by Jerry eBooks
“I have a piece of any money he gets from that kid. Level, I should get half. A double saw at the worst, and a double saw would get me to L.A.” Williams was talking to himself now. He waved to the fat man, pointed to his empty glass. The balloon man shook his head. Frank Worth Williams stood up.
“A couple lousy bucks and the whole damn town heating up for me so that any second a cop might knock me off. He owes it to me and I’ll get it from him if I have to cut him. I can cut a big man down. Cut him down, and cold, man.”
BUT Frank Worth Williams knew that it wasn’t fear of the police, nor a right to a twenty-dollar cut of the money in Mitchell’s wallet that ate through him like acid. It was that the fine woman, the lovely, untouchable woman, Erika London—and he had tormented himself through his terrible nights with waking dreams of women like her—would be taken tonight by Big Tom. He knew that; it was a set thing from the second the two square kids had gone into Kuppfen’s car. Big Tom might take the girl with the red-gold hair in quick violence, as he had done other girls, smashing her lips against her broken teeth with the heel of his hand so that she couldn’t scream through the blood in her mouth. He might take her hours from now with the weed smoke thick in her head as she laughed. But he would take her. The Gopher knew that.
And all he wanted was to be there afterwards, even for a minute or two. That was all he wanted.
Twenty dollars and whatever was left of the tall, fine girl. That was all he wanted, and he’d set them up.
Big Tom could have been decent, Frank Worth Williams thought in the scarlet rush of hate. But not that bull-brute with his cruelty and his laugh.
He could be cut down. Williams’ wet hand fondled the flick knife in his trouser pocket. There were pictures in his mind: a thin boy, Frankie Williams, thirteen, slashing Georgie the Greek’s face with a knife in the yard of Juvenile Hall, watching the blood come out like straight, red lines across the screaming, frightened face; Gopher Williams, seventeen, taking the money from a sobbing boy on Fillmore and then digging his knife into the boy’s upraised arm as he tried to shield his face from the point.
Go to the apartment. Talk easy and friendly until Big Tom Kuppfen wasn’t looking and then put the blade up under his ribs and watch him fall with a funny look and no laughter on his face.
Frank Worth Williams walked up the steps and into the other darkness outside, fingers tight around the smooth plastic of the knife handle, and the taste of hate bitter-hot in his mouth. . . .
In the back seat of the Buick the girl they called Honey saw the golden edge of Erika’s hair as the car passed under a street lamp.
“Blonde girl,” thought Honey. “I used to know blonde girls in school. That was a long time ago before I knew anything. I didn’t know anything about cool music, or the stuff, or men. Just boys, and they didn’t know anything, either. Long time ago. . . .
“It’ll be a ball again tonight. We better stop and get some stuff, maybe. With everybody pulling on sticks we won’t have enough for more than a couple days, maybe. Doesn’t matter. Somebody’ll find some, or somebody’ll come by. Somebody’ll hit the in-wood and shout out ‘What’s doin’, man?’ and somebody’ll swing the in-wood wide and say ‘Roll in, roller, ’cause we’re gettin’ thin, man.’
“Big Tom’ll beat the girl apple up and. if I’m the right high maybe I’ll watch. Maybe the boy apple will want to pad out and I can roll onto his watch.
“Got to get me a little heap of loot, ’cause I want to get me a pad all my own. I keep balling with Big Tom and these boys, I might get me into some trouble. Best I get me a little pad of my own.
“High up on a hill with everything shiny and bright. Maybe three rooms with my own fine hi-fi and a mile-high stack of the best, and I’ll play ’em and listen snug in my own little pad. . . .”
THE girl called Honey rolled her thoughts across the soft fog of her mind, slowly. Nothing much mattered to Honey any more. She still dressed and groomed herself carefully, maybe because some not-yet-lost part of her still tried to reach out to reality, or tried to reach back a year to the time when she was the prettiest junior in the high school across the Bay.
