Read Hard Case Crime: Baby Moll for Free Online Page A

death. “Ibeen around too long, Pete,” he said. “I’ve slowed down. I’ve known too many other guys, quicker and smarter than me, who couldn’t find any place to hide once the finger was on them. Oh, he’ll get me, all right. He’ll get me.” His fingers touched the butt of the automatic, lifted convulsively. “Unless you—”
    “How many people in the house knew which road you’d take tonight?” I asked him.
    His shoulders lifted. “It was no secret around here that I was going to Orange Bay.”
    “Who’s living here besides Macy?” I thought of Diane, the girl I hadn’t been able to see quite well enough. “He got a woman around?”
    “Macy? No. He don’t care nothin’ about women any more. Once in a while I guess he can use one. Like me. I got to rub up against one all night before I—”
    “There’s a girl I met on the beach a few minutes ago. She was swimming.”
    “Diane.”
    “That’s her name.”
    “She takes care of the kid. Aimee.”
    “Who is this Aimee?”
    Rudy scratched fingers through his hair. “Macy’s pet. A little nine-year-old girl. She’s Cuban, I think.”
    “How’d he come by that?”
    “You remember Chilly Rosales?”
    “Yeah.”
    “One of Chilly’s cousins was a Spanish Town whore. This Aimee was her kid. The whore’s husband may or may not have been her father. He wasn’t home much. One night when he was home he took a butcher knife and cut up the whore. Aimee was watching. Then he wentafter the kid and chased her down three flights of stairs. He got close enough once to take a swipe at her and opened one of her arms from the elbow down. So there they were, both of them bloody as Jesus and the girl screaming and running out into the street. A cop heard the screaming and shot the guy dead. Since the whore was his cousin, Chilly took care of the girl for a while, until he creamed himself and his Cadillac in an accident one night.”
    “Then Macy took her in,” I said, grinning crookedly.
    “Well,” Rudy replied, “he said she needed to have somebody. She was wild as hell when he latched onto her. Diane toned her down. Took a long time.”
    “I’ll be damned,” I said, shaking my head in astonishment.
    “Yeah.”
    “Who else is around, then?”
    “Well, Diane and Aimee. Macy’s brother Owen, too. He’s supposed to be manager of the hotel but he don’t do nothin’ but booze and paint those pictures of his. Charley Rinke’s here, too, with his wife.”
    It was a new name. “He’s sort of like you used to be,” Rudy explained, “except he ain’t big enough or mean enough to handle the contact work. Rides the books, mostly. There’s something about him I don’t like much. He struts, you know, like he was real dangerous, especially around people who don’t know no better, but any trouble and he’s the first to find some place where it’s safe to watch. I don’t think even his wife likes him. She’s been laid by some of the boys in town, especially Reavis. He does most of the heavy work these days, like collecting.”
    I felt the first quieting nudge of sleep, and stirred soremuscles in getting up. “I think I’ll turn in. See you in the morning, Rudy.”
    He went to the door with me. “How did you ever happen to go to work for Macy, Pete?” he asked suddenly.
    I considered that for a while. “I guess Aimee wasn’t the first lost kid Macy ever took in,” I said, and walked outside.
    Going up the hill, I thought about the way it had been; coming home from the war with each nerve bare from the endless nights of patrol and attack and retreat to find Jean, the wild beauty I had married at the end of college, slowly becoming a hopeless paretic. And nothing, nothing could stop the pitting of the brain that gradually turned her into a strange creature, with a halting walk and thick speech and weird hallucinations. I lasted long enough to see that she would be taken care of in the best institution I could afford. Then I cracked up. There