by Jim Thompson
“But four thousand dollars,” Mitch protested. “Four thousand dollars!”
“You’re covered,” the cattle buyer said coldly. “Shoot!”
“Well, all right,” Mitch said nervously. “All right, dang it!”
He rubbed his hand against his pant leg, wiping the sweat from it before picking up the dice. His nervousness was not entirely feigned. Once, even with the best of surgeons, the scalpel may slip. Once the most skilled of knife-throwers may throw a little too close. Once—only once—the high-wire walker may misstep to eternity. So with the dice handler.
No amount of skill or practice is completely impregnable to luck. There is no statute of limitations on the law of averages.
Two minutes to go. Eight thousand dollars on the bed. Just about all they were carrying, Mitch guessed. Certainly all that it was safe to take away from a group like this. And the taking would have to look very good. No sevens or elevens this time. Nothing that a square might do legitimately. An Honest John might make seven or eight straight passes in a row, but a hustler had to play it cute.
He clicked the dice. He threw them awkwardly. Then stood chagrined as the others snorted with laughter.
“Up jumped the devil! You got a big four, Pops.”
“Now, god-dang,” Mitch whimpered. “God-dang it, anyways!”
“Want to bet a little more, Corley? Give you six to five.”
“Danged if you won’t,” Mitch grumbled; and they laughed again.
Joe, of course, is the lowest point on the dice. Above it are Phoebe Five (a hard gal to know), Easy Six (three combinations), Craps (three), Eighter-Decatur (three), Quinine (a bitter two), Big Dick (two) and the fielders, Heaven-eleven and Boxcars, which have no bearing after the initial roll. The theoretical odds against five and nine are approximately three to two, as opposed to six to five for six and eight. The odds are two to one against ten and four, but any crapshooter will swear that ten is an easier point to make.
Obviously, Little Four has little going for him. As if recognizing the fact, he normally stays out of sight after showing his luckless little face.
“Roll ’em, Pops! Let’s see some craps!”
“Don’t rush me,” Mitch whined. “I’m rollin’ these here dice!”
He threw them. A big ten (four on the bottom). He threw again—nine. Then, eight and five and six. Where the hell was Red? What the hell was she waiting on? With so much riding, these guys could be hard to handle. He was getting tense, and tension was hell on control, and—
There it was! The signal. The muted, familiar cough, coming from just outside the door. It went unheard by the others, lost in their own noise.
“Seven dice! Let’s see a six-ace!”
“Come on, Pops! What the hell you waitin’ for?”
“Give me time, dang it! Stop rushin’ me!”
He wiped his hand against his pant leg again. He picked up the dice, set them, clicked them. And threw.
Nerves whispered that it was a bad throw. Screamed silently that he’d goofed off a week’s careful finagling and a wad of expense money in one bad moment.
He watched hopelessly as the cubes spun across the blanket, seeming to spin forever and ever. An eternity—a split second. They turned over twice in unison. Stopped with an imperceptible backspin.
Two deuces peeked up from the blanket.
Before the three men could react, there was a sudden furious banging on the door. They turned toward it automatically, and Mitch swept up the money and stuffed it into his pockets.
It was the contractor’s room. With a curse, he strode to the door and yanked it open. “Now, what the goddam hell—?”
“Wh-at? What! Don’t you curse me, you—you thing!”
Red stormed into the room, giving the contractor a shove that sent him stumbling backward. Her angry gaze scorched the other two men, then settled witheringly on Mitch, who seemed to wilt beneath it.
“Uh-hah! There you are!” She allowed herself to see the dice. “And up to your old tricks again! You just wait until I tell papa! You just wait!”
“Aw, now, sis—” Mitch squirmed childishly. “These here fellas are just—”
“Bums, that’s what they are! Just bums like you! Now, you march right out of here! March!”
