Стюарт Стерлинг - Collection of Stories

He could have passed the Buick then. But he dropped into third, watched the iridescent film widening on the smooth satin of ice beneath his headlamp.

Minnie’s affliction became suddenly aggravated. Her front wheel slewed wildly. He slowed to forty. The motorcycle threatened to shiver itself apart. He cut to thirty, to twenty-five, before he could handle her.

The tail-lights began to narrow together, draw away into the darkness of a long upgrade. At a bend, they blacked out momentarily. He didn’t dare push Minnie too hard but in a quarter-mile, he caught sight of them again.

If he hadn’t drilled those punctures low enough in the gas tank, they might still have enough fuel to escape. He kept his siren going full blast to inform any late wayfarer which way the chase was going.

The Buick hit the crest of the big hill a full mile ahead. When he got to the peak, he saw the loom of the headlights far below. They were swerving, turning. Maybe they meant to make another stab at crashing into him.

No! The car was in a skid. A long, sweeping slide. The gas had been used up. The motor’d died. They hadn’t had power to use on the curve.

He was a hundred yards behind when the headlights dipped, somersaulted, lunged off into the darkness of the pine woods, came to rest, pointing up into the night from a deep gully.

He slurred Minnie around in the middle of the highway, kicked down the stand, left her chuttering softly with her blinker light still going. That would halt any passing traffic and tip off any of the troop cars that might be answering a phone from One-Eyed Jack’s.

He plunged off into the soft, wet mulch of leaves and spruce needles — flashlight in his right hand, 45 in the fist he could depend on.

The Buick lay on its side, far below on the steep slope — the broken ice of a brook wriggling alongside it like a spotted snake. The Demon could see no sign of movement.

But after fifty yards of scratching his eyes out on thorny scrub and barking his shins on ice-coated boulders, he saw something that looked like a raveling of red yarn on the ice. It was above the car; it couldn’t have dripped from the Buick.

Someone had been hurt, had managed to get out. It wasn’t the girl. He could make out her blond curls tangled with the wheel where she lay slumped over, clamped in the wreckage.

The Demon kept rigidly quiet, heard nothing. He went on twenty steps, stopped again. There was no sound other than the whining of the wind in the evergreens, the lashing of sleet against branches. But through the aromatic pungency of the pines — the clean, fresh fragrance of the spruce — he caught the unmistakable odor of garlic.

Medini was coming toward him! Heading straight for the road — with the idea of kidnaping Minnie and riding her out of the danger zone!

The Demon knelt in the slime of sleety leaves and twigs and needles. The smell became stronger. He thumbed on the flashlight switch, threw the plastic tube down the slope. The cone of light turned and twisted like a landing beacon gone crazy.

The brusque bark of the .32 answered, but the Demon was dazzled by his own pyrotechnics. He couldn’t see the finger of flame to shoot back.

The flashlight bounced off a tree, caromed onto a rock, slid a few feet, came to rest on its side — the beam half pointing toward the Demon!

A tapering evergreen, silhouetted against the luminous blur, became suddenly thinner at its base. A shadow; like that of a misshapen boulder, detached itself from the trunk.

The Demon held his automatic with both hands, sighted, fired.

The answering snarl was that of a wounded animal. The Demon crawled toward the sound. He couldn’t see Medini. But there was no difficulty about smelling him.

The .45 held stiffly before him, the Demon inched nearer. The man might be playing ‘possum.

Medini coughed — a harsh, strangling cough. “I told Katie — I should’ve taken time — to punch your ticket — back there at the joint—”

The Demon shoved the automatic against the killer’s ribs, reached for the hammerless. The stench of garlic seemed overpowering. It didn’t come from the man’s breath. It was on the gun. It had been on Medini’s right hand.

“How was it?” The Demon felt the soggy spot at the breast pocket of the coat the murderer wore. “Did Brad Wistor have a handful of garlic when you jumped him? Grab your gun? When you shot him? That how it went?”

“The hat,” the dying man said painfully. “The hat Katie brought me — too big.” He struggled to sit up, succeeded only in rolling to his side. “Tried to grab a hat from that runty grocer. He put up a battle — had to give it — to him.”

“How’d you get by the road-block, Medini?”

“Hid — trunk compartment. Lifted lid — jumped out. Got back in other side.” He coughed again, weakly. “Get me — to a doc!”

“And leave your girl, like that?”

“She’s gone,” Medini gasped.

You won’t be far behind her, the Demon thought. But he said: “We’ll do what we can for you — Minnie and I.”

But by the time he’d checked on the girl to make sure she was beyond help, and had lugged Medini up to the highway, a patrol coupe came screaming in from the south.

Cap Matthews got out, cradling a submachine gun in his left elbow. Two other troopers piled down the hill to the sedan.

The Demon had his say.

When he’d done, the Captain grunted approval. “Not bad, for a one-man job. Not bad.” He regarded the Demon critically. “We’ll take the bodies in. You look a little blue around the gills. Better stop in somewhere and have something good and hot. There’s a nice spaghetti joint, couple miles south.”

“Not for me.” The Demon shook his head. “I’ve had all the garlic I can take, for one day.”

Popular Detective, September 1948

The patrol-boat Vigilant furrowed the oily blackness of the Sound like a plow turning soft mud. The probing finger of her searchlight groped past the rusty hulk of an anchored tanker, found the red nun buoy, slanting sharply in the ebb.

In the pilot house the big sergeant spun the spokes to circle the channel marker. “You’ll be havin’ your name on the promotion roster, sure, Steve.” In the dim glow flooding up from the binnacle bowl, his fleshy Celtic face had the appearance of an aggrieved Kewpie. “The powers that be can do no less than up you to a Captain’s berth after the neat way you pin a lily on that dock rat’s chest.”

“Ah, Sarge, I wouldn’t bust up our partnership like so.” Steve Koski’s lean, muscular figure relaxed against the port bulkhead. The reflection of the running light off the foredeck ruddied his long, narrow features, varnishing the prominent cheekbones with a weathered-oak effect which made him appear more like a stoical cigar-store Indian than the Harbor Squad’s most feared plainclothes lieutenant. “What’d a captain’s badge get me? Swivel-chair spread. Executives’ pot. Uh-uh, I’ll stick to a deck instead of a desk, long’s they’ll let me. Our trouble is, cops get no more chance than undertakers. Usually we don’t get called in until the corpse is cold. How often do we save anybody?”

Mulcahey protested. “Show me any boat in the Marine Division with a better record of rescues than the Vigilant, now!”

“I wasn’t referring to cock-eyed bargehands we drag out of the drink, or the desperate dames we fish out of the East River.” Koski held the white funnel of light on a floating object, about the size of a man’s head bobbing in a black eddy some thirty feet off the buoy. “Speaking of rescues, let’s peek at that.”

“ ’Twill likely be a half melon off a garbage scow. Or a rare, vintage derby blown off the night boat.” Mulcahey throttled the grumbling exhaust down to a hollow mutter.