Blood Game (2 page)

“That part doesn't matter, Leo. What matters is that we convince him to get back here in time for the fight Saturday afternoon.”

“Where is he?”

“Across town.”

“Doing what?”

“If I know Victor, he's soaking up the suds and spending all the time he can with Mexican women. He loves Mexican women, just before they go to fat. You understand?”

Guild nodded. “So what am I supposed to do?”

“Get him for me.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“Take him this envelope. When he sees it, he'll come along.”

“If it's so easy, why don't you do it?”

“Because he wouldn't even give me the chance to hand him the envelope. He'd just start swinging.”

Stephen Stoddard said, “He's a genuine madman, Mr. Guild, Victor is. A genuine madman. I once saw him knock a Brahma bull out with one punch.”

“Great,” Guild said, “and I'm supposed to go get him.”

“The sheriff said that's the sort of thing you do,” John T. Stoddard said.

“If you mean Sheriff Cardinelli,” Guild said, “he only says things like that after about three or four schooners. He always gets sentimental and likes to talk about how tough all his former deputies are. I suppose it reflects on how well he trained us thirty years ago.”

“You worked for him here?”

“No. Up in the territory. Near the border.”

“Oh.”

Guild sighed. “I'm not your man.”

“What?” John T. Stoddard looked shocked.

“I'm fifty-five years old. I've got a crimped right knee from a riding accident, and I'm used to dealing with criminals, who most of the time are willing to have you bring them in because they're tired of running and hiding. Victor doesn't sound as if he'll be happy to see me at all.”

“You're afraid of him, then?” John T. Stoddard said.

“Of course.”

“I can't believe you're admitting this.”

“Why wouldn't I admit it?”

“Well, because.”

“Because as a bounty hunter I'm supposed to be big and strong and brave?”

“I guess something like that.”

Guild stood up, fanned at his sweaty face with his Stetson. He was playing something of a game and he was about to see if all his theatrics were about to pay off. He had immediately sized up John T. Stoddard as a cheapskate, a man who would expect a man to accept whatever pittance he felt like paying. Obviously, there weren't many men in this town willing to deliver the envelope to Victor, whatever the fee. Guild figured he should get a good dollar.

“You're leaving?” John T. Stoddard said.

“I'm leaving.”

“I'd think pride alone would make you take this job.”

“Well, you'd be wrong.”

Now John T. Stoddard stood. “How much do you think I was going to offer you?”

Guild considered a moment. He wanted to name a price that would establish a high ceiling. “Fifty dollars.”

“Fifty dollars!” John T. Stoddard moved with the large, melodramatic motions of an opera star in his dying moments on stage. ‘‘Who would pay you fifty dollars just to deliver an envelope?''

“I wouldn't take fifty dollars, anyway. I'd want seventy-five.”

“Seventy-five!”

Guild fanned himself some more with his hat and waited for what he sensed was the right moment and then turned to go.

“Do you realize how many young boys you're letting down?” This one was so good Guild had to stop halfway to the door and turn around. “Beg pardon?”

“Young boys. In this town. Do you know how many of them have their hopes up to see Victor Sovich?” He paused and threw a wild hand toward the heavens. “Do you read magazines, Leo?”

“Sometimes.”

“Have you ever read articles on how disappointment can stunt a young boy's mental development?”

“I see,” Guild said. “If they don't see Victor on Saturday, they might be mentally stunted.”

“You can scoff if you like, Leo. But that's exactly what we're dealing with here.”

“Sixty-five dollars,” Leo Guild said.

John T. Stoddard glared at Guild as if he were one of those socialists now stirring up labor trouble around the country. “You would put your own pocketbook above the well-being of eight-year-old boys?”

Guild shook his head. “Yeah, I guess that's the kind of low-down son of a bitch I really am.”

Stephen Stoddard, whom Guild already liked anyway, had the good grace to laugh. At least until his father glared at him.

