caught glimpses of the .38 bulldog she kept in the bottom righthand drawer of her desk. I once asked Rose if she knew how to use it and he smiled and winked and left it at that.
She told me Signore Maceo had sent LQ and Brando and one of his slot machine mechanics to the Red Shoes Cabaret near Alvin. I knew the place. It was in Brazoria County, just west of the Galveston line, and it rented its machines from the Gulf Vending Company. The place had changed hands a few months before and the new guys had been consistently slow about toting up the daily take from the slots and handing over the Maceos’ cut. Artie Goldman suspected they were shaving their revenue reports, and Artie’s suspicions were good enough for Rose.
The Red Shoes guys would be surprised when the mechanic showed up that morning to check their machines. Each of the slots had been geared to keep a tally of the money it took in—a running tally that wasn’t erased each time the machine was emptied, as many of the joint owners had been led to believe was the case. LQ and Brando would ensure that nobody interfered with the mechanic’s inspection of the slots—and they would take the necessary measures if the machine tallies didn’t match the ones on the Red Shoes reports. It was a job I normally would’ve been tending to.
I told Mrs. Bianco I’d be in the gym if Rose wanted me, then went up to the third floor.
The large room echoed with the huffing and grunting of hard effort, with the slapping of jump ropes and the clanking of barbells, punches smacking the heavy bags. The daily reek of sweat and liniment was already starting to build.
It had been a good while since my schedule let me have a morning workout, and Otis was glad to see me come in during his shift. I figured he’d want to go a few rounds and I was ready to oblige him. But he was booked solid with his club rat boxing lessons for the next two days.
“I got a ten o’clock open on Saturday,” he said. “Don’t tell me you’ll be out of town.”
I said I had to hang around town all week, so Saturday was fine.
“I’m locking us in at ten,” he said, writing “lesson to hotshot” in ink on his big desktop calendar.
I took the pen from his hand and drew a line through the word “to” in his notation and wrote “from” above it.
“Cocky sumbuck,” he said. “We’ll see. Three three-minute, no headgear, Watkins refs?”
“You’re on,” I said.
I went to my locker and got into my shorts and T-shirt and ring shoes. I’d never been in a gym before I got to Galveston, never fought with gloves or according to any rules. I’d known how to fight—not box,
I did a few sets of sit-ups on the slantboard, then skipped rope for a while, breathing deep and easy. After that I put on the bag gloves and pounded the heavy bag till my T-shirt was pasted to me. Then I moved over to the speed bag.
I started slowly, building a smooth rhythm of alternating lefts and rights. Little by little I increased the tempo until I had the bag ricocheting in a steady racketing blur that sounded like a train highballing by. I was aware of the attention I’d attracted, the guys gathered behind me. Even Otis couldn’t work the light bag better than I could. I kept at it until my arms felt packed with burning concrete, then gave the bag a hard overhand that shook the boards and I stepped away and gestured to the others that the bag was all theirs.
A few of the guys applauded and somebody let out a whistle.
Otis had interrupted his boxing lesson to lean on the ropes and watch me work the speed bag. I grinned at him and stripped off the gloves, then mopped my face with a towel. He smiled and shook his head and then went back to showing some husky guy in the ring how to slip a punch.
After I showered and dressed I checked in at Rose’s office again. Mrs. Bianco said he’d been dealing chiefly with phone business all morning. He’d received a few visitors, none of them strangers to her. He’d given her no messages for me. I told her I’d be out for a while and come back later.
Unlike the stores, most of the cafes were open for business. I went into De Jean’s and had a T-bone and a bottle of beer. I finished up with coffee and a cigarette as I watched the sparse pedestrian traffic pass by the sidewalk window.
It was strange to be so idle. My days usually consisted of going here and there to take care of this or that. The other Ghosts tended to the routine jobs around the island, including the daily cash pickups, but the Maceos had dealings all over this region of Texas, and sometimes Rose would hand me a list of jobs that took me out of town for days or even a couple of weeks at a time. I frequently went up to Houston, sometimes out to San Antone, now and then down to Corpus. More often than not I took LQ or Brando with me, usually both.
Among my assignments were visits to guys who’d been slow to make loan repayments or turn over the daily slot cuts. They usually got their accounts up to date real quick after I gave them a warning. Everybody knew one warning was all Rose ever gave, and few of them were late with the money again. Now and then somebody would require a second visit but nobody ever needed a third.
The ones who’d been doctoring their books were another matter. They never failed to correct themselves, either, but their transgression was more serious than a late payment, and it had to be punished, even as a first offense. A broken hand would usually do, but sometimes a foot was also called for, maybe an arm or a leg, sometimes something worse. It depended on how long they’d been at it and how much they’d skimmed.
Then there were the robbers. The island clubs never got robbed—they were much too well protected—but now and then some little joint on the mainland or in a neighboring county would get hit, some club or cafe or filling station with Maceo machines in it, and although the stickups were rarely for more than peanuts, they included Maceo peanuts. Only the dumbest stickup guys would ever hit a place without first making sure it had no Maceo connection. Next to an outsider who tried to cut in on Galveston, nobody got Rose as hot under the collar as a robber. Any business that had even one Maceo machine in it was guaranteed protection, and Rose took his guarantees seriously.
Most of the stickup men were such dopes they didn’t even leave the local area after pulling their heist. They’d hole up with a relative or a friend or a sweetheart. But the Maceos had a standing reward offer for information about robberies—the reward sometimes more than what was taken in a holdup—and the information always came, as often as not from the people the robbers were hiding with. It never took me long to track them down, and when I did, there was nothing to discuss. If they had the money with them, fine, and if they didn’t, the hell with it. Not only was the money rarely very much, its recovery wasn’t the point, not to Rose. As he once put it, “What I want is those bastards removed from the living”—which made me chuckle and say he sometimes had a touch of the poet in him. Which made him give me a look and say he sometimes thought I was fucking touched. In any case, once the thieves were removed from the living, he made sure the news got around.
Few robbers ever skipped the state, but if we got a sure tip on one that did, we went after him—no matter how little he’d made off with, no matter how far he’d gone. But reliable information about a guy who lammed the state was hard to come by, and even when Rose thought the tip was solid he was reluctant to send more than one man on the job. He believed one man had a better chance of getting around unnoticed in unfamiliar territory and a better chance of getting back out if the job went bad. I agreed. The only two times he sent me out of Texas I went alone.
I ran down the first guy in a rooming house in a rundown section of St. Joseph, Missouri, exactly where the rat had said he’d be. I slipped in after midnight. The stairs creaked but if any of the other tenants woke up they stayed put and minded their own business, lucky for them. The guy’s doorlock was even easier to jimmy than the
