For an instant his hard pale face registered confusion. His eyes widened a little as they dropped down to my upright bag, and I struck so fast he didn’t have time to raise his hands to ward off the blow. The edge of the clipboard caught him in the throat, then I bolted like a wild animal.
I got as far as my dining room before I heard his footsteps coming after me. My heart was hammering against my ribs as I raced into the kitchen, my feet nearly going out from under me on the smooth linoleum as I wheeled around the butcher block and jerked the fire extinguisher off the wall near the refrigerator. The instant he burst into the kitchen I blasted him in the face with a choking storm of dry powder. A long-bladed knife clattered dully to the floor as he clutched his face with his hands and gasped. Snatching a cast-iron skillet off the stove, I swung it like a tennis racket, hitting him solidly in the belly. Struggling for breath, he doubled over and I swung again, this time at his head. My aim was off. I felt cartilage crunch beneath the flat iron bottom. I knew I had broken his nose and probably knocked out several teeth. It barely slowed him down. Dropping to his knees, coughing and partially blinded by the powder, he grabbed at my ankles with one hand, his other hand groping for the knife. Throwing the skillet at him, I kicked the knife out of the way and fled from the kitchen, slamming my hip into the sharp edge of the table and knocking my shoulder against the doorframe.
Disoriented and sobbing, I somehow managed to dig my Ruger out of my suitcase and jam two cartridges into the cylinder. By then he was almost on top of me. I was aware of the sound of the rain and his wheezing breath. The knife was inches from my throat when the third squeeze of the trigger finally struck firing pin against primer. In a deafening explosion of gas and flame, a Silvertip ripped through his abdomen, knocking him back several feet and down to the floor. He fought to sit up, glassy eyes staring at me, his face a gory mass of blood. He tried to say something as he feebly raised the knife. My ears were ringing. Steadying the gun in my shaking hands, I put the second bullet through his chest. I smelled acrid gunpowder tainted by the sweet odor of blood as I watched the light fade from Frankie Aims’s eyes.
Then I fell apart, wailing as the wind and rain bore down hard against the house and Frankie’s blood seeped over polished oak. My body shook as I wept, and I did not move until the telephone rang a fifth time.
All I could say was “Marino. Oh God, Marino!”
I did not return to my office until Frankie Aims’s body had been released from the morgue, his blood rinsed off the stainless-steel table, washed out pipes, and diffused into the fetid waters of the city’s sewers. I was not sorry I had killed him. I was sorry he had ever been born.
“The way it’s looking,” Marino said as he regarded me over the depressing mountain of paperwork on top of my office desk, “is Frankie hit Richmond a year ago October. Least, that’s how long he’d been renting his crib on Redd Street. A couple weeks later he got himself a job delivering lost bags. Omega’s got a contract with the airport.”
I said nothing, my letter opener slitting through another item of mail destined for my wastepaper basket.
“The guys who work for Omega drive their personal cars. And that’s the problem Frankie run into long about last January. His ‘eighty-one Mercury Lynx blew the transmission, and he didn’t have the dough to fix it. No car, no job. That’s when he asked Al Hunt for a favor, I think.”
“Had the two of them been in contact before this?” I asked, feeling, and I’m sure sounding, burned out and distracted.
“Oh, yeah,” Marino answered. “No doubt in my mind, or Benton’s, either.”