The Name of the Game is Death (7 page)

Winick looked up from the paperwork on his desk when

I knocked and entered his office. The room smelled of cigar ash and stale coffee. Winick's high-cheekboned features were just as expressionless as they'd been before. He leaned far back in his chair, folded his arms, and looked me over. "Stanton said you wanted to see me," he said at last.

As though he'd just got the word. "Where's Oily?" I asked.

"In a cell. Where he belongs."

"Why? What for?"

Winick's slitted eyes were unwinking. "Your friend has a bad habit. He coaxes little girls behind buildings and takes their pants down." His harsh voice deepened as his eyes bored into mine.
"Little
girls. Seven, eight, nine. He's done it before, you know. So it wasn't hard to know where to look, even without the kid's description of him, when her mother brought her in."

The roof of my mouth felt dry. "How good—what kind of a description?"

"Oliver Barnes' description." Winick's voice blared at me suddenly. "He served a reformatory term and a prison sentence for the same thing. You're not very choosy of your company.
How
long have you been in town?"

"Six mouths. When what lime did it happen?"

The big shoulders rose and fell in an elaborate shrug. "Five, six
o'clock
yesterday. The kid wasn't sure."

I felt a quick
stir of
excitement. "Five or six o'clock in the evening?"

"Five or six o'clock in the evening," Winick conceded with exaggerated patience.

"Then it couldn't have been Oily!" I said triumphantly.

Winick smiled, "lie confessed."

"Confessed?" I felt staggered. "Look, you said it happened between five and six yesterday?"

He was watching me narrowly. "That's what I said."

"Then it couldn't have been Oily," I repeated. "He brought Mime books over to my room at four in the afternoon and he stayed until I went out to eat at seven. It
couldn't
have been Oily, you hear me?"

Winick stood up behind his desk. "You're mixed up on the days. It happens to you nightworkers. Besides, he confessed."

"The hell I'm mixed up on the days! How could he confess to something he didn't do? You must have—"

"Careful of the territory you're taking in, kid," Winick's hard voice cut me off. "Where do you fit into this? What kind of friend is Barnes to you?"

"Why don't you ask me what kind of friend I am to Barnes? The way I see it, I'm the friend he needs. I want to talk to him."

"Sorry." Winick shook his head. "He's havin' a fit of remorse."

I could feel myself shaking. "Listen, I tell you I'll testify Oily couldn't possibly have—"

"You're goin' off half-cocked, kid." Winick's voice could have cut wood. "Did you hear me say Barnes had confessed? In stinking detail?"

"You made him confess! He was afraid the minute he saw you. Because he did it before doesn't mean he did it this time. You must have forced—"

"Listen to me." Winick's voice was quiet again. "He did it. He
confessed.
Can you get that through your thick skull?"

"There must be somebody else for me to talk to around here besides you," I said desperately. "You're not even listening. Oily
couldn't
have—"

"You're
not listenin' to
me."
Gimlet eyes drilled into mine. "Barnes is a menace to society. He's proved it. He should never have been out on the street. This time I'm tuckin' him away for a good long stretch."

"But he didn't
do
it! Not this time!"

"He did it." Winick's heavy voice was Hat with authority. His eyes appeared almost closed. "Should I ask Barnes if you were with him?"

My hands clenched. "Is that supposed to make me run out of here? I know what I know, by God. I don't care what he did before. This he didn't do, and I'll talk till I get someone to listen."

Winick's voice became slow and draggy, emphasizing each word. "You sound to me like someone fixin' to get his balls caught in the machinery, kid." He leaned down over his desk, resting his weight on his big-knuckled hands. "I know what Barnes is. The people in this town know what he is. When you talk to me, you're talkin' to all of them."

I went out of there in a tearing rage.

I didn't believe Winick, but I found out he was right. Everyone I tried to get to listen to me gave me a blank stare. Nobody would believe it couldn't have been Oily.

Then I found out the hard way that some of them were never
going
to believe it. The next day I lost both my job and my room. Winick had been to see my boss and my landlady. All of a sudden I was on the street with twenty-three dollars between me and the icy gutter.

