One shot harry, p.20
One-Shot Harry, page 20
The amount was enough to assuage his conscience. If he didn’t do it, someone else would, and for sure there was no sense leaving money on the table. Get it done then get back on the hunt after the rally, he vowed.
Less than an hour later he was on his way to Altadena taking the Pasadena Freeway, the first one built in Southern California. Once off the freeway, he had to stop twice to consult his Thomas Guide when he got turned around. Ingram got reoriented and approached the street he was looking for. Rising behind the homes were the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. He’d arrived at the location in a roundabout fashion taking back streets, and he spotted a parked car he recognized—the Dodge driven by Wickland.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered as he slowed. The two weren’t in the car, which meant they were waiting for him around the corner at the address he’d been given. He didn’t have his gun with him, but he wasn’t going to run. How had they identified him? It had to be Hoyt, or maybe one of the hoods had seen him on TV being interviewed. Dammit, that’s what he got for hogging the spotlight. That meant Wicks and Morty knew where he lived. They’d lured him out here so as to work him over nice and slow in isolation, then dump his body in those hills for the coyotes to feast on.
Ingram double-parked briefly and got his tire iron out of the trunk. He’d worn a light windbreaker and taking this off, wrapped it around the tool. He had to park on the other street or they’d get suspicious. Anyway, his foot wasn’t completely healed so it wasn’t like he could escape by running. He doubled back and drove onto the street from the direction he’d have come if he hadn’t gotten lost. He parked, and with his coat folded under his arm as casually as he could make it seem, he walked with his limp up the flagstone path to a humble Craftsman, its porch bordered in river stones as was the custom of houses out this way. He’d left his cane in the car.
The porch was constructed such that one of them could be crouched behind the low wall of the balustrade, waiting to ambush him. Instinctively he slowed his step but kept going, his senses on alert. There were shades down behind the windows facing him. It did not seem to him anyone was peeping out. Ingram went up the three steps, glad the porch was empty. He rang the bell.
“Yes?” came a voice from inside.
“Mr. Loomis, I have a delivery for you,” he called out.
From the other side of the door, “Come on in, it’s unlocked.”
Ingram tried to steady his breathing. Hand on the knob, he dropped the pretense of hiding the tire iron and let his jacket flutter away. He put his shoulder to the wood. Counting to three and tuning the knob, he barreled into the house, the door banging against the wall. The one called Morty was standing there, looking surprised. He had a knife in a shoulder rig and another in his hand. Ingram hit him in the upper shoulder of his knife arm with the tire iron.
“Fuck,” he rasped.
Peripherally Ingram was aware of Wicks on his left, his gun holstered over a blue striped shirt. Rather than try to get past, Ingram dropped the tire iron and grabbed Morty, spinning him around and propelling him into Wicks, who was unholstering his weapon. Morty collided with him and both stumbled backward into a round table with a doily and a lamp on it. As the lamp crashed to the floor, shattering, Ingram snatched up the tire iron again and drove the wedge end into Wicks’s leg right at the side of the knee.
Wicks cried out and crumpled to the floor, using both hands to stem the blood pumping from the wound as Ingram withdrew the tire iron. Morty made to come at him with the knife but another swipe of the lug end of the tire iron connected solidly against his temple and this time Ingram staggered him. Ingram headed toward the kitchen and hopefully a back door.
“Get that slippery Black bastard,” Wicks said.
Moving through the kitchen, Ingram noted they’d made preparations to torture him. There was a thick tarp on the linoleum floor under a wooden chair, rope to bind him and a roll of duct tape too. He half-ran out the back, raising and lowering his injured foot as fast as he could. It hurt like anything but fear of being caught kept him going. There was a patio, trim medium-sized lawn and an incinerator in the backyard. A wooden fence framed three sides of the yard, a gate allowing access to an alley. The remaining side was a hedge nearly six feet high separating this yard from the neighbors’. In his run-hop Ingram heard Morty rushing out the back door. Any second he was going to stick him with that knife.
