Ричард Деминг: The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK®

The movement re-emphasized to Mac that he was playing a game so dangerous, the slightest slip would make it fatal. For the girl’s scowling escort was Thomas Cougar, sometimes referred to as “The Strangler” because of his rumored proficiency with his pale, powerful hands.

Thomas Cougar was a tall, raw-boned man with an oddly narrow face with gray skin stretched so tightly it gave him a mummified appearance, an effect heightened by sparse, nearly colorless hair and eyebrows. Momentarily the mocking smile on Mac’s lips died as his eyes unconsciously dropped to the man’s enormously long and narrow fingers, which played with the stem of a cocktail glass. A mental image of those hands reaching for his throat caused Mac to shift his gaze hurriedly back to the girl.

The Town House was one of those glittering cocktail lounges of chrome and artificial leather, new but cheap, and already beginning to tarnish on the edges. It was the kind of place where the fringe of the underworld gathered—not actual criminals, but grifters and racetrack touts and petty gamblers. A forty-foot bar ran along one wall, and facing it along the opposite wall ran a forty-foot leatherette-upholstered bench before which, at spaced intervals, were set tiny cocktail tables. The blonde and her escort sat behind one of these a dozen feet closer to the door than Mac.

At this hour of the afternoon there were few customers, Mac was gratified to note, for the scene scheduled to occur at any minute was designed solely for the lovely blonde murderess. The fewer interested spectators, the better. At the moment, aside from Mac and the couple, two men seated at the bar near the door were the only customers.

George Doud slammed open the street door and stalked in exactly on schedule. Without glancing at him, Mac drained his beer, set down the glass and slid from his stool, as though preparing to leave.

Purposefully, George stalked the length of the bar, his wide, flat face set in the belligerent stare of the slightly drunk, and his massive arms swinging at his sides. As he neared the table at which the blonde and her companion sat, he leered sidewise at her, slightly changed direction, and still looking, crashed heavily into Mac.

The smaller man bounced away like a tennis ball, automatically raised both hands to sparring position, then dropped them back to his sides.

“Stick out your hand when you make a turn, mister,” he advised mildly.

George stared him up and down contemptuously. “Smart apple!” he said thickly, and lashed out with a fist the size of a grapefruit.

Mac’s knees bent, lowering his head a foot, so that the blow merely swept off his hat. His left stabbed into the big fellow’s stomach, his right immediately followed to the heart; then the heel of his left palm shoved against the other’s blue-black jaw and smashed the man into the leatherette bench next to Thomas Cougar.

For a moment George remained seated, his expression dazed and his arms spread wide for support on either side. Then he whipped his arms toward each other. His right hand darted at his left sleeve, and a six-inch blade suddenly glittered.

Shifting his back toward the barkeep and the two customers near the door, Mac’s fingers twinkled under his coat and out again. He held the automatic close to his body, so that only George, the blonde and Cougar could see it, but the muzzle centered unwaveringly between George Doud’s eyes.

George let his mouth drop open, and the knife slipped from his fingers to the floor.

“Kick it over here,” Mac said softly.

Obediently George toed the knife toward Mac. The smaller man stooped with a sudden spring-like motion, and when he straightened with the knife in his left hand, the gun had disappeared.

Thomas Cougar made a furtive movement toward his shoulder.

“Don’t touch it,” Mac advised, “I can beat you with my back turned.”

To prove it, he swung his back on all three, scooped his hat from the floor and started to move toward the entrance—a gesture not so heroic as it seemed, since in addition to the probability that Cougar’s motion toward his gun had been instinctive rather than overt, Mac knew George Doud would drop all of his 220 pounds on the gunman if Cougar even looked like he intended to draw.

“Wait, please,” a soft voice called behind him.

Instantly Mac stopped. She took the bait, he thought with savage elation, but his expression was merely quizzical as he eyed her over his shoulder. When her lip corners lifted in the faintest hint of a smile, he turned around. Tossing George’s knife on the bar, he said to the bartender, “Souvenir,” and walked back to the table.

His eyes hard and his face expressionless, he said to George, “Scram.”

George eyed the smaller man warily, licked his lips, rose to his feet and sidled widely around Mac. Like a frightened bear he lumbered toward the door and was gone.

With his face still expressionless, but with the light in his eyes turned from cold to mocking, Mac said to the girl, “Yes?”

“Sit down,” she suggested, “and have a drink.”

Mac shrugged, took a seat next to the girl and dropped his hat on the leather bench beside him.

“My name is Nan Tracy,” she said. “And this is Thomas Cougar.”

“Larry MacDowell,” Mac said. “Generally called Mac.” It was pure coincidence that he and the deceased gunman whose identity he had assumed answered to the same nickname, a coincidence which gave him the slight advantage of not having to learn to respond without thinking when his name was mentioned.

Mac nodded briefly at Cougar and received an equally brief nod in return. Hostility and suspicion seeped from the tall man’s eyes, and his pale fingers caressed his glass stem as though he wished it were Mac’s throat. For a wild moment Mac thought the man had detected the farce with George Doud, and he shifted his gaze to Nan Tracy in order to hide the uneasiness in his eyes.

The blonde was easier to look at anyway. Again he experienced a feeling almost of unbelief that her mask of innocence concealed a coldness and cupidity rare even in criminals—a mind that deliberately planned murder for profit.

“Your best contact is Nan Tracy,” Mac’s chief had said, “because Bart’s last report was on her.”

The chief had paused uncomfortably after mentioning Bart’s name, and Mac felt the bitterness rise in him again. Young Bart, only a year out of law school, already advancing in the bureau and engaged to be married. The kid had the world by the tail, but suddenly the bright future was snuffed out by a senseless bullet.

Mac had said harshly, “All right. What about her?”

“She seems to be the recruiter of professional killers for the organization,” the chief went on. “Possibly she even heads the whole setup. We’re almost certain it was she who killed Bart when they suspected he was an FBI agent. At least we’re sure it was a woman, and as far as we know, she’s the only woman actively connected with Homicide, Incorporated.”

“Nice name they picked for themselves,” Mac commented.

“Describes the organization perfectly,” the chief said grimly. “It’s pure murder for hire, organized down to a T. For a fee they’ll kill anyone, anywhere, anytime. Already they’ve operated in seven states that we know of, and no telling how many we don’t know about.”

“How the devil do they get customers?” Mac asked.

“Mainly through tie-ins with underworld gangs who hire them to do their dirty work. But they also seem to have a plant in at least one insurance company, because they seem to be able to find out what wives have heavily insured their husbands and vice versa, and then they quietly move in and offer to make the insurance payable for a fifty percent cut.