Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (6 page)

‘Jesus, that’s a great act you put on,’ Mason said with heavy sarcasm.

I drew back my leg and kicked him on the club foot as hard as I could. He grunted and doubled over, and when he straightened up his face was corrugated with pain.

‘Don’t you ever say that to me again,’ I said.

‘Jesus! Ralph,’ Jinx said. ‘What the hell…’

‘You understand?’ I said to Mason. ‘Don’t ever say that to me again.’

‘You beat it,’ Mason said. ‘Beat it. Get out of here.’

I just looked at him. ‘How much for these automatics?’

‘Get out,’ he said, with a little moan. ‘Beat it. Put them pistols down and beat it.’

‘How much?’ I asked again.

He glared at me. Finally, he said: ‘Two hundred dollars for the both of ’em.’

‘It’s a deal,’ I said. I knew this was far too much, but I didn’t want to argue with him. ‘Come on,’ I said to Jinx. ‘Let’s push …’

‘Cash,’ Mason said.

‘I’ll have the cash in an hour,’ I told him. ‘I’ll settle for everything then. Including a Ford sedan with a Mercury motor.’ I could see the wheels going around in his head. ‘Stop worrying,’ I said. ‘I’ll be back. You know that…’

He sat down in the chair, picking up his club foot and holding it as he would a baby. There was still a lot of pain in his face. I nodded to Jinx, and we went out into the garage and got in the Zephyr.

‘Jesus. Ralph,’ Jinx said, as we drove out. ‘You shouldn’t a done that. He’s lame.…’

‘So much more reason why he ought to be careful what he says to me,’ I said.

We turned into the street, into the traffic.

‘Yeah. But he’s helping us a lot.…’

‘If he didn’t help us, somebody else would. All you need is dough. Christ look at Karpis and Dillinger and Pierpont and those guys. Dump all their brains together and you haven’t got enough intelligence to get past the fourth grade. How the hell do you think they manage to get by? Dough, that’s how. They want a guy like Mason, they buy him. They want a cop or a sheriff, they buy him. The answer is dough.…’

We were rolling down the street, in the traffic.

‘No sense in throwing money away,’ he said. ‘You had a thirty-eight. Why buy another one?’

‘I don’t like a revolver. I told you that. I don’t like any revolver. That’s why I asked for automatics. Where’d he get these? These are brand new.…’

‘Oh, he can get anything in that line you want. Pistols, rifles, machine-guns, tear gas masks…’

‘How? That stuffs dynamite to handle.’

‘Not the way he works it. His brother-in-law’s chief of police out at the steel mills. They got rooms of the stuff at the steel mills. All the big plants around here’ve got that stuff.’

‘Makes it nice.’ I said.

‘Especially for the little guy,’ Jinx said. He turned into the parking space behind the A-One Market. ‘Where?’ he asked.

‘Anywhere,’ I said. The clock on the dashboard of the Zephyr said five minutes after nine. ‘You set that clock?’ I asked.

‘Right on the nose at eight-thirty,’ he said, easing the sedan into a parking place. There were a few cars on either side of us. ‘He ought to be along any minute now if your figuring’s right.’

‘Unless the bottle-washing machine busted again,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘It’s a private joke,’ I said. ‘You get the tape?’

‘Yeah.’ He took two rolls of tape out of his pocket, showing them to me. They were white adhesive tape, two inches wide, the kind you can buy at any drug store. ‘What about the pads?’

‘I got it. And the masks, too.’ I unbuttoned my coat, holding it open so he could see the masks pinned to my shirt. They were comic masks, the kind children wear on Hallowe’en Night. I unpinned one, handing it to him. It had dabs of black paint on the cheeks and under the nose was a handlebar moustache. The other one, mine, was a replica of a young girl’s face; crimson cheeks and exaggerated eyelashes and an oversized mouth. He took his, not saying anything, putting it inside his coat

‘Holiday got ’em at the five-and-dime,’ I told him.

‘She got a lot of ’em. Hell of a gag, don’t you think?’

‘I’ll say…’

‘I’ll have these cops crazy before I get through with ’em. A few nice jobs and west we go.’

He nudged me and I looked out. The milk truck was rolling up to the concrete railing in the rear of the market, by the unloading platform.

‘That him?’ Jinx asked.

‘That’s him’

Jinx leaned forward, looking past me at the milkman. It was Joe, all right. He had got out of the truck now and was filling the wooden box with bottles of milk.

