Fletcher Flora - The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK™ - 26 Stories by Fletcher Flora

“Sure. You and me. You and me and Leo.”

“We’ll find a way to eliminate Leo later on. A safe way. Sometime, somehow, we’ll find a way.”

I was tired. I was a tired, broke, sick damn fool, but I had no particular desire to die, and I wanted Hilda wholly or on shares, any way I could get her whenever she wanted to come. I leaned back in the seat and said, “You save it for us, honey. I’ll be waiting around.”

The taxi wheeled into my street and stopped, and I got out and stood beside it on the curb. Hilda leaned out after me, her face lifted above her white, arched throat, and I leaned down and kissed her without touching her with anything but my lips. Then the taxi pulled us apart, and I went inside and upstairs alone.

What do you do with the twenty-four hours that may be your last? Get drunk? Get religion? Go crazy? I guess it depends on who you are, how much that next breath means to you. For what it signifies, I had one drink, one cigarette, and went to bed. I also slept. I slept long and well, and when I woke up I saw by the watch on my wrist that it was far past noon. I got up and oriented, and I didn’t feel so good, but I didn’t feel so bad, either. Sort of so-so. Sort of like almost any garden variety day. I went into the bathroom and showered and shaved and brushed the fur off my teeth. I dressed and asked myself if I was hungry, and I decided that I wasn’t hungry but that I could do with a drink. I had the stuff available, rye and bourbon, but I didn’t want a drink alone in the apartment. I wanted a drink in a bar. This seemed a reasonable desire for a guy well into his last time around the clock, so I went out to gratify it.

I got the drink at Stony’s. Stony himself poured it for me. He asked me how I was, and I said I was all right. After drinking half of what he’d poured, I almost believed it. Someone in a booth paid a nickel for Many Times, which isn’t a bad tune in itself, but it started me thinking about Hilda trying to make Leo see that I wasn’t worth killing, and that wasn’t good. I tried to quit thinking about it, but little details kept forcing their way into my mind which may or may not have been parts of the way it actually happened, so I lifted my drink to finish it, and in the process I saw something that made me think for a moment that it hadn’t happened at all. In the mirror behind the bar, I saw a character named Jack Steap, a thin guy with a body like ten-gauge wire and a face like the edge of a razor. He was a guy for hire who worked for Leo Gall when Leo needed a fast, professional job, and he was standing precisely behind the empty stool on my right. One hand was in the pocket of his coat, very casually. I felt, suddenly, dry and withered inside, all dead and done and ready for the fire.

He said softly in a thin tenor voice, “Okay, hero. Let’s go.”

I turned on the stool, and it was then that I realized that he hadn’t spoken to me at all. His eyes and voice were directed toward the customer on the other side of the empty stool. He’d come in a few minutes after me, and we were now the only ones at the bar. He looked like a college guy. He was wearing a hat, but the hair that showed below it was blond, and I knew it was cut short and square on top. I was a little surprised to see that he still had the price of a drink. Hugh Lawson, I mean.

If he ever recognized me, he didn’t show it. He looked over his shoulder at the gunsel and said, “You talking to me?”

“You, hero. Let’s go.”

“What the hell you talking about?”

Jack Steap showed his teeth in a smile that was all on the plane. No depth, no meaning. “You know, hero. Just for kicks, though, I’ll brief you on it. I’m talking about your dropping a bundle to Leo Gall last night. I’m talking about your coming back later to reclaim it. It and the other lettuce Leo’d won, plus fifty grand or so he had lying around for household expenses. It was real messy, the way you did it. Smashing his skull that way. Leo’s head was a real mess.”

Hugh Lawson spun around slowly on his stool. His face had gone white and slack, and the first wash of fear was coming up into his eyes. His voice was a sick croak. “You’re crazy! Leo was alive when I left. Kal Magnus and I went together.”

“I know. Kal went and stayed. You didn’t. You went back.”

“I didn’t! I swear I didn’t!”

“Sure you swear you didn’t. But you did. You were seen, hero. You were seen leaving the apartment by someone else who went back. Someone on Leo’s team. So the word went out to Leo’s boys. So the boys sent me out to find you. So here I am. And so let’s go.”

A greenish tinge began to creep into the dead white of Lawson’s face. It was the face of a man who knew that nothing he could say would make any difference. His mouth labored to create sound, but the most it managed was a whimper, and his eyes slithered around desperately for help that wasn’t there. They crossed my face, his eyes, but I don’t think I registered in them. Then he was off the stool and running parallel to the bar. He must have intended to duck around it and out the back way into the alley, but he never made it. Jack Steap’s hand came out of his pocket, and there were two muffled detonations so close together that they almost blended, and Hugh Lawson stopped and turned half around and leaned back against the bar like a guy who might have stopped in for a short beer. After a moment, he slipped down to a sitting position and toppled over sideways.

There was a long moment of dead silence in the bar, and then the five or six customers in booths got up and out before the cops got in.

Jack Steap walked down along the bar, stepped over Lawson’s body, and went on out the way Lawson had wanted to go.

I went that way myself. I went out into the alley and down the alley to the street and back to my apartment.

I went inside and closed the door and leaned back against it with my eyes closed. Something was hurting inside me, and the hurting was related to the death of Hugh Lawson. He was a guy I hadn’t known well and had neither liked nor disliked, but I didn’t want him dead at the hands of a thin weasel like Jack Steap for the sake of a fat pig like Leo Gall. Not even when his death was maybe my salvation.

Hilda’s voice said, “What’s the matter, darling?”

I opened my eyes, and there she was. She was there like something beautiful and warm and real that I needed like hell. I started for her, and she started for me, and we met and merged somewhere between our starting places.

“It’s all right, darling,” she said. “Leo’s dead.”

“I know he’s dead. So’s Hugh Lawson. I just saw him shot down in Stony’s place.”

“Leo’s boys think Hugh’s the one who killed Leo.”

“I know. That’s what the gunsel said.”

“Don’t you see what it means, darling? It means you and me in the open. You and me without a worry. We can go away for awhile. South, I think. Somewhere a long way south of the border.”

“Using what for money?”

She broke out of my arms then and went for her purse in a chair. It was a big job, almost as big as an overnight bag, one of these things on a strap that’s worn over the shoulder. She picked it up and brought it back and turned it upside down, and paper began to fall out. Green paper. I thought it’d never quit falling. It fell and spread and piled up around my feet.

I raised my eyes to her face, and it was still the loveliest face I’d ever seen, smooth and creamy under copper, with a bright and gifted mouth and smoky eyes.

“You,” I said. “You killed Leo and put the finger on Lawson.”

She shook her head. “No. I put the finger on Lawson, all right, but I didn’t kill Leo.”

“Lawson really did, then?”