“Ah,” she said when I walked in, “a gourmet lunch.”
I was pleased to see that she had the gun in her hand when I walked in. She had picked it up when she heard what sounded like the key in the lock.
“Just to be on the safe side,” she explained, putting the gun down when she saw it was me.
“Good girl.”
I was glad that I had scared her sufficiently enough to make her careful.
“How did it go?” she asked, emptying out the Charles & Co. bag on the table and laying out the spread.
“Okay, I guess. Trelayne showed up. I don’t know for sure about Max or about Hocus. I couldn’t spot either one.”
I’d explained it all to her the night before, just before she went to sleep in the bedroom and I went to sleep on the couch. This was done by unspoken agreement, and speaking for myself it wasn’t all that easy to forget that she was just a room away.
“Suppose that happens in the Forum?” she asked. “Suppose you think Hocus and his partner are there, but they’re not?”
“Please,” I told her, giving her a pained look, “don’t even think it.”
“Well, I wish you would think about it and reconsider,” she told me.
“Julie, we went through this last night; let’s not go through it again.”
She didn’t speak after that, but she started banging things around as she prepared lunch, then banged a sandwich down in front of me.
“Geez,” I said, half aloud, “it feels like we’re married.”
She whirled around on me and snapped, “I wish—” and then caught herself. She stayed frozen like that for several seconds, and then the tears started and she ran from the kitchen.
“What did I say?” I said to nobody.
I got up and walked from the kitchen, intending to go to the bedroom and talk to her, but just then the phone rang. I detoured to the instrument and picked it up.
“Yeah, hello,” I snapped.
“Did I call at a bad time?” Hocus asked.
“I assume you were there,” I told him.
He laughed and said, “Couldn’t see us, huh?”
“As long as you saw me I’m satisfied,” I countered.
“Every step of the way,” he assured me. “I got the okay all around,” he said then, “so we’ve got the Forum for tonight.”
“Good. I’ll tell Trelayne when he calls me later.”
“Can we count on him?” he asked.
“Hey, he’s the one whose balls are in a vise,” I reminded him. “He’ll be there.”
“Okay. Here’s how it will work. The door on the Eighth Avenue side will be left unlocked. We’ll all get in that way.”
“Just make sure you’re there. I’ll be terribly disappointed if you don’t make the party.”
“You hold up your end, and we’ll hold up ours. Uh, are you gonna bring that gun?”
“Yes,” I said straight out without hedging.
“Yeah, well, if you have to fire it, watch where you’re firing, huh?”
“I’ve fired a gun before, Hocus,” I told him, not bothering to add that it was about two years ago when Eddie had been trying to get me to qualify.
“Yeah, well just watch it. Okay?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Okay, what time are you going to set this thing up for?” he asked.
Here came the lie.
“Nine-thirty,” I told him. “And don’t be funny, okay?” I added hurriedly, to make it sound good. “Like waiting a little extra? I don’t relish taking this guy on again.”
“Don’t worry,” he told me, “the timing is going to be just right.”
“See you tonight,” I told him.
I hung up the phone and found Julie staring at me. I hadn’t heard her come back into the room.
“I thought you said it was going to be at nine,” she said.
“Did I?” I asked. “I must have made a mistake.”
“Yeah,” she said, staring at me hard, “a big one.”
Chapter Fifty-One
The sex was very good, but it was also very desperate.
Again, we agreed on something without even speaking to each other. She went back into the bedroom and I followed. She had dropped the robe to the floor and was waiting for me by the bed. She was so incredibly lovely that she took my breath away, and touching her, kissing her, was just like dying and going to heaven.
When it was over we lay there side by side, catching our breath and holding hands.
“I’m so scared,” she told me.
“I know. I am, too.”
“This has become so much more than I ever thought it would,” she told me, and I wasn’t sure if she meant the problem we were facing that began with Benny’s arrest or the relationship between us.
“It’ll be over soon,” I promised.
“Yes, but will you be alive when it is?”
I rolled on my side and looked down at her lovely face, clouded with fear and told her, “I’ll be alive. I’ve got a lot to live for, you know?”
“What about Benny?” she asked.
“I’m still hoping to prove him innocent,” I told her.
“But what will we do when he gets out?”
“We’ll talk to him, Julie. That’s all we can do.”
“I don’t want to hurt him, Jack, but I love you, and I’m afraid of losing you,” she told me. She threw her arms around me and I cradled her sleek, firm body in my arms while she cried. She cried because she was afraid of hurting Benny and afraid that I’d get hurt—or worse.
Benny would have to understand that we never meant for this to happen.
And Max the Ax would have to understand that there was no way in hell I was going to let him do me any further harm, not while I had this woman waiting for me to come back in one piece.
Chapter Fifty-Two
It was odd being in the Forum when the lights weren’t all on and the seats weren’t all filled. I had a definite “ghost town” type of feeling, which didn’t help my nerves any.
