The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK

by Fletcher Flora

  Slumped in the seat, he tried with desperate urgency to figure a way out. The old truck rattled and popped, fighting the hills. After a short drive, Luke wheeled it south onto a road that was a little wider, a little better graded. He handled the wheel in dour silence, the .45 rammed casually under the belt of his jeans.

  “How far is it?” Dickie asked.

  It hurt him to talk, the pain as actual as if he had tonsillitis. Beside him, Luke grunted.

  “Up the road a piece. Not far.”

  They climbed a hill, rattled down into a hollow, climbed again. They crossed the crest, and the road dropped away, the truck plunging down with a fusillade of exhaust explosions.

  Then, down in the hollow, the glaring spot leaped up, sweeping the truck. In the light, barely discernible, stood a man with a rifle in his hands. Luke cursed viciously, jamming brakes, and Dickie, acting at last under the grim compulsion of his last chance, tore at the door handle beside him and dove out sprawling onto the rocky road. Clawing, scrambling for the ditch in the blinding bath of light, he was aware of a confusion of sounds, shouts and explosions in a discord of violence. Something struck his shoulder, a dull impact, prompting the crazy thought that someone had hit him with a rock. He was slammed over into the ditch, rolling, and he was amazed at the force of so slight a blow.

  On the road, stark in the merciless light, a guy who had everything to lose however he played it, Luke stood spraddle-legged and emptied the old Colt of its six bullets. He did it very deliberately, with spaced timing of crashing detonations, as if he were counting a long second between every pull on the trigger. When the chamber had revolved to a dead shell, he let the gun drop to the road, and stood for a moment looking down at it. Then his long body folded in the middle, and went over gently onto his head and shoulders, spinning off into his back with a violent spasm of released muscles.

  At that moment, Dickie was up and running. He ran blindly, relying on a sort of desperate instinct to get him back to the farm where Rose was waiting. The anesthetic of shock was gone from his smashed shoulder, and the pain was now there, growing steadily greater, eating its way like a slow fire into the rest of his body. He held the shoulder crumpled forward, the forearm below it clamped tight across his stomach.

  Staying away from the road, cursing and sobbing in a waste of precious breath, he ran and fell and scrambled up to keep running, and after an eternity, by a great miracle, he climbed to the farm and stood swaying in the kitchen, looking at Rose in a swirling red fog.

  “God,” she said. “Oh, God.”

  He sat down very carefully in a chair at the table and let his head fall forward onto his good arm.

  He began to cry again, sobs of pain and exhaustion, the crying of a stricken child. At last he raised his head and formed whispered words.

  “Luke’s dead,” he said. “He was just like you said. Like a crazy man.”

  She didn’t answer, and he saw then that her eyes were not on his face, where they should have been, but rather lower on his body. He looked down and saw that his entire shirt front was soaked with blood. The fear in him was like a swelling icy wind as he became aware for the first time that he might really die.

  “The blood,” he whispered. “Stop the blood.”

  Apparently she didn’t hear. Her eyes raised slowly, and the red fog at that moment seemed to drift out of his vision, so that he could see the eyes clearly—the compassionless calculation in them, the cold consideration of personal advantage. The advantage of the green cache unsplit.

  He was filled, suddenly, with an intense, wild pity for himself. Strangely, on the edge of death, he was homesick.

  And it was a long, long way to Kansas City. A way that grew longer by the second, stretching toward infinity.

  HEELS ARE FOR HATING

  Originally published in Manhunt, Feb. 1954.

  About a week before the date of his fight with Emmet Darcy, Jackie Brand went home one evening to find his wife Peg at the kitchen table with a pencil in her hand and a big sheet of paper covered with figures in front of her. Peg was a little gal, maybe five-one in heels and about ninety pounds sopping wet, but every inch and every pound collaborated to produce a quality product. Her hair was pale gold, almost white, and it had the same soft glow that got into her eyes when she was excited about something.

  When Jackie came in, Peg looked up at him and said, “I drove out on Highway 66 today. That little motor court is still for sale. I talked to the owner.”

  “How much?” Jackie asked.

  “Twenty-five thousand. Ten would finance it.”

