Joe Gores - Hammett

Heloise stopped in midflight. Her feet flew straight out in front of her on either side of Harry. From midair, she sat down.

She landed on her chair like a flash flood. It burst asunder. Collapsed, it looked like a spread-out pattern for itself. Heloise sprawled in the midst of it making noises like a bathtub emptying.

‘Where’s the chink?’ asked Hammett.

Heloise didn’t answer. Harry took out his pistol again and thumbed back the hammer. With the ritual tenderness of a man entering a woman, he pushed the muzzle forward until it touched the end of her nose. Sweat popped out on her forehead. The mean black raisins buried in the folds of flesh beneath her nearly hairless brows crossed slightly.

Very, very softly, Harry said, ‘Take out your teeth, you unspeakable dung heap.’

Her eyes rolled. Her mouth worked to form some sort of word. It might have been, ‘Please.’

Harry waited. The sweat ran down her face. Finally something he saw in her eyes, some capitulation, perhaps, made him relax and straighten.

Very slowly, while she stared at his face as if mesmerized, her right hand went up to remove the full set of dentures. She slipped it from her mouth and sat with it on her half-opened hand in her lap. Her face looked collapsed from the nose down, as if someone had removed part of the essential underlying bone. The teeth gleamed like an uncatalogued fossil.

Harry put out a calloused palm. After a full thirty seconds, her hand laid the teeth on Harry’s hand.

The radio had stopped playing. The silence of the room was broken only by the softening hiss of the kerosene lantern.

Harry dropped the plates on the floor. He carefully brought his heel down on them, then twisted and turned the heel. The teeth gnashed themselves to rubble beneath his boot.

Tears spilled over to run down Heloise’s satiny skin and into the corners of her shrunken mouth.

‘Goddamn you!’ she cried mushily. ‘I was beautiful once!’

‘Where’s the chink?’ said Hammett.

‘Brighton Street,’ lisped the fat woman on the front seat between them.

The main street of Bolinas, Brighton wound around the point of the peninsula and dead-ended at the ocean.

‘Point out the house,’ said Hammett.

It was a plain white Victorian in midblock; the gas lamp on the corner gave just enough illumination to show them the porch pillars. The yard was overgrown with weeds; the house was still and dark. A black flivver was parked in the driveway beyond a white picket fence that needed paint.

‘Right on by,’ said Hammett, before Harry had a chance to slow the big car. ‘Park on the other side of the street facing back this way.’

Animation entered the lisping voice. ‘You won’t hurt my baby.. ’

‘He’s the one with the shotgun.’

‘He ain’t but seventeen.’

‘The girl was eleven when you sold her to the cathouse in Illinois.’

Heloise did not respond.

Harry stopped the car. He started to get out, but Hammett forestalled him.

‘Streets and houses, Harry. My kind of hunting. Remember?’

Harry made a face and nodded. They had planned their strategy after Heloise had given them the layout of the house, but the big South African still felt his role was too passive.

The fat woman quavered. ‘My boy. Don’t hurt my…’

Hammett leaned back into the open car. His irrational fear of the irrational boy with the shotgun lay on his stomach like an undigested meal.

‘Your boy!’ he said in a low tight vicious voice. ‘In the south they keep his kind behind the stove.’

He walked away feeling slightly nauseated. It had been a destructive night, and it wasn’t over yet.

The gate was ajar, the front porch solid and uncreaking underfoot. Only one window was open, that of the second-floor bedroom in which Heloise had said her son was holding the Chinese girl. Hammett’s skeleton key worked the simple mortise lock without difficulty. Nothing came out of the inner darkness at him, but his hands were clammy by the time he had been through the downstairs rooms. There was no way to duck a shotgun blast if it came.

He checked his watch, then started up. Harry and the fat woman would be getting out of the car in another thirty seconds.

He stopped with a foot half raised. Above his head, the boy’s muffled voice. Door of the room shut. A muffled laugh, remarkable for its idiocy, then an answering female voice. What sounded like a pleading tone.

Hammett raised his head slowly above the level of the hall floor. Pitch blackness. From behind the unseen door, the girl’s voice again. The idiotic laughter. Harry and the fat woman would be coming up the silent street now, Harry’s cannon half buried in her side.

The bedsprings started that cadence that can never be mistaken for anything else. Go or not? He went up the final stairs in a quick silent rush.

The tempo was increasing, becoming frenzied. He felt his way down the hallway to that door, traced enough of its surface to know which way it opened. Downstairs, the creak of a floorboard told him that Harry and the fat woman had come in.

The boy started making animal noises. The girl cried out, a wild lost sound. Hammett was flattened against the wall beside the door, his gun in his pocket, his soap-weighted wool sock in one hand and his flashlight in the other.

Three… two… one… now!

From downstairs came Heloise’s terrific bellow. Another. A cry, a curse inside the room.

The Chinese girl shrieked, the sort of shriek that brought the hairs erect on Hammett’s neck.

Scuffling noises downstairs. Harry’s cursing. Then the fat woman’s yell of warning.

‘ANDY! LOOK OUT!’

Bare feet hitting the floor inside the room. Pause to get gun. Running feet. The door was ripped open…

Hammett was already spinning off the wall. His right arm swept the homemade blackjack as his left hand thumbed blinding light into Andy’s face. The soap-weighted sock caught the youth between the eyes with such force that his head snapped back and the shotgun squirted from his nerveless fingers unfired.

Hammett’s light followed him down, the arm swinging the sock with the tireless rhythm of panic even as Crystal, inside the room, cried, ‘Look out! He’s got a gun!’

Hammett dropped the sock and straightened with the. 38 in his hand, his light arcing the other bedroom doors. None of them opened. Andy had been a lone jailer.

‘Hammett!’ yelled Harry from below. ‘Is…’

‘He’s out.’

The Chinese girl hurled herself into the lean detective’s arms, crying and clawing at him, tears streaming down her face, her naked body twined around his.

‘He was… they wouldn’t… he forced me to…’

‘That’s all right, it’s okay now, that’s all right…’

Hammett’s voice was soothing. He tried to disentangle himself from her. Her body was hot and lithe, arousing.

‘Get some clothes on, Crystal, we’re getting out of here.’

He got her back into the room and himself out into the hall. Harry followed his flashlight up the stairs.

‘Heloise get away all right?’ asked Hammett.

‘Should have seen the fat bitch run.’ Harry was chuckling.

‘We can be damned sure she won’t go to the police,’ said Hammett. ‘But she’ll be sure we won’t either. She’ll be back to get Andy, so you’d better get back to the car just in case she tries to disable it or something.’

Hammett turned on the hallway light for the first time, and broke the fallen boy’s shotgun to jack out the shells. Andy was breathing regularly, still out cold.

Hammett could hear Crystal’s muted sobbing as she moved around the room. Through the closed door, she called, ‘I will be ready right away.’