“The money?”
“You mean from Fun Island?”
“No, the money we’ve been skimming. Is he onto that?”
“No. He still believes it’s just that times are slow.”
“So what does he know?”
“That he should take a look around. That something isn’t kosher.”
“And we have these people from out of town to thank, huh?”
“Mostly.”
“What’s their names?”
“They call themselves Parker and Green.”
”What are they like?”
“Green didn’t come to the meeting. Parker looks tough.”
“What kind of tough? He talks big?”
“He doesn’t talk much at all. He just makes you want to step to one side.”
“Scare him, buy him off.”
“Not the first. And I doubt you could do the second with less than the full seventy-three thousand he came here for.”
“I hate to say it, but I think maybe we need the two of them hit.”
“Good God. Like O’Hara?”
“That wasn’t my idea. He did it on his own and told me later.”
“It was a bad thing to do. We’ve been clean up to now, no killings, no strong-arm. Sooner or later you’re going to have to deal with some people at the national level, Jack Fujon in Baltimore, Walter Karns in Los Angeles. They don’t have any complaint against Al, and you don’t want them to have complaints against you.”
“I’ve already talked to some of them. Don’t worry about it, leave them to me. They’ll accept the situation the way it is.”
“They won’t be happy if we start acting like twenties gangsters.”
“What do you mean, gangsters? I’m a businessman.”
“I mean O’Hara, for one thing.”
“I told you that wasn’t me. Besides, I understand he wasn’t that strong a personality, it might have been possible to lean on him. This Parker sounds like someone who might have been able to get O’Hara to talk.”
“He could have been sent away on vacation for a couple of weeks. The point is, we’ve already had one killing, now you’re talking about two more.”
“Drifters. Parker and Green, who are they? We do it right, we don’t leave bodies, there’s no trouble at all. They drifted into town, they drifted out again. No fuss.”
“I don’t like to hear about this sort of thing.”
“You wanted a piece of it.”
“I wanted to be on the winning side. I’m not a fool. But if you want somebody killed, don’t talk to me about it, that’s not what I’m here for.”
”Calm down. I wasn’t at the meeting, that’s all, I haven’t met these two guys. I’m asking your opinion, that’s all it is.”
“My opinion is, don’t talk to me about murder.”
“All right, all right. Relax.”
“I just don’t want to hear about it.”
“Fine. Fine.”
Eighteen
Grofield awoke to excruciating pain, and a sense that the world had shifted on its axis. Why else was the sun down there in that strange position, why else did he have the feeling of being surrounded by the interior parts of an automobile all turned on their side, and why else did he have the impression he was standing up and lying down at the same time?
And why this excruciating pain? His neck twinged, his right shoulder was killing him, his legs ached abominably. And what was that mounded thing between him and the sun? And what was that awful bonging sound?
He closed one eye and squinted the other, the better to see, and suddenly understood that the mounded thing was a naked buttock. A torso was somehow draped across him so that the buttock was over his waist, with the sun rising over it. And from the roundness and the impression of softness—and from his own past history—he presumed the buttock to be female.
And the automobile parts? An automobile, a true complete automobile, on the back seat of which he was more or less lying.
