“Don’t ‘baby’ me, Manny. Just don’t.”
“Well, what the hell do you want?” I was beginning to get a little sore, too. I mean, what the hell! Enough is enough.
“You know what I want,” she snapped.
“I don’t know, and I’m not going to guess.”
Her face got soft, the way I liked to see it, and her voice softened to match it.
“When’s it going to end, Manny?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The anger flared in her again. “You know damn well what I’m talking about!”
“All right, I know, and it’s never going to end. All right?”
“Who are you going to kill next?”
“Nobody,” I said. “I’m not going to ever kill anybody. I ain’t killed anybody so far. Just you remember that.”
She slapped the newspaper with the back of her hand. “This Gallagher, and the girl—”
“I don’t know anything about this Gallagher. And I don’t know anything about his damned whore.”
Betty looked at me across the table, and she shook her head slowly. “You’re a fool, Manny. You really are a fool.”
I got up, shoving my chair back so hard that it fell over. “I don’t have to take this kind of crap. I’ll be damned if I have to take it.”
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“None of your damn business!”
“To your friends? To your big Mr. Williams?”
“Oh, can it and sell it,” I told her. I slammed the door behind me and walked down to the ’48 Chevy parked at the curb. I yanked open the door, nearly ripping off the loose handle, and climbed in behind the wheel. What the hell could you do with a woman like Betty? She didn’t understand that I’d be driving a Caddy in a few years, that we’d have the best, everything. She didn’t understand that I was sick of Brokesville, that I wanted to be up there where I could wallow in the stuff. Or maybe she thought it was an easy pull, like walking up to some guy and saying, “Man, I want the big time, you know? Lay it on me.”
Sure, just like that.
Damn it, you had to fight for everything you got in this world. There was always another guy waiting to step on you if you let him. I wasn’t going to let him. Mr. Williams liked me. He’d given me the Gallagher kill when there were a dozen punks slavering at the lips for it. You could bet on that, all right.
So she rode me for it. She didn’t understand this was all for both of us — that Manny Cole would be a big man soon, almost like Mr. Williams.
I turned on the ignition, started the bus, and pulled away from the curb. She’d see. When the loot began pouring in, she’d change her tune pretty damn quick. As soon as the loot began pouring in.
Turk was riding high when I found him. He looked at me glassy-eyed for a few seconds, and then he said, “Hey, Cole. How’s it, man?”
I remembered when Turk had been a top boy in the organization. I remembered how I’d gotten close to him first, just to get near Mr. Williams. He wasn’t so top now.
“What’s the word, Turk?” I asked.
“I hear you ventilated Gallagher nice,” he said. “Real nice.”
I looked around over my shoulder. “Hey, man,” I said, “get off that. Cool it fast.”
“Sure, Cole, sure.” The dreamy look came back into his eyes again. He’d been main-lining it for a long time now. I felt sorry for the big slob. He’d been a good man long ago. Before he hit the skids and before he met heroin. Now he was getting slop details, rustling chicks for the big boys when they wanted them, stuff like that. He had a double-tread of puncture marks on his arms and was starting the second tread on his legs. This was the guy I’d looked up to a few years back.
“Where is everybody?” I asked.
“Huh? What was that, Cole?” The glassy eyes opened, sunken deep in the once-full face.
“The boys. Where?”
“Oh, yeah. Down at Julie’s, I think. Yeah, Julie’s got a game going.”
“Thanks, Turk.”
“Not at all,” he said politely. He coughed then and added, “You got a fin, Cole? I can get a couple caps for a fin, and I ain’t been fixed since the Ice Age.”
I dug into my wallet, opened it. I didn’t let Turk see that all I had was a fin and a deuce. I pulled out the fin and laid it on him. “Here, man,” I said. “Blow your skull.”
“Well, thanks, Cole. Thanks a million. Hey, thanks.”
I left him staring down at the fin, and hopped into the Chevy, heading for Julie’s dump. Julie was close to the top, and he’d started out the way I had. Mr. Williams liked him, too, but since I’d come around, Julie wasn’t getting many of the big jobs any more. I figured Julie for maybe another year or two, and then good-by. You had to stay on your toes all the time, and Julie had dropped his guard when he’d let me squeeze my way in. So, Julie was on the way out.
I parked the car between Second and Third and walked down to Julie’s. He still wasn’t living big, but he hadn’t played it right. He was from nowhere, Julie, and I wondered how he’d ever got so close to the top in the first place. I rapped on the door, saw Cappy’s eye appear in a crack the width of a dime.
“Oh, Cole,” he said.
The door swung wide, and I stepped into the room. “Hello, Cappy. How’s it going?”
“Comme ci comme ça,” he said, pulling his face into a grimace.
“Where’s the game?” I asked.
“In the bedroom. You playing?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said casually. “Any action?”
Cappy shrugged his narrow shoulders. “I ain’t playing,” he said. He slumped down into a chair near the door, and I headed for the bedroom. When I walked in, the guys at the table, both sitting and standing, looked up.
“Hey, Cole! Look, guys! It’s the big kid himself.”
“How goes it, man? Give us all the cool jive, mister.”
“Hear you punched some holes last night!”
“Nice work, Cole.”
That’s the way the talk was drifting until Julie cut in.
“We playing cards or greeting punks?” he asked.
The boys all shut up, as if Julie had clamped a big hand over all their mouths. I looked at him across the table. He was holding his cards out in a tight fan, and his black brows were pulled together over beady brown eyes. He had a thin, curving nose and a cigar pointed up from his lips, tilting so that it almost touched his nose. He didn’t look at me. He kept staring at his hand while the boys waited for me to say something.
“What was that, Julie?” I asked.
“You heard me, Cole. You’re disrupting the game.”
“Seems you’re the only one I’m disrupting, Julie.”
He looked up then, his brows lifted. Slowly and carefully, he put his card fan down on the table. “Yeah,” he said, “maybe it’s only me you’re disrupting.”
“Well, you know what you can do about it, Julie.”
“And what’s that, Cole?”
“You can shove it up your—”
He backed away from the table so fast that I didn’t know he’d moved for a second. He walked around the players quickly and rammed a big hand at me, wrapping it in the lapels of my jacket.
He brought his other hand back across his chest and then sideways, catching me across the face with his knuckles. My head bounced back, and then his forward slap caught me on the other cheek.
That was all I needed.
I brought my balled fist forward in a short, chopping jab to Julie’s gut. He was surprised, all right. He was so surprised that he dropped my jacket and was reaching under his armpit when my other fist looped up and exploded on the point of his jaw. His lips flew open and the cigar flopped out of his mouth. He still had his hand on the bunny-in-the-hutch, so I picked up my knee fast and rammed it into his groin. He folded over like a jackknife, and I brought my fist down on the back of his neck hard, hard enough to crack a couple of vertebrae. He pitched forward like a drunken sailor, kissed the floor with his face, and then sprawled out without a care in the world. Julie was out.