Росс Макдональд - The Doomsters

“I think you’re basically a fool,” I said, “like any other man who tries to beat the ordinary human averages. I think you’re a dangerous fool, because you’re frightened. You proved that when you tried to silence Rica. Did you try to silence Zinnie, too, with a knife?”

“I refuse to answer such questions.”

He rose jerkily and moved to the window. I stayed close to him, with the gun between us. For a moment we stood looking down the long slope of the city. Its after-midnight lights were scattered on the hillsides, like the last sparks of a firefall.

“I really loved Zinnie. I wouldn’t harm her,” he said.

“I admit it doesn’t seem likely. You wouldn’t kill the golden goose just when she was going to lay for you. Six months from now, or a year, when she’d had time to marry you and write a will in your favor, you might have started thinking of new angles.”

He turned on me fiercely. “I don’t have to listen to any more of this.”

“That’s right. You don’t. I’m as sick of it as you are. Let’s go, Grantland.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Then we’ll tell them to come and get you. It will be rough while it lasts, but it won’t last long. You’ll be signing a statement by morning.”

Grantland hung back. I prodded him along the hallway to the telephone.

“You do the telephoning, Doctor.”

He balked again. “Listen. There doesn’t have to be any telephoning. Even if your hypothesis were correct, which it isn’t, there’s no real evidence against me. My hands are clean.”

His eyes were still burning with fierce and unquenched light. I thought it was a light that burned from darkness, a blind arrogance masking fear and despair. Behind his several shifting masks, I caught a glimpse of the unknown dispossessed, the hungry operator who sat in Grantland’s central darkness and manipulated the shadow play of his life. I struck at the shape in the darkness.

“Your hands are dirty. You don’t keep your hands clean by betraying your patients and inciting them to murder. You’re a dirty doctor, dirtier than any of your victims. Your hands would be cleaner if you’d taken that gun and used it on Hallman yourself. But you haven’t the guts to live your own life. You want other people to do it for you, do your living, do your killing, do your dying.”

He twisted and turned. His face changed like smoke and set in a new smiling mask. “You’re a smart man. That hypothesis of yours, about Alicia’s death – it wasn’t the way it happened, but you hit fairly close in a couple of places.”

“Straighten me out.”

“If I do, will you let me go? All I need is a few hours to get to Mexico. I haven’t committed any extraditable offense, and I have a couple of thousand–”

“Save it. You’ll need it for lawyers. This is it, Grantland.” I gestured with the gun in my hand. “Pick up the telephone and call the police.”

His shoulders slumped. He lifted the receiver and started to dial. I ought to have distrusted his hangdog look.

He kicked sideways and upset the gasoline can. Its contents spouted across the carpet, across my feet.

“I wouldn’t use that gun,” he said. “You’d be setting off a bomb.”

I struck at his head with the automatic. He was a millisecond ahead of me. He swung the base of the telephone by its cord and brought it down like a sledge on top of my head.

I got the message. Over and out.

I CAME TO crawling across the floor of a room I’d never seen. It was a long, dim room which smelled like a gas station. I was crawling toward a window at the far end, as fast as my cold and sluggish legs would push me along.

Behind me, a clipped voice was saying that Carl Hallman was still at large, and was wanted for questioning in a second murder. I looked back over my shoulder. Time and space came together, threaded by the voice from Grantland’s radio. I could see the doorway into the lighted hall from which my instincts had dragged me.

There was a puff of noise beyond the doorway, a puff of color. Flames entered the room like dancers, orange-colored and whirring. I got my feet under me and my hands on a chair, carried it to the window and smashed the glass out of the frame.

Air poured in over me. The dancing flames behind me began to sing. They postured and beckoned when I looked at them, and reached for my cold wet legs, offering to warm them. My dull brain put several facts together, like a boy playing with blocks on the burning deck, and realized that my legs were gasoline-soaked.

I went over the jagged sill, fell further than I expected to, struck the earth full length and lay whooping for breath. The fire bit into my legs like a rabid fox.

I was still going on instinct. All instinct said was, Run. The fire ran with me, snapping. The providence that suffers fools and cushions drunks and tempers the wind to shorn lambs and softening hardheads rescued me from the final barbecue. I ran blind into the rim of a goldfish pond and fell down in the water. My legs Suzette sizzled and went out.

I reclined in the shallow, smelly blessed water and looked back at Grantland’s house. Flames blossomed in the window I had broken and grew up to the eaves like quick yellow hollyhocks. Orange and yellow lights appeared behind other windows. Tendrils of smoke thrust delicately through the shake roof.

In no time at all, the house was a box of brilliant jumping lights. Breaking windows tinkled distinctly. Trellised vines of flame climbed along the walls. Little flame salamanders ran up the roof, leaving bright zigzag trails.

Above the central furnace roar, I heard a car engine start. Skidding in the slime at the bottom of the pool, I got to my feet and ran toward the house. The sirens were whining in the city again. It was a night of sirens.

Radiating heat kept me at a distance from the house. I waded through flowerbeds and climbed over a masonry wall. I was in time to see Grantland gun his Jaguar out of the driveway, its twin exhausts tracing parallel curves on the air.

I ran to my car. Below, the Jaguar was dropping down the hill like a bird. I could see its lights on the curves, and further down the red shrieking lights of a fire truck. Grantland had to stop to let it pass, or I’d have lost him for good.

He crossed to a boulevard running parallel with the main street, and followed it straight through town. I thought he was on his way to the highway and Mexico, until he turned left on Elmwood, and again left. When I took the second turn, into Grant Street, the Jaguar was halfway up the block with one door hanging open. Grantland was on the front porch of Mrs. Gley’s house.

The rest of it happened in ten or twelve seconds, but each of the seconds was divided into marijuana fractions. Grantland shot out the lock of the door. It took three shots to do it. He pushed through into the hallway. By that time I was braking in front of the house, and could see the whole length of the hallway to the stairs. Carl Hallman came down them.

Grantland fired twice. The bullets slowed Carl to a walk. He came on staggering, as if the knife in his lifted hand was holding him up. Grantland fired again. Carl stopped in his tracks, his arms hanging loose, came on in a spraddling shuffle.

I started to run up the walk. Now Mildred was at the foot of the stairs, clinging to the newel post. Her mouth was open, and she was screaming something. The scream was punctuated by Grantland’s final shot.

Carl fell in two movements, to his knees, then forehead down on the floor. Grantland aimed across him. The gun clicked twice in his hand. It held only seven shells. Mildred shuddered under imaginary bullets.

Carl rose from the floor with a Lazarus grin, bright badges of blood on his chest. His knife was lost. He looked blind. Bare-handed he threw himself at Grantland, fell short, lay prone and still in final despair.