Brett Halliday - Armed… Dangerous…

He gestured at the window. “That isn’t a chessboard out there. It’s a city full of cars and people. You tell me to turn left at such and such a corner. What if somebody’s digging a hole in the street and I can’t turn left? You’ve got to leave some of it up to me. And if I don’t know any more tomorrow than I do now, I can guarantee you I’ll make the wrong move.”

“To be specific,” she said.

“A garbage truck, for God’s sake! With two cops on the tailgate! OK, is it the kind of garbage you want me to dump in the sewer if I get in trouble? If I can’t get in touch with you, who do I get in touch with? What kind of protection have we got?”

She put down her drink. Coming over to his chair in her stocking feet, she kissed the corner of his mouth. “You are making a large Alp out of a small bump in the ground, you know. Number one: we have no protection. Let us be careful not to be caught. Number two: I can’t see what difference it makes, but if you must know what will be in the truck-”

She began unbuttoning his shirt. “It will begin its journey at a police warehouse, and end at an incinerator. The police in New York have collected certain evidence against some important people, and these people, I must tell you, do have connections. They are the existing organization in certain illegal areas.”

“Are you talking about the Mafia or something?”

“Oh, the Mafia. It is true that many of them are Sicilians, South Italians of the second generation in America, but it is not the kind of group you think of when you say Mafia. This evidence, some is serious, some is merely business information. By pulling strings, by spending money, they have persuaded the police to burn it, and my friends, who would like a share in the profitable affairs controlled by the Mafia, wish to seize it before it can reach the incinerator.”

“Why? I must be dumber than I thought. I don’t get it.”

“Darling, one doesn’t ask why. The Mafia people are vulnerable, you know. The times have passed them by. In the days of jet travel, they think and do business in the old slow way. My friends will say to them in effect, ‘Here are Xerox copies of certain documents in our possession. Retire.’ Now. To answer another question. If you find yourself unable to reach the transfer point, do not empty the truck in the sewer. Call me at a number I will give you.”

Shayne uttered a coarse expletive. “I’m over my head here, baby. It’s not my kind of deal. The sooner I get back in my own league, the better for everybody.”

“You set your sights too low, darling,” she said, smiling. “Wait till you see yourself in your new clothes.”

Shayne’s voice had begun to lose its edge. “I’ve had chicks try to change me before. I forget their names.”

“I don’t want to change you. I want to change your surroundings. You have no objection to being rich, surely?”

“I’ve been in the chips once or twice,” he said. “But a funny thing about stickup dough. It’s not like real money.”

“I get you real money,” she said. “And the real money today, you are right, is honest money. That’s what these Mafia primitives will never understand, with their codes, their quickness to commit murder for something of utterly no importance, like an insult.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Shayne said. All the anger was gone from his voice.

“I tell you then.” She left her perch, whirled around with her arms raised, and came back to the arm of the chair and kissed him hard. “You make me feel excellent. When I was a young girl there was no money in my family. Only a few lucky ones had work in that region, so my mother went away to the city. She was a handsome woman, men gave her money, she sent some to us in our village, so we ate not badly. But always she thought her manner of living sinful. Wrong, right, what did it matter, who decided it was right to sit in the house without a sou and go to political meetings and come home hungry? My father said it was society one should blame, the system of government, but I learned from my mother, not my father. He died of pneumonia, it was called. Some years later I was the friend of a rich man, who had tankers and passenger vessels and three yachts and much besides. He started from a hungry family like mine. He taught me about making money, it amused him. First, he said, you accumulate a small sum so you have something to risk. That one time it may be necessary to break a law or so, which is all right if you go in fast and get out fast. But after that you hire lawyers, who take excellent care that you no longer break laws. If it is necessary to be cruel, be cruel, but within the law. I listened carefully. And I have many ideas. I have come to know many useful people. I think I do well.”

“Baby-” Shayne scowled, trying to put his thoughts into words without going outside the character he was pretending to be. He gave it up with a disgusted wave. “If that’s your idea of living.”

“It is very much my idea of living,” she said. “I know women are not expected to become rich except when a rich husband dies of an early heart attack. It is all right for a man to be hard and ruthless, not a woman. I need a man to work with me, who is not a slave of sentimentality, who can move, who can do what is necessary.”

Again Shayne let his voice take on a hard edge. “And who shot a cop in the States? I can see how you figure, baby. I’ll have to jump when you crack the whip, or New York gets a long-distance phone call, the full details on where they can find me.”

She said quietly, “I hope I can think of some way to show you that isn’t so.”

“I hope so too, baby, but that’s all right. I’m a hard man to push. Right now you and I are going in the same direction. Maybe we’ll make it as far as Portugal. But don’t make any long-range plans. I’ve never been with a dame longer than two months.”

“But two months! It is an age!” she said with a delighted smile. “Darling, I knew we would agree.”

Shayne shook his head wryly. “One thing I will say. I never met anybody like you.”

“Take off your gun.”

“In a minute.”

“No, at once. So you are a hard man to push?”

Her mouth came down to his and he felt her probing tongue. There was something he had to do, he remembered. He had to keep her from listening to the news or reading the afternoon papers.

Without opening her eyes, she whispered, “Unfasten your pistol.”

“That’s not pushing,” he said. “That’s pulling. I’m an easy man to pull. Unfasten it yourself.”

“Where, here?”

He showed her. She showed him how to unfasten her white dress.

When Shayne noticed the time again, the afternoon was gone.

They made it to Brooks Brothers as the store was closing, and picked up Shayne’s slacks and the pants to his new suits. He made one other stop, outside Grand Central.

“I want to stash the dough and pick up some liquor,” he said, reaching for the dispatch case. “Won’t take a minute.”

“You will be back?”

He gave her a direct look. “What do you think?”

He stopped at a liquor store in the arcade and bought two fifths of bourbon. He didn’t have to look around to know that she had left the car on the street and followed him in. He went down to the men’s room on the lower level. He paid a dime for a booth, opened the dispatch case and put in the diamonds he had taken from Tim Rourke the night before. They were real diamonds. He put the forged passport in his pocket.

He checked the dispatch case in a coin locker and started back to the street, giving Michele time to get there ahead of him. She smiled at him brightly as he got in.