He fell to the floor, and the fat wiggled for a second before it was still.
I looked down at him just long enough to see the red puddle forming under his head. Then I turned away.
‘Come on out,’ I said.
There was a soft whimper in the bedroom, but no movement.
‘Come on, come on.’
I heard bare feet padding on the rug, and then she was standing in the doorway. She’d thrown a robe around her, and she’d done it pretty quickly because she was still fastening the belt at the waist. The robe belonged to Gallagher, apparently, and it didn’t help much to cover her. The initials RG were over the pocket, but the pocket was nowhere near where it should have been. It hung far to the right of her rounded shoulders.
She had hair like a bed of charcoal, and it hung over one eye. Her lips had a fresh-kissed look, the way they can look only when the lipstick has been bruised into the flesh. Her eyes might have been smouldering a few minutes ago, but they were scared now. Her lips opened a little, and her eyes dropped quickly to the .45, and then over to Gallagher. She took a deep breath, and then stepped back a pace.
She didn’t say anything. She just looked at me with that frightened-animal look in her eyes, wide and brown, and she kept backing away, moving towards the bed. She almost tripped on a pile of silk stockings and underwear on the floor. She looked down quickly, caught her balance, and then started to pull the robe closed over her breasts.
She hesitated for a moment, swallowed hard, and then caught her hand in mid-motion.
‘A fat slob like Gallagher,’ I said. I shook my head. ‘I can’t get over it.’
She was staring at me. ‘You’re... you’re just a kid,’ she said.
‘Shut up!!
‘Look, I... I don’t know Gallagher from a hole in the wall. I was just here, you understand? I got a call, that’s all, and I came. It’s a job, like you told Gallagher. A... a business.’
‘Sure,’ I said. I grinned and took a step closer to her. ‘You scared, baby?’
‘N-n-no.’
‘You should be. You should be damned scared.’
‘Kid, please. I’ll do whatever you say. Anything. Anything at all, kid. Only...’
‘Only what?’
‘Only... Anything you say.’
‘You want to get out of this alive?’ I asked. ‘Is that it?’
She smiled and took a step closer to me, confident of herself now, confident of her body and what it would get her.
The smile was still on her face when I fired. I made it clean and quick. A fast one that caught her right over the bridge of her nose. She was dead before she hit the rug. Quickly, silently, I left the apartment.
Betty didn’t understand. Nothing I said mattered. She sat with the open paper in front of her and a coffee cup in her right hand. The steam from the coffee rose up and swirled around her nose. She didn’t understand, and she didn’t like it. Her mouth told me that.
‘You look lousy when you’ve got a puss on,’ I told her.
‘Then I’m going to look lousy for a long time,’ she said. She was blonde, almost nineteen, with her hair cropped close to the oval of her face. She had green eyes that were blazing at me now, and tiny white teeth that were exposed when she pulled back her lips in a snarl. Her folks had split up when she was seventeen, and she’d taken a job downtown, and she rented her own pad. She was my girl, you know, and she was a real pretty piece, except when she was angry like now.
‘Look, baby-‘ I said.
‘Don’t “baby” me, Manny. Just don’t.’
‘Well, what the hell
‘You know what I want,’ she snapped.
‘I don’t know, and I’m not going to guess.’
Her face got soft, the way I liked to see it, and her voice softened to match it.
‘When’s it going to end, Manny?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
The anger flared in her again. ‘You know damn well what I’m talking about!’
‘All right, I know, and it’s never going to end. All right?’
‘Who are you going to kill next?’
‘Nobody,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to ever kill anybody. I ain’t killed anybody so far. Just you remember that.’
She slapped the newspaper with the back of her hand. This Gallagher, and the girl-‘
‘I don’t know anything about this Gallagher. And I don’t know anything about his damned whore.’
Betty looked at me across the table, and she shook her head slowly. ‘You’re a fool, Manny. You really are a fool.’
I got up, shoving my chair back so hard that it fell over. ‘I don’t have to take this kind of crap. I’ll be damned if I have to take it.’
‘Where are you going?’ she asked.
‘None of your damn business!’
‘To your friends? To your big Mr Williams?’