in New York on eight-hundred-foot cores that fit onto the Steenbeck’s revolving stainless steel plates. She’d carried two of those cored rolls to the studio tonight, and had already run one of them through the machine several times, taking notes, marking film and magnetic sound tracks. The second roll was now on the machine, together with her A and B tapes. She checked her sync marks again, to make sure the film and the mag tracks were in absolute sync, and then moved the control lever to roll all three at twenty-four frames per second.

One of the two screens above the editing surface flashed the first image.

The speakers on either side of the screens erupted with sound.

It was almost ten-thirty when the last frame of film rolled through the machine.

She lighted another cigarette, threw the control switch to fast reverse, and sat there smoking while the work print and the mags whirred back through the machine, savoring the cigarette this time, a satisfied smile on her face, pleased with what she’d seen but realizing there was still a great deal of work to be done before the first of the month.

The negative was what she’d be taking with her to Mexico. Plus the work print and the synchronized sound tracks. Find a lab down there to do the rest of the work. Plenty of work down the road. Assuming all went well. Assuming Jake came up with what she needed down there. Assuming Henry didn’t start getting...

Well, no sense getting itchy herself.

This was no time to panic.

She stubbed out the cigarette, lifted the cores from the plates, made sure film and sound rolls were tightly wound, and then taped their ends. She put the two cores of film in a sixteen-millimeter film can, one on top of the other, put the lid on it, and closed it securely. She packed her four sound rolls in plastic bags and then put them into an aluminum carrying case together with the can of film. She carried the case to the back door, set it down just inside it, and then went around the studio turning off all the lights except the one just inside the door.

She picked up the carrying case.

She hesitated near the light switch.

Went back to the flatbed to make sure she’d put out her cigarette.

Went to the door again.

Looked back into the studio, her hand on the burglar alarm panel beside the door.

Put down the carrying case for a moment while she searched in her shoulder bag for her keys.

Picked up the case again, hit the three-digit code on the alarm pad, opened the door, snapped out the last of the lights, and stepped outside.

It was twenty minutes to eleven.

A lightbulb in a cage hung over the back door to the studio.

It cast her long shadow on the white gravel of the parking lot.

She locked the door, located her car keys in the illumination afforded by the lightbulb, and was walking toward the car when she saw a second shadow on the ground.

She was turning, starting to turn, when the knife plunged into the meaty part of her back, just above the shoulder blade.

She felt only searing pain as the blade penetrated.

She screamed.

And then she was turning, being turned, a hand clasping onto her right shoulder and spinning her around to meet the knife as it plunged again. She dropped the aluminum carrying case. She screamed again. The knife kept coming at her. She screamed as blood bubbled into her mouth, spit blood as she screamed, kept screaming until she could no longer scream, the front of her yellow blouse covered with blood welling from her wounds, her face covered with blood, her throat, her hands, covered with blood as she fell to the white gravel and the gravel turned red.

And she stared up sightlessly at a star-drenched Florida sky while the palm fronds whispered and the blood continued to run from her torn and lifeless body, touching at last the aluminum carrying case with its cores of film and sound tapes.

At eleven-thirty that night, in a bar called the Goat’s Head, some sixty miles north of where Prudence Ann Markham leaked her blood onto a white gravel driveway, two girls in aerobic costumes were playing darts and drinking beer. One of the girls was a blonde and the other was a redhead. The blonde was wearing black tights, a yellow leotard, and yellow leg warmers. The redhead was wearing blue tights, a green leotard and green leg warmers. They were both nicely color-coordinated. Neither of the girls was wearing aerobic shoes. They were both wearing shoes with extremely high heels. Black patent leather on the blonde, blue patent on the redhead. The snug costumes, the leg warmers, the stiletto heels, made them look like Bob Fosse dancers.

Or hookers.

The girls had just come from an aerobics class, though they probably hadn’t been wearing the high heels while they exercised. They kept talking about the class being too crowded, and there being hardly any space near the mirror, meanwhile throwing darts at the board and occasionally hitting it. Each time one of their darts flew out of control, they wiggled their pert little asses and giggled. They were making a big deal out of playing darts like beginners.

Tick and Mose figured the show was for them.

They had been coming on with the girls for the past half hour now, from the minute the two of them pranced into the place like racehorses. So far, Tick and Mose were batting approximately zero. This was because they had started off by telling the truth. They had told the girls they were in the movie business. The girls thought this was a line. The girls were both in their early twenties and hip to the ways of the world. You met two guys in a Tampa bar that looked like an English pub — all mahogany and brass and leaded windows — and they told you they were in the movie business, you had to figure they were full of shit. That had been the first mistake Tick and Mose made, telling the girls the truth about their line of work. They should have said they were in the construction business. The next mistake was giving the girls their true and proper names, which the girls thought were phony.