The Deep Page 18

  “Where are you, Deep?”

  “At the old clubhouse. Grab your pencil and come along. It’ll be the biggest story of your life ... the one you always wanted to write. That old gang of mine. All one big obit.”

  “Deep ...”

  “But come easy,” I said. “They got Helen upstairs and first I got to shake her loose.” I was grinning and he knew it. “Maybe you’ll get your wish, kiddo. I may not make it, but somebody had better be here to take care of Irish.”

  Before he could answer I hung up.

  I made one more call. I couldn’t afford to buck the odds. Alone I might get part way, but that was all. Both sides wanted Helen and if there was any doubt she’d be better off dead than alive.

  The operator gave me my number, the one who answered gave me another to call and I got Sergeant Hurd at home. I said, “Don’t talk, just listen,” and gave him the poop.

  His voice was as cold and as nasty as he could make it. “Stay alive, Deep. I want you all for myself.”

  I laughed. “But just in case, hardman, I could still beat the crap out of you anytime.”

  “Stay alive, Deep,” he said, “if you got the guts to.”

  I was certain now. It was a scream from upstairs.

  I put the phone back and yanked the .38 out, thumbing the hammer back. I went up the stairs into the narrow vestibule and almost tripped over Henny. He was alive, but blood flowed from a gash in his head. He still had a flashlight in his hand and I took it from him, tested it and snapped it off.

  The picture was fairly clear now. Hugh Peddle had come in, sapped Henny and probably made a quick tour of the place with Helen. When she couldn’t come up with anything, he called for his boys. They’d be in bad shape, but still more the type to squeeze a woman than he was. Peddle was ruthless. He could give the orders, but personal involvement when it came to putting heat on somebody was another thing.

  I went up the stairs and like the last time, felt the notch Bunny Krepto had carved out with his switchblade the night before Petie Scotch had killed him and ran my hand over the break in the post at the top of the landing just like in the old days.

  Think.

  Think.

  Five are looking for three. Possibly seven guns and if Peddle packed one, eight.

  There was a scream again and I spotted it. They were on the top floor and I could hear the terse, whispered commands that came through the walls. The others had heard it too.

  Only now the edge was mine.

  I had run the course more often than they and knew the twists and turns. I knew the way the wall angled back at the landing, and how you could get through the window to the part of the old fire escape that had never been torn down and if you wanted to take a chance, could climb up.

  A core of steel still existed under the rust otherwise it never would have held. I got to the window I looked for, and strangely enough it eased open after all these years, or else Henny had been a better caretaker than I assumed.

  They had her in that big room, sprawled out on the floor, her raven hair spilling out over her shoulders and her dress high above the waxen smoothness of her thighs.

  Hugh Peddle wouldn’t look. He stood to one side examining his fingernails while the guy, Al, the guy I had shot in the arm, was standing spraddle-legged over Helen, his arm in a sling and he was enjoying everything he was doing. He had a rag wrapped around his good hand so he wouldn’t carve up his knuckles and a few feet away the other guy whom I hadn’t seen before watched him with obvious pleasure.

  I laid the sights of the .38 on the back of Al’s head and held it so I was sure of the shot. He had his foot ready and was going to put the boot to her in another second and the instant he moved his brains would come out through the front of his face.

  My finger curled around the metal, I started the squeeze, already had Hugh and the other one in my peripheral vision to kill next, when somebody yelled and Hugh spun around toward the door at the far end of the room and said, “Who was that?”

  “Knock that light out!” Al told him.

  Hugh reached the switch, flipped it and threw the place into total darkness.

  They had locked the door, but it gave under a barrage of shots. I heard Hugh yell hoarsely and run toward the far end. He wasn’t a pro like the other pair. They snapped off a couple of fast shots, scrambled for the protection of the furniture and stayed there.

  I put the gun back. I didn’t waste any of the seconds I had left. I went crabwise across the floor, found Helen and dragged her backwards. By then the ones outside had hit the front entrance and knocked the door open. Somebody was yelling for a light.

  She tried to fight me until I told her to be still. She recognized my voice and slumped with the sheer relief she felt.

  Together we inched forward on the floor, got to the break in the room and cut around the angle of it.

  Behind us the roar of gunfire was a steady thing and bullets were slapping into the walls and skipping off the metal things. Somebody began screaming and wouldn’t stop.

  I said, “Are you hurt badly?”

  “No. They had ... just started to ... really hurt me.”

  “We have to climb down a flight and bypass the action.”

  “All right.”

  So I helped her out above me, guided her feet into the rungs and hoped the steel would hold until we reached the level below.

  Luck was on our side this time and it did. The gunfire above abated, then started again. Feet slammed down the stairs and we flattened out against the wall. When they passed we followed them down, stopped at the first landing, cut back to the rear where the other stairwell went down to the basement and held it while I listened.

  A voice far above us was yelling that they had them and the shooting stopped abruptly. Another voice found Al, the other and Peddle, and they were dead. Somebody wasn’t quite sure about one and there was another shot and everybody laughed.

