Killers Are My Meat Read online

  Killers Are My Meat

  Stephen Marlowe

  A MysteriousPress.com

  Open Road Integrated Media Ebook

  1.

  THE LITTLE BOAT coughed and slapped its way across the dark choppy waters of the bay on a five-horse-power kicker. Against the wind and the driving rain and the uneasy tidewater it had taken us almost an hour to come this far from Chesapeake City, a small fishing town about thirty miles south of Annapolis.

  “That’s Little Chesapeake Island now, son,” the man hunkered over against the wind in his oilskin coat at the stern of the dinghy shouted over the wind and whipping rain on the water. He was charging me twenty dollars for the round trip from Chesapeake City to the island and back again. He said I was crazy to want to go out there at all on a day like this, especially since it would be dark before we returned. He said he was crazy to take me. He said twenty dollars was dirt cheap. Since a man’s life hung in the balance, it probably was dirt cheap.

  The island loomed like an animal crouching on the lead-gray horizon, the gray finger of dock thrust out over the water, a ribbon of sand that was the beach, and the low black humps of hills covered with tidewater pine. Pretty soon we reached the dock, my pilot slowed his kicker from an explosive chattering to a steady throbbing, threw a coiled rope, caught it around something, and hauled us in.

  “Watch your step,” he said. “Rotten planks up there, son.” He raised the capes of his oilskin coat, I saw the brief flare of a match and smelled cigarette smoke before the wind drove it away, then I hoisted myself to the dock, pulled down my hatbrim and started moving against the wind.

  In another month or so Little Chesapeake Island would be crowded with week-enders from Washington and Baltimore, filling the small clapboard cabins with their noise, their lights, their smells. Right now except for me the island had only one occupant. I had to find him and bring him back to the mainland before someone else crossed the choppy waters of the bay and put a bullet in his brain. I wasn’t in love with the idea. For one thing he wouldn’t know who I was until I got close enough to shout my name above the shriek of the wind and the drumming of the rain, and all he had for company was probably a gun, a bottle, and a lot of wild ideas. For another, bringing him back to the mainland might prove more dangerous than leaving him on Little Chesapeake. There, though, I had no choice. His wife had driven me in her car to Chesapeake City. She’d have come with or without me. She had driven like a madwoman across the southern Maryland scrubflats from Washington. Alone she wouldn’t have done her husband any good and alone or with company she might have been followed. This way at least they had someone who wasn’t either drunk or crazy with fear.

  I went across the dock, feeling the pulpy give of rotten timber underfoot. I went up a brown muddy path down which the rainwater tumbled in dirty brown streams. The path made a sharp left on high ground, and suddenly in the little light that was left I could see the cabins. They had been built along the edge of a ridge forty or fifty feet above the beach, with flights of wooden steps hugging the cliffside behind them. There were about twenty of the cabins, stretched out in a long ragged row on the shelf of rock. I didn’t see any lights.

  When I reached the first cabin I left the muddy path and walked around behind the flimsy-looking clapboard building. About a dozen feet of soaked bare earth separated the rears of the cabins from the edge of the shelf of rock on which they had been built, and I made my way along this. Just as I reached the fourth cabin, a pistol shot banged like a thunderclap over the sounds of the storm. I crouched at the corner of the cabin wall, the pistol banged again, and clapboard splinters flew about three feet from my nose.

  On the third shot I saw the muzzle flash in the side window of the seventh cabin in line. Seventh cabin. That was theirs. His wife had said so. I shouted:

  “Hey, cut out your damned shooting! It’s Chester Drum!”

  If he heard the sound of my voice, it was all he heard. He fired again. I cursed him and his wife and the weather and did the only thing I could. I sat down behind the wall of the fourth cabin on a bark-stripped log and waited for darkness.

  In about twenty minutes the rain began to soak through my trench coat. In another twenty it was so dark I couldn’t see the splatter of rain in the puddle at my feet. Then I got up and walked very quickly, slipping in the mud, to the path in front of the cabin.

