Odor of Violets, Baynard Kendrick [best short novels .txt] 📗

The watchman on duty hailed it. Louis quickened his steps and was just in time to prevent an altercation between the watchman and the driver.

He broke it up by showing his long teeth and saying, “That’s plumbing equipment. What are you stopping for? I’ve been waiting for it all day.”

“This is a hell of a time to be bringing it in.” The watchman glared from Louis to the driver and back to Louis again. “This shebang’s supposed to be shut down. Tomorrow’s Christmas Day.”

“And we go to work again the day after.” Louis hopped on the running board beside the driver and said, “Take it through.”

The watchman looked after them until the truck stopped by the new addition and disgorged the driver and helper. The watchman shrugged and went back into the warmth of his little house. It was cold outside, anyway.

Louis waited while the two men unloaded a short squat box, handling it gingerly.

“Bring it in here,” he ordered, and clicked on a flashlight to dispel inside shadows grown long with the fading of the day.

The two men followed him through skeleton walls down the length of an uncompleted hall.

“Here.” Louis pointed to a spot with his flashlight. “This’ll do. Any more?”

“This is plenty,” said the driver.

Louis guided them out and stood in the doorway until he heard the motor roar. When the truck had gone, he made his way back to the building without using the light. Near the box, he stood silently, turning his head from left to right and back again. Not quite satisfied, he knelt on the floor, put his ear against one end, and gave a wolfish grin.

It was dark when he reached the other side of the parking lot and opened the door to turn on the lights of his car.

A hand reached out and fastened itself firmly to the throat of his cardigan jacket.

“I’ll help you in,” said a voice.

The arm went back into the sedan with Madoc attached to one end of it. He had a sensation of falling through space as his shins scraped along the running board, and his feet kicked vainly in protest. Not more than five seconds elapsed before Louis found himself tucked neatly behind the driver’s wheel.

“You drive, Hawkface,” said the voice.

The dashlight went on and shed rays on the camel-hair coat.

“That uncomfortable lump in your side is a Luger 7.65. I’d hate to have to shoot it because this coat set me back sixty-nine fifty and at a hundred feet this Luger will penetrate eighteen inches of pine. Now drive on like a good lad because some friends of mine will be here in a few minutes to take your little box away.”

Louis stepped on the starter with a foot that seemed suddenly affected with frostbite. “Who the devil are you?”

“I’m the Spirit of ‘76,” said Arnold Cameron, “but you can just call me Toots and I’ll call you Hawkface, and we won’t get in each other’s way. When you get outside the gate, turn toward Hartford—and don’t dillydally.”

“This is kidnaping.” Madoc’s bony frame began to shake with a chill of sheer fury. “You can’t get away with it. I’ll signal the first policeman I see.”

“All you need to do,” said Cameron, “is raise your right hand and wiggle your fingers in the rear-view mirror. There’s a state trooper named King riding in the back of your car.”

“You can’t arrest me without a warrant.”

“Who said I was arresting you?” Cameron demanded bitingly. “I wouldn’t waste my time.”

“What do you think you’re going to do?” Madoc’s voice wasn’t quite so brave as before.

“I’m going to torture you,” said Cameron. Something terribly sincere in his tone caused Madoc to swerve the car.

“Keep on the right side of the white line,” Cameron told him, “or the Sergeant will run you in. I said I was going to torture you and I mean it, too.”

“You can’t scare me,” Madoc told him, but the force of the words was lost on a quavering note which crept in on the end.

“Scare you?” Cameron repeated, surprised. “I’m not going to scare you, Hawkface, I just don’t like you. I’m going to feed you to rats and throw what’s left of you away.”

2

It was cold and extremely dreary in the top-floor room of the closed-up, deserted hotel. Wallpaper which had long ago served its purpose was beginning to scale in tiny curls from the wall. Louis Madoc, stripped down to shirt, socks, and shorts, lay on the pancake mattress and stared at the flinty, clean-lined face of Sergeant King. Arnold Cameron had just finished a neat job of trussing with sash cord cut from the long closed windows. Madoc had taken it unresistingly, gazing with feverish, birdlike eyes into the steady muzzle of the Sergeant’s gun.

Cameron took off his camel-hair coat and hunted for a dust-free place to hang it up. Failing to find one, he went over the top of the bureau with a handkerchief and deposited his treasured garment there. That done, he sat down and began to rock himself slowly back and forth in a squeaky rocking chair.

“It would be quicker,” said Sergeant King, “to shoot him and be done with it. I hate these stinkin’ foreigners. He chopped off the head of a girl.”

“I never killed anybody in my life,” Madoc whimpered protestingly.

“Shut up,” said Cameron, “or I’ll stick my finger in your eye.”

He rocked back and forth a dozen times more, each separate squeak stabbing into Madoc’s nerves with the pain of a dentist’s drill.

“I’d match you,” said Cameron, still rocking, “to see who’d shoot him first. In that way one of us could start and we could riddle him with bullets. Maybe we’ll do that after he tells us what they’ve done with Duncan Maclain.”

Madoc’s wrinkled lids slid down as though the light of the single bulb in the room had become too strong. He raised them quickly as Cameron left the chair.

A suitcase carried upstairs by the Sergeant sat just inside the door.