Hard-Boiled Immortal (The Immortal Chronicles) (6 page)

“W
hat can I do for you fellas?” I asked.  They both had their barrels trained on me but neither started shooting, which was nice.  After a five count, the one nearest the door knocked on it, and two more men walked in.  I only knew one of them.

“Rocky, I’m real sorry about
all this.”

“
Hiya, Vinnie.  Looks like you know some folks with guns.”

Vinnie looked like he always did, which was to say he didn’t look like much more than a bruiser of the sort you hired to shake down people smaller
than him.  He was someone I never really wanted to run into outside of Jimmy’s, figuring if I did it was for a bad reason.  We were still in Jimmy’s, but this encounter certainly qualified.

The guy next to Vinnie
, who I’d never seen before, took a good look around the place.  “What a dump,” he said.  He was a squat little guy, the least physically impressive of the four of them, which made him most likely to be the guy in charge.  He was balding, and had an unpleasant scar on the side of his face.

“It looked a lot nicer about five minutes ago,” I said.  “Who are you?”

“I’m nobody you need to know, except if I say so these guys here finish you off.”

“Do you have a name?”

He eyeballed Vinnie, who shrugged. 

“No,
” he said to me, “I don’t have a name.”

“This is my employer, Rock,” Vin said.  “That’s all you need to know.”

“Maybe you’re right, Vin, and I don’t need to know his name.  But just maybe
he
needs to know whose bar he just shot all to hell.”

This was a dangerous play on my part, but I didn’t have many other options.  My only secret weapon was the succubus with the pistol under the bar, and I didn’t think she could shoot or screw us out of this
.  Maybe if there were fewer guys. 

Vinnie’s employer still looked annoyed about the state of the bar.  “
You aren’t Jimmy?”

“
No I told you,” Vin said.  “This is Rocky.  I never met no Jimmy.”

“
Jimmy doesn’t come around all that much, mister, except to collect the register and check on whose bar tab needs some personal attention.  Couple of times a month he runs a poker game out back, but you’re probably not invited seeing as you don’t have a name and I don’t recognize your mug.  His last name’s Ricca.  Maybe that rings a bell or two.”

It
should have rung a whole orchestra of bells.  Ricca was the surname of the family that ran the Chicago Outfit, which was the local syndicate. 

Vinnie and his boss both went a little paler than they started out.  “You saying this shop is owned by Jimmy
Ricca?” the boss asked.

“That’s what I’m saying.  But I’m sure you fellas di
dn’t mean to wreck his place.  You can just call him up and apologize and I’m sure he’d understand.”

The boss looked deeply displeased. 
“I think maybe we’ve got ourselves a big problem,” he said.  “Wouldn’t you say, Vinnie?”

“Yeah…” Vinnie’s expression made it clear he was pretty sure he was in a heap of trouble.
  I was nearly positive Vin knew who owned the bar, and just didn’t think about it until right then.

“Tell you what,” I said.  “You four walk on out of here right
now, I’ll make up something and leave you out of it.”

“You’d do that for us, Rocky?” Vinnie asked.

“Of course I would.”

“No, no
that’s not gonna work,” the boss said, shaking his head.  “Vinnie might be a damn idiot, but he tells me he overheard you and some dame talking about going to the feds, and we’re not okay with that.  Granted, we could have perhaps approached the matter with more subtlety, but that don’t change things all that much in my mind.  So where are you hiding the girl, Mr. Rocky?  And don’t tell me she ran out the back because we were watching.”

I looked down.  It seemed inappropriate, having her stand wearing only that coat, like she was showing up at the door in a negligee.  But she gave me a little nod, so I figured it was okay.

“You got her rattled with all the shooting.  Can’t blame her.  Come on honey.”  I extended my hand for her to stand.  She gave me a private eye-roll before getting to her feet.

“What’s going on, Rocky?  What do these fellas want?”
  She slid in with my arm around her like it was the most natural thing in the world.  Felt good too, having her there. 

Lucy
gave them the doe-iest doe-eyes anybody had ever seen.  You’d have sworn she was the most innocent girl on the face of the earth, regardless of how nearly naked she was.  But it was clear nobody was buying the act.  Problem was, most people—regardless of gender—would have been in hysterics after that show of gunfire, and she came off like we’d just met an encyclopedia salesman.

“I don’t know, baby
,” I said.  “I think these guys are just confused.”

“She’s the one,” Vin said.  “Asking too many questions.”

“Well…” the boss said.  He looked her up and down in a way that made me want to punch him in the jaw.  “Ain’t you a sight?”

“
Aww, thanks, mister.  But I don’t know what you boys are talking about.  I just stopped by here for a little nightcap with Rocky.  What kinda questions you mean?”

“A nightcap, huh?”  The boss eyed what she wasn’t wearing.

“Maybe a little more than a nightcap, but what’s it to ya?  That’s no reason to go around shooting up a place.”

“No, it isn’t
.  But you see miss, we procured some items from this establishment, and then sold those items and made a little money from them, and we’d rather nobody knew about that little arrangement. Vincent, who I think you met earlier this evening, helped with the procurement.  He’s a suspicious guy who doesn’t want to go to jail for trying to make an honest buck, as I’m sure you understand, so when you started whispering in his ear he got to thinking maybe we had a problem.  He heard a
similar
bunch of disturbing details just before running down the street and placing a call to me.  Now we have a different kind of problem, because even if Vincent here was completely wrong about everything else, it turns out—according to your boyfriend here—I’m standing in a bar owned by the Outfit, with two witnesses what don’t work for me that have seen my face.”

He took a look at his two gunners.  I’d been keeping an eye on them myself because it’s never a bad idea to keep track of the guns in the room.  Their expressions hadn’t changed at all.  I was pretty sure they were either stone deaf or didn’t speak the language.

