Shoot It Again, Sam Read online

  "Heaven sent," I said. "That's two times you've said that. You're from hell, Flasher. And so is Gloria, here. Make no mistake about that."

  "Possibly," he agreed, without anger. The .45 moved again. Down to my top jacket button. The bore of the thing looked awesome. "But what a scheme, eh? Using your foolish movie orientation, your hero worship, your hero's mind that suggests the good man should always win. Gloria tells me you were quite convinced you were Sam Spade. What an idiot you must be! Yet it made you the perfect tool for the execution of the plan."

  "Gloria tell you what a good lay I was, too?"

  I couldn't help that. It shot out of me before I could stop myself. But Gloria's dead-white face smirked and she put her tongue out at me behind Flasher's back. The little man shrugged.

  "If your ego demands the crumb, yes, she said you were a satisfactory lover. She's had better, of course."

  "Of course," I agreed, dropping it. "Who was the jack-in-the-box who was made to look like Dan Davis rising from the dead?"

  Flasher's eyebrows rose.

  "You're not serious?"

  I blinked. "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "I was sure," Flasher said, still sounding puzzled, "that your people would have determined that a long time ago. But I see you have not. Just as well. It leaves us with another corpse that nobody will bother their heads or waste their time looking for."

  "Spell it out, Flasher. I'm still in the dark."

  The lens of the spectacles twinkled as he arched his head. He seemed amused now, too. At my stupidity and the U. S. Government's.

  "Peter Davis was in that coffin, Noon. Peter Davis, son of a great movie star. Who was also an agent. For us, of course. When he abandoned your country a few years ago, it was easy enough to get him working for our cause. He was young, idealistic, hated war and politics—so you see, we made blandishments and fooled him. It was a fitting joke all around. When his father died—a father he had no use for, incidentally because he was so supremely the perfect capitalist, we flew young Davis in from London, taking him off a less important assignment and arranged the coffin hoax. Goolsby got him into the box just an hour before the deception. Once when you might have imagined you were only dozing, you were actually under the influence of a gas which rendered you unconscious. It has no after effects. Goolsby arranged it all." Flasher paused. "You see, Noon, and I suppose it is one thing you did not know, the shock we meant to induce in you had to be more than just a cleverly made up actor impersonating a dead man. Peter Davis was an identical look-alike for his father. Almost a twin for resemblance. Same size, too. The funeral parlor aspect was merely a final touch—"

  He had hit me with all of that pretty fast. I tried to think, to remember—I couldn't. Jolly little Goolsby and the living dead.

  "Corpse, you said."

  "Yes. Young Davis was disposed of once we had you in safekeeping. We could never be sure he mightn't have a delayed remorse for a dead parent. A risk we couldn't be bothered with, you see. Your assassination of the President had gained top priority even over this other project. But now, we resume where we left off. We are ready once more."

  Gloria fidgeted impatiently. Her hips and bosom twitched as she walked nervously around behind the little man.

  "God, why are you telling him all this? Get rid of him, now, Flasher."

  He sighed, but chuckled, too.

  "You're right, Gloria. But we know what we had to know. They made no connection between the movie and Dan Davis whatsoever. I was right to sit it out here and wait. It was a gamble but it paid off, you see. Cervantes was right—how did he put it?—'patience and shuffle the cards. . . .' "

  "I like Alan Hale's old line from Algiers better."

  "Ah!" Flasher wagged his head, the .45 jiggling. "The eternal movie buff again. And what is that line, dear Mr. Noon?"

  " 'We play the game but fate controls the cards.' "

  I was stalling now, buying time, trying to find an exit, a way out. It was twenty one floors down to the street and I didn't want to get there the hard way. Nor did I want a .45 calibre slug parting my spinal column. I hadn't been kidding him. I didn't have a gun. I didn't think I had needed one calling on a harmless movie producer. Famous last thoughts. Maybe the very last ones.

  Flasher didn't laugh at Hale's thrust and moved away from the desk. He motioned Gloria to move with him. His entire attitude was suddenly controlled, coordinated. His wedge-shaped figure balanced on the toes. The nose of the .45 pointed to the window. Gloria murmured something that sounded like complete approval. My flesh crawled, in spite of myself. I could see what Flasher had in mind.

  "Go to the window," he commanded. "And be very careful what you do. I assure you. Falling is less agonizing than the smash of a bullet into your flesh."

