April Evil Read Online Free PDF Page B

checking those damn pictures. So I stay the hell in the house.”
    “That nearly cooled me off too. It makes you too heavy. Then I thought what the hell. It’ll just make you more careful.”
    “I’m careful.”
    “You weren’t careful, Harry, when you killed that woman.”
    “I was careful. I was just unlucky. I fired at the floor. The damn bank had a marble floor. It bounced up and clocked her right under the chin. A fat lady.”
    “Real fat?”
    “She was a hell of a big woman. I heard later she didn’t even have any bank business. She just went in to use the john. And she wasn’t the one yelling, the one I fired to shut up.”
    “Is this the place? Say, this is pretty fancy.”
    “It has to be. You stay in a crummy place, some cop looks you over. You stay in a place like this, they don’t bother you.”
    He ran the Buick into the garage. They got out and Harry pulled the overhead door down. They went into the house through the garage, into the kitchen.
    Sally Leon stood at the stove, stirring something in an aluminum pot. She smiled faintly at the two men as they came into the kitchen.
    “Sally, this is the Ace.” They nodded at each other. “Big bastard, isn’t he?”
    The Ace seemed to fill the kitchen. He was well over six feet, tall and he was broad all the way down, with hardly any suggestion of a waist. He was in his early forties. The top of his head was shiny-bald, sun-reddened, surrounded by kinky ginger hair. His brows and nose and lips were thickened by early years in the ring. His jacket was expensive and well cut. His eyes were small and blue and bright. He looked as though he could have been an ex-pro-football linesman turned salesman.
    “Whatever you got there, it smells good,” Ace said.
    “It’s a beef stew like.”
    Harry Mullin made two drinks, gave one to Ace and they carried them into the living room.
    “Nice deal. Pretty here. With the lights on those bushes. Where do I bunk?”
    “There’s two down that hall. Take either one.”
    “I’ll get the bag later. If I decide to come in on this.”
    “You want the story now. Okay. The month before I crashed out, I got to know one of the new fish who’d just come in. He figured with me being in there four years already and being a lifer, I’d know all the scores. He was in on armed robbery, a supermarket in Evanston. He’d come in from the West Coast and it was the first thing he tried and he’d hooked up with the wrong guy so it went sour. He was all set on what he’d do when he got out, and he knew I couldn’t ever be paroled so he thought it was safe to talk it over with me.
    “It seems when he was out on the coast he had this good friend named Joe Preston. Preston was always getting into small time trouble. But Preston talks about some rich doctor in this town here, here in Flamingo, that he’s related to. Preston and his wife leave. This fish, his name is Irv Dingle, gets a letter from Preston. Preston brags about the rich doctor relative. He says he and his wife have moved in with the old boy. He says the doctor doesn’t believe in banks and he’s made a killing in land and has maybe a million bucks in cash in the safe in his house.”
    “Sure. A million bucks. Ten or fifteen thousand.”
    “Wait a minute. Four years didn’t soften me up. After Riverio hid me out I started thinking about it, wondering if it could be true. So I had Riverio run a check. He had somebody come over from Miami and look around. It gets checked a half dozen ways and it adds up to a minimum of a half million. Cash. It could be a hell of a lot more. He lives in a big stone house. The Preston couple and some old jig live there with the doctor. I couldn’t get the dope on the kind of box, but it was put in twenty years ago.”
    “Then a torch and a can opener ought to do it.”
    “That’s your business. But like I said, Riverio checked.”
    “I’ll believe that. But why doesn’t he assign it?”
    “Because he hasn’t got the people