He had sixty-five dollars' worth of John T. Stoddard's greenbacks in his wallet, he was smoking one of John T. Stoddard's stogies, and he was sitting across the aisle in the streetcar from a very nice looking fortyish woman in a big picture hat. Her occasional glances at the six-foot Guild in his white boiled shirt, black suitcoat, black serge trousers, and black Texas boots said that he was probably a rapscallion, but an interesting one. Only when her soft brown gaze fell to the .44 strapped around his waist did her lips purse in that social disapproval city folks display for people not their kind.

In addition to watching the woman, Guild just enjoyed the ride. He liked the way the streetcar ran down the center of the sprawling town with its three- and four-story buildings and all its buggies and rigs and wagons. He enjoyed watching all the men in straw boaters and high-buttoned suits and the women in flowered hats and twirling red and blue and yellow parasols, and he liked seeing all the big shiny store windows filled variously with high-button shoes and fresh bakeiy goods and pharmaceuticals and barbers in dark suit coats and handlebar mustaches stropping their razors and patting shaving cream on sagging faces. There was a music to the city that he sometimes longed for, the announcing clang of streetcars, the hoarse whistle of the factory changing shifts, the traffic policeman's street corner instructions to keep moving, keep moving, the sweet passing laughter of women he could at least dream about.

The woman he'd been playing eye games with got off about three blocks before he did, and as usual he felt a vast and personal disappointment, as if she'd been the woman he'd been meant to marry only she hadn't understood this and had gone shopping for rutabagas instead, and with not so much as a glance back at him. Not a glance.

The city changed abruptly. Where the stone and brick and wooden business buildings had given way to wide streets lined with forbidding iron gates and what passed for mansions in a midwestern town this size, so then did the mansions give way. Now the streets narrowed and the houses grew smaller and uglier in appearance, immigrant houses already sixty years old, older than the town's incorporation itself. Wild, filthy children ran the streets, and a cornucopia of garbage—the red of tomato rinds, the yellow of gutted squash, the tainted brown of sun-rotting fly-infested beef—filled curbstones and gutters alike.

Mothers bellowed harshly for their children, threatening enormous violence if the kids did not show their faces soon. Drunks wound and wove amid it all, one poor bastard puking into a garbage can, puking blood. There were cats and dogs and a few horses, all rib-gaunt and glassy-eyed from malnutrition, and here and there you saw a man smack a woman hard in the face or belly, and you saw a woman bash a man with a broom. White faces, black faces, brown faces, red faces, all showed the toil taken by living here. The sadness so easily became rage, and the rage so easily became despair. This was the part of city life Guild hated, the eternal poor and their eternal doom.

When he stepped off the platform of the streetcar, he took from the pocket of his coat the piece of paper John T. Stoddard had given him containing Victor Sovich's address.

The house stood two stories tall. It looked as though it had once been green. Now there was so much grime it was hard to tell what color it was. Not a single window remained intact. Cans, newspapers, pages of magazines, and plump brown dog turds covered the thin grass of the front yard. A small mulatto child, perhaps a year and a half, lay naked on the front step, fondling himself and crying.

A woman with a leaf-shaped paper fan bearing the name of a funeral home on its front side leaned in the doorway, watching Guild approach. Next to her squatted a dog with dirty white fur. From what he could see of the woman, she looked Mexican.

“Hello.”

“What do you want?”

“I'm looking for a man named Victor Sovich.”

“I don't know a man named like that.”

Beneath the thin white cotton of her dusty dress, a beautiful, breathtaking set of breasts rose and fell with her breathing.

Guild sensed eyes watching him from all the windows of this tightly packed neighborhood. A word from her and two or three young men would no doubt appear, and Guild, if he wasn't quick and ruthless enough with his .44, would most likely be sorry.

“I have some money for him. Five hundred dollars.”

He felt sorry for the quick, cheap light in her brown eyes. She had so little money, the child at her feet obviously malnourished, that mention of it made her almost ugly with desire. “Money you say?”

“Money. Five hundred dollars.”

“For this Victor?”

“For Victor. Yes.”

