He was feeding nickels slowly into a slot machine when somebody paused beside him and said acidly, “I hope you get lemons.”
He jerked around and saw Holly.
Twelve
The girl’s face was pale. There were lavender smudges under her eyes and her ponytail of bright hair was drooping and she looked as if she had been kept up far beyond her bedtime. He glanced around to see if arty-body he knew, such as Carson Smith, had been keeping her up. She was alone, though. This was a new problem. Perhaps she didn’t know about the night’s events. He hoped she didn’t; she was in this too deeply already, and he wanted her to go away and forget she had seen him.
She said, “That was a mean trick, sneaking away the minute we reached Reno. And without a word to me, either.”
“Teacher,” he said wearily, “I don’t have to attend your classes. I’ve passed the truant officer stage.”
“Yes, you’ve worked up to real policemen, haven’t you? Did you find that man?”
“Who, Frankie? I missed him.”
“Oh, did you?” she said in a grim tone. “Well, somebody didn’t.”
She knew, all right. “I wish you’d beat it and forget you saw me.”
Say It With Bullets 171
“That wouldn’t do you any good. Too many people remember they saw you tonight.”
“Have the cops got a good description of me?”
“No description of you could be very good. But they certainly must have some interesting ones. According to one I heard, you’re seven feet tall and have red eyes and came running down the stairway after the murder waving a knife in each hand. Another person claimed you were five feet six inches tall and had a scar that twisted the left side of your face into a snarl. Then a silly impressionable woman told me you’re almost six feet tall, handsome in a tough sort of way, black hair, dark eyes, heavy dark eyebrows that have a slanted rakish look. That’s quite close, except for the handsome part.”
“Where did you find out all this?”
“Why, it’s all over town! How could I miss?”
“Did any of the Treasure Trippers happen to be in that place and see me come running out?”
“None that I’ve talked to.”
“Do the cops know my name?”
“I wouldn’t know,” she said coldly. “They haven’t taken me into their confidence. Nobody has.”
“And you don’t know which description the cops are betting on?”
“No. But I wouldn’t want to be a man seven feet tall, or one who is five feet six with a scarred face, or one who looks like you, and try to get out of town. Or stay in town, for that matter.”
“You have a real knack for cheering me up.”
“Your best chance is to hope none of our crowd saw you, and leave with us as if nothing had happened. In a crowd you may get through.”
“It won’t work,” he said. “Your glamor boy knows. I refer to Side-Saddle Smith.”
“Oh no, Bill!”
“Oh yes. He chased me down and marched me to a deserted part of town and was going to shoot me and run for sheriff.”
Her gray eyes looked big and shocked. “But you’re alive and here! I don’t understand.”
“I knocked him out. I don’t understand either.”
“I simply can’t believe it. He’s so big and strong and—”
“He’s just the most wonderful guy in the world,” Bill said irritably. “But he wasted so much time counting the notches on his gun that I managed to leave a few notches on his jaw.”
“You’d better tell me the whole story.”
“All right. But you’ll have trouble believing it too.”
She listened to the mistake-by-mistake account of his evening, and then said, “Is that the whole story? Is that really it, from beginning to end?”
“No. That’s just from beginning to now. Stick around a few hours and maybe you’ll see the end.”
“I’ll have to think what to do.”
“On Fridays I do my own thinking. This is now Friday. What you can do for me is scram.”
“You won’t last twelve hours by yourself. Look at you now, right out in the open where anybody can find you.”
“This is the best place in town to hide.”
“Is it? I had no trouble finding you.”
“You have an advantage. You knew I like hiding in crowds. You knew I signed up for the Treasure Trip so I’d have a crowd to hide in. Wasn’t that the way you figured tonight?”
“Well, yes. But you’re doing a very bad job of acting like one of this crowd. You don’t show any interest in gambling. You play these machines like a man forking over his income tax. You haven’t put in a nickel while we’ve been talking. That girl attendant has been watching and is starting to wonder about us. Put something in, will you?”
