The Death Gods (A Shell Scott Mystery) (55 page)

So, why did I have a
hunch, why did I strongly suspect, that if I simply delivered all
of us to the law it might turn out to be not they—the billionaire
businessman-philanthropist friend of Congressmen and Judges and
Heads of State, and the prestigious Lasker-Award-Winning
Nobel-Prize candidate who was also a doctor—at risk of suffering
well-deserved justice, but a private investigator named Scott who
could be facing life plus a thousand years in the
slammer?

I raised one of
Wintersong’s eyelids and let the lid drop slowly close, knowing he
was still thoroughly unconscious, completely out of it. But there
was no way to be sure how long that condition would last, so I had
to make a decision pretty quick. The same annoying little problem
I’d mentioned to Dane was still nagging me: What the hell was I
going to do with this guy? Not to mention the hugely disgruntled
Hobart Belking?

The shape I was in, just
carrying Wintersong a hundred yards to my car might do me in. So I
turned around and said to Dane, “My Cad’s parked up the road. I’m
going to drive it down here. Which means you’ll be alone for a
minute or two.” I pulled the Colt Special from its holster and
extended it butt-first toward her. “I’m sure you won’t need this,
but if anything moves, shoot it.”

“
Shoot...it?” Dane took the
Colt from me with a distinct absence of enthusiasm and held it
dangling from her fingertips, muzzle pointing toward the
floor.

“
It won’t work like that,”
I said. When I got the gun’s butt out of her fingers and into her
palm, I pointed. “That’s the trigger. Just pull it and a bullet
will go boom out the other end.”

She was holding the gun at
arm’s length, peering slant-eyed at it as if the thing was a dead
mouse which had just wiggled. So I said, “That’s the ticket,” and
split.

I was back in two minutes.
A minute and a half to reach the Cad, start it, and drive back;
then half a minute to open the trunk and dig out a paper-wrapped
gauze pad and what little was left of the roll of tape I’d first
used at Omega and last used on Belking.

During that entire
half-minute, Hobart Belking yelled at me and cursed me ferociously.
Well, that’s what I assumed. The sounds were muffled and made
unintelligible by another of those gauze pads taped over his mouth,
but they sure sounded like unintelligible yellings and
cursings.

I started getting feelings
of considerable unease again—then slammed the trunk’s lid and
trotted back into the house and upstairs, Wintersong was immobile
on the desk where I’d left him, and Dane was still standing where
she’d been before. But the gun was on the floor at her
feet.

I looked at the gun, then
at Dane, and smiled painfully.

“
Swell,” I said.

“
It made me feel bad,” she
said belligerently. “Creepy. Awful! I think guns are—”

“
Don’t tell me about it. I
said swell, didn’t I?”

I picked up the Colt and
stuffed it into its holster, then stepped to the desk and picked up
Wintersong, which was a lot tougher. I grunted, feeling the burn
under my left arm, something like a malevolent sprain in my spine,
and about forty or fifty pains, aches, and curious agonies
everywhere else.

“
Be right back,” I grunted,
standing there, wondering why nothing was going.

But pretty soon I got a
leg to move, then the other, and kept them moving till I reached
the Cadillac. I’d left the passenger-side door open and, like a man
shot-putting a boulder, managed to heave Wintersong’s limpness
through it and onto the back seat cushions. After slamming the
door, I began the long trek back to the house, up the stairs, into
the room where Dane was. Going down those stairs carrying
Wintersong had been miserable, but even climbing up them was
discouraging, and when I got all the way back into that upstairs
room I was still puffing and huffing and my legs felt like
taffy.

I nodded at Dane, going
past her to flop into the chair where she’d been seated when I
bounded in to rescue her. Any Brownie points I might have gotten
for that were already turning blue, apparently, because when I
coughed and wheezed a little she asked, “Shell, are you all right?
You look horrible.”

“
Of course I’m all right.
Fantastic. Super-duper.”

“
But you’re so out of
breath.”

