Quinn's voice barked in the room. "Yeah?"

Blister got a pained expression on his face, hearing that "Yeah?" in one ear from the phone and in the other from the speaker here. "Boss?" he said.

"Yeah, who's this?"

"Blister, boss. It's you, all right. Is it O.K. to talk while you're on the television?"

On the screen, Quinn pulled the phone from his ear as if it had suddenly gotten hot and burned him. He stared at it for perhaps five pregnant seconds, then stuck it on his ear again. "What in h.e.l.l did you say?"

"Well . . ." Blister cleared his throat. "Ain't you on Slob For A Day?"

That did it. Quinn's "Whaat?" shook the walls. He let loose a stream of profanity, and finally Blister broke in with, "But boss, you is on television. Right here in the room with me and Shadow and Scott."

There was sudden silence.

Quinn started to speak, cut it off and jerked his head, the wattled flesh beneath his chin jiggling. Then he said softly, "You're with Scott?"

"Yeah, that's right, boss."

"You in the hotel?"

"Yeah, we is all up here in, uh . . . 418."

Quinn smiled, and it was a smile I would remember in my dreams - if I ever dreamed again - and then he said, "You got Scott taken care of, ain't you?"

"Sure. Shadow's got his heat on him right now. You want we should shoot him?"

"Not yet. First, you can see me on television, huh?"

"Sure. You and the whole bunch with you there."

"You can see all of us, huh?"

There was increased movement among the men, heads jerking around, some speaking to others. Two men stood up suddenly, but Quinn waved a hand at them and they sat down.

"That's right, boss," Blister said.

Quinn asked him, "Where am I looking at? At you?"

"No, off to the right, sort of."

Quinn turned his head, asked the question again, and finally Blister said, "Now. Now you is lookin' straight at me."

Still smiling that same smile Quinn said, "Fine. That's all I wanted to know. Now, Blister - "

I was pretty sure I knew what he was going to say, and I was d.a.m.ned sure I didn't want him to say it. "Hold it," I yelled loud enough to make Blister yank his head around toward me. With both men looking at me, and Shadow's gun trained on my chest, and my throat dry as bones in a graveyard, I stepped toward Blister.

"Give me that phone," I said and extended my hand toward it.

Blister hesitated, gave me the same look he must have given his pants that morning, then decided to ask for help again. "Boss," he said.

I clamped my fingers around the phone and yanked it from Blister's ear. "Quinn," I said rapidly, "this is Sh.e.l.l Scott. And you'd sure as h.e.l.l better listen."

Blister grabbed for the phone again, but then Quinn said, "I'm listenin'," and Blister let his hand drop.

I said, "Blister wasn't kidding, you're on television all right. You and your whole gang of thieves."

"He told me that already."

"He didn't tell you you're all in big trouble. He didn't tell you your chops are coming in on thousands of TV sets all over Southern California."

"No, he didn't. Is that right, Scott?"

Quinn didn't sound very impressed. I said, "Get a set and tune in. Take a look. You and that bunch of high-cla.s.s hoodlums are all stuck. Unless . . ."

"Unless?" He really sounded interested.

I had a feeling it was a losing game, but I went ahead with it anyway. "Unless you call off the heat and tell Blister and Shadow to let me walk out of here. I would then suggest that you and that whole gang head for the hills."

He was quiet for a rather long time, staring straight at the camera hidden in that bar down there. He was so still he looked even more like fresh buzzard meat than usual, and I wondered if, unlikely as it seemed, I had shaken him up a little, wondered if he might actually let me walk out of here.

Finally he said, "Put Blister back on."

I handed the phone to Blister and stepped back toward the center of the room, slowed down, but kept moving toward the door. Blister was saying, "Yeah, boss. What you want us to do?" and as he waited for Quinn's answer, even Shadow's eyes were riveted to the screen.

My heart was pounding in my chest, throat, ears, everywhere. Probably I should have known it wouldn't work, and I guess I pretty much expected what happened, because I never stopped moving and was six feet from the door when Quinn answered.

Either he was sure I was conning him, or didn't give a d.a.m.n, or wanted me dead more than anything else in the world, or possibly just rose to his peak of murderous magnificence for the day, but he looked straight out into the room, scowled mightily, and said in a kind of high-pitched thunder: "Blister, kill the sonofab.i.t.c.h."

Fifteen.

Well, that was all she wrote. That tore it.

There was no thought now of trying to save my films or tapes, or anything but my skin. Before Quinn even finished the sentence - my sentence - I was jumping through the air, grabbing for the doork.n.o.b and yanking on it. A gun blasted, loud, ear-splitting - so it was Shadow's gun, not Blister's - and wood splintered as the heavy slug bored through the doorframe.

