Strongarm (Prologue Crime)

by Dan J. Marlowe

  It wasn’t.

  I tossed Cavallieri a coat that looked about the right size. He was reaching to grab it when there was a staccato brrrtt-t-t-t. Machine gun bullets pierced the truck like a tattoo needle through the skin. A red spot jumped out on Cavallieri’s forehead; his outstretched arm fell to his side. He pitched headlong across our tied-up hostages as the white coat fluttered to the floor.

  “Move it, Georgie,” Falcaro growled. He was standing within a foot of me, his powerful legs braced.

  Stutz was already moving it. My eyes were riveted on the gate that had stopped opening. We slammed off one side of it, caromed off onto the other, hesitated, and literally bulled our way through. The truck rocked violently. I slid along the floor, burning my knees. Daylight poured in through a long rent in one panel, but we staggered through in a screech of scraping metal.

  The brrrtt-t-t-t returned as we started to pick up speed. Another swarm of bees went through the truck, lower down. I was looking right up at Falcaro when little puffs of dust flew from the back of his blue denims as the machine gun hemstitched him from shoulder blade to shoulder blade. Incredibly, he didn’t go down. The only sound he made was a grunt, but the face he turned to me was sick.

  “Coat — ” he croaked. I started to get up, and was bounced down hard as Stutz whirled the truck into a right-hand turn. I banged my shoulder and head. I forced myself erect despite the truck’s careening; after the right-hand turn we were in the business district and only three blocks from Falcaro’s relay station. He was standing with both hands on the back of the driver’s seat, his knuckles white. I snatched up a coat from the pile and got one of his arms into it. He tried to push me away. “Grab-wheel,” he got out of a throat that sounded filled with ground glass. “Got — Georgie — ”

  I spun around to Stutz. He had only one hand on the wheel, and that limply. He was sliding slowly from the seat, his face like putty. His foot was still on the accelerator. The truck curved in a sweeping arc as I lunged over his shoulder for the wheel.

  I never made it.

  I had a glimpse of an acre of neon signs and plate glass looming ahead of us, and then we jumped the curb, crossed the sidewalk, and hit the building wall head-on. The noise of the crash and the bursting glass seemed to go on for a long time as the truck ripped through the front of the place.

  I was surprised to find I could move. I dug myself out from where I’d thrown myself down behind Stutz; his body had absorbed the impact. My face was wet; I passed a hand over it. It was covered with blood. I couldn’t tell whether it was mine or Stutz’s. He was motionless. Cavallieri was motionless. The guard and the driver were motionless. Falcaro was stirring, struggling in the half-on coat, trying to sit up.

  When I raised my head to where the windshield used to be. I could see we were in a bar. The truck was three-quarters inside, still upright. Part of the ceiling had come down; the air was filled with plaster, lath, and a choking dust. A fine white powder was slowly settling over everything.

  Somehow I got Falcaro to his feet and his other arm into the white coat. Where it touched his back it turned red. He was reeling like a drunken man. Only his tremendous animal vitality kept him going at all. “Come on,” I said to him, and, half-led, half-pulled him out of the truck. I was positive we were within a block of the reinforcements.

  The truck had taken out the entire front end of the bar. People were lying on the floor, groaning and bleeding. The big plate-glass window had rocketed inward like a bomb-load of grapeshot. Everything was noise and confusion. I steered Falcaro out onto the street, holding him up. His eyes were open, but they weren’t seeing anything. We drew curious glances, but we were moving against the tide; everyone was running toward the accident.

  I set my sights on the end of the block that looked a mile away and began to carry Falcaro toward it. He was weakening fast. I had to concentrate to keep his steadily increasing weight from dragging me down to the sidewalk. He was so heavy my breath felt like a sword in my throat. Finally I had to stop and rest.

  We were still only two-thirds of the way to the end of the block when two cars pulled up alongside us. Men boiled out of them. I thought we were scooped until I saw the dark, swarthy faces. They carried Falcaro to one car. Two thin, intense-looking men helped me into the second one. As we drove off I could see someone in the car ahead wrapping a jacket around Falcaro’s stained white coat.

