The Death Gods (A Shell Scott Mystery) (49 page)

He was wearing brown pants
and a white T-shirt with blood on it. The blood was just beginning
to spill high on his chest near the left collar-bone, and low in
his stomach, below the navel, oozing over the belt of his brown
trousers. Three shots, wall, chest and guts. Not very good
shooting. Correction: damned good shooting. It got the job
done.

There was, already, quite
a lot of blood. But the Colt .45, was still in Grinner’s hand. The
pistol although pointing at the floor and not toward me, was still
loosely held. Besides which, when I moved around the desk and
stepped close to him, he looked at me and I’d swear tiny snakes
were still unthawing behind those cold blue eyes.

I took the last step
swinging my right leg forward, and the heavy Cordovan shoe on my
foot crunched against Grinner’s right hand, sending the gun flying.
And, I think, breaking one or two of Grinner’s fingers. He didn’t
appear to notice. So I grabbed him around the neck, pulled him six
inches toward me, then slammed his head back against the
wall.

No? I should be nice? I
should be gentle with this degenerate creep who’d just tried to
blow my teeth out, and me out with them? The truth is, I felt like
slamming his conk some more, until it broke.

But I didn’t. I wanted
some words from Grinner.

“
Francis,” I said, but he
got in ahead of me.

Looking at me quite
calmly, his expression bland, Grinner said matter-of-factly, “You
sonofabitch, you killed me.”

“
Well, you’re not dead yet,
Francis. But—”

“
Don’t call
me...”

“—
you will be if you don’t
start puking. Because I intend to squash one of your kidneys for
openers, and reach down your goddamn throat to get at
it.”

“
... Francis.”

“
What? Oh, yeah. Okay,
Grinner, okay? Mr. Grinner if it’ll help.” I was still holding onto
his neck, but lightly, so I shook it a little. “Get started,
pal.”

“
Where?”

It was a pretty good
question. I had to give him that. There were a lot of things I
wanted to know about, and Grinner had probably been involved in at
least half of them. He was doing pretty well for a guy bleeding so
much.

“
Henry Hernandez, M.D.,” I
said. “That Friday and your attempted hit-run—I caught up with you
and Kell in that van yesterday, so I figure the two of you were in
it when you tried to wipe out Hernandez. But I want to hear it from
you, Grinner.”

“
Yeah, Kell. You broke both
his goddamn fingers, you’re really a mean sonabitch. Broke his
goddamn—”

“
You’re getting me fried,
man. Open your mouth.”

“
Open...? What the hell
for?”

“
So I can get in
there.”

He actually grinned. I
mean, not the way he did when he was shooting people, but as though
truly amused in a painful way. But he didn’t say
anything.

So I did. “You may not
fully realize it, Grinner, but you’re running out of time. Which
means, so am I. And I’m impatient. I am, in fact, getting damned
impatient—”

“
It was us, sure. Me and
him. But in a different van. There’s three vans altogether. When we
tried to waste him...tried—I still don’t believe I missed him. This
old coot—he’s like a thousand years old, y’understand—and he lamps
us and goes—zonk. Like a bleeping circus acrobat, does a
half-gainer backwards, totally flips around like a chiropractor
throwed him away, and is eyeballing Kell as we speeds off, Kell
being astonished considerable—”

“
Keep it short,
Grinner.”

I was a little puzzled.
Remembering Hank’s description of the “Fu Manchu” mustache he’d
seen on one man in the van, I’d thought it possible neither of
those two men had been Kell or Grinner. I was not, of course, going
to mention any such doubts to Grinner.

I said, “You and Kell,
huh? I thought one of the guys owned some long droopy lip
whiskers—”

“
Them was Kell’s. He glued
them hairs on to disguise himself, case anyone glommed us running
over anybody. He’s practically an idiot, y’know. Wouldn’t want you
to think it was my idea, which it wasn’t. Like I said, Kell’s an
idiot.”