“What’s going on out here?” An older woman stood on her back steps, which allowed her a look into the yard over the hedges. She held a basket of freshly washed clothes, about to pin them out on the line to dry.
Morty turned his head. “Go on about your business, you old biddy.”
The woman gaped at him.
Ingram used the distraction to turn and step in close to Morty. He jabbed the tire iron into the other man’s stomach. But this time it didn’t sink in as it had on Wicks and Morty sliced at Ingram’s upper arm, tearing through material and muscle. Still, Ingram had done some damage. The hood backed up, grimacing. The material of his shirt over his navel was reddening.
“I’m calling the police.” The woman dropped the basket and hurried back inside her house.
Ingram was out the gate and, in his hobble-skip-run, made it down the alley as fast as he could. It seemed at least he’d immobilized Wicks. Cutting through a rip in a chain-link fence, he was on dirt and soon scrambling up a gradual incline of a hill from which scrub brush, ice plants and high weeds grew. Discarded household items were strewn everywhere as he ascended. He climbed past the ringer part of an old-fashioned wash tub. A doll’s smashed head stuck out between rollers. Half of one of its plastic eyes glared at him.
Huffing, his lower body slashed by thickets, Ingram kept going. There was no turning around and no one would be able to help him. Off to his right were even thicker and taller patches of vegetation and some thin trees rising above that into the foothills. He plunged in, chancing to crouch down for several seconds to catch his breath and hope that he was hidden.
“You ain’t getting away from me, Ingram. You gonna answer our questions about your buddies Kinslow and that broad Hanisha, then I’m gonna gut you, gut you good. Hear?”
Oddly Ingram pondered what sort of chakra hoo-ha Korla Pandit and Hanisha would summon if they were him. Up he went on all fours so as to minimize noise, like he’d been taught in the Army, and to ease the pressure on his foot. The day had suddenly become night, concussive blasts rending the black in crimson and yellow. Ingram shook off the firefight, concentrating on his present predicament. Continuing up, he reached a switchback, and getting to his feet on the inclined path, went to the right where it descended, breathing hard toward a bend of the hill. Hurrying as best he could, he could hear Morty charging through from below. Ingram got around the bend and found himself on a semicircular plot of earth, a small plateau cut into the side of the hill. From the other side of this area the path continued slightly upward but he knew that trying to run along that was doomed to failure. He stopped, sweating hard as he stood. As far as he was concerned, he was at a dead end. A panorama of houses and nature swept below him.
“Motherfuck,” he muttered. This was it.
“You’re a game sumabitch, I’ll give you that.”
He turned to face Morty, who had a knife in each hand. He made elaborate circular slashing motions, as if performing a circus act. There was a broad smile on his face as he closed in on Ingram. The trapped photographer swung the tire iron at Morty, who sliced the back of his hand open, causing him to drop the tool, cursing. Ingram backed up. Morty did his ballet of blades, closing in. Ingram coolly realized Morty not only wanted him alive but mobile—he had to get back down to flat ground with him. He grimaced as the edge of a knife cut into his cheek and the point of the other blade pressed against his rib cage. Morty was close to him, the two glaring at one another, breathing into each other’s face.
Then, “Boo,” Ingram said, shoving Morty hard with both hands.
The thug backpedaled, loose rocks kicking up from beneath his leather soles, his arms pinwheeling. Off-balance, he threw one of his knives, missing Ingram. Ingram drove his good foot into the man’s sternum, sending him over and down the ridge. Morty didn’t scream. He rolled down the hill, his body crashing through the undergrowth. He appeared again, coming to rest on an outcropping of rocks and hillside below. His neck broken, Ingram noted dispassionately.