  "How would you know?" It came out of me like the snarl of a trapped animal.

  "Scientific. You'll probably lose consciousness on the way down. Move, I said. Now—or I will shoot." He was a good five feet away from me. As was Gloria, staying close to his side. The wooden crate with all the deadly out-of-sight nitro, cannisters or bottles, was over on the far wall of the room. There was nothing I could do or use. I moved to the window, taking all the time I could. I had one thing in my favor. The window was closed. It would have to be opened. By me, naturally. I saw another way to buy a second. I took it. Desperately.

  "Why Walker's book, Flasher? Why didn't you just pick an original screenplay? Why go to all the bother of buying a big novel?"

  "It's obvious you haven't read that book, Noon. The middle section has many scenes involving the UN Building. It is what gave us the idea in the first place. Now—very carefully, raise the window. That's right. Slowly, carefully—" Gloria giggled somewhere behind me. A delightful sound. It had all the sex appeal of a cackling witch.

  I raised the window as high up as it could go. It was still a lovely day. Fresh breezes wafted into the room. My tie fluttered. I turned around. Flasher and Gloria were still too far away to do me any good. With my back to eternity and all that space, I shook my head in Flasher's direction. The bleak stone pile of the CBS building had looked as gloomy as a mausoleum. It was somewhat a fitting backdrop.

  "Flasher," I said.

  "Yes, Mr. Noon?" He was still enjoying himself hugely.

  "The room isn't soundproof anymore."

  Now, he shook his head. The glasses twinkled, again.

  "What difference would it make now? The bullet would kill you before anybody could help you. You'll probably fall backwards anyway. Noon, I must say, however, you're very calm. Your sang-froid is amazing. I salute you."

  "Sure. I'd be dead," I said, talking fast. "But can you afford a shot? Really, can you? No fall from twenty one floors can hide what a .45 slug would do to me at this range. This building would be overrun with investigators. All kinds. Then what happens to your precious box of nitro? How would you keep it from being discovered? Especially since that stuff has to be handled with kid gloves. Come on, Flasher. Think a bit. Don't do anything rash that you might regret."

  Gloria's haunted face was a mask at his shoulder. Her red mouth curled. "Stop talking to him. Do it—"

  "No, wait," Flasher snapped. "We can take a second to think. To weigh everything he has said. He's not going anyplace—"

  I sure as hell wasn't. The breezes at my back, fanning my spine, were a feathery reminder of all the wide-open air behind me. I was poised between Heaven and Hell, in some nameless Limbo, balanced on a tiny pinpoint of time which had come full cycle. I had the entire answer or at least most of it, to everything the President wanted to know. The Cabinet was his own affair, something he'd probably handle on the q.t. anyway if he ever did find out anything about that.

  But this—this was it.

  All the way. Final Curtain.

  Last train from Madrid. Last Caper.

  Noon's Last Case. Eddie's Last Stand.

  The one they closed the books on.

  Gloria stifled a nervous giggle.


  "Look at him," she blurted. "Look at his eyes. He's still thinking, still trying to come up with something. A miracle, maybe. Goddammit, if you don't kill him, I'll do it for you!"

  Flasher-Dr.Hilton-Peter Lorre sighed and raised the .45 once more. He took dead aim on my chest.

  "Go on," he commanded. "Jump. Or I'll shoot right now."

  He sounded like he meant it at last. And there was no more time for stalling or gagging it up or fooling around.

  There's only one thing you really get out of life and that's choices. No matter how or where or why you were born, everything after that is choice somehow. The job you pick, the woman you select, the places you go to visit—and sometimes, just sometimes, the way you choose to die. A lot of times you pretty much can pick that too, whether you die from not taking care of yourself the way you should, or getting hit by a car or just walking off the end of a pier. Nobody asks you to be careless.

  I made my last choice.

  I jumped.

  Not backwards, out of the window.

  But forward.

  Straight across the too much distance between myself and the little man and his Gloria. Into the Valley of Death.

  Straight into the mouth of a blasting .45.

  I will hear the roaring thunder of that gun for whatever is left of my lifetime. Whatever is left of my memory.

  It sounded like all the screaming, crying voices of Hell.

  The world collided with something.

  Something that would never be the same again.

  Ever.

  ". . . that's one kiss you won't wipe off . . ."

