Under the Skin

others at the table and they also refrained from remarking on my bruises. All this time as their neighbor and I still made them nervous. I fetched a beer from the icebox and leaned against the counter and watched Morales form up the deck and begin shuffling.

There was an awkward silence while “Arbolito” played on the radio and then Gregorio asked if I wanted to sit in. The others all nodded and said yes, join us, please, and so forth. I said no, thanks, I was tired and going to bed in a minute. Avila’s wife must’ve told him of Daniela’s date with me, but of course he would make no mention of it. I was debating whether to tell them of our adventure with Black Tom when Gregorio asked if I’d seen my telephone message on the slateboard. I hadn’t. The only messages I’d ever received at the Casa Verde had been from the office and I hadn’t gotten one in so long that I rarely even glanced at the board anymore when I came into the house.

I went down the hall and saw “llamo el clobb—10:06 pm” scrawled on the slate next to the phone. I picked up the earpiece and dialed Rose’s number and he answered on the first ring.

“Youngblood,” I said.

“Where the fuck you been?”

I started to tell him but he said, “Never mind—just get your ass down here.”

“What is it?”

“Micks. Now get over here.” He hung up.

I figured I’d better be prepared for anything, so I went up to my room and packed a small valise. I put the .380 in the bag and took off my coat and put on the shoulder holster and slipped the Mexican .44 in it and put my coat back on. Then I went back downstairs and put the valise on the table by the phone and went into the kitchen. The game had just broken up and some of them were laughing and counting their money and some were bitching about their rotten luck, and then they all shut up and looked at me.

I told Avila that Daniela was expecting me to take her to breakfast in the morning but something had come up and I might not be able to meet her as I’d said. I said to tell her I didn’t know how long I would be away, maybe only until later tomorrow, maybe a few days, but in any case I would call on her as soon as I returned.

“Si, claro, le dare el mensaje,” Avila said, nodding rapidly.

“Okay then,” I said.

They’d hit the team that made the nightly cash collection from the joints along the north end of the county—including all the places where Ragsdale had put in the Dallas slots. The two Ghosts had come out of a little club in Dickinson with the next-to-last pickup of the night and had just got in their car in the parking lot when a black Hudson sedan pulled up beside them and the men at the passenger-side windows opened fire with .45 automatics. The Ghost behind the wheel took hits in the head and died in a blink but our other guy—a fellow named Dooley—managed to tumble out the right-side door and run off with the attackers chasing him on foot and still shooting at him and he made it into the woods behind the club and hid in the darkness. He stayed crouched in the bushes and tried not to even breathe. He wouldn’t know it until after he was taken to the hospital but he’d been hit three times. He heard the shooters walking along the edge of the woods and cursing. He heard one of them say “Pete’s gonna shit.” Then he heard them walking away on the parking lot gravel and then somebody yelled something and there were a few more pistol shots and a moment later the Hudson went tearing out of the parking lot.

The last few patrons who’d been in the club would tell the police they heard the shooting and came out and saw two men walking back toward a pair of cars parked side by side. One of the men fired shots over their heads and the patrons all ran back inside and the shooter fired several rounds through the glass front window and they all hit the floor. The owner of the joint had crawled over to the telephone and called the police. What the owner didn’t tell the cops was that he also made a call to the Turf Club. After a while one of the patrons had peeked outside and saw that one of the cars was gone but the other car was still there—and then saw another man come staggering from behind the club and into the lot and fall down, but everybody in the club was too scared to go out and help him. Then the cops showed up.

The witnesses had all been smart enough not to spill too much to the police. They all said they’d never seen either of the two victims before. None of them had been sure of the make of car the shooters were in or if there had been another man in the car. Dooley the wounded Ghost feigned unconsciousness to avoid being questioned. Then one of Rose’s lawyers showed up ahead of the ambulance and had a private moment with Dooley before the ambulance guys took him away. He got the story from Dooley and told him what to tell the cops when they questioned him in the hospital. The lawyer then had a talk with the sergeant in charge of the investigation. Then he and the sergeant went to the station and chatted with the captain. When the official report was released it detailed a homicide by unknown assailants during the commission of an armed robbery and said the perpetrators stole nothing more than the wallet of the murder victim. The report made no mention of the Maceo name or that the guys in the Hudson had made off with more than two grand of collection cash.

“I figure they been checking us out the last few days,” Rose said. “They knew the places where Willie Rags put in those slots and they cased the route. They picked the Dickinson club for the hit because it’s on an open stretch of road, not much else around there, not many witnesses passing by. It makes for an easy getaway.”

It was nearly eleven-thirty and we were sitting in the office, me and him and Sam. I asked Rose what made him so sure it was the Dallas micks.

“Who else?” Rose said. “They hit the collection on the slots those Dallas fucks think belong to them. It aint coincidence.”

“What if the robbers were just anybody and didn’t know what route they were hitting?” I said. “And if it was Dallas, what would be their point? They couldn’t expect the take to cover the worth of the machines they lost.”

“Their point,” Rose said, “is to try to fuck with our business, to scare the piss out of our customers, make us think it can happen again, make us wonder when and where, maybe get us to reconsider their offer to negotiate. That’s their fucking point. Or maybe they just wanted to do something to feel better about losing their goddamn machines. That would sure as shit be my point.”

He blew out a hard breath and ran a hand through his hair. He was smoking mad. Outsiders had not only robbed his men, they had done it on his own turf.

“We’re not just guessing it was them,” Sam said. He slid a photograph across the desk to me. I turned it around and regarded the picture of a beefy, well-dressed blond guy sitting in a circular booth and showing his big white teeth at the camera, a goodlooking woman on either side of him. He was close to handsome even with a small scar over one eye and a nose that had been broken sometime. His eyes were so lightcolored they seemed to have no irises at all.

“That’s Healy,” Sam said. “Peter Healy. Pete Healy. As in ‘Pete’s gonna shit.’”

I looked up from the picture and Rose was showing that smile of his that had nothing in it that smiles are supposed to have.

“I don’t move on just a guess, Kid,” he said. “You oughta know that by now. And I aint been sitting on my hands these last few days. While they been checking us out I been checking them out. This Healy’s got a rep. He’s a comer, a hardass. Got his start on the loading docks in New Orleans but the word is he killed a guy and took off to Fort Worth. Got in with the Carlson bunch. Then he moved over to the Burke outfit in Dallas. Went on his own over a year ago and took a gorilla named Parker with him. Parker used to do muscle and clip-work for Burke. Six-four, two-seventy they say, scares everybody shitless. Healy was already getting a piece of most of the slots in both Tarrant and Dallas County. Now he owns all the machines up there.”

“The Fort Worth and Dallas outfits are afraid he’s getting too ambitious,” Sam said. “Afraid he might start moving in on their gambling clubs, maybe the cathouses.”

“Those Dallas guys are pussies in cowboy hats,” Rose said. “Too scared to put the fucker in his place—six feet under.”

“Healy keeps beating them to the punch,” Sam said. “He popped Lou Morgan, Carlson’s main muscle—and I mean he did it. Went up to Morgan in some little sandwich joint and boom-boom, two times in the head and walked out cool as could be. Broad daylight, a dozen people in there, and nobody saw a thing.