  I closed my eyes gratefully. Black darkness moved in on me so fast it scared me; I opened them again. They closed at once in spite of me. I tried once more, and then stopped struggling. I could feel muscles I didn’t know I had relaxing as I let go all holds.

  Then I didn’t feel anything.

  When I came to I was in a bed, and half a dozen men in business suits were at the foot of it. The nearest one, a slender man with graying hair and a big-nosed hawk’s face, spoke up when he saw my eyes open. “I’m Joe Bonigli,” he said, tapping himself on the chest. “B-O-N-I-G-L-I.”

  I didn’t know any Joe Bonigli, but the voice carried authority. “Tony?” I asked when I could make my throat work.

  “He didn’t make it. He was hit too bad.” Bonigli had moved closer to the bed. He picked up my wrist. “He made us move his bed over to yours before he died.” Bonigli nodded at my wrist. On the back of it was traced a rude cross in dried blood. “His blood. His cross.” When I didn’t say anything, he continued. “What’d he promise you?”

  “A little help on a job,” I said. I looked around at the dark, alien faces; alien not in the sense of foreign, but in the sense of strange. “But I guess that’s different now?”

  The hawk face registered disapproval. “You stayed with him, man,” Bonigli said. “He made you his blood brother. Some day you’ll ask us for something.” Two or three of the dark heads nodded approval.

  I tried to think about it, and found I couldn’t. I kept drifting away into the fringe of the darkness. “Some day — ” I repeated. I thought of Risko. “Maybe I will.”

  “We would hardly say no,” Bonigli said. “Within reason.” The dark heads nodded again.

  I think I floated off before they left me.

  Three weeks later one of Bonigli’s men drove me to Chicago and parked in front of the LaSalle Hotel. He pushed a wallet and the key to the car into my hand, muttered something about it having nothing to do with the blood-brother debt, and walked away from me before I could say anything.

  Chicago had been my choice.

  Risko based a lot of his deals in Chicago, although his headquarters was three hundred miles away.

  Because I knew where to look, in a month’s time I found Joe Williams running Risko’s little errands. Williams was new, and didn’t know me. Williams was nothing; the first rung on my ladder to Charley Risko.

  When I found out that Risko was working with Michigan contractors and that Williams was spending more time in Detroit than he was in Chicago, I shifted my base to Detroit.

  I met Lynn there, and despite the difference in our ages, we struck a spark.

  But it was Risko who was on my mind.

  chapter IV

  My watch said twenty past midnight.

  I spun the rear wheels on my car getting out of Palladino’s parking lot. My mouth was dry. My hands were damp on the steering wheel. All I wanted was a race track where I could put my foot down and throw some miles away behind me. Like a homing pigeon I headed for the Edsel Ford Expressway.

  We were past Metropolitan Airport and coming up on Willow Run before my head began to take over from my foot. Willow Run was tempting; right that second I’d have loved for us to be on a plane to anywhere. In the long run it wouldn’t solve anything, though. And the terminal was probably being watched. I drove on by.

  Lynn stirred on the front seat. She probably had been expecting me to turn in. “Where are we going, Pete?” she asked, breaking the silence for the first time since she’d sat herself down in the automobile.

  It was a good question. “Chicago,” I said, not quite
as much at random as if she’d asked three minutes before.

  “Want me to drive awhile?”

  “I’ll let you know if I do.” I was too nervous to let her drive and try to sit there myself with my hands folded.

  The more I thought about Chicago, the better I liked it. I knew my way around there. I could get my breath in Chicago. I could get us organized. Get rid of the damn car that — for anyone looking for us — tied us to Pete Karma. Find an apartment for Lynn. Get my thinking straight on how I was going to go after Charley Risko. Chicago wasn’t a bad idea at all. Across Michigan to Kalamazoo, turn south on U.S. 131 to the Indiana Toll Road, then into Chicago via the Skyway. Should be able to make it in five hours. Should be able —

  “Your gas is low,” Lynn said beside me.