‘You think you can handle him all by yourself?’ Jinx asked.

‘I think so,’ I replied.

A young boy wearing the greyish apron of a market helper came out the back door carrying a big wicker basket and walked to the truck.

‘Hi, Joe …’ he said.

‘Hi, squirt…’ Joe said.

The squirt climbed into the truck and began to fill the wicker basket with packages of butter and cheese and cartons of eggs, talking to Joe about an ice hockey team or something. I could not hear all of what was being said. He soon filled the basket and went back inside the market. Joe followed him in dragging the box of milk bottles on a piece of rope tied through the handle.

‘You got this straight?’ I asked Jinx.

‘I slept on it. I follow you to Hartford’s. I turn the car around and park outside. I go inside and wait by the icebox till everything checks.’

‘Right.’ I opened the door and got out.

‘I’ll keep my fingers crossed,’ he said.

‘You save that for next time,’ I said.

He started the motor and backed out, heading the sedan for the street. I idled over to the milk truck. A fat, frowsy woman came out of the back door of the market eating a candy bar and carrying a manila shopping bag so full the paper sides were straining at the twine handles. When she passed I leaped into the milk truck, crouching down behind the front seat. I lifted the automatics from my coat pockets and laid them on the floor. Then I took off my hat and coat rolling them into a bundle which I pushed into a corner of the seat. I put one automatic in my left hip pocket and held the other one in my right hand, and then, over the top of the seat, I saw Joe emerge from the market, dragging the empty wooden box. When he reached the truck he picked up the box and tossed it over the seat, over my head, into the truck. He stepped into the truck and was about to crawl over the seat into the rear when he saw me.

‘Come back here,’ I said. My face was not more than two feet from his face. He was scared. He opened his mouth and I knew he was trying to scream; and I swung hard, left to right, laying the barrel of the automatic across the side of his head just above the ear. There was a sound like thumping a cantaloupe and the blood spurted. He fell forward and I grabbed him with my left hand, hauling him over the seat, out of sight, thinking only one thing now: I had to keep his white jacket from getting bloody, I had to get it off him in a hurry. It was some mess back there in that narrow truck, with me trying to get his jacket off and milk bottles and butter and cheese packages spilling off the shelves and making so much racket that I expected at any moment to have somebody stick in his head to see what was going on. But I finally got the jacket off, and I hit him on the head again, straight down this time, feeling reasonably certain that this would hold him for awhile. I slipped into his jacket and put on his cap, which was a trifle small for me, and got under the wheel of the truck, rolling out into the street. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jinx fall in behind me.

I turned the corner and drove down the street to Hartford’s, stopping just inside the driveway, leaving room between the milk truck and the sidewalk for Jinx to put the Zephyr, making sure that there would be absolutely no way for the Zephyr to be hemmed up when the time came to get away. I cut the switch and sat there, watching Jinx turn the Zephyr around and back it into the slot I had made for him. Then he got out, moving to the rear entrance of the market. I crawled into the rear of the truck and started filling the wooden box with milk bottles. Joe was bleeding like a stuck hog. You wouldn’t believe that an old man could bleed so much. The blood was running down a little drain in the center of the steel floor and I took a quarter-pound of butter from the rack and plugged the drain with it. Then I crawled over Joe’s body, over the seat, out of the truck and went inside, dragging the box of milk behind. Nobody paid any attention to me. I opened the icebox door, and was stacking the bottles inside when Jinx came up and opened the other door, pretending to be a customer.

‘Okay in front,’ he said.

‘Let’s go then,’ I said.

I closed the icebox door, shoved the empty wooden box over to one side, against a row of breakfast foods, and started up the steps to the office. I looked out to my left. There were about a dozen customers in the market; from up here, on the steps, it looked like a color advertisement of the interior of Any Market, U.S.A. There was a narrow landing at the head of the stairs, and I motioned to Jinx and we bent over and slipped on the masks. Then I opened the screened door of the office and went inside, taking the automatic from my pocket. Hartford was sitting at the desk nearest the door stacking cheques and silver and currency, and sitting at the next desk, her back to me, was a woman.

Hartford looked up when he heard the screened door open. He started to say something and then he saw the automatic in my hand and Jinx standing behind me, and his mouth snapped shut.

‘Clasp your hands behind your neck,’ I said.

