They got up and went through the semidarkness to the little room, out and downstairs to the street. It was raining very hard. Dickinson said he had a car; Kells paid off the cab and they went into the vacant lot alongside the building.
Dickinson’s car was a Ford coupe; he finally found his keys and opened the door. Then a bright spotlight was switched on in a car at the curb. There was a sharp choked roar and something bit into Kells’ leg, into his side. Dickinson stumbled, fell down on his knees on the running board; his face and the upper part of his body sagged forward to the floor of the car. He lay still.
Kells lay down in the mud beside the car and drew-up his knees and he could taste blood in his mouth. His teeth were sunk savagely, deeply into his lower lip, and there were jagged wires of pain in his brain, jagged wires in his side.
He knew that it had been a shotgun, and he lay in the mud with rain whipping his face, wondered if Dickinson was dead, waited for the gun to cough again.
Then the spotlight went out and Kells could hear the car being shifted, into gear; he twisted his head a little and saw it pass through the light near the corner — a Cadillac.
He crawled up onto the running board of the Ford and shook Dickinson a little, and then he slowly, painfully, pushed Dickinson up into the car — slowly.
He pressed the knob that unlocked the opposite door and limped around the car and crawled into the driver’s seat. He could feel blood on his side; blood pounded through his head, his eyes. He pried the keys out of Dickinson’s hand and started the motor. Dickinson was an inert heap beside him. He groaned, coughed in a curious dry way.
Kells said: “All right, boy. We’ll fix it up in a minute.” Dickinson coughed again in the curious way that was like a laugh. He tried to sit up, fell forward and-his head banged against the windshield. Kells pulled him back into the seat and drove out of the lot, turned east on Santa Monica. Dickinson tried to say something, groped with one hand in the side pocket. He finally gave it up, managed to gasp: “Gun — here.”
Kells said. “Sit still.”
They went down Santa Monica Boulevard very fast, turned north on La Brea. Kells stopped halfway up the block and felt in Dickinson’s pocket for the bottle, but it had been broken, the pocket was full of wet glass.