by Ed Gorman
“What’re you doing?” She was still talking in a whisper, but when Jonas answered he spoke out loud.
“My job,” he said, and fired one bullet into the sleeping man’s haunch.
Donovan bellowed, lurched awake grimacing. He spun and reached for the table where his gun lay, but a second shot from Jonas’ .45 sent the gun spinning off into a corner of the room.
“Rise and shine, pretty boy,” Jonas said. “I hope she was worth it.”
“Don’t!” Missy screamed. She plunged her heel down hard on Jonas’ foot, spoiling his aim. The third gunshot went wide, splintering a framed elevator inspection certificate hanging on the wall.
Donovan was on his knees now, clutching a pillow in front of his privates. The pillowcase was turning red at the edges.
“You’re going to ruin everything!” Missy said.
“Yep, that’s me, I ruin everything.” Jonas pulled the trigger once more and a puff of goose feathers exploded into the air. The center of the pillowcase turned red now, or what was left of it did. Donovan’s face crumpled and he fell back onto the mattress groaning. “Pillows, mattresses. Only not seventeen-year-old girls. I draw the line there.”
Missy wrenched her arm from his grasp and ran to Donovan’s side. “Mike, Mike,” she said, leaning down to cradle his head. She stroked his hair. “You’ve gotta tell me, Mike. Who is it? Who’s the big man that’s gonna put the finger on Harry? Who?”
But Donovan’s mouth was screwed shut as tightly as his eyes, his whole face a knot of agony. Tears were running down his cheeks, and his head was twitching.
“Who?” Missy said again.
Jonas pushed her roughly away from Donovan, set the barrel of his .45 against the man’s forehead, and used his last two bullets to put him out of his misery.
The echoes of the gunshots seemed to hang in the air, reverberating for a minute in the closed space.
Jonas tucked the empty gun back into its holster. He turned to find Missy standing an arm’s length away, Donovan’s gun held in her shaking hands. It was aimed at him.
Her hair had tumbled down and her hat was askew.
“You dumb ox,” she said, “do you know what you’ve done?”
“Yeah. I’ve taken away your toy.”
“I’m not a child, damn it. I’m a grown woman.”
“This is how you prove it? Sleeping with a slob like this?”
“I was getting close to him for a reason.”
Jonas shrugged.
“I was!”
“All right,” Jonas said. “So you were.”
“And now he’s dead, you stupid, stupid man.”
“Yeah, he’s dead. That’s the way your brother wanted him.”
“My brother. Without me keeping tabs on his enemies, my brother’d have been on a slab three years ago. And maybe now he will be, thanks to you.”
“He told me to — ”
“Yeah, he told you to. Make sure Missy’s pure and clean, make sure no dirty mick’s puttin’ his fingers in her drawers. When at my age he was screwing half the chorus girls in Ziegfeld’s, two at a time.”
Jonas stepped forward, one hand extended, a reasonable look on his face. He wasn’t scared, but that didn’t mean he thought it was impossible she’d pull the trigger. “Give me the gun, Missy.” When she didn’t, he said, “We’ve got to get out of here, kid. Someone’s bound to have noticed. No car backfires six times.”
“Seven,” she said, and shot him in the chest.
She wiped the gun down, tucked it into Donovan’s fist, bent his stiffening fingers around it, even threaded one inside the trigger guard. It made her feel sick to see him lying there, his brains soaking into the bed. But about Jonas, who was lying on the floor in a spreading pool of blood, she felt nothing. He wasn’t a man. He was a robot, like in those pulp magazines with a screaming lady on the cover, a lumbering metal man carrying her away at the bidding of its egghead mad scientist master. Jonas was all meat and muscle, no brains, like a machine you set in motion and it kept going in whatever direction you pointed it.
Well it wasn’t going anywhere now.
She put her hair back up, closed the door behind her and took the stairs all the way down to street level. No point letting the elevator man see her.