  He didn’t have a light on. He wouldn’t, of course. I reached the heavy plank door of his cabin and stood there. He would have locked it. Barricaded it too, probably. Maybe he was standing inside there, his face about six inches from my face, with a loaded gun in his hand. I moved around to the side of the cabin which had a window. I crouched alongside the window. Or maybe he would be there, I thought, on the other side of the dirty panes of glass, waiting. The rain hissed and throbbed, water squished in my shoes as I resettled my weight, and the wind—which had slackened some—made a moaning sound. I took a deep breath and stood up suddenly and smashed the barrel of my Magnum .357 against the glass and heard it shatter and shouted as loud as I could:

  “Hold it! Hold your fire. It’s Drum.”

  Then I dove down on my hands and knees in the mud and waited.

  The storm. My breathing. A trickle of water near my chin. Then his voice, a bleat of fear like a condemned man’s last words. “Drum? Drum, is it really you? Drum? Are you alone? Get out in front of the window where I can see you. I’ve got a gun. I’ll shoot. I …”

  “Your wife brought me,” I said distinctly. “She’s waiting on the mainland. We’re going to take you home.”

  “Don’t want to go home.”

  “Let me in and we’ll talk about it.”

  “Don’t want to talk about it. Go away.”

  “Let me in or I’ll fight my way in, damn it.”

  There was a silence, then a sound like a groan. Then: “All right. Come around to the door.”

  I heard furniture scraping across the floor when I got to the door. In a minute or so it was opened a crack, and a gun and an eye peered out. Then the door opened and I went, soaking wet, into the cabin. I struck a match and it flared momentarily before the man in the cabin knocked it from my hand.

  “You crazy?” he said.

  “We’re alone on the island except for the man who brought me. He’s waiting with a boat. I’m taking you home.”

  The man in the cabin, whose name was Gilbert Sprayregan, was a private detective who once had been big in Washington, D.C., who had skidded the last couple of years as fast as you can skid in Washington in our business or any business, and who was now doing divorce work for twenty-five a day and expenses.

  He said, “You’re not taking me home. Or any place.”

  “If you were any safer here I’d say wait. But it’s not the thing to do. Your wife’s brought you food a couple of times already. She’s too scared to stay with you and too scared to leave you here alone. Maybe they followed her here. Maybe they know where you are.”

  “Maybe they followed you here tonight. Just leave me alone.”

  “Maybe they did. Do you want to stay here alone and wait for them to come? Is that what you want?”

  He moaned. A floorboard creaked. I could see him only as a vague darker shape in the darkness. It was very cold and damp in the unheated cabin.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ, Drum,” he said, “what would you do?”

  “The thing for you to do if you really want to get away is get in your car and keep driving, not stay holed up on an island like a sitting duck. Your wife’s got a bag packed for you. After all you only have to get out of town for a few days. They’re leaving the country soon. You know that.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then we’ll see. Well? You coming or do I have
to take you?”

  “Don’t try it, Drum,” he said. Then I heard a gurgling sound. At first I didn’t know what it was, then I realized he was drinking from a bottle. His lips smacked and the bottle clunked down somewhere.

  “Get your coat,” I said.

  He laughed and drank some more. “I’m wearing it,” he said. “Haven’t been out of it for two days.”

  “Well?”

  He threw the bottle and it broke against the wall. His laugh was a desperate and bitter sound. “I called you yellow once, Drum,” he said. “That was a lot of crap. Someone’s yellow, all right.” He hiccupped and then either laughed or sobbed. “Come on. Get me out of here. Get me out of here before I wet the God-damned floor.”

  We left the cabin together. I put my gun in its shoulder holster. I could just make out the glint of his in his hand. He slipped a couple of times in the mud. We went past the row of cabins and down the hill with me holding his elbow and half-supporting his weight.