Ingram stared at the aftermath of his deadly handiwork. He’d killed before in the war, enemy combatants who happened to be Asian, and to his everlasting woe that child. He’d fought white men, could remember one ruddy-faced chump crumpled at his feet after the two had gone blow-to-blow like Emile Griffith and Benny Paret one night outside a bar on leave. But this was the first white man he’d killed. It occurred to him looking at Morty’s corpse that he didn’t feel particularly racked about this, no worse than any other time. Before, like now, had been in the heat of battle—even the horrible accident with the kid, an innocent. Well, he reasoned, as the sound of a siren floated up to where he was, if he wasn’t careful or lucky, he’d have plenty of time to reflect on the nature of life and death sitting in a prison cell.
He started back down on his bum aching foot. Driven by the desire to survive, Ingram had found it easier to go up than descend. But he still wanted to survive. He figured out a way to stoop over to use the tire iron as a kind of cane. His hand was bleeding but not badly. Occasionally he had to scoot on his butt, but he made it back down. He came out of the brush the way he’d gone in, pausing at the slit in the chain-link fence bordering the alley.
“Shit,” he swore, pushing the chain links outward with his head and taking a look. A county sheriff’s prowl car with its big star in the center of each door was parked in the alley, not twenty-five feet away. He backed away. If a deputy walked this way, he was a goner.
“Hey,” Ingram heard.
“What’s up?” Footfalls sounded in the alley and then they stopped.
“There’s blood on the rug inside the house here and signs of a struggle. There’s a man’s windbreaker on the porch. Like it was taken off and thrown down.”
“Maybe that guy came up, saw who was inside, and took it off to get ready to fight?”
“Yeah, could be. There was a scuffle for sure. But sure looks to me like more than just a bloody nose was leaking inside.” There was a pause accompanied by the unmistakable click of the top of a Zippo lighter being flicked open. How many hundreds of times had Ingram heard that in the trenches? The faint smell of smoke drifted toward him.
The deputy who’d been talking continued. “Neighbor where our caller used the phone says they both heard a car peel away. But only looked out then. They saw the rear of the vehicle, but neither can identify it.”
“Is R&I running down whose house this is?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, so what do you want to do?”
“If this isn’t nothing but two guys beefing over who knows what, the captain will ream us a new one if we call it in to the desk requesting a detective. No body, no gunshots.”
“We got a negro in the yard here carrying a tire iron and a white fella with a knife after him,” the other one noted.
Ingram imagined the other one blowing smoke in the air. “Like I said.”
The second cop talked. “The colored fella might be the one that bled and then ran out to save his ass. He could be lying around the corner all cut to shit and whatnot. If we don’t make the effort to find his corpse, you know what’ll happen if a civilian calls it in. Which could be happening right now.”
“Yeah, okay, you’re tight. You take Gravalia to the next block and I’ll walk along Aralia. One of us find a carved-up darkie, we come fetch the other one.”
They both chuckled and walked off. Ingram counted to ten and chanced stepping out into the open. Wicks was gone. Neither deputy had mentioned him, or the tarp and rope in the kitchen. Undoubtedly Wicks had taken those items with him. For now, he was one less problem for Ingram to contend with—but the hired muscle would be coming for him. Maybe even coming for Anita. His immediate problem was that his car was parked on one of the streets they were checking.
While there were Black people living out this way, he did have a pronounced limp and scratches on his arms and the cut on his face. The gate still unlatched, he went back into the house and cleaned up as best he could using a dish towel at the mirror in the tiled bathroom. His windbreaker had been laid on the couch. There were no papers or anything else in the pockets. He concluded it was best to leave it where the deputy had placed it. Besides, no sense taking the risk of being spotted wearing the jacket. The common garment had been bought at a JCPenney, therefore little worry it could be traced to him, other than maybe tracking it down to the ghetto by its batch number. Ingram used the dish towel to wipe the place down in case fingerprints were taken later. He also wiped down the tire iron and carried it into the backyard, holding it by the dish towel. He laid it beside the incinerator, not making an effort to hide it. Maybe one of the deputies would notice it was newly placed there or maybe not. He returned to the house and, folding it over, put the dish towel back in the drawer in the kitchen where he’d found it.