He dug into his pocket and brought out a coin and tried to fit it into the slot of the nickel machine. The coin was a quarter and wouldn’t go in. He moved down the line a few machines and dropped it in a quarter machine and pulled the lever. “You can’t help me the least little bit,” he said. “Please go away and—”
“Look!” she cried.
“Are you crazy, yelling that way? You—” “Jackpot!” she screamed.
Bill turned and gave the machine a dazed look and saw the three bars lined up. He reached in his pocket for another coin to get rid of the things but just then the girl attendant brushed him aside and looked at the machine and called in a loud clear voice, “Jackpot! Number four hundred and twenty-six!”
Several people turned to look at him. He whispered to Holly, “See what you did! Everybody’s looking. If you hadn’t yelled I could have slipped another quarter in the slot and wiped that thing off.”
“That girl was watching,” Holly whispered. “She would have known something was wrong if you tried to get rid of a jackpot. Besides it’s five hundred dollars! You can use it.”
“No,” he muttered. “I never liked elaborate funerals. I—” Somebody tapped him on the shoulder. He turned, ready to go quietly, but it was a man in a neat dark blue suit who smiled at him and said, “Congratulations, sir. That is the four hundred and twenty-sixth jackpot made here since eight o’clock yesterday morning. You have won five hundred dollars. Would you like it in cash?”
He was still groggy from that tap on the shoulder. “Make it a check,” he mumbled. “Payable to William—”
Holly stabbed him with an elbow, and said quickly, “Cash would be better. Can we have it in twenties?”
“Certainly,” the man said. He brought out a wallet and counted a sheaf of currency into Bill’s hand. “Good luck,” he said, and walked away.
Bill shoved the money into a pocket. People were still looking at him enviously, and he started to move to another part of the club. Somebody else tapped him
on the shoulder; they might just as well shoot him as keep on doing that. This time it was the girl attendant.
She said, “Wouldn’t you like to put in a coin and remove the jackpot from this machine? It’s customary. Of course we will do it, if you prefer.”
He was sick of this. “I don’t have a quarter left,” he growled. The sooner he could get to another part of the building, where people weren’t watching him, the better. Holly said, “Here’s one,” and gave it to him. He scowled at her and put it in the machine and yanked the lever and walked away. Suddenly Holly began screaming on a rising pitch, like an air raid siren. He whirled. Holly and the girl attendant were staring at the machine. The girl attendant straightened up, blinking, and called in a shaky voice, “Jackpot! Number four hundred and twenty-seven!”
He walked back to them on legs that had turned into old broomstraws. “It must be a mistake,” he said thickly.
The man in the neat dark blue suit rushed up and said, “What are you trying to pull? You got paid for that one. Don’t try that stuff around here.”
Holly cried indignantly, “He isn’t pulling a thing! All he did was hit two jackpots in a r
ow.”
“I saw it,” the girl attendant said. “I don’t believe it but I saw it.”
“You’re in it with them, are you?” the man said.
People were starting to crowd around, chattering. A heavy man in a checked shirt shouted, “I saw the guy put in the quarter and pull the handle. He hit that jackpot. Don’t let them shove you around, mister.”
The man attendant stuck out his jaw and said, “These machines don’t hit twice in a row.”
“They do too!” a woman cried. “I saw a dollar machine hit twice in a row one night in Harold’s Club. Did they squawk? No.”
The man in the checked shirt grabbed Bill’s arm and said, “Make ‘em pay, mister. I’ll run out and get you a cop.”
Bill stared at him dumbly. The room was a big cement mixer whirling faces and voices around him. A cop would be swell. Pardon me, officer, but I came in here to hide out from a murder rap and these crooks won’t pay off. “I don’t want any trouble,” he muttered. “Let’s forget the whole thing and—”
The protesting howl of the crowd drowned his words. A big man in a sharply creased gray suit brushed through the crowd and snapped a few questions and then said to Bill, “Sorry this happened. Hope you’ll accept the apologies of the house.” He turned to the man attendant and said, “Pay him,” and walked off.