I stuck around another day, still trying to get someone to listen. I was half out of my mind, crazy-mad at the town and the people in it. And at Winick. Especially at Winick. That night I slept till four A.M. in the railroad station with my head on my bag. Winick's cops found me then and threw me out into the snow. I must have ground a quarter-inch oil my teeth, stumbling around the slippery, frozen streets,
lugging my bag.
I was half numb by the time the first one-arm coffee joint opened.

In the cold gray light of morning I gave up. I walked out to the edge of town and stopped a highway bus and told the driver to take me eleven dollars' worth away from there. I purposely hadn't bought a ticket at the bus station because I figured if Winick wanted to keep a string on me he'd have checked there.

I wound up across the state, a hundred-eighty miles away. I got a job as a stockboy in a chain grocery. Three times a week I bought a northern Ohio newspaper and read every word of it, looking for news of Oily.

It was three months before I found it.

The black headline said Oily had been sentenced to fifteen years.

That day I quit the human race. I never went back to my job. The only legitimate work I've done since has always been with an illegitimate purpose in mind. If that was the way it was, I'd play it as it lay.

I bought a gun in a hockshop. I didn't even have a car. The local paper nipped hard at police heels about the series of gas station holdups by a quick-moving pedestrian who always disappeared into the darkness.

I was surprised at how easy it was. I had only two close calls. Once I was scared off before I'd committed myself, and another time I had to stop an attendant from chasing me by shooting over his head.

I was no high liver, and the money piled up. I had a purpose for it. I bought a secondhand car and learned how to drive it. Ten weeks after Oily started his sentence I drove the hundred-eighty miles back across the state.

Back to Winick.

I rang his doorbell at ten o'clock at night. He opened the door himself. Not that it made any difference; I was all ready to go right into the house after him.

I shot him in the face, four times. He went backward in a kind of shambling trot. "That's for Oily, you bastard," I told him, but I don't think he heard me. I think he was dead before his big shoulders hit the floor.

Winick was the first.

I woke at sundown in the Bracketville motel, humped myself across the street to a combination grocery-restaurant, and loaded up on bacon, eggs, and black coffee. I recrossed the highway and went right back into the sack. I woke the next morning at five-thirty, feeling better physically than I had in weeks.

I had breakfast at the same restaurant and was ready to leave. I climbed into the new Ford, listened appreciatively to the engine sound when I started it up, and tried to back out of my parking place. The car rocked back and forth, but it wouldn't budge. I sat there blankly for a moment before it dawned on me what had happened. All that Texas gumbo I'd driven through had frozen the brakes, including the emergency, when dried.

I went back across the road again. I rousted out a barefoot kid at the restaurant and brought him back to the car. He crawled underneath it and clawed out a couple of pecks of rich-looking mud. He had trouble freeing the emergency, but he finally managed it. I gave the kid two dollars, and he turned cartwheels all the way back to the restaurant.

It was a beautiful morning when I hit the highway. Everything was fresh and clear after the storm. The road was dry and there was no traffic that early in the day. I laid into the accelerator the first straight stretch to see what the engine in the Ford could actually do. I chickened out at 116, and it felt like I had an inch of gas pedal left. The thing was a fireball. It held the road well, too.

I drove on through Uvalde, San Antonio, Seguin, and Luling. I had lunch in Weimar. In the afternoon I plowed on through Houston, Beaumont, and Orange. I spent the night in Lake Charles, Louisiana. The odometer said 469 miles for the day.

I'd pushed it a little because I wanted to make Mobile the following night. I could get guns and other things I needed in Mobile from Manny Sebastian. I had to ditch the artillery I was carrying. One gun traced to two bank guards in Phoenix, the other to a body floating in a rain-swollen ditch. If Manny hadn't lost his contacts, I could get a Florida license and registration from him to match what I was driving.

1 was out on the highway again by six-thirty the next morning. Ten miles east of Lake Charles I turned north on Route I ON at a little place called Iowa. I stayed with the new route for twenty miles to Kinder, then headed east again on 190, the New Orleans bypass.

