“This stuff is safe,” Johnny said. “The broad won’t squeal. She wouldn’t report me.”
“Maybe not. But if she’s insured you can bet she’ll report the theft. She’ll say it got burglared or something, but she’ll report it.”
“Maybe.”
“So I don’t know what I can get, Johnny.”
“To hell with it,” he said, shrugging. “You can sell it? You can turn it over tomorrow?”
“Sure.”
“Take it now,” Johnny said. “I’ll meet you up here tomorrow night. I got things to do.”
Beans stuffed the loot into his pockets. “I’ll get what I can,” he said. “You don’t want to hang for a game or two?”
“No,” Johnny said. “No, I can’t. I got to move.”
His own room was just as he had left it. He kicked the door shut and propped a two-by-four under the knob so that it wouldn’t open. In a dump like that he wasn’t taking any chances. Anybody saw he had better than a hundred bucks and he might be in for a rough time.
He didn’t want a rough time. The two-by-four had stood him in good stead in the past; he used it as a lock whenever he had a broad up to the room. Now he had money, and that was more important than a broad. He sat down heavily on the bed and took the wallet from his pocket.
He counted the money four times.
A hundred and sixty-two goddam bucks. A beautiful hundred and beautiful sixty-two beautiful bucks.
It was more money than he’d ever had at one time in his life. It was a huge roll — and at the same time it wasn’t enough to get going on until he got the extra dough from Beans. A suit alone would run him close to a yard all by itself. Shoes were fifteen or twenty, shirts five or six bucks apiece, socks a buck a pair. And he’d need an extra pair of pants and a sport jacket, plus a decent suitcase to keep his clothes in. You couldn’t check into a hotel with a paper sack under your arm.
Then there was the hotel. If he was going to come on strong he wasn’t going to live in a craphole. He’d need a hotel, and it would have to be at least average and probably better than that. That would cost money.
But if Beans brought back anywhere from a C-note on up, then he could swing it. And as soon as the front was set up he wouldn’t have to worry about money. It would come in as fast as he needed it.
He smiled.
They’d pay, he thought. The goddamned broads would pay through the nose, just the way Fancy Pants Nugent had paid. They’d get what they paid for — he’d teach them what sex was all about and make them feel like a million dollars.
But they would pay for it.
He sat around planning until well past midnight. Then he stashed the alligator wallet between his mattress and the spring, pulled off his clothes and crawled into bed. He was tired now. The Nugent dame had been fun and the money was nice, but he was exhausted. She had really known how to wiggle that cute little rear of hers. She was choice stuff.
He smiled happily, remembering how it had been with her, how he had made her beg for it. They were going to do worse than beg, he thought. All the rich bitches with itches, they’d beg and more. They would come crawling to him, crawling on their hands and knees and crying like babies.
The picture pleased him.
He slept easily and well. He dreamed about money and women and power.
It was a few minutes past noon when he awoke. He didn’t know this, though. He had no idea what time it was, and he realized that he was going to have to get a watch as soon as he could afford one. It was a shame Nugent’s widow hadn’t kept his watch as a souvenir. He would have kept it and worn it himself.
He got out of bed and his skin felt dirty. It wasn’t surprising. He’d worked up a good sweat in the rack with the Nugent broad and he hadn’t taken a shower since then. He wrapped himself up in a towel, grabbed a small chunk of dirty yellow soap and headed for the bathroom down the hall.
He opened the door without knocking, mainly because it never occurred to him that somebody might be inside. As far as he knew, nobody else in the stinking building ever got washed.
He opened the door and saw a flash of pink flesh. Then the pink flesh squealed and disappeared behind the shower curtain. The curtain was plastic and he could see a silhouette through it.
The silhouette was pleasantly female.
“Who is it?”
He recognized the voice. It was the girl who lived down the hall. Her first name was Linda and her last name was something unpronouncably Polish. She lived with her mother, a fat old slob who washed other people’s floors and drank cheap wine.
He saw the bottles piled outside the door every morning. But he’d never paid any attention to Linda before. She was fourteen or so, which made her a little too young for Johnny to be interested in her.
Now, however, he wasn’t so sure. What he had seen of her had been pleasantly pink. And the silhouette gave him a nice view of breasts that jutted out sharply from her young body.
Maybe—
“Johnny Wells,” he said. “Sorry I charged in on you. You should have locked the door.”
“The bolt broke.”
He looked at it and saw that she was right.
“I’ll be through in a minute or so,” she said. “Then you can have the bathroom.”
“Fine,” he said.
“You can go now. I’ll be done soon.”
“Fine,” he repeated. But he made no move to go and she didn’t say anything.
What would the best move be? He smiled. He could take off all his clothes and step into the shower with her. That would scare the daylights out of her, but it ought to work. She’d be scared first, and then he’d grab her and give her a hug and she’d get excited, and from there it would be easy.
And fun. He could kill two birds with one stone. First they could soap each other up and have some fun in the process, and then he could turn off the shower and fill the tub with water and take her in it. It was supposed to be a kick in a bathtub.
Suddenly he was ashamed of himself. For Christ’s sake, the broad was all of fourteen years old! What the hell was the matter with him?
Noiselessly he stepped out of the bathroom and closed the door. He padded back down the hall to his own room and waited there until he heard her open the door.
“All ready,” she called.
He wrapped himself up in his towel again, picked up the soap and opened the door. He passed her in the hallway. She was wrapped up in a towel of her own but she had a different problem. He only had to cover himself from the waist down. Her towel was the same size as his and it had more ground to cover. He saw the tops of her breasts and he saw her legs clear to her thighs.
“It’s all yours,” she said cheerfully. “Have a nice shower, Johnny.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Sure.”
He got under the shower and let the hot water lash at him. Hell, he thought, she was only a kid. But the trouble was that she just plain wasn’t put together like a kid. Kids didn’t have boobs like she did. Kids didn’t have legs like that.
Maybe he should have tossed her a pass. Something easy, though, so he wouldn’t scare her if she wasn’t having any. It might have been worth a try.
But fourteen, for God’s sake!
He said to hell with it and finished his shower.
The day was a drag. He bought himself a breakfast of waffles and bacon at the luncheonette on the corner and washed the food down with a large glass of milk. He wandered around for an hour or so but there was nothing he wanted to do and nobody he felt like running into. He didn’t even have eyes to shoot pool. He was marking time, waiting for Beans to come back from his fence with money for him.