Fletcher Flora

— Time to Kill—

O’Connor said, “I’ll take three.” He sluffed three and picked up the replacements that Deming flipped off the deck Slumping in his chair a little, he lifted his hand up even with his eyes and fanned the cards slowly, bringing each new card into view separately.

“Two,” Sigman said.

O’Connor glanced quickly at Sigman from under heavy lids. “You oughtn’t hold a kicker,” he said. “You’re bucking the percentages.”

Sigman looked at his cards fast and slipped them on the bottom of his hands. He laid the hand on the table in front of him.

“If you think I’m holding a kicker,” he said, “you can always bet on it.”

“Poker’s figured on the percentages.” O’Connor said. “Play them and you win in the long run.”

Deming helped himself. Under the bluish cast of the single bulb burning overhead, his young face looked thin and tight. A shadow of black beard lay on his cheeks.

“One to the dealer,” he said. He flicked a corner of the card with a thumb nail and saw that he’d filled his house. What luck he’d had! Straights, flushes, full houses. All for matches. He laid his cards face down on the table and leaned back. He and Sigman looked at O’Connor.

At the window, Czynowski said, “There’s a guy going in.”

O’Connor counted twenty matches and pushed them to the center. “What’s he look like? This oughtn’t scare your three of a kind any, Siggy.”

Sigman left his cards on the table. “The hell with it,” he said.

“Snap brim hat, topcoat,” Czynowski said. “He looks too short. Too much weight.”

The window had a Venetian blind, lowered and closed. A dark drape was pulled across behind the blind. Czynowski stood to one side of the window, lifting the drape a thin crack for his eye. From there he could get a knife’s edge of vision past the edge of the blind.

“The weight could be padding,” O’Connor said. “Twenty to you, kid.”

Deming’s nerves were screaming. He was building up high voltage sitting in a hard chair looking at pasteboards for matches. He wanted to throw in his hand and move around some. But he didn’t. He didn’t, because he had a full house, and when you have a full house you play it for all it’s worth. Even for matches. Maybe it’s a principle.

He counted twenty and twenty.

“Raise,” he said.

O’Connor looked at his cards, sucking in his cheeks until his lips were pursed like a cupid’s. With the hand that wasn’t holding the cards, he fingered his pile of matches. Big deal. As if they were blue chips at fifty per. With O’Connor, it was principle.

“Nuts,” he said. “It’s your night, kid. Here’s openers.” He showed a pair of Ladies and leaned back, balanced on the rear legs of his chair. The leather strap of his holster stretched tight diagonally across his thick chest, and a black automatic was revealed under his armpit.

“How about some coffee?” Sigman said. He got up and moved to a pot on a hot plate. Deming got up, too, stretching, easing the tension of muscles and nerves.

“If it’s him,” Czynowski said, “Kelly ought to be calling.”

“If he’s awake,” Deming said.

O’Connor applied a match to the mangled remains of a cold cigar, looking up at Deming through the flame. “Don’t worry about Kelly, kid,” he said softly. “Don’t worry about Kelly at all.”

In a corner of the room, the telephone began to ring shrilly. The sound was grating to Deming’s nerves. Czynowski turned at the window, letting the drape slip from his fingers. Everyone looked at O’Connor, who remained as he was, rocked back in the chair, looking at Deming through flame. But he wasn’t seeing Deming now. After a moment, he dropped the match on the table and went over to the phone. Under the surveillance of three pairs of eyes, he spoke briefly to grunts and hung up.

“Kelly, all right,” he said. “The guy went into the room.”

Czynowski stepped away from the window, relief in his eyes and in his voice as he spoke, as if the waiting had been worse than what remained to be done.

“It’s him,” he said. “And time, too. High time.”

O’Connor stretched, reaching high with both arms, rising onto his toes. His eyes had gone strangely still, glinting with a dream. “Maybe. Maybe not. It’s dark in the hall up there. Kelly couldn’t be sure.”

The coffee had begun to boil, and the smell of it was in the room. Sigman reached out and jerked the plug of the hot plate.

“Let’s find out,” he said.

O’Connor went over to his chair and shrugged into his coat. He looked for a moment at the soggy butt of his cigar and let it drop into an overloaded ash tray on the table.

“No hurry,” he said dreamily. “Wirt’s at the bottom of the fire escape in the court. Kleig’s in the alley. Kelly’s in the room across the hall. Maybe it’s Connie, and probably it is. If it is, he won’t go anywhere. He’s there for us, like a rat in a trap, and we’ll take him in our own good time. Drink your coffee, Siggy.”

