When you throw that right at his jaw, shift your left foot four inches to the side. If he’s throwin’ a right at your jaw, you’ll connect an’ he’ll go over your shoulder.
Both men snapped off cannon-shot right hands. Everybody in the first five rows heard Ned’s terrible blow shatter the Tiger’s jaw. The back of his head rebounded off the canvas. Lucius Breen started the count, steady as a metronome. At ten he went to the neutral corner and raised Ned’s arm in the air.
Dunc laughed out loud. Ned had won it fair and square. But Artis had hold of him, wouldn’t let go.
“Carny’ll come after us, all of us!” She was wild. “I’ve gotta cash in. Get Ned, pick me up at my house.”
The ring was filled with excited men, Breen and a doctor were shielding Terlazzo from trampling feet. Ned went through the ropes, Gimpy hanging on to his arm like a puppy.
“Ned, you gotta square this with Carny! Gotta tell him it was your idea, not mine... An’ I... I bet all our money on...”
Ned’s puffy lips drew back in a grin. “We ain’t gonna need money where were goin’, Gimp. Not you an’ me.”
Carny Largo’s beautifully manicured right hand switched off the TV set. He kept twisting the knob until it came away in his fingers, then threw it into a corner as he cursed in a low guttural voice. “Nitro Ned. And Gimpy Ernest. And Artis. And even the kid. I want all of those fuckers dead. Dead.”
Rafe said, “When I do Artis, can I—”
“Make sure she’s dead first. Then do whatever you want.”
Carny started pacing. He had to come up with something, quick. Look what the people back east had done to Bugsy when they thought he had been holding out on them. And he’d been one of their own. Carny was no made man, just a guy who owned a Glitter Gulch casino and did them favors now and then...
Yes! They wanted to become his partners in the Gladiator as Bugsy Siegel had done to that degenerate gambler Wilkinson who had owned the Flamingo. So what if he offered them the Gladiator, free and clear, to prove he hadn’t ripped them off?
His hand shook as he reached for the phone to try and reach Meyer Lansky in New York. It would work. It had to work.
Ned pushed by anyone wanting to talk with him. Sweat still gleamed on his face, one of the unbandaged cuts above his eye still oozed blood. “Is Artis in the car?”
“She left right after the fight to cash in her tickets. She said she’d meet us at her place. She said—”
“Artis an’ her goddamn money.” Ned stopped dead, his face foreboding. “Not good, kid. Not good. If...” He trailed off and shook his head. “Okay. Do what I said. Go get her...”
Raffetto would want to do them at the ranch, it was too public here, but Gimpy was taking no chances. He switched off the lights, checked the deserted hall before stepping out. Drive straight to McCarran field, catch the first flight out.
He went up the steps. High in the sky above the parking lot was a thump! and a flower of twinkling colored lights. The crowd above and behind him went “Oooh!” and “Ahhh!” As he took his car keys from his jacket pocket, a man stepped around the front of his car. Barely five feet tall and wearing a midnight-blue suit and black shirt and white tie.
“Carny told me to give you this.”
Rafe’s right hand, lengthened by eight inches of black steel, slashed horizontally across Gimpy’s throat. Gimpy made a strangled sound. He’d thought Rafe would be waiting at the ranch; should of left a margin for error. Rafe wiped his blade on Gimpy’s coat, thrust it back into the sheath between his shoulder blades, faded back into the other shadows. Nitro Ned next. Then the kid. The best for last. Artis.
As he opened his car door, a familiar voice said, “Rafe?”
Carny Largo, phone to his face, was doing the selling job of a lifetime. It had taken him a half hour to track down Meyer Lansky, not in New York but in Miami.
“Yessir, Mr. Lansky, the Gladiator, that’s right, your accountants can... Thank you, Mr. Lansky. Thank you.”
As he hung up he heard Rafe coming back in. He turned, using his wadded handkerchief to wipe the sweat from the hand that had held the phone. He gasped.
Nitro Ned Davenport, battered but whole, said amiably, “I called ’em before the fight, anonymous-like, tole ’em you an’ that fighter of yours, Nitro Ned, was workin’ a cross against ’em. I should of knowed you’d talk your way out of it.”
“You’re a dead man, Ned,” said Carny. “So’s your bitch girlfriend and Gimpy and the kid. I sent Rafe—”
“Yeah, you did, didn’t you?” Still grinning amiably, Ned advanced like an earthmover. “So now Rafe ain’t here. I am.”
Carny emptied all five steel-jacketed slugs from the .25-caliber revolver in his jacket pocket into Ned’s lemon-yellow shirtfront. Ned staggered, but kept coming. Still grinning. Carny’s lips thinned, panic flickered yellowly in his eyes as he tried to twist away. Too late. Ned’s huge hands had him.
“The margin of error you was always bleatin’ about, Carny. Five pills would stop ’em all in time — all of ’em ’cept me.”
His dying hands folded Carny Largo’s head back at a right angle to his body as if it were on a hinge, snapping his neck like a cornstalk.
It was a two-story frame house in a residential area south of Fremont Street. A little run-down, Dunc could see by the streetlights as he slammed to a stop at the curb, but lived-in, inviting. Like the homes on a thousand tree-covered streets back in the Midwest. Lights were on upstairs and behind the front door. Thank God. Artis had made it and he was in time. Without a map, it had taken him twenty minutes to find the place.
Dunc jumped out, ran up the walk. The front door was ajar. She wouldn’t have left it that way. He should have brought the tire iron from the car. He could barely breathe for fear, but there was no rime to go back for it.
Straight ahead a flight of carpeted stairs led up to the second floor. The stairwell light went out: it was pitch-black except for slight illumination from the streetlight outside.
“Artis!”
A small, quick stairwell shadow came bounding down at him, led by a gleaming blade. Raffetto! Dunc’s arm swept it aside, grappled with him. But the little killer was quick as an eel, strong as electricity. He broke free, ran down the stairs. The front door slammed.
Light showed under the closed door of the front bedroom. Dunc smashed it open.
Artis was sprawled on a dressing bench at the foot of the bed, leaning back against the coverlet. Her once-white silk blouse was red. The sweetish smell of blood filled the room. One hand clutched a small gold cross with a thin broken gold chain. One foot still wore a blood-spattered high-heeled sandal with gold straps over the arch. The other sandal lay on its side a yard away. Dunc dropped to his knees beside her.
“I’ll get help. Don’t move, it’ll be okay. I’ll...”
Those intense black eyes opened to look at him sternly. She had so much to tell him. Had to tell him a whole lifetime of never being a player, just one of the suckers. Had to tell him about her murder.
“Christ, kid,” she said, “it hurts.”
Then she died.
Four police cars were parked at odd angles in front of the Flamingo, revolving lights spilling blood over the crowd. An ambulance was just pulling away, siren keening.
“Two men dead,” somebody said.
“One of ’em was the boxer,” said another. “Nitro Ned.”
“Other one was some gambler ran a casino in Glitter Gulch.”
“Bet the fight was fixed and they fell out over the split.”