“Let’s see the money, Gerry,” Frankie said.
He picked up the Colt and opened the cylinder and dumped the cartridges in his hand. Then he closed the cylinder and dry-snapped the revolver. The cylinder revolved the way it was supposed to.
The noise of the dry snapping upset Gerry Atchison.
“What are you doing?”
“Making sure these things work.”
“You didn’t have to do that. I checked them out.”
Yeah, but you don’t know diddly-shit about guns. You just think you do.
The Colt was to be the primary weapon. He would do both the wife and the partner with the Colt. The cowboy gun was the backup, in case something went wrong. Better safe than sorry, like they say. The Savage was to wound Atchison in the leg. Frankie would have rather shot him with the .38 Special Colt, but Atchison insisted on the smaller .32 ACP Savage.
Atchi
son held out an envelope to Frankie.
“You get this on delivery, you understand?”
Frankie took the envelope and thumbed through the thick stack of bills.
“You leave it in the desk,” Frankie ordered, handing the envelope back to Atchison. “If it’s there when I come back, I do it.”
Frankie next checked the functioning of the .44 Russian cowboy six-shooter, and finally the .32 Savage automatic.
He put them back in the corrugated paper box and folded the mechanic’s rags back over them.
“I sort of wish you’d take those with you,” Atchison said. “What if somebody comes down here and maybe finds them?”
“You see that don’t happen. I’m not going to wander around Center City with three guns.”
Atchison looked like he was going to say something, but changed his mind.
“I’ll show you the door,” he said.
Frankie followed him out of the office and farther down the corridor to the rear of the building. There a shallow flight of stairs rose toward a steel double door.
With Frankie watching carefully, Atchison removed a chain-and-padlock from the steel doors, then opened the left double door far enough to insert the padlock so that there would be room for Frankie’s fingers when he opened the door from the outside.
“Be careful when you do that. You let the door slip, you’ll never get it open.”
“I’m always careful, Gerry,” Frankie said.
Atchison took the corrugated paper box with the pistols from Frankie and put it on the top stair, just below the steel door.
He turned and sighed audibly. Then he smiled and put out his hand to Frankie.
“Jesus!” Frankie said with contempt. “Make sure that envelope is where it’s supposed to be,” he said, then turned and walked purposefully down the narrow corridor toward the stairs.
FIVE
Detective Wallace H. Milham reported for duty in the Homicide Unit in the Roundhouse at midnight as his duty schedule called for. The alternative, he knew, was sitting around his apartment alone with a bottle of bourbon. Or sitting around in a bar somewhere, alone, which he thought would be an even dumber thing to do than getting plastered all by himself in his apartment.
It had been a really lousy day.Wally told himself that he should have expected something lousy to happen—not something as lousy as this, but something—the other shoe to drop, so to speak, because things lately had been going so damned well. For eighteen months, things had really been lousy.
In what he was perfectly willing to admit was about the dumbest thing Wally had ever done in his life, he had gotten involved with his wife Adelaide’s sister, Monica. Monica lived in Jersey, in Ocean City. Her husband was a short fat guy who sold insurance. Adelaide’s and Monica’s mother and dad owned a cottage close to the beach in Wildwood.