Ричард Деминг - Manhunt. Volume 1, Number 6, June, 1953

His eyes were buried deep in soft pads of flesh, two glittering black marbles that studied me carefully. “You want someone?” he asked.

“I’m looking for Mike Vellutini,” I said, and felt the weight of the gun under my left shoulder.

“Yeah?” He moved his cigar from one corner of his heavy, wet lips to the other. “About what?”

“Business, you might say.”

His voice sounded like a flat tire rumbling over hollow pavement. “Come in here.” He turned his back on me and lumbered into the office room.

I followed. It was a small, hot place like the other rooms. A French door opened out onto a courtyard where banana trees stood motionless in the still night.

The heavy man sat down behind his desk on a creaking swivel chair. He picked up a palmetto leaf and fanned himself while he looked at me through the cigar smoke with his shiny marble eyes.

“Go ahead,” he rumbled. “I’m Mike Vellutini.”

I sat on a chair, keeping my coat loose so the gun would come out fast. I went right to the point. “Several months ago,” I said, “a woman, Grace Perring, came over from St. Pete with a man who was not her husband. During the night they were in a number of places in Ybor City. She was too drunk to remember any of them. But in one of the places, she and this man were in bed and somebody took their picture. A week later, a thin little man came to call on her with prints of this picture. He represented another man who wanted a large sum of money not to show the picture to her children and friends. He kept coming back for money until it was more than she could pay. I came over to find the real blackmailer.”

Vellutini sat behind the desk with an amused look on his face. “So now you find him. Me — Vellutini.” He laughed, and sucked hungrily at the cigar. “Yes, that was a good picture. She sure was enjoying it, that blonde bitch. What a wrestle she was giving him!” He laughed some more, with his flabby lips around the cigar. “So why you risk your neck, you dumb flatfoot? Money? Or did that blonde bitch offer to pay you off the way she’s been payin’ off all those other guys in St. Petersburg?”

I shrugged. “Let’s say she has some nice kids. Three of them.” I reached for my gun, feeling a little tired.

Vellutini might have looked fat and lazy but he wasn’t dumb. While he flicked the palmetto leaf with his right hand, his left had crept below the level of the desk to an open drawer. Now it sprang out and there was a very heavy revolver in it, pointed at me.

We both fired the first shot together. Mine didn’t miss. I followed it with a second.

A pair of red roses blossomed out on Vellutini’s soggy undershirt, then dissolved and ran down over his fat belly. He grunted, staring at me stupidly, his slobbery lips hanging open. Slowly, he rose to his feet, knocking the chair over behind him. He stood there for a second, swaying, staring at me. Then he fell across the desk with a crash.

Quickly, I dragged out desk and file drawers, pawing through them while voices murmured in the hall and fists beat against the door.

In the bottom of one drawer I found what I wanted, a snapshot negative. Even in the undeveloped negative I could recognize Grace Perring, and see the drunken, animal pleasure on her face as the man with her fondled her.

I stuffed it into a pocket and went through the French doors, through the courtyard and out into the dark streets.

I walked down through the stinking alleys of Ybor City toward the boat. I still had a body to bury out in the bay on my way back to St. Petersburg, and I still had to phone Lolita and warn her to say she knew nothing if the police questioned her.

Inside, I felt tired, dirty, and defeated. It would be nice, I thought, to stick around this Ybor City and the hot-blooded Lolita, who was mine for the asking.

But I had to get home to the quiet hell I lived in, across the bay.

I had to go on protecting, the best I knew how, the lives and happiness of three wonderful children whose mother was Grace Perring — my wife.

The road, even in good weather, must have been little more than a trail. Now, covered by nearly a foot of snow and with the depth increasing by the minute, Cynthia realized it would have been impassible for a lesser car or a lesser driver. Even with its special chains and with Johnny Venuti at the wheel, it seemed a miracle to her the big sedan was able to go on.

From the back seat she strained to peer past Johnny’s shoulder at the road ahead, but by now the distance the yellow fog lights were able to probe through the steadily thickening curtain of falling snow had become so slight, the hood obstructed what little of the road could be seen from the back seat. Involuntarily she gave a frightened little whimper, and her husband at her side squeezed her hand reassuringly.

“We’ll make it, baby,” he said. “Johnny could drive through a swamp at midnight easier than most guys can drive on a flat road at noon. Hey, Johnny?”

“We’ll make it, Mrs. Ross,” the driver said in a relaxed voice. “It’s only about another mile.”

Ashamed of her whimper, Cynthia sank back against her husband’s shoulder. But when she spoke, her voice was fretful. “Even if we do, we’ll be trapped for the winter. We’ll never get out of these mountains until it thaws.”

“Thawing will start within six weeks,” Harry Ross said in the same reassuring voice. “And we don’t want to get out before then. There’s enough wood and food in the cabin to last twice that long. And remember, if we can’t get out, nobody can get in to us either.”

“We should have headed for Canada,” Cynthia said. “We should have taken a chance.”

“I know what I’m doing, baby. It wouldn’t have been a chance. When Masters points his finger, your only chance is to disappear. Completely. Nobody but me and Johnny knows I got this hunting cabin, but syndicate guns will be checking every other spot in the country I ever been to. In six weeks they’ll be tired of looking and we’ll have a chance to sneak out of the country.”

Sneak, she thought. Run like a frightened rabbit. The mighty Harry Ross turned coward.

No, she corrected herself instantly, it was not cowardice. Even when the guns sounded he had not exhibited fear. Retreat in the face of invincible odds was merely good sense. But the catastrophic sense of loss remained with her. Where was the glamorous life she had visualized as a top racketeer’s wife? What good were diamonds and a mink coat in an isolated mountain cabin? Would the showers of expensive gifts, the gay times she had enjoyed for only three short months ever return?

I wish I were back at the hospital passing bedpans , she said to herself, and then the thought of her past nursing career reminded her of her current nursing problem.

“Your leg,” she said to Harry. “Suppose it gets infected?”

Harry emitted an indulgent laugh. “That's why I married a nurse, baby. There's a first aid kit in the cabin, and it’s up to you to see it don’t get infected.”

“I’m not a doctor,” she said dubiously.

The car made a slow right turn, crept on a few yards and stopped.

“What’s the matter?” Cynthia inquired anxiously.

In a matter-of-fact voice Johnny Venuti said, “We’re there.”

He pointed left, and when Cynthia rubbed a clear place in the fogged-over window with her glove, she could dimly make out the silhouette of a small cabin not more than a dozen feet away.

“I’ll leave the motor running and you people sit here where it’s warm until I get a fire going,” Johnny said. “It must be around zero out, and it’s probably just as cold in the cabin.”