Erika wanted to lean over to Arthur and tell him that she was going to scream the first time they passed a police car. Scream and switch off the ignition. She knew that Kuppfen would hit her, but calmly she had decided that the risk of a broken nose was worth it, if they could escape.
She wanted to tell Arthur, but she was afraid to whisper. Kuppfen was wheeling the old car along the side streets, avoiding the main one-way routes. They passed other cars, and sometimes taxies, but the risk of a scream would be too great with anything less than a police car and its two-way radio.
Big Tom’s great hands held the wheel loosely and he was holding to a steady thirty-five. Erika knew that he would be a skillful, reckless, high-speed driver, and that if she couldn’t stop the car when she had found her chance to scream he would try some crazy ninety-mile-an-hour getaway that might end in shattered metal and shattered bodies against a building or another car.
She thought of these things almost as if she was planning a morning’s shopping, or scheduling her classes at Berkeley. This is the way it is, and these are the things to be considered. But her knees and thighs were still pressed tightly, compulsively, together and her hands were tight balls
At twenty-three, and as a man, the thoughts in Arthur Mitchell’s mind were different. He was no longer afraid, and he was angry. Angry with Erika, angry and jealous. For a moment back there on the sidewalk he had expected trouble with the big ape and his two friends. It might have been a nasty little fight. Then Erika said she wanted to go to the big ape’s place and listen to records. After dancing with him in that rat hole.
YOUNG Mitchell was seething with jealousy. A big, good-looking sleepy-eyed ape comes along and dances with the girl and she gets hot to go. The hell with her.
Good to find these things out. And this evening he’d been thinking of not waiting another year for marriage. So they would have got married, maybe, and the first big ape with eyes like Robert Mitchum and she’d go all primitive female. The hell with her.
A damn marijuana addict at that. And that suave little character they’d met was a damn phoney. A real lousy crowd to be mixed up with. But Erika has to want to go to the big ape’s apartment and listen to records.
Probably that singer, Honey, smoked the stuff. Maybe he ought to make a play for her to set Erika straight. The girl had a strange fascination, at that. She couldn’t have any marijuana habit; she looked too clean, too trim, too beautiful. Not like a college girl—maybe a very smooth, high-salaried secretary.
What’s she doing in this ratty crowd? Arthur Johnstone Mitchell had thought things out to that point when Big Tom saw the solitary man.
“Get the setup, Kicks. You and me will make it. Gage, lay the edge on our apple. He might as well learn the facts,” said Big Tom in his easy, casual voice. The car braked to a stop almost in front of the solitary man standing by the bus-stop sign, and Kuppfen pulled the hand brake as he swung open the front door of his car.
Mitchell turned and saw the lonely stranger look up in quick, aware fright as the car stopped, and then Mitchell had a problem of his own. He felt the edge of the knife like a sudden line of cold against the side of his throat, under his right ear.
“I’m hurtin’ to cut you, you lousy crumb, achin’ in my bones to cut your damn throat like a pig,” said the high, strained voice behind his head. “Move, move, you bastard, so I can cut you. Just move.”
Mitchell heard Erika scream, like something being torn, a pulsating scream, but he did not move his head. He kept it as it had been when Gage put the knife to his throat. His head was turned to the window and so he saw what happened to the solitary man.
The man had turned and started to run when Big Tom grabbed him, spun him, and hit him in the stomach. The other boy held the man as Big Tom went through his coat and trousers pockets and pulled off a wrist watch. Then, a
s the boy held the man, Big Tom slugged him in the face until the man’s head fell back.
They let him drop to the sidewalk and then they both kicked him several times before running back to the car and jumping inside.
Erika was still screaming. Big Tom slammed the door, released the hand brake, and stepped down on the gas pedal. The old Buick roared out toward the street.
Big Tom’s voice had an exultant note, but it was still soft as he spoke to Erika. “Make a silence, chick. Make a silence.”
Erika’s scream ended in a shaking sob.
The knife edge was still against his throat and he could still see in violent memory the crumpled man, the swinging feet, the terrible heels stamping down. Arthur Mitchell felt sick as if someone had kicked him in the stomach.
