The rumrunner’s electric power winch started to whir. The first fifty cases, already loaded into the rope net sling, came up fast out of her hold. The winchman swung them over on the flexible steel cable, lowered them quick through the cruiser’s open hatch. Everybody had the transfer down pat. It didn’t take more than an hour to load and unload all six slings.
“Smooth as silk,” the kid said when Doolin had us underway again. “But I still kind of wish we’d run into hijackers. Make a swell chapter for my book.”
“You and your goddamn book,” Angelo said.
We made short work of the Bringle’s Cove transfer too. Two hundred cases went onto the Graham, hidden by the produce crates. We took the other hundred in the chicken truck, including the twenty of twelve-year-old Scotch that somebody up here in the county had ordered special. The Graham headed northeast to Santa Rosa to make its delivery, we drove south to Constantine’s chicken ranch outside Petaluma. Constantine would handle local distribution from there.
In Angelo’s flivver, on the way to the Sausalito ferry, the kid started chattering again about the book he was writing. Hooch this, Hooch that. And some more about how all of us were in it under made-up names.
It was early evening by the time I got to the Bay Area Distributors warehouse, on the Embarcadero down by Islais Creek. Renzo’s operation was big, the biggest in San Francisco and the North Bay. More than four hundred on his payroll, contracts with haulers and distributors and homegrown suppliers of cheap jackass brandy and dago red. He ran it all from here, but he had another storage warehouse in South S.F. and a third up in Santa Rosa. All of them were packed with barrels of wine, crates of the jackass brandy, bonded Canadian Club and the best Scotch and Irish whiskey. Just about any liquor anybody could want, even some fancy cordials from France and Italy.
None of the warehouses had ever been raided. The fix was in with the city coppers and the county sheriffs here and up north. A few of the Feds, too. Not everybody’s got his price but plenty enough do. We’d had a little trouble with a couple of rival gangs trying to muscle in, but we handled them the way we handled the hijackers. Everything was running smooth now, smooth as silk like the kid said. But you still had to be careful. Real careful. You couldn’t afford to take chances.
Stairs at the far wall led up to Renzo’s office. I could smell the wine in there as I climbed up. Most of it was good, pre-Prohibition Burgundy from Sonoma and Napa counties, but there was plenty of the cheap stuff too. You couldn’t smell it from outside. The walls were thick concrete with wood facing. The warehouse was like a fortress.
Renzo’s office was blue with the smoke from the Toscanelli stogies he smoked. Why he liked those stinking black tule roots I couldn’t figure. You had to drag hard just to get smoke from one end to the other and even then you couldn’t get enough to inhale.
“Hey, Joey,” he said. “How’d it go up the coast?”
“Like usual. Clean operation.”
“Good, good. So how come you don’t look happy?”
“I think maybe we got a problem.”
“Yeah? What kind of problem?”
I told him what kind.
He fired up another Toscanelli while he thought it over. Then he said, “Yeah. Yeah, I see what you mean. Probably nothing to get worked up about, but we can’t afford to take chances.”
“Just what I was thinking. You want me to handle it?”
“You’re my right hand, Joey. I wouldn’t trust nobody else.”
The next night I called up Angelo and had him come get me in his flivver. He didn’t say much when I told him what we were going to do. Good boy, Angelo. Reliable. Did what he was told and didn’t ask questions.
We picked up Bennie Sago at his apartment on Fell Street. He said when he climbed in, “So what’s happening tonight? Another coast run?”
“No,” I said. “We got some business down in Brisbane.”
“What kind of business?”
“You’ll find out when we get there.”
We headed south out of the city. “How’s that book of yours coming?” I asked him.
“Real good. I’m telling you, Joey, Hooch is gonna be better than Little Caesar, Red Harvest, all the rest. It’ll sell like hotcakes, then get made into a talking picture. Make me famous.”
“Me and Angelo and Renzo, too, huh?”
“Oh, sure. Only nobody’ll know it but us. We’ll all have a big laugh over that, right?”
He was primed now. He kept flapping his gums while Angelo swung us away from the Bay and up into the Brisbane hills. About how swell Hooch was, and did Angelo and me want to borrow some copies of this Black Mask so we could see if he wasn’t right about Hammett and Daly and the other hard-boiled writers. I quit listening after a while. He didn’t care. He went right on jabbering to Angelo.
We were up into the thickly wooded part of the hills, nobody around, no lights anywhere, when he finally ran down. “Say,” he said, “where we going, anyhow? This road’s nothing but a fire trail.”
I didn’t say anything. Neither did Angelo.
“Joey? How much farther we got to go?”
“This’ll do right here,” I said, and Angelo pulled the flivver over to the side. “Get out, Bennie.”
“Here? What for?”
“Get out. Stand in the lights.”
He got out, went around to the front. Stood there looking around, then at me with this puzzled look on his face. Punk kid wasn’t even half as smart as he thought he was. He didn’t have a clue what was happening until I showed him my rod.
His eyes got big then, round and white as eggs in the headlights. “Christ, Joey, why? Why?”
“That book of yours,” I said. “That’s why.”
“Hooch? No! No, wait, listen to me—”
“Too late for that.”
“Please, Joey, please, you got to listen!”
I shot him twice, then went over and put a third round into him to make sure. I’ll give him this — he hadn’t tried to beg or run. He stood there and took it like a man.
I opened the door to the Fell Street apartment with the key I’d taken off Sago’s body. It wasn’t much of a place and it didn’t take Angelo and me long to search it top to bottom, every corner, every nook and cranny.
There were a bunch of books in a little case, the ones the kid had talked about and a few he hadn’t. A stack of Black Mask magazines and some other pulps too.
But there wasn’t any Hooch.
No manuscript pages, no notes, nothing at all written down. The kid hadn’t even owned a typewriting machine.
“He never wrote a word about us and the operation,” Angelo said. “Damn fool was just trying to make himself sound important. You didn’t need to bump him after all.”
“Yeah, I did. Can’t trust a punk even thinks about doing something like that.”
“Well, you and Renzo don’t have to worry about me writing a book. I ain’t ever even gonna read one.”
“That’s playing it smart,” I said. “All them things do is put ideas in your head.”
Just Looking
He hadn’t had a woman in so long, he’d started carrying a picture of his right hand around in his wallet.
Everybody he told that to, the guys he worked with at Mossman Hardware, his buddies at the Starlite Tavern, thought it was a pretty funny line. He laughed right along with them. But at night, alone in his two-room apartment, he didn’t think it was so funny anymore. Thing was, it was the plain damn truth. He’d only had a couple of women in his entire life — thirty-four years old and been laid just twice, both of those times with hookers, last time had been over eight years ago. He was just too embarrassed to get undressed in front of some hard-shell whore in a lighted room, have her look at him naked and see the contempt and laughter in her eyes. Too painful, man.