“You won't be long?” she asked. “Being in the open on the street like this makes me-concerned.” She glanced at the child quietly watching the passersby.
“The way I'll put it to him he'll give me a 'yes' or a 'no' in about thirty seconds,” Johnny promised. “An' after I get you two salted down in there I'm goin' to get in touch with Riley. I think he's another one about ready to change horses.” He opened the door and prepared to step out on the sidewalk.
“Be careful with that man,” she warned. The planes of her striking features were all highlights and shadows as she looked up at him through the open door. He thought that she had lost weight since the first night he had seen her. “Jack Riley is much changed,” she continued earnestly. “When I saw him in New York with Dick Lowell he had assumed an arrogance I never saw in Jefferson.”
“Yeah? Well, he's had a couple bumps lately that maybe reduced his hat size.” He closed the car door. “Hang on,” he said through the partly opened window, and started up the street toward the Gamecock.
A dozen yards from the cab the import of her remark struck him. He hesitated, half turned to go back, and then reversed himself. He strode rapidly up the street. Time enough later for the other. Right now he had to get those two off the street.
He entered the tavern and tried to adjust his eyes to the dimness of the interior. When he could see, he noticed that all the booth lights were out and that only a single shirt-sleeved customer stood at the bar. The Gamecock evidently did little business in the daylight hours. So much the better.
There was no one in sight behind the bar. “Rudy around?” Johnny asked the shirtsleeved man and saw in the same instant in the back-bar mirror that the man was Rudy himself. “What the hell, man?” he said in surprise. “You workin' the front as well as the back?” Rudy turned his head to look at him but said nothing. “Listen,” Johnny hurried on, “you look to me like a man who knows which side his bread's buttered on. We both know there's goin' to be some changes in this town. Do me a favor now an' I'll see to it you're not out in the cold when it comes time-”
He stopped abruptly in his sales talk. Several things had impressed him simultaneously: the complete immobility of the gambler's dark face, the almost hushed quiet in the tavern's poorly lighted recesses, the near-rigidity of Rudy's position at the bar. Johnny backed swiftly to the door.
“That's far enough, Killain!” Johnny halted in his tracks as Tommy Savino rose from a crouching position behind the bar, a small automatic level in his hand. Johnny's heart sank as Jim Daddario stood up at the opposite end of the bar and walked around it. “Over here with your friend,” Savino said with a sneering grin, motioning with the automatic.
Johnny slowly approached the bar alongside the wooden-faced Rudy and stood with his back to it. They were standing in the room's best light which came through the half-drawn drapes at the front window. Daddario approached them as Savino covered them with the automatic. Johnny saw that a silk scarf had been wound around his neck and throat Without a word the politician walked up to Rudy and punched him heavily in the mouth. “That'll teach you to even think about crossing me,” he said angrily.
Rudy's body slammed back into the bar, but he showed no sign of going down. He spat impassively but made no other move under the eye of the automatic. “He's a big, brave man, Rudy,” Johnny jeered. His hand closed on a heavy ash tray on the bar. “You should have seen him an hour ago like I did.”
“I'll get to you,” Daddario assured him.
Tommy Savino laughed as he angled out on the floor between Rudy and Johnny and the tavern's front door, the automatic unwavering. “Did you think I wouldn't go up to the penthouse because the elevator wasn't running?” he mocked Johnny. “And it was so nice of you to leave your phone number with the telephone operator.”
“So I'm stupid,” Johnny said. He took a half step out from the bar, raised his arm, and threw the ash tray between the half-drawn drapes and through the tavern's front window. The window vanished in a dull explosion of glass bursting out on the sidewalk. The automatic punctuated the noise with a sharp crack and Johnny felt a hot wind brush at his ear.
Jim Daddario rushed at Savino and knocked up his gun hand before he could fire again. “We've got to make him talk first!” he cried out. “Don't you go off half-cocked again!”
Johnny drew a shallow breath. A girl like Micheline would know what to do when she saw that plate glass come flying out into the street. She'd stand not upon the order of her going. Anything was better than having The front door opened suddenly and Savino pivoted. Dick Lowell dashed in, his white hair flying and his face scarlet. “You fools!” he burst out at Savino and Daddario. “He had them outside in a cab. They just drove off!”
“How do you know?” Daddario pounced.
“I followed them over here!” Lowell shouted. “If it wasn't for you idiots in another two minutes I'd have had-”
But Jim Daddario had recovered his wits. He silenced the mayor with a peremptory wave of his hand. “He'll know where they went,” he said with a look at Johnny. “And he'll tell us. Savino, take him inside. You go, too, Dick.” He glared at the silent Rudy. “You cover up on this. It's your neck now. Tell 'em something fermented in the window and blew out the glass. Tell 'em anything. You let me down and I'll personally see to it you never turn another trick on the east coast. Understand?” Rudy nodded and Daddario turned to the rest. “Hurry it up, everyone,” he said briskly. “Inside.”
Rudy opened the door and they entered the gambling room, Johnny in the lead with Savino's gun trained on his back, then Lowell, and finally Daddario. Rudy flipped a light switch and cold fluorescent light flooded the dark, window-less room, exposing the canvas-covered roulette wheels and the bare green tables. Johnny pulled a stool out from a blackjack table and climbed up on it, careful that a wall was at his back. Rudy closed the door and they all distinctly heard the click of the lock in the silence.
“Has he got us locked in here?” Dick Lowell demanded. His voice was hysterically shrill.
“Don't get yourself jerked off,” Savino advised him comfortably. “Jim's got a key.” The slim, dark man sat at a table two removed from Johnny's, far enough away so that Johnny couldn't rush him, the gun loosely in his hand.
“Where's your knife today, pigstabber?” Johnny gibed at him. Savino smiled unruffledly and touched his cloth-covered wrist. “That the one you used on Carl Thompson?” Johnny continued.
The smile disappeared. “He was dead when I found him, the no-good bastard,” he snarled, glaring.
“Yeah? How'd you get into the room?”
“A maid let me in, that's how!”
“Too bad your boss never believed you,” Johnny needled. “You know he's gonna toss you to the wolves when the hot breath is on the back of his neck?”
Savino flicked a glance at Jim Daddario and slid from his stool in a smoothly deadly suppleness. “You talk too damn much, Killain,” he said deliberately, stalking Johnny. “I'll fix-”
“Back off there!” Daddario ordered peremptorily. “Can't you see he just wants to get you within reach of his hands? I saw Kratz, if you didn't.”
Savino hesitated but retreated reluctantly to his chair. Johnny turned his attention to Daddario. “How you gonna feel when you're in the death cell as an accessory to a murder committed by that halfwit? You know what you should do?” He cut loose with a flood of rapid-fire Italian at Daddario.
Instantly suspicious, Savino was on his feet. “Talk English!” he hissed, and raised his gun hand as Johnny continued. “Damn you-!”
“Drop it!” Daddario roared. “I don't know what he's saying!” He glared right back at the dark man's skepticism. “If he's saying anything. Are you so stupid you can't see he wants us at each other's throats?” He spun on Johnny. “All I want to hear from you is where that cab went.”