Collected Short Fiction, page 506
Keller made a strangling sound. Fitzpatrick released him, and Keller gasped for breath. After a minute he said, “Don’t know what you’re talking about—traps—girl asked me to drive up to Portage and—”
Fitzpatrick slapped him hard, backhand. Blood began to well from a split corner of Keller’s lower lip. The gangster said after a moment, “All right, wise guy. We’ll see whether it’s a trap or not. You’re going to spring it.”
“I’m telling you—”
“Shut up. Come on. We’ll all go walk into that motel court. You can lead the way. You can walk up to Room 24 and knock on the door. Then the door opens. If it’s a trap, you’re the first one who gets shot.” Fitzgerald gestured with his thumb. “Let’s go.”
The hundred yards seemed to take forever. Keller’s legs longed to fold up under him.
He knew what would happen as soon as he entered the main plaza of the motor-court leading the three gangsters. Coppola’s men would open fire. He would be cut down along with Fitzpatrick and the others. Fitzpatrick was counting on having Keller crack before they reached the entrance. Fitzpatrick was right. Ten yards still remained when Keller said, “Hold it,” and stopped.
“You want to tell us something?” Fitzpatrick asked.
“Yeah,” Keller said, breathing heavily. “I don’t have anything to do with this. I’m just a guy who checked into the motel tonight. But you guessed right—it is a trap. Coppola and two other guys are in Room 24 with your girl. I guess the idea is to gun you down when you go to get her. They said they’d kill my wife and children if I didn’t decoy you into it.”
Fitzpatrick’s smile was ugly. “Good thing you wised up and told us in time, pal. This switches things around a whole lot.”
He glanced at one of his companions. “Get some rope from the car, Sammy.”
The heavyset thug jogged back to the sedan, opened the trunk, and took out a coil of hemp. Returning, he and his comrade quickly trussed Keller’s legs together, then his arms, while Fitzpatrick supervised.
“This is just to keep you out of trouble for a while,” Fitzpatrick explained. “And so we can find you again later if you’ve pulled some kind of triple-cross on us. So long, sucker.”
Keller lay by the side of the road, a hundred yards from his own car, unable to move, and watched the three gangsters stealthily move toward the entrance of Wofford’s Motel. The furnace salesman was bathed in his own perspiration by now. Thoughts spun wildly through his mind, as he figured all the possibilities and tried to compute the way they would affect him.
No doubt Fitzpatrick and his men would try some kind of sneak assault on Room 24. Keller figured the different things that might happen. If Fitzpatrick and his two fellow hoods succeeded in killing the Coppola outfit, they might still come back here and kill him too, just to silence him. But if Coppola emerged the victor, he would probably go after Keller for having betrayed him—or even just to shut him up.
Either way, Keller realized coldly, he was a dead man. Whether Fitzpatrick’s side won the duel or Coppola’s. His only hope was that all of them get killed. Every last one. Only then would he be safe.
The road was utterly silent. No cars were coming by—not now, after eleven o’clock. Keller wondered what Fitzpatrick planned to do. Duck around back, perhaps. Or try to lure Coppola into the open.
He momentarily stopped conjecturing and fought with his bonds. They were well tied; they sliced painfully into his wrists and ankles. But he knew a little about knots. And he had strong fingers. He struggled to maneuver himself into a position where he could go to work on the ropes.
There, he thought, bending and twisting backward. His clutching fingers managed to snag the ropes binding his ankles. It was difficult work. A chill wind roared down on him. In the forty-degree weather, his hands were growing numb rapidly.
But he had an end of the rope, now, and he deftly twisted and maneuvered. He had to get free, he told himself. Had to. For Beth and the kids.
The rope gave momentarily in his hands. He took up the slack, weaved it through a loop, and suddenly he realized that he was going to get his legs free. The knot was open. It was just a matter of unwinding the tight cord, now. Around and around and around, and abruptly he could move his legs again. He paused for a moment, letting the circulation return. Then, bracing himself against a tree, he clambered to a standing position.