The attendant took a deep, counting-to-ten breath and recited, “Congratulations, sir. That is the four hundred and twenty-seventh jackpot made here since eight o’clock yesterday morning. You have won—” another quivering breath “—five hundred dollars. Would you like it in cash?”
The crowd laughed and cheered. “Yes, cash, please,” Holly said.
The man counted out the money slowly and then went up to the machine and put a hammerlock on it and wrenched it around as if he were wringing a neck. He said, “This machine is out of service,” and stood with his back to it, arms folded, glaring at Bill.
Bill shuffled guiltily away. He found Holly clinging to his arm, and he whispered, “What will you take to beat it?”
“Me?” she gasped. “Look at the luck I brought you!”
“Next time try bringing good luck. Half the people in the place are watching us.”
“Don’t be silly. This is perfect. Haven’t you ever watched a magician at work? He does something very obviously with one hand to catch your attention while he does the trick quietly with the other. It’s called misdirection. You caught everybody’s attention by hitting two jackpots in a row and nobody would think you were trying to hide.”
“If a magician gets a big enough audience, somebody in it will know how he does the trick. And baby, we got an audience.”
In fact it was a little difficult to move away from that haunted machine. People kept patting him on the back and urging him to stop and try some of the other machines. A big man in a checked shirt—the one who had offered to call the cops for him—blocked the aisle and protested, “You can’t walk off like this, mister.
You’re hot. I’ve seen it happen before. You can take this place apart. Just put a couple coins in. Come on. Just for fun.” “No,” Bill said.
“Then be a sport and stick this one in for me.” The guy forced a silver dollar into his hand and grabbed his arm and hauled him to a machine. “How about this one?” he said eagerly.
This was crazy. Still, all he had to do was hit a few lemons and that would get rid of people. He pretended to study the machine carefully and then shook his head and muttered, “No. Not this one.” He moved to the next dollar machine and put in the man’s coin and yanked the lever. The wheels spun. Click. An orange snapped into place. Thank heaven for that. He couldn’t have taken another Bell Fruit Bar. Click. Another orange. Now wait a minute, machine. Take it easy. Take—click. Another orange. He shuddered as eighteen silver dollars rattled down into the cup.
The crowd roared. It was ridiculous. He had seen crowds act this way at a prize fight when the underdog suddenly began clouting the champ all around the ring. Only this time he was in the ring. He was the underdog, the way people always were against gambling machines, and he was clipping the champ. They loved it.
Holly put her lips close to his ear and whispered, “There’s no use trying to walk out. People will follow you all over town. And you simply can’t stop playing. It will look queer. Find something to play where you won’t create such a riot.” “This is your riot.”
“Try roulette, Bill. That’s a quieter game.”
He shoved through the crowd toward one of the roulette tables. It was crowded but word of what he had done was spreading and somebody got up and gave him a stool. He changed some money into chips and began playing blindly. He wasn’t quite sure what he was doing, but nobody was screaming “Jackpot” now so probably things had cooled off. As time went on he noted with relief that his stacks of chips didn’t seem to get much bigger. Something odd had happened to the color of them, though.
He looked around and saw Holly next to him and said, “I thought I started with white chips. Now they’re all blue. How come?”
Her eyes were as big and round as the chips. She swallowed once, said huskily, “If you will keep on winning, what can you expect?”
“Am I still winning?” he said in a horrified whisper.
“The white chips were dollar ones. The blue chips are twenty dollars. What do you think? And on top of that I’ve been taking chips away and cashing them in whenever your stacks began to get too big.”
He peered over his shoulder, and shivered. Behind him rows of faces were stacked up like eggs in a crate. He said, “How much have I won?”
“I—I don’t know, Bill. My handbag is jammed with money. It’s…it’s sort of horrible, isn’t it?”