  “How much we got in the bank?”

  “About a G.”

  “Okay, a grand. My guarantee for the Darcy brawl is five more. Expenses will whittle that. You see, baby?”

  She crumpled the paper up into a little ball. “Sure, Jackie, I see. I was just passing the time, anyhow. I’d better fix you something to eat.”

  That’s the way she was. Never any bellyaches, even though she’d learned quite a while ago that she and Jackie weren’t going much of any place. Jackie was a pretty fair middleweight, as middleweights go, but pretty fair isn’t good enough. Pretty fair means you’re just there for the really good boys to knock over on the way up. In the meantime, you earn a living. You hang around on the edge of Big Time, and you earn a living.

  The longer Jackie looked at Peg that night, the worse he felt. After supper, he couldn’t stand it any longer, so he got up and said he was going for a walk. He decided a beer might make him feel better, and he went down the street a few blocks to Happy Sam’s Bar and Grill. Happy Sam’s was a place where a lot of minor sports characters hung out, and when Jackie went in, there was Benny Lester, Emmet Darcy’s manager, sitting at a table with a bottle of Blatz. He lifted a thumb, and Jackie went back.

  “Hi, Jackie,” he said. “Sit down and have a brew.”

  Jackie sat down, and Happy Sam carried another Blatz over from the bar. Benny sat watching Jackie until he’d had a couple of big swallows from the bottle. Benny was a guy who could bide his time, like a spider in a web. He even looked like a spider. Thin and gray, with a wizened face.

  “I been thinking about your match with Emmet,” Benny said. “The kid’s a comer, but he’s green. He needs experience. You been around a long time, Jackie. You know the tricks, and you got a good right. It’s mostly that right that worries me. Green as the kid is, he might walk into it.”

  “Maybe I’m supposed to send flowers,” Jackie said.

  Benny killed his Blatz and wiped his mouth with the back of a dry hand, looking into the empty bottle as if he’d lost something there. “Time comes when a guy ought to check out, Jackie. It doesn’t pay to hang around after hours. A guy can quit and get into something soft if he’s got a bundle.”

  “What’s a bundle?”

  “Ten grand, maybe.”

  Jackie laughed. “You got ten grand to spend?”

  Benny lifted his shoulders. “Not me, Jackie. There’s a guy interested who spends ten grand like nothing. In an investment like this, he wouldn’t even think twice.”

  Jackie thought of Peg and the way she was quietly breaking up inside with the wanting of something she couldn’t have. A little motor court. A stinking little outfit out on 66. It wasn’t much to ask, after the years she’d given. Add ten grand to the five grand guarantee, it made a lot of things possible.

  Jackie finished his beer. “Talk’s cheap,” he said. “Talk’s not worth ten grand. Not your kind, anyhow.”

  Benny leaned forward, his gray little face quiet and closed. “How about Jay Paley? You figure his talk might be worth ten grand?”

  Jackie traced the outline of the empty Blatz bottle with the tips of his blunt fingers. He wished there was something left in it. A lot better if it were something stronger than five percent. The na
me of Jay Paley was enough to make a guy want a quick shot. In its way, it was a name like Emmet Darcy. They were both supposed to be on the way up. In different rackets, though. In Jay Paley’s racket, there wasn’t any breather between rounds, and the only rules were the ones that were made to break. A pretty important guy, Jay Paley. He’d even been on television with some senators and other guys. He’d had a kind of minor part, really, but he’d been there just the same.

  “What makes Paley interested?” Jackie asked.

  Benny sat back with a thin, dry smile that managed by a physical paradox to look oily. “Come off, Jackie. Who you think owns Darcy?”

  “Word is, you do.”

  “Don’t be silly. Darcy’s valuable property. I couldn’t buy a couple of his left hooks.”

  Jackie took a deep breath that burned in his lungs like the ones he usually started drawing around the sixth. “You tell Paley he can see me if he wants.”

  Benny’s thin smile cracked open, permitting an escape of beery air. “You’re getting sillier, Jackie. Jay Paley doesn’t come see people. People go see him. If you’re ready to go, I might be able to find him.”

