Max Collins - Mourn The Living

He collected his things, picked his suitcase up off the floor and hastily re-packed it, got his clothes-bags too. He rubbed his temple; his head was still pounding like hell, but his balance was okay. A few aspirin would help the head as long as there wasn’t concussion. His mouth was bleeding and hurt like a bastard, but he ran a hand over it and didn’t think he would need stitches.

Out in the hall, he could hear a muffled Tulip in there saying “Mean s.o.b.” over and over. Nolan lugged his suitcase and clothes-bags thinking he could have been a lot meaner than he’d been. He wouldn’t have lost much sleep over killing that pair.

The Lincoln was indeed waiting and he walked easily over to it. Vicki was at the wheel, the engine running. He got in the rider’s side, tossed his things in back.

When she saw him her eyes rolled wide and she gasped. “What happened! Your face, your mouth...”

“Hard day at the office,” he said. “Beat it the hell out of here.”

Sometimes, when insomnia hit him and he spent half the night fighting for sleep, Phil Saunders almost wished his wife were alive.

This was a night like that. He’d gone to bed at twelve, as soon as the late night talk show had signed off. Now it was two-thirty and he was still awake.

Yes, too bad, in a way, his wife wasn’t alive any more.

At least if she were there she could have bitched him to sleep.

Now there was no one. No one to talk to, have sex with, live with. A little old fashioned nagging never killed anybody. At least you weren’t alone.

Not that it was bad, living alone here. He had a nice apartment, six rooms, luxury plus. And very nicely furnished, too, in a conservative sort of way. But then, Phil was a conservative sort of person, outwardly upright, honest. But on the inside? Life had grown a sour taste lately.

A year and a half ago life had been sweet. A year and a half ago when he had been Police Commissioner of Havens, New Jersey, a legit above-board job he’d worked his ass off over the years to get. A year and a half ago his wife had been a drying-up prune he put up with out of habit and for appearance sake. A year and a half ago his affair with Suzie Van Plett, that succulent soft little seventeen-year-old, had been in full bloom.

Too bad his wife had walked in on him and Suzie that time. There’s nothing like the sight of a naked seventeen- year-old blonde sitting on the lap of a naked forty-nine- year-old balding police commissioner to give a really first rate instantaneous and fatal heart attack to a fully-clothed fifty-two-year-old grey-haired police commissioner’s wife. Then the reporters, the disgrace, the friends deserting him, the question of statutory rape in the air and finally the humiliating midnight escape.

His name had been different then, but it died with his wife and his reputation in Havens. He turned to his cousin, a longtime con artist going by the name Irwin Elliot. Elliot had a sweet set-up going in Chelsey, Illinois, through the Chicago crime syndicate. Cousin Elliot was good at documents and he forged the defrocked Havens police commissioner a good set of references, pulled the proper strings, opened and closed the right mouths, and the newly named Phil Saunders sprang to life, full-grown at birth. He filled the puppet role of Chelsey Police Chief and watched his cousin Elliot control the town as the brains behind another puppet, that fat fool George Franco, who was a brother of some Chicago mob guy.

It was a rich life, and an easy one.

But there were no succulent seventeen-year-olds in his Chelsey life, nor would there be, on Cousin Elliot’s orders.

Just a conservatively furnished six-room apartment that even his dead wife could have brightened with her presence. At least if his wife were around there would be someone not to listen to, not to talk with.

The door buzzer sounded, startling Saunders. Then, knowing who it would be, he went to the door and opened it.

He smiled and said, “Hi, buddy,” and then he noticed the .38 in his visitor’s hand.

The gun went to his temple, the visitor fired and Saunders joined his wife.

Lyn Parks had been with Broome long enough. He was a lousy bed partner, he smelled bad and his manners were nonexistent.

They were in the backstage dressing room at the Third Eye, and it was three o’clock in the morning. Broome had been trying desperately to get her to come across since after the band’s last set and his failure was getting him angry, despite the fact that he’d shot up with horse a few minutes before and should have been feeling quite good by now.

“Get your goddamn hands off me!” She shook her head in disgust with him, with herself. “You’re really a sickening bastard, Broome, and it’s pretty damn revolting to me to think I ever let you touch me.”

“Come on, babe, you ain’t no cherry...” He groped for her and she was sick of it. After seeing him shoot up with H — he’d never had the poor taste before to shoot up right in front of her — she was almost physically ill with the thought of her few months of close association with the man. She was ready to move on — life with Broome and these sick creeps was worse than life with her father, “One Thumb” Gordon, a gangster who pretended respectability. She hated phonies, like her father, and she hated Broome as well, for his brand of phoniness.

“You aren’t anything but a pusher, Broome,” she told him bitterly. “Flower power? Some of the kids in this town are on the level with their peace and love, but you... you’re a bum, a peddler, a cheap gangster worse than my father ever was.”

“Your father? Who’s your father?” Broome wasn’t having much luck with trying to speak, everything was coming out slurred.

It was disgusting to Lyn, this rolling around with a doped-up lowlife on a threadbare sofa in a back-stage people closet with dirty wooden floors and graffitied walls. Broome was no threat, he was already on the verge of incoherence, sliding into dreaminess. She started for the door.

Then heard the footsteps.

Somebody banged on the door.

Fear caught her by the throat and she instinctively ducked in the bathroom, where Broome had so often shot up, his works still on the sink.

She heard Broome mumble something out there, maybe a greeting. A few more words.

Then a gun-shot.

Kneeling tremblingly, she peered through the keyhole and saw a person she recognized pocket a revolver and turn and go. She waited three long minutes before opening the closet wide enough to see Broome, lying on his back like a broken doll, his freaky blond Orphan Annie curls splattered with blood and brains, skull split by a bullet.

She puked in the sink.

She wiped the tears from her eyes, found control of her retching stomach, wondered what to do...

Webb.

That was it, she had to find Webb.

He could do something about this.

At least he could take her away from it...

She ran.

George Franco was pissed, in several senses of the word.

He sat by the window and stared down the block at the extended sign of Chelsey Ford Sales, the building he’d seen Nolan enter several times during the day — the last time around midnight with a pretty girl, a girl George thought he recognized.

It was too late to be drinking, but George was. He sat in his red and white striped nightshirt like a colorful human beach ball and nursed a bottle of Haig and Haig.

That fucker Nolan. Who did he think he was, pushing George around? And why hadn’t Nolan called? One whole day gone since he and Nolan had made their pact, with Nolan saying he’d check in every now and then. Well, why the hell didn’t he?

George had decided he wanted a favor from Nolan — in return for keeping quiet about the thief’s presence in Chelsey. It was only fair... and it would be a favor that Nolan would get something out of in return...