The Big Bite Read Online Free PDF Page B

twenty-five.”
    “Seventy-five for me?”
    He shook his head with a pained kind of smile on his face. “Seventy-five for me, chum.”
    “Back off and look again,” I said. “The wind’s whistling through your head.”
    “How’s that?”
    “Who got run over out there that night? You, or me?”
    He shrugged. “That doesn’t enter into it. Who dug up the evidence, after everybody else had sloughed it off as a traffic fatality?”
    “You’ve got more?”
    “More what?”
    “Evidence.”
    “Some,” he said. “But maybe not quite enough. That’s where you come in.”
    “Where I come in is when somebody says sixty grand. That’s my cue line.”
    He sighed. “Fifty.”
    I knew that was what he’d planned on from the first. Try to chisel me, would he?
    “Sixty,” I said. “Take it or leave it. You wouldn’t have called me in if you hadn’t needed me.”
    “I need you like I need the gon. It just happens you’re in a very good position to put on the pressure. It’s a psychological twist that’d make it easy, but I can do it alone if I have to.”
    I grinned at him very coldly. “Then do it alone.”
    “You think I can’t?”
    ”That’s right. You need somebody who was right there when he was murdered and who might or might not have been completely unconscious all the time under that other car. It’s a highly specialized field, and not many applicants could qualify.”
    He exhaled a lungful of smoke and watched it moodily. I knew I’d hit him where it hurt. “Well, let’s table that discussion for the moment,” he said. “How about a cold beer?”
    “Sure,” I said. I had him on the run now and all I had to do was keep the heat on him. Let him drop his guard and then jump him again. And I’d let him have it, but good.
    We went out through the door at the right. It led into the dinette and kitchen, which were divided by the refrigerator and a serving bar about chest high. You had to go around the end of the bar to reach the refrigerator, which opened from the kitchen side. He flicked on the light. The kitchen part was just a cubbyhole with a sink and a two-burner gas stove next to the wall. You couldn’t see into the living-room from here. He opened the reefer and took out two bottles of imported beer. I think it was Danish. He uncapped them and set them on the drainboard of the sink. There was no window, and it was very hot under the light.
    “You had more to go on than what you’ve told me so far, didn’t you?” I asked casually. “I mean, beside that hole in his head and the fact he wasn’t drunk.”
    “What makes you think so?”
    “You must have.”
    He stared at me very coolly. “So? So maybe there is more.”
    “Such as?” I asked. Now was as good a time as any.
    “Such as nothing, at the moment.”
    I reached out with my left and caught the front of his shirt. Pulling him to me, I gave him the open right hand across the side of the face. “Let’s have it now,” I said. It was a mistake.
    There was no resistance in him at all. He came right on up against me like a couple of old inner tubes hanging off my arm, and when he got there he exploded. I had Purvis all over me. Fragments of flying Purvis hit me in the solar plexus and Adam’s apple at the same time, and then something chopped me just under the left ear and I was through. I didn’t even fall; he eased me to the floor like somebody putting down an old mattress he’d been carrying around. I was sick and I couldn’t get my breath. My whole body felt paralyzed. I tried to turn over. It was no use.
    A convention of Purvises stood in a circle, looking down at me. “I wouldn’t try that again,” they said, all speaking at once. They sounded a long way off.
    I retched and gagged, trying to get air through my throat again. The kitchen tilted and went on spinning slowly like a carousel. I opened my mouth and tried to bite a mouthful of air before I died of suffocation. Just before the room went completely black I