Джордж Хиггинс - The New Black Mask (No 4)

I tied him up with the hose of the enema.

I tied him up with the electric-light cords from the reading lamps. And some pillowcases and bedsheets. And a large roll of adhesive bandage.

That was about all I could find to tie him up with, so I let it go at that. But I still wasn’t sure that it was enough. With a guy like that, you could never be sure.

I backed out of the bathroom, keeping my eye on him. I backed across the bedroom, still watching him, and out into the hallway. And then I stopped stock-still, my breath sucking in with shock.

Connie stood flattened against the wall, immediately outside my door. And lurking in the shadows at the top of the stairs was the hulking figure of my father-in-law, Luther Bannerman.

I looked from him to her, staring stupidly, momentarily paralyzed with shock. I thought, How ... why ... what ...? Immediately following it with the thought, How silly can you get?

She and Bannerman had journeyed from their home place together. Having a supposedly invalided daughter was a gimmick for chiseling money from me. So he had parked her before coming out to my house this afternoon, picking her up afterward. Since Kay wouldn’t have volunteered any information, they assumed that she was no more than the nurse she appeared to be, one who went home at night. She left. While they waited to make sure she would not return, they saw Manny’s husband enter the house in a way that no legitimate guest would. So they followed him inside, and when he failed to do the job he had come to...

My confusion lasted only a moment. It could have taken no longer than that to sort things out and put them in proper order. But Connie and Luther Bannerman were already edging toward me. Arms outspread to head off my escape.

I backed away. Back was the only way I could go.

“Get him. Papa!” Connie hissed. “Now!”

I saw a shadow upon the shadows — Bannerman poising to slug me. I threw up an arm, drew my own fist back.

“You hypocrite son of a bitch! You come any closer, I’ll—!”

Connie slugged me in the stomach. She stiff-armed me under the chin.

I staggered backward and fell over the rail of the balustrade.

I went over it and down, my vision moving in a dizzying arc from beamed ceiling to paneled walls to parquet floor. I did a swift back-and-forth review of the floor and decided that I was in no hurry at all to get down to it.

I had never seen such a hard-looking floor.

I was only sixty-plus feet above it — only! — but it seemed like sixty miles.

I had hooked my feet through the balusters when I went over the rail.

Connie was alternately pounding on them and trying to pry them loose, meanwhile hollering to her father for help.

“Do something, dam it! Slug him!”

Bannerman moved down the stairs a step or two. He leaned over the rail, striking at me. I jabbed a finger in his eve.

He cursed and let out a howl.

Connie cursed, howled for him to do something, goddammit!

“Never mind your damned eye! Hit him, can’t you?”

“Don’t you cuss me, Daughter!” He leaned over the rail again. “It ain’t nice to cuss your papa!”

Connie yelled “Oh, shit!” exasperatedly, and gave my foot an agonizing blow.

Her father took another swing at me, and my head seemed to explode. I heard him shout with triumph, Connie’s maliciously delighted laugh.

“That almost got him, Papa. Just a little bit more now.”

“Don’t you worry, Daughter. Just you leave him to papa.”

He aimed another blow at me. She hit my sore foot again.

And I kicked her, and I grabbed him.

He was off balance, leaning far out over the rail. I grabbed him by the ears, simultaneously kicking at Connie.

He came over the rail with a terrified howl, clutching my wrists for dear life. My foot went between Connie’s legs, and she was propelled upward as Bannerman’s weight yanked me downward.

She shrieked, one terror-filled shriek after another. Shrieking, she flattened herself against my leg and hung on to it.

She shrieked and screamed, and he yelled and howled. And one jerked one way, and the other pulled the other way. And I thought, My God, they’re going to deafen me and pull me apart at the same time.

They were really a couple of lousy would-be murderers. But they were amateurs, of course, and even a pro can goof up. As witness, Manny’s husband.

I caught a glimpse of him, as I was swung back and forth, looking more like a mummy than a man, due to the variety and number of items with which I had bound him. He came hopping through my bedroom door, very dazed and wobbly looking. He hopped out onto the landing, lost his balance, and crashed heavily into the balustrade.

It creaked and scraped ominously. The distant floor of the reception hall seemed to jump up at me a few inches, and the terrified vocalizings of the Bannermans increased.

Somehow, the mummy got to his feet again, though why I don’t know. I doubt that he knew what he was doing. He got to the head of the stairs, stood looking down them dazedly. He executed another little hop — and, of course, he fell. Went down the steps in a series of bouncing somersaults, hitting the leg that Bannerman had just managed to hook over the rail.

The jolt almost knocked Bannerman loose from me. Naturally, I was yanked downward also, simultaneously exerting a tremendous yank upon the balustrade.

It was too much. Too damned much. It tore loose from its ancient moorings and dropped downward. Connie skidded down my body headfirst, unable to stop her plunge until she was extended almost the length of her body. Clutching her father’s legs, she clung to me by her heels.

She screamed and cursed him, hysterically. He cursed and kicked at her.

A strange calm had settled over me — the calm of the doomed. I was at once a part of things and yet outside them, and my overall view was objective.

I didn’t know how the few screws and spikes that still attached the balustrade to the landing managed to stay in place, why it didn’t plunge downward, bearing us with it, into the reception hall. Moreover, I didn’t seem to care. Rather, I cared without caring. What concerned me, in a vaguely humorous way, was the preposterous picture we must have made. Connie, Bannerman, and I balled together in a kind of crazy bomb, which was about to be dropped at any moment.

I waited for the weight to go off of me, the signal that we were making the final plunge. I waited, and I kept my eyes closed tight, knowing that if I opened them, if I looked down at that floor so far below me, it would be about the last time I looked at anything.

There was so much racket from the Bannermans and the grating and screeching of the balustrade that I could hear nothing else. But suddenly the weight did go off of me in two gentle yanks. There was another wait then, and I expected to hit the floor at any moment. Then, I myself was yanked, and a couple of strong arms went around me. And I was hustled effortlessly upward.

I was set down on my feet. I received a gentle bearing-down shake, then a sharp slap. I opened my eyes, found myself on the second-floor landing, with its ruined balustrade.

Connie and Bannerman were stretched out on the floor, facedown, with their hands behind their heads. Manny’s husband lay at the foot of the stairs in a heap.

Kay peered at me anxiously. “I’m terribly, terribly sorry, darling. Are you all right?”

“Fine,” I said. Because I was alive, wasn’t I, and being alive was fine, wasn’t it?

To show my gratitude, I would gladly have gone down on my knees and kissed her can.

“I would have been back sooner, Britt, but a truck driver tried to pick me up. I think I broke his darned jaw.”