When I could, I said
sweetly, “Dane, dear, would you please not ask any more dumb
questions for a minute?”

I was wondering how I
could get so ticked off at this beauty when instants ago I had been
kissing her and thinking only positive thoughts, if any. Probably
has something to do with sex, I thought. I hoped.

“
Well, ” I said finally,
“while I rest...ah, while I relax here for a minute, and plan my
next move, let me ask a question or two. Right after I socked
Wintersong, you said something about not knowing if I was dead or
had been dead, and that you hadn’t been killed yet. What was that
about? Also, how come you’re still ali—still here? I mean, how come
they grabbed you in the first place? If you know.”

“
Well, I do and I don’t.
Know, I mean. It’s all very strange. When you drove me to Omega,
and those men made me go in with them in their jeep, they wouldn’t
let you come along, remember?” I nodded, and she continued, “That
bothered me, and I was already upset, nervous. When I went inside
alone, nobody else was around and everything seemed spooky.” She
smiled slightly. “I suppose that sounds ridiculous?”

“
Not a bit. Even when the
gangs all there that joint is spooky.”

“
Well, I began feeling
almost scared. So when I walked through that big room with those
work stations and animal cages to Dr. Wintersong’s office, I
started to just go on in. Normally, I wouldn’t have dreamed of
walking in there without knocking, but...”

She let it trail off, and
I said, “You barged in on him unannounced? He’s probably dissected
people for less than that.”

“
No, I didn’t—didn’t really
go in. I turned the knob and started to, but then I realized what I
was doing and stopped. The door was only cracked about an inch, and
I just stood there for a moment and that’s when I heard Dr.
Wintersong say ‘Kill him.’”

“
Heard what? He—” I
stopped, thinking back, beginning to understand. “Go
on.”

“
He was speaking to
somebody on the telephone—I didn’t know that then, I thought it was
maybe to somebody else in his office. I heard him say, ‘Kill him.
If you’re sure it’s him.’ Then after a few seconds he said, ‘So do
it now, then get in here.’ That’s when I heard Dr. Wintersong hang
up his phone. Well, I was really scared, and I closed the door, I
didn’t want him to know I might have heard.”

I winced. “Closed it with
a big bang, yes?”

“
No. It’s not as if I
panicked, I closed it very, very slowly, no noise at all. But I
still had my hand on the knob when Dr. Wintersong yanked the door
open and stood there looking at me.”

“
Beautiful. Smiling
sweetly, no doubt.”

“
Actually, he was smiling.
But not with his eyes.”

“
He never smiles with his
eyes. Well, give me the rest of it.”

“
Dr. Wintersong took my arm
and pulled me into his office—not violently, just firmly. And he
was quite pleasant, very calm, all the time. He said he knew I’d
overheard him speaking on the phone, and wanted me to understand
he’d merely been approving the necessary sacrifice of an injured
experimental animal, which was a routine procedure at Omega. He’d
been talking to his chief veterinarian about the unfortunate, but
humanely necessary, destruction of a suffering pig.”

“
Pig?”

“
That’s what he said.
Actually, he was very convincing, Shell, and it did seem to make
sense, the way he was explaining it all very logically to me. But
then, while he was still explaining, we heard the
gunshots.”

“
Ah...” I nodded,
remembering six shots fired from my Colt, one from the other
guard’s gun; and before I got out of range, Grinner had emptied his
automatic at me. “A lot of gunshots, right?”

“
It sounded like a war.
Even there in Wintersong’s office—it wasn’t very loud, but there
was no mistaking what it was, and that it was happening near the
gatehouse, where I’d just left you. And, well, I guess I got a
little hysterical.”

I smiled. “Thought they’d
done me in, hey? Well, not to worry—”

“
I knew right away Dr.
Wintersong had been lying, and it wasn’t a suffering pig they were
destroying, they were destroying you, shooting you, and you were
dead, dead, they’d murdered you, right that minute were murdering
you—”

“
Dane, you don’t have to
say it over and over—”

“
And if they were murdering
you and I knew all about it, they’d have to murder me, too,
wouldn’t they?”