With her red hair, her white high-cheekboned face, she was every inch the termagant; obviously a dame to steer clear of. But there was a fidget of protest from the three losers. Mitch had almost all their money, and they were entitled to a chance to win it back. And the lady could see that for herself, couldn’t she? And she could see that they weren’t bums, either.
“I’ve got offices in Amarillo and Big Spring, and—Ouch!” The contractor fell back, rubbing the side of his face.
Red ran at the other two, hands wickedly clawed. Voice rising, she threatened to scream. “I’ll do it!” Her eyes blazed insanely. “I’ll call the police!”
She threw back her head, mouth opened to its widest. Mitch grabbed her in the seeming nick of time.
“I’ll go! I’m comin’ right now, sis! Just you calm down, an’…” He urged her toward the door, grimacing over-the-shoulder apologies. “Sorry, fellas, but…”
But they could see how it was, couldn’t they? What could you do with a crazy woman like this?
He closed the door on the dazed silence behind him. He and Red went swiftly down the hall to the elevator.
She had already checked them out of their rooms, of course, and a black-shirted porter stood waiting with their baggage at the side entrance of the hotel. As a cab sped them toward the railroad station, she moved close on the seat to whisper to him.
“I got us a stateroom together. Okay?”
“What?” He scowled in the darkness. “We’re registered as brother and sister, and you—”
“Now, honey…” She was a little hurt. “I didn’t get it through the hotel.”
“You were late tonight.”
“Me? Why, I don’t see how I could have been.”
“What difference does it make whether you see it?”
She moved away from him. It would take very little more to get her truly angry. Which would not be something to enjoy. But he was pretty burned up himself. She’d been late on the take-out, dammit, a whole two minutes late. He’d had to sweat, in danger of losing the dough and getting a schlamming, just because she couldn’t be bothered to check the time. What the hell had she been doing, anyway? What was she—a woman with a kid’s head?
Red said very quietly, “You’d better shut up, Mitch.”
“But, goddammit, you were late! I don’t mean to talk rough to you, honey, but—”
“And don’t honey me!”
As they followed the redcap to their train, he looked up at the station clock, then took a startled glance at his watch. Fast—by almost two minutes. So the mix-up was his fault. Red hadn’t taken him out late, as he should have known. As he had known. But hustling the heavy scores kind of drained a man dry, and until he filled up again he didn’t have anything but crap for anyone. Probably, Mitch supposed, it was that way with any big-time frammis, even the legitimate ones. At least, most of the big-timers he knew had screwed up personal lives. If you were willing to settle for some gig like working for the park department and saving tinfoil as a hobby, you could stay loose. But on the hard-hustle, uh-uh. No matter how much you had on the ball, there was still a limit to it. And if you blasted it off, you couldn’t spread it out.
In their stateroom, with the roadbed whispering swiftly beneath them, his hunger for Red suddenly became a raging thing. And knowing that it was no use, he began a roundabout apology, mentioning acquaintances, real and imaginary, whom stress also made unreasonably unreasonable.
“There was my dad, God rest him.…” He forced a reminiscent chuckle. “He was a special-editions promoter, you know; traveled around the country putting out special editions of newspapers. He’d run a boiler room all day, bossing a bunch of phone men and closing the tough babies himself, and
by the time night came you could hardly say hello to him without getting socked. Why, I remember…”
Mitch sighed, letting his voice trail away, silently cursing her for being as she was. He’d hardly said a thing to her—nothing at all compared to the guff he had to take from people. Yet apologies, coaxing, were obviously a waste of time.
She intended to stay sore; the well-stocked commissary of her flesh was closed until further notice. He was sure that she wanted him as badly as he wanted her. That was apparent from the single stateroom she had booked. But it was also apparent, from her manner of undressing, that she was prepared to make him suffer, and to hell with her own sufferings.
Normally, she was almost prudishly modest. Forced to undress in close quarters, she would do so under her nightgown, primly urging him not to peek as she worked out of her clothes. But when she didn’t intend to let him have anything, then she put it all on display, everything that she wasn’t going to let him have.