He pushed himself back in the chair, clasping his hands behind his neck. Now the woman turned around, moving her body, and I saw that there was a small telephone switchboard on her desk.

‘Get away from there and lay on the floor,’ I said.

She got up slowly and stood by her desk hesitantly. She did not seem in the least frightened.

‘Lay yourself down,’ I said, hearing behind me the sound of adhesive tape being unrolled. She heard it too; there was a flicker of indecision in her face and I gestured with my automatic and she sat down on the floor. I took two pads from my pocket and handed them to Jinx as he moved towards her.

He said to the woman, ‘All the way down,’ pushing her over to the floor. Then he doubled on the Kotex pads, stuffing it into her mouth and taping it tightly.

Hartford turned his head, watching this operation. ‘You’re cute,’ he said to me.

‘Get down there with her,’ I said.

He got up and lay down beside her on the floor and Jinx went to work on him. After he had been gagged and taped, Jinx pulled his ankles up behind him and taped them to his wrists.

‘Now, you’re cute,’ I said. I put the automatic in my pocket and picked up all the currency and cheques in sight, stuffing them inside my shirt, not bothering with the silver. Then Jinx and I strolled out, taking off our masks, going down the steps. In the market, business was proceeding as usual…

We reached the ground floor and went outside. I retrieved the bundle from the milk truck that was my coat and hat, and when I got into the Zephyr Jinx let in the clutch and the car moved out into the street.

‘You sure as hell knew what you were talking about,’ Jinx said softly. ‘We must’ve got twenty grand.…’

‘Not that much,’ I said. ‘But for the first day’s work it wasn’t bad.’

‘It was six thousand, one hundred and forty-two dollars, and Mason’s eyes bugged out a foot. ‘By God!’ he exclaimed. ‘You stick up that produce market?’

‘What do you care?’ I asked.

‘What do I care?’ he said. He turned to Jinx, his face dark. ‘You ought to know better’n that, you crazy bastard!’

‘Don’t get yourself in such an uproar,’ Jinx said quietly. ‘It wasn’t the produce market.’

Mason glared at him, not quite understanding, and then he suddenly reached over and picked up some of the cheques I had stacked beside the currency. He glanced at them, two or three of them, and his lips trembled angrily.

‘Hartford’s! Hartford’s!’ he said. ‘That’s just as bad! That’s even worse! Right down the street! Whyn’t you tell me where you were going?’

‘I’m awfully sorry, old man,’ I said. ‘Truly. Your agitation distresses me very much. I would have been delighted to tell you what we had in mind except for one little thing – it never occurred to me that it was any of your goddamn business!’

The thin scream of a siren outside, down the street, reached our ears and Mason jumped as if a hot copper wire had been pushed into his urethra, all the way in.

‘You crazy bastard!’ he said to Jinx. ‘Sticking up a place in this neighborhood!’

The siren, which had been growing thinner and more intense, now filled the office with its fragile ominousness as a squad car raced by in front. I saw Nelse run by the office door, going towards the street.

‘No use bleeding now,’ I picked up a handful of currency. ‘One-fourth of sixty-one hundred and forty-two dollars is fifteen hundred and thirty-five dollars. Two hundred for the automatics makes it seventeen hundred and thirty-five. The thousand Holiday owes you makes it an even twenty-seven and thirty-five.’

‘Just a minute,’ Jinx said. ‘What about my cut?’

‘I’m coming to that,’ I said.

‘You’re coming to it too late.…’

‘Jesus!’ Mason said. ‘Do we have to stand here with all that money in plain sight and argue about it? Somebody might walk in here any minute. Let’s go back in the battery room.’

‘You’re a hemophiliac,’ I said. ‘Anybody walks in here, it’ll be just too bad.…’

His eyes blazed and his lips whitened. ‘Then hurry up and split the stuff and get the hell out of here and don’t ever come back,’ he said. ‘You’re a goddamn lunatic, that’s what you are, and I don’t want any part of you. If I’d known what I was getting into…’

‘I got nothing to do with that thousand dollars Holiday owes,’ Jinx was saying. ‘Take out his seventeen thirty-five and you and me split what’s left. It comes to forty-four hundred and seven dollars. I’ll take two thousand.…’

I slapped the currency on the desk, looking at him. ‘You cut it up.’

‘Sure …’ he said, moving to the desk, starting to cut up the money. Nelse came in and stopped, surprised by the sight of all the currency, staring at it.