“
You’re wasting time,
Grinner. I guess the sad thing is, you don’t even know
it—”

“
You think I don’t, huh?”
He gave me an odd, almost sleepy-eyed look. “Why you think I’m
puking all over myself? It’s to frustrate your bowels, Scott.
Because I know you won’t be able to do nothin’ to me about any of
it, which I hope gets you constipated as a rock.”

I got a queer feeling he
might be doing better than I was. But I said, “Be that as it may.
What about—”

He wasn’t listening. He
kept on going, his voice softer, “If Jake and Eddy’d finished you
like...supposed to, I wouldn’t be here now. You wouldn’t be here,
so I wouldn’t neither. Man, if my hopes come true you won’t crap
for a year.”

“
Jake and Eddy?”

Grinner wasn’t answering
questions. He was just saying those things that, for whatever
reason, he felt like telling me, or talking about, at the moment.
And there weren’t going to be many more moments; he was
wandering.

Switching time and place
again, he said, “Missed the old coot, then his damn dog came after
us barking like a herd of apes in Africa. So we let him jump
in...”

Grinner stopped. While
speaking, his cold blue eyes had been fixed on my face; but
suddenly, without any movement or change of expression, he wasn’t
looking at me any longer. He was looking at something a lot farther
from him than I was. After two or three seconds, his eyes got very
wide. Only a minute ago, he’d as much as told me he knew he was
dying. But I’ve seen it before: there’s knowing, and knowing. And
the difference was, right now, Grinner
knew
.

But he was still sitting
up, moving a little. I’d squatted before him, but wasn’t squeezing
his neck any longer. He glanced down at the blood on his chest.
Nearly the entire front of his once-white T-shirt was red
now.

He lifted his head. “Doc
Wimp was pissed we missed the coot, really pissed. But when we tell
him who this extra dog we picked up on our sweep is, who the mutt
belongs to, we had to back up so old Wimp wouldn’t kiss us. Got
unpissed quick, and so happy—goddamn quack’s dog he says, good-good
he says about nine times, beautiful work after all, he says—Kell
and me, we think he’s about to cream his pants. Really
happy...”

I said, gently, “I guess
you mean Wintersong.”

“
Wintersong. Doctor Wimp.”
He closed his eyes, opened them slowly. “Jake and Eddy now,
they...”

There were other things,
and people I would much rather have heard about, but I wasn’t going
to push. I’d take anything more I could get from Grinner. If there
was going to be more.

But I said, “Jake and
Eddy, they the two knife artists who tried for me?”

“
Of course. Didn’t I tell
you? Thought I did. They was supposed to kill you. Really too bad
they didn’t—”

“
Kill me, why? And whose
idea was it to waste me? Almost had to be Wintersong,
right?”

“
Him? Doc Wimp? He sicced
us onto Hernandez, like I said...didn’t I? But we don’t take orders
from him—or anybody unless the boss okays it...which that time he
did. No, the guy sent them slicers to carve you up like a turkey
was Belk—”

Just like that, he was
gone. From living and talking, all the way to dead, in no time at
all.

I stood up, rubbed a small
painful cramp out of my left calf. It felt wonderful!

* * * * * *

I did the rest of it
concentrating on fast, not careful. I simply walked through rooms,
laboratories, past rows of identical metal cages, Colt .38 in my
right hand. I didn’t check all areas in the three Omega buildings,
but I saw enough to last me for a lifetime and I took all the
pictures I needed. Fortunately, I met one of the four weekend
workers Hank had said should be here, and he wasn’t any trouble. He
was a kid, barely twenty, and I got the impression nobody had ever
pointed a gun at him before.

He told me today was “his
turn” and the three other guys were sacked out, either resting or
industriously snoozing on the job, in what he called the Rhesus
room. This turned out to be a room, in one of the two other
buildings, where a bunch of monkeys were kept under observation “to
see how long they lived” after receiving injections of an
experimental anti-cancer drug. I had the kid tell me exactly where
it was—so I wouldn’t go there.

