Carolyn Banks - The New Black Mask (№6)

Glendora was safe, so I told him. As Schmettler moved us back to the military reservation rapidly, Arnie began unzipping the golf bag. He was ready for anything — pistols, a carbine, a deer rifle, and what looked like a rocket launcher next to a machine pistol. There were even a couple of grenades. Arnie rubbed his jaw as he contemplated his armory. “Where’s his cell?”

“I don’t know, but he has the exercise yard all to himself from two till three every afternoon.”

I went over my plan as we drove out to the brick buildings on the edge of the reservation where military delinquents put in hard time. About eighty yards off the roadway, his face a pale blob in the afternoon sun, a huge man leaned against the wall holding an orange Frisbee across his chest like a target. Even though it wasn’t necessary, I pointed. “Looey Flowers. That takes care of my part of this.”

Schmettler glanced at me through the mirror. I was the last pork chop on the plate. Arnie took my arm for emphasis. “That’s a dummy stuffed with pillows.”

Looey did look like a dummy, a fat scarecrow. “You’re right,” I said. “But I told you he had a serious weight problem. It’s an effort for him just to breathe. Look, he moved.”

Looey had dropped the Frisbee.

Arnie had reached the heights of his organization by being careful, which I had counted on. He told Schmettler to drive on.

“Frisbee,” he announced, “I don’t like not having a string on somebody who works for me, which is what you’re doing from now on. We’re going to shoot that loudmouth into pieces. But before we shoot, you shoot. That way, you’re using a firearm during the commission of a felony, as guilty as we are.”

I didn’t have to search my memories of first-year law school to know he was right. I figured if Arnie didn’t want a handle on me, I’d be dead by now, so I was glad he wanted a longer relationship.

After our stop at a turnaround for final instructions, we came back for the money run. Looey still looked like a sloppy bundle of clothes, just as I’d planned. After the fireworks, Arnie and Bruno would be arrested on the spot for all sorts of gun-law crimes and attempted murder. Since I wasn’t a policeman, I hadn’t entrapped them. Also, I wouldn’t have compromised my pacifist principles. The plan was complicated, but it was working nicely.

The dummy leaned against the brick wall as if looking at cloud formations to the west. Schmettler readied the rocket launcher while Arnie nudged me out with his machine pistol. His instructions when he gave me the deer rifle were clear.

“You fire one round. Otherwise, we leave you here. To make sure, we don’t fire till you do. Fire within the next five seconds or you get the first pill.”

I drew a bead on a ventilation pipe sticking out the roof and squeezed off. Then the noise commenced. Arnie emptied a magazine into the target and nodded to Schmettler, who took his time and fired the rocket. There was whoosh and a giant slam! A hole appeared in the wall where the dummy had been leaning. Arnie took the deer rifle from me. I noticed he was wearing gloves.

About this time, a sufficient number of police of various jurisdictions were scheduled to rise out of the weeds and solve all my problems.

But nothing happened.

We drove off in silence. I missed the company of the law-enforcement types, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Just as I’d put a hole in the steel ventilator, the dummy had raised an arm to make an international gesture at us.

I’d earned ten thousand the hard way. Looey Flowers was dead and Arnie had a hook in me. Things were very bleak indeed. I wondered how Arnie expected to get away with all that shooting, even on a military reservation. We drove back to the scenic turnout. As we parked, Arnie carefully put the deer rifle on the back seat, along with the rocket launcher and the machine pistol.

“We leave the guns here, especially the rifle with your prints on it.”

We got out of the car and Schmettler started waving his tent-sized coat. Then I heard the flat! flat! flat! of a helicopter coming in. I felt really bad when Arnie punched my biceps.

“Sweet, hey? I reported the car stolen this morning right after your call. Us? When all this happened, we were riding over scenic Lake Pontchartrain in a helicopter you rented. The wise money will know what happened, but our story is Bruno and me flew down here to pick you up. You need me now, Frisbee.”

I felt an unimprovable fool. I build a trap like the Taj Mahal and then put my own foot in it. Before I could feel sorry for myself, a loud hailer came on from overhead.

“Don’t move! Federal agents! You’re under arrest!”

Two other helicopters were coming up from other points of the compass. It was about time. Arnie started to break for the car, but I caught his collar and slammed him down. While I reached in to get the money, Schmettler looked at me, waiting for advice from Arnie.

I kept my foot on Arnie’s neck while I explained things. “Bruno! Listen hard! You tell people Arnie hired you to kill Looey Flowers. If you turn state’s evidence, you’re safe. If you don’t, it’ll be Old Sparkie. Plus, for a limited time only, I give you this ten grand, tax-free.”

As soon as the first chopper landed, I let Arnie up. He watched in disgust as Schmettler, his pockets stuffed with money, started telling his story to the first uniformed person who walked up.

“I want my lawyer!” Arnie shouted, but without much conviction. “When Glendora got out of the last bird, he turned purple.

“There was no way you could get a message to that broad. What’s she doing here? You didn’t tell her a thing on the phone!”

Glendora was on the arm of Ralph David Luna, the special agent from the Plaquemines District across the river, a handsome devil with silver hair and a great tan. Arnie was being a bad loser. “There was no way you could trace that call!”

Glendora gave me an I’ll-get-around-to-you-in-a-minute wave as she turned to Arnie. “We didn’t have to trace calls, Mr. Buttons. As soon as my beau here told me Mr. Flowers had avoided a solid cordon of your people who were watching every possible exit on the base, I knew where he was.”

If Arnie had turned purple when he saw Glendora, he was puce now. She took pity on him.

“Mr. Frisbee told me to listen carefully. He made quite a point that Looey had avoided your men. In law, evade and avoid are two different things. Tax evasion, for example, is a crime, but tax avoidance is not. That was the first clue. Since it wasn’t against the law, that meant the forces of law were helping Mr. Flowers. The second clue was he said he’d see me today, and he’s doing that. So it had to be someplace close. The base was close, so all I had left to do was work out where Mr. Flowers belonged. He belonged in jail. So he had to be in the base stockade.”

Arnie turned to me. “You told her?”

Glendora explained further. “If Mr. Flowers had evaded your people, he’d have gone through them. But he avoided them by not leaving the base. Since he was in the stockade, they didn’t need those marshals anymore. I figured Mr. Frisbee intended to bring you out here for reasons of his own. So we got in touch with the military and they told us the whole plan.”

After they led Arnie away, she patted the cheek of the special agent from Plaquemines and nodded at the two large men in business suits who were still holding me. “He did a good job for us, you can let him go now.”

“All right, Glendora,” I told her.

“Why didn’t I have them arrest you all at the scene of the crime? Well, Mr. Buttons sent a horrible woman to the YWCA to kill me. I decided if he was going to be like that, he couldn’t be trusted not to kill you, so we decided to catch him with the helicopter he was expecting.”