Читать книгу Rackets, Inc.: A Johnny Merak Classic Crime Novel - John Glasby - Страница 4

CHAPTER ONE

DEATH AND A LADY

I guess it was to be the kind of arrival in the country that Maxie had always planned. After all, he had been away for seven years, and maybe he thought that if he came straight in on the normal air service from Mexico City to Los Angeles, he’d throw most of the sharks wide of the scent. There were plenty of them still around, even after seven years, but the majority of them would be expecting him to sneak in like the rat he was.

Maybe they didn’t have the kind of connections I had. Maybe they even figured there would be plenty of time once he did arrive because, big as Los Angeles is, there’s no place for even a rat to hide if the Big Boys are after your blood.

In the old days Maxie had been the principal owner of a string of motels scattered throughout the coastal resorts south of Los Angeles, with a share in plenty of other interests, all of them strictly legal and above board. But he had always been one of the kingpins of the Underworld Organisation until he had crossed them up seven years ago and skipped over the border.

Now they were waiting for him, somewhere, ready to take everything they could lay their hands on once they caught up with him. They’d take his money and his women and then give him the once-over, just for laughs.

In the end he wouldn’t be Big Maxie anymore. Just a has-been who’d made two fatal mistakes: double-crossing the Organisation in the first place and then coming back, looking for trouble instead of playing it safe and staying where he was.

A man cannot walk away from the Organisation after spitting right in their faces and hope to stay in one piece for long. Maxie Temple was somewhere on that plane coming in to land, and within minutes he’d be stepping off and walking into trouble. Big trouble.

But maybe he knew all this and had his own plans. Not only for himself but for the Organisation also. The thought made me uneasy.

I slipped my hand into my pocket, closed my fingers around the .38, and tried to make myself look inconspicuous. A gun was easy to get, but its possession was, of course, a felony. But I’d had this particular weapon for seven years. There was little chance of it being traced back to me if anything went wrong.

A little nagging thought was nibbling at the edge of my mind and I forced myself to concentrate on it, to bring it out into the open. There was a man standing by the newsstand, a paper between his hands, hiding his face almost entirely. Once or twice he seemed to be glancing unobtrusively in my direction.

The fourth or fifth time it happened, I turned my head slightly and paid some attention to him. There was nothing out of the ordinary about him at first sight. He was just a type.

You find his class nearly everywhere. Square-framed, a wide-brimmed soft hat pulled well down over his eyes, shading the upper half of his features. A clipped moustache over thin lips that were clamped into a tight, hard line. A special type of man, when looked at more closely. A hoodlum of the lowest breed. And there was no need for me to think twice about the reason for him being there at that particular time and in that particular place. He lowered his paper as he caught me watching him, then sauntered over.

“Waiting for somebody?” He stood square and straight, eyes faintly amused, looking at me, hoping I’d start something, ready for a fight.

I swung round and looked into his narrowed eyes. “Who the hell are you?”

There was no doubt in my mind that he was somebody who knew me and had probably been tipped off as to why I was there myself, but I didn’t recognise him at the moment. There must have been thousands like him in Los Angeles wandering from bar to bar, doing dirty work for the Big Boys, sweeping aside those minor crooks who happened to be in the way of the Organisation.

And it looked as though a few of the big shots were moving in already. Rolling forward with the irresistible quality of some giant steamroller to smash Big Maxie and everything he stood for, utterly and completely. But first they’d have their play with him.

“You’re Johnny Merak, aren’t you?” he said, speaking between his teeth. “My guess is that you’re here to get Maxie Temple, right?”

“What’s that got to do with you?” I asked. I didn’t know the hoodlum, but he sure knew plenty about me, and if there wasn’t to be any hitch in my plans, I’d have to get to know what his particular game was.

“You came down here from uptown less than an hour ago. Your car’s parked a couple or so blocks from here. Seven years ago you were in on the big deals with Maxie before he hit out for Mexico City. Since then you have been up on a three-year stretch in Big Q for something Maxie framed up, just to keep you out of the way. Now you want to get even with him, maybe even try to clear yourself. That’s the way of it, isn’t it?” There was something ugly about his face as he thrust it up to mine.

“Well, I’ll be dammed,” I said softly.

“You will be if you don’t make yourself scarce, bud.” He licked his lips impatiently with a dry hunger. “We don’t want you in on this deal. That clear?”

“Just who is it you’re working for?”

“Could be we’re both working for the same people, only they’ve just decided not to trust you.”