  My pulse jumped at the unexpected sound of her voice. It jumped higher when I looked at the gauge. I’d have let us run out completely. The knowledge didn’t do my frayed nerves any good. Neither did having to get off Interstate 94 to gas up, but there was no help for it. We were coming up on Jackson; I swung off on the exit to U.S. 127, north, away from the center of town.

  The slowed-down exit speed rumbled my nerves; instinctively I looked over my shoulder. Three more cars were taking the same turnoff, but traffic had been steady all the way from Detroit. I passed up the first lighted gas station beyond the exit and turned into the second one. “Got to make a phone call,” I said to Lynn, opening the car door after stopping at the farthest pump. “Have him fill it up with high test and check everything.”

  She smiled at me. “Where did you go to college, Pete?”

  “Ohio State,” I said before I thought. I was already out of the car; I put my head back in the window. “What the hell made you ask me that right now?”

  “I don’t seem to do so well with questions when you’re thinking about the answers,” she answered me. Her smile was steady.

  If I smiled myself, it was grudging. “Pull on ahead over to the side there when he’s finished with it,” I said. The pump area was brightly lighted, but there was only a single gooseneck lamp in the station itself. I intercepted the coveralled attendant and exchanged three dollar bills for a dozen quarters. He was a wizened old rooster with bowed legs that would have looked more at home on a horse. The phone booth was outside, in the shadow of the station. When I entered it, I left the door ajar so the interior wouldn’t light up. But the time I’d given the long distance operator the Chicago number, Lynn had passed the word to the attendant and walked around to the ladies’ room.

  “Mrs. Mahoney?” I asked the sleepy mezzo soprano at the other end of the line.

  “Yerss. Who’s this?” she demanded in her usual bellicose manner.

  I almost said Pete Karma. Mrs. Mahoney didn’t know Pete Karma. I stood there spinning my mental wheels, trying to get out of the ditch. “Bill Nelson,” I said finally. She didn’t know a Bill Nelson, either. “Jeff Randall told me to call you.” She knew a Jeff Randall, all right. “My wife and I need an apartment for a few days. Two or three rooms.”

  “Take care of you fine,” Mrs. Mahoney said as though there was nothing unusual in a six- or eight-second pause while a man remembered his name.

  “We’re on the way in now,” I told her, and hung up. It wasn’t the humid air that had placed the moisture on my forehead. It had been a stupid performance. I was going to have to learn to do my thinking before I opened my big mouth. I stood there in the booth, wondering if we should go there at all.

  A big dark blue sedan had pulled into the pumps right behind my car. As I watched, three men got out of it, big men in dark clothes. The look of them bristled the hair on the back of my neck. The biggest one raised an expensive-looking camera he had on a strap around his neck and took a picture of the rear of my car. It looked as if he’d focused right on the license plate. I slid deeper inside the booth, thankful for the shadows of the station.

  The men had their heads together in what looked like a council of war. The gas station attendant, finished with my car, bowlegged his way toward them. At a gesture from one of them he inserted the gas hose in their tank and started it going, then went around to the front and raised the hood. I noticed that the men moved to one side so the uplifted hood didn’t block their view of the station.

  Lynn emerged from the ladies’ room, walked to our car, got in and started the motor. Unnoticed by her, the man with the camera snapped her picture. When she started to pull away, they made a dash for their car. When she reparked, away from the pumps, over to one side, they halted in their rush. At another time it might have been comical. They’d be sure now they’d guessed right and hadn’t been following a lone woman. Their next move would be to look for me.

  Their car was between them and me. It was also between the attendant and me. I slipped out of the phone booth into the dimly lit station. Its walls seemed only a size larger than the booth. Even my breathing felt constricted. If they cornered me here, at least I could knock out the plate-glass window. I hoped Lynn would have sense enough to take off when she heard the noise.

  I peered through the glass at the bulky figures still on the far side of their car. They appeared to be in no hurry. I couldn’t understand the delay. Or the picture-taking, either. Unless they wanted to follow me from the station and see if I was meeting someone, before they moved into arrest me? A surge of anger mingled with my feeling of helplessness; I’d be damned if I’d play chicken-on-the-spit for them while they turned up the fire.

