Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye by Horace McCoy Read Free Book Online Page B

that…’
    He sat down in the chair, picking up his club foot and holding it as he would a baby. There was still a lot of pain in his face. I nodded to Jinx, and we went out into the garage and got in the Zephyr.
    ‘Jesus. Ralph,’ Jinx said, as we drove out. ‘You shouldn’t a done that. He’s lame.…’
    ‘So much more reason why he ought to be careful what he says to me,’ I said.
    We turned into the street, into the traffic.
    ‘Yeah. But he’s helping us a lot.…’
    ‘If he didn’t help us, somebody else would. All you need is dough. Christ look at Karpis and Dillinger and Pierpont and those guys. Dump all their brains together and you haven’t got enough intelligence to get past the fourth grade. How the hell do you think they manage to get by? Dough, that’s how. They want a guy like Mason, they buy him. They want a cop or a sheriff, they buy him. The answer is dough.…’
    We were rolling down the street, in the traffic.
    ‘No sense in throwing money away,’ he said. ‘You had a thirty-eight. Why buy another one?’
    ‘I don’t like a revolver. I told you that. I don’t like any revolver. That’s why I asked for automatics. Where’d he get these? These are brand new.…’
    ‘Oh, he can get anything in that line you want. Pistols, rifles, machine-guns, tear gas masks…’
    ‘How? That stuffs dynamite to handle.’
    ‘Not the way he works it. His brother-in-law’s chief of police out at the steel mills. They got rooms of the stuff at the steel mills. All the big plants around here’ve got that stuff.’
    ‘Makes it nice.’ I said.
    ‘Especially for the little guy,’ Jinx said. He turned into the parking space behind the A-One Market. ‘Where?’ he asked.
    ‘Anywhere,’ I said. The clock on the dashboard of the Zephyr said five minutes after nine. ‘You set that clock?’ I asked.
    ‘Right on the nose at eight-thirty,’ he said, easing the sedan into a parking place. There were a few cars on either side of us. ‘He ought to be along any minute now if your figuring’s right.’
    ‘Unless the bottle-washing machine busted again,’ I said.
    ‘What?’
    ‘It’s a private joke,’ I said. ‘You get the tape?’
    ‘Yeah.’ He took two rolls of tape out of his pocket, showing them to me. They were white adhesive tape, two inches wide, the kind you can buy at any drug store. ‘What about the pads?’
    ‘I got it. And the masks, too.’ I unbuttoned my coat, holding it open so he could see the masks pinned to my shirt. They were comic masks, the kind children wear on Hallowe’en Night. I unpinned one, handing it to him. It had dabs of black paint on the cheeks and under the nose was a handlebar moustache. The other one, mine, was a replica of a young girl’s face; crimson cheeks and exaggerated eyelashes and an oversized mouth. He took his, not saying anything, putting it inside his coat
    ‘Holiday got ’em at the five-and-dime,’ I told him.
    ‘She got a lot of ’em. Hell of a gag, don’t you think?’
    ‘I’ll say…’
    ‘I’ll have these cops crazy before I get through with ’em. A few nice jobs and west we go.’
    He nudged me and I looked out. The milk truck was rolling up to the concrete railing in the rear of the market, by the unloading platform.
    ‘That him?’ Jinx asked.
    ‘That’s him’
    Jinx leaned forward, looking past me at the milkman. It was Joe, all right. He had got out of the truck now and was filling the wooden box with bottles of milk.
    ‘You think you can handle him all by yourself?’ Jinx asked.
    ‘I think so,’ I replied.
    A young boy wearing the greyish apron of a market helper came out the back door carrying a big wicker basket and walked to the truck.
    ‘Hi, Joe …’ he said.
    ‘Hi, squirt…’ Joe said.
    The squirt climbed into the truck and began to fill the wicker basket with packages of butter and cheese and cartons of eggs, talking to Joe about an ice hockey team or something. I could not hear all of what was being