Ken Kuhlken_Hickey Family Mystery 01 by The Loud Adios Read Free Book Online Page B

Clifford with the big wooden MP coat so a Colt would stick under his belt without showing the bulge.
    The kid eyed Leo warily. The old guy didn’t inspire confidence. He looked slow, dumpy, with a graying walrus mustache and wrinkled eyes. His hat was cocked sideways.
    A horn beeped several times before the others stepped outside and found the Jeep, with Lefty behind the wheel slugging down a beer. “Changed my mind,” he said. “Give me thirty bucks and I’m in.”
    Leo eyed the Jeep. “Hell with this contraption. Let’s take a real car with a roof and everything.”
    “We might need to drive back across the river. If del Monte alerts the cops, they might roadblock the bridge.”
    “Gimme the scoop once more, Pop,” Lefty said.
    “All you gotta do is drive.” Hickey passed a twenty. They piled into the Jeep and Lefty wheeled south. They crossed the bridge, bounding at forty mph into the dark with the browned headlamps barely shining ten feet ahead, and turned onto Revolución. Suddenly the drizzle quit. For a second you could vaguely see a shifting of the clouds, before the rain came in great walloping gobs. They hunkered under their arms, except Lefty who sped up, cussing all the way. To beat the stalled traffic he ran over a curb, raced through a parking lot, an alley, another parking lot, and crashed back off the curb. Sailors, pimps, drug pushers, whores, and street kids all ran for cover from the rain, while Lefty zoomed into the wrong lane, hung a left on Calle Siete, and flew downhill toward the Club de Paris.
    At the base of the hill where he pulled over, the mud reached the hubs of some cars. The four men jumped out and ditched under a balcony of the Ritz hotel. Leo coughed and leaned against the wall. He jabbed Hickey with an elbow and grumbled, “If I die of pneumonia, I’m taking you with me.”
    “Swell, now let’s snatch the girl and get back on land.” Hickey lifted his hat and shook it drier. “Okay—Lefty pulls the Jeep right over there.” He stepped out into the rain and pointed around the corner, over the vacant lot to a point across the road from the rear wall of the Club de Paris. “Just wait there, make sure it’ll start any second. And keep the seats bailed out.”
    “In the rain?” Lefty moaned. “I wanta go inside.”
    “Give the wimp a parasol.” Leo lit a smoke, crumbled the empty pack and sailed it into the Jeep, fifteen feet through the rain.
    “Leopold, you go in the joint and wait till she comes on for the act. She’ll dance a while, then do this routine of letting everybody touch her. I guess she always does that, right, Clifford?”
    The kid snapped around with fierce, red eyes, and studied each of the men. Finally he nodded and Hickey went on, “When she’s, say, three guys from the end of the line, you slip out and get around back fast. There’ll be a door on the west end of the rear wall. It leads to the back room, where the girls dress. We’ll be in cover as close to the door as we can get.” Hickey laid his arm on Clifford’s shoulder. “By then she’ll be in the back room. At least I hope to Christ she will.”
    “What if she ain’t there?” Lefty asked. “Suppose she goes for a drink?”
    “Then we hand it over to you, smart guy.”
    Leo turned and started lumbering toward the club but Hickey caught him. “Keep an eye out for a little tough they call Mofeto, the ‘skunk,’ big hat, thin mustache.” With a nod, Leo trudged on.
    “The old guy oughta drive,” Lefty said. “I’ll go in the bar. They’ll spot him. He don’t look like the kind that goes in there.”
    “Move it.” Hickey gave Lefty a nudge. He led the kid out around the corner to the vacant lot, where their feet sank deep and squished loudly. A few times Clifford got stuck. Broad shouldered, a farmboy’s arms, half Hickey’s age, still he slogged through the mud like somebody decrepit. They might as well hang the kid as send him to war this way, Hickey thought. He’d