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“So?” he said.

“So you knew your folks didn’t either, not deep down. They just wanted to trust Roth. They wanted to believe it was okay so they could go on living their nice life in comfort. But deep down they knew Roth as well as you do. They tossed you to the wolves, kid.”

“They’re old,” he said. “I owe them.”

He was a really nice kid, it was written all over him. A kid with big dreams of a big world. But he was caught. It’s always harder for the really good ones. He wanted no part of his father’s world, but he had a sense of duty, of responsibility to his father and mother. He knew what his parents were, but he had a code of his own, and he was good enough to stick to it.

He might have made it, keeping his code and still staying alive, if I hadn’t come along. I queered the deal. I had them all looking for him. Sooner or later even Pappas would hear about it and begin to wonder. Roth knew that, and so did I. I had ruined his chance, it was up to me to save him.

“How much?” I said. “You owe them, sure, but how much do you owe them, Jo-Jo? You’ve got a duty to them, sure, but how about your duty to yourself? That’s the hard one, Jo-Jo. You got a duty to stay alive.”

“It won’t come to that,” Jo-Jo said, almost whispered, and even he didn’t believe it because he added, “I’ll keep ahead of them.”

I nodded. “All right, let’s say you can, and that nobody tells about you. What then, kid? What about all you want to do? What about your dreams? You want to be a race driver, a Viking with cars!”

Jo-Jo’s eyes glowed there in the shabby room. I was still listening to the sounds outside. There could not be much more time.

“I’ll do it, too!” Jo-Jo said eagerly. “I get the diploma from automotive, and with my record driving, I’ll get with Ferrari!”

I hit him with it. “What record? What diploma? You’ll never get back to school, and you ain’t Jo-Jo Olsen anymore, you’re Dan Black. You’ll never be Jo-Jo Olsen. You’ll be on the run all your life!”

I could see him wince, blink, and I did not let up. In a way I was battling for my own life. If I didn’t convince him, there was no telling what would happen when the two bully boys arrived on the scene.

“You got three choices, Jo-Jo, and only three,” I said. “You can come back with me, give that ticket to the cops, and let Roth take what’s coming to him. Then you can go ahead and live your own life.

“You can try to keep a jump ahead of Roth and his men all your life, and maybe make it. You’ll live in shacks like this, you’ll never be Jo-Jo Olsen again, and you’ll have no past and no future. You’ll never be able to set-up a record because you’ll be changing your name too often.

“Or you can try to talk to Roth and join him. You can convince Roth you want to play his side of the street and that you’re a safe risk. I doubt if he’d go for it, but he might. Maybe you could kill me for openers so Roth knows he’s got a hold on you.”

I threw in that last one as a shocker. Even if he killed me, I doubted that Roth would trust him. Once Jo-Jo was a full-fledged criminal, it would be too easy for him to get in good with Pappas by telling. But he wasn’t dumb, he thought of that. In fact, he was ahead of me.

“There’s a fourth way, Mr. Kelly,” Jo-Jo said. “I could just go to Mr. Pappas and tell him without telling the police. That should put me in good with him and maybe save my father’s job.”

I nodded. “Sure, it might even work. But that would be the same as throwing in with Roth. You’d be an accessory to what happened to Roth. You’d be withholding evidence, and that’s a crime. Besides, kid, you thought of that from the start, didn’t you? That was why you ran and didn’t tell your father. You don’t want any part of that life or of Pappas.”

The boy sat there silent. I had not told him anything he had not thought himself. It was like a psychiatrist. I just made him face it more. His whole world was rising up on him like a tidal wave in a typhoon. He hated his father’s way of life, hated what his father had become, wanted to be free and alone, and yet he loved his father.

“Be a real man, Jo-Jo,” I said. “Be man enough to take your own dreams, your own way. You want a certain life, you want to do certain things. That’s the hardest road, kid. It’s easy to do what will please everyone else. It’s hard to take your own dream and follow it out of sight over the horizon like the old Vikings did.”

Jo-Jo smiled and looked up. It was not a smile of happiness or triumph or any of that. It was a smile of simple recognition.

“They did, didn’t they,” he said. “My father even lets them call him Swede when he takes their favors.”

“He lost it somewhere, Jo-Jo,” I said. “You’ve got a chance. It’s rough to accept the responsibility of your own dreams, but those old Vikings had to leave the old folks and the weak behind, too. I guess you have to hurt people to be honest with yourself.”

“I guess you do,” Jo-Jo said.

And that was all. After that it was, as the Limeys say, a piece of cake.

Even if the two bully boys had been pros they would not have had much chance. They expected to find one unsuspecting boy in that motel, and they found two ready-and-waiting men. Two well-armed men waiting for them like bearded Vikings in a cave. The two hoods walked out singing.

The police arrived and we all went down to Headquarters in Daytona Beach. We slept a nice night in the comfort of strong cell bars in case Jake Roth had any ideas of a last-gasp attempt to silence all of us. He didn’t try, and the next day we all flew North with lots of friendly guards around.

Gazzo welcomed us with open arms and a secure paddy wagon. Jo-Jo turned over the parking ticket, and the Captain had him locked up safely until Roth was accounted for. Gazzo called in Andy Pappas to identify the license number on the ticket. Pappas looked at it for a long time.

“Yeh, it’s the number of my small convertible, a black Mercury. I don’t use it much, Captain, I got a lot of cars. I keep the Mercury out in Jersey at my shore place, all the boys use it sometimes,” Pappas said very quietly. He looked at Gazzo. “You say Jake used it?”

“It figures that way, Pappas,” Gazzo said. “Kelly tells me Bagnio knows that Jake had a losing ticket on a certain horse at Monmouth the day before Myra was killed. You know we found a ticket like that in her place.”

Pappas nodded. “Jake always had a temper. Stupid, too. You say the ticket shows the car was on Water Street at five o’clock that day?”

“It does, and Jake hired some boys to find the Olsen kid.”

Pappas stood up. “Is that it, Captain?”

“That’s it for now. We’ll want you again when we pick up Jake Roth,” Gazzo said.

Pappas didn’t even smile, he was that sad. He looked at Jo-Jo, and them at me, and I almost felt sorry for him. I could see he was thinking about Myra Jones, and all at once he was like just another middle-aged man who had lost his woman through a stupid accident and the anger of another man. Only he was Andy Pappas, not just another man, and he had some pain coming.

“Thanks, Patrick,” Pappas said, “You did a good job. I’ll send you a check. The kid who got beat, too.”

“Petey thanks you,” I said. “I don’t. No checks for me from you, Andy. I made the choice a long time ago.”

“Suit yourself, Patrick,” Pappas said. He had begun to pull on those white kids gloves he affects now. But his mind wasn’t on the gloves.

“Leave Roth to us, Pappas,” Gazzo said.

“Sure,” Pappas said. As he went out Andy Pappas was smoothing his hand over his suit jacket at the spot where he used to carry his gun.