Ричард Деминг - She’ll Hate Me Tomorrow

She shivered when he ran a hand slowly down her side, across the roundness of her hip and along her thigh. Her knees parted to let the hand fall from her outer thigh to her opposite inner thigh. Raising his head from its buried position between her breasts, his lips sought hers as his hand stroked the soft flesh, creeping slowly upward. Her arms tightened their grip and she rolled onto her back, forcing him to roll with her until his weight crushed her slighter frame beneath it.

Then her mouth formed a little round O and her face assumed the expression that never failed to intrigue him at this particular moment: a mixture of surprise and trepidation and delight.

“Oh, goodness!” she said in an odd voice.

They merged into one being, their minds and souls intermingling into a single entity which shut out awareness of their surroundings so completely. For the prolonged period of their union, neither knew where they were. All the rest of the universe became a meaningless void as they concentrated solely on each other and lost all consciousness of any existence outside of themselves.

Much later, when they were downstairs again, she asked if he would stay for dinner. Glancing at his watch, he saw that they had dallied upstairs for nearly an hour.

“I can’t,” he said. “I have too many things to do before the shops close at six.”

“The shops?” she said puzzledly.

“Uh-huh. I have to make a couple of purchases.” He gave her a quick kiss and headed for the side door.

Running after him, she caught him at the door and clung to him for a minute. “Promise me you’ll be careful, Clancy?”

“I’m always careful,” he said in honest surprise, under the impression that he was.

He had a tendency to confuse carefulness with alertness. And because he kept all five senses tuned to a fine key, so that he was always prepared to react instantly to any sign of danger, he sincerely believed that he was acting carefully even when he rushed headlong into situations where the odds were stacked against him.

Disengaging himself from her embrace, he gave her another quick kiss, this time on the nose, and ran down the steps to his car.

During the drive back to town Ross reviewed the plan he had already formed the instant he became sure that Christine Franklin and Vanita Bell were the same person and that the woman was setting him up as a target for her lover, Whitey Cord.

At the cottage that evening he assumed that in the natural course of events things would become as warm as on his previous visit. And you can hardly make love wearing a shoulder holster. He was relatively sure that the woman would make a point of getting his gun away from him, then someone, perhaps Whitey Cord himself, would suddenly appear with the intention of burning him down while he was unarmed.

The motive was as obvious as the plan: Cord has decided it would be impossible to get to Stella until Ross was out of the way, and he had little faith in Bix Lawson’s ability to remove the gambler from circulation.

It was ten minutes after five when he parked in front of Olsen’s Shoe Repair Shop on Fourth Street. Inside, a round little Swede in his fifties was pounding tacks into the heel of a riding boot. He paused to peer at Ross over silver-rimmed glasses, then set down his shoemaker’s hammer and came over to the counter with a wide grin on his face.

“Clancy Ross, by gar. I hear by the radio you yust had some trouble by your club.”

“A little. Can I get a special job done fast, Elmer?”

“Sure. For you I stay open past closing time, if necessary.”

“How late are you open?”

“Six p.m.”

“It shouldn’t take that long,” Ross said, and described what he wanted.

Pursing his lips, the little Swede nodded understanding. “Yust slip off your coat. The right arm only is all I need.”

Ross slipped the sleeve from his right arm, letting the coat hang from his left shoulder, so that his gun harness remained covered. There were no customers in the place, and he had a permit to carry the gun anyway, but he was always reluctant to advertise to his numerous friends who had no connection with the rackets that he carried a gun.

Coming from behind the counter, the shoemaker wrapped a tape measure around his right forearm, just below the elbow.

“Okay,” he said. “Shouldn’t take more than forty-five minutes. Come back yust at closing time.”

Ross left the shoe repair shop and drove six blocks north to Franklin Avenue. He parked in front of a glass-fronted emporium where three gilded balls hung over the doorway. Discreet gilt lettering on the window read: LEVINE’S PAWNSHOP — LOANS.

Inside, a dapper, impeccably groomed man with graying hair and the distinguished manner of a judge stood behind the counter. Outside of his business place, no one would have dreamed that Solomon Levine was a pawnbroker, and as a matter of fact he wasn’t a very good one. He had too soft a heart for the business, with the result that Clancy Ross had twice been forced to bail his old friend out of impending bankruptcy.

For a period after his near financial downfalls, the pawnbroker always operated his business with the relentlessness of a Scrooge, so he had been able to pay both advances back. But the moment he became solvent again he immediately became a sucker again for everyone who walked in with a sad story of a sick mother or a dying wife and wanted to pawn for fifty dollars a watch he had just bought in another pawnshop for ten.

He was one of the gambler’s favorite people.

The pawnbroker gave him a reserved but pleasant smile and said, “How are you, Clancy?”

“Fine, Sol,” the gambler said, thrusting his hand across the counter to clasp the pawnbroker’s. “How’s the family?”

“Rose is well. Joe graduates from college next spring. I hear you’ve been having a little trouble.”

“Some. I need a particular type of gun, Sol. It has to be small; about vest-pocket size. And it has to have a ring at the base of the stock that I can tie a cord to.”

The pawnbroker furrowed his brow in thought. After musing a few moments, he went to a glass case at the rear of the shop, unlocked it and lifted out a small leather box. Carrying it back to the counter, he set it in front of Ross and lifted the lid.

A stubby, double-barreled derringer lay in the velvet-lined case. A small metal ring on a swivel was fixed to the base of the butt.

Breaking the gun open, Ross peered down the barrels.

“It’s in perfect condition,” Levine said. “I test-fired it.”

“Got any shells for it?”

“Sure.” Returning to the gun case, he brought back a box of .41 caliber rim-fire cartridges.

Replacing the gun in its velvet-lined case, Ross snapped shut the lid, dropped the case in one side pocket and the box of cartridges in the other. Taking out his wallet, he said, “How much do I owe you?”

The pawnbroker’s lips formed a half smile. “I planned to ask thirty-five and come down to fifteen. But you never play the game, Clancy. If all my customers were like you, there wouldn’t be any fun in this business.”

Ross grinned. “I could haggle you down to ten without half trying. And if I told you I needed it to put my poor old sick mother out of her misery, you’d give it to me for nothing. Who you trying to kid?”

“Okay, ten,” Levine said.

Giving his head a hopeless shake, Ross dropped a ten and a five on the counter. “I heard you the first time. How much for the shells?”

“Included. I don’t suppose you want to sign the gun-register book?”

“Of course I do. Let’s have it.”

The pawnbroker looked faintly surprised. From beneath the counter he brought a thin ledger and flipped pages until he came to one only half filled with notations. In the space immediately below the last entry he wrote down the make and serial number of the gun. Then he reversed the ledger to face Ross and handed him the pen.