  When they couldn’t find Helen they made a circuit of the room and suddenly realized what had happened, only they thought she had done it all by herself. There was a sharp order and feet began pounding down the stairwell. I grabbed Helen and we made the last run into the old clubroom.

  Outside on The Street sirens began their unearthly howl, coming closer and closer and it was almost all over.

  They never quite reached us. They stopped when they heard the squad cars and being pros, knew the score. They scrambled for a way out, knew that the cops would have that end covered too.

  We huddled there in the pale light that drifted out of the coal bin, heard the cops smash their way in and listened while the shooting started again. They were pros up there and were going as far as they could because there was nothing else to lose. On the top floor were three dead men and the wheel would turn on all of them because of it. All they could do now was take out their hate on society until they were dead or their bullets were gone and hope they died first because the death the law prescribed was, in reality, more horrible than dying with a cop’s bullet in your gut.

  Helen said, “Deep ...?”

  “I didn’t lay a gun on anybody,” I said.

  Her hand felt for my face, found it and pulled it down to hers. Her mouth was cold and I could feel her tremble under my hands.

  “Please, Deep ... I don’t understand.”

  “Look ...”

  “Hugh Peddle came. He made me tell him what you had said.”

  I squeezed her shoulder. “I know what he did.”

  “He thought I knew.”

  “He was wrong.”

  A riot gun roared into the night, tearing things apart. Whistles shrilled and somebody shouted orders directly above us. More sirens were coming in now, surrounding the block. Like an air raid, I thought. Death a few feet away. You huddle together in a dungeon of a cellar and listened to death upstairs.

  I said, “I called Roscoe. He should be watching this. It’ll make quite a story.”

  “But ... he hates you.”

 
“He hated everybody, kitten.”

  She felt the change in my voice. “What do you mean?”

  “Tell me, were you engaged to Bennett?”

  Helen pushed back, stared at me, her eyes searching for my meaning. One side of her face was all swollen, but she was still beautiful. “No, Deep,” she said. “He asked me, but I told him no. You know what I was trying to do.”

  “He didn’t know that, kid. He thought he had you. He was going to let all the boys in on the big secret that he was going to ask you to marry him.”

  “But how could he ...”

  I interrupted. “He never grew up. Remember ... he still thought like back in the old K.O. days. To him, if you stayed close, you were his.”

  “He was mad! I never ...”

  “Did you tell Roscoe he asked you that?”

  “Well, yes, I did, but ...”

  The firing grew more intense. A section of ceiling powdered and came down like snow around us.

  Very slowly, almost dreamlike, Helen turned and looked up at me. Her eyes were large, dark. She caught my intimation but couldn’t believe it. “Not Roscoe,” she said.

  “Your half brother.”

  She put the seal on it herself. “No ... he was my father’s stepson, thanks to an earlier marriage. He really wasn’t my brother at all.”

  The last seal. It was done.

  I said, “He was always in love with you.”

  “Oh, no.” Her face buried itself against my chest and I knew I had to tell her then.

  “It was Roscoe, kitten. It was bad enough he hated all of us, but long ago I had you and he knew it. He wanted you himself and because I had you it warped his whole life. He didn’t stay here for any reason other than to direct his hate at the things that took you away from him.

  “Me, I was long gone. Psychos learn to redirect their hatred and you even helped. He could take almost anybody, but never me or Bennett. When Bennett proposed to you he flipped. He really flipped. It was like having me there again. It was the old days. He went all the way back to the crazy hatred of the old days.”

  She still couldn’t understand. It was too big for her.

  “He went nuts, sugar. Roscoe went absolutely nuts. All he could do was think of how he could kill Bennett and he reverted to those old days himself. He had no gun but knew where we used to keep them. He got down here and opened the arsenal and found a zip.

  “You know, if the gun hadn’t been there he might have come back to normal. He might have realized what he was about to do, but there was still a couple of pieces and some ammo in the old spot behind the shelves and he pulled one out and loaded up.

  “Bennett was killed at night. Early. Not a normal hour for a kill at all. It was before ten when most pros haven’t started out yet. Roscoe went up there, popped Bennett who was waiting for Dixie, ran for it and passed the alley where Bennett had run. See ... he hadn’t killed Bennett. When he knew Bennett followed him he had been running toward his own sanctuary ... Hymie’s deli, which was still open. The thought that anybody would connect them scared him and in that frenzy all psychos get, did the impossible ... carried Bennett back to his apartment and dropped him.”

  I nodded.

  “That’s what happened. He was out of his mind. He was a full-fledged madman. He was something else, too. He was a catalyst. He did something terrible to the world he lived in. He ousted Bennett but reintroduced me. He started things happening, instituted forces he never thought existed, and in his madness, never gave a true thought to what he had done.”

  Somebody opened up with a Thompson upstairs. There was another scream. They were firing from the full perimeter of the building now and the sound of guns and cars and voices was a cacophony of sound that made music perfectly suited to the city. It was a moment of moments.

  “He was a madman at the first kill,” I said. “Not the second.”

  “What?” Her voice sounded small.

  “Roscoe killed Tally, Irish.”

  “He ... no!”