Out on the street she got a look and a whistle from the driver of a lone automobile. On his way to church, no doubt. She hurried to the nearest bus stop, sat on the bench to wait for the next bus to come by. In her whisper-thin sheath with bare arms and calves and heels that lifted her a good six inches when she stood, Missy was conspicuous and she knew it. Not in a nightclub on Saturday night, perhaps — but at a bus stop Sunday morning? You didn’t see girls dressed like that unless they were coming home from a night they wouldn’t want anyone to know about.
She wished she had a coat, or an umbrella, or even a newspaper she could open and hold in front of her. But she had nothing, just a little handbag smaller than her palm. She sat stiff-backed and watched the horizon.
When she heard the voice behind her, she jumped in her seat. “Miss? Do you need any help?”
She turned to see a flatfoot standing with his nightstick in hand, a beat cop in more senses than one, the long night’s tour of duty showing in the weight of the bags beneath his eyes.
“Actually,” she said, smiling at the thought of a quick ride home in a comfy squad car, door-to-door service courtesy of the City of New York, “yes I could, thank you.” And she leaned forward a touch, tilting one shoulder to let her strap fall.
The telephone was on the far side of the bed, on the floor, where it had fallen when Jonas’ gunshot had knocked Donovan’s gun off the table. That was only ten feet away, but ten feet might as well have been ten miles at the stop-and-start pace that was the best Jonas could manage.
His breath was coming in short strokes, and try as he might he couldn’t fill his lungs. He’d vomited once already, a mix of bile and blood, and each inhalation triggered another wave of nausea. But he crawled toward the phone, a little at a time, trying not to notice the sticky trail of blood he was leaving behind him.
Halfway there, he passed the dead man’s outflung hand, brushed against it. Normally the touch of a corpse would have been unpleasant to him, but now he barely noticed it. He’d be joining Donovan soon enough.
He thought about Missy as he went, and about Harry, and about the police. He’d never called the police in his life, not once, not for anything. Where Jonas grew up, you didn’t talk to the police if you could help it, and the feeling was mutual. But he was tempted now. He’d seen the look in Missy’s face when she’d pulled the trigger, and he knew she was bad medicine, the sort of person you can’t just leave walking the streets. Harry Siegel, Mike Donovan — they were bad men, like Jonas himself was a bad man, but they were professionals, they did what their business called for, no more. Missy Siegel was a different breed. He shivered thinking about her.
So: Call the police. Tell them what happened. Let them pick her up.
Or: Call Harry. That was the other choice. He’d had a job to do and by god he’d done it. He’d found her and he’d killed the son of a bitch who’d been laying her, nailed the bastard right in his greasy, goyische schvantz. Harry would like that. Harry would want to know.
But when Jonas finally reached the phone — miraculously upright, miraculously still connected to the wall, miraculously still yielding an operator’s voice when he tipped the handset out of its cradle and collapsed beside it, the mouthpiece by his lips — he had energy enough only for a single call and he knew it. And he didn’t use it up calling Harry.
He didn’t use it up calling the police either.
When the door opened and Missy walked through it, she was wearing a knit dress and a cream blouse with a jacket over it. She was almost as conservatively dressed as her brother. He rushed over to her, took her face between his gloved palms, peered anxiously into her eyes. “Missy, where were you? You know how worried I’ve been?” He snapped his fing
ers at the men posted on either side of his office door. “Get out of here. Go on.”
They left, and Harry led his sister to one of the room’s overstuffed armchairs. “What happened?”
She had a handkerchief clutched in one fist and artfully smeared mascara, and between realistic-sounding sobs she told him the whole sad story: How after plying her with gin in an after-hours club Mike Donovan had lured her to his room, how she’d resisted, how Jonas had shown up looking for her just in time, and how the two men had — and here she gave a little shudder — shot and killed each other. She was capable of delivering a good performance when she had to be, and she knew she had to be very good now.
“He didn’t — Donovan didn’t — you didn’t — ”
She forced herself to stifle the smile that wanted to rise to her lips. She shook her head timorously like a little mouse, a little virgin mouse.
