Dell Shannon - Mark of Murder

Then they saw him, for just another half second. There was a street light at the corner, and they saw him-a darting thin figure in clothes that flapped loose about him-turn left there, running awkwardly in great strides. They came round the corner after him, and skidded to a haIt.

"Where the hell did he go?" gasped the uniformed man. This silent empty street was fairly well lighted; along here all the buildings were dark, but they could see the full block ahead, and no living thing moved on it.

"Damn!" said Mendoza. "into one of these buildings. The nearest one, for choice. I want men-a lot of men-we're going through every building on this block-"

A squad car screeched to a stop beside them, with one man in it. "O.K.," said Mendoza tautly. "You call up reinforcements-tell them where we are. You two go round to the side of this place-and be damn careful, no flashlights! John, let's see what we've got here." He moved to the front of the corner building. "I think this has got to be it, we weren't thirty feet behind him-he didn't go far past the corner. What in God's name is this place?"

It was an old building; and they saw now, in the yellow light from the old-fashioned street lamps, that this whole block of buildings was waiting for demolition. In the last few years a good many of these shabby old streets had come in for renovation; the city was building itself new city and county buildings, and big companies were buying up this valuable downtown land to knock down the derelict old buildings, put up shiny new skyscrapers.

A start had been made on demolishing the buildings near this corner. A great pile of knocked-apart lumber and twisted metal lay in a heap alongside the corner building, which had two wings enclosing a square open entrance. For a second that looked vaguely familiar to Palliser, but he couldn't place it. A department store of some kind? But no sign of display windows. The whole place looked ready to fall down, and up there past the wings it was dark as the mouth of hell. But Mendoza was walking up toward where the door would be, quite cool, gun in hand.

"He'll be lying quiet," he muttered, "hoping we won't realize this is where he's got to be."

There had been a door, probably; it was missing now, they found by feeling along a rough stucco wall. They went in shoulder to shoulder-into whatever it was, and Palliser thought, an extra-wide doorway.

Bare wooden floor. Mendoza wasn't trying to be quiet. He took a few steps straight ahead and, holding his flashlight at arm's length away from his body, switched it on briefly.

"Christ!" said Palliser involuntarily.

It sprang at them out of the darkness, terrifying, incredible-a dark-skinned giant in a great feather head-dress and long glittering cloak, double life size.

He heard Mendoza take a breath, and then laugh. "Wall mural," he said. "Polynesian god of some sort?" His voice echoed oddly. "Where are we, anyway, John?"

Palliser held his own flashlight out and pointed it to their right. A long wide corridor, thick with dust. There was a door, closed, at the far end: they could just make out, painted on it, the mute legend GENT ME.

Nothing stirred: no gun spoke out of the darkness. Mendoza turned his flashlight ahead, lower. There was a wooden counter there, like a bar; fittings of some kind had been removed from it. The light flashed around nervously, here and there, and a pair of giant hula dancers seemed to undulate at them from another wall.

"I think-" said Mendoza, and at that moment the light showed them a face. A face not fifteen feet away-a face of nightmare. The man was pressed against the wall there, rigid, looking toward them. Not a big man: a thin man in ragged clothes too big for him, nondescript clothes. His face was a mask of blind hate and rage and terror: and splashed across it was the mark-the red scar mark of death, that in the end had triggered death.

For an instant they all stood there motionless; then the Slasher made one quick, convulsive movement and vanished out of the circle of light. Mendoza plunged after him, the flashlight sweeping a wide arc.

Black as the Earl of Hell's weskit, thought Palliser ridiculously, hurrying after him. His grandmother used to say that. Black as…

But the flashlight showed a rectangular blackness-and another-and then they were through the nearest one, and he understood where they were.

This was a derelict movie theater. That had been the candy and popcorn stand out there. All the fittings taken out-carpets and curtains-probably the plumbing-and, here, the seats.

It was a vast, black, empty great place, with the floor sloping sharply away under his feet. The two flashlights found the man again, running diagonally across the uneven floor, stumbling, turning up toward the archway that had once led to the last left aisle. Mendoza fired at him and evidently missed.

Then the quarry was out of the light, and the roar of Mendoza's gun was echoed by anther-a bullet slammed past Palliser's shoulder, close. He fired blindly.

They were running, up the slanting floor now, and Mendoza fired again. Dimly Palliser was aware of sirens somewhere in the distance, and loud excited voices nearer…

He rammed into a wall, and swore. He had missed the archway-he groped for it and came out into unexpected light.

They had parked two squad cars directly in front, and headed their searchlights up here. It wasn't very bright, but you could see in here now. Palliser saw.

The man who liked to kill was standing against the wall there twenty feet away, his terrible face contorted. He still had both his guns. Mendoza was facing him, ten feet down from Palliser.

Men were coming, pouring into the lobby excitedly.

The man fired, and missed, and raised the other gun. Then a shot spat at him from another direction, and he fell back against the wall and slid down it slowly, and sprawled full length.

"Thanks very much, Bert," said Mendoza. "That was my last slug. I never claimed to be a marksman."

Dwyer walked up to the body and looked down at it, gun still in hand. "You can say I told you so if you want," he said. "You and your hunches!"

There was quite a bit of clearing up to do; Mendoza didn't get home until two-thirty again. There were all the reporters swarming around. And they found the Slasher's secret place and the rest of his arsenal; they found out who he had probably been, from an old union card in his wallet. The Railroad Brotherhood. So for a start they looked for that name, John Tenney, on the list of former S.P. employees, and there it was-he'd been hired, briefly, as a trackwalker, some years back.

"In a kind of way, you might feel sorry for him, if he hadn't.. ." said Palliser, leaving that unfinished. And Mendoza said, "That damned lush Telfer! Look at all this mess! Seven people killed--I don't suppose anyone's missing the wino or Florence, or the other Skid Row type we found this morning, but there's the boy, and Loretta Lincoln, and Simms-and several more hurt, including a couple of cops. My God, and if Telfer hadn't been drunk that night we'd probably have picked the Slasher up inside twenty-four hours, with a full description."

"It isn't going to trouble Telfer's conscience," said Palliser dryly.

"No, probably not… "

And when he did get home he couldn't sleep. Had the assauly on Art been tied up to Nestor? How and why? Had to get at that thing again in the morning… Cliff Elger? He still didn't know where the Elgers had been on Tuesday night when Nestor was shot…

But, he thought suddenly, coming to complete wakefulness from an instant's half-sleep, it had to come back to that appointment in Nestor's office that night. Didn't it? He had told his wife he had an evening appointment. It might have been a date with a girl, but- vide Anita Sheldon-they wouldn't stay there. Naturally. So if it had been that, then he must have been killed very close to the eight o'clock margin Bainbridge gave them, or he wouldn't still have been in the office. But if it hadn't been a girl friend…