The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction

“You can turn now, not fast,” he said through his nose. He added reprovingly: “You never were mouthy, Dink. How come?”

Slabbe pivoted, but slowly. Ike Veech’s dapper shoulders were against the door. The .32 in his gray-gloved hand was carelessly assured, his shiny patent leather slippers were flat on the floor. His dark liquid eyes roved only as much as necessary between Slabbe and Dink on the bed.

Slabbe defended himself to Dink. “He wasn’t on me when I came in.”

“Why, no,” Ike Veech, agreed sympathetically. “A guy built like you ain’t hard to trail, though.”

“Lissen, Ike,” Dink said fast. “I don’t talk unless Fudge says so, see? And he knows I know, and you don’t walk in on him, brother. He takes care of his guys, too. You better take it easy with me.”

“What’s the color, Dink?” Veech chuckled.

“White! Go to hell! I’m just telling you. Give it to me and see. Fudge’ll have Slip and Tommy and Pointer run you down even in South America.”

“Shuddup!”

“Sure!”

“Why didn’t you shuddup right along? A rat’s a rat.”

“—you!” Dink said. “Fudge liked Jake George. I don’t know why. Maybe Jake sent him a box of candy once. He told me to tell Slobby here what I seen, so I tell him. I didn’t tell him about the guy with you ’cause I didn’t make him. Like I was just saying, I start after him when he pulls out after helping you dump Jake in your car. Only my jalopy is parked away from the cabin so’s you wouldn’t hear me start up, and while I’m running for it, your partner gets a start. I try for about five miles but don’t catch him, then I come back to the cabin to see what you’re gonna do with Jake’s body, only by then you’re gone too. That’s a lot I know, isn’t it? And would I tell it in court? You don’t have to touch me—”

“Shuddup!” Ike Veech stirred the air with his gun barrel, in Slabbe’s direction. “He goes. That’s for sure.”

Dink let his pillow have him again. His teeth chattered just a little, stopped. He might have been a bit tireder than normally, but the difference was too slight for Slabbe to judge. He knew Dink had talked his way out of it, though. Dink knew, too.

He said wearily to Ike Veech: “Not here. Not now. Take him out.”

Veech frowned, cocked his pearl-gray fedora back on crisp black curls with a casual twist of the gun barrel. “It has to be here,” he decided. “I wouldn’t fool with him in an elevator or like that.”

“Not with me here!” Dink squeaked. “The johns would put me through the wringer. I’m not taking that.”

Veech’s voice snarled: “Get out, then!”

“I’m not dressed.”

“Get dressed!”

“Yeah. OK. Watch him now.”

Dink flung his blankets aside, came to sitting position, swiveled to get his feet over the edge of the bed. And while he did this, his scrawny wrist disappeared under his pillow and he brought it around, pillow and all, and shot three times like that.

Two of his slugs missed Ike Veech completely. One of them, the second probably, took Veech in the midsection.

Slabbe was on the floor.

Veech cursed loud and bitterly. He emptied his gun at Dink.

He was curdling at the knees, though. Slabbe didn’t know it and got his hand on his .38 and turned it up, butt braced on the floor. He shot twice, held the third because he saw, by then, that Veech’s gun was pointing at nothing but the ceiling. Presently Veech’s head and open eyes were, too.

Dink still had the pillow in his lap, only now he was trying to hold something together with it. It was smouldering, and little curls of acrid smoke twisted into his face. They were not dispelled by any breathing for an interval.

Slabbe got to a knee, stood, reached to slap the pillow out.

Dink wouldn’t – or couldn’t – let it go. His voice had never been tireder. “It wasn’t Fudge that liked Jake George,” he said. “It was me. Jake helped me get a divorce and put my kid in a good school, years ago. That’s why I sang. If I’d-uh had guts, I’duh gone into that cabin. Honest, I didn’t think they were gonna g-give it to him, though.”

Slabbe stopped trying to pull the pillow away. There was no flame in it and Dink didn’t seem to mind.

Slabbe said: “You didn’t make the guy Ike was working with?”

“Honest, no. The car, though, I know it good. A twelve- cylinder Caddy. That bigshot’s, John Nola. You can take it from there, huh?”

Dink bent in the middle over the pillow.

Carlin’s dark eyes smouldered on the burnt pillow which a medical examiner had pried away from Dink Quint’s middle. He said: “Damned if it wouldn’t have been another corpse burned behind you, at that.” His cigar jutted suspiciously Slabbe’s way. “Did you smell this coming?”

“I read it in Dink’s palm, yeah,” Slabbe said. “Don’t be that way. I told you just how it happened.”

“Don’t you always – afterwards?”

“Let’s eat, Pat.”

“You stay right where you are!”