The muscles in her brows came down over her eyes.
“You’ve got a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, have you?”
I nodded up into her handsome brutal face.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I came for.”
“Oh, you haven’t got them? You want them?”
“Listen, sister, I want my dough.” I had to get tough if this play was to go over. “This swapping ‘Oh-have-yous’ and ‘Yes-I-haves’ don’t get me anything but a thirst. We were in the big knock-over, see? And after that, when we find the payoff’s a bust, I said to the kid I was training with, ‘Never mind, Kid, we’ll get our whack. Just follow Percy.’ And then Bluepoint comes to me and asks me to throw in with him, and I said, ‘Sure!’ and me and the kid throw in with him until we all come across Red in the dump tonight. Then I told the kid, ‘These coffee-and-doughnut guns are going to rub Red out, and that won’t get us anything. We’ll take him away from ’em and make him steer us to where Big Flora’s sitting on the jack. We ought to be good for a hundred and fifty grand apiece, now that there’s damned few in on it. After we get that, if we want to bump Red off, all right. But business before pleasure, and a hundred and fifty thou is business.’ So we did. We opened an out for the big boy when he didn’t have any. The kid got mushy with the broad along the road and got knocked for a loop. That was all right with me. If she was worth a hundred and fifty grand to him—fair enough. I came on with Red. I pulled the big tramp out after he stopped the slug. By rights I ought to collect the kid’s dib, too—making three hundred thou for me—but give me the hundred and fifty I started out for and we’ll call it even-steven.”
I thought this hocus ought to stick. Of course I wasn’t counting on her ever giving me any money, but if the rank and file of the mob hadn’t known these people, why should these people know everybody in the mob?
Flora spoke to Pogy:
“Get that damned heap away from the front door.”
I felt better when he went out. She wouldn’t have sent him out to move the car if she had meant to do anything to me right away.
“Got any food in the joint?” I asked, making myself at home.
She went to the head of the steps and yelled down, “Get something for us to eat.”
Red was still unconscious. Nancy Regan sat beside him, holding one of his hands. Her face was drained white. Big Flora came into the room again, looked at the invalid, put a hand on his forehead, felt his pulse.
“Come on downstairs,” she said.
“I—I’d rather stay here, if I may,” Nancy Regan said. Voice and eyes showed utter terror of Flora.
The big woman, saying nothing, went downstairs. I followed her to the kitchen, where the little man was working on ham and eggs at the range. The window and back door, I saw, were reinforced with heavy planking and braced with timbers nailed to the floor. The clock over the sink said 2:50 a.m.
Flora brought out a quart of liquor and poured drinks for herself and me. We sat at the table and while we waited for our food she cursed Red O’Leary and Nancy Regan, because he had got himself disabled keeping a date with her at a time when Flora needed his strength most. She cursed them individually, as a pair, and was making it a racial matter by cursing all the Irish when the little man gave us our ham and eggs.
We had finished the solids and were stirring hooch in our second cups of coffee when Pogy came back. He had news.
“There’s a couple of mugs hanging around the corner that I don’t much like.”
“Bulls or—?” Flora asked.
“Or,” he said.
Flora began to curse Red and Nancy again. But she had pretty well played that line out already. She turned to me.
“What the hell did you bring them here for?” she demanded. “Leaving a mile-wide trail behind you! Why didn’t you let the lousy bum die where he got his dose?”
“I brought him here for my hundred and fifty grand. Slip it to me and I’ll be on my way. You don’t owe me anything else. I don’t owe you anything. Give me my rhino instead of lip and I’ll pull my freight.”
“Like hell you will,” said Pogy.
The woman looked at me under lowered brows and drank her coffee.
XIII
Fifteen minutes later the shabby little old man came running into the kitchen, saying he had heard feet on the roof. His faded brown eyes were dull as an ox’s with fright, and his withered lips writhed under his straggly yellow-white mustache.
Flora profanely called him a this-and-that kind of old one-thing-and-another and chased him upstairs again. She got up from the table and pulled the green kimono tight around her big body.
“You’re here,” she told me, “and you’ll put in with us. There’s no other way. Got a rod?”
I admitted I had a gun but shook my head at the rest of it.
“This is not my wake—yet,” I said. “It’ll take one hundred and fifty thousand berries, spot cash, paid in the hand, to buy Percy in on it.”
I wanted to know if the loot was on the premises.
Nancy Regan’s tearful voice came from the stairs:
“No, no, darling! Please, please, go back to bed! You’ll kill yourself, Reddy, dear!”
Red O’Leary strode into the kitchen. He was naked except for a pair of gray pants and his bandage. His eyes were feverish and happy. His dry lips were stretched in a grin. He had a gun in his left hand. His right arm hung useless. Behind him trotted Nancy. She stopped pleading and shrank behind him when she saw Big Flora.
“Ring the gong, and let’s