I sailed through Eunice, Opelousas, Baton Rouge, and Hammond in Louisiana, then crossed into Mississippi at Slidell. A few miles farther on 190 hooked back into 90 again, and I rolled along the Old Spanish Trail through Liny St. Louis, Pass Christian, Gulfport, Biloxi, and Pascagoula. Along that sunlit stretch I was seldom out of sight of white sand and blue Gulf. When I pulled into a motel in Mobile about five o'clock, the odometer said 343 miles.

I washed up, had dinner, and drove downtown to the Golden Peacock, Manny Sebastian's joint. After midnight the place swung like a steeple bell, but at this time of night it was quiet. Manny had a finger in a lot of pies. He hadn't seen me in quite a while, but he recognized me as soon as I walked in. He came over and shook hands. He'd put on weight since I'd last seen him, and his jowls and extra chins transformed the face I remembered as jovially ugly Into something sinister.

"The back room?" he asked with a cocked eyebrow.

I nodded. He walked behind the bar and engaged in small talk with a couple of the half-dozen customers. After live minutes he selected a key from a huge ring on his belt and opened an unmarked door at the end of the bar alongside one marked "Office."

I gave it a couple of minutes before I went to the door and tapped. Manny let me in and closed and barred the door. He had a bottle and glasses already out on a small table—the room's only furnishing except an old-fashioned Iron safe in one corner.

"Long time, man," Manny said expansively. "How's old hit-the-squirrel-in-the-eye-at-a-hundred-yards?" He poured and handed me a drink. "What's your problem?"

"Not the same as yours, I hope. You talk too much, Manny." I took a swallow from my glass. "How are you fixed on Florida registrations?"

He nodded. "What're you driving?"

"A Ford all over mud on your parking lot." I handed him one of my Chet Arnold business cards. "Have your boy match that up and run off a license while he's at it."

Manny went to the door and unbarred it. He called someone over to whom he spoke in a low tone, then closed the door again. "Ready in an hour. Like what else?"

"Hardware. Preferably a Smith & Wesson .38 police special and a Colt .22 Woodsman."

He nodded again. "I'll have to send for the Woodsman but I've got a .38 right here." He was already whirling the dial on the old safe. He produced the Smith & Wesson with a flourish. "Never been fired except by me an' never in anger."

"Okay. What's the damage?"

He squinted up at the ceiling. "Oh, say six hundred. Paperwork comes high these days."

I paid him. Paperwork wasn't the only thing that came high, but I had to have those guns.

"Grab a seat at the bar," Manny said. "It's on the house. It'll give you the office when I get your stuff together. How're things in general?" Shrewd eyes in the larded-over features studied me.

"Quiet, Manny."

He chuckled. "A hundred seventy-odd thousand quiet?"

I forced my face into a smile. "I read about that. A nice touch. It sounded like Toby Coates. Or Jim Griglun."

"Toby's in Joliet," Manny said smoothly. "And Jim lost his nerve after the time in Des Moines."

"Sometimes a man gets it back."

Manny shook his head. "Not if he didn't have too much to begin." He grinned at me companionably. "That Phoenix job had your pawprints all over it. "You ought to miss a shot once in a while."

Out of the mouths of fools.

I made a mental note.

"Sorry to disappoint you," I said lightly. "I've been in hibernation." But I felt a growing sense of irritation. This kind of earache I didn't need.

I le seemed to sense my mood. "Who should know better?" lie said, cryptically enough, then opened the door. "Order up. It's on the house, remember."

I sat at the bar and ordered a highball I didn't want. Through a window at the right I could see the parking lot. A slim redhead with a limp was walking around the Ford. He raised the hood as I watched, then opened the front door, leaned inside, and wrote something down. The engine number, I figured. The redhead went back to the hood and looked inside for two or three minutes before closing it.

I nursed my drink for half an hour, then had another. I was two-thirds of the way down to the bottom of it when Manny slid onto the next stool and laid a package in my lap. "Eddie says that's a real fireball you've got on the lot," he said softly. "I got a wheelman would give his front teeth for it. You want to trade? I'll give you something to boot."

"Not right now, Manny. I'll keep you in mind, though."

I waited until he left and then went out to the car. I unwrapped the package, put the new license and registration in my wallet, and switched loads from the old guns to the new. I tried them for balance, and they felt all right. I'd check them out for sighting accuracy as soon as I had a chance.