The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories

Reeling and scraping to a stop, the car turned off abruptly into an opening between the trees, climbing over half-hidden roots and spewing up dead leaves. The man at the wheel braked with a grim sound of finality, and there was a moment’s breathless silence after the car’s racket.

Lindquist’s voice broke it, in calm interrogation. “Vhy are you stopping here? Vhat are you going to do here?”

“Get out, you cold-blooded Swede, you’ll find out. I don’t want my car all messed up when I shoot you full of holes!”

Nothing seemed able to get a rise out of the doctor. “But vhy are you going to shoot me? I never saw you before until you met my train this afternoon.”

“Just to make sure you don’t horn into that Swanson case!”

The doctor was evidently the type of man who becomes garrulous during crises. “But vhy don’t you vant me to help Swanson? Vhat have you got against him?”

The man next to him had unleashed a gun. “Because he’s the guy that’s taking the rap for us, and we wanna make sure he takes it!”

“Oh, so that’s what you did to Dr. Meredith, too?” The doctor’s voice suddenly lost its Swedish accent.

“So you know that, do you?” The man’s face contorted violently. “Well, we’ll see that it doesn’t go any further!”

“Will you get him out and finish him?” the woman screeched wildly, standing up in back of them.

She swung the small pistol she had been carrying in her muff, backhand, brought it down butt-first toward his skull. But out of the corner of his eye he had seen the blow coming. He swerved his head aside and the reversed butt chopped down past his shoulder.

He caught the butt with both hands, dragged it forward, twisted it around, her hand still pinned to it, into the other man’s face.

“Now just drop that gun, Cochrane, or I’ll blow your pretty Greek nose off. If there’s going to be any shooting in this car, I’ll do it!”

The woman had the more courage of the two, the courage of despair. Dragged half across the top of the front seat, unable to extricate her own hand from the gun because of the intended victim’s stranglehold on it, she urged breathlessly: “Shoot him, Allen! Don’t be afraid of getting hurt! He’s some kind of a dick! Don’t you see it’s either him or us?”

Butler, alias Dr. Lindquist, who could see Cochrane nerving himself to pull the trigger even in the face of the bore pointed straight at his own face, fired first, tilting it a little to avoid killing him if possible. It tore a long crease up Cochrane’s scalp. The heavier weapon he was holding thundered out by reflex finger-action, harmlessly puncturing one of the air bladders Butler wore under his balloonish Lindquist clothes.