“I’m gonna kill you,” Bobby said. His hands were curled into claws. His face was bright red, and spittle formed at one corner of his mouth.
Tony put the big octagonal coffee table between them. “Stop right there, dammit!”
He didn’t want to have to kill Bobby Valdez. In all his years with the LAPD, he had shot only three men in the line of duty, and on every occasion he had pulled the trigger strictly in self-defense. None of those three men had died.
Bobby started around the coffee table.
Tony circled away from him.
“Now, I’m the crocodile,” Bobby said, grinning.
“Don’t make me hurt you.”
Bobby stopped and grabbed hold of the coffee table and tipped it up, over, out of the way, and Tony backed into a wall, and Bobby rushed him, shouting something unintelligible, and Tony pulled the trigger, and the bullet tore through Bobby’s left shoulder, spinning him around, driving him to his knees, but incredibly, he got up again, his left arm all bloody and hanging uselessly at his side, and, screaming in anger rather than agony, he ran to the fireplace and picked up a small brass shovel and threw it, and Tony ducked, and then suddenly Bobby was rushing at him with an iron poker raised high, and the damned thing caught Tony across the thigh, and he yelped as pain flashed up his hip and down his leg, but the blow wasn’t hard enough to break bones, and he didn’t collapse, but he did drop down as Bobby swung it again, at his head this time, with more power behind it this time, and Tony fired up into the naked man’s chest, at close range, and Bobby was flung backwards with one last wild cry, and he crashed into a chair, then fell to the floor, gushing blood like a macabre fountain, twitched, gurgled, clawed at the shag carpet, bit his own wounded arm, and finally was perfectly still.
Gasping, shaking, cursing, Tony holstered his revolver and stumbled to a telephone he’d spotted on one of the end tables. He dialed 0 and told the operator who he was, where he was, and what he needed. “Ambulance first, police second,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” she said.
He hung up and limped into the kitchen.
Frank Howard was still sprawled on the floor, in the garbage. He had managed to roll onto his back, but he hadn’t gotten any farther.
Tony knelt beside him.
Frank opened his eyes. “You hurt?” he asked weakly.
“No,” Tony said.
“Get him?”
“Yeah.”
“Dead?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.”
Frank looked terrible. His face was milk-white, greasy with sweat. The whites of his eyes had an unhealthy yellowish cast that had not been there before, and the right eye was badly bloodshot. There was a hint of blue in his lips. The right shoulder and sleeve of his suit coat were soaked with blood. His left hand was clamped over his stomach wound, but a lot of blood had leaked from under his pale fingers; his shirt and the upper part of his trousers were wet and sticky.
“How’s the pain?” Tony asked.
“At first, it was real bad. Couldn’t stop screaming. But it’s starting to get better. Just kind of a dull burning and thumping now.”
Tony’s attention had been focused so totally on Bobby Valdez that he hadn’t heard Frank’s screams.
“Would a tourniquet on your arm help at all?”
“No. The wound’s too high. In the shoulder. There’s no place to put a tourniquet.”
“Help’s on the way,” Tony said. “I phoned in.”
Outside, sirens wailed in the distance. It was too soon to be an ambulance or a black-and-white responding to his call. Someone must have phoned the police when the shooting started.
“That’ll be a couple of uniforms,” Tony said. “I’ll go down and meet them. They’ll have a pretty good first aid kit in the cruiser.”
“Don’t leave me.”
“But if they’ve got a first aid kit–”
“I need more than first aid. Don’t leave me,” Frank repeated pleadingly.
“Okay.”
“Please.”
“Okay, Frank.”
They were both shivering.
“I don’t want to be alone,” Frank said.
“I’ll stay right here.”
“I tried to sit up,” Frank said.