I yanked the door open, bent double and jumped through into the hallway, heard a sharp spat as Blister fired at me. The bullet sang under my ear, nipped at the fabric of my coat. Then my feet landed on the hallway's carpet and I hooked my fingers around the door's edge and jerked it shut. I jumped across the hall as feet thumped inside the room. But I didn't run anywhere, just hit the far wall with my hands and turned, shoving away from it the way a swimmer in a sprint kicks away from the pool's edge, and headed back toward the closed door, right fist balled tight, hoping the door would open before I reached it. It did. It was slammed open hard and Blister loomed in it - but not for long.

I threw my right arm forward, turning my body with it, shoving with my foot and slamming every ounce of strength I had into the blow. That and the fact that I was moving forward as fast as I could turned my fist into an almost lethal club that landed on Blister's nose with a sound that seemed almost as loud as that first shot at me. My knuckles went into his face like a plow in a cornfield, and I felt his nose gush wetness, heard cartilage crunch, felt pain like the brand of a hot poker run up my wrist through the arm and into my shoulder.

Blister couldn't have felt anything after the first fraction of a second. His head snapped back, far back on his thick neck, and he spun as he fell. I don't know if he literally left his feet - but I did. A blur on my right was Shadow and I dived straight past him, reaching for the floor with one hand and for his nearest leg with the other.

His gun crashed again, and I felt the sting of burning powder on one ear, but then my hand closed around an ankle so small it felt like a chicken bone. I clamped my fingers on it, held on tight as I hit the floor and rolled. Shadow's legs went out from under him and I got both hands on that ankle, twisted, heard the sharp snap and the high yell from his lips at the same time. I got my left hand on the floor, shoved myself up with my right hand stretched open, starting to swing. Shadow's face was a yard away, twisted, his mouth open and his eyes squeezed shut. The edge of my palm slammed the side of his jaw and he went out, his face smoothing, jaw angled incredibly far to one side.

When he'd fallen my Colt had flipped half out of his pocket. I grabbed it, jumped to my feet, took time for one sweeping glance around the room - and saw the TV screen go blank. The phone hung dangling at the end of its cord - which meant Quinn would have heard the shots, yells, sound of scuffling; there would be men running up here, charging to room 418. I spotted Shadow's automatic on the floor and bent to grab it, then ran into the hall and turned toward the steps I'd come up last night.

But already feet were pounding on those stairs. I could hear them thundering up like a herd of bison, getting closer in a hurry. There was another way, possibly a better way. The elevator. If all of Quinn's miserable a.s.sa.s.sins had ignored it in their hurry to get up here, and if I could get into the thing unseen, there was a chance I could take it clear down to the bas.e.m.e.nt and out. It was behind me, at the other end of the hall. I spun around, raced toward it, then stopped and aimed the .45 in my left hand at the head of the stairway.

Doors were banging open and voices yelled; heads were popping out into the hallway. When I'd judged from the sound that those pounding feet were almost at the top of the stairs I fired twice, saw plaster chip and fly through the air. There was the sound of voices down there, a shout; one man, unable to stop, sprawled in the hallway but quickly wriggled back out of sight.

I squeezed off one more shot to keep those b.u.ms back for a little longer, then swung around and jumped toward the elevator. And a gun blasted at me from ten feet away.

The cage had just stopped here at the fourth floor and the door was sliding open, almost all the way open now. Two men were inside the cage, and the one on my right, the first one to see me as the door slid open, was the one who had shot at me. The gun had been aimed at my back, and only my sudden movement as I'd turned and jumped had made him miss.

He was a man I knew, a sonofab.i.t.c.h I knew, a broad, round-shouldered man, burly, with a pock-marked face and black hair, with a sharp widow's peak lancing low on his dark forehead.

Papa Ryan.

It was one of those sharp moments when vision is almost too clear, perception almost too acute. I felt the rush of emotion slam through me like a sudden blow, heard with a kind of whispering sibilance in my ears the names Heigman, Weiss, Lolita, saw the snub-nosed revolver in his hand with its bore still elevated from the recoil following that shot - at my back.

It didn't matter that he was steadying his gun to fire at me again, that a second man stood on his right, that other men were behind me, or that now I could hear the pounding of feet on the other stairway a few yards from where I stood. At least for this one moment, it didn't matter.

I held the .45 in my left hand, aiming straight ahead, the short barrel of my Colt angling toward the floor. So I squeezed the index finger of my left hand while bringing my right arm up, saw the second man in the elevator cage jerk, his left arm flipping strangely. I'd missed Ryan, hit the other man; he banged against the back wall of the cage, slid down it. I flipped the gun's bore right, heard the blast of Papa's gun mingling with my own and felt the jarring slap of the slug hitting me somewhere on the left, my left side or hip.

