The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries

The butcher’s hand went up. So did the salesman’s and the tailor’s. After a moment, when there was no other show of hands, the tailor indecisively lowered his. The salesman held out a minute longer. He shrugged, dropped his hand. “With a start like this, we’ll never get a guilty verdict, and I got competition selling my customers every hour I’m in here.”

The butcher stood alone, and Eddie relaxed in his chair knowing he had it made.

Shortly after nightfall, Eddie parked the Toyota in the shadows of the elm trees that lined the driveway of the Wood suburban estate. He got out and walked the few remaining yards to the imposing, white-columned colonial home.

Baxter Wood was waiting for him, standing as a shadow beside a wrought-iron veranda table.

“I guess we made it, Mr. Wood.” Eddie felt that he was one big goosepimple of anticipation and excitement. He could hardly keep his voice from breaking into a delirious falsetto. “Had some trouble with one fellow, a butcher, but I carried the ball without a stumble.”

“So you did, and I’m grateful.” A note of real feeling was in Wood’s voice. He thrust out a manila envelope. “Count it, if you like. It’s all there. Twenty-five thousand in hundred and fifty dollar bills.”

Eddie took the money with the feeling that he was swooning. Wood threw a meaty arm about his shoulders and walked Eddie to the edge of the veranda.

“Don’t’ ever feel that we did anything wrong, young fellow. Remember that you gave my son — and me — a fresh chance. I’ve bought into some mining interests in Mexico, and I’ve had it out with Richie. He’s going down there and make a man of himself, work in the earth, learn to sweat a little and eat plain, gut-sticking grub. Appreciate a cot in a mining camp when he flops after a day’s honest labor.”

Wood dropped his hand and looked out into the darkness. “Yes, young fellow, it should make a man of my son, this final chance for him to be a man.”

“I’m glad to have had a part in it, Mr. Wood,” Eddie said, anxious only to be away, paying off that bloodsucking loan shark Fleschetti, then blasting off to Joella.

“Good night, m’boy.”

“So long, Mr. Wood.”

Eddie nudged the speed laws as he drove back to his apartment. He left the Toyota in the no-parking strip in front of the scabby brick building. He would be inside just long enough for a change of shirts and a phone call to Joella.

He took the steps to the second floor two at a time, keyed open his door, clicked on the bed-sitting room light. Whistling merrily, he rummaged through the chest of drawers, finding a pink broadcloth in its laundry plastic.

He turned, heading toward the bath with the fresh shirt in his hands. Halfway across the room, he caught a movement out of the side of his vision. He stopped suddenly, with knees almost buckling.

Richie Wood was standing in the dark kitchenette doorway, as big, tough, and twice as mean looking as his father.

Heart pounding at the sudden sight of the intruder, Eddie clutched the back of a chair and swallowed the dryness in his throat. “Why... what...” he stammered. “How’d you get in here?”

“Simple,” Richie said, taking a couple of grizzly bear steps into the bed-sitting room. “Good old dad told me about our juror to spare me strain during the trial. I looked you up in the phone book, climbed the fire escape, and broke the kitchen window. Then I waited, figuring you wouldn’t be long in dashing in after the payoff.”

Eddie backed a step, feeling an acid sweat eat suddenly across his face.

“Wh-what do you want?” he asked thickly, guessing already from Richie’s presence, Richie’s eyes, Richie’s deadly determined manner what Richie wanted.

“The last thing I want is that deal the old fool has hatched for me in Mexico,” Richie said. “Man, I’d blow my mind down there with those peons and time clocks and holes in the ground.”

Eddie hugged the manila envelope stuffed under his belt. “No! You can’t have it! It’s my money!”

“Yeah?” Richie said, inexorably closing in. “Who you squawking to? The fuzz? Man, how you going to report a theft you don’t dare explain?”

Richie snapped his fingers. “Hand it over, punk. Have a heart. The old man has cut off my allowance, bought that one way ticket to Mexico, told the foreman down there to treat me just like the hired help. So make like a love-child, man. Return the Wood lettuce, to me. By the time I get through jetting off and having a twenty-five thousand dollar ball the old man will wish he’d never heard of mines in Mexico.”

Richie’s hand was reaching. Eddie lunged back. Richie lunged forward. The bleat from Eddie’s lips was cut in half by the impact of Richie’s fist.

Eddie slammed against the wall. Almost beyond feeling, he sensed that Richie had grabbed him by the neck and was banging his head against the dirty plaster. Then Richie, the room, the panic all vanished.

The apartment was filled with a deep-space silence when Eddie began to live again. The process was a torment. The pain in his head squeezed a thin moan through his lips. He was crumpled with his face against the musty-smelling carpet. He felt as if he was being put back together with a welder’s torch. Even more painful was the knowledge that Richie Wood and the twenty-five thousand were long gone.