Стюарт Стерлинг - The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories

The detective opened the door, motioned him through, closed it after them. He set the bag down, led him down the hall toward a room at the back. “Just wait in here,” he said tersely.

“He issn’t here yet?” asked Lindquist.

“No, he’ll be here in a few minutes.” He closed the door on him, left him in there alone.

Lindquist moved toward the closed door with surprising agility and stealth for anyone so bulky; tried the knob. It was locked. That didn’t seem to disturb him particularly. He touched his hip bone, then crouched, put one eye to the keyhole, tilting his glasses out of the way. The key blocked the hole effectively.

He straightened, put his ear to the door-seam instead. Voices came through, from one of the other rooms near-by. One was a woman’s, sharply recriminatory. “What’d you bring him here for? Now you’ll only have to take him out with you again, do it somewhere else!”

“I’m going to try it another way first,” he heard the man who had met him at the train say. “I think I can fix it without having to do what we did last time.”

Lindquist was seated in a large wing-chair at the far side of the room, patiently steepling his fingers together, when the lock clicked and the door reopened. The detective came back in alone, closed it behind him.

“He didn’t come yet?” asked the doctor ruefully.

“Forget about him,” said the dick curtly. “Now, Dr. Lindquist, just what form is this evidence in that your friend Swanson is so confident will clear him? Documentary, or just verbal?”

“Vell, partly one, partly the other. I got my little book here, in which I keep my calls written, with his name and the date and the hour. But mostly it should be enough I tell them I vas vith him the whole time that night; I ain’t never told a lie in my life—”

“Lemme see the written stuff,” said the dick. Lindquist placidly fumbled, brought out a dog-eared memorandum book.

The detective glanced at it, raised his eyes craftily. “This won’t do him much good; it could have been written afterwards. It’s not worth a damn. On the other hand, it could be worth a good deal — to you.”

“So?” said the doctor stupidly.

“How would you like to go back to Sweden, all expenses paid, and stay there?”

“Very mooch,” Lindquist admitted stolidly. “Who vould pay the expenses?”

“I would.” The other man took out a wallet, shuffled bills out of it, dealt them rapidly on the table before them like playing cards. “Two thousand bucks. Enough to set you up for life in Swensky money.”

Lindquist took it very matter-of-factly; nothing seemed able to surprise him. “Thank you very much.” He nodded. “So soon I see the D.A., find out vether I can do anything for this poor fellow Swanson, I take the next boat to Stockholm, you bet.”

A single note of harsh mirthless laughter rasped in the other man’s throat. “No, you take the next boat to Stockholm-you-bet, right away, without going near the D.A. or Swanson or anyone else — that’s what the whole proposition is. You also leave this little appointment book of yours with me, and keep your mouth closed over on the other side.”

Lindquist seemed to ponder the matter, took his time about answering. “But then if I don’t go and tell them vhat I know, Swanson might get the chair, and he’s an old friend of mine.” He looked up finally. “No, I can’t do it that vay,” he said imperturbably. “If I got to do vithout going back to Sweden, all right I got to, but I couldn’t turn my back on an innocent man.”

“Is that your final answer?”

“Yuss. I only give one answer, never two, to anyt’ing.”

“I told you so!” a voice said stridently from the doorway. A woman came slowly forward into the room. She was blond and might have been pretty ordinarily, but her face wasn’t pretty just then. “Now you see? You’ll have to!”

“I’m going to, don’t worry,” he said softly out of the corner of his mouth. “Just take it easy, will you? This place is in my name.”

He addressed Lindquist. “All right, Doc. Let’s forget the whole thing. Come on, get your bag; I’ll drive you back to town again, drop you off at a hotel. You better come too, Rose.”

Lindquist, whom nothing seemed to surprise, went with them out into the hall, picked up his heavy bag, and carried it out to the doorstep. The woman came out on one side of him, her two hands thrust into a small barrel-muff now, the man on the other.

“You sit in front, next to me, like before,” the detective said dryly.

“I put my bag in the back, yah?” the doctor said, and waddled over with it. He heaved it in, set it on the floor, fingered its latches and straps carefully as if to make sure it was securely fastened. Then he climbed in next to the detective. The woman got into the back from the opposite side of the car.

They started off, but instead of turning and going back the way they had come previously, they continued on up-country in the same direction as before.

“This is far enough, Allen,” the woman remarked finally. “No use taking all night!”

Reeling and scraping to a stop, the car turned off abruptly into an opening between the trees, climbing over half-hidden roots and spewing up dead leaves. The man at the wheel braked with a grim sound of finality, and there was a moment’s breathless silence after the car’s racket.

Lindquist’s voice broke it, in calm interrogation. “Vhy are you stopping here? Vhat are you going to do here?”

“Get out, you cold-blooded Swede, you’ll find out. I don’t want my car all messed up when I shoot you full of holes!”

Nothing seemed able to get a rise out of the doctor. “But vhy are you going to shoot me? I never saw you before until you met my train this afternoon.”

“Just to make sure you don’t horn into that Swanson case!”

The doctor was evidently the type of man who becomes garrulous during crises. “But vhy don’t you vant me to help Swanson? Vhat have you got against him?”

The man next to him had unleashed a gun. “Because he’s the guy that’s taking the rap for us, and we wanna make sure he takes it!”

“Oh, so that’s what you did to Dr. Meredith, too?” The doctor’s voice suddenly lost its Swedish accent.

“So you know that, do you?” The man’s face contorted violently. “Well, we’ll see that it doesn’t go any further!”

“Will you get him out and finish him?” the woman screeched wildly, standing up in back of them.

She swung the small pistol she had been carrying in her muff, backhand, brought it down butt-first toward his skull. But out of the corner of his eye he had seen the blow coming. He swerved his head aside and the reversed butt chopped down past his shoulder.

He caught the butt with both hands, dragged it forward, twisted it around, her hand still pinned to it, into the other man’s face.

“Now just drop that gun, Cochrane, or I’ll blow your pretty Greek nose off. If there’s going to be any shooting in this car, I’ll do it!”

The woman had the more courage of the two, the courage of despair. Dragged half across the top of the front seat, unable to extricate her own hand from the gun because of the intended victim’s stranglehold on it, she urged breathlessly: “Shoot him, Allen! Don’t be afraid of getting hurt! He’s some kind of a dick! Don’t you see it’s either him or us?”

Butler, alias Dr. Lindquist, who could see Cochrane nerving himself to pull the trigger even in the face of the bore pointed straight at his own face, fired first, tilting it a little to avoid killing him if possible. It tore a long crease up Cochrane’s scalp. The heavier weapon he was holding thundered out by reflex finger-action, harmlessly puncturing one of the air bladders Butler wore under his balloonish Lindquist clothes.