revolver with a five-inch barrel. The second was what Frankie thought of as a cowboy gun. In this case it was a Spanish copy of a Colt Peacemaker, six-shot, single-action. 44 Russian caliber revolver. The third was a Savage Model 1911. 32 ACP caliber semiautomatic.
“There they are,” he announced.
“Where’s the money?” Frankie asked.
“In the desk. Same drawer.”
“Let’s see it.”
“You don’t trust me?” Atchison asked with a smile, to make like it was a joke.
“Let’s see the money, Gerry,” Frankie said.
He picked up the Colt and opened the cylinder and dumped the cartridges in his hand. Then he closed the cylinder and dry-snapped the revolver. The cylinder revolved the way it was supposed to.
The noise of the dry snapping upset Gerry Atchison.
“What are you doing?”
“Making sure these things work.”
“You didn’t have to do that. I checked them out.”
Yeah, but you don’t know diddly-shit about guns. You just think you do.
The Colt was to be the primary weapon. He would do both the wife and the partner with the Colt. The cowboy gun was the backup, in case something went wrong. Better safe than sorry, like they say. The Savage was to wound Atchison in the leg. Frankie would have rather shot him with the. 38 Special Colt, but Atchison insisted on the smaller. 32 ACP Savage.
Atchison held out an envelope to Frankie.
“You get this on delivery, you understand?”
Frankie took the envelope and thumbed through the thick stack of bills.
“You leave it in the desk,” Frankie ordered, handing the envelope back to Atchison. “If it’s there when I come back, I do it.”
Frankie next checked the functioning of the. 44 Russian cowboy six-shooter, and finally the. 32 Savage automatic.
He put them back in the corrugated paper box and folded the mechanic’s rags back over them.
“I sort of wish you’d take those with you,” Atchison said. “What if somebody comes down here and maybe finds them?”
“You see that don’t happen. I’m not going to wander around Center City with three guns.”
Atchison looked like he was going to say something, but changed his mind.
“I’ll show you the door,” he said.
Frankie followed him out of the office and farther down the corridor to the rear of the building. There a shallow flight of stairs rose toward a steel double door.
With Frankie watching carefully, Atchison removed a chain-and-padlock from the steel doors, then opened the left double door far enough to insert the padlock so that there would be room for Frankie’s fingers when he opened the door from the outside.
“Be careful when you do that. You let the door slip, you’ll never get it open.”
“I’m always careful, Gerry,” Frankie said.
Atchison took the corrugated paper box with the pistols from Frankie and put it on the top stair, just below the steel door.
He turned and sighed audibly. Then he smiled and put out his hand to Frankie.
“Jesus!” Frankie said with contempt. “Make sure that envelope is where it’s supposed to be,” he said, then turned and walked purposefully down the narrow corridor toward the stairs.
FIVE
Detective Wallace H. Milham reported for duty in the Homicide Unit in the Roundhouse at midnight as his duty schedule called for. The alternative, he knew, was sitting around his apartment alone with a bottle of bourbon. Or sitting around in a bar somewhere, alone, which he thought would be an even dumber thing to do than getting plastered all by himself in his apartment.
It had been a really lousy day.
Wally told himself that he should have expected something lousy to happen-not something as lousy as this, but something-the other shoe to drop, so to speak, because things lately had been going so damned well. For eighteen months, things had really been lousy.
In what he was perfectly willing to admit was about the dumbest thing Wally had ever done in his life, he had gotten involved with his wife Adelaide’s sister, Monica. Monica lived in Jersey, in Ocean City. Her husband was a short fat guy who sold insurance. Adelaide’s and Monica’s mother and dad owned a cottage close to the beach in Wildwood.
Everybody in the family-Adelaide’s family; Wally was an only child-got to use the cottage. Adelaide had one other sister besides Monica, and two brothers. The Old Man-Adelaide’s father-wouldn’t take any money when anybody used it, which sort of bothered Wally, who liked to pay his own way and not be indebted to anybody. So when the place needed a paint job, he volunteered to do that. He told the Old Man that the way his schedule worked, there were often two or three days he had off in the middle of the week, when Adelaide was working in the library, and he would rather do something useful with that time than sit around the house watching the TV.
Which was true. When he offered to paint the cottage in Wildwood, that was all he had in mind, pay his way. Monica didn’t come into his thinking at all.
But Charles, Monica’s husband, got in the act. He said that if Wally was going to drive all the way over from Philly to do the labor, the least he could do was provide the materials. So he did. And Monica drove the paint down in their station wagon because Charles of course was at work.
And he didn’t think about that either. The first two days he spent painting the cottage, he used up most of the paint that Charles had Monica drive down to give him, so he told Adelaide to call Monica to ask Charles if he wanted to provide more paint, or have Wally get it, in which case he would have to know where he’d gotten the first three gallons, so they could mix up some more that would match.
Adelaide told him that Charles said that the paint would be there waiting for him the next time he went to Wildwood. It wasn’t, so he started painting with what was left, and just before noon Monica showed up with the paint, and said that Charles had told her to take him out to lunch, and not to take no for an answer, it was the least they could do for him.
So they went out for lunch, and he was surprised when Monica tossed down three martinis, one after the other. He had never seen her take more than one drink at a time. And she started talking-women with a couple of drinks in them tend to do that-and she started out by saying that she was a little jealous of Adelaide because Adelaide was married to a man who had an exciting career, catching murderers, and Charles was a bore.
In more ways than one, she said, if Wally took her meaning.
And he told her that being a Homicide detective wasn’t as exciting as people who didn’t know thought it was, that most of it was pretty ordinary stuff, just asking questions until somebody came up with the answer.
She said, yeah, but he got to meet interesting, exciting people, and she asked him if he ever met any exciting women, and he told her no, but she said he was just saying that, and she’d bet that if he told her the truth, he got to meet a lot of exciting women.
That’s when he realized what was going on, and if he had had half the sense he was born with, he would have stopped it right there, but he’d had three martinis too.
In her car on the way back to the Old Man’s cottage, she kept letting her hand fall on his leg, and ten minutes after they got back to the cottage, they were having at it in the Old Man’s and Grandma’s bed.
Afterward, Monica told him she didn’t know what had come over her, it must have been the martinis, and they could never let anything like that happen again. But the way she stuck her tongue down his throat when she kissed him good-bye, he knew that was what she was saying, not what she meant.
So far as he was concerned, that was it, the one time. It would be a long time before he ever let himself be
