Ed Gorman: Blood Game

“I’m earning some decent money, kid. I don’t mind it.” Stephen set down the pitcher and the glasses. He said ironically, “You changing your mind about my father?”

“Long as he pays me, I don’t have any complaint.”

Stephen sat down, poured them lemonade, and sat back in a squeaking office chair. “If Victor loses, my dad may be ruined.”

“I’m sure he’s been ruined before. He’ll come back somehow.”

“Not at his age.” Stephen made a sour face. “There’s just no way Victor should be losing.”

“Maybe Rooney’s a better boxer than we gave him credit for.”

Stephen shook his head. “We watched him in three different towns, just to make sure he was the man we wanted. We figured he could give Victor a decent fight but he’d never win.” He shook his head again. “Now look.”

Guild sipped his lemonade and lighted a cigarette. He felt, as usual, pity for the kid and an inability to do anything about his pity. Maybe it would be for the best if the old man lost all his money. Maybe in doing so he’d have to cut the kid free.

Stephen said, “I told you about my mother.”

Guild nodded.

“What I didn’t tell you is that I hired this ex-Pinkerton to find her for me.”

“Why now? After all these years?”

Stephen shrugged. “I suppose it’s like a bad tooth, Leo. You never quit worrying about it.”

“So did this ex-Pinkerton find her?”

“Yes.”

“What’s she doing?”

“Living her new life. Pretty happily, from what the detective said.” He paused. Sorrow filled his eyes. “She’s got a lot of new kids.”

Guild sighed. “Makes you feel kind of bad, doesn’t it? Knowing she started a new family and forgot about you?”

“Yes. Makes me wonder if she ever thinks about me or Dad at all.”

“Maybe you should try to look her up sometime.”

“She wrote me a letter.”

“She did?”

“Yes.”

“What’d it say?”

“I haven’t read it yet.”

“Why not?”

“Scared to, I guess.”

“Probably be better if you’d read it, don’t you think?”

“Maybe that’s why I came back here.”

“Why?”

“So I could read it in front of you. Maybe you could help me with it. Afterward, I mean. If I get real bad or something.”

“Sure, kid.”

“I don’t want to hate her anymore, Leo. I’m tired of hating her. It takes too much out of me after all these years.” He stared out the window. “Maybe she had a reason.”

“Maybe she did.” Gently, he said, “Why don’t you open up the envelope?”

Stephen looked down at his hands and then brought his right hand to the inside of his coat. He took a plain white envelope from the pocket and set it on his knee.

“I’m kind of scared, Leo. I really am.”

“You want me to read it to you?”

“Would you, Leo? Would you?”

Stephen sounded no more than eight.

“Sure.” Guild reached out to take the envelope, and it was then he smelled the smoke.

This time Reynolds had gotten it going nicely. The smoke was an oily black snake slithering beneath the door.

On one knee now, his weapon aimed directly at the door, he waited for Guild to appear.

Leo Guild said, “Sit right there, Stephen, and don’t move.” Guild handed him back the envelope unopened. “Afraid that’s going to have to wait.”

Guild took out his.44 and eased up to the door.

“What’s the smell, Leo?”

“Kerosene smoke. Somebody wants to play a little trick on us.”

“What kind of trick?”

All this time Guild was easing up to the door, flattening himself on one side of it so he could get a clean shot off when he opened it up.

“They want us to think there’s a fire in the hallway. This gets me to open up the door, and then they come running in and take the money.”

“Don’t give them the money, Leo. Please.”

“Just sit there, and let me handle it.”

Guild was now up to the door. He dropped to his haunches and put a hand on the knob.

He flung the door open in a single motion, and that’s when the firing started, as he had assumed it would. The bullets came at chest height, where he would normally have been if he hadn’t ducked down.

The smoke was so thick Reynolds couldn’t see anything. When the door opened, he fired by impulse.

Moments later he heard a harsh cry and then listened as a body slumped to the floor somewhere on the other side of the smoke.

Leo Guild turned just in time to see Stephen Stoddard fall from his chair to the floor. The bullets had gone so wild they’d taken the kid by accident.

Expecting more gunfire but hearing none, Guild crawled back along the floor to Stephen.

Even from here he could see there wasn’t anything he could do for the kid. One of the bullets had entered through the forehead. The back of Stephen’s head would look like a terrible purple flower suddenly in bloom.

Behind him he heard footsteps.

From the smoke emerged a short, slight man with a gun in his hand. He was coughing from the greasy smoke, and Guild saw no reason not to shoot him just because he was indisposed at the moment.

He shot him in the chest and the groin, and then he moved back up to the man’s face. Just as the man began to crumple, he shot him in the forehead, right where the man had shot Stephen.

Standing, he walked to the front of the office and down into the smoke. Coughing himself now, he went down to the basement, where he found two water buckets. He filled them and carried them back upstairs. Putting out the fire was no problem. He put the smoldering rags and newspapers in one of the empty buckets and took everything back downstairs.

Back in the office, he got the kid propped up against a desk. He was still dead, but somehow he didn’t look quite so vulnerable in this position.

He went back to the robber. He kicked the man twice hard in the ribs. He could hear bone cracking. The sound did not displease him.

Just then the crowd roared, and he realized that nobody had come running after the gunshots because most likely nobody had heard the shots. Not above the noise of the crowd.

He saw the white envelope on the floor near where Stephen had fallen from the chair.

He went over and picked it up. Red spatters of blood covered the front of it.

He wondered why she had left them. It seemed a terrible and incomprehensible thing to do. Maybe not to leave some son of a bitch as mean as John T. Stoddard but to leave the boy they’d raised together.

He folded the envelope twice and slid it down the back pocket of his black trousers.

He went back to the dead robber. He went through his coat and then his pants. For a time he was afraid he was not going to find what he was looking for.

But it was there, all right.

Oh, it was there.

He hunched there looking at the man’s bad complexion. He stared at where the bullet had gone in the man’s forehead.

He tried to tell himself the kid hadn’t been happy alive, that maybe he would be happy dead.

He stood up and went over to the door and locked it securely behind him. Then he went looking for John T. Stoddard.

Victor Sovich went down for the first time midway through the eleventh round. What was so surprising for the crowd was that he was scarcely hit. Rooney had thrown a right hand, but it had glanced off Sovich’s shoulder. It was not the sort of punch that could put a man down, but Sovich went to one knee, where he remained for a time while the referee counted off the seconds. Sovich, obviously dizzy, looked with dismay at his comer. What was going on here?

When he regained his feet and the fight went on, Sovich obviously made a decision-to throw his strongest punches against Rooney. The roundhouse, for example, was exactly the kind of punch that had killed people in the past, and probably would have this time-if it had landed. Still suffering from dizziness, Sovich threw three roundhouses during the remaining minutes of the round-but none connected, each missing Rooney’s jaw by an inch or so.