“I quit,” I said.
He looked at me steadily for over a minute, then I could see the doubt in his eyes, and the lines of his mouth soften. “You... kid,” he said. “You... punk kid. College boy. Trouble with you is, you got too much education. Too many ideas crammed into your brain. Like your dad.” He spread his hands. “Why? Just tell me why. Tell me something reasonable. You’re not happy?”
“No. I’m not happy. I don’t know if I ever will be. Maybe it’s not important. Maybe I just want a change. My side of life has always been the side with its face in the gutter. I’m tired of neon sunsets and living at night. Maybe I want a woman who’s never been rented out like a lending library book.”
He lit a cigarette and watched the match burn, the charred wood curling slowly like a dying thing. “You nut. A regular nut. That’s what I got. I kept you from drinking yourself to death once, didn’t I, boy?”
I nodded. He seemed about to go on, then caught his breath. “Oh, what the hell. I can’t say nothin’ to you. You might as well go. Feeling the way you do you wouldn’t be no good to me. I never understood you. You’re the biggest screwball I ever knew. Sometimes I think you could tell me to spit and make me like it. You shouldn’t have any trouble. They don’t even have your phone number downtown you’re so clean.”
When I hesitated he told me to get out. He stopped me with a word when I reached the door.
“You know Lollipop, Pete?”
There was a hard surge of fear to smother the rising happiness and relief I was feeling. “I know what it stands for.”
“I’m soft in the head for letting you walk out on me alive,” he said tonelessly. “Maybe I got to know you too well. Maybe I’m soft because of your old man, remembering what a hell of a good lawyer he was—”
“Don’t talk to me about the bastard.”
“Don’t ever give me reason to call somebody like Lollipop,” he finished. “I can’t help how much you know. But I can do something about it. Remember that!”
“I’ll remember,” I said.
I flipped a cigarette stub into the cool air streaming outside the car window, put my face into my hands, trying to press the ache from my eyes with my fingertips. For many months I had slept with a revolver tied to my wrist, always careful of the strangers around me, of the shadows at my back. No one ever came. Gradually I learned how to forget the way it had been: the tense crowded nights, living at the edge of a scream, nerves straining and alert for a look, a footstep, a gleam of light on knife or gun; trusting nothing, not the secretive men who gave information in whispers, nor the whisky drunk in locked bedrooms in a vain hope for relaxation, nor the silken flesh and long hot touch of many women.
“What’s it like down there now?” I asked Rudy.
“There’s a squeeze on,” he said, glancing at me. “Stan Maxine’s behind it. You remember Stan?”
“I remember him,” I said dryly.
“Stan’s a big boy now. Got a taste for big money. He has an idea that Macy runs too much. Maxine’s got important friends upstairs. Guys who believe in taking care of their own. Macy’s owned South Florida for years but he doesn’t come from north of the Mediterranean and some of the wheels resent that. They wouldn’t try to move one of their own boys into Macy’s territory but if Maxine cut in they’d look the other way.”
“Why doesn’t Macy slap him down?”
Rudy shook his head slowly. “Who knows?” He paused, hunting for the right way to tell me what was on his mind. “You know how it was when you were with him, Pete. Macy owned everything then. He got his cut on every drop of bootleg, every deck of morph and stick of tea, every policy slip. There wasn’t any two-bit gambler or waterfront loan shark who wasn’t under Macy’s thumb. He told everybody what to do. From the crummiest cat house to police headquarters to the union halls. Macy musta owned a thousand people in five or six counties.”
“You trying to say Macy doesn’t run the show any more?”
“Not like he used to. I just run errands nowadays, I’m not on the inside like you used to be. But I can tell Macy’s slipping. He had a couple of props knocked out from under him. When you got as much territory as Macy does, you got to work hard and have some smart boys to keep the organization clicking. But he never found anybody as good as you to check on the boys up the line and finger the ones who were pocketing more than their share of the gravy, cheating Macy on the cut. Then there was a shakeup in coptown and some of Macy’s pals got kicked out. Macy had to sweat out a local crime commission probe and close down gambling here and there until things cooled some. All those guys were interested in was gambling and a couple of murders and they didn’t touch anything else. But it threw Macy off stride and it seems like he never caught up. Sometimes I think he don’t care. He stopped working so hard. Took trips. Stayed down at his place on the island a lot instead of in town.
“Then word got around that he wasn’t so tough any more and the boys started cheating him blind.
“Anyhow that’s what I’ve heard. The cuts aren’t so fat these days. Hard times, the boys say. But I hear the bootleg and dope shipments haven’t slowed down none. Maxine’s watched this going on and now he’s starting to feel his muscle.”
“And Macy’s not doing anything about it?”
“Right now he and Maxine are sort of watching each other. Smiles with a gun in the pocket. See?”
“Cold war, huh?”
“Like that.”
I sat back, thinking about Macy Barr. Things were going bad for him. Once he had been absolute, a ruthless tyrant in a tiny rich empire, who would roll up his sleeves and use his own hands on those it was necessary to impress with his power. Now he was beginning to feel his years. Maybe Maxine would get him. Maybe it would be the Treasury boys finding chinks in the legitimate front constructed over the years by a squad of expensive lawyers. At any rate, somebody would get him, because once his kind of luck began to sour he was finished.
I had a different life now. I didn’t want to step back into his. I didn’t want to die along with him. But it wasn’t my choice to make. I felt helpless. Resentment heated my throat. Each passing mile shoved me deeper into the web from which I might not escape. After this job there would be others. Macy would find a reason to keep me around. I swallowed grimly. I’d kill him myself before I’d let that happen.
Rudy pushed the big Pontiac hard along the wide highway, hitting better than ninety, slowing as little as possible for the clusters of towns that were little more than winking traffic lights, darkened buildings, bright angles of neon. Outside of Port Wentworth the highway widened by two lanes illuminated by tall curved posts tipped with dazzling bluish lights. We were in an industrial suburb. Long blocks of warehouses with small windows stretched along the roadway behind chain-link fencing. Half a mile ahead red warning beacons winked atop huge silver globes in a chemical storage yard.
My eyelids were heavy and I thought about closing my eyes to rest them. Instead I reached for a cigarette. If I had closed my eyes, my face would have been shot off in another minute.
A hundred yards ahead a car spurted onto the highway and stopped directly in the path of the speeding Pontiac. In the second it took Rudy to whip out a curse and put his foot to the brake we had traveled a third of that distance. I glanced at the speedometer. We were going 105 miles an hour. Try to stop a car going that fast in two hundred feet. Rudy knew it, too, and I heard him groan helplessly as we skidded toward the other car. It was a black Ford, I saw now. I saw something else, too, as Rudy wrestled with the wheel, trying to ease the Pontiac to the other side of the highway. The tires were screaming. I ducked below the dash an instant before the right side of the windshield was blasted out with a shotgun aimed from the Ford.