I lay the note by the lamp on the night table where she couldn’t miss it. I leaned over and blew a kiss into her hair, then turned and got out of there.
Nobody had to tell me to be careful. I made sure nobody saw me leave the building and double-checked on it when I got to the corner. The trip over the back fences wasn’t easy, but it was quiet and dark and if anybody so much as breathed near me I would have heard it. Then when I stood in the shadows of the store at the intersection I was glad I had made the trip the hard way. Buried between the parked cars along the curb was a police cruiser. There were no markings. Just a trunk aerial and the red glow of a cigarette behind the wheel.
Captain Gerot wasn’t taking any chances. It made me feel a little better. Upstairs there Helen could go on sleeping and always be sure of waking up. I waited a few minutes longer then drifted back into the shadows toward the rooming house.
That’s where they were waiting for me. I knew it a long time before I got there because I had seen them wait for other guys before. Things like that you don’t miss when you live around the factories and near the waterfronts. Things like that you watch and remember so that when it happens to you, it’s no surprise and you figure things out beforehand.
They saw me and as long as I kept on going in the right direction they didn’t say anything. I knew they were where couldn’t see them and even if made a break for it, it wouldn’t do me any good at all.
You get a funny feeling after a while. Like a rabbit walking between rows of guns wondering which one is going to go off. Hoping that if it does you don’t get to see it or feel it. Your stomach seems to get all loose inside you and your heart makes too much noise against your ribs. You try not to, but you sweat and the little muscles in your hands and thighs start to jump and twitch and all the while there’s no sound at all, just a deep, startling silence with a voice that’s there just the same. A statue, laughing with its mouth open. No sound, but you can hear the voice. You keep walking, and the breathing keeps time with your footsteps, sometimes trying to get ahead of them. You find yourself chewing on your lips because you already know the horrible impact of a fist against your flesh and the uncontrollable spasms that come after a pointed shoe bites into the muscle and bone of your side.
So much so that when you’re almost there and a hand grabs your arm you don’t do anything except look at the face above it and wait until it says, “Where you been, kid?”
I felt the hand tighten with a gentle pressure, pulling me in close. “Lay off me. I’m minding my…”
“I said something, sonny.”
“So I was out. What’s it to you?”
His expression said he didn’t give hang at all. “Somebody wants to know. Feel like taking a little ride?”
“You asking?”
“I’m telling.” The hand tightened again. “The car’s over there, bud. Let’s go get in it, huh?”
For a second I wondered if I could take him or not and knew I couldn’t. He was too big and too relaxed. He’d known trouble all his life, from little guys to big guys and he didn’t fool easily. You can tell after you’ve seen a lot of them.They knew that some day they’d wind up holding their hands over a bullet hole or screaming through the bars of a cell, but until then they were trouble and too big to buck.
I got in the car and sat next to the guy in the back seat. I kept my mouth shut and my eyes open and when we started to head the wrong way, I looked at the guy next to me. “Where we going?”
He grinned on one side of his face and looked out the window again.
“Come on, come on, quit messing around! Where we going?”
“Shut up.”
“Nuts, brother. If I’m getting knocked off I’m doing a lot of yelling first, starting right now. Where…”
“Shut up. You ain’t getting knocked off.” He rolled the window down, flipped the dead cigar butt out and cranked it back up again. He said it too easily not to mean it and the jumps in my hands quieted down a little.
No, they weren’t going to bump me. Not with all the trouble they went to in finding me. You don’t put a couple dozen men on a mug like me if all you wanted was a simple kill. One hopped up punk would do that for a week’s supply of snow.
We went back through town, turned west into the suburbs and kept right on going to where the suburbs turned into estates and when we came to the right one the car turned into a surfaced driveway that wound past a dozen flashy heaps parked bumper to bumper and stopped in front of the fieldstone mansion.
The guy beside me got out first. He jerked his head at me and stayed at my back when I got out too. The driver grinned, but it was the kind of face a dog makes when he sees you with a chunk of meat in your fist.
A flunky met us at the door. He didn’t look comfortable in his monkey suit and his face had scar tissue it took a lot of leather-covered punches to produce. He waved us in, shut the door and led the way down the hall to a room cloudy with smoke, rumbling with the voices of a dozen men.
When we came in the rumble stopped and I could feel the eyes crawl over me. The guy who drove the car looked across the room at the one in the tux, said, “Here he is, boss,” and gave me a gentle push into the middle of the room.
“Hi, kid.” He finished pouring out of the decanter, stopped it and picked up his glass. He wasn’t an inch bigger than me, but he had the walk of a cat and the eyes of something dead. He got up close to me, faked a smile and held out the glass. “In case the boys had you worried.”
“I’m not worried.”
He shrugged and sipped the top off the drink himself. “Sit down, kid. You’re among friends here.” He looked over my shoulder. “Haul a chair up, Rocco.”
All over the room the others settled down and shifted into position. A chair seat hit the back of my legs and I sat. When I looked around everybody was sitting, which was the way the little guy wanted it. He didn’t like to have to look up to anybody.
He made it real casual. He introduced the boys when they didn’t have to be introduced because they were always in the papers and the kind of guys people point out when they go by in their cars. You heard their names mentioned even in the junk business and among the punks in the streets. These were the big boys. Top dogs. Fat fingers. Big rings. The little guy was biggest of all. He was Phil Carboy and he ran the West Side the way he wanted it run.
When everything quieted down just right, Carboy leaned on the back of a chair and said, “In case you’re wondering why you’re here, kid, I’m going to tell you.”
“I got my own ideas,” I said.
“Fine. That’s just fine. Let’s check your ideas with mine, okay? Now we hear a lot of things around here. Things like that note you delivered to Renzo and who gave it to you and what Renzo did to you.” He finished his drink and smiled. “Like what you did to Johnny, too. That’s all straight now, isn’t it?”
“So far.”
“Swell. Tell you what I want now. I want to give you a job. How’d you like to make a cool hundred a week, kid?”
“Peanuts.”
Somebody grunted. Carboy smiled again, a little thinner. “The kid’s in the know,” he said. “That’s what I like. Okay, kid. We’ll make it five hundred per for a month. If it don’t run a month you get it anyway. That’s better than having Renzo slap you around, right?”
“Anything’s better than that.” My voice started getting chalky. Carboy held out his hand and said, “Rocco…” Another hand slid a sheaf of bills into his. He counted it out, reached two thousand and tossed it into my lap. “Yours, kid.”