Before leaving, a curious Ingram checked in the bedroom closet. There were a couple of shirts hanging there and no items in the chest of drawers save a box of opened mothballs. The kitchen too had clean pots and pans in it with a few dishes and glasses in the cupboards. But there had been no boxes of cereal or pancake mix, and in the refrigerator, which was running, meaning the power was on, there was a half carton of eggs and a jar of strawberry jam. In the freezer were two full ice trays. The impression he had was the house was used but not steadily.
Cautiously he opened the front door. A young father smoking a cigarette was pushing a stroller and he waited for him to go past, then stepped out and walked along the sidewalk.
He was nervous about walking to his car, but he was certain waiting around he’d be arrested. It might be days before Morty’s body was found, though Ingram was aware people liked to hike these foothills. He got to the corner and went along the side street. As he rounded the next corner, he spotted the sheriff’s deputy standing mid-block talking to a woman on her lawn. They hadn’t seen him, and he reversed course, backtracking along the side street again. Was the deputy coming this way or heading in the other direction? Ingram refused to be frozen by indecision and kept walking. He was back on the original street. On he went, aware of a curtain shifting in a window. He did his best not to favor his wounded foot, just a guy out for a stroll.
Down the other parallel side street he went, passing a mailman on his rounds. He got to the next block again and didn’t see the deputy. He stepped up his pace. Down the block on the other side of the street, he saw him, a foot on the lower step of a porch as he talked to an older man standing in the doorway of his home. Just as the older man’s head turned his way, Ingram reached his car. From this distance, with his head down and hands on the trunk obscured by the car’s tail fin, he hoped it was harder to tell he was Black. Ingram opened the trunk, pretending to be busy in there. He again counted to ten and peeped around the lid. The deputy was walking away from the house he’d stopped at, his back to Ingram. He eased the trunk closed and got behind the wheel, holding his breath the entire time.
Keyed up, he depressed the accelerator too many times, flooding the engine. The odor of unburned gas was sharp in his nostrils. He should get out of the car and pop the hood, manually work the butterfly vents on the carburetor to better release the fuel vapors. But he was terrified of getting out and being spotted. He waited an agonizing thirty seconds and cranked the ignition again. Once, twice, three times the engine growled but didn’t catch. He switched the ignition off and forced himself to wait, then tried again and this time the car started after yet another skipped heartbeat. He put the car in gear and began a three-point turnaround midblock. Good thing, as the deputy was now on his side of the street and walking this way. Keeping his cool, he righted the car and drove away, not sure if the cop was paying him any mind or not. But he made it to the freeway without a squad of sheriff’s cars swooping down on him like jet jockeys buzz bombing enemy bunkers.
Driving, Ingram concentrated on what Morty had said about Kinslow and Hanisha. He interpreted this to mean they did know each other. Hoyt had tumbled to their scheme. Hanisha and Clovis hadn’t gone on the run when Kinslow turned up dead. He supposed they didn’t want to draw attention. But something had spooked them.
By the time Ingram got off the freeway, his anxiety and ruminations had given way to a pronounced hunger. But first he stopped to make a call.
“Is Anita Claire available?” he asked when the line connected at the Tom Bradley campaign offices.
“She’s out, shall I take a message?”
“Tell her Harry called, if you would.” He hung up. There was no particular reason Wicks would know they were seeing each other, but no sense being lackadaisical about a gunman out to get him, either. He drove to the Detour diner and sat down heavily on one of the stools at the counter. At this time of day, there weren’t many customers.
“What’ll it be today, Harry?” Winnie McClure asked him, eyeing the fresh cut on his cheek. She was one of the co-owners of the establishment. She didn’t wait on tables or booths but she did take orders at the counter. McClure was a heavyset, solid woman with a handsome face and reddish-brown hair always worn short and straight like illustrations he’d seen of Peter Pan.
“Let me get some coffee, that strip steak you got medium-well, three eggs scrambled, home fries and toast. And grits too, please.”
“Damn, you got a bunch of trees to cut down?” she said, writing down his order.
“Already have, Winnie. But I gotta keep my strength up for the next round.”