The Eighth Avenue door—just off Thirty-third Street—had been left unlocked as promised, and I had apparently been the first to arrive—unless the Ax was somewhere up in the seats. The only light that had been left on was shining a beacon down on the boxing ring. It would have been impossible for me to see the killer, even if he were sitting in one of those seats.
I had been referring to Max Collins several different ways: as the Ax, as Max, as the hit man; but what he was was a killer, and that’s how I thought of him now. As long as I kept telling myself that he was a killer, I was sure to act with the proper caution and not try anything heroic.
I stayed by the entrance to the Thirty-third Street runway, not wanting to get near the ring, in case the killer was waiting to catch a glimpse of me. I didn’t think he’d pull anything until Trelayne showed up, but I didn’t want him locating me, nevertheless.
I was there about fifteen minutes when I started to worry about the others not showing up. What if the killer had followed Trelayne instead of me from Grand Central Station and had already killed him? What if he was waiting by the Eighth Avenue door to take care of Trelayne right there when he tried to get in?
I put my hand up to my head, and when I encountered the bandage over my eye it occurred to me that a flash of white at the wrong time could cost me my life. I pulled the bandage off, and as it nestled in my hand something else occurred to me, too . . .
I dropped the bandage to the floor as I heard a sound from behind me. It was a door, first opening, then closing, followed by the sound of hesitant footsteps.
I flattened myself against the door to a maintenance closet and waited to see who it was. As the footfalls got closer, I reached inside my jacket and came out with the nine-shot automatic.
The light shining down on the ring also made for a certain amount of light coming through the doorway and into the tunnel I was in. There was just enough so that I’d be able to recognize who was approaching once he came
from the shadows into that dim shaft of light.
As the man who called himself Trelayne came into view, I stepped from the doorway and allowed him to see me and the gun. His eyes widened and his mouth opened as if to yell. I clamped one hand over his mouth and prodded his temple with the gun I was holding in my other hand.
“When I take my hand away,” I told him, “if you make one sound I’ll blow what little brains you have away. You got it?”
He gave me a panicky nod and I removed my hand.
“Jesus Christ, Jacoby, what the hell is wrong with—” he began, but he clammed up when I prodded him with the gun again.
“If you want to talk,” I told him, “I’d advise you to keep it under a whisper.”
“Are you crazy?” he whispered desperately.
“No, as a matter of fact I’ve just come to my senses,” I told him.
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about you, pal. I don’t know what your real name is, but it sure as hell isn’t Trelayne. In fact, I don’t even think I’ve heard from the real Trelayne after that first call.”
“You’re crazy,” he said again, obviously unable to think of anything else to say.
“No, I’m right,” I told him. “I should have seen it when you called me and we set up the meet at Grand Central Station. You asked me how you would know me? Well, the real Trelayne didn’t ask me that because he had been at my fight and he knew what I looked like. No, you’re a phony and your job was to lure me somewhere so the man from Detroit could take me out. He must be afraid I’ll find the real Trelayne first, so he figures to get me out of the way and eliminate the problem. Well,” I added, prodding him with the gun again, harder, “this time I’m going to eliminate him—and you, too, if you don’t do just what I tell you to do.”
He flinched from the pressure of the gun and said, “W-what do you w-want me to do?”
“Tell me what the plan is?”
“I-I’m supposed to make some noise, you know, to tell him where we are. The next move was his.”
“Does he have a gun?”
“Shit, no, man, he’s a blade man.”
“Now the rest of it,” I told him, poking him hard in the temple with my iron finger.
“Man!” he protested.
“This guy’s a pro, pal,” I said. “We both know he’s got to have a backup plan.”
His shoulders slumped and he said, “I was to try to get you out by the ring.”
“And he’d take it from there, right?”
“Yeah, right.”
Remember, I told myself, this guy’s a killer, but I went ahead and did it anyway.
The ring was my turf, not his. If he wanted to challenge me out there, who was I to turn him down? Besides, once I drew him out into the open, Hocus and his partner would close in, anyway.
“Okay, pal,” I told the bogus Trelayne, “you’re going to walk me out to the ring and stay ahead of me all the way. Make a move I don’t like and I’ll put a hole in you. Got it?”
“I got it.”
“Let’s go.”
I took the gun away from his temple and pushed him ahead of me. I put the automatic away in the holster and started after him. I knew that if he decided to take off I wasn’t about to shoot him in the back, but he didn’t know it. He wasn’t the one I wanted, anyway. Besides that, if he took off he wouldn’t get past the cops.
As we approached the ring he started to slow down and I told him, “Keep going, friend.”
“That’s far enough, friend,” a voice said from behind me.
I was about to turn when I felt a point of cold steel touch the side of my neck.
Shit! He must have had me spotted the whole way! And I walked right into his lap.
“Get going, Pop,” the voice told the old man, and the phony man-from-the-fifth-row didn’t waste any time, he just took off.
“This was a dumb play,” I told the man behind me. I assumed he was Max the Ax from Detroit. “The cops are all over the place.”
“You mean they were supposed to be,” he told me, reaching around me and taking the gun from my holster. The knife didn’t move from my neck.