  The boatman came up on the dock and helped us aboard his dinghy. He said, “Going home, are you, Mr. Sprayregan?” and Sprayregan laughed and answered something in a drunken mumble. In a little while we were heading back in the dinghy across the choppy tidewater to Chesapeake City.

  What they call the municipal pier in Chesapeake City is a quay extending out into the bay for about forty yards at the end of the town’s one big street. It had been so muddy in the parking lot between the end of the street and the beginning of the pier that Mrs. Sprayregan had parked their Packard a couple of hundred yards up the street, where the red and blue and green neon of the Chesapeake City storefronts glowed wetly in the rain.

  At the entrance to the parking lot the boatman said, “Drop you all somewhere? Got my heap in here.”

  “Mrs. Sprayregan’s car is down the block,” I said.

  Sprayregan shook his head. “Like to walk if you don’t mind, Drum. I still need some air. I—I don’t want her seeing me like this.”

  I told him he looked and sounded all right to me and was imagining things, but he insisted on walking. It really didn’t seem to make much difference and I saw no reason to push it. I gave the boatman his twenty dollars and he took it with him into the parking lot. Several cars were parked there in the rain.

  We began walking toward the neon glow of Chesapeake City. The sidewalk did not begin for another hundred and fifty yards or so. The shoulder of the road was slick with mud. We walked on the edge of the asphalt.

  When we had covered about a third of the distance, a car started up behind us. Ahead of us a car door opened and slammed and heels click-clacked along the sidewalk. A woman’s figure was silhouetted against the neon. Distantly I heard the sound of music from one of the taverns on Chespeake City’s main drag. The woman cried:

  “Is that you, Gil? Did you find him, Mr. Drum?”

  “We’re coming,” Sprayregan called.

  “Oh, thank God,” his wife said.

  Just then the car roared up behind us. Its headlights, up on high beam, swept us and held us. Its tires whined in the rain. Mrs. Sprayregan screamed. I grabbed Sprayregan’s elbow, but he seemed frozen there as the car bore down, its front tires spraying arched silver planes of water. Sprayregan pulled his arm away from me. Maybe he tried to run. Maybe he stood there. I leaped and something barely seemed to brush my shoulder and simultaneously there was a ripe bursting wet-sounding slap of impact and a hoarse, choked-off cry from Sprayregan and then I seemed to sail serenely through the night and the rain up over the darkness and down suddenly down and I heard pounding feet and more screaming and the sound of the rain and the car roaring away and then all at once magically and with absolutely no pain everything was shut off.

  2.

  ALL ALONE in a vast clanking tractor factory running entirely by automation, the last man on Earth was trapped. He was a little man. Finally he jumped up on the punch press. The press slammed down, the little man tried to run away, the press slammed down again. The shiny new tractors rolled off the end of the long assembly line endlessly with no one to see them or drive them away. Down slammed the punch press.

  It was a novel dream as such dreams go, but after a while I came out of it. My head felt like the little man on the punch press. I peered from under half-opened eyelids and saw a long white mound about the length of a man’s body and walls which looked accordion-pleated until I realized they weren’t walls at all but portable hospital screens. Two figures, fuzzily double-exposed, floated in front of the accordion-pleated walls. Slowly and still fuzzily the two figures became one figure, which approached the white body-long mound which was a blanket and a sheet with me under them on a bed. It bent down, sex indeterminate, and stared at my face. One of us let out a groan. It moved away making a noise like, “Doctor!”

  Four figures this time, all fuzzy at the edges. Four three two. Little Red Nightinghood and Dr. Livingston, I presume. My head was still on the bed of the punch press but at least I could see better and that was something. The nurse was middle-aged and had a mole at exactly the same spot on each of her two long noses. The doctor seemed young and had four-lensed glasses. They came closer and did things which may have helped them but did not help me in any way I could see or feel. Something got hold of my cheekbone and brow and tugged them apart.

  “Observe the difficulty he has in focusing,” a woman’s voice said. “It’s a simple concussion, isn’t it, Doctor?”