“I’m sorry, you seem like a classy dame and I’m sure this Rocky here is a stand-up guy, but my boys here are gonna have to shoot you.  Then I figure we’ll have to torch the whole place and work on our alibis.  If Jimmy Ricca owns the dive it’ll get chalked up as a hit on him, that’s how I’m seein’ this.”

Something about me, and bars and Chicago always seem to add up to mobs, guns and fires even
tually.  It made me think I should choose a different city, provided I figured out a way to walk out of this one on my own, which was a tall order under the circumstances.  I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to convince Vinnie or his boss that I was immortal and didn’t give a goddamn who he was. 

Fortunately, Lucy took the information like it was nothing.  She smiled and laughed like he’d just made the best joke she’d heard all year, and dammit if he didn’t smile a little.

“You’re funny!” she exclaimed.  She stepped out from under my arm and leaned forward  The boss had his hands on the bar, so she took one of them and started rubbing his wrist.  I couldn’t see the front of her from the angle I was at, but I knew exactly how much cleavage she was showing off when she did this.

“I’m serious, honey
,” he said, patting her hands.  “Sorry it’s gotta be this way.”

“
Ah, you!  I tell ya what,” she said, shooting him a comically perplexed expression that was adorable and not at all appropriate when contrasted with the news of her imminent demise.  She reached behind the bar and revealed the half-empty bottle of whiskey we’d been draining all night.  “As it turns out the only bottle your boys didn’t shoot is the best one in the house.  How ‘bout you and Vinnie here join us for a shot and then we can talk about what to do about this little mess of ours.  We got a little time, right Rock?”

“Yeah, plenty
,” I said, although what made anybody think I was an expert on this I couldn’t say. 

“
There see?  C’mon, you fellas have been all worried about this little secret of yours the whole night I bet you could use a stiff one.”

*   *   *

A stiff one was exactly what they needed, and the drug in the alcohol was exactly what
we
needed.  Ten minutes later Vinnie and his boss—whose name we quickly learned, was Echols—were feeling a lot better about everything in their lives.  At Lucy’s suggestion Echols ordered the two guys with the big guns to stand outside, which made relaxed the situation considerably.  They would undoubtedly remain standing out there until her g-men backup arrived, and that was maybe bad news for the feds, but it wasn’t my problem.  My problem was either Vinnie and Echols, or Lucy.  I couldn’t be sure.

“Seems to me, you guys have a bigger
concern than Jimmy Ricca,” Lucy was saying, as she fed them their third or fourth shot apiece. 

By this time the drug had settled in nicely and I was beginning to understand why she was so surprised when I didn’t react to it.  These hardened criminals
had already confessed to selling the contents of the napkins, not knowing until later it was going to end up in the hands of the Germans.  Once they learned this they did everything they could to erase any connection between them and the sale, which meant following the overly inquisitive Lucy and shooting up what they were afraid was a barroom full of federal agents.  They felt awful about this, and agreed they had not acted particularly rationally, and now were panicking about the whole thing. 

They were also
ready to do whatever she said.

“What do you mean, sweetie?” Echols asked.

“You were wrong about the place being full of feds,” she said.  “But there was at least one.”  She put her credentials on the table.  “Ain’t that a kick in the head?”

Vinnie and Echols looked at it, thought about it for a while, and then started laughing.  “Yeah,” Vin said.  “Yeah, that’s a problem, huh?”

“Now we
really
have to kill both of you!” Echols said.

Lucy laughed. 
“No, no, no, you’re thinking about it all
wrong
.  I don’t care about you boys, all I want is who you sold the napkins to.  The Outfit don’t have to be the wiser for it either way.”

“But look what we did to this place!”

“I tell you what,” Lucy said, a glimmer in her eye and a sidewise glance at me.  “Word on the street is, Rocky here was into some stuff on the side.”

Vinnie looked at me, wide-eyed.  “
Was
he?”

“I didn’t think so, no,” I said.
  “I’m pretty sure I didn’t have anything going on.”

She
threw me a wink.  “Sure you did, Rock.  You were in some stuff Jimmie didn’t know about, and it turns out that stuff involved selling secrets to the Germans, and it’s a shame how those secrets got you killed.  And these fellas here, they’re heroes for finding out and turning over the whole operation.”

“Heroes!” Echols agreed.

“All they have to do is give me the name of everybody they know who touched those napkins.  You know, since you don’t actually know those names and these guys do.”

“I’m not sure I like that story,” I said.

“Yeah, I didn’t think you would.”  She had her gun out again.  Apparently she really did have a place in her sleeve to hide that thing.  She pointed it at my head.  “Sorry, Rocky.  It’s the only story everyone’s gonna buy.  Tough thing is, you gotta die for it to work out.”

I was thinking she had skipped a couple of non-lethal options
, and possibly also forgotten the part where I said I wasn’t bulletproof.  “These fellas will believe anything you say,” I pointed out.

“Su
re, you’re right, but the FBI won’t.  You’re a guy with no last name and no family, manning a bar that stole and sold state secrets.  People get locked up for that much.  It’s better off for you this way.”

“
So you’re gonna shoot me?”  I was pretty sure I was missing something.

“Nah, not me.  These boys are the ones that did it, right boys?”

“Sorry, Rock,” Vinnie said.  “You were a solid guy.”

“Such a shame,” Echols agreed.

I looked into Lucy’s green eyes and caught her giving me another wink.  Then I noticed the barrel of the gun wasn’t actually pointed right at my head.  It was aimed at the air to the right of me. 

“I always figured it’d be a
dame that got me in the end,” I said.  Because if you’re going to go, why not go out saying something memorably cliché?

“
Ain’t that the best way?” she asked.