I did a few sets of sit-ups on the slantboard, then skipped rope for a while, breathing deep and easy. After that I put on the bag gloves and pounded the heavy bag till my T-shirt was pasted to me. Then I moved over to the speed bag.
I started slowly, building a smooth rhythm of alternating lefts and rights. Little by little I increased the tempo until I had the bag ricocheting in a steady racketing blur that sounded like a train highballing by. I was aware of the attention I’d attracted, the guys gathered behind me. Even Otis couldn’t work the light bag better than I could. I kept at it until my arms felt packed with burning concrete, then gave the bag a hard overhand that shook the boards and I stepped away and gestured to the others that the bag was all theirs.
A few of the guys applauded and somebody let out a whistle.
Otis had interrupted his boxing lesson to lean on the ropes and watch me work the speed bag. I grinned at him and stripped off the gloves, then mopped my face with a towel. He smiled and shook his head and then went back to showing some husky guy in the ring how to slip a punch.
After I showered and dressed I checked in at Rose’s office again. Mrs. Bianco said he’d been dealing chiefly with phone business all morning. He’d received a few visitors, none of them strangers to her. He’d given her no messages for me. I told her I’d be out for a while and come back later.
I took a trolley over to the Strand, downtown’s main street. The clouds had broken and scattered and the sun was high and warm and had done away with last night’s threat of a cold spell.
Unlike the stores, most of the cafés were open for business. I went into De Jean’s and had a T-bone and a bottle of beer. I finished up with coffee and a cigarette as I watched the sparse pedestrian traffic pass by the sidewalk window.
It was strange to be so idle. My days usually consisted of going here and there to take care of this or that. The other Ghosts tended to the routine jobs around the island, including the daily cash pickups, but the Maceos had dealings all over this region of Texas, and sometimes Rose would hand me a list of jobs that took me out of town for days or even a couple of weeks at a time. I frequently went up to Houston, sometimes out to San Antone, now and then down to Corpus. More often than not I took LQ or Brando with me, usually both.
Among my assignments were visits to guys who’d been slow to make loan repayments or turn over the daily slot cuts. They usually got their accounts up to date real quick after I gave them a warning. Everybody knew one warning was all Rose ever gave, and few of them were late with the money again. Now and then somebody would require a second visit but nobody ever needed a third.
The ones who’d been doctoring their books were another matter. They never failed to correct themselves, either, but their transgression was more serious than a late payment, and it had to be punished, even as a first offense. A broken hand would usually do, but sometimes a foot was also called for, maybe an arm or a leg, sometimes something worse. It depended on how long they’d been at it and how much they’d skimmed.
Then there were the robbers. The island clubs never got robbed—they were much too well protected—but now and then some little joint on the mainland or in a neighboring county would get hit, some club or café or filling station with Maceo machines in it, and although the stickups were rarely for more than peanuts, they included Maceo peanuts. Only the dumbest stickup guys would ever hit a place without first making sure it had no Maceo connection. Next to an outsider who tried to cut in on Galveston, nobody got Rose as hot under the collar as a robber. Any business that had even one Maceo machine in it was guaranteed protection, and Rose took his guarantees seriously.
Most of the stickup men were such dopes they didn’t even leave the local area after pulling their heist. They’d hole up with a relative or a friend or a sweetheart. But the Maceos had a standing reward offer for information about robberies—the reward sometimes more than what was taken in a holdup—and the information always came, as often as not from the people the robbers were hiding with. It never took me long to track them down, and when I did, there was nothing to discuss. If they had the money with them, fine, and if they didn’t, the hell with it. Not only was the money rarely very much, its recovery wasn’t the point, not to Rose. As he once put it, “What I want is those bastards removed from the living”—which made me chuckle and say he sometimes had a touch of the poet in him. Which made him give me a look and say he sometimes thought I was fucking touched. In any case, once the thieves were removed from the living, he made sure the news got around.
Few robbers ever skipped the state, but if we got a sure tip on one that did, we went after him—no matter how little he’d made off with, no matter how far he’d gone. But reliable information about a guy who lammed the state was hard to come by, and even when Rose thought the tip was solid he was reluctant to send more than one man on the job. He believed one man had a better chance of getting around unnoticed in unfamiliar territory and a better chance of getting back out if the job went bad. I agreed. The only two times he sent me out of Texas I went alone.
I ran down the first guy in a rooming house in a rundown section of St. Joseph, Missouri, exactly where the rat had said he’d be. I slipped in after midnight. The stairs creaked but if any of the other tenants woke up they stayed put and minded their own business, lucky for them. The guy’s doorlock was even easier to jimmy than the one in the kitchen. He didn’t wake up till I cut his throat. I’d killed with a knife before but never cut a throat—although I’d come close one time, when I was still a kid—but I’d seen Brando do it and knew they didn’t make much noise that way, just a kind of gargle like water going down a partly clogged drain. I thought I’d be able to avoid the mess better than Brando had, but I wasn’t. I had to trade my bloody shirt for a clean one of the guy’s, and I went out with my ruined coat rolled under my arm. He’d made off with about five hundred dollars but I found less than fifty in the place.
After that job I started using an ice pick for the close work. You had to be more exact with a pick but it was a hell of a lot neater.
In the other case, the robber hit a Texas City club for three grand and then went to hide at his brother’s house on the Pearl River, a few miles south of Jackson, Mississippi. The place was so isolated I didn’t have to be very clever about it. I waited till dark and then left the car in among the pines and walked back up the road to the house. I found his car parked around in back where it couldn’t be seen from the road. I peeked in all the windows and saw that there was nobody in the place except him and a girl. He was in his undershorts, the girl in T-shirt and panties. I couldn’t spot a gun anywhere.
I kicked open the door to the kitchen where they were having supper and shot him through his open mouth before he could even stand up. The back of his head splattered the wall behind him and he drained off his chair.
The girl shrieked and jumped away from the table and then clapped her hands over her mouth like she wasn’t all that new to situations suddenly gone bad and knew that rule number one was shut up. But her eyes were huge with fear. She was a slim bob-haired blonde with freckles and nice legs. She looked about seventeen. One of her cheeks had a pale purple bruise.
“Where’s the guns?” I said.
“He aint got but the one.” She nodded at the kitchen counter behind me. I picked it up—a snubnose five-shot .38—and dropped it in my coat pocket. Then I stepped out the kitchen door to see if any lights had come on anywhere, some nearby cabin, some neighbor in the woods who maybe heard the .44’s blast, but there was nothing. I went back in and shut the door.