Killer, Come Back to Me

Julie shoved him on. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dark after sun. People’s faces blurred in the gloom, and he was moving, his hard heels rapping like knuckles, following the sullen redhead with the pendulum walk.

A lot of seated men jerked up, a lot of reading men stopped reading, a lot of talking men caught their tongues in their teeth, a lot of smoking men choked on their cigarettes. It was like flinging a boulder into a stagnant pond, watching ripples skim out and rush back:

“Ricky! For God’s sake, fellas, it’s him!”

“Ricky!”

“I’m seein’ things!”

A sound of bodies stirring, shadows moving, and then one single voice saying:

“That’s not Ricky Wolfe.” And again, “That’s not Ricky.”

It was a flat statement.

Broghman felt his gun in his palm slip like a frightened animal. His breath hissed in his nostrils. In the silence that followed, he stopped dead still and there was only the sound of Julie’s high heels tacking along the wooden floor and slowly, with a kind of frozen dread, coming to a halt, too.

Broghman turned. Out of the shadow a guy slipped who was too well-dressed for his own good. With a long white horse-face and red-rimmed, tired eyes and sweat on his cheeks. A sort of balding guy, whose features set off a trigger in Broghman’s mind. Merritt. Julie’d given a description. Merritt, from the old days. One of Ricky’s sidekicks, a jealous kind of gunsel. Merritt. The name clicked.

There was something in Julie’s expression. Almost fear. It looked strange on her. Out of place. Lost. Lost and crying in the dark. Her hand crawled along her dark purse, vaguely.

Broghman knew it was no use. It was no use all along. “That’s right,” somebody else agreed. “It ain’t Ricky at all.” The voice sounded awed, funny, disappointed in its surprise.

Merritt said, “What you trying to pull, wise guy? You and the redhead?”

Broghman’s jaw stiffened.

“No,” he admitted evenly. “No, I’m not Ricky.”

He heard Julie’s gasp. He continued:

“I’m not Ricky Wolfe. Not at all. I don’t have to be him. I’m me. I’m myself! You, you Merritt, you don’t count for beans!”

The darkness began to swim. Everybody was sort of held by Broghman’s voice, waiting.

“You can’t get away with an old trick like that,” was Merritt’s quick reply. “What are you—kids to try something like this?”

Broghman pulled his gun, and while the darkness got darker, and there was only Merritt in front of him, and the others waiting, he swore, tightened up and fired three shots.

Merritt folded over the bullets, taking them into him with curious, pushing, helpful fingers. He fell flat down on his head, choking.

“Ricky!” it was Julie’s voice. He had a flash of the metal jaws of her purse flipping wide, her gloved hand burrowing like a white squirrel inside, extracting a little blue gun.

“I’m in!” said Broghman. There was a sort of power to the way he mouthed it. He sort of grew upward. He seemed to fit his suit better. Everybody else still stood, looking at his face, like they were seeing the devil and couldn’t run away.

* * *

Broghman took in every face. Names, data, facts, figures that Julie’d given him. Here. One face, a fat red one with beer smelling from its lips. “Kelly!” he snicked it out, with a jerk of his gun. “You know what to do. Get moving with this body!”

“Sure, Boss!” Kelly moved his big stomach and big shoulders and fat, long arms.

Broghman glanced around. “You, Rhodes, help him. Get your car around in the alley, on the double.”

Rhodes hesitated.

“Well?” asked Broghman.

“Sure,” said Rhodes, hastily. “Sure, Boss.”