“You’re lying in your teeth, punk,” I muttered thickly. “I work for nobody but Johnny Merak. Tell your bosses that. And I’m not scared off so easily.”

He laughed. An ugly sound. “I was just waiting for you to say that. The guys I’m working for don’t want anything to go wrong. Maybe you’re just a little man, but they seem to think that you might be able to louse up this deal, so I’m here to keep an eye on you. They wouldn’t want you to do anything stupid.”

I guessed what was coming next. Land yourself into something dirty and you’re bound to run into people who’re the same. You can’t expect anything else. We were almost alone now. A couple of guys were standing in the main entrance to the lounge, but they were looking intently the other way. They obviously didn’t want any trouble, I decided.

This fellow would be a dirty fighter, I’d figured, hoping to cripple within seconds, stiffened fingers in the eyes, all his weight behind a swift punch to the belly and no holds barred. All these little thoughts had been running through my brain while we had been talking.

Before he could move, I reached over, wrapped my fingers tightly around his left wrist, pulled his arm so that his head went well down, slipped my other arm swiftly under his downstretched elbow, across the back of his neck, then pressed. Turning him swiftly, my right knee came up and hit him hard in the pit of the stomach. His breath gushed out in a single, agonised bleat and he made funny whistling noises as he tried to suck in air.

There was a gun in his pocket. I could feel it as I swung his body towards me sharply. So they hadn’t been kidding. They were playing for keeps, meaning to get rid of me if I didn’t play ball. Hell, I thought, they must want to get hold of Maxie pretty badly.

Before the hoodlum could recover his bounds, I dropped his hand and hit him twice with my bunched fist. Once to the heart, then on the tip of his square jaw. If it hadn’t been for the urgency, I might not have been quick enough to get rough like that.

One usually thinks twice about roughing up the hirelings of the Big Men, and there were lots of things twisting inside me—Maxie, my last chance to clear myself, the power of the Organisation moving in relentlessly. It was no time for an unknown hoodlum to start getting fresh with Johnny Merak.

Apart from the gasp as I hit him in the belly, he hadn’t made a sound. His face was a dirty grey and there was blood on his lips where his teeth had bitten deeply into them. He was still groggy as I slipped my hand into his pocket and brought out the gun. It was a German automatic. A big weapon for these men. Usually they preferred to carry small, easily hidden weapons.

“You’ll regret this, Merak,” he mumbled, wiping his lips. I shoved him back against the wall. Still no suspicious move from the two characters near the lounge.

“Shut up!” I said. “I’m in no mood for arguing.” I looked at the automatic, then placed it carefully in my pocket. “I’ll keep this,” I said, “just in case you start to get any fresh ideas. Now get moving.”

“Is this your last answer, Merak?”

“Get moving,” I repeated. “And if I ever see you again, I’ll finish the job.”

He opened his mouth to say something more and I hit him again, hard, with my fist. His head snapped back and there was a glint of pure evil in his close-set eyes. Steadying himself, he hung on to the wall for a couple of seconds, shaking his head. Then he rubbed his jaw tenderly.

“I’ll remember that,” he said ominously, and then walked away. I watched him stagger for a couple of paces, turn, and look back at me over his shoulder. Then he straightened himself and walked away, down the steps, and out into the street.

I walked into the lounge with long, quick steps, disregarding the fear that cut through my mind. It was all right acting tough in front of such hoodlums, but there was a fear all the same. You can’t defy the Underworld and hope to get away with it forever. Your only chance is to get things done, the important things, before they finally catch up with you.

My watch showed nine-thirty. In five minutes the plane from Mexico City would be touching down and Big Maxie would have arrived, if everything had gone according to plan. And I had to get to him first, before the sharks got their teeth into him, spilling his gold and his blood.

Dead—and he was no use to me. And in the hands of the Big Boys he was as good as dead. I wondered with a little part of my mind what the hoodlum was doing at that particular moment. Reporting back—or watching me from some dark corner, biding his time, nursing his revenge?

Three men and a woman sat at a round table, all of them with glasses in front of them. They stopped talking as I walked past. One of the men whispered something and the woman turned her head to follow me.

There was something in her dark eyes that intrigued me. A smouldering, fathomless fire that seemed to burn right at the back of them. It was as if a hidden devil had suddenly jumped up from the black depths, licked its lips hungrily, then fallen back again. She had half-swung round and was toying with her glass idly.

