Джо Горес - Cases

Patrons flowed out into the street, openmouthed, but were drawn back by Big Jay’s still-jamming combo. The girl went with them. Dunc looked at his watch. Pushing midnight. He could go type reports now without fear of running into Drinker.

As he started walking back out Bush Street, a taxi pulled up and Harry the Hipster got out still blowing his sax, crossed the sidewalk back into Say When. He hadn’t dropped a note while he’d been gone. God, Dunc loved this town!

It was pushing midnight when Jack Falkoner parked the blue Ford. He checked the redhead’s Magnum carefully; he was going up against Mr. David himself. In Bible school as a kid he’d read about that other David, the one in the Old Testament, who had a falling-out with his God. Now it was Falkoner’s turn.

He walked downhill on the right-hand side of narrow, one-block Glover, crossed over, came up the other side, breathing heavier from the incline. No cars he knew, no dark shapes in any of the vehicles along the curb, no people at all.

Mr. David being here was a long shot, but he’d paid Kata’s rent and on Sundays had liked to watch Ed Sullivan with her. Even when she wasn’t here he’d come to think and plan, usually with only Jack for security. If he was here, an easy hit.

Falkoner climbed the stone steps. No lights. He used Kata’s keys to open the heavy oak door. After switching off the alarm, he went aprowling through the lush, five-room apartment, cocked Magnum m hand, rubber soles silent on the polished floors and thick carpets. The place was empty.

The hit was going to be a lot harder at Mr. David’s Seacliff home, but Jack knew a way in without tripping the alarm. And since he had kept the redhead from getting to a phone, nobody would be expecting him.

As he slid in behind the wheel, a gun muzzle was poked into the back of his neck. A hand came over his shoulder to lift the Magnum from its shoulder holster. A smooth voice spoke.

“Hands on the head, sweets, and slide over slow.”

He did. A dark figure crossed the street, opened the driver’s door, got in under the wheel. The interior light did not go on. Falkoner was oddly breathless.

He remembered his fucking wife’s second lover, that goddamn Tommy Exeter. “I’m not afraid of you,” Tommy had said.

A long black Cadillac drifted around the corner and crawled up behind them. It looked remarkably like an undertaker’s car. The Ford pulled out. The Cadillac followed them out Pine all the way to Presidio; they cut over to Balboa, drove decorously, like a midnight funeral procession, out through the dark still avenues flanking Golden Gate Park. His head ached; he felt a little sick to his stomach. Jack Falkoner is not afraid.

The driver was hunched over the wheel. His face was unfamiliar. Maybe Falkoner could... The unknown man in the backseat said, “Don’t try it, sweets.”

“How about a cigarette?”

He laughed. Later Tommy Exeter had cried and babbled and even prayed. Falkoner had laughed before shooting him in the face to spoil the pretty-boy good looks that had seduced Ginny.

Surf grumbled against the concrete breakwaters as the Ford turned left onto the Great Highway at Playland at the Beach, its rides and stalls closed against the chill December rain starting to blow in off the Pacific.

Just short of Sloat Boulevard, they swung in facing the ocean on a deserted dirt lot where neckers parked on moonlit nights. A hedge of dark cypress, bent and twisted by the wind, screened them from the houses on the other side of the highway.

Their lights illuminated wet sand dunes and windblown California bunchgrass; they were doused. The Caddy drew up behind them parallel to the Great Highway, lights dimmed.

Jack Falkoner is not afraid. Jack Falkoner is not afraid.

He shoved the cold, slippery door handle violently down to throw himself out into the night. Behind him something plopped twice and two bees stung him. He fell dizzily out of the half-open door to crash down on his shoulder on the hard-packed dirt.

Just another month, a week, a minute, a second...

Orange flame spurted. Lead ripped his throat. The man with the gun went over to the Cadillac and got in beside the driver. The Ford backed around to follow them away from there.

Mr. David chuckled and took a hundred-dollar bill from a slim leather folder in the inner breast pocket of his camel’s-hair coat. He had crisp wavy hair receding from a high brainy forehead, a generous nose, sensuous lips above a narrow chin.

He proffered the bill to the man beside him on the backseat of the Cadillac. This man was bulky, wore an indifferent suit, had a red face and graying hair combed straight back.

“Jack feared neither man nor devil,” said Mr. David. “He was a bad one, that’s for sure.”

“I like ’em bad,” said the man beside the driver, removing the perforated steel cylinder from the muzzle of his .32. “But Sweets was scared — I saw his face when he went under.”

“I’d be disappointed if that were the case.”

The killer realized he was, too. Fear was what he was here for, but he found it disgusting in Jack Falkoner. Hell, Falkoner of all people should have known how swift death was, how casually given.

Dunc stood at the office window. Below, the light turned green, late night traffic burst up Franklin Street like uncaged animals. Would Jack Falkoner double back to San Francisco as he’d suggested to Drinker Cope? If he did, what would...

Galvanized by a voice on Drinker’s police-band radio, he grabbed his jacket off the top of the desk and ran for the door.

Dunc pulled Grey Ghost Two into the dirt lot off the Great Highway, walked over to the rain-soaked huddle of people. Moaning wind tore his breath away. Water darkened the shoulders of his sport jacket and soaked his short-cut black hair. He could smell salt sea, wet sand, and, faintly, loosened bowels. A car whipped past, tires hissing on the wet pavement.

By the white glare of their prowl car spotlight, two cops in wet tunics lifted the corpse by a shoulder to see if it bore any life. Dunc stared for a moment, then turned away.

Frozen on Falkoner’s features, almost ferocious in its intensity, was an expression of pure terror.

Drinker Cope’s office door was thrown open with such force that it rebounded off the sidewall. Dunc slammed that morning’s folded-open Chronicle down on the desk, jabbing a forefinger hard at the headlines.

“You bastard, you set me up to get two people killed! Kata Koltai! I pinpoint her in Palm Springs, the client’ll send a man down to pick her up, you said. He sure as fuck did. Then—”

“A friend of yours, if I ain’t mistaken.”

“A goddamn killer. Working for one of your goddamn unnamed clients. Then you stuck me on him so I could—”

“Shut up!” roared Drinker. “What’d I tell you the first day you walked in the goddamn door bellyachin’ for a goddamn job?"

Dunc could get hot, Drinker thought, but he couldn’t hang on to it. Not a good hater, the Irish would say.

“You said you’d take any case from anybody.”

“That’s right. Anybody. Any case. And you said...”

“I said okay, but I wasn’t thinking about people I knew. Kata and Jack are dead because I figured out how to find ’em.”

“That’s what we do in this office — whatever the client hires us to do. Sure, we get lied to all the time, an’ sometimes we end up in a mess like this. But we ain’t in the morals business. If you got a problem with that, get out of the fucking detective trade. So what’s it gonna be?”

Sherry’s face appeared in the open doorway of the cubicle.

“Coffee’s made and there’s hot water for tea. What’s it going to be?”