The purple hog whispered away as Johnny Mack and the girl, who looked like she was right off the Greyhound, went up the front steps. No hairdo for the girl, a skirt to cover her knees instead of barely covering her pudenda. Yeah. Johnny Mack would be taking her application, recruiting her to his string with a tumble in the sack. As they went through the front door he was all over her, squeezing and touching and loving up.
By this time Heslip was out of the Pinto and halfway across the street. As he reached the sidewalk the streetlights went on, casting his abrupt, moving shadow around his ankles. He looked up and down the street — and froze.
In the next block two bulky men were getting out of the Chrysler. For the first instant he recognized only the stance: the set of the feet, the way the arms were held, the slight arrogance in the tilt of the head. That edge of contempt that physical competence gives one. It is a stance with no innocence. Heslip had some of it himself from his years in the ring, which was why he could successfully pose as muscle when the need arose.
In the next instant he recognized the men — the ones who had tailed him from Fleur’s house to the airport in New Orleans. Sure to have been two of the four who attacked Zeb Rounds. Also sure to have been those who slashed up Fleur Lisette.
Here in Boston. Here, now.
Heslip was taking the outside stairs of the three-decker two at a time. He was sure Johnny Mack was taking the girl to the upstairs flat. If the two strongarms caught up with him, they would have Verna next. Johnny Mack would be a slender reed.
Johnny Mack was at the door of the third-floor flat, key in hand and free arm around the giggling, clinging girl, when Heslip kicked in the outside door and came through from the porch. Johnny Mack thrust the girl toward Heslip and backed up against the wall with his hands out toward Heslip, palm first. “You want Willy Brown,” he babbled. “I ain’t him. Ain’t even a friend, jus bummed the borrow of his apartment fo—”
“You,” Heslip snapped at the girl. “Out of this.” He saw she was stoned on weed. He grabbed an arm, almost threw her across the hall at the interior staircase by which she and Johnny Mack had just come up. “Downstairs, and if you’re smart, get a bus back to Podunkville and stay there.”
With a drug-tranquilized look, she shrugged and went down the stairs. As she disappeared from sight, she started to giggle. Heslip crowded Johnny Mack up against the door frame and bunched both muscular hands in the lapels of his suitcoat. “Where’s Verna? Fast and quick.”
“Man, I don’t know where that bitch—”
Heslip slammed the back of his head against the edge of the frame so hard he cried out. “There’s two men on the way up who cut the nose off a girl in New Orleans for giving them that answer. Talk, goddam you!”
Johnny Mack split wide open as Heslip had expected. “I ain’t seen her since she had the baby, like three months ago. Only heard she’d been in the hospital after she was gone—”
“Which hospital?”
“Boston Lying-In.”
“Doctor who?”
Johnny Mack was almost crying with tenor. “Man, how in hell’m I gonna know...”
Heslip slapped the keys to the Pinto into Johnny Mack’s hand. More than anything else, he had to keep this dude out of the hands of the strongarms. They’d get the hospital lead and go from there to Verna. “It’s a red Pinto on the other side of the street down near the corner. Go through the apartment and use the rear stairs to the alley. Go around to the car. Wait in it for me. If they spot you, take off with the car. Otherwise, wait — or I’ll find you and splinter your elbows. Go!”
Johnny Mack went. As soon as the apartment door clicked shut behind him, Heslip started pounding on it and shouting. “Open up there!” he yelled. “Goddammit, Verna, I know you’re in there. Open that door, or...”
From behind the locked door he heard the distant slam of the rear door. Johnny Mack on his way down the back staircase. Heslip hoped the bastard wouldn’t steal his car, but it was better than letting the strongarms get him.
“Verna Rounds, I know you’re in there!” He yelled. He smashed his fists against the door. “You and that pimp of yours!”
Silence, within and without. He was silent himself, listening. Nothing. He went to the stairwell, leaned down, listened. Nothing. Had the bastards shucked him, and been waiting at the foot of the back stairs to grab Johnny Mack?
Heslip went up the hall to the outside door he’d kicked in, and out onto the front porch. From there he could see down the three flights of wooden stairs to the street. It had gotten darker while he’d been inside, but he could see the men weren’t on the stairs.
At the railing he leaned out to crane down the street and saw Johnny Mack running across toward the parked Pinto, where he stopped to fumble at the unlocked door.
Heslip leaned out further yet to look up the next block at the Chrysler New Yorker. He almost fell over the railing. The Chrysler was gone. Gone? But then... he knew the two men had been the same ones who...
He looked back to the Pinto. As he did, it dissolved into a fireball. The thud of concussion sent a shock wave of air against his face. As he stared in horror, frozen for the moment there on the third-floor porch, the realization rose up like vomit in his throat: the killers hadn’t been after Verna Rounds. They had been after Bart Heslip.
Twenty-Eight
Heslip came back to his table in the lower-floor cafeteria below the Boston Lying-In Hospital with a refilled coffee cup and another doughnut. He sat down, checked his watch for the dozenth time. It was 7:45 on Saturday morning. Better wait another fifteen minutes for his best shot. It was a scam he’d picked up from Ed Dorsey, who’d quit DKA a couple of years ago after a severe beating by a couple of thugs, and he’d never tried it himself.
To pass the time, he read the newspaper account of his death.
At least he hoped the guys who had done it would assume it had been him in that Pinto. He figured that since it was the weekend it would probably be forty-eight hours before a positive I.D. of Johnny Mack Brown would hit the papers, letting the killers know they’d gotten the wrong man. Until then, he was clean in Boston. Nobody from the other side knew he was alive, would know, until Johnny Mack was identified. Unless he blew his own cover.
Which meant no calls, not even to Corinne, not even if she would somehow receive notification that Bart Heslip had been killed in a drug-connected car-bombing in Boston — which was what the newspapers were hinting the hit had been all about. The opposition didn’t know he was alive, and didn’t know there was a lead to Verna here at the Boston Lying-In Hospital.
He checked his watch again. Eight o’clock. Put down his tip and left. Climbing up the stairway to the broad front entrance of the hospital, he felt good. Rested. After the bombing he’d walked for miles, dazed. Had finally realized what the hit men had realized earlier: that they didn’t have to find Verna, all they had to do was keep Heslip from finding her before that all-important — God knew why — Monday morning hearing in San Francisco.
A simple box bomb under the car seat. Anyone sitting on the driver’s seat would push down the top of the box, which would thrust a spike down into an acid detonator, breaking the bottle, and WHOOMP!
So Heslip had gotten a hotel room and slept for ten hours, since eight in the morning was the best time for the scam he was about to run.
Inside the front door of the hospital he went into a phone booth and looked up the number of the front desk. On a board opposite were the names of the doctors who worked with the hospital. He picked one that had no flag showing he was at the hospital at the present time. He dropped his dime and dialed. “Boston Lying-In Hospital.”