Hands, now. That was a tougher proposition. His wrists were pinioned behind his back, and it was impossible for him to reach the cord with his fingers. He looked around, hoping to find something he could use to sever the cord with. Rub it against a tree trunk? That might take forever before the friction weakened the rope. But there had to be some way. He had to get free. His heart pounded mercilessly. Five minutes had passed since the Fitzpatrick outfit had entered the motel grounds. What was happening? Why was it so silent?
The car, Keller thought in sudden triumph.
Fitzpatrick’s sedan was parked just behind his own car. Breathless, Keller ran to it. It was as he thought. The sleek sedan sported a hood ornament—a streamlined torpedo shape that came to a sharp point!
Keller approached the mobster’s car back-first. He put his feet on the bumpers and stood up, leaning back, so his wrists faced the sharp hood ornament. He set to work, digging the point of the ornament between the fibers of the rope, ripping, weakening. It was tough work. But he kept at it, twisting and pulling and once almost toppling face-forward off the bumpers.
And finally the frayed rope snapped.
Keller whipped his arms apart. Feverishly he undid the knots, ripped off the fragments of rope, freed himself. He rubbed his aching hands together. He was free!
His first thought was to get into his car and drive away. Far away, maybe even home to Beth. He could always come back some other time to pick up his belongings from the motel owner.
But a moment later he realized with strange clarity that to run away now was the worst thing he could do. He had to stay here and find out what happened. He had to make sure none of Coppola’s gang escaped to make good their threat against him and against his family. He had to make sure none of Fitzpatrick’s men escaped to carry out vengeance against him. He could not run away now. If he did, he would live in lingering fear, never knowing when violence would enter his life once again.
He stood there, thinking things through. Suddenly a single shot split the silence of the night. Keller frowned.
Then, cautiously, he began to make his way toward the entrance to Wofford’s Motel.
Two more shots—and a man’s scream—shattered the night before Keller reached the entrance. He paused for a moment at the arched neon gateway to the motel. For the second time tonight he was sticking his neck out when it was safer just to remain hidden away like a turtle in its shell.
But this time he had to know what was happening.
He ducked around the gateway and peered into the long L-shaped court of the motel. Lights were on all over the place, but no one was coming out of his room to investigate the shooting.
Keller glanced up at Room 24. The front window, he saw, had been splintered by a bullet.
Suddenly bright bursts of light spurted from the facing wing of the L. Keller ducked instinctively, but the shots were not aimed for him. He realized that Fitzpatrick’s men were lying in the courtyard, concealed behind two of the parked cars. From where he stood he could see them plainly—the heavyset one named Sammy, and the thin, short one. Fitzpatrick was nowhere to be seen. His two henchmen lay behind the cars, sighting over their hoods and pumping shots through the window of Room 24. All the way across the court, on the facing wing of the L, they were drawing fire from two men Keller had never seen before. He realized that these must be other confederates of Coppola. He remembered that Coppola had said that three more “associates” of his were registered in other rooms of the motel.
Then he saw the third “associate.” There was a man sprawled grotesquely out in a pool of blood, almost at the feet of the two Coppola thugs at the far side of the motor court. So one of the pudgy gangster’s men was dead or seriously wounded already. That left five, including Coppola himself, to fight off three attackers. That is, if Fitzpatrick were still alive.
From his vantage point near the entrance to the motel, Keller watched the thin Fitzpatrick man edging through the side of the motor-court while the bigger one covered him. Suddenly Keller heard shots from a distance, muffled-sounding.
He knew where Fitzpatrick was. The scar-faced man had gone around back of the motel, and was firing into the rear window of Room 24. Another scream told him that a second Coppola man had been hit. The men in Room 24 were under attack from both front and rear, now.
But the two men at the far end of the L were preventing any careful assault from the front, because they were keeping up a more or less constant fire.
Keller wondered about the girl in the room under fire. Probably she was locked in the bathroom and out of danger. But was Fitzpatrick so anxious to kill Coppola that he was willing to risk hitting the girl? Evidently he was, Keller realized.
