Dan Marlowe - Killer with a Key

“Get him!” the nearer man grated, and a bludgeoning arm and the weight of the blocky body thrust Johnny backward. Instinctively he clamped the thrashing figure in his arms, and as he drew on arm and back muscles for the constriction he half turned to look for the third man. Metal glinted to Johnny's right as the man in his arms bleated hoarsely, screamed and went limp; he shifted position, but not in time. A starburst exploded above his right eye; he felt something rip, and a curtain of blood washed over the eye. He threw the crumpled body in his arms to the sidewalk, where it rolled off into the gutter, and turned to the man with the brass knuckles.

He absorbed a body punch as he cocked his head awkwardly because of the blindness in his eye; he moved in closer and landed a glancing left of his own. As the man backed up a step Johnny charged him; the shirt-sleeved arm swung hurriedly and missed, and Johnny dumped him to the sidewalk with a blasting right that missed the chin and landed on the throat. With bitter anger a brassy taste in his throat he stooped and picked up the crawling figure waist-high and slammed it into the street.

“All right, Johnny. That's enough.” Johnny whirled at the voice behind him, half crouched, arms outstretched, and the speaker backed hastily away. “Easy. This is Rogers.” Johnny focused with difficulty on the sandy-haired detective and then looked beyond him to the man still suspended from the fence.

“Outta the way.” His voice was a croak. “I want that one.”

“Stop it!” Detective Rogers grunted as Johnny shouldered through him on his way to the fence. He reached quickly for his shoulder holster as Johnny grabbed the belt of the dark man on the fence, and yanked. The man came off the fence wearing just the sleeves of his suit jacket, and his face was a dirty gray.

“Let's hear it while you can talk,” Johnny snarled down into the face, and his shoulders swelled as his arms bunched. “Who sent you?”

Detective Rogers pushed in between them; his face was shiny. “Drop him, Johnny. I'll handle this.”

“Aghhhh-” The sound was prolonged, breathy, and disgusted. “Take a walk around the block, Jimmy. Then you can have him.”

“I said drop him.” Firmness had returned to the detective's tone; he placed a hand on the dark man's arm. Johnny snorted angrily but turned loose his belt hold, and the dark man's dead weight nearly carried Jimmy Rogers to the sidewalk with him.

Johnny stepped back and sleeved the obscured eye, but it filled right up again, and he reached for the spare handkerchief in his hip pocket.

“Johnny!” Lorraine Barnes ran toward him awkwardly; in her dash to the street she had lost a shoe. Her breath came rough and hard as she turned indignantly to Detective Rogers. “I saw it all from-upstairs. They were waiting, one at the-gate, two in the car. They rushed-”

“I saw it, too,” the detective cut in. He looked down at the man at his feet. “I couldn't've been more than sixty yards down the street, but by the time I put in the squeal from my car and got over here Johnny had rearranged the landscape.” He looked down at the revolver still in his hand as though wondering how it had come there; he re-holstered it hurriedly. He took three steps to the curb and inspected Brass Knuckles, who was struggling to his knees. The detective pushed him to a sitting position, took one look at the still figure in the gutter-the man who had been in Johnny's arms-and turned away.

“Your eye-” Lorraine Barnes said to Johnny.

“I'll run him over to the hospital soon's the boys get here,” Detective Rogers said quickly.

“No hospital,” Johnny said flatly. He turned to Lorraine. “You don't mind my drippin' a little I'll go upstairs and clean up.”

“You're going to need stitches in that eye cut,” Jimmy Rogers said positively. He stepped out into the street with his arms over his head as he pushed his way through the gathering crowd and signaled to the muted siren and flashing red light which had turned into the end of the block.

“Come on.” Johnny took Lorraine's arm and walked her back through the gate. She hobbled along beside him in a one-shoe-on-and-one-shoe-off gait until she retrieved the lost pump at the upper end of the walk. She pulled back to look at Johnny doubtfully as she slipped it back on her foot.

“He said you needed stitches, Johnny-”

“He been right about anything yet? Let's get upstairs.”

Upstairs, she took charge briskly. “Lie down on the sofa,” she told him as she picked up the phone in the hall. “I'll be right in with towels.”

He pulled off the shredded, blood-streaked shirt and stretched out carefully. His ribs were throbbing. There was a gaping rent in the thigh of his slacks; he probed at it, but the damage seemed to be external. He tried to regulate his breathing to minimize rib pressure and listened to the cool voice on the telephone.

“-rush, Terry. I want the strongest non-prescription external coagulant that you have, material enough for a couple of cold compresses, a little extra gauze and s‹#ne thin tape. You'll hurry it, please? Thank you.”

She came in almost at once from the bathroom with a wet and a dry towel. “Now let's have a look.” She swabbed delicately at the right side of his face, cleansing the cut area, and leaned down to examine it critically. “Just above the brow. More of a deep bruise than a cut, although it is split. It undoubtedly should have a stitch or two. It could scar without it.”

“It could scar with it, too.” He looked up at her curiously. “You a nurse?”

“I was.” She turned his head to one side. “You're bleeding under the other ear, and there's a lump.”

“That's from my friend on the fence.” He straightened his head to look up at her again. “Forget the stitches. Slap a little tape on it.”

She looked doubtful. “If I can stop the bleeding. The boy should be here any second now; the drug store's just up at the corner.” She rose at a knock on the door. “There he is.”

It was Detective Rogers who walked into the room when she opened the door, but the delivery boy was right on his heels. The sandy-haired man stood silently as Lorraine Barnes opened the package, made one quick trip for an antiseptic and cuticle scissors and deftly worked the coagulant into the split brow. She tidied up the bruised edges of flesh, cut thin strips of gauze for a pad, and overlaid it with a professional-looking application of tape. She stood up and brushed off her skirt. “I'll make a compress for that lump under your ear.”

She went back into the bathroom, and Jimmy Rogers stared after her an instant before he looked down at Johnny. “Acts like she knows what she's doing. Put a knife in your teeth now and you'd be ready for the photographer.” His voice turned official. “What started this fracas?”

“You said you saw it.”

“I know what started it downstairs. How about before that?”

Johnny's voice was unpleasant. “If you hadn't stuck your beak in so damn quick I'd have found out.”

“They'll talk,” the detective said, but there was no conviction in his tone.

“They'd have talked to me. Another forty-five seconds and I'd've had his life history.”

“Another forty-five seconds and I'd have been taking you in for manslaughter,” Jimmy Rogers said sharply. “People become deceased when you bust them all up.” He stared moodily downward from his height. “I begin to see what the lieutenant's been talking about all these years. What makes you tick? By God, I thought I'd seen a few tidal waves-”

He broke off as Lorraine Barnes returned with the compress and adjusted it along the jawline and under the ear. Johnny grinned up at her as she straightened and wiped her hands on a piece of gauze. “Call Gus at the hotel for me, huh? Tell him to run up to my room and get me a change of clothes from the skin out and shoot it over here in a cab.”