Read Gold Comes in Bricks for Free Online Page B

the knob slowly turned. Someone was trying to open that connecting door. He tried it once, then quit.
    I walked out into the corridor, closed and locked my door behind me, slipped the key in my pocket, went around to four-nineteen, and knocked.
    I heard a chair move, then steps on the floor, and a man’s voice said, “Who is it?”
    “Lam,” I said.
    “I don’t get you.”
    “Message from the chief.”
    He opened the door and looked at me.
    He was big, and had the lumbering good nature of a man who’s big enough and strong enough to know no one is going to push him around. The eyebrows were a little too heavy and came together across his nose. His eyes were such a deep reddish brown they were almost black, and I had to hold my neck back against my collar to look up at him.
    “Who the hell are you?” he asked.
    “I’ll tell you that when I come in.”
    He held the door open. I walked in. He closed the door behind me and twisted the bolt. He said, “Sit down,” and walked over to the same chair in which he’d been sitting while Alta had called on him, put his feet up on another chair, lit a cigarette, and said, “What’d you say your name was?”
    “Donald Lam.”
    “You’re Greek to me.”
    I said, “No, you’ve never seen me before.”
    “You aren’t telling me anything. I never forget a face. You said you had a message?”
    “Yes.”
    “From the chief?”
    “Yes.”
    “Who do you mean, the chief?”
    I said, “The chief of police.”
    He was lighting a cigarette when I said that, and the match didn’t so much as waver. He didn’t look over at me until after he’d taken a deep drag at the cigarette, then his reddish-black eyes turned my way.
    “Spill it.”
    I said, “This message concerns your personal health.”
    “My health is good. It’s going to stay good. What the hell’s the message?”
    I said, “Don’t cash that check.”
    “What check?”
    “The one you just got.”
    He took his feet down from the chair. “You’ve got a hell of a crust,” he said.
    I said, “Brother, you’ve cashed twenty thousand bucks in checks through the Atlee Amusement Corporation. That’s just twenty grand too much. You’ve got another check in I hat right-hand coat pocket. As soon as you give it to me, I’ll get out of here.”
    He looked at me as though I’d been a funny tropical fish swimming around in an aquarium.
    “Now,” he said, “you interest me. Who the hell are you?”
    I said, “I’ve told you who I was and what I wanted. Now, what are you going to do about it?”
    “In about ten seconds,” he said, “I’m going to throw you out of this room so hard you’ll bounce.”
    He got to his feet, walked across to the door, unbolted it, opened it, jerked with his thumb, and said, “Out.”
    I got up and picked my place, a place where I could make a nice pivot, throw his right arm over my shoulder, hear down as I twisted, and send him hurtling over my head.
    He walked over to me, very casually.
    I waited for him to move that right arm.
    It didn’t come up the way I’d been practicing with Hashita. It came around from the side. It caught me by the coat collar. His other hand caught me around the hip pockets. I tried to brace myself, and might as well have tried to push a freight train off the track. I went out of that room so fast I could hear the doorjamb whiz as it went by. I threw up my hands to break the force of the impact against the wall on the opposite side of the corridor. I grabbed the edge of the glass mail chute beside the elevator. He tore my grip loose, pivoted, and sent me down the hall at the same time he brought up his left foot.
    I know now just how a football feels when a player kicks a field goal.
    What with the momentum of the bum’s rush and the force of the kick, I went sailing down the hall for twenty feet before I came down flat on the floor.
    I heard him go back, close and lock the door. I limped on down the corridor and around a bend, looking for the