“Hah!” he said bitterly. “I haven’t been winning since I hit town. Don’t let this fool you.” He slapped a blue chip on number 30, which was the age they would inscribe on his tombstone, and watched the wheel stop with the little ball cuddled in number 30. The croupier’s hand flicked in front of him and went away leaving a couple more stacks of chips.
“Bill,” Holly said faintly, “I’m going to leave for a little while. Do you mind?”
She was running out on him. He didn’t blame her a bit. “Good luck,” he muttered. “Buy yourself a hair ribbon with that money.”
“I’ll—I’ll be back.”
Sure, she would be back, and snake eyes was a lucky number to roll in craps. What was the use of feeling bad about it; he’d wanted her to clear out, hadn’t he? He took a final look at her as she slipped away through the crowd. She wasn’t a bad kid. Probably she’d make a nice partner for a guy who didn’t mind repeating first grade the rest of his life.
He turned back to the roulette table and tried to concentrate on what was happening. It was very difficult. The moment he got things sorted out, the croupier would spin the wheel and the red and black numbers and faces and chips and lights would all mix together in a rainbow blur. He knew he was winning, though. Piles of chips teetered higher and higher in front of him and faces around the table stacked up like chips. An attendant moved in beside him and cleared a space and set up a special table for his chips. It was absurd. All that money and he couldn’t make carfare out of town.
Time went by and finally he noted something interesting. He had stopped winning. The stacks of chips were shrinking. The stacks of faces were shrinking. The table vanished from beside him. After a long time he ran out of chips. He looked around. There weren’t many people left, and they were no longer paying attention to him. He stretched rusty joints, looked at his watch. It was five in the morning.
He grinned at the croupier and said, “We had quite a hassle.”
The croupier had a face like boiled dumplings. “I only worked part of the time, Mac. You wore out the other guy. Usually it don’t make no difference to us, win or lose, but something about the way you played rattled the other guy.”
“How much was I ahead?”
“I wouldn’t want to say, Mac. Migh
t make you feel bad.”
The guy was wrong there. He didn’t feel badly at all. What they didn’t realize was that he had come off a winner. He had won quite a few hours, and a few extra hours of life were worth any amount of money you could name. Unfortunately, winning time left you with a gambler’s urge to win more, and he wasn’t quite sure how to do it. He got up and walked unsteadily toward the rear. He passed a row of slot machines and stopped to search his pockets and found a silver dollar and dropped it in a machine. The wheels clicked around. Lemons. That was the last of his money.
Somebody caught up to him and asked, “Did that break you?”
He stared at the guy through a haze and recognized the big man in the sharply creased gray suit who had settled the jackpot argument, hours ago. The gray suit looked rumpled now. “Yeah,” he said, “that was it.”
“What about that girl who was with you earlier? She took away a good hunk of change. She didn’t come back. Think she will?”
He grinned. “Do they ever come back?”
“Well, I guess you’re right. What are you going to do now?”
“I thought I’d wash up and then try to figure what to do.”
“No place to stay?”
“No. But that’s all right. You don’t have to worry about me.”
“Come up to my office,” the man said. “You can catch a nap up there. Then you can shower and shave and I’ll have breakfast sent up. I wouldn’t want you to go out like this. I’ll be honest. It would give me a bad name. You put up a swell show. Drew the biggest crowd I’ve had in a year. A spending crowd, too. I made out all right.”
He had just gambled a dollar and won a few more hours. “That’s mighty nice of you,” he muttered. He followed the man to a private office and sank down on a leather couch.
“By the way,” the man said, looking slightly embarrassed, “I hope you didn’t mind those pictures.”
“What pictures?”
“Well, I had a photographer take some shots and rush them over to the newspaper. Good publicity, see? Reno visitor wins seventy-six thousand bucks. I’ll be honest. I can’t have them running a follow-up saying you walked out broke.”
Say It With Bullets Page 13