Harry Siegel let out an enormous sigh of relief. “Those goddamn micks. This is the last time. They’ve got to be taught a lesson. They can’t kill one of my men and get away with it. They can’t touch you and get away with it.” He pressed a buzzer on his desk. When the door swung open he said to the bruiser standing behind it, “Get everyone together. Now. We’re having a war council.” He turned back to Missy. “This discussion isn’t over. We’re going to talk some more, me and you. You could’ve been hurt, or killed, or…” He obviously didn’t even want to say what the third possibility was, and she almost threw it in his face: He could’ve screwed me! He could’ve ridden me hard in a fold-down bed on the roof of the Dover Building, and he could’ve done it all night long! But she didn’t say any of this, just nodded meekly and stepped outside. Let him have his war council. Let him spill some Irish blood to pay for his sister’s almost-ravished innocence. It would do him some good — make the Irish take him a bit more seriously. Make them hate him that much worse, too, but… she could keep them from getting too close. She’d done it before. Her way.
Missy passed through her brother’s outer office, then through the main entryway with their father’s picture hanging in it, looking serious and grim, like the president of a bank that had just had a run on it. The one man left on duty tipped his hat to her as she stepped into the elevator. The operator was a skinny boy maybe a year younger than she was, and she saw him give her the eye. Her stare froze him where he stood and he quickly turned back to the controls, the wolf whistle dying on his lips.
When the cab settled on the first floor, the boy pulled the accordion gate open. But before Missy could step outside, another woman was pushing her way in, a matron of forty or so in an unseasonably heavy coat, her hands joined in front of her inside a matching woolen muff.
“Excuse me!” Missy said. “I’m getting out.”
The woman didn’t move. “Not this time,” she said, and her voice shook as she spoke.
The operator said, “Hey!” and reached for the lever to take the elevator up again, but the woman had already pulled her right hand out of the muff and a pistol with it. It was a .45 just like Jonas’.
“Step away and put your hands up,” the woman said. “This is between me and her.”
The boy complied.
“Hold on,” Missy said, “who are you?”
“He called me,” the woman said, her finger tightening around the trigger. “Do you know what that was like? Listening to my husband die over the telephone?”
Missy’s face paled. “I didn’t do it, Donovan did — ” Missy began, but Hazel’s bullet was already on its way.
CHARLES ARDAI is an Edgar and Shamus Award-winning writer and the founder and editor of the celebrated Hard Case Crime line of pulp-style paperback crime novels, in which capacity he has edited the work of authors such as Stephen King, Mickey Spillane, Donald E. Westlake, Lawrence Block, Max Allan Collins, Ed McBain, and others. He was also the creator of the pioneering Internet service Juno in the 1990s and currently serves as a managing director at the D. E. Shaw group. His novels include Little Girl Lost and Songs of Innocence, both published under the pseudonym “Richard Aleas,” and fifty-To-One, published under his real name.
The Pig Party
BY DOUG ALLYN
I was working hotel security at the Ponchartrain in Detroit, taking a break in the third floor bar, when her face flashed on the overhead TV. Sara Silver, the network correspondent with a career as brilliant as her name. She was interviewing Kathy Bates on a news show. Noticing my stare, the guy next to me followed my gaze up to the tube.
“Beauty and the beast,” he quipped, sipping his scotch.
“Yeah? Which one is which?” I asked. Which earned me a look. Kathy Bates is a great actress but she’s no head-turner. “I went out with her once,” I explained.
“Who? Kathy Bates?”
“No, the media babe, Sara Silver.”
He started to scoff, but a glance my way changed his mind. I’m not gorilla size, but I’m big enough. And life’s scuffed me up some.
“No kidding, you really dated Sara Silver?” he said, doubtfully. “Where did you take her? Las Vegas?”
“Nope, to a frat party. Roughest night of my life.”
“I’ll bet,” he said, pointedly turning back to his scotch. I knew what he was thinking. A smalltime hotel dick dating Sara Silver? Tell me another one.
I didn’t bother. He wouldn’t believe me anyway. But it happened to be the truth. I really did trip the light fantastic with Sara Silver once, on the wildest night of my life. Only it wasn’t a date, exactly.
Because I didn’t ask her out. She asked me.