You read about these things, he thought, like you read about terrible car accidents and planes crashing. You read about them but they can’t be real. But this is real.
Now he realized what Erika had realized first, when she had turned around in the car and had seen Honey—Honey with the amused indifference on her lovely, perfect, heart-shaped face.
Mad dogs.
“Man hardly made no noise at all,” said Kicks from the back seat. “Like an old-time silent movie. Man just getting hit and then goin’ down so polite. Man probably never goin’ to look the same again. All new kind of face.”
“Sort of beat-up kind of face,” said Big Tom. “I got him pretty good. Going to have to wash my shoes off.”
“Can’t get your kicks without losing a few tricks,” said Harold Johnson in a singsong voice. “Was the apple holding much?”
“Couple bucks.” Kuppfen had cut across town at sixty, running two stop lights. Now he slowed back to thirty-five. The car was headed south, and they were passing through an area of new homes.
“Figure we’ll go south a bit and drop off this apple,” said Tom.
Gage had settled back but the knife was ready, and Arthur Mitchell turned his head slowly, knowing that the man behind him was watching. Mitchell was trying to think. Three men, one of them a giant, and one of them with an eager knife. Lonely avenues, well after one o’clock in the morning. Three men, vicious, cruel, deadly. Mad dogs.
The girl, Honey. She had said nothing. Neither the knife nor the brutal robbery had caused any reaction.
And his girl, Erika. The sobs had stopped and now he felt her hand reaching for his. There was a quick, hard pressure. “We’re together, we’ll make out, we’ll have to fight”—that’s what the pressure of hands seemed to mean.
CHAPTER FIVE
ARTHUR MITCHELL spent a few seconds in bitter self-anger. Getting in the strangers’ car on O’Farrell Street was stupid; he had known it was stupid when he agreed. But he had wanted to show that he wasn’t afraid of Big Tom.
He was afraid of him now.
In the back seat Gage, Duane Freeposter, ran his thumb over the edge of his knife. This was more like it, he thought. This had the real excitement to it. Maybe he would knife this big, good-looking boy tonight. He’d used his knife to frighten girls; he liked to see their eyes widen and their mouths open as they felt his knife bite a little into the soft skin of their throats. A couple of them had told him afterwards that it had been a thrill, being frightened like that. He hadn’t really cut any of them, but it was certainly more fun than the usual routine of getting them drunk or getting them to try a stick of marijuana.
The big tiling would be to do it to a man, really do it. Feel the knife slide in, and know that the boy was going to die. It sort of frightened him to think about it. If he did it he might have to leave town, or hide out.
Maybe he didn’t have the stuff to really do it. Maybe he’d chicken out when it was right there, the man there, the knife there, and his hand on the knife. Maybe he’d chicken, Duane Freeposter thought, as his mind seemed like the paper streamers in front of an electric fan. Well, at least he’d have a chance to find out.
There was a quick picture. He saw this big apple, Mitchell, going down under the big fists of Kuppfen, being kicked the way they always did when they had somebody down, and then he, Gage, was over the man, cutting him. Maybe he’d do it like that.
Why? Because he wanted to do it. There was a hate in him. People didn’t know about that hate, not even his mother. A hate like a tiger that lived within him. Feed that tiger.
Harold Johnson wished that they’d finish up so that he could get to a piano. He could riff out now; he always had the live things in his fingers when he was going great like tonight. He’d just made a little score and making a score always set him up high. Get this thing of these two things going and done, and then maybe to that flat up in North Beach where the piano was waiting for the live thing in his fingers.
Man, you’d live thin for weeks, maybe months. Some flea-box of a room on Turk, and with those hunger aches like cold rocks in the belly. You’d get afraid, and nervous. Miserable, man, and down. Nothing great, but low and low. Nothing.
Then you’d run into some fine people, and you could hang around their pad and smoke right up, with the sweet smoke making you big. The fine people would work with you, and you’d go out with them and find some guy alone and you’d chop him down and take his gold and give him the heavy boot.