Dark eyes, long black hair, curling over bare shoulders, and small, white teeth showing evenly because she was smiling a little with her lips just parted.

She was probably just curious about me. Maybe one of her guys knew me or had heard of me. There were a lot of things that could make a woman curious.

The loudspeaker system suddenly blared, catching my attention, directing it from the woman. She looked away and I could see that she was still smiling.

I shrugged. Women were a dime a dozen in Los Angeles. Shark-eyed girls from the studios of Hollywood, down for laughs, away from the cameras and television networks. They were good for laughs, too, if you had that kind of money, but that was about all.

I went outside and waited for the plane to come in. She was up there, somewhere, circling the airport. The wind was cool and there was a moon, low down, hiding behind strips of tattered cloud. A crowd was already there, jostling, talking loudly, looking at the long rows of lights that marked the runway.

Johnny Merak, I thought fiercely, you’re a chump. Fancy thinking you can step in and cheat the Big Boys out of this deal. There will be some of them around, waiting. Why does a man have to try to make an idiot out of himself? To prove something? Seven long, waiting years—and now this. I found myself thinking suddenly about that woman at the table.

The half-open lips and the searing, naked passion in the dark eyes. A private hell with nothing at the bottom of it. Only devils that had to be kept chained and could never be quietened for long. Demanding and insistent.

But there had been something uncertain about her smile, too; so she wasn’t quite as sure of herself as she would have liked to be. I reached down and felt the .38 resting snugly in my pocket, ready for any emergency.

I stood there, apart, on the edge of the crowd, and looked straight into the night with the brilliant light stretching away into the dipping distance. The plane was coming in gently, touching down with a distant bleat of protesting tyres. A moment later I could see it, then it vanished again into the darkness at the far end of the runway, and the urgent tension in my brain started piling up again.

How does a man get to be like Johnny Merak? For me it had been easy once I’d started on the slide. Everything connected with the racket seems big and exciting when you’re only eighteen and a bit. You do it in the beginning because all the other kids do it; because you want to get one step ahead of them all and stay that way.

The Big Men all have a decent, respectable front. They own large slices of real estate, chains of motels in the best quarters of town. Solid, dependable citizens. But at the back of it all, behind the pasteboard and the lies and the campaigning, you find the large and profitable rackets.

All the time there was trouble. Rival syndicates, people with bright ideas. That was why these men at the top needed others who could be trusted to carry out orders, to do the dirty work, and ask no questions. In the beginning I liked it fine. There were plenty of trips to the coast, the best hotels, and the bills were always paid by somebody you never saw.

The tough thing, though, is when it really hits you between the eyes and you see what a mess you’ve let yourself into. But then it’s too late. Maxie had been the last of the big names as far as Johnny Merak was concerned. Anything rotten enough, anything the other boys wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole, and I’d be the guy to fix it.

And in the end I had fixed myself so good that I still couldn’t get out of the mess. Hence the gun and the meeting I intended to have with Maxie Temple. There were some pretty important papers he still had in his possession with Johnny Merak’s name scrawled legibly across the bottom. If they got into the wrong hands, I’d go up the river for a far longer stretch than three years. And Maxie knew it.

Everybody knew it.

I watched the plane come in, propellers just ticking over.

A couple of overalled guys ran out the wheeled stairs and push them up against the door. I waited for it to open. The minute Maxie stepped off that plane and through the Customs, I wanted him. I wanted him bad.

The first passenger alighted, followed by three others. The fifth was Big Maxie. Seven years had changed him very little. Expensive clothes, a thick cigar, broad fleshy features, blue-eyed and smiling as though he hadn’t a care in the world. Outwardly, he looked a regular guy. When you got to know him, you realised the evil that lay at the back of that genial mask.

A cold-blooded killer. It was like mistaking a man-eating tiger for a Persian cat. He walked forward slowly, eyes flicking from side to side looking for trouble, ready to meet it when it came. He seemed wary. And he had every reason to. For all he knew, his little game had come unstuck and half the crooks in Los Angeles were waiting for him behind the barrier to square accounts.

Maybe he thought he was still one of the top guns. His coming here like this must have meant that all hell was breaking loose south of the border. Ten yards away I saw him look up and stared directly at me. The look in his small eyes was one of surprise rather than fear. Then he looked away again and it was done deliberately. He knew me at first sight, but he was making it clear that he had dismissed me as unimportant. He was Maxie Temple, Big Shot.