There was another exchange of shots. One went astray and smashed into the window of Room 23, Keller’s room. He grinned despite himself. It was a lucky thing he was somewhere else, he told himself.
For two or three minutes after that exchange, there was silence. By this time, Keller thought, the motel proprietor had probably notified the police of the gun battle. But it would take time for the cops to arrive—maybe as much as ten or fifteen minutes, if they were coming from Portage, the nearest good-sized town. Plenty could happen in ten or fifteen minutes.
Keller noticed that the thin man was still creeping toward the porch, despite an occasional burst from the two strafers on the other wing of the motel. A sudden loud interchange of shots took place and one of the two Coppola men uttered a horrible gargling scream and dropped forward onto the concrete parking area.
Two Coppola men down now. The remaining man out there huddled behind a stanchion and pumped a fruitless shot toward the two Fitzpatrick men. The odds were narrowing, now. Four against three.
But where was Fitzpatrick?
Keller heard a sudden voice.
Coppola’s. “Fitzpatrick, can you hear me? Call off your men or I’ll kill the girl! I’ll kill her!”
Silence.
Then, out of nowhere, the sound of shattering glass, followed by a howl of rage.
Smoke began to pour from the front window of Room 24. A curious greenish greasy smoke.
Keller realized why Fitzpatrick had been silent so long. The gangster had obviously taken the opportunity to slip around back through the dark woods, past the motel grounds, back to his car. He had taken some sort of gas bomb out and, returning, hurled it through the rear window of Room 24.
Coppola was smoked out! Keller heard choking, coughing sounds. Smoke still billowed through the broken window. He wondered how long Coppola and his two henchmen could remain in the room.
He got his answer a moment later. The door of Room 24 was flung open. The youthful blond boy Keller had seen with Coppola earlier emerged. Blood already streaked his white shirt, and Keller realized that he was the one who had been wounded before. Now he came out coughing and screaming, with a gun in his right hand and his left arm thrown over his eyes.
The thin Fitzpatrick man sprang up immediately and fired two shots. The blond boy grabbed at his middle as a spout of red suddenly burst forth. He toppled forward, tumbling over the low railing and dropping with a heavy thud onto the hood of somebody’s parked car.
But in the same instant the gun of the remaining Coppola mobster across the motor-court spoke. This time his aim was accurate. The thin man fell, yelling.
Keller revised his score. There were still two men in the room, Coppola and the hard-faced man, along with the girl. A third Coppola man was dug in for sniping across the way. Fitzpatrick was someplace in the back of the motel, and the heavyset man named Sammy was stationed out in front, behind a parked car.
Three against two. But it could only be a few more seconds before the smoke bomb forced Coppola and has aide out of Room 24. And in only a few more minutes the police would be here to mop up the survivors.
Fitzpatrick had appeared now. He came suddenly around the other side of the motel, rounding the L no more than fifty feet from Keller. But he did not even see Keller. The gangster took careful aim and blew the head off Coppola’s sniper.
Two against two. And Fitzpatrick and Sammy were still fresh, while the two men in the room were struggling against the effects of a gas bomb.
The door of Room 24 opened a second time. Keller, crouching in the shadows, stared. The girl emerged this time.
She was nude. The brightness of the almost-full moon showed her pale, lovely body, and showed the tear-stained puffiness of her face. She came stumbling out of the room as if she had been pushed.
Keller saw Fitzpatrick go racing across the motor-court toward her. It was a mistake. Abruptly fat Coppola himself came from the room. He was wearing an improvised gas mask made out of strips of cloth, evidently torn from the girl’s clothes.
Coppola chuckled harshly. Fitzpatrick was caught in the middle of the motor-court, with no place to hide. He had never expected Coppola to have been able to withstand the gassing, it seemed.
Coppola was holding the big .357 Magnum. He brushed aside the gauze that had protected his eyes and face and fired twice, in rapid succession.