I wasn’t a detective then. Just an ex dogface, a couple of years out of the Marine Corps, taking a few college courses, trying to decide what to be when I grew up.
Meanwhile, I helped pay my rent by bartending part-time at Shannon’s Irish Pub, a sports saloon just off the Westover College campus in Lansing. A jumpin’ joint, Shannon’s, foosball tables, pool tables and pinball machines. Busy all day long, totally nuts at night.
Preppies would start popping in at noon to knock down a beer between classes, shoot pool or line the bar for the usual intellectual collegiate repartee; Freud and Kant, easy A’s and easy lays.
Occasionally I’d have to eighty-six a kid who overdid but for the most part the college boys were pretty mellow.
Their women were even better. Coeds and townie girls prowled Shannon’s like tigresses around a waterhole, scouting for upwardly mobile mates. But sometimes they’d settle for an affable bartender.
The first time I saw Sara Silver, I figured she was just another Westover babe on the hunt. Sat at the far end of the bar, away from the others, nursing a white wine spritzer. Attractive, but nowhere near the network knockout she is now.
Her blonde hair drawn back in a loose ponytail, held by a silver clip. Finely boned features, slim legs, her figure tomboy taut but unmistakably feminine. Her oversized glasses gave her a studious look. Figured she was waiting for an intense, long-haired type with wild eyes and wilder politics.
Wrong. She was looking for me.
“You’re Tommy Malloy, right? The ex Marine?”
“Guilty,” I said, sliding a napkin under her glass. “Do I know you?”
“Sara Silver,” she said, keeping her voice down, making sure we weren’t overheard. “I’ve been asking around. I understand you tend bar for a lot of fraternity parties.”
“I do my share.”
“Have you ever worked a Delta Omega party?”
“Once. And not recently. Why? Do you want to hire a bartender?”
“Not exactly,” she said, meeting my eyes. “I need a date.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There’s a party at Delta Omega tonight. I need an escort to get in. Can you manage that?”
“Probably, but I’ve got a better idea. Let’s make it dinner and a movie instead.”
“I’m not looking for a boyfriend, Malloy, just somebody to get me into the Delta House party. Tonight. Are you interested or not?”
/>
“Miss, I’d love to take you out. Sometime. But not to a Delta House bash, and definitely not tonight.” It was my turn to glance around to be sure we weren’t overheard. “It’s a pig party,” I whispered.
“I know.”
“Really? Do you have any idea what that means?”
“Of course.”
“I doubt that. Pig party rules say the frat boys have to bring the ugliest chicks they can find. You don’t remotely qualify.”
“Thanks very much. I still want to go.”
“No you don’t, damn it! Listen, it’s a really ugly scene, and I’m not just talking about the girls. It’s loud, lewd, and crude. Everybody drinks too much, the guys are jerks, the girls are desperate — ”
“Sounds like you’ve been there.”
“No way,” I said. “It’s not my trip. But bartenders hear things, and some of them aren’t pretty. A pig party’s a rough, sorry-ass spectacle. It’s definitely not a party you want to crash.”
“I’ll pay you an even hundred bucks to get me in,” she said, digging into her purse, carefully counting five tens out on the bar. “Fifty now, fifty more afterward.”
I made no move to pick up the money. “Why? What’s so important?”
“I write for the Westover Wildcat, the college paper.”
“Sara Silver,” I said, nodding slowly. “I thought your name sounded familiar. You did a story last semester on fake IDs. Burned some local bartenders.”
“I hope you weren’t one of them.”
“Nope, I’m always super careful. But why bother with a story on a pig party? It may be sophomoric but it’s a campus tradition. The Delts hold one every year. Most of the girls who attend know the score and it’s no crime to throw a bash.”
“Isn’t it? There’s a rumor that a girl was gang raped at a pig party. Have you heard anything about that?”
“I’ve picked up the same rumor. As wild as the pig parties get, I suppose it’s possible. Which is one more reason why you shouldn’t go.”
“I’ll be perfectly safe,” she said mildly. “I’ll be with a Marine.”
