Fletcher Flora - The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK™ - 26 Stories by Fletcher Flora

Hilda stood up very slowly, the movements of her arms and legs possessing the unreal quality of action in slow-motion. She stood looking down at Leo. “Jesus,” she said. “Oh, Jesus.”

Hugh Lawson’s breath whistled shrilly through his nostrils, and Kal Magnus heaved his ponderous bulk erect. He turned his eyes from Leo’s prone carcass to me, and his broad face was flat and still and hard as stone.

He said tonelessly, “You tired of living, Andy?”

I didn’t bother to answer. I went over and knelt beside Leo. I felt for his pulse and found it. Then I passed my hands swiftly over the obvious places for a gun, but there was no gun on him. I knew he would come out of it soon, and I didn’t want him coming with death in his hand. My death, I mean. Chances were it’d come soon enough. Soon and sudden, if I was lucky. Soon and not so sudden, if I wasn’t.

Standing, I looked across the body at Hilda. Her lips were slightly parted, and the tip of her tongue appeared between them to slip slowly around the red circumference. Her eyes were hot and cloudy behind lids descending to veil an intense inner excitement.

On the floor between us, Leo stirred and shuddered and came up jerkily from the hips, leaning back for support against braced arms. He shook his head from side to side and brought one hand forward and up across his split lips. He sat there on the floor and looked in a stupefied way at the smear of blood on his hand. At last, moving like an old, old man, he got one knee under him and rose slowly to his feet. His eyes were as dull and lifeless as dirty metal disks. They slid from face to face until they reached and remained on mine, and his voice was a gassy whisper escaping through loose teeth and blood and swollen flesh.

“You dirty bastard! You scummy little louse! Get out of here! Get the hell out of here fast! And right now you better start living it up. Right now you better start to live up all your God-damn life in the next twenty-four hours, because maybe you’ll have that long and maybe you won’t.”

Hilda took a step toward him, lifting one arm with a jerk, as if she were breaking ice in the joints. “Look, Leo. It was just one of those crazy things. Andy just went nuts for a second, that’s all.”

He turned to face her. His mangled lips were working, and a trickle of saliva leaked out of one corner of his mouth and down across his chin. “The hell you say! So we just forget all about it, is that it? So we kiss and make up? Well, it’s nice to know you’re so damn concerned about the lousy punk. If that’s the way it is, maybe you better get the hell out, too.”

“It’s not that way, Leo. You know it’s not that way.”

His voice broke controls, skidding up to a high, feminine scream. “Get out! Get the hell out, you God-damn tramp!”

She stood very still for a moment, her breasts held high against her dress, and then she turned without speaking and went into the bedroom. She returned immediately in mink and went over to the hall door and out, still without speaking and without looking at any one of us. When she was gone, I helped myself to my hat and followed. Behind me, Leo’s shrill voice said, “Don’t try to run, punk. Wherever you go, wherever you try to hide...”

There was more, but I never heard it, because I cut it off with the door and went down the hall to the elevator. Hilda had left the car in the lobby, and when I’d brought it up, Kal and Hugh still hadn’t come out of the apartment. Taking time to clear themselves, I thought. Making certain that none of Leo’s trigger men came looking for them in whatever good time was convenient for killing. On the same trip, probably, when he came looking for me. God knows I couldn’t blame them. I could blame them in no way for not wanting to share Andy Corkin’s suicide. Descending alone in the elevator, I cursed myself in the bleak and passionless futility of irreparable idiocy, but it only came to the same result that most things had come to in the life of Andy Corkin. To nothing, that is.

Outside by the curb, the taxi was waiting with its engine running. The back door opened as I came out, and I scooted across the sidewalk and inside. The taxi lurched forward, swerving out into the traffic lane, and Hilda came over against me with a kind of restrained violence, her body twisting around to a frontal approach, her soft mouth hungry and aggressive. I snarled fingers in her short copper hair and pulled her face down so hard that I could feel her lips flatten and spread and her teeth click sharply against mine. Her breath was hot and labored, and after a long time she twisted away and fell back in the seat, her breasts rising and falling in slow cadence with deep, ragged gasps.

“Andy,” she said. “Andy...”

“I just thought we’d better be making hay, honey.”

“Don’t say it that way. Don’t ever say it that way.”

“You heard Leo. Live it up, he said. Twenty-four hours, he said.”

“Why, Andy? For God’s sake, why’d you do it?”

“I went blind, honey. I saw his fat fingers, and I thought of you, and I thought of the fingers and you together, and so I smashed his ugly mouth. Besides, maybe it was just getting too late. Maybe I’m just a sour loser who should’ve stuck to penny ante. Who really knows what makes a guy do something crazy? He does it, that’s all. First thing he knows, it’s done.”

“Now what, Andy? What’re you going to do now?”

“Something pleasant, I hope. It’s up to you.”

“You’ve got to get away, Andy. Just till I’ve had time to try to fix things.”

“Run?”

“Call it what you like. If I can’t get it fixed, I’ll run after you.”

I shook my head. “There’s no place far enough, honey. And if there were, there’s nothing fast enough to get me there.”

“Jesus, Andy, you can’t just sit and wait for it. There has to be something we can do.”

“There is. I said it was up to you. Something pleasant, I said.”

She came back then, and my hands crept in under mink, and it was as if she was trying desperately to give me everything in no time at all, but a taxi’s no place for it, a taxi prescribes limits, and so pretty soon I said, “We’d better go to my place, honey.”

“That’s where we’re going. I told the cabbie.”

“Sweet baby.”

“I can’t stay, though, darling.”

“Why the hell not?”

“I’ve got to get back.”

“To Leo?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t be a fool. He kicked you out. Remember?”

“Look, Andy. It was just because he’d been humiliated, and I’d seen it happen. It was just because his bloated little ego couldn’t stand my seeing it. When I get back, it’ll be different. By that time, he’ll be wanting me so bad it’ll be stronger than anything else, even stronger than the effect of my seeing him slapped in the chops like a fat brat.” Her voice sank to a thin complaint. “I’ve been earning the rent, Andy. Believe me, I earn it in plenty of service and a thousand futile damn regrets.”

“Don’t tell me. I don’t want to hear it.”

“It’s for us, Andy. If I left him, it still wouldn’t clear things for us. He’d have us both killed. Can’t you see it’s for us? You’re the only one I really ever want it from, darling. Just you.”

“You’re forgetting something, honey. I’m the guy who clobbered him tonight. He’s going to have me taken care of, anyhow.”

“Maybe not. Maybe I can stop him. If I go back tonight, I think I can stop him. Not entirely, of course. He’ll want something out of you. Something to salvage his pig’s vanity. But I can make it something less than death. Then it’ll be you and me, Andy, the same as now, and there’ll be a thousand nights together to make up for this one.”