From the door, the sonorous voice of Ramon Tellez, Mexican cop, had a tone of gentle reproof. “You should have consulted the authorities, señor. As I said, the police of my country are not children. Did you think we would leave you unobserved?”
After that, there was little or nothing I could do, and pretty soon Tellez shook my hand and said everything would of a certainty be alright, and I went back to my room…mine and Hannah’s. She was still asleep, with her hair spread on the pillow, and there was a warm and aching happiness inside my ribs as I stood for a while looking out at the paling stars.
It’s time to head north, I thought. It’s time to go home.
THE COLLECTOR COMES AFTER PAYDAY
Originally published in Manhunt, August 1953.
CHAPTER 1
Frankie looked through a lot of bars before he found the old man. He was sitting in a booth in a joint on lower Market Street with a dame Frankie didn’t know. They were both sitting on the same side of the booth, and Frankie could see that they were plastered together like a couple of strips of Scotch tape.
“Come on home, Pop,” Frankie said. “You come on home.”
The woman looked up at him, and her lips twisted in a scarlet sneer. The scarlet was smeared on the lips, as if she’d been doing a lot of kissing, and the lips had a kind of bruised and swollen look, as if the kisses had been pretty enthusiastic.
“Go to hell away, sonny,” she said.
She lifted her martini glass by its thin stem and tilted it against her mouth. Frankie reached across the booth in front of the old man and slapped the glass out of her hand. It shivered with a thin, musical sound against the wall, and gin and vermouth splashed down her low-cut dress. The olive bounced on the table and rolled off.
The woman raised up as far as she could in the cramped booth, her eyes hot and smoky with gin and rage.
“You little punk,” she said softly.
Frankie grabbed her by a wrist and twisted the skin around on the bone.
“Leave Pop alone,” he said. “You quit acting like a tramp and leave him alone.”
Then the old man hacked down on Frankie’s arm with the horny edge of his hand. It was like getting hit with a dull hatchet. Frankie’s fingers went numb, dropping away from the woman’s wrist, and he swung sideways with his left hand at the old man’s face. The old man caught the fist in a big palm and gave Frankie a hard shove backward.
“Blow, sonny,” he said.
For a guy not young at all, he was plenty tough. His eyes were like two yellow agates, and his mouth was a thin, cruel trap under a bold nose. From the way his body behaved, it was obvious that he still had good muscular coordination. He was poised, balanced like a trained fighter.
Frankie saw everything in a kind of pink, billowing mist. He moved back up to the booth with his fists clenched, and in spite of everything he could do, tears of fury and frustration spilled out of his eyes and streaked his cheeks.
“You get the hell out of this,” he said. “You ought to be ashamed, drinking and playing around this way.”
The old man slipped out of the booth, quick as a snake, and chopped Frankie in the mouth with a short right that traveled straight as a piston. Frankie hit the floor and rolled over, spitting a tooth and blood. He was crazy. Getting up, he staggered back at the old man, cursing and sobbing and swinging like a girl. This time the old man set him up with a left jab and threw a bomb. Frankie went over backward like a post, his head smacking with a wet, rotten sound.
No one bothered about him. Except to laugh, that is. Lying there on the floor, he could hear the laughter rise and diminish and rise again. It was the final and utter degradation of a guy who’d never had much dignity to start with. Rolling over and struggling up to his hands and knees, he was violently sick, his stomach contracting and expanding in harsh spasms. After a long time, he got the rest of the way to his feet in slow, agonizing stages. His chin and shirt front were foul with blood and spittle.
In the booth, ignoring him, the old man and the woman were in a hot clinch, their mouths adhering in mutual suction. Turning away, Frankie went out. The floor kept tilting up under his feet and then dropping suddenly away. All around him, he could hear the ribald laughter.
CHAPTER 2
It was six blocks to the place where he’d parked his old Plymouth. He walked slowly along the littered, narrow street, hugging the dark buildings, the night air a knife in his lungs. Now and then he stopped to lean against solid brick until the erratic pavement leveled off and held still. Once, at the mouth of an alley, he was sick again, bringing up a thin, bitter fluid into his mouth.
It took him almost an hour to get back to the shabby walkup apartment that was the best a guy with no luck could manage. In the bathroom he splashed cold water on his face,
