The Last Cop Out (16 page)
Papa Menes assured them Shelby would have no difficulty. He was, after all, their own protégé, with a remarkable memory, and although he never kept any incriminating records, he would have sufficient coded notes to work from. He, Papa Menes, would see to it. Meanwhile, the whole thing might break wide open faster than they realized since the Frenchman was personally conducting a search for the person who could point the way.
When he hung up he spat out something dirty at the phone wishing the bastards at the conference table could hear it. Fucking pigs, he thought. The New York operation accounted for as much as all the rest put together and he had run it efficiently for more years than most of them had lived and here they were laying the threat on him. Those cocksuckers wanted to try him out and they were going to get a mouthful bigger than they could handle. Ten years ago he had seen it coming when they gave him that birthday party in Chicago and he had prepared for it. He had his own people right inside their most protected places and they still didn’t know about it. Let it come to a showdown and they’d know what a gang war was really like.
It’s just too bad, he thought, that he didn’t let Joey Grif fire a bazooka rocket right into that damn room while he was on the phone with them. Joey was right across the street on the top floor of a building just two stories lower than the one where the conferences were held in supposed safety, but the angle of elevation had already been carefully calibrated and Joey sure wanted to shoot that bazooka.
Papa Menes smiled at the thought and felt better. He was still in control and could prove it with one call to Joey at the right time. They were pretty close to Miami and he wondered if they ought to go into the city and look up a couple of girls. That last one had been pretty damn good. On second thought, he wasn’t all that young any more and had to ration his hard-ons. He’d hate to get all mentally aroused and only have a limp dick frustrate him. Yeah, he’d wait another day or two then really stuff it to that broad. She really liked it up the ass and when they liked it, he liked it better too.
He told Artie Meeker to take him home.
“You thought fast, Helen,” Gill told her.
“I had to. I was pretty sure somebody had already reached him and I didn’t want him putting it to me. Right now he thinks he has a loyal company girl working for him.”
“Has he?”
“As long as they pay my salary I keep the legitimate workings of Boyer-Reston confidential. Nobody has subpoenaed me or has me on a witness stand.”
“That’s the way it should be.”
“But I don’t have to live with them.”
“You don’t have to stay there either,” Gill said.
“Don’t be funny. What could I offer anybody else in the way of references?”
“Guess you have a point there. Any action in the office right now?”
“Not the kind you would expect. Mr. Verdun came in long enough to get something out of the safe and left. He didn’t say when he’d be back. He had no calls and no visitors since. All we’ve been doing is sending out invoices and taking orders.” She paused, her eyes worried. “Gill ... what’s happening?”
“You read the papers.”
“Is it ... really like that?”
“People keep saying there is no Mafia. No such thing as organized crime either.” Burke let a wry grin play around his mouth and took a long pull on his cigarette. “I wonder why all the biggies have their armies out while they stay in the bunkers. They’ve been chewing up the phone lines trying to find out which one of them is doing the pushing and all the alliances are being strengthened. They have couriers and spies strung out from one coast to another and you can damn well bet there is one hell of a price for the brains behind the revolt.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“You can never tell. They’ll probably close their ranks on an individual basis until they know for sure what’s going on. Otherwise they’ll just hole up somewhere while their pros tackle the job. Nothing different from any other revolutionary tactic.”
“But the police ... they’re protecting them. The papers said . . .”
“Protective surveillance to forestall any trouble. Too damn many citizens can get in the way of stray bullets if they start shooting, and believe me, it’ll start before long.”
“Gill...”
“What?”
“Take me home. Please?”
“Okay,” he told her. “Mind if I make a stop first?”
“No, I don’t mind.”
When he pulled up at the curb outside the pawnshop, she glanced at him curiously at first, hiding a smile. “Are things really that bad?”
He patted her thigh with a laugh. “Cop business, honey. I’ll only be a minute.”
“I was only kidding.”
“You’d better hope so.”
The broker was selling a battered guitar to a long-haired kid and Gill waited until the transaction was completed before he walked over to the counter. “Evening Mr. Turley.”
A natural suspicion clouded the owner’s eyes and his tongue ran over his lips. “Officer ... do we have to go through that whole thing again? I was just about to close up and . . .”
“A little early tonight, aren’t you?”
“My wife wants to go out.”
“Well, I’ll only take a minute of your time.”
“So take.”
“It isn’t easy to forget details of a holdup, I guess.”
“No? You ever get held up? You get somebody waving a gun and you’re supposed to remember?”
“How was he waving it?”
“Like he was going to use it, that’s how!”
“Okay, take it easy. Just what did he say?”
“Oh, mister, come on.”
“He didn’t just stand there.”
“For me to give him money is what he says. He’s all drunk and I can hardly understand him only that gun says plenty.”
“Don’t you usually hand it over?”
“What else you expect with somebody pointing a gun?”
“You’ve had a pistol license for ten years. Where do you keep it?”
The guy shrugged and pointed with his thumb. “On the bottom shelf.”
“Not very handy, is it?” Gill asked.
“My neighbor, Mr. Koch, he says I should have it. So I get it and there it stays. It’s better I just give over the money. Guns I know nothing about.”