  Moving back from the window, I brushed against a pair of greasy coveralls hanging from a nail. I didn’t even think about it; I snatched them down and climbed right into them. They were too small, but I got the front zipped up. I grabbed an oily rag from a corner, fumbled my cigarette lighter into my left hand, and went out the station doorway, moving fast.

  All of them were still on the other side of the car from me, the attendant crouched over the gas hose as he watched for the spill-over level. I didn’t look directly at the men as I approached the front of the car, but from the corner of my eye I could see that the one facing me had a broad, pale face with high cheekbones. The face had the used-up look a lot of cops have. His hair was either blond or gray. His glance slid over my coveralls and off again as he talked animatedly to the others, turning to nod at Lynn.

  I leaned in under the raised hood and dropped the rag behind the carburetor. I touched it off with the lighter, and as soon as it flared I turned my back and walked away, toward my own car. I hadn’t taken half a dozen steps when I heard a soft phoom! as the dust and grease around the carburetor went up with the oily rag. Over my shoulder I could see a thick cloud of black smoke covering the whole front end of the car.

  The three men jerked around as if the rag had gone off in their pockets. The attendant had straightened up and was staring stupidly at the billowing smoke. Nobody was looking at me. “Fire! Fire!” the attendant bawled, dropping the hose. It spewed gas all over his shoes and a widening expanse of cement. The attendant took off at a banty-legged run for the back of the station. One of the men pointed at the gasoline flowing on the ground and barked something at the others. They all broke into a crouching run in the wake of the attendant.

  I climbed into our car. “Pete!” Lynn exclaimed. “That car’s on — oh!” Her eyes took in the coveralls.

  “Yeah,” I grunted, wheeling out the driveway and heading north. The rag would burn itself out, but if they left it there long enough it would burn away the connecting wires. I rammed the car up the road, away from Interstate 94. I didn’t know how those cops had picked us up on the highway so soon, but I damn well wasn’t going back out there to give their uniformed buddies a chance to do even half as well. For some reason the trio hadn’t been sure enough of us to make the pinch out of hand, but I couldn’t expect to be that lucky forever.

  “Did you notice those men weren’t talking English?” Lynn asked.

  I half-turned to look at her. “They weren’t?”

  “No. It was hard and
guttural-sounding.”

  “Oh. Polish, maybe. Lots of Polish cops in Detroit.”

  I pulled off the road and took a minute to shuck the coveralls and toss them into a ditch. Back under the wheel, five miles up on 127 I turned west on 50. I knew the road like the beard stubble on my face. Eaton Rapids, Charlotte, Kelly, Woodbury, Lake Odessa, past the Cold-water River, then a straight shot north to Route 16 and west again to Grand Rapids. A good road, Route 50, but not a main road. Not much traffic. From Grand Rapids we’d —

  “Pete.” I jumped at the sound of Lynn’s voice. I’d been miles away. “Where are we going now?”

  “Muskegon. We’ll jump across on the ferry to Milwaukee and drive down to Chicago.” I risked another glance at her. She was sitting quietly, watching the road, her hands in her lap. For the first time I noticed her evening gown. Have to do something about that.

  “How often do the ferries run?”

  “The schedule’s staggered. Every other day there’s a five A.M. sailing, followed by another in the late afternoon. On most of the alternate days there’s a noon sailing.”

  “But we don’t want this to be an alternate day?”

  “You’re damn right we don’t. Keep your eye peeled for a phone booth; I’ll call ahead. If we can get a cabin, this could turn out to be a good thing. It’s a five-hour trip on the ferry, and we can use the sleep.”

  She didn’t ask any more questions. Driving through a darkened Eaton Rapids, we both saw it at the same time: a lighted phone booth on the west side of the street. I pulled into the curb and opened the door and walked across to it. After an interchange with Information, the phone at the other end of the line rang and rang and rang. There was no answer. I tried to put a confident smile on my face when I returned to the car. “I forgot it was only a little after two. Too early to call. I’ll try it again later.”