The impact jerked me a little to the side and suddenly my leg wasn't in the right spot and my foot was angled on the floor and I was going down. But even as I fell I knew the slug couldn't have hit me solidly, because I could still operate, could still move when and where I wanted.

The slide of the .45 in my left hand had stayed open, so the automatic's magazine was empty, but from down on the floor of the hallway with my left leg bent under me and my left hand propping me erect I had already brought the revolver in my right hand to bear on Papa Ryan's chest.

But he was through by then. That last shot from my automatic had caught him somewhere in his midsection. It had caught him solidly, had probably hit bone, and slapped him against the back wall of the elevator cage. The elevator door was closing, gliding shut again. I heard his head crack against the wall, saw death spreading over his face.

But I made sure. I made sure of Papa Ryan.

I steadied my Colt, squeezed off two shots. One sliced through his skull into his brain; the other tore off part of his jaw.

There was little pain as I got to my feet, but my left side felt numb. I took two steps toward the stairway nearest me. The sound of running feet had stopped during the exchange of shots, but as I looked down the stairs one man was in sight, on the landing halfway to the floor below. He held a gun in his fist, flipped it toward me. But I fired first. The bullet hit him low in the trunk, in his stomach or groin. He went back a step, staggered, bent over and made it out of sight around the far end of the landing.

And for a moment then everything was still. It was a strange moment, the quietness accentuated by the h.e.l.lish noise just ended, the odor of gunpowder acrid in my nostrils and a sharp taste in my mouth. But there wasn't a sound. No doors were open now, and there were no heads poked into the hallway. It could have been a hotel filled with sleeping people in the early hours of a still morning.

Then there was a mild sound - as the elevator, its door closed, started down again. Somebody below with his finger on the b.u.t.ton. Fargo, maybe. Or possibly even Quinn himself. And Quinn's trigger-happy hoods were blocking both stairways. There didn't seem to be any way out of here except up, and I would even run out of up much too soon.

I was going to get shot. All the evidence pointed to that depressing conclusion; I was going to get shot.

But there had to be a way out of here. There had to be - that's what I kept telling myself. But at the same time I was also telling myself what seemed like several hundred other things. Sometimes it happens. Just as a little old lady when her house catches fire can practically carry out the grand piano and two suitcases on her little old head, so, sometimes, in moments of abnormal excitement or stress, does the human noodle get souped up unbelievably. In the s.p.a.ce of a wink, fifty or a hundred separate pictures flashed across my mind, each picture an apparent possibility for escape - each of which turned out to be impossible.

And then - the possible one.

It was so direct, so simple, I almost tossed it away with the others. But I grabbed it and hung on. The picture was my view of the Barker Hotel two nights ago, the pattern of bright and dark windows - and the graceful trunk of three towering fan palms. Three palms with their leafy fronds almost on a level with - the fourth floor of the hotel, the floor I was on.

Only seconds could have pa.s.sed since my last shot at the man on the landing below. The echo had barely died. The arrow over the elevator doors was just moving past the figure "3" going down, heading for the lobby floor. I turned, ran back toward the La Brea side of the hotel. When I reached the hallway I ran left toward the front of the hotel, knocked at the fourth door from the hall's end. No answer, no sound from inside. I stepped back, slammed my foot near the lock, kicked the door open. The room was empty. I moved to the window in the outside wall, wrestled it up and looked out. The palm fronds were visible, a little below the level of my eyes - but they seemed a sickening distance away. Beneath those fronds the top of the nearest tree's trunk was only seven or eight feet straight out - but eight feet is a sickening distance when you're four stories in the air above solid pavement.

I got my feet on the base of the windowsill, leaned out into the open air with my left hand firmly gripping the base of the window behind me and slowly straightened up. Never had open air seemed so open. I made the mistake of looking down, not down at the tree trunk but at the sidewalk, but then I squeezed my eyes shut, opened them again, forced myself to imagine a less squashy landing - and jumped.

One instant I had been hanging to the windowsill making a faint ga.s.sy sound. The next instant, with everything blank in between, I was getting hit in the face with stinging palm fronds and walloped in the chest by a flying tree trunk. The breath went out of my lungs with a great shoosh and then the tree trunk was racing upward raking at my hands and arms and chest and legs.

When aching clarity returned I was halfway down the palm, and below me I could see people standing gawping, a couple of men pointing up at me, one grandmotherly type pressing both hands to her cheeks with her mouth opening and closing rapidly.

But none of those people were aiming guns at me, none of them were shooting.

I shinnied and slid down the rest of the way, felt sweet relief when my feet touched the pavement, then turned and let my feet touch the pavement very rapidly. Half a block from where I'd landed I skidded to a stop as a man climbed out of a Buick convertible, keys in his hand. There was no time for the niceties or even rapid-fire explanation - later maybe, but not now. I grabbed the keys out of his hand and was in the car, had the engine started and was gunning the Buick from the curb, before that startled individual cried out, "Hey, you, stop!"