I left him reasonably
comfortable, hand and feet and mouth incapacitated by strips from
my roll of surgical tape, and went on my way. I spent only twenty
minutes looking around, without meeting anyone else, and without
any trouble.

The next time my attention
was so completely captured that a kindergarten kid could have
bopped me on the head was when I found Precious.

Yeah, no kidding. I found
her.

But not, thank God, like
Rusty. And there was no doubt, once I saw her, that it was
Precious: white paw, scarred ear, and especially the unmistakable
crooked tail that went “like this...and there” as warm and lovely,
brown-eyed, brown-everythinged Lucinda had told me yesterday
morning.

Yesterday? No, last month,
surely...last week? Whenever, on a crisp cool morning a long time
ago.

I went back in the central
building preparing to get out of this joint, or at least try to.
Turning from the main hallway into the one where I’d left my Trojan
crate, I recalled the room—only a few yards from me now—where I’d
seen the shapely lass bending forward, poking a
combination.

I had wondered then what
was in there, but assumed it was probably something innocuous, like
a rest room. For some reason, maybe because it was directly
opposite the “Director” door, I walked over to it, poked
1-9-33-88-1, pushed the door open and stepped inside.

It wasn’t a rest room.
Looked more like a kennel, or whatever they call them for cats. A
wire screen, wall to wall and from floor to ceiling separated the
narrow space where I was from the rest of the small room. Beyond
that screen, lying on the linoleum floor or slinking around, were
at least fifteen or twenty cats. Not many specimens, either. These
looked healthy, well-groomed and well-fed. Moreover, if these were
pound cats or strays, they included at least one glossy brown
Burmese, a pair of Siamese, and what looked to my unpracticed eyes
like a long-haired Persian, and a Manx. I saw a couple of water
bowls, some litter boxes, plastic containers filled with dry
food.

Most gratifying to me
after where I had just been. Apparently none of these animals had
been operated on, or drugged, or brain-wired, or microwaved, or, I
thought, remembering one of Hank’s outbursts, cooked in ovens until
crispy.

But why they were here,
and what they might be here for, were not my chief concerns at the
moment. I’d seen enough and turned to leave reaching for the inside
doorknob. But looped over the knob, dangling from it, were a
handful of pet collars, each about the size of a cat’s
neck.

I pulled them off the
knob, looked them over. There were four of them. Not quite a
handful; maybe a heartfull. Because two were prettily jeweled, or
at least displayed gem-like bits of colorful glass; one was plain
worn leather; and the last was a half-inch wide strip of velvety
black cloth with a row of rhinestones along its middle, feminine as
a fan-dancer’s garter.

Attached by figure-eight
hooks to each collar was a metal license tag, one of them with no
identification except a phone number. But the other three carried
engraved names: Tzu-Tzu, Dynamite and Delilah.

I dropped all four collars
into my coat pocket, reached for the doorknob and something behind
me went “Maa.”

That was odd. I knew I’d
never heard anything quite like that squeaky “Maa” before, so why
did it remind me of something?

I turned the doorknob and
again heard, “Maa, Maa!”

You’ve got to be kidding,
I thought. Either that bed-spring needs grease, or a lamb is
going...wait a minute....

“
Maa!”

I turned around, took a
step forward and squatted before the wire screen, and looked at the
lovely, lovely little cat about a foot away now, with white paw,
partly-gone ear, crooked tail.

And I said, “Hi, there. I
thought Lucinda was cutesy-pooh to stick such a goofy name on you.
But I was wrong, kid. You really are Precious.”

Precious wiggled as she
said, “Maaaaaaa!” And I understood completely. Didn’t blame her,
either.

CHAPTER
THIRTY-ONE

I walked toward the big
double doors at the hallway’s end, carrying a closed cardboard box
in which, apparently content, was Precious—along with my now-excess
baggage of camera, lock-picks, flashlight, and four cat collars.
The roll of surgical tape was still bulky in my coat pocket, since
with a little more luck I hoped to be using it again, and
soon.