Honey’d be around and nobody had a tag on her any more, least of all Honey; so if you wanted to zoo around you could zoo.
Fine, man, and up. Real great, and up.
Erika London had needed the hand pressure. She had screamed into the night and nothing happened. Maybe back there, miles back there where the man lay on the sidewalk, someone had opened a window and had looked into the dark street to see who had screamed.
But they were miles away now. going south along a quiet avenue between the ghost-gray rows of houses.
There were lonely country roads not too far away now. Back roads where the car could stop and . . . .
SHE couldn’t think like that. There must be something they could do now. This was San Francisco, and people like Arthur Mitchell and Erika London weren’t abducted by three young thugs, merciless, cruelty-crazed youngsters. There weren’t young men who would beat, rape, and even murder just for fun.
There were laws, and police, and prisons, and sociologists.
Not in this Buick moving toward the lonely roads.
She had been alone in cars with overexcited young men. The calm, remote attitude usually worked.
“Tom, Big Tom—” she began. “You’re talking, chick. I’m listening.”
“I thought we were going to your place to hear records.”
“I forgot I don’t have any place, chick. We’re going to do everything kind of more direct.”
“We don’t know you, Big Tom. We couldn’t even remember what you looked like. No matter who asked us, we wouldn’t be able to remember.”
“Cool, chick, cool.”
“Why not let us out somewhere?” Kuppfen laughed. “We’re going to have a ball, chick. A real tall ball with fun for all.”
He felt tonight as he always did when he was moving. For him there were two kinds of living, moving and not moving. Sometimes, maybe more than half of the time, he thought, he was nonmoving. Like a resting animal, sleepy, slow, not much interested.
And then there were the moving times, like now, and he felt like a truck or maybe a bus rolling down a steep grade; swinging around the curves, always going faster, knocking over other things, smashing through fences, killing people on the road, rolling faster and faster. Maybe more than a truck or a bus, more like a tank, or something armored.
His uncle had been in the armored division that was called “Hell on Wheels.” Something like that, that’s what he was when he moved. Hell on wheels. He liked that.
Kuppfen knew what he wanted when he was like he was now, in movement. At the end of the long downhill roll the big truck or bus or tank, or whatever would stop and he would get out. Get out wearing a two-hundred dollar suit and one of those thousand dollar wrist watches. Hand-cobbled
boots from London. Everything tailored for Tom Kuppfen, the wheel. The great wheel.
Lots of money, and people taking orders, smiling and bowing, and other big wheels waving hi-ya at him in the clubs and the fancy places. A new girl every night, and the girl all excited and happy because she was going to give her first to the great Tom Kuppfen.
He spun the steering wheel in quick anger, and the rubber of the tires burned on the pavement as the car lurched around a corner.
Jerking stuff. Dreaming like he did when he was nonmoving. He knew what the trouble was. The trouble is the world wouldn’t give him his chance to knock on the in-wood, the door, the big door. He was big, strong, smart, tough, with plenty of stuff on any ball, and what did the world want him to be? A flunky, a clerk, a salesman knocking his brains out.
He ought to be driving his own Jaguar now, a sweet, long XK-120, working on some big job in television or advertising. Maybe the manager of some rich business. If they gave him six months to prove himself, that’s all he asked. Give him the job, and say, “Big Tom, show us if you’re a real wheel!” He’d show them.
But the doors, the in-woods in cat jive, were always locked tight. They needed somebody in the shipping department, or peddling brushes or newspaper subscriptions.
Strong back, weak mind.
So he got his the hard way and every time he knocked a man down and robbed him and stamped on his face he was getting even. He was a robber baron, like in the old days that Morse, the history preacher, used to talk about when he was in high school.
He figured on not taking any chances with this Mitchell. It was okay now with Gage and his knife in the back seat and Mitchell knowing his throat had had it the moment he moved wrong. But up ahead, outside the car, when he gave it to this Mitchell he better take no chances.
This Mitchell was kind of big. and he looked rangy, maybe fast, too. A pretty fair end on a small college team.