“
Ah, pretty good
thinking.”

“
What finally happened, I
was yelling, accusing Dr. Wintersong of being a murderer, having
you killed and all, saying I knew you were dead, you were
murdered—”

“
Dane, would you
mind—?”

“—
and he gave me a shot, an
injection. He kept saying I was mistaken, confused, he’d been
talking about animals, it would all be explained, things like that.
And I remember his exact words just before he stuck that needle
into my arm, ‘This is merely a mild sedative to calm you down, my
dear girl.’ Girl, he called me, my dear g—”

“
Dane, can you control your
female dismay until you’ve shared the rest of it?” I paused.
“Incidentally, it’s clear Wintersong wasn’t as calm and controlled
as he seemed, because he could have told you he’d been phoning
somebody in Cleveland. Of course, once he mentioned Omega, he was
stuck with it. But something else puzzles me. If Wintersong thought
his boys had just finished blowing me away—and you’d actually heard
him telling them to do it—why would he give you merely a sedative
then? I mean, he had to know you’d just become a stupendously big
danger to him, much more of a danger than you realized, so why
didn’t he squirt you with cyanide or something that would kill...
Now you’ve got me doing it.”

I started over, after
thinking back to those violent seconds out there at the gatehouse,
remembering how long—and noisy—those seconds had seemed to
me.

“
No, Wintersong couldn’t
have known, at least not for sure, that I’d been taken care of.
Because it wouldn’t have sounded like a war if one of those guys
had started it by hitting me in the head. And you both heard at
least a dozen shots fired.” I looked at Dane. “After that,
Wintersong gave you an injection—in the arm?”

“
Yes.”

“
Where in the
arm?”

Dane gave me an odd look,
but then turned slightly, showing me a definite needle mark in the
skin inside her left arm below the bicep, below the shoulder. It
was very small but unmistakable, and now surrounded by the faint
discoloration of a bruise.

I said, “Did it knock you
out?”

“
No, it just made me—numb.
Dopey, like a zombie. Dr. Wintersong even left me alone in his
office for a while, and I just sat there, didn’t want to move.
After that, and I’ve no idea how long after, I realized Mr. Belking
was there, too. I don’t know why, or...it’s all pretty
fuzzy.”

“
Uh-huh. I’d give large
odds Wintersong phoned Belking to tell him there was trouble.” I
thought about it. “To tell him there was a lot of trouble, because
by then Wintersong would have known not only that Grinner missed me
and the other guard was dead, but that I’d gotten away—more than
enough reason for Belking to hustle out there. Did he say anything,
talk to you?”

“
Mr. Belking? No, no, then,
not until...well, they took me outside, sometime. All I know is it
was still daylight.”

“
Yeah, it was when they
both drove off, but I’m not sure which one of them you were
with.”

“
I was in the car with Dr.
Wintersong. But they both—” She stopped, looking at me in surprise.
“How could you know that?”

I didn’t try to tell Dane
the whole thing, just gave her enough so she understood I’d been
briefly aware she was being taken from Omega by Belking and
Wintersong, but had been prevented by peculiar circumstances from
reaching the men and their bodyguards and tearing them all limb
from limb, which was why none of them were limbless. She appeared
to chew on this as if it was something yummy, but I continued
speedily, “You said Belking didn’t talk to you then. Does that mean
he did later?”

“
Yes. Before we reached the
Freeway, he stopped at the side of the road, and we parked behind
him. He spoke to Dr. Wintersong outside the car for a minute. I
couldn’t hear them, but Mr. Belking shook his head a couple of
times, then they both came back and talked to me.”

“
Were you able to carry on
a conversation, understand what they were saying?”

“
Oh, yes. I was still very
relaxed, sort of spaced out, but I could function. And I remember
what they kept telling me, but at the time it just didn’t seem
important. I’m still not sure—”