Sigman jerked his shoulders savagely and fumbled for a cigarette.

“To hell with the coffee,” he said.

Deming watched O’Connor, a little ashamed of the rapid pounding of his heart, the almost painful throbbing of the pulse in his throat. O’Connor was a tough old veteran. He’d seen a lot of this kind of stuff. He played the game as Deming’s old man had played checkers, setting his traps and waiting, moving in for the kill without hurry or fuss.

Connie, Deming thought. O’Connor called him Connie. Not Conrad Riebeau, which is his full name, nor even Riebeau alone, which would seem more appropriate, but just Connie. The diminutive. The little name of affection. That’s the way the game is played. You wait thirty-six hours in a room playing poker for matches. You wait for a killer who kills for hire, and probably in his heart for fun, and who has finally made the mistake of killing a cop under the eyes of a witness with the guts to talk. You wait the thirty-six hours to take him dead or alive in a trap well set, and in your own heart you hope that you take him dead. So you stretch, and you smile, and you call him Connie, the pet diminutive, and you hope to see his blood in a matter of minutes.

“What I can’t understand,” Deming said, “is how you knew he’d come. You said he’d come to see a woman in that room up there, but it doesn’t stand to reason. Whatever he is, he’s no fool, and he’s hot for murder, and it doesn’t stand to reason that he’d smoke out for any woman on earth.”

O’Connor smiled as if he were smiling to himself, and an element of dreaminess came into the smile.

“I knew he’d come,” he said. “I knew, because I know Connie Riebeau. Oh, I know him like I know the palm of my hand. He’s a sleek, smooth prince of a killer. He’s killed for hire, and he’s killed for the hell of it, and always with the brains to keep himself clean. But now he’s mine. He’s mine in a room with the one woman who could bring him out, and I’ll take him dead if there’s any justice.”

He stopped talking, staring across at Deming without focus, and suddenly he looked what he was. An old man. A tired man. A tired old cop with years of tough work behind him.

“I’ve waited a long time for Connie,” he said. “A long, long time.”

Sigman cursed and ground his cigarette under an angry heel. “Let’s move,” he said. “Let’s get the hell over there.”

O’Connor’s eyes, turned to Sigman, came sharply to focus. He laughed. “Sure, Siggy, sure. We’re going now. Right now.”

They went, the four of them, down to the narrow street between old buildings. They walked under a strip of starless sky with the moon a sickly smear behind an overcast. Besides them, nothing lived in the street, except the wind, and there was no sound, except the sound of wind-touched things — the scurrying rustle of a newspaper, the rattle of a garbage can. It was cold. A few flakes of snow fell on the quiet street.

In the deep shadow of the building from which they emerged, they stopped, and O’Connor spoke tersely.

“Czynowski, join Wirt in the court. You’ll have to go around to the alley and in the rear. Siggy, you go with Czynowski, but stop with Kleig in the alley.” He paused, looking up at Deming, his lips drawn back off his teeth in a stiff grin. “You’re a big kid, Deming. Big and tough. Besides, you’re riding your luck. You’ll come with me.”

Czynowski and Sigman moved away, and O’Connor stood quietly, his head thrown back, staring up at the dark building across the street.

“The room’s toward the rear,” he said. “No view of the street.”

He crossed the sidewalk and stepped off, Deming at his heels. In Deming’s ears, the hollow sound of their heels on the rough brick of the old street had the cadence of a death march. He wondered wryly how long a man could ride his luck before he fell off. Maybe you use it up filling your house from a deck of cards for matches. Maybe, when you need it for bigger things, you find there’s none left. He was gratified that his pulse was now normal. What he felt was no more than a realistic acceptance of his part in what seemed an inevitable order of events.

They went up two flights of ancient stairs to the third floor hall. Up there, the cold was still and heavy and almost tangible. It wrapped itself around Deming like a clammy hand. The place was like a morgue, as if, behind closed doors, nameless corpses awaited their final, impersonal disposition. Deming twisted his stiff lips into an ironic smile, wishing that he had no more than a corpse or two to concern him. Behind one of those doors, caught in O’Connor’s patient trap, was the most dangerous of all wild animals — a human killer.

They walked the old boards cautiously, without sound. Down the hall, a door swung inward with a whisper of hinges, and Kelly, a blocky shadow, slipped into the hall to confront them. He gestured at the closed door across the hall, and O’Connor nodded. Deming saw that O’Connor’s automatic had appeared as if by magic in O’Connor’s hand. Strange, Deming thought. He hadn’t seen O’Connor reach for the gun at all.