  Jackie started to think again about Peg and the place on 66 and fifteen grand minus expenses. And it seemed to him, sitting there over an empty beer bottle, that Benny’s gray little weasel face dried up completely and blew away, and in its place was Peg’s, the eyes trying to hide their hurt and hunger behind a kind of gallant, small-girl smile. Peg, who asked for so little and got such a hell of a lot less. Peg, who was married to a big stumble bum who tried and tried his level best, God knew, but whose best was never good for more than peanuts here and there. Peg, Peg, Peg. The name was like a crying inside him, and all at once he was standing up.

  “I’m ready,” he said.

  On the way out, he glanced into the mirror behind the bar, and there was a pair of snotty eyes popping out of the glass at him. They belonged to Spud Perkins, who was hunched like a toad on a stool at the bar. He didn’t turn to face Jackie. He didn’t make any kind of sign.

  Spud was a flabby little guy with eyes that were popped half out of his head by an overtime thyroid. His throat was scarred and sunken where a goiter had been removed. He was Jackie’s manager all the years Jackie was in the fight game. He always took good care of Jackie, and he was always strictly honest. Jackie hated him. He hated his guts.

  Maybe it was because those popped eyes were always snotty with cold contempt. Maybe it was because Spud always wrapped a sneer around a ten-cent cigar. Or maybe it was because he always said what he thought, and most of what he thought was nasty with the same contempt you could see in his eyes.

  Like in the dressing room after the fight in which Jackie upset Joe Donny with a ninth round kayo. When everyone had gone but Spud and Jackie, Spud rolled his cigar to one side of his sneer and said, “So you won. You won because the guy got sloppy and left an opening you could’ve thrown a chair through. You took a hell of a beating for eight rounds just hanging on for a chance to throw the sleeper. You’re a catcher, boy. You take six to heave one. Pretty soon you’ll be punch-drunk. You’ll be a bum. You’d better quit.”

  Jackie had cocked the right that had smeared Donny and measured the blur that was Spud’s face. Spud hadn’t moved an inch, and the fist had dropped.

  “Look,” Jackie had said. “I’ll take the punches. You just match the fights.”

  Spud had shrugged. “I saw Benny Lester in the hall. He wants you for Emmet Darcy. He thinks a Brand-Darcy match will be a step along for his boy.”

  “That’s what Donny’s manager thought. You get me Darcy.”

  Spud had shrugged again and turned away. “I’ll get him,” he’d said.

  And so he’d made the match, the one that Jackie was putting on the market, and now Jackie held his eyes in the mirror for a second and then went on out with Benny. On the street, they legged it a block to Benny’s parked Olds and took a short ride across town to Eddie Malaca’s Elite Billiard Parlor. They went in past a crowd of fringe characters playing rotation and snooker and into a back room. Jay Paley, the big guy around Eddie Malaca’s, was sitting at a round table in a corner with a handful of pasteboards. His little eyes took time to mark the approach of Benny and Jackie and then returned to the consideration of a club flush. He backed the flush and won, teetering back in his chair with smug complacency.

  “Something on your mind, Benny?”

  “I’ve brought Jackie Brand around. He thought you might be interested in buying some insurance.”

  The little eyes flicked over Jackie as if he were another flush. “You selling insurance, Jackie?”

  “Just big policies. Nothing less than ten grand.”

  Paley laughed and rocked his chair down. Standing, he strolled across the room and dropped at a vacant table. Benny prodded Jackie into motion, and they followed after.

  “Sit down, Jackie,” Paley said. “What kind of policy you got?”

  Jackie remained standing. “Ten grand in advance and you name the round.”

  Paley’s little eyes were twin points of glittering light. “Ten grand’s a lot of lettuce, Jackie, even to a guy like me. I expect my money’s worth. If I don’t get it, you better invest the ten in a policy of your own.”

  “I’ll deliver. You just name the round.”

  “The seventh ought to do. Not too soon. We’ll want to give the customers something.”

  “Okay. The seventh. Now I’d like to see the ten G’s.”

  “You’ll see the ten, all right. You think I carry a bundle like that in my pocket? I’ll send someone around to Lefty Jordan’s Gym tomorrow. How about three o’clock?”

