“Thirty grand!” The Schultz in the chair heaved upward to his feet, his voice skidding up the register ahead of him to a shrill squeal. He stood for a minute bent forward, his fat belly overlapping the oak, and then he sank slowly into the chair again. His lips twitched in a sickly smile. “You’re joking, boy. Young guys like you always got to have their joke. We got eighty grand invested in the joint, me and Jake. It’s worth a hundred.”
Ray shook his head sadly. “Dixie said thirty. He said if you didn’t like thirty, he’d settle for ice.”
“What’s Dixie’s idea of ice?”
“It’s simple. A kid could figure it. There’s you two and Dixie. It comes out a third each way, however you slice it.”
“An even split? You’re killing me, boy. You’re killing me dead with your corny jokes.”
Ray shrugged. “There are worse ways to die.” He turned, moved to the door, turned again. “Dixie doesn’t want to crowd you any, but he thinks you owe him an answer. He’s been waiting ever since election, and he thinks twelve hours more ought to be plenty.”
His eyes deserted the twins, wandered over to Prince Caleb Kirk. The lank sheriff had dragged himself into a chair, and he sat slumped there with his long legs sprawled and his body canting over the arm.
He’d wiped some of the blood off his face with his handkerchief, and held the bloody cloth wadded in his hand. His eyes were as yellow as his jaundiced hide, filled with the pus of a malignant hatred. His smashed lips writhed wolfishly off stained teeth.
“You’re riding high, sonny. You’re riding high enough to get hurt if you fall. I’ll tell you something. You better take real good care of that body you’re hired to guard. If anything happened to it, you might lose altitude awful fast.”
Ray studied him briefly and then went out through the game room and the bar to the Caddy under the willows. Wheeling around in the parking area, he followed the drive back to the white welt of concrete. Slipping into the tide of traffic, he drifted with it into the heart of the city. Outside City Hall, he tucked the Caddy into Dixie Cannon’s reserved spot and went up a wide sweep of stairs into the main floor hall, where he caught a fast elevator at the bank. Upstairs, he got out and exercised his privilege by turning the knob of Dixie Cannon’s private door.
Dixie was pink and white and plump. He had pale, silky hair brushed smoothly over a round skull, and he looked like a happy child. He possessed the natural, amoral cruelty of a child, too. The voters loved him and crammed the ballot boxes to prove it. With plenty of indications to the contrary, they just couldn’t believe that Dixie would ever do anything really wrong.
He smiled a welcome at Ray across the polished expanse of the huge desk that made him look like a small boy playing executive.
“You see the twins. Ray?”
“I saw them. I gave them the deadline. They’re squealing like stuck pigs, but they’ll come around. I saw Prince Caleb Kirk, too. He was at the club.”
“So?”
Ray lilted his shoulders and let them fall. “He’s got a nasty tongue. I had to work on him a little.”
“Yes? Well, watch yourself, boy. Don’t make the mistake of underestimating the devil. He’s mean as a rattlesnake.”
Ray repeated his shrug. “A guy beats his gums, you take action. It’s bad for discipline to let a guy get away with loud-talking you.”
Dixie dry-washed his plump hands, his soft mouth pursing with gentle approval. “Sure. Ray. You look after Dixie like an angel.” He stood up and patted his neat little pot with satisfaction. “Well, it’s been a nice, profitable day. I think I’ll knock off.”
“Shall I drive you home?”
“Never mind, boy. I’ll make it all right. You go buy yourself a couple beers or something.”
* * * *
Ray made it another Collins and took his time with it. In the afternoon he sat in a small-stakes poker game in the back room of a friendly cigar store and rode a moderate run of luck to a small profit. Later, as lights came up in the end of the long evening, he sat in his room in the Commerce Hotel with rye and water in his hand and a dark restlessness in his brain. He thought of a golden body reclining in sunlight, and closing his eyes, he developed the thought behind his lids in vivid imagery. Myra. Myra Cannon. He pronounced the magic syllables aloud, but softly, and when the telephone rang shrilly at his elbow at that moment, he had a sudden intense conviction that she was, through some kind of supersensory awareness between them, responding to the name.
The voice was a woman’s, but not Myra’s.
“Mr. Butler?”
“Yes.”
“This is the Cannon maid. Mr. Cannon would like you to come out.”
“Tonight?”
“Yes. A car will be sent for you.”
“All right. I’ll be waiting.”
He hung up and stood tor a minute beside the phone, wondering what urgent deal Dixie Cannon now had cooking. While he waited for transportation, he mixed another rye and water, sipping it slowly until he finally heard knuckles on his door. The guy in the hall had a bullish, blocky body and an undersized head. The left corner of his mouth was lifted in a perpetual leer by a puckered scar that ran across his cheek at a tangent. Ray had seen him around. He was called Rhino.
On the way downstairs, Ray said, “What’s the pitch?”
He didn’t expect a solid answer, and he didn’t get it. Rhino lifted thick shoulders. “Business. That’s all I know. Just business.”
They left it that way, driving in silence to Dixie Cannon’s suburban stone stack and walking in silence up from the drive into the front hall, Rhino keeping pace a step left and to the