The first shot caught Fitzpatrick square in the chest. The impact of the big slug ripping into him knocked the scar-faced man back almost ten feet. Fitzpatrick let out a grotesque howl and shrank into a crumpled dead heap. His gun went skittering out of his hands and came to rest no more than five paces from where Keller was hiding.
Coppola’s second shot was aimed at Fitzpatrick’s fleshy henchman, Sammy. But this time Coppola was not quite so lucky. The girl, Peggy Ryan, running wildly and blindly around the motor-court area, lurched in her hysterical flight and crossed in front of Coppola the instant his bullet was released.
Keller gasped. The .357 slug entered the girl’s body between her shoulder blades and ripped its way right through her. A fountain of blood erupted between her full, ripe breasts. She stood transfixed, a white statue stained with red, frozen in the moonlight for a fraction of a second. Then the force of the shot knocked her down.
Sammy, who had been spared by her lucky lurch, made the most of his opportunity. He rose from his hiding place behind the car and pumped two slugs into Coppola’s flabby body. The mob boss looked astonished and amazed. Coppola still had not fully realized that he had killed the girl instead of his remaining enemy. He frowned in a curious fashion, then clutched at his stomach and started to sag. Sammy tried to fire again at the falling Coppola, but his gun clicked and refused to deliver a shot. He had fired his last round.
Smoke had just about ceased to billow from Room 24 now. The gas bomb had spent itself. Sammy rose from hiding and looked around cautiously in all directions. Keller drew his breath in sharply as he saw the snout of a gun project from the glassless window of Room 24. Sammy had underestimated the number of his opponents. There was one left, the lean, hard-faced man who was the dead Coppola’s second-in-command.
The gun in the window chattered three times.
Sammy whirled as the slugs thudded into him.
“What the—”
He never finished the sentence. He went down as though his legs had instantly turned to spaghetti. The motor-court was very silent. It was the silence of the tomb.
Keller, huddled up in the dark shrubbery near the entrance, felt some of the tension ebb out of him. The duel was over. They were all dead—Fitzpatrick, Sammy, the girl, Fitzpatrick’s other thug, Coppola and the blond boy and the three others.
There had been only one survivor. The hard-faced man.
Keller shifted his feet. He was getting cramped. He looked out across the shambles that the pleasant little motel had become. Three dead men lay sprawled on the base of the L, over to his right. Closer to him lay the ugly corpse of Fitzpatrick. On the balcony was Coppola’s body. Here and there in the parking area lay the corpses of Fitzpatrick’s two henchmen, the girl, and the young blond-haired boy.
But there had been one survivor. Keller stared with new horror as he understood the full implication.
As he watched, the door of Room 24 swung slowly open for the last time. The hard-faced man came out. He looked in all directions. He had no way of knowing how many henchmen Fitzpatrick had come with.
But there was no sign of anyone else. Keller watched as the lean, cold-expressioned killer began to tiptoe across the balcony to the stairway, down to the parking area. He was going to drive away, now, before the police arrived.
The motel walls were cracked with bullet holes, and half a dozen windows had been smashed during the violent battle. No doubt the other guests had remained huddled under their beds all the while, not daring to look out. In only a minute or two, the police would probably show up.
Maybe, thought Keller, the police would get here in time to apprehend the hard-faced man.
Maybe not, though.
His mind dwelled for a moment on what might happen if the hard-faced man escaped. No doubt there were other members of the Coppola organization still in Chicago. They would want revenge. The hard-faced man would tell them of the furnace salesman who had tipped Fitzpatrick off about the ambush, and so caused the deaths of so many men.
They’ll come after me, Keller thought. They’ll kill Beth and Jeanie and Tom and the baby, and me last of all.
He could not let the hard-faced man escape.
Keller stood frozen in an agony of indecision. He was a law-abiding man. He knew how to use a gun, but he had never shot at any living thing in his life. And he knew that if he let that coldblooded killer escape, he was signing not only his own death warrant but that of his wife and children.