I didn't stop. I was on my way - without my films and tapes, with everything gone to h.e.l.l, wet with sweat, torn, hands on fire, body aching, blood oozing from my left thigh, head throbbing, but feeling very good and very much alive - on my way.

It was dark, and there was a chill in the air.

There was a chill in my bones, too, despite the fact that, having escaped from the frying pan, I was now going to jump into the fire.

This afternoon's attempt to bug Quinn and his gentlemen in cahoots had been a bust. A horrible bust, in fact, since I wound up worse off after it than before. But you can't win 'em all, and I still thought it had been a good idea, worth all it had cost - besides, I'd paid off Papa Ryan.

And I could say now that I'd tried. I'd taken my best shot, done every d.a.m.ned thing I could to get the job done - without having to attend Quinn's miserable party. But it hadn't been enough, so now I had to pay the price.

Yeah, Frank Quinn's party. Old Buzzard Meat's hoodlum ball. Costumed suicide. In a word: Halloween, Allhallow's Even, the Druids' pagan festival of the dead, night of ghosts and spooks and goblins, of masks and parties and pranks. But we would not play "bob apple" tonight.

In a small shop on a side street I had bought new clothing, a tan sharkskin replacing my torn and bloodstained suit. I had left my stolen Buick on the street, walked to a car-rental agency and rented a new black Lincoln sedan. I had visited my locker at the Greyhound Bus depot, and my boxed costume was on the car seat beside me, the engraved invitation in my pocket. A makeshift bandage was around the gouged spot on my left side - Ryan's slug had bounced off a rib, and the wound was painful, but it wouldn't slow me down. The palms of my hands were raw, too, but otherwise I felt all right.

Since this would be, to say the least, my last act on the case, I had phoned my client to let her know that, despite the lateness of the hour, all was not yet lost. Doris wanted me to come by and tell her everything. Remembering Quinn's words about having places I might go watched, I was hesitant and told her I might not be able to make it. She started to cry, the sounds twisted and m.u.f.fled in the phone. Finally I told her to leave the back door open and I'd come by if I could manage it.

I managed it without difficulty, parking blocks away and walking, approaching the duplex from the rear and letting myself inside. Doris was sitting in the living room; she stood up smiling when I walked in.

"Oh, Sh.e.l.l, I'm so glad you could come," she said. "I was going crazy until you phoned."

"I was a little too busy to phone before, Doris. Several, uh, kind of complicated things happened."

"You said there was still a chance. What else can you tell me, Sh.e.l.l? I want you to tell me everything."

Considering the outfit Doris was wearing this time, she was telling me quite a lot herself, if not quite everything. As that thought flitted through my mind she said, "Oh, forgive the way I'm dressed, will you? I haven't dressed all day, I've just been sitting here ever since I got up."

There was nothing to forgive. She was wearing a pale-blue peignoir over a blue bra.s.siere and step-ins, and the fact that I was able to notice the latter should tell you quite a bit about the former. Moreover, I had seen an identical bra.s.siere before - the same brand and style, that is - and it was an item which once seen is rarely forgotten. It was called "b.o.o.by Hatch," and looked as if the inmates were escaping. It was really crazy.

So I said, "It's quite all right. I can't stay long anyway, worse luck. Ah - "

"What's been happening, Sh.e.l.l? How does it look?"

"It looks great - ah, if you'd just quit bouncing . . . walking around I mean . . . Look, let's sit down and I'll tell you all about it, O.K.?" I sat on the couch and she sat in a chair, and in the time it took to smoke a cigarette in fast puffs I brought her fairly well up to date. Laid out all at once it presented a dismal picture.

When I'd finished Doris said anxiously, "Is there any hope left at all, Sh.e.l.l?"

"There is. Don't get me wrong - that's all there is: a chance. Frank Quinn is tossing a party tonight to celebrate . . . That is, he's throwing a costume ball. A Halloween party. All wrapped up as a clown, and with my face smeared with paint, I can probably manage to get inside the place. Then, with luck, I can get into Quinn's safe. And with some more luck, there'll be info in the safe that can hang Quinn and spring your brother."

The furrows between her oddly disturbing blue eyes smoothed out a little, but didn't go away. My tidings hadn't raised her spirits to any giddy level. Dully she said, "I see. Well, maybe it will work out all right."

The more I thought about tonight's ball, and my planned part in it, the less likely it seemed that there would be any positive development, except my getting shot in the head, or even somewhere fatal. But I told Doris, in a confident tone, "Honey, the setup may not sound like the most perfect we could ask for - but isn't it better than just sitting around waiting for . . . the news broadcast, say? And there really is good reason to believe that if I can get into Quinn's safe, there'll be everything in it but marshmallows."