No pro could do a more tantalizing strip tease than an offended Red (right name Harriet, for God’s sake!). She would pull her panties halfway down around her hips, casually turning this way and that to give him a glimpse of what could be glimpsed, fore and aft, with her panties pulled halfway down. Then, the brassiere was loosened, and the breasts carelessly allowed to come into view. Pink-tipped, traced through with fine blue veins—their abundance seeming to bow her frail-looking shoulders. (She damned well wasn’t frail!) Then, if she was feeling particularly mean, she would lift them up and examine them, critically and lengthily, until his tongue felt as big as a ball bat.
She was very down on him tonight, so he got the breast bit in full. Then, disdainfully, she discarded the last wispy fragment of her underthings, and stood naked with her feet slightly apart, her head thrown back to let the red mass of hair spill down around her shoulders. She raised her hands and began to fluff it, her breasts moving delicately with the movements of her arms. Finally, she ducked her head forward, bringing her hair over her shoulders, letting it spread silkily over her breasts. It parted perfectly on either side of her beautifully shaped head, and at last she looked at him; the look of a wicked angel. And spoke to him huskily.
“How’d you like to have a little?”
Mitch knew it was strictly zilch. He said two words, one a personal pronoun and the other a very naughty verb.
“Oh? Not even a teensy bit?” She measured an amount on her finger. “Not even a teensy-eensy-weensy bit?”
Mitch groaned and reached for her, surrendering.
Red said the same two words that he had said.
Then she hoisted herself into the upper berth and pulled the covers over her.
Eventually, Mitch fell asleep in the lower berth, dreaming not of Red, strangely, but of his father. Dreaming that the old man was sore at the statement that he was a hard guy to get along with. He wasn’t at all unreasonable, his father said. Not a goddamned bit.
And he certainly wasn’t. All things considered…
ACCLAIM FOR
JIM THOMPSON
“The best suspense writer going, bar none.”
—New York Times
“My favorite crime novelist—often imitated but never duplicated.”
—Stephen King
“My man in crime fiction.”
—Jo Nesbø
“If Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Cornell Woolrich would have joined together in some ungodly union and produced a literary offspring, Jim Thompson would be it.… His work casts a dazzling light on the human condition.”
—Washington Post
“The master of the American groin-kick novel.”
—Vanity Fair
“Like Clint Eastwood’s pictures it’s the stuff for rednecks, truckers, failures, psychopaths, and professors.… One of the finest American writers and the most frightening, Thompson is on best terms with the devil. Read Jim Thompson and take a tour of hell.”
—New Republic
“The most hard-boiled of all the American writers of crime fiction.”
—Chicago Tribune
Books by Jim Thompson
The Alcoholics
A Swell-Looking Babe
After Dark, My Sweet
Bad Boy
The Criminal
Cropper’s Cabin
The Getaway
The Golden Gizmo
The Grifters
Heed the Thunder
A Hell of a Woman
The Killer Inside Me
The Kill-Off
The Nothing Man
Nothing More than Murder
Now and on Earth
Pop. 1280
Recoil
The Rip-Off
Roughneck
Savage Night
South of Heaven
Texas by the Tail
The Transgressors
Wild Town
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
About the Author
Preview of Texas by the Tail
Acclaim for Jim Thompson
Books by Jim Thompson
Newsletters
Copyright
Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 1952 by Jim Thompson, copyright © renewed 1980 by Alberta H. Thompson
Excerpt from Texas by the Tail copyright © 1965 by Jim Thompson, copyright © renewed 1994 by Alberta H. Thompson, Sharon Thompson Reed, Patricia Thompson Miller, and Michael J. Thompson
Author photograph by Sharon Thompson Reed
Cover design by Julianna Lee, Cover photograph by Anthony Marsland/Getty Images
Cover copyright © 2014 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
Mulholland Books / Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
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First ebook edition: May 2012
Mulholland Books is an imprint of Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Mulholland Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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