as hell.
“Who are they?” I asked the girl.
She didn’t answer, she was still twisted about in the seat, watching the big sedan chasing us maybe a hundred yards behind. I grew real mean and snarled. “Look, I’m nobody’s fall guy. When I’m chased, I like to know who’s after me. Maybe that’s kind of old-fashioned to you, but that’s the way I was brought up. Are those guys cops or hoods? Sometimes the resemblance between the two species is so close you can’t tell one from the other.”
The sedan was gaining on us. I gave the coupe the gun again and felt I was the biggest patsy of all time. I could hold my own in the concrete jungle of New York, but someone was making a chump of me out in the Indiana sticks. The girl still did not answer.
Mean is not the word for how I felt right then.
“Who the hell are those guys?” I demanded in the tones they use in the back rooms of police stations when they have a firm grip on the rubber persuaders.
The sedan growled after us, swallowing up the miles.
“They’re Athelstan Shelmerdine’s men,” she replied in a voice little more than a whisper.
That rocked me from the roots of my hair to the cuticles of my toenails. I crouched over the wheel like an eager jockey and watched the blurred, headlamp-whitened highway ribboning out of the blackness and flashing under the car.
Athelstan Shelmerdine! Hell!
Shelmerdine, the big-time racketeer who had his fingers in every illegal enterprise within who-knew-how-big a radius of Chicago. Shelmerdine, who sat behind a façade of respectable businesses and pulled strings that made all sorts of things happen on various levels of the underworld and upperworld. Shelmerdine, who graduated from being a booze-runner in the prohibition days to the new style in gang-moguls. Shelmerdine, who owned people outright, who waxed fat on super thievery, and on whom nobody could pin anything.
And a bunch of his mugs were tailing us.
And my Browning was packed away in my grip which, in turn, was locked away in the trunk.
I said nothing for a long time, I just concentrated on putting distance between the sedan and my own car. But the black overcoats and fedora hats were no slouches when it came to getting life out of a car. The sedan stuck to us too close for comfort.
“How the blazes did you fall foul of Shelmerdine?” I asked Joanne Kilvert.
She was crouching low in her seat, tensed and frightened.
“It’s a long story,” she said. She never took her wide eyes from the driving mirror, in which the pursuing sedan was reflected, as she spoke. “It’s a long story, but have you heard of Arthur Kilvert?”
I watched the highway racing up out of the night with one eye and with the other watched the gleaming headlights of the car behind us in the driving mirror.
I remembered the name Arthur Kilvert and went riffling through a mental card-index for the connection. Over the years I’ve developed a faculty for stowing away data inside my skull. It becomes almost second nature after a while, like the photographic eye some cops develop so they can spot a face or a way of walking, or even the special way a guy lights a cigarette or flips back his hat, though a number of years have passed since they first noted the mannerism.
The Arthur Kilvert connection was not a matter of years away, only months. I jockeyed the coupe, watched that black beast of a sedan roaring along behind us, and the story came seeping to the surface.
“Yes, I remember,” I told the girl. “Arthur Kilvert was an official in a trade union in Chicago. Seemed to be a right guy and resented the racketeers who began to shove their noses in, trying to pull the strings of his union as they did in so many others. Kilvert didn’t care for the new style of protection racket, and said so loud and clear and wrote so in black and white. He began crusading and got to be a regular bug in the hair with the racket-boys.…”
I tailed off and got to thinking about the rest of the Arthur Kilvert story. It was ugly.
I only knew the case from newspaper reports, black words on pulp paper telling of a man who tried to play it square and what became of him. Telling of a car screeching to a stop close to the front lawn of a house in a Chicago suburb where a man, his wife, and child romped in the warmth of a summer afternoon—Sunday afternoon.
Sunday afternoon shattered by the screech of brakes, rent by the hard stutter of a sub-machine gun with the snort and growl of a hastily started car as an anti-climax.
That had been the way of it. Arthur Kilvert paid off for being a straight citizen, paid off prohibition-day fashion. Only this was Chicago in the nineteen-fifties, not the twenties.
“You’re Kilvert’s widow?” I asked.
I was concentrating on keeping an even distance between the coupe and Shelmerdine’s hoods and, so far, I was doing fine. I was watching the highway, but I could see the girl’s features reflected in the windshield. A hardness had taken possession of them now, the kind of hardness you see in a woman’s face after all the tears have been cried away.
“No, not his wife, his sister. My sister-in-law survived the shooting, but she’s worse off than Arthur. She walks on crutches now because she doesn’t have a left leg any more, but they injured her mind worse than her body. She saw Arthur shot down before her eyes, and the baby was killed in her arms. She’s twenty-four-years old.”
Nothing about crookdom surprises or disgusts me anymore; I know it from the soles of its stinking feet to the roots of its lousy hair. There was a time when a thing like the shooting at the Kilvert home would have made me spit—or maybe vomit. But I know the ways of the big-time thieves too well now. A man, his wife, his baby are as nothing to them in their climb towards dirty riches. Nothing at all, not even the ashes and dust the Book says they are.
There was no more time or opportunity for philosophy. Joanne Kilvert was turned about in her seat again, she suddenly clutched my arm in alarmed urgency.
“They’re going to shoot!” she cried. “Get down!”
The little world of the car was an enclosed box, thrumming to the pulse of the engine, rocking to the whirr of the wheels. Outside, the growl of the pursuing sedan was sounding loud. I saw the car in the mirror, pulling out into the centre of the highway, positioning itself with one of the overcoats and fedoras leaning from a window with something in his hand.
Joanne Kilvert crouched down to the floor, close to the grip that seemed so important to her. I pressed the accelerator down to the floor boards, and the outside world was a liquid blur of racing shadows.
The mobster with the gun seemed to wait a hell of a time before opening up. But he did eventually.
Three shots bellowed out, and I put the coupe into a zigzag. One slug spanged into the bodywork of the car somewhere at the back, one ripped the fabric of the hood, and the third must have been a complete miss. Maybe the Shelmerdine hoods were just trying to scare us into stopping, maybe they were trying to hit our tyres.
I was cursing loudly because my Browning was packed up with my T-shirts in the trunk.
“These mugs must want you awful bad,” I told Joanne Kilvert.
Then I doused