  But she knew I was right. “He wasn’t mad the second time around. He knew what he was doing then. I scared him when I told him that Tally spat on his corpse. I scared hell out of him when he heard about Pedro bone-picking. All he thought was that they had seen him run by, or perhaps pack the body back. He got to Tally with the only weapon he had at hand—a bottle. He nearly killed me with the same thing.

  “That’s what I overlooked. It was a simple kill to begin with. An amateur kill. Only the prize involved was so big I gave other people credit for smoking up the trail. It would have been worth the try.”

  She said, “But Tally ...”

  “He wasn’t a madman then, kid. He was covering his tracks. I’ll give you odds that before long a small Mexican named Pedro will turn up dead someplace with his head squashed in or his throat cut. Roscoe knows the turf. He could run anybody down he wanted to. He’s as worldly-wise as I am and playing it just as cute and now his back is to the wall.”

  From the darkness of the coal pit Roscoe said, “Not all that far, Deep.”

  We couldn’t quite see him, but we could hear the madness in his voice. Out of the shadows his hand protruded and in it was a gun if you could call it that, and that you had to because it had already killed two people. Long ago Bennett had killed Spanish John with it and not too long ago Roscoe had killed Bennett with it and now there was another bullet left and it was going to be in me. I had to come first because when I was done it would be an easy job to handle Helen and not too hard to explain away the kill, especially when you were a madman and knew the ropes too.

  He stayed right there, the gun leveled at my head with a strange, deadly precision that most amateurs don’t ever attain but a madman might.

  There was death all around us now. Upstairs the hammering had slowed, become intermittent, then suddenly stopped. There were feet pounding up the stairs ... voices shouting back and forth, counting the dead.

  It had to come.

  It came very close by too.

  Somebody had found the door that led to the old cellar club.

  The K.O.’s.

  Us.

  Remember us? We were the big ones.

  Time again, the one factor that enveloped us all. There was so much of it. He could shoot me and club her to death. No trouble. It would stick. He was smart. He could do it, explain it off and get a story out of it afterwards. I thought of all the ways he could do it and knew how easy it would be.

  She said, “No matter. It’s over now, isn’t it?”

  Back there in the darkness I knew he was ready. The gun was small, but the tube of it was something I could look into. I could even imagine the deadly little .22 nestling there ready to puncture my skull the way Bennett had designed it to, knew the chances of a misfire were as remote as missing your head with a hat. The little man was crazy cool and had already thought out the answers and I was his only obstacle left.

  There were only seconds more and we all knew it and Helen squeezed my forearm not really knowing what to do, the pure love she felt wanting to throw herself in the line of fire, but holding back because I pushed her back and let Roscoe play it all the way out.

  “You’re dead, Deep.”

  His voice sounded strained when he said, “The end of the trolley ride, Deep.”

  “Is it?”

  “You’re like all the rest. You paid your nickel, you get the ride.”

  “I guess you heard what I said.”

  “I heard it all.”

  “You’re nuts, Roscoe.”

  “Let’s say I was. As you stated, now I’m protecting myself.”

  “You’re still nuts.”

  “No more.”

  “Sure you are, small man. You forgot the big point.”

  He paused, then. “Go on.”

  “The trolley ride.”

  “So.”

  “It’s my nickel. I can get off wherever I please. Remember your simile of the trolley?”

  And he did. Like the ama
teur he was he came screaming through the door with the same gun he had killed Bennett with only this time it was for me and while Helen was screaming with a partial realization of what was happening I drew and fired and shot Roscoe Tate through the right eye and his brains spattered all over the clubhouse walls.

  He seemed terribly shrunken in death, a little guy who had nursed a big hatred for those for whom he’d held a big envy too long. It wasn’t the bullet that killed him. It was The Street. He had been killed a long time ago and never knew it.

  Roscoe Tate had died when he tasted fear, and instead of spitting it out like the rest of us, forced himself to swallow it. He was killed when he let a revengeful satisfaction chain him to The Street and twist his guts until the explosion came.

  Helen’s hands were pressed against her mouth, near hysteria making the cords in her neck stand out like wires, pressing her face out of shape until her face had an animal look. Blood squirted suddenly from her lips, staining her teeth a bright crimson.

  But she wasn’t looking at the mess on the floor. She was looking at me.

  There were more police whistles blowing upstairs. More voices and ominous sounds. Somebody threw the door open and a splash of light beamed down into our cavern, searching, yet reluctant to press the issue.

  They knew where we were!

  “You had to do it,” she said. “You had to do it!”

  I frowned at her, looked at the gun in my hand and slammed it back into the holster.

  “Helen ...”

  Eyes that hysteria had held wide too long suddenly washed themselves with tears and she dropped her hands to her sides in abject helplessness. Her lip was swollen from where she had bitten it and very softly a sob caught in her chest.

  “You had to go and kill him, Deep. Why?”

  “Helen ...”

  I could barely hear her voice. “Why didn’t you kill me, Deep? It would have been easier that way.” I tried to stop her, but she went on. “You killed him, but you should have killed me. In a way you really did anyway.”