Free Find This Woman by Richard S. Prather Page A

many questions I didn't know which of them came first. I picked one at random. "Tell me about Isabel Ellis, Dante."
    He didn't say a word.
    "I've got ways, Dante. I can open that foul mouth of yours. Maybe you heard about the two goons at the airport." I stopped. "You bastard, that was some of your work. And that's just one more thing to club you for."
    He just sat there behind his black desk as if he were waiting for something, and then I realized what it was. I'd had my gun on him all the time, and he hadn't gone into that drawer, but I couldn't see his knees or his feet or the buzzer that was probably under the desk, and I knew damned well he was waiting for somebody to bust in.
    I stepped toward him and I snapped at him, "Up! Get up! Back away from that desk and get on your feet." He was slow about it, but he moved. I walked over within a yard of him, the gun close to my side. "Get over to the door," I said. He took a couple of steps towards the door I'd come in by, then he stopped. "Damn it, move," I told him.
    He was too slow about it, and I owed this guy plenty anyway, so I kept the gun in my right hand, pointed at him, straightened the fingers of my left hand, and with my thumb up and hand rigid I swung my arm around and chopped him under the left ear. It spun him around and he staggered and dropped to his hands and one knee. He stayed like that for a moment, moving his head slowly, and I put my foot against his bottom and shoved him as hard as I could.
    His arm buckled and he shot forward, his face skidding for three inches on the carpet. "Now get the hell over there," I said, and the door opened.
    He came in without any singsong patter, and it was my other acquaintance from the Pelican party last night, but the thing that surprised me was that he came in without a gun. Apparently that buzzer didn't mean trouble, but simply "You're wanted by the boss."
    He didn't come all the way in, just one step, and he stopped so fast that about half the mass of dry hair on his head flopped forward over one eye, but he saw enough out of the other eye to scare hell out of him.
    That eye rolled down at Dante on the floor, then rolled up at me, and I thought it was going to roll clear back into his head. But it stopped at me and I yelled at him, "Get in here. And don't try a thing."
    My gun was pointed right at him, but he was still only about a foot inside the door, with his right hand on the knob, and he leaped backward, swinging the door shut, and was gone as neatly as if he practiced it every day.
    Dante slowly got up off the floor. He put his left hand up to his neck and looked at me. Finally there was something in his eyes: There was hate there, for me, but there was pain, too, and he was breathing so hard the air hissed in and out of his pinched nostrils.
    He looked at me but he didn't say anything, so I did. "You going to answer my question now, Dante? About Isabel? And one about William Carter? And Freddy Powell?" I knew he wouldn't, and I knew I had to get the hell away from here, but I had to try.
    He barely opened his mouth. "You won't get out, Scott. You won't get ten feet away from the Inferno. Not alive."
    He was probably right. I knew as well as he did where our friend had gone. For help. And help was what they had plenty of here. But I was going to get one step closer to being even with Dante before whatever was going to happen finally happened.
    I know a lot of Judo from the Marines, and I know how easy it is to put a man out or kill him with just one hand or even the fingers of one hand. But there is absolutely no satisfaction quite like slamming a hard fist into the face of a man who has beaten you up and tried to kill you.
    So I transferred the .38 to my left hand, balled up my right into a large horny fist, and stepped closer to Dante. He suddenly understood what I was going to do. He got it, all right, but he got it too late, and he'd barely started to move when I launched my fist up at him, my arm straightening