Twisted: The Collected Stories (52 page)

“Yeah, what’s that?”

“You’re a button man, Paul,” Manielli said brightly, as if he’d been looking forward to saying it.

Gordon said, “Last March Jimmy Coughlin saw you . . .” He frowned. “What do you people say? You don’t say ‘kill.’”

Paul, thinking: Some of us people say “chill off.” Paul himself used “touch off.” It was the phrase that Sergeant Alvin York used to describe killing enemy soldiers during the war. It made Paul feel less like a punk to use the term that a war hero did. But, of course, Paul Schumann didn’t share any of this at the moment.

Gordon continued. “Jimmy saw you kill Arch Dimici on March thirteenth in a warehouse on the Hudson.”

Paul had staked out the place for four hours before Dimici showed up. He’d been positive the man was alone. Jimmy must’ve been sleeping one off behind some crates when Paul arrived.

“Now, from what they tell me, Jimmy isn’t the most reliable witness. But we’ve got some hard evidence. A few revenue boys picked him up for selling hooch and he made a deal to rat on you. Seems he’d picked up a shell casing at the scene and was keeping it for insurance. No prints’re on it—you’re too smart for that. But Hoover’s people ran a test on your Colt. The scratches from the extractor’re the same.”

Hoover? The FBI was involved? And they’d
already
tested the gun. He’d pitched it out of Malone’s window less than an hour ago.

Paul rocked his upper and lower teeth against each other. He was furious with himself. He’d searched for a half hour to find that damn casing at the Dimici job and had finally concluded it’d fallen through the cracks in the floor into the Hudson.

“So we made inquiries and heard you were being paid five hundred dollars to . . .” Gordon hesitated.

Touch off.

“ . . . eliminate Malone tonight.”

“Like hell I was,” Paul said, laughing. “You got yourself some bum wire. I just went to visit him. Where is he, by the way?”

Gordon paused. “Mr. Malone will no longer be a threat to the constabulary or the citizens of New York City.”

“Sounds like somebody owes you five C-notes.”

Bull Gordon didn’t laugh. “You’re in Dutch, Paul, and you can’t beat the rap. So here’s what we’re offering. Like they say in those used-Studebaker ads:
this’s a one-time-only offer. Take it or leave it. We don’t negotiate.”

The senator finally spoke. “Tom Dewey wants you as bad as he wants the rest of the scum on his list.”

The special prosecutor was on a divine mission to clean up organized crime in New York. Crime boss Lucky Luciano, the Italian Five Families in the city and the Jewish syndicate of Meyer Lansky were his main targets. Dewey was dogged and smart and he was winning conviction after conviction.

“But he’s agreed to give us first dibs on you.”

“Forget it. I’m not a stool pigeon.”

Gordon said, “We’re not asking you to be one. That’s not what this is about.”

“Then what
do
you want me to do?”

A pause for a moment. The senator nodded toward Gordon, who said, “You’re a button man, Paul. What do you think? We want you to kill somebody.”

J
effery Deaver is the author of twenty-one suspense novels, including the
New York Times
bestsellers
The Vanished Man, The Stone Monkey, The Blue Nowhere, The Empty Chair, The Devil’s Teardrop
and
The Coffin Dancer,
as well as
The Bone Collector
and
Speaking in Tongues.
His latest novel,
Garden of Beasts,
is forthcoming in hardcover from Simon & Schuster. As William Jefferies, he is the author of
Shallow Graves, Bloody River Blues,
and
Hell’s Kitchen.
He is a five-time Edgar Award nominee, an Anthony Award nominee, and a three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Reader’s Award for Best Short Story of the Year. Deaver was born in Chicago, attended the University of Missouri, and received a law degree from Fordham University in New York. Readers can visit his website at
www.jefferydeaver.com
.

A
LSO BY
J
EFFERY
D
EAVER

Carte Blanche

Edge

The Burning Wire*

Best American Mystery Stories 2009
(Editor)

The Watch List
(
The Copper Bracelet
and
The Chopin Manuscript
) (Contributor)

Roadside Crosses**

The Bodies Left Behind

The Broken Window*

The Sleeping Doll**

More Twisted: Collected Stories, Volume Two

The Cold Moon*/**

The Twelfth Card*

Garden of Beasts

Twisted: Collected Stories

The Vanished Man*

The Stone Monkey*

The Blue Nowhere

The Empty Chair*

Speaking in Tongues

The Devil’s Teardrop

The Coffin Dancer*

The Bone Collector*

A Maiden’s Grave

Praying for Sleep

The Lesson of Her Death

Mistress of Justice

Hard News

Death of a Blue Movie Star

Manhattan Is My Beat

Hell’s Kitchen

Bloody River Blues

Shallow Graves

A Century of Great Suspense Stories
(Editor)

A Hot and Sultry Night for Crime
(Editor)

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(Introduction)

*Featuring Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs

**Featuring Kathryn Dance

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

SIMON & SCHUSTER

1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright © 2003 by Jeffrey Deaver

Originally published in hardcover in 2003

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

ISBN 0-7434-9159-9
ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-6236-1 (eBook)

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