Joe Gores: Hammett

He tried to urge more speed from his car. Once he had lost his pursuer… now!

His breath whistled through stained, gappy teeth as Egan Tokzek wrenched over the wheel to send the heavy machine skidding into Thirty-seventh Avenue.

Holy Mother of Christ, there it was, the big foreign car with the steering wheel on the wrong side, just as the phone call had warned.

Chief of Inspectors Daniel J. ‘Preacher’ Laverty eased his black Reo Wolverine from under the shadows and out into Lincoln Way. It was his own car, not a police vehicle; the call had reached him at home with the family.

Far ahead, through a gap in the roiling fog, was a wink of red taillight. The wind hissed sand against his windshield. All the way to the ocean? Or would the car thief sense pursuit and try to lose him in the avenues running south from…

Another gap. Taillight… ah! South it was.

‘Two can play at that game, laddie,’ muttered the plain-clothesman through his teeth. He was a grizzled Irishman with a sad, judging face under a thatch of once-carroty hair now ash-gray. His accent was Mission District, more like Canarsie or Baum’s Rush a continent away than a stage Mick’s brogue. Only his eyes suggested the copper.

Laverty dragged his steering wheel over and switched off the headlights just as the turn was completed. The mist had tattered enough so he could use the lights of the car ahead as a guide. While trying to coax more speed from the Reo, he removed a long-barreled Police Positive from his mackinaw pocket and laid it on the seat against his thigh.

Fear rode with Egan Tokzek like some obscene Siamese twin. The lights had disappeared from his mirror, but he still had the bundle to dispose of.

Why’d the little bitch have to die, anyway? None of the others had, down through the years. He snuffled painfully. They’d survived, been shipped back east, and that had been the end of them, every one.

Until tonight.

Far enough south to dump her? Had to be at least two miles from the park. The houses that had crowded the first two blocks were gone. He eased off the accelerator. Lug it out into the dunes and dump it. Days, maybe weeks before nosy brats would find whatever the animals had left.

There’d be no more after tonight. Coasting, he pulled toward the shoulder of the road. No more. One dead was one too many. He glanced in the mirror as he reached for the brake.

Egan Tokzek screamed. Filling his mirror was a huge black auto, thundering down upon him.

He slammed the car back into gear, tried to shove his foot through the floorboards, and wrenched over the wheel in the vain hope of cutting the other off. Fenders crumpled. He swung away. The pursuer’s radiator was at his rear door, creeping up. Sudden lights flooded the mirror to claw at his drug-sensitized eyes. His hands jumped and shook on the wheel as if electricity were pouring through them.

Dan Laverty’s hands were rocks. The cars were shoulder to shoulder. He wanted to do it the easy way if he could. One big hand left the wheel to make violent motions as he pulled up on the left of Tokzek’s car.

‘POLICE!’ he bellowed over the roar of powerful engines and the scream of wind. ‘PULL OVER!’

But Egan Tokzek was already scrabbling for the scarred walnut butt of his huge old Colt. 44 rim-fire.

His first shot passed in front of Laverty’s windshield. The policeman’s teeth gleamed in a wolfish grin. This was what he lived for, this was when he felt really alive.

The gun roared again. This time Laverty’s window shattered. He felt the warm trickle of blood down his cheek from a hurled splinter of glass. More shots. Still no hits. And still Laverty’s gun remained on the seat beside his thigh.

Then his lips pursed and his eyes narrowed. A hundred yards ahead the road ended at Yorba Street, without going through to Sloat. The grizzled policeman leaned all the way across his seat to rest the fleshy heel of his gun hand on the door frame where Tokzek’s bullets had taken out the glass. He pumped two rounds into the side of the bullnose.

Tokzek heard the first shot. A terrible fist struck his shoulder with the second. He fought the wheel. Jesus. Left arm dead. And the road was gone. Jesus Jesus!

The Morris-Cowley rammed headlong into the sand, reared like a stallion, slewed, sheered off two stubby pines while losing a fender and a door. The car canted, almost rolled, butted sideways into a sandhill, and rocked to a halt.

Tokzek was hurled across the seat by the impact. He lay still, panting, hearing without comprehension the moaning wind and a liquid trickling noise. His gun was still in his hand; directly ahead gaped escape where the door was gone.

He slithered forward, jackknifed down over the running board. A push with cautious boots, a twist, and he was out.

On his usable elbow and his knees, he crawled a dozen yards to a lip of dune and sought shelter behind a tussock of coarse fringing sea grass. He bit through his lip to keep from crying out; the wet cold had begun worrying at his bullet-torn shoulder. His lips writhed back from his bloodied teeth. His hand took a fresh grip on the smeary pistol butt. He waited.

Dan Laverty was out of his Reo and shielded behind an open door with the. 38 in his hand. Nothing moved in the stark glare his headlights laid on the other car. There was no sound except the high whine of escaping steam. The visible, right-hand door was closed. Laverty moved out past his own car.

Now he could smell gasoline from a ruptured tank. One shot fired..

The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.

The Psalm chanted through his mind, unsought but oddly comforting. He doubted if the man could have survived the crash. Why had he risked his life over a mere car theft?

He placed each step deliberately, so no water-filled succulents would crunch underfoot. Through the window he could see that the far door was gone. Three or four more paces, and he could see something blanket-wrapped in back. Even as this registered, his eyes were finding the awkward turtle-trail scrabbled away from the car. Digging knees and elbows, which meant…

He was spinning and dropping into his firing crouch, but Tokzek had already come up from behind the dune a dozen feet away with the big. 44 revolver speaking at Laverty’s chest. Its voice was merely a series of clicks. The hammer was falling on empty chambers.

With a groan of terror, Tokzek fled into darkness. He made two paces before Dan Laverty shot him in the spine. He went down in a sudden heap, writhing and screaming, as Laverty turned back toward the car and the hastily glimpsed bundle. He shone his flashlight in through the unbroken rear window. Flung up against the glass as if in entreaty was a delicately boned hand. He recoiled savagely.

‘Blessed Virgin, protect us,’ he breathed.

The sprawled girl had been pitched from her blanket shroud by the crash. Even in the flashlight’s wavering rays her nude body was the delicate amber of old ivory. The ebony hair was in wild disarray, the Oriental features contorted with pain and fear. On the flesh were the mottled bruises of a systematic beating.

The policeman went around the car to the other rear window. He could feel the black Irish rage rising, threatening to engulf him again like that other time. When his light again flooded the interior, bile choked his throat.

Blood was streaked across the girl’s lower belly and on the insides of her thighs. The flesh there was roughened and empurpled.

She could not have been over twelve years old.

Dan Laverty turned from the car with his face terrible and his eyes feverish. He trudged back to Tokzek with a sleepwalker’s step.

‘Want me to ease your pain, laddie?’ he asked in his soft Irish tenor.

Grunting with effort, he drove the toe of his boot up into Tokzek’s testicles. Tokzek screamed, bucked with the impact like a man gripped by a naked high-tension line. Again. Again. As if to successive jolts of electric current. Finally, shattered ends of bone severed his spinal column and ended it.