Moving in on the indicated door, O’Connor crowded the wall and thumbed Deming behind him. Kelly flattened himself against the wall on the other side of the door. O’Connor’s heavy fist, hammering the flimsy panel, was a sudden violation of the suspended silence. His voice, raised above the racket of his pounding, retained, somehow, for all its volume, its timbre of calmness.

“Okay, Connie. We’ve got you nailed. Don’t make trouble for yourself, boy.”

Inside the room, silence. Silence for a long moment, while all sound and motion hung suspended. Then the expected, shocking explosion and the ripping of the panel where O’Connor’s hand had been a moment before. O’Connor laughed exultantly and sent a slug smashing into the old lock of the door.

“It’s dead he wants to come,” he shouted, “and it’s dead we’ll bring him!”

Beyond the door, a window screeched in its sash. Another slug ripped through the panel, and farther away, below in the court, there were a series of explosions.

“He’s on the fire escape,” O’Connor said. “Get the door down!”

Deming found himself throwing his two hundred pounds against the door. He felt the barrier give, hang for a second on an edge of metal, and then crash inward. He plunged into the room in a head-long sprawl, getting a blurred impression of curtains billowing at a window, of a seated woman staring at him with wide, stricken eyes. Then he was through the window.

On the sharp-angled steps a floor below, Czynowski lifted a face startling white in sudden illumination from the window beside him. “The roof! He went for the roof!”

From a small platform, an iron ladder went up on the perpendicular. Gun in hand, Deming took it fast, throwing himself without thinking over the parapet above. The vicious whine of a ricochet sliced into his ears. A splinter of brick ripped his cheek. He hit on a shoulder on tar and gravel and rolled to his feet, driving for the black shape of a ventilator yards away. Beyond him, another slug ricocheted off the brick.

The shots had come from the shadow of a chimney across the roof. Under cover of the ventilator, Deming crouched and waited. There was movement at the edge of the brick mass, shadow slipping within shadow, and he fired once. The shadow quieted.

Then he became aware of other movement. Not at the chimney, but wide of it and beyond it. The flat expanse of roof seemed to stir and break. A trap door lifted slowly, inch by patient inch. And Deming realized suddenly that O’Connor had not followed him into the room below and onto the fire escape. Quickly, for diversion, he snapped two slugs in the direction of the chimney, and the small movement of the roof erupted in decisive violence. Orange tongues licked the darkness, and the crash of O’Connor’s gun repeated itself.

Deming stood up. There was a wild, uncontrolled singing in his head. He felt a little sick to his stomach, and his cheek burned like fire. Carefully, spacing his feet wide, he walked over to the chimney.

O’Connor was standing there beside the body of Connie Riebeau. If he was aware of Deming, he gave no sign. It was as if he and Connie were up there on the roof alone. Deming had the sudden disquieting feeling that he was intruding on a fantastic and esoteric ceremony.

“Good-by, Connie boy,” O’Connor said in a weird, light tone of exultation.

Turning, Deming found his way to the trap door and down. In the hall below, he walked back to the room from which Connie Riebeau had fled. The woman was still there, sitting motionless in her chair. She had a thin, drawn face with big, lifeless eyes. They stared at each other, she and Deming, without speaking. Deming saw now that the woman’s chair was equipped with wheels. A light blanket covered the woman’s legs.

Behind Deming, O’Connor spoke harshly. “Connie’s dead as those he killed.”

He was speaking to the woman, but she didn’t answer. She didn’t even look at him. Tears gathered slowly in the dead eyes and spilled over onto the worn cheeks. Tears without sound. Tears for a killer who would inspire no other grief than this.

Deming moved again, out into the hall past O’Connor, who, following, said, “I’ll call the meat wagon.”

He went into Kelly’s room and used the phone. When he came out, Deming said, “That woman in there. She’s crippled.”

“Yeah,” O’Connor said. “Paralyzed.”

“What’s she to Riebeau?”

“She was Connie’s wife,” O’Connor said. “That’s how I knew Connie would come. She was isolated here. No friends. No money. No one to take care of her. Connie had to come.”

“Look,” Deming said, “Connie was a born killer. A torpedo for hire. A guy who had no right to live. You telling me he risked his life to come back here for a woman? A crippled woman?”

O’Connor stood quietly, looking over Deming’s shoulder at nothing, his eyes carefully blank. “Yeah,” he said. “Wouldn’t anybody?”

Content

Fletcher Flora
— Time to Kill—