  “Three’s as good a time as any. I’ll be in the dressing room.”

  Jackie turned and looked at Benny, and he could see the contempt was already in Benny’s eyes.

  “I’m sticking around for awhile,” Benny said. “Grab a cab.”

  Jackie grabbed the cab and went back home. Peg was waiting for him in the living room. Across the room, Martin Kane was throwing some guy all over the television screen.

  “Where you been, honey?” Peg said. “I thought you were just taking a walk.”

  “I dropped into Happy Sam’s and got talking with some of the boys. I didn’t aim to be so long.”

  “It’s okay, honey. I was just a little worried.”

  He sat down and watched Martin work on the other guy. He felt sick and dirty. He wished to hell he was the guy catching it on the screen. He glanced at Peg and away. Even his look might contaminate her, he thought. Something dirty might rub off.

  Jackie had never quite believed in the miracle of his marriage. A gal like Peg and a guy like him. Spud Perkins had trouble believing it, too. He couldn’t for the life of him understand what Peg saw in a second rate catcher like Jackie. Spud was crazy about Peg. Not gland-crazy, like a young guy who had to do something about it, but crazy in a quiet way, like an old guy who only wanted a kind word and a little company. He liked to come around and talk with Peg. Or maybe just sit and look at her. Once in a while he’d just barely touch her on the cheek or on the hair or some other innocent place like that, very gently, with a funny wet look in his popped eyes. If he caught Jackie watching him, he’d sneer and snarl and light one of his foul cigars.

  It’s for Peg, Jackie kept thinking. I’m doing it for Peg.

  After he collected the bundle the next day, there wasn’t much use thinking at all. He continued to work out at Lefty Jordan’s, going through the motions, and mostly he wished he could drop dead before the fight came up.

  The day before the fight, Spud came in late and stood leaning against the wall, his hands rammed down into his coat pockets and his eyes watching every move Jackie made. It was like being spit on by a pair of eyes. That’s the way Jackie felt, having Spud watch him like that.
Later, Spud tagged along to the dressing room and stood around while Jackie showered and dressed. Jackie was tying his tie in front of the mirror when Spud spoke.

  “Why bother, tramp?” he said, and his voice sounded just like his eyes looked.

  Jackie pulled the knot of his tie up snug against his neck and turned, giving the smoke of quick anger time to clear out of his eyes.

  “Maybe you’d better tell me what you mean.”

  Spud didn’t crawl a bit. He was a short, soft, nasty little man, and he’d have been a pushover for any fleaweight in the world. But he had guts, and he wouldn’t crawl. In all the years he knew him, Jackie never saw him crawl.

  “Sure, tramp,” he said. “You’re selling out. The other night you were bunghole buddy to Benny Lester, and you’re selling out. Benny wouldn’t waste his time on a tramp except to buy something. What round’s it set for?”

  “As far as you’re concerned,” Jackie said, “it’s round one.”

  Then he clobbered Spud. Right in his nasty mouth. Spud’s feet were lifted clear off the floor, and his flabby body smeared itself against the wall like a blob of putty. His upper plate jumped out onto the cement floor and skittered away in two pieces. He slid down slowly against the wall to a sitting position and slumped over on his side.

  Jackie felt sick. Sick to think he’d smeared a guy who wouldn’t have been a good match for a Brownie. He stood there looking at Spud for a long time, wondering if he’d ever move again. After a while, Spud did, pushing himself slowly back up against the wall. When Jackie left, he was still sitting there on the floor, looking down with a kind of stunned wonder at the curve of his fat belly.

  * * * *

  Jackie stood on the curb, his stomach a hard knot. For a minute, he was afraid he was going to be sick in the gutter. He stood there with his legs spread and his head back, breathing deeply, fighting the sickness. It was pretty silly. A guy who’d looked into dozens of pairs of glassy eyes and who’d had his own looked into more times than it was pleasant to remember. A pro who’d seen as much blood as he had, both his own and the other guy’s. A guy like that going squeamish over a simple clobbering. It was just one more poke in the kisser, delivered to a snotty character who had it coming. To hell with it.