  Jean Arthur as Calamity Jane in

  The Plainsman. (1937)

  FADEOUT

  □ My left shoulder exploded in a reddish, flashing burst of agony and flame. The little man and his long-legged paramour loomed before me like startled, frightened children. It had been inconceivable that I would do what I did. But Flasher had fired, anyway, the big gun bucking in his hard hand. Gloria screamed out loud and Flasher darted to one side, bringing the .45 up again. But a madman was loose in that room. Somebody whose mind had played a lot of tricks on him, somebody to whom pain and shock and torment were not strangers but now familiar old faces. Through a blinding, red-curtained haze and some incredible inner fury that had to be unleashing me, I reached Flasher and Gloria.

  The room seemed to echo and reecho with the single blast of that one shot and in my mind's eye, nitro cannisters or bottles danced dangerously around in a rectangular, oblong wooden crate.

  I broke Flasher's wrist even as he brought the gun up and the snap of bone from the clubbed chop of my right hand sounded even louder. Gloria broke away from us with another scream and a flash of white legs. Flasher snarled something in his throat, twisted away from me and the .45 fell to the carpet. He rolled like a ball across the floor, the wooden crate behind him and his good left hand pawed at the inner pocket of his suit jacket. For the little black Beretta. Gloria reappeared suddenly, swinging a big metal crowbar. Eyes wanting to close, head roaring with a cataract of dizzy waters, I groped for the gun on the floor and found it. My hand closed over it. Gloria charged me head-on, long arms raised to poleaxe me with the iron crowbar. Flasher shouted something else and the black Beretta leaped into his left hand. He was another man who could forget about the agony when there was no time to moan about it.

  There was no time. No time at all.

  I crawled away from Gloria, triphammers battering me, savage, shocking little needles ripping into the left side of my body. Through a red wall of insanity, I got the .45 up and away. And fired. I kept on firing, jerking the Colt like a wing-shooter on a skeet range.

  I killed Gloria first.

  She slammed on back through the open doorway, still holding the crowbar aloft, her lithe, long-legged figure jerking spasmodically like a dancing puppet on a string. Poor butterfly. She folded her wide wings for the last time somewhere out there on the darkened floor of the outer office. She, the last Brigid of them all.

  Flasher got one shot off before I closed up his shop forever. I never did get my gnarled forefinger off the trigger of the .45. It just kept on exploding against my palm, scalding the flesh of my hand. The barrel of the thing snaked and jittered until there was nothing but the desperate, futile empty click-clicks of an insane man continuing to fire on an empty clip.

  Rumbles of muted thunder raced around the office, cannonading off the walls, echoing off faintly into some great far-off distance. The lights of the room bobbed, danced and weaved. I couldn't feel the cooling wind breezing in from the opened high window, anymore.

  Flasher's mutilated little body was between me and the wooden crate that held the answer to the UN enigma.

  Sirens might have started to go off, women may have screamed, people may have shouted. I didn't know.

  I started to crawl around Flasher, trying to get to the wooden box somehow. I don't know why but it seemed very important at the time. I was in the middle of a great conflagration, a blaze of color and agony. Shock waves of everything past, present and future were washing over me. Bobbing me, making me float, carrying me to the box in the corner of the room, just beyond Flasher's body.

  His glasses twinkled like a thousand stars as I reached him. Tiny little lights in a tidal wave of darkness beginning to roll in from the doorway, the open window, the walls. From all over.

  I squirmed along the floor. Trying to claw, to scratch, to push my way past Flasher's body. I couldn't. He was a wall I couldn't move. The dim outlines of the wooden crate mocked me, casting high sides before me, daring me to climb, climb, climb.

  Like Cagney in the rain outside the bar in The Public Enemy . . . "I ain't so tough . . ."

  Somewhere, it had to be outside the building, a piercing, shrieking, screaming siren filled the air all around me. Like the key of E, set to the harmony of a banshee chorus of ghouls.

  I tried to crawl past Flasher.

  The siren sound was ecstasy somehow.

  Something stirred in my mind. A flickering shadow from the weird and wonderful long ago. Beau Geste dying behind the walls of Zinderneuf, lying in his brother's arms and the bugle call trumpeting over the desert sands as the relief column from Fort Tokotu rides up.

  Cooper was right.

  It was a lovely sound.

  But it was a trifle late.