“But Proctor was drunk, you said. You couldn’t fake him out or anything?”
“You think I wanted to
shoot
somebody?”
shoot
somebody?”
“You thought he was going to shoot you. It’s a good enough excuse to make a try to save your own skin.”
“Mister . . . that cop came in. I didn’t have to. Maybe if he didn’t . . .”
He made a “who knows” gesture and Gill said, “Yeah, I guess you’re right. He turned toward the door, seeing Helen in the car reflected in the angular glass window and wondered why the hell he was bothering with it all anyway.
When he started the engine she asked, “Do any good?”
“I think I drew a blank.”
“Think?” she queried.
“It looks like that,” he told her.
She laid her hand over his on the steering wheel. “Then it’s because it is, or it’s supposed to,” she said.
For a few seconds he just sat there, then his mouth worked itself into a grim smile and he looked at her. “That’s the kind of talk that can get you kissed,” he said.
“Can we wait until we get home?”
“Just barely,” Gill told her.
A rising sense of annoyance had Helga on edge. She had given Mark Shelby everything he had demanded of her, plus a little extra, and instead of leaving as he usually did, he had slept for six hours making it impossible for her to keep her date with Nils. Not only that, but after he had called his answering service and gotten a message, he was aggravated enough to give her two solid smacks across the face to get her out of the bedroom while he phoned in private. The inside of her mouth was cut and she was hoping that she wouldn’t get another black eye.
For once she felt like picking up the extension to see what it was all about, but she knew very well that if Shelby even suspected her of doing that he’s whip her hide raw with his belt. Or worse. There was something about Mark Shelby that really terrified her but why a wholesale grocer from Trenton, New Jersey, could do that, she couldn’t understand.
Instead, she went to her bar and made herself a light drink. She sure would like to go do something nasty to him, though. Maybe someday she’d light that damn candle under the religious statue on the back bar that he made her keep there. She’d burn it all the way out and ... then a smile cracked across her swollen lips and she looked at the mirror behind the bar. She had a better idea. She’d take his holy candle that had such an interesting size and shape, maybe round the end off a little and lubricate it well and when Shelby wasn’t there she’d use it on herself while she conjured up her sexual fantasies and make herself come a dozen times, at least. Then, when she was good and mad, she’d tell him what she’d done with his religious paraphernalia and walk out with Nils.
She reached out to touch the waxen form and didn’t hear him come into the room until he said, “Get the hell away from that.”
Her smile and pert glance completely eclipsed her thoughts. “It reminds me of you, my love.”
It appeased his male ego enough so he let the matter drop when she brought him a drink. A fleck of blood still stained the comer of her mouth. “I hurt you?”
She reached up and patted his face. “You know I like it when you beat me. Only aren’t there better places to hit than my face? It makes it difficult for me to do best what you like most.”
He yanked a couple of hundred dollar bills out of his pocket and shoved them in her hand. It was the only answer he knew how to give. He knew how stupid he was to treat her like that, but he was sure one fucking lucky bastard to have a broad like her around who could take it. Without her he’d flip, and right now, of all times, he had to stay cool as ice and just as slippery. Even the trouble was working for him and if things kept on, and went even a little bit further, he’d be at the exact positioning of time and place to attain the goal he had set for himself that evening ten years ago.
When Shelby finished dressing he kissed Helga on the side of her neck and took the elevator down to the street. He walked to the corner, waited until a cab came by and gave the driver the Frenchman’s address. Let Frank Verdun issue the orders and if anything got screwed up, Frank could take the responsibility. Frank would want to use his own men and that would keep him out of it altogether. Hitting a cop was a delicate job.
8
She relaxed on the bed in total languor, naked and satisfied, feeling Gill’s hand stroking the smooth contours of her body. She murmured and rolled her head to lay in the muscular hollow of his shoulder. The lingering pleasure of the past hour made a tremor go down her thighs and his fingers, sensing it, kneaded her flesh gently.
Never before had it been like this, she thought. Never so beautiful, so good, so strong. Never had it been her own emotional demand ... no, that was the wrong word ... her desire that led her into the wild gyrations of love that was so incredibly sensuous she could hardly believe that it was part of her own self.
At fourteen she had been indoctrinated into sex by a street punk who liked to be called Killer Miller, who had attacked her in the vestibule of their own apartment. When Joe Scanlon caught up with him in the parking lot of the supermarket it took four men to drag him off a pulpy body so mutilated and so brain-damaged, that when Killer Miller was released from the hospital seven months later they all called him Silly Millie.
There were no screams of police brutality in those days, either.
At eighteen sex was something Kiernan said was part of love and she fought down the horror and the sickness because she believed him until he dumped her for the big chested nymphomaniac who ran the liquor store on Broadway.
At twenty-two sex became a necessity to sign a contract, see her name in the gaudy lights outside the theaters or any place the agents and managers decided to book her and she learned to accept it as she would a bad dream, closing her mind off from the experience and completely forgetting about it afterward. She had neither wanted it nor sought it. Actually, she had avoided it, learning all the tricks possible that could void a man before he could culminate his intent, even to the point where they blamed themselves for their own overexuberance rather than her expertise.
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