The Erection Set

want not.’ ”

“You do that, Vince,” I told him. “Only don’t save it for me.”

The fucking rain never seemed to stop. It beat against the windshield and the one lazy wiper on my side barely brushed it away. Across the highway the early traffic was already crawling, tied up by a station wagon with a flat a mile back, impatient and angry, building up to a whole day mad.

Sharon didn’t look at me at all, gazing idly out the window at the rows of cars, her hands limp with hopeless regret in her lap. When I took the cutoff to Linton, she glanced at me thoughtfully for a moment, as if she had made some kind of decision, then sucked in her breath, shook her head and turned away again.

But she couldn’t keep it bottled up inside her, she had seen too much and the sense of it wasn’t getting through. I knew by the way she was sitting there that she was trying to formulate her own answers, but they were coming out all wrong.

When it finally got to be too much it was like the words were being wrung out of her. “What is Dick Lagen going to write about you, Dog?”

“Does it matter?”

“Before ... when you told me about ... those other things, it didn’t at all. Then when I saw the casket ... was it really heroin?”

“Absolutely pure and totally uncut. Probably the biggest shipment that’s gotten through in a long, long time.” I kept my voice low and nice and even.

“And all yours. It was shipped to you?”

“That’s right, but now it’s been reconsigned.”

“I won’t let it happen, Dog.”

“Let what happen?”

“That ... policeman. He and that evil little man. The dirty bastards who push that stuff would never exist if they weren’t protected somehow. I was a witness and I can identify them. I think Dick Lagen will be ready to listen to me.”

Hell, let her think what she wanted. It was better for her this way.

“You’d need the evidence, baby. I don’t think anybody’s going to see that casket again. Lagen wouldn’t try making unfounded accusations and nobody else is going to be offering the information.”

Sharon let it settle in her mind, the gentle smile toying with the corners of her mouth saying it wasn’t going to be like that at all. “What was your price, Dog?”

“You’d never believe me,” I said.

“Yes ... I really would.” Her eyes were cold and direct again. “Was it in the millions?”

“More than that, kitten. Much more. Money couldn’t even buy what I got for that hand-carved body box.”

“What’s worth more than money?”

“If you don’t know now, you never will,” I told her.

She still wouldn’t take her eyes from me. They were like tiny drills augering into my flesh. “To you, Dog. What’s worth more than money to you?”

“To come home. To be free.” I was going to tell her something else, but caught it in time and just let it end there. I watched the road unwinding through the rain and suddenly felt the needlepoints of her eyes stop stabbing me. I looked at her quickly and her expression had changed, a small frown reflecting some annoying perplexity that tugged at her mind. She wet her mouth, clenching her lower lip between her teeth and I saw the tears rise in the corners of her eyes.

When I turned down the street where I had left my car in front of the house Ferris had used I saw the jam of cars up ahead, two with their blue lights winking in the morning light and a pair of fire engines standing in the middle of the road. A pall of dark haze was hanging over something by the curb, but the knot of curious people blocked it from view. They didn’t block the shattered windows and crumpled porch on the houses opposite the area though.

I rolled down the window and called a couple of kids over to see what had happened. One had his school books bunched under his arm and looked kind of sick.

“Car blew up,” he said. “That nutty little Jansen kid what’s always stealing rides in cars saw the keys in that one and was gonna ride to school. It blew all apart when he started it. Gee, we tried to tell him and everything ...”

Then I felt a little sick too.

The other kid said abstractedly, “He just got outa reform school for the same thing.”

I rolled the window up and sat there a moment.

“Dog ... ?”

“It was supposed to have been me,” I said.

Her sob was a futile cry that caught in her throat.

“He’s the last one out there. After him there won’t be anymore.”

“Who?” Sharon whispered.

“The worst one of all.” I was all tight again. “Damn, there’s so much more to do, too.”

I dropped Sharon off outside the Barrin plant. She gave me a wistful little smile, pulled the collar up on her coat and walked through the rain toward the building. The S. C. Cable Productions trucks were still lined up on the west side, but all the activity had moved indoors and the canvas canopies were down except for the one over the area where a few of the crew were surrounding the coffee urns. I circled the complex twice before I spotted Hobis sitting in a parked car, stopped opposite him and waved him in beside me.

“Any action?” I asked.

“Just a little accident with a car downtown.” He grinned at me, his lips tight over clenched teeth. “I sent The Chopper over to check it out. Either you’re on the ball or your luck’s running strong.”

“What did he get?”

“It was that rented heap of yours, all right. Somebody used one of the new plastics with a heat-sensitized detonator wired to the exhaust. Easy to slap on and takes about five seconds to activate. A real pro job. I don’t think the local cops even know how it happened yet. Sure tore that kid all to hell. What was the bit there?”

“He was trying to steal the car. I had left the keys in it.”

Hobis shrugged and lit the stub of a cigar he took out of his pocket. “Scratch one potential con. Who did it?”

“Arnold Bell.”

He nodded without looking up until he had the butt lit, then took a couple of deep drags on it. “Old Bell’s diversifying. He used to specialize in that little .22 of his. Figure how he ran you down?”

“The city isn’t all that big,” I said.

“Uh-huh. But it still makes it a big job. You think he’s working alone?”

“He didn’t start off that way.”

“Maybe he rang in some locals.”

“Not Arnold Bell. The solo speed is the way he likes it. Now the big pot is all his if he makes the hit.”

“As long as he was paid in advance,” Hobis said.

I cut around the corner and headed back toward the factory again. Hobis’s tone of voice had sounded a little strange and I looked at him, the question in my eyes.

Hobis said, “I called New York this morning. The whole European scene blew wide apart.”

My hands went tight around the steering wheel. “How?”

“Some of Le Fleur’s boys went after The Turk and threw a couple of slugs in his belly. The Turk thought he was dying and blew the whistle on the big man. The fuzz moved in and nailed all his records and put enough heat on some of the lower echelon so that they started talking too.” He took another drag on the cigar and tossed the butt out the side window. “Would have made quite a package, only while he was being held in custody a twenty- year-old cousin of a guy Le Fleur had eliminated walked in with press credentials and popped his eyes out with a Luger. When the boiler blows, she really blows fast, doesn’t she?”

“That gets the Guido brothers off the hook then.”

“Kiddo,” Hobis told me, “you’ve been away much too long. Over there they’d just call it quits and start over