presenting a low silhouette to the law after a job. I can cut the mustard anywhere working with an ax and a crosscut saw. Generally I keep the job two or three months. This time it had lasted almost a year. It lasted, in fact, until the interval began to tell me something about myself. My nerves weren’t the same after the botched job that had me lying low. When a man gets older, he doesn’t rebound as well.
Everything about the last job had gone well except the getaway. Well, no, I couldn’t really say that. I’d had two partners on that bank job, and one had been killed because he couldn’t keep his mind off women. The other partner and I got away with the cash.
We each had a car, but the money was in his. Then I had to stand in pouring rain on a slick hillside curve and watch a quarter million burn up in the trunk of my partner’s car that hadn’t made the curve. He died of a broken neck. If I hadn’t already mailed $10,000 to the plastic surgeon who’d made me a new face, the job would have been a total loss. It wasn’t the type of operation that bred confidence for the future.
I hadn’t known much about either partner. I’d taken them on unwillingly only because I needed quick money after my departure without benefit of clergy from the south Florida prison hospital. Then the partnership job went wrong. It left me at a low ebb, mentally and financially. Hazel had struck a nerve when she asked how I was fixed.
So with two fiascos back to back, a short bankroll, a new face, and a new name, I’d come to San Diego. There’s a waterfront bar called Curly’s, which has operated as an underworld meeting place since shortly after the time of the forty-niners. Curly’s was a good place to reestablish contact, I felt.
Before the trip to Hazel’s I’d been dropping in almost every night. Not mixing but sitting at the bar and watching the room behind me in the backbar mirror. Looking for familiar faces and not finding any. I’ve been in the business for fifteen years. After that length of time prison cells and unmarked graves claim a lot of familiar faces.
When I was able to have the lengthy wooden splint on my left hand removed and replaced with a finger cast, I started hitting Curly’s again. It was better than getting cabin fever sitting in the room and staring at four walls.
The tavern had a bulletin board in one corner of the low-ceilinged, smoky room. It was always covered with thumbtacked messages, some cryptic, some not. My first night out after the episode at the ranch I stopped as usual to look the board over. There were the usual assortment of cars for sale, apartments for rent, and GWENDOLYN, PLEASE CALL BEAUREGARD personals. And there was a new message I read three times. Or had I missed seeing it before?
IMPORTANT! said a three-by-five card lettered in red ink. WILL CHARLIE GOSGER CALL AREA CODE 815, 479-2645. IMMEDIATELY. IMPORTANT!
That was all. There was no signature or initials. I moved along to the bar and ordered a Jim Beam on the rocks. About ten years before I had used the alias Charlie Gosger for a short time. I couldn’t even remember the details. Probably I’d used it for a specific job, then dropped it. Could someone from that period be trying to contact me now? It hardly seemed likely.
I went to the phone booth and checked out Area Code 815. It was in northeast Illinois, not too far from Chicago. It told me nothing. I couldn’t even remember in which part of the country I’d been Charlie Gosger.
I went back to the bar and thought it over. A telephone call would settle it. If I didn’t like what I heard, I could hang up. But why call at all? Did I want to meet anyone from my Charlie Gosger period?
There was even a reason for not calling. I’d escaped from the prison hospital with my facial bandages still on after the plastic surgery. No one knew what my face looked like. Nobody could connect the current Earl Drake by sight at least with any previous identity of mine. No one with whom I’d ever worked previously could recognize me now even if he sat down at the bar beside me. It was a factor worth protecting.
And yet—
I was marking time, and I hadn’t much more time to mark. I had a car, not new, and a little money. Neither was going to last long. I should have been planning what came next. Instead, I was sitting in Curly’s, sipping bourbon. I kept telling myself that I had to get going, but I didn’t do it.
It’s odd how a man’s mind works. I found myself dwelling upon past jobs, how well they’d gone, and how satisfying it had been. Who was it who said that a man is over the hill when he thinks about what he’s accomplished in the past rather than what he plans to do in the future?
The hard-core realization that I was ducking the issue set me in motion. I changed a five-dollar bill into silver at the bar, then left Curly’s and went down the street to a pay phone. I didn’t trust Curly’s phones. I gave the operator the number. She asked me for $1.75 for the first three minutes. When the phone started ringing, I glanced at my watch. It was after midnight. Around Chicago it would be two A.M. I hadn’t realized it was that late.
The phone rang five times at the other end of the line. I was almost ready to hang up when the receiver was picked up and a gruff voice said hello.
“I’m calling from California,” I began. I realized that I hadn’t planned what I was going to say. “I saw your message to Charlie Gosger. If it’s your message.”
For a moment I heard only the line hum against a muted background of faint static. “Yeah?” the voice said at last. “Is this Charlie?”
“I don’t know if it is or not.” Now, that’s a fine thing to say, I thought. “I mean, I might have been once.” My feeling of irritation increased. The second remark made no more sense than the first.
But the heavy voice seemed to have no qualms about my uncertainty. “Where you callin’ from?”
I hesitated. “Down the street from Curly’s,” I said at last.
“I thought you’d make that circuit sooner or later.” There was a complacent note in the voice.
I had a sudden thought. “Was there more than one of the Charlie Gosger messages?”
“A dozen. Around the country in places like Curly’s. You still in business?”
“Wouldn’t that depend on the business you had in mind?”
“Okay, okay. You remember Slater?”
Slater? Slater. I opened my mouth and closed it again. Slater. Am image began to form. Big. Hard-nosed. Close-mouthed. Trigger-happy. Slater. Black hair. Bulldog features. Heavy voice. Yes. I remembered a Slater.
“You got it?” the voice inquired.
“If it’s the same man.”
“If you’re Charlie Gosger, you stood next to Slater in Massillon, Ohio, one mornin’ when he was directin’ traffic.”
I remembered Massillon, but that wasn’t enough. “Two cars left the square that morning,” I said. “Which way did they go?”
“One north an’ one south.”
“How many men in each car?”
“Three an’ three.” The line hummed for a moment. “Okay?”
“Okay. So far.”
“I’d like to meet with you, Charlie.”
I wasn’t ready to go that fast. “You’re Slater?”
“Right. I got a proposition for you. Biggest thing’s come along in years. Maybe ever.”
It wasn’t my method of operation. In the past I’d always drawn up the plan and put the proposition. But I had nothing going for me now. I stood there in the phone booth, trying to recall what I could of Slater’s characteristics from the Massillon job.
“You still there?” the telephone voice inquired.
“I’m here. I’m trying to make up my mind.”
“Charlie Gosger never had no trouble makin’ up his mind.”
It was true. So true that it jolted me. Was that what was the matter with me lately? One of the things? Charlie Gosger would study a situation, and if it looked right and felt right, he’d open the stops and bore in. Life had been marvelously uncomplicated in those days.
But the old days had nothing to do with my decision now. If I said yes and met this man Slater, I’d be giving away the anonymity of Earl Drake, which I’d literally gone through hell to establish. And depending upon Slater’s proposition, I could be giving it away for nothing.
But where was I headed now? Into penny ante stuff because my nerve was gone? That wasn’t right, either. It wasn’t my nerve. The affair at the ranch had proved that. It was just that I couldn’t seem to initiate a project any
