Ричард Деминг - Manhunt. Volume 1, Number 2, February, 1953

I felt the hand tighten with a gentle pressure, pulling me in close. “Lay off me. I’m minding my own...”

“I said something, sonny.”

“So I was out. What’s it to you?”

His expression said he didn’t give a hang at all. “Somebody wants to know. Feel like taking a little ride?”

“You asking?”

“I’m telling.” The hand tightened again. “The car’s over there, bud. Let’s go get in it, huh?”

For a second I wondered if I could take him or not and knew I couldn’t. He was too big and too relaxed. He’d known trouble all his life, from little guys to big guys and he didn’t fool easily. You can tell after you’ve seen a lot of them. They knew that some day they’d wind up holding their hands over a bullet hole or screaming through the bars of a cell, but until then they were trouble and too big to buck.

I got in the car and sat next to the guy in the back seat. I kept my mouth shut and my eyes open and when we started to head the wrong way, I looked at the guy next to me. “Where we going?”

He grinned on one side of his face and looked out the window again.

“Come on, come on, quit messing around! Where we going?”

“Shut up.”

“Nuts, brother. If I’m getting knocked off I’m doing a lot of yelling first, starting right now. Where...”

“Shut up. You ain’t getting knocked off.” He rolled the window down, flipped the dead cigar butt out and cranked it back up again. He said it too easily not to mean it and the jumps in my hands quieted down a little.

No, they weren’t going to bump me. Not with all the trouble they went to in finding me. You don’t put a couple dozen men on a mug like me if all you wanted was a simple kill. One hopped up punk would do that for a week’s supply of snow.

We went back through town, turned west into the suburbs and kept right on going to where the suburbs turned into estates and when we came to the right one the car turned into a surfaced driveway that wound past a dozen flashy heaps parked bumper to bumper and stopped in front of the fieldstone mansion.

The guy beside me got out first. He jerked his head at me and stayed at my back when I got out too. The driver grinned, but it was the kind of face a dog makes when he sees you with a chunk of meat in your fist.

A flunky met us at the door. He didn’t look comfortable in his monkey suit and his face had scar tissue it took a lot of leather-covered punches to produce. He waved us in, shut the door and led the way down the hall to a room cloudy with smoke, rumbling with the voices of a dozen men.

When we came in the rumble stopped and I could feel the eyes crawl over me. The guy who drove the car looked across the room at the one in the tux, said, “Here he is, boss,” and gave me a gentle push into the middle of the room.

“Hi, kid.” He finished pouring out of the decanter, stopped it and picked up his glass. He wasn’t an inch bigger than me, but he had the walk of a cat and the eyes of something dead. He got up close to me, faked a smile and held out the glass. “In case the boys had you worried.”

“I’m not worried.”

He shrugged and sipped the top off the drink himself. “Sit down, kid. You’re among friends here.” He looked over my shoulder. “Haul a chair up, Rocco.”

All over the room the others settled down and shifted into position. A chair seat hit the back of my legs and I sat. When I looked around everybody was sitting, which was the way the little guy wanted it. He didn’t like to have to look up to anybody.

He made it real casual. He introduced the boys when they didn’t have to be introduced because they were always in the papers and the kind of guys people point out when they go by in their cars. You heard their names mentioned even in the junk business and among the punks in the streets. These were the big boys. Top dogs. Fat fingers. Big rings. The little guy was biggest of all. He was Phil Carboy and he ran the West Side the way he wanted it run.

When everything quieted down just right, Carboy leaned on the back of a chair and said, “In case you’re wondering why you’re here, kid, I’m going to tell you.”

“I got my own ideas,” I said.

“Fine. That’s just fine. Let’s check your ideas with mine, okay? Now we hear a lot of things around here. Things like that note you delivered to Renzo and who gave it to you and what Renzo did to you.” He finished his drink and smiled. “Like what you did to Johnny, too. That’s all straight now, isn’t it?”

“So far.”

“Swell. Tell you what I want now. I want to give you a job. How’d you like to make a cool hundred a week, kid?”

“Peanuts.”

Somebody grunted. Carboy smiled again, a little thinner. “The kid’s in the know,” he said. “That’s what I like. Okay, kid. We’ll make it five hundred per for a month. If it don’t run a month you get it anyway. That’s better than having Renzo slap you around, right?”

“Anything’s better than that.” My voice started getting chalky.

Carboy held out his hand and said, “Rocco...” Another hand slid a sheaf of bills into his. He counted it out, reached two thousand and tossed it into my lap. “Yours, kid.”

“For what?”

His lips were a narrow gash between his cheekbones. “For a guy named Vetter. The guy who gave you a note. Describe him.”

“Tall,” I said. “Big shoulders. I didn’t see his face. Deep voice that sounded tough. He had on a trench coat and a hat.”

“That’s not enough.”

“A funny way of standing,” I told him. “I saw Sling Herman when I was a kid before the cops got him. He stood like that. Always ready to go for something in his pocket the cops said.”

“You saw more than that, kid.”

The room was too quiet now. They were all hanging on, waiting for the word. They were sitting there without smoking, beady little eyes waiting for the finger to swing until it stopped and I was the one who could stop it.

My throat squeezed out the words. I went back into the night to remember a guy and drag up the little things that would bring him into the light. I said, “I’d know him again. He was a guy to be scared of. When he talks you get a cold feeling and you know what he’s like.” My tongue ran over my lips and I lifted my eyes up to Carboy. “I wouldn’t want to mess with a guy like that. Nobody’s ever going to be tougher.”

“You’ll know him again. You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.” I looked around the room at the faces. Any one of them a guy who could say a word and have me dead the next day. “He’s tougher than any of you.”

Carboy grinned and let his tiny white teeth show through. “Nobody’s that tough, kid.”

“He’ll kill me,” I said. “Maybe you too. I don’t like this.”

“You don’t have to like it. You just do it. In a way you’re lucky. I’m paying you cash. If I wanted I could just tell you and you’d do it. You know that?”

I nodded.

“Tonight starts it. From now on you’ll have somebody close by, see? In one pocket you’ll carry a white handkerchief. If you gotta blow, use it. In the other one there’ll be a red wiper. When you see him blow into that.”

“That’s all?”

“Just duck about then, kid,” Phil Carboy said softly, “and maybe you’ll get to spend that two grand. Try to use it for run-out money and you won’t get past the bus station.” He stared into his glass, looked up at Rocco expectantly and held it out for a refill. “Kid, let me tell you something. I’m an old hand in this racket. I can tell what a guy or a dame is like from a block away. You’ve been around. I can tell that. I’m giving you a break because you’re the type who knows the score and will play on the right side. I don’t have to warn you about anything, do I?”