I didn’t like the way he sounded, much too confident. The old man was his plant, which meant that he knew this was supposed to be a trap, but he came anyway.
“You know,” he told me, “personally I don’t think you’re worth shit, but my principal, he thinks you could be trouble, so he wanted me to take you out. As far as I’m concerned, you’re just an amateur, and not even a talented one, at that.”
“So go ahead,” I told him, “take me out . . . from behind. So far you’ve killed a helpless junkie, an old man, and a woman,” I told him, referring to Lucas Pratt, Corky Purcell and Louise, the black hooker. “Killing me from behind ought to be right up your alley.”
“I don’t have to take care of you from behind, punk,” he told me, and as soon as I felt the point of the knife move away I lunged forward, beneath the bottom rope and into the ring.
I stood up and backed away to the center of the ring, wondering if he’d decide to use my gun.
“And what about the private eye you killed?” I asked him. “What about him? Did you kill him from behind, too? How come you didn’t use your knife on him, huh? C’mon, big man, come on into the ring and get me, or are you afraid to face someone who’s facing you?”
I was so scared my knees were threatening to start shaking, but I hoped he couldn’t see it.
He stood there with my gun in one hand and his knife in the other, his face turning red as I taunted him. I was finally getting a good look at him, and he didn’t look like the coldblooded killer I knew him to be. He was about five nine, with glasses, short-cut brown hair and a brown mustache. He looked like a college professor, not a killer.
“C’mon, man,” I called to him. “As far as I’m concerned, you don’t look like a hell of a lot, either. You didn’t do all that great that night under the West Side Highway, did you? I fired one shot in the air and you took off like a scared rabbit. And at the gym you didn’t even have the guts to make a try for me, although you were brave enough to torture an old man. C’mon, make up your mind,” I shouted, wishing he’d either use the gun or throw it away.
He stared at me with ice-cold eyes and finally made his decision. The hand holding the gun began to move, and for a moment I thought he was going to use it on me; but that wasn’t his intention. He held it up for me to see, then threw it away into the seats.
“I don’t need a gun to handle you, friend,” he told me. He approached the ring, jumped up on the apron and climbed between the ropes.
I was about to fight the biggest match of my life.
We both assumed our stances, me with my left out, he in a crouch with the knife held steady in front of him. I began to circle and he began to stalk me. I thought I needed the psychological edge of striking first, so I threw a left jab that caught him on the jaw, startling him but not doing much damage. Hell, it didn’t even knock his glasses off.
I kept circling and he didn’t know how to cut the ring off on me, so he just kept following me. I threw a few more tentative jabs, trying to set him up for a right. I didn’t want to throw the right until I knew I could do some damage, because I knew that as soon as I threw it the stitches on my right side were likely to bust wide open.
He kept the same grim expression on his face the whole time, and his eyes never left mine. He was content to let me jab, and didn’t try for me once during the first few minutes. It scared me to think that maybe he was just playing with me.
We must have circled that way, me jabbing and he just keeping up the constant pressure, for the equivalent of three rounds, only I was used to having a full minute of rest between rounds. Also, I’d been eating kind of good the last week or so, and it had started to catch up with me. He must have been in pretty damn good shape, because he wasn’t even breathing hard, while my chest was starting to burn a little from the effort. I knew somethin
g was going to have to happen real soon, or he was going to be able to cut me up at his leisure.
And where the hell was Hocus? What was he doing? Sitting up in the stands eating popcorn and enjoying the fight?
I decided to take a chance. The next jab I threw I stepped in a little closer to make it more solid. It connected, but he dropped his head and took it on his forehead, at the same time slashing at me for the first time with the knife. The tip of his blade tore into my left forearm and opened a three-inch gash which started to bleed freely. I jumped back out of his range to assess the damage and also the effectiveness of my blow.
As I jumped back, he was juggling with his glasses and managed to keep them in place on his face; but until he had the glasses securely in place on his nose, for that moment his face had lost its stony composure. There was a welt on his forehead where my blow had landed, but the blow he had struck was by far the most telling. The blood was dripping to the canvas, and if I tried to use my right hand to staunch the flow, I’d be fighting one-handed. I decided to try and ignore the burning pain on my left forearm and concentrate on the fight at hand.
I decided to take advantage—or try to take advantage—of the one and only weakness I had detected during the fifteen minutes or so we had been in the ring. I stopped circling and began to back myself into one of the corners. Something was going to give this time, one way or the other, because I was trying to lure him into the corner. If my plan didn’t work, then I’d be trapped in the corner, at the mercy of his blade.
A wolfish grin began to form on his mouth. He must have assumed that I was too tired to keep circling and that once he had me in the corner I was all his.
When I felt the ropes against my back I tried to look like I was totally exhausted, which didn’t take a whole lot of acting. The sweat was running down my face and off my chin like a faucet. I allowed my knees to buckle a little, then took a deep breath and dropped my hands, just enough to suck him in. It took him a split second to decide to go for the kill as my hands dropped. During that split second I threw a vicious right that caught him coming in.
Eye in the Ring Page 19