But as far as I was concerned, in dismissing me he was making one of the biggest mistakes of his life.

I felt my fingers bite into the palm of my left hand. Maxie walked slowly with a small crowd of passengers, his face hard. He was puzzled. My being there was something he hadn’t expected. It was something he was trying to figure out.

I suppose you know what you’re doing, Johnny, I thought quickly. Because if you don’t, this could be the end of the line for you.

Five minutes later Maxie came out of the Customs, walking hurriedly in a crush of people. Obviously, he’d been clever and arrived with a clean bill of health.

I saw him watching me furtively, like a rat in a corner. Perhaps he’d had second thoughts about me during those five minutes. It did something to me inside to see that first, faint touch of cringing fear. He would probably never understand how much I hated his guts.

Quite suddenly, without warning, his gaze flicked over my shoulder to something behind me and I knew then that trouble was going to break. It came sooner than I had expected. I half-turned my head, but by that time it was too late. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the black circular hole that appeared like a shadow between Maxie’s eyes, the vacant look on his fleshy face as he sagged slowly, awkwardly, at the knees and hit the ground.

Whoever had shot him had used a silencer. A blind man could figure that, but by the time I had recovered from my surprise there was a crowd running forward, jostling each other, and it would have been like looking for the needle in the proverbial haystack to pick out his murderer.

Somewhere a woman began to scream in a high-pitched, hysterical voice.

I had known what I was risking when I had come to the airport. My record was known to the cops of perhaps a dozen states, also my sworn determination to fix Maxie Temple. Somehow, desperately, I had hoped to get to him in time to figure out a way of clearing myself. Now, he was dead, less than five yards from where I was standing like some dumb fool, and at any moment there would be a dozen cops milling around the joint and Johnny Merak would be picked up on suspicion.

I thought about that .38 in my pocket and decided I had better get out of the vicinity while I still had the chance. Awkward questions might be asked, and another thought occurred to me as I started to push my way through the crowd.

There were a lot of people who might want Maxie Temple out of the way permanently. There were also plenty who wanted Johnny Merak silenced for good, too. And maybe some clever guy had hit on the bright idea of doing both with the one shot.

The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed. Ten to one that shot which killed Maxie Temple had come from a .38 similar to that in my pocket. And on top of that, another ten to one shot that somebody was, at that very moment, phoning for the cops, telling them that I had been spotted in the vicinity and I began to see what kind of a trap I’d let myself in for.

To Johnny Merak, the big thing now was to get as far away from the airport in as little time as possible. I ran down the steps outside three at a time. No sign of the square-shouldered hoodlum who had tried to be funny earlier. Maybe he was still around somewhere, reporting back on my movements, just in case I managed to slip through the police net.

Two blocks and I was nearly there. A siren was wailing dismally like a lost soul somewhere in the street ahead, coming nearer. A moment later three cars came cutting through the late-night traffic. Cars and trucks pulled out of the way, gliding into the kerb as they heard the wail of the sirens.

They went on past and I was beginning to feel better, more easy in my mind. For the time being I’d slipped the net and was still on the loose. Maxie was dead and there was nothing I could do to bring him back again.

I cursed the unknown assailant who had beaten me to him. That bullet which had cut into Maxie’s brain and ended his life had ended my hopes of getting back those all-important papers that would have cleared me.

I turned the corner of the third block. My car was still there parked against the kerb, ready for a quick get-away. Eyes alert, I began to accelerate my stride. Once I was well away, there would be plenty of time to think things out, to plan the next move, pick up old threads, and see if any of them tied together to give me a new lead. If they didn’t, I was right back where I had started, four years before.

I was still twenty or thirty yards from the car when I spotted them. Two or three dark shapes huddled in one of the doorways. That made me stop. They hadn’t seen me yet, but they were waiting for me. They knew it was my car and I’d need it to get back into town.

I backed against the wall, stood there and waited. Maybe I could fight these three hoodlums waiting for me, but even if I did, the Organisation was so big that a dozen others could pop up out of the walls and hustle me off, and nobody would be any the wiser.

I thought of going back, hailing a cab. Uncertainly, I stepped away from the shadows. A long, sleek car pulled up suddenly against the side of the kerb, opposite to me. The door opened.

I swung round, my hand in my pocket. Then I stopped.

She was sitting there, behind the wheel, alone.

“Quickly! Get inside!” she said. Her voice was soft and husky, as I’d known it would be.

And that little devil was there again, leaping at the back of her coal-black eyes.