  The doctor, who was very young and spoke very slowly, allowed as how it was a simple concussion. “Patient will probably have retrograde amnesia—say until breakfast. You’d better not feed him until then, either. Just liquids perhaps. They sometimes have difficulty keeping it down.”

  “I know about concussion, Doctor,” the middle-aged nurse said frostily.

  The last thing I remembered, I was in the office. Then a big black wall a high as the moon and as wide as a continent. On the other side of it, the ractor factory with the punch press, and here and now.

  “Where,” I said, “am I?” Careful, Drum. Some more dialogue like that and they’re liable to offer you a job writing for TV, headache and all.

  “You see?” the intern cried triumphantly. “Retrograde amnesia.”

  The bed seemed to move and the nurse held something to my lips. It was wet and cool. Then they went away and I closed my eyes and slept without dreaming.…

  “Feeling better?”

  “Better.”

  “There. Let me see those eyes. Ah. Yes. Ah, uh-huh. Can you see distinctly?”

  This time I could see distinctly. I said so.

  “This is the Michael Bell Memorial Hospital in Chesapeake City, Maryland. Do you remember now?”

  I remembered. I remembered not remembering, too. My head ached and throbbed, but I could learn to live with it. I said: “Sprayregan?”

  I shut my eyes. There was a whispered conference. A voice said: “Mr. Sprayregan was pronounced dead on arrival. Someone from the sheriff’s office wants to see you, Mr. Drum. But at your own time, please.”

  “No, it’s all right. I’ll see him.”

  I didn’t feel any sadness about Sprayregan. He was not that sort of man. On top he had been tough and cold and occasionally magnanimous as only the tough and cold could be. Riding the long slide he had been an object of pity. I felt sorry for his wife. I wondered what she would do.

  They propped me up in bed and went away. They didn’t take away the portable screens. Then I was looking at the man from the sheriff’s office. He was a stocky man with a raincoat on his arm and a square face and bleak, small, wide-spaced eyes. He had a small thin white scar on his blue-whiskered jaw. His name was Malloy, he said. He showed me an ID card in a little plastic window to prove it. A small bronze star had been affixed to the card. He said I was very lucky to be alive at all. He said the other guy wasn’t any kind of lucky.

  “His wife didn’t even get a look at the car, Mr. Drum.” He added something unprintable before the words hit-and-run driver. He said, “Did you get a
look at it?”

  “No.”

  He made an unhappy sound. “Stuff in your wallet says you’re a private eye from Washington named Chester Drum. You down here in Chesapeake City on business, Mr. Drum?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The dead private eye your business?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Got any reason to think you’re in trouble?”

  “No. Why should I?”

  “I wanted to warn you. Anything you said could be used against you. You know. Then you can talk about it?”

  “I can talk about it.”

  “Good. Sprayregan your client?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Meaning—exactly—what?”

  He spoke with a chip on his shoulder, as if he didn’t like coming over to the Michael Bell Memorial Hospital in the middle of the night to question a man who had been struck down by a hit-and-run driver. I thought it was an easy night’s work but didn’t say so. I asked him if he was from Baltimore. He talked like a native of Baltimore. He admitted it with reluctance, as if he liked Chesapeake City, population 3200, better. I told him I had been born in Baltimore, although I had lived most of my life in Washington. I named the street. He had spent his childhood about five blocks away, but of course we had never seen each other before tonight. Anyway, quite suddenly, he was less wary and less suspicious.

  “Sprayregan wanted me to do him a favor,” I said.

  “Coming out here tonight—well, last night?”

  “No.”

  I thought about the favor Gil Sprayregan had wanted. It had been the kind of favor you could go to jail for. But now Sprayregan was dead and they couldn’t touch him with it. And it might help them get the drivers of the hit-and-run car. I thought I knew who they were.

  When the waiter had dropped our luncheon check face down on the table, Sprayregan had reached for it with a crablike motion of his big hand and dragged it across the littered tablecloth with as much effort as it would take to haul a passed-out drunk up three flights of stairs.