downstretched elbow, across the back of his neck, then pressed. Turning him swiftly, my right knee came up and hit him hard in the pit of the stomach. His breath gushed out in a single, agonised bleat and he made funny whistling noises as he tried to suck in air.
There was a gun in his pocket. I could feel it as I swung his body towards me sharply. So they hadn’t been kidding. They were playing for keeps, meaning to get rid of me if I didn’t play ball. Hell, I thought, they must want to get hold of Maxie pretty badly.
Before the hoodlum could recover his bounds, I dropped his hand and hit him twice with my bunched fist. Once to the heart, then on the tip of his square jaw. If it hadn’t been for the urgency, I might not have been quick enough to get rough like that.
One usually thinks twice about roughing up the hirelings of the Big Men, and there were lots of things twisting inside me—Maxie, my last chance to clear myself, the power of the Organisation moving in relentlessly. It was no time for an unknown hoodlum to start getting fresh with Johnny Merak.
Apart from the gasp as I hit him in the belly, he hadn’t made a sound. His face was a dirty grey and there was blood on his lips where his teeth had bitten deeply into them. He was still groggy as I slipped my hand into his pocket and brought out the gun. It was a German automatic. A big weapon for these men. Usually they preferred to carry small, easily hidden weapons.
“You’ll regret this, Merak,” he mumbled, wiping his lips. I shoved him back against the wall. Still no suspicious move from the two characters near the lounge.
“Shut up!” I said. “I’m in no mood for arguing.” I looked at the automatic, then placed it carefully in my pocket. “I’ll keep this,” I said, “just in case you start to get any fresh ideas. Now get moving.”
“Is this your last answer, Merak?”
“Get moving,” I repeated. “And if I ever see you again, I’ll finish the job.”
He opened his mouth to say something more and I hit him again, hard, with my fist. His head snapped back and there was a glint of pure evil in his close-set eyes. Steadying himself, he hung on to the wall for a couple of seconds, shaking his head. Then he rubbed his jaw tenderly.
“I’ll remember that,” he said ominously, and then walked away. I watched him stagger for a couple of paces, turn, and look back at me over his shoulder. Then he straightened himself and walked away, down the steps, and out into the street.
I walked into the lounge with long, quick steps, disregarding the fear that cut through my mind. It was all right acting tough in front of such hoodlums, but there was a fear all the same. You can’t defy the Underworld and hope to get away with it forever. Your only chance is to get things done, the important things, before they finally catch up with you.
My watch showed nine-thirty. In five minutes the plane from Mexico City would be touching down and Big Maxie would have arrived, if everything had gone according to plan. And I had to get to him first, before the sharks got their teeth into him, spilling his gold and his blood.
Dead—and he was no use to me. And in the hands of the Big Boys he was as good as dead. I wondered with a little part of my mind what the hoodlum was doing at that particular moment. Reporting back—or watching me from some dark corner, biding his time, nursing his revenge?
Three men and a woman sat at a round table, all of them with glasses in front of them. They stopped talking as I walked past. One of the men whispered something and the woman turned her head to follow me.
There was something in her dark eyes that intrigued me. A smouldering, fathomless fire that seemed to burn right at the back of them. It was as if a hidden devil had suddenly jumped up from the black depths, licked its lips hungrily, then fallen back again. She had half-swung round and was toying with her glass idly.
Dark eyes, long black hair, curling over bare shoulders, and small, white teeth showing evenly because she was smiling a little with her lips just parted.
She was probably just curious about me. Maybe one of her guys knew me or had heard of me. There were a lot of things that could make a woman curious.
The loudspeaker system suddenly blared, catching my attention, directing it from the woman. She looked away and I could see that she was still smiling.
I shrugged. Women were a dime a dozen in Los Angeles. Shark-eyed girls from the studios of Hollywood, down for laughs, away from the cameras and television networks. They were good for laughs, too, if you had that kind of money, but that was about all.
I went outside and waited for the plane to come in. She was up there, somewhere, circling the airport. The wind was cool and there was a moon, low down, hiding behind strips of tattered cloud. A crowd was already there, jostling, talking loudly, looking at the long rows of lights that marked the runway.
Johnny Merak, I thought fiercely, you’re a chump. Fancy thinking you can step in and cheat the Big Boys out of this deal. There will be some of them around, waiting. Why does a man have to try to make an idiot out of himself? To prove something? Seven long, waiting years—and now this. I found myself thinking suddenly about that woman at the table.
The half-open lips and the searing, naked passion in the dark eyes. A private hell with nothing at the bottom of it. Only devils that had to be kept chained and could never be quietened for long. Demanding and insistent.
But there had been something uncertain about her smile, too; so she wasn’t quite as sure of herself as she would have liked to be. I reached down and felt the .38 resting snugly in my pocket, ready for any emergency.
I stood there, apart, on the edge of the crowd, and looked straight into the night with the brilliant light stretching away into the dipping distance. The plane was coming in gently, touching down with a distant bleat of protesting tyres. A moment later I could see it, then it vanished again into the darkness at the far end of the runway, and the urgent tension in my brain started piling up again.
How does a man get to be like Johnny Merak? For me it had been easy once I’d started on the slide. Everything connected with the racket seems big and exciting when you’re only eighteen and a bit. You do it in the beginning because all the other kids do it; because you want to get one step ahead of them all and stay that way.
The Big Men all have a decent, respectable front. They own large slices of real estate, chains of motels in the best quarters of town. Solid, dependable citizens. But at the back of it all, behind the pasteboard and the lies and the campaigning, you find the large and profitable rackets.
All the time there was trouble. Rival syndicates, people with bright ideas. That was why these men at the top needed others who could be trusted to carry out orders, to do the dirty work, and ask no questions. In the beginning I liked it fine. There were plenty of trips to the coast, the best hotels, and the bills were always paid by somebody you never saw.
The tough thing, though, is when it really hits you between the eyes and you see what a mess you’ve let yourself into. But then it’s too late. Maxie had been the last of the big names as far as Johnny Merak was concerned. Anything rotten enough, anything the other boys wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole, and I’d be the guy to fix it.
And in the end I had fixed myself so good that I still couldn’t get out of the mess. Hence the gun and the meeting I intended to have with Maxie Temple. There were some pretty important papers he still had in his possession with Johnny Merak’s name scrawled legibly across the bottom. If they got into the wrong hands, I’d go up the river for a far longer stretch than three
