“Had to Helen. I wasn’t going to come back but I had to do that too.”
Maybe it was the way I said it that made her frown. “You’re a funny kid.”
“Don’t say that.”
Something changed in her eyes. “No. Maybe I shouldn’t, should I?” She looked at me hard, her eyes soft, but piercing. “I feel funny when I look at you. I don’t know why. Sometimes I’ve thought it was because I had a brother who was always in trouble. Always getting hurt. I used to worry about him too.”
“What happened to him?”
“He was killed on the Anzio beachhead.”
“Sorry.”
She shook her head. “He didn’t join the army because he was patriotic. He and another kid held up a joint. The owner was shot. He was dead by the time they found out who did it.”
“You’ve been running all your life too, haven’t you?”
The eyes dropped a second. “You could put it that way.”
“What ties you here?”
“Guess.”
“If you had the dough you’d beat it? Some place where nobody knew you?”
She laughed, a short jerky laugh. It-was answer enough. I reached in the jacket, got out the pack of bills and flipped off a couple for myself.
I shoved the rest in her hand before she knew what it was. “Get going. Don’t even bother to pack. Just move out of here and keep moving.”
Her eyes were big and wide with an incredulous sort of wonder, then slightly misty when they came back to mine and she shook her head a little bit and said, “Joe…why? Why?”
“It would sound silly if I said it.”
“Say it.”
“When I’m all grown up I’ll tell you maybe.”
“Now.”
I could feel the ache starting in me and my tongue didn’t want to move, but I said, “Sometimes even a kid can feel pretty hard about a woman. Sad, isn’t it?”
Helen said, “Joe,” softly and had my face in her hands and her mouth was a hot torch that played against mine with a crazy kind of fierceness and it was all I could do to keep from grabbing her instead of pushing her away. My hands squeezed her hard, then I yanked the door open and got out of there. Behind me there was a sob and I heard my name said again, softly.
I ran the rest of the way down with my face all screwed up tight.
The blue Chevvy was down the street on the other side. It seemed to be empty and I didn’t bother to poke around it. All I wanted was for whoever followed me to follow me away from there. So I gave it the full treatment. I made it look great. To them I must have seemed pretty jumpy and on my way to see somebody important. It took a full hour to reach THE CLIPPER that way and the only important one around was Bucky Edwards and he wasn’t drunk this time.
He nodded, said, “Beer?” and when I shook my head, called down the bar for a tall orange. “Figured you’d be in sooner or later.”
“Yeah?”
That wise old face wrinkled a little. “How does it feel to be live bait, kiddo?”
“You got big ears, grandma.”
“I get around.” He toasted his beer against my orange, put it down and said, “You’re in pretty big trouble, Joe. Maybe you don’t know it.”
“I know it.”
“You don’t know how big. You haven’t been here that long. Those boys put on the big squeeze.”
It was my turn to squint. His face was set as if he smelled something he didn’t like and there was ice in his eyes. “How much do you know, Bucky?”
His shoulders made a quick shrug. “Phil Carboy didn’t post the depot and the bus station for nothing. He’s got cars cruising the highways too. Making sure, isn’t he?”
He looked at me and I nodded.
“Renzo is kicking loose too. He’s pulling the strings tight. The guys on his payroll are getting nervous but they can’t do a thing. No, sir, not a thing. Like a war. Everybody’s just waiting.” The set mouth flashed me a quick grin. “You’re the key, boy. If there was a way out I’d tell you to take it.”
“Suppose I went to the cops?”
“Gerot?” Bucky shook his head. “You’d get help as long as he could keep you in a cell. People’d like to see him dead too. He’s got an awfully bad habit of being honest. Ask him to show you his scars someday. It wouldn’t be so bad if he was just honest, but he’s smart and mean as hell too.”
I drank half the orange and set it down in the wet circle on the bar. “Funny how things work out. All because of Vetter. And he’s here because of Jack Cooley.”
“I was wondering when you were gonna get around to it, kid,” Bucky said.
“What?”
He didn’t look at me. “Who are you working for?”
I waited a pretty long time before he turned his head around. I let him look at my face another long time before I said anything. Then: “I was pushing a junk cart, friend. I was doing okay, too. I wasn’t working for trouble. Now I’m getting pretty curious. In my own way I’m not so stupid, but now I want to find out the score. One way or another I’m finding out. So they paid me off but they aren’t figuring on me spending much of that cabbage. After it’s over I get chopped down and it starts all over again, whatever it is. That’s what I’m finding out. Why I’m bait for whatever it is. Who do I see, Bucky? You’re in the know. Where do I go to find out?”
“Cooley could have told you,” he said quietly.
“Nuts. He’s dead.”
“Maybe he can still tell you.”
My fingers were tight around the glass now. “The business about Cooley getting it because of the deal on Renzo’s tables is out?”
“Might be.”
“Talk straight unless you’re scared silly of those punks too. Don’t give me any puzzles if you know something.”
Bucky’s eyebrows went up, then down slowly over the grin in his eyes. “Talk may be cheap, son,” he said, “but life comes pretty expensively.” He nodded sagely and said, “I met Cooley in lotsa places. Places he shouldn’t have been. He was a man looking around. He could have found something.”
“Like what?”
“Like why we have gangs in this formerly peaceful city of ours. Why we have paid-for politicians and clambakes with some big faces showing. They’re not eating clams…they’re talking.”
“These places where you kept seeing Cooley…”
“River joints. Maybe he liked fish.”
You could tell when Bucky was done talking. I went down to Main, found a show I hadn’t seen and went in. There were a lot of things I wanted to think about.
Chapter 3
At eleven-fifteen the feature wound up and I started back outside. In the glass reflection of the lobby door I saw somebody behind me but I didn’t look back. There could have been one more in the crowd that was around the entrance outside. Maybe two. Nobody seemed to pay any attention to me and I didn’t care if they did or not.
I waited for a Main Street bus, took it down about a half mile, got off at the darkened supermarket and started up the road. You get the creeps in places like that. It was an area where some optimist had started a factory and ran it until the swamp crept in. When the footings gave and the walls cracked, they moved out, and now the black skeletons of the buildings were all that were left, with gaping holes for eyes and a mouth that seemed to breathe out a fetid swamp odor. But there were still people there. The dozen or so company houses that were propped against the invading swamp showed dull yellow lights, and the garbage smell of unwanted humanity fought the swamp odor. You could hear them, too, knowing that they watched you from the shadows of their porches. You could feel them stirring in their jungle shacks and catch the pungency of the alcohol they brewed out of anything they could find.
There was a low moan of a train from the south side and its single eye picked out the trestle across the bay and followed it. The freight lumbered up, slowed for the curve that ran through the swamps and I heard the bindle stiffs yelling as they hopped off, looking for the single hard topped road that took them to their quarters for the night.