Guild would never be sure what happened next. No matter how many times he tried to reconstruct it, he just couldn't get the sequence straight.

Apparently Victor Sovich had been hiding in the vestibule right behind the woman. No other position would have allowed him to catapult out of the house. Or maybe he didn't catapult out of the house. Maybe Sovich came from behind him. Or from the side.

Not that it mattered.

The man with the fancy tattoos and the gray chest hair and the slick-shaven head and the biceps like coconuts started his attack by hitting Guild in the ribs.

Not that Sovich gave him a chance to do anything about it.

Before Guild's fists came up reflexively, Sovich hit him twice in the face and once more in the stomach.

Guild knew that he was bleeding, knew that he had peed his pants, and knew that he was making some kind of vague mewling sound.

Then Sovich slammed a right cross straight into Guild's crotch.

If Guild was not precisely unconscious at that point, he certainly was when his head slammed against the ground.

“You keep this one there,” the Mexican woman said twenty minutes later, bending into Guild's face with her soft breasts and her breath smelling of spicy Mexican food.

Guild lay on a red daybed in a white room. The hot sunlight shone directly on him through the room's single window. The room stank of food and tobacco smoke and heat. His head hurt and his jaw hurt, but neither hurt half so much as his groin. In the hallway outside, he could hear kids running up and down the wooden steps, screaming and laughing. One of them kept saying the dirtiest word Guild ever heard anybody say. The kid couldn't have been more than five.

“He lost his temper, Victor.”

Guild tapped his sports coat. “He also took his money.” “You know what he did with the money?”

“What?”

“He burned it.”

“What?”

He saw tears in her eyes. She shook her head in anger and a curious kind of fascination. “Look.”

She showed him the white envelope John T. Stoddard had given him. She opened it up like an oyster. He peeked inside. Black curled ashes filled the white envelope.

“He is crazy sometimes.”

“I'm sorry.”

“He was cheated.”

“Victor?”

She nodded. “I do not blame him for being mad.”

“Who cheated him?”

“Stoddard.”

“How much did he cheat him out of?”

“Many, many thousands. They have a—what is the word? Paper you sign?”

“Contract?”

“Yes. Contract. They have contract giving Victor half of everything. He gets nothing except five hundred dollars every three or four months. It is not fair.”

“Where is Victor now?”

“He's in the kitchen.”

Guild raised his head. He could never recall being hit so hard or so often without being able to swing back.

“What's he doing in the kitchen?”

“He's waiting for you.”

“He wants to hit me again?”

“No. He only wants to talk.”

“To me?”

“Yes.”

Guild patted his right hip. His .44 was there. He drew it out and looked it over. “I'm taking this into the kitchen with me.”

“He will understand. He knows how he can get.”

“You tell him if he tries to hit me again, I'll kill him right on the spot.”

She surprised him by smiling. “He scares you?” There was a certain pride in her voice.

“Absolutely. Now you go tell him.”

She went away with her sweet, swaying breasts and long, good legs and bare, slapping feet. Guild sat up. He moaned several times and cursed. He checked his Ingram. He had been out for over half an hour. He focused his eyes. There was no evidence of concussion that he could tell. His groin was so painful, he was afraid to move.

The Mexican woman came back. “He asked if you would like a glass of beer.”

“That would be nice, yes.”

“He asked if you would like a cigarette.”

“That would be nice, too.” He paused. “Did you tell him what I said about killing him if he tries to hit me?”

“He is calm now. The only time you have to worry about Victor is when he is not calm.”

Guild tried to stand up.

The undignified mewling sound came from his chest again.

The Mexican woman reached down and helped him stand. She put her arm around his shoulder and walked him across the sunhot floor and down a small hallway past walls the kids had drawn circles and lines and sort of Aztec faces on with pencils.

The kitchen was a tiny room with a wobbly wooden table and four chairs and a stove and an icebox. It smelled of sour milk and beer and beans. Fat black flies squatted everywhere, the webs of their wings iridescent blue and green in the sunlight.