Big City Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

he said thinly.
    “You just don’t understand the Mad Dog,” Harve said. “He’s a big man in the news.”
    “Well, I could take some of that out of him,” George said. He turned around and looked directly at Sewell Neely. “Maybe I will, Neely.”
    Sewell stared at him coldly. “You won’t get no cherry. I been pistol-whipped before.”
    “Maybe you never had a real good job.”
    Inside the store, under the hard lights, a girl came up from somewhere in the rear and stopped near the door at one of the counters. She was drinking a Coke and weaving slightly in time to the music from the juke box. She was a big, dark-haired girl with wide hips and heavy thighs that swelled against the sleazy dress when she moved. Harve looked at her hungrily and gestured with the manacled left hand.”Better take a good look, Mad Dog,” he said, grinning. “That’s probably the last of it you’ll ever see.”
    Sewell Neely ignored him. Harve warmed up to his subject.
    “Mad Dog’s having a good look, George, so twenty years from now he can remember what they look like. He’s laying in a supply. Maybe we better stick around a while so he can fill up good. We wouldn’t want the Mad Dog up there at the pen twenty, thirty years from now blaming us because he’d forgotten what a woman looks like.”
    Neely listened to him with acute boredom and wished he had a cigarette. A smoke would taste good, and there was no use thinking about the girl. He didn’t look at her.
    He was a big man, and even as he sat in the car handcuffed to the deputy and outwardly relaxed, there was about him the faintly signaled warning of poised and latent power, still, unruffled, but forever coiled. He had a large head with thinning red hair, and across the backs of his hands and neck and face there were large, splotched reddish-brown freckles faintly seen through the skin. The rugged, wide-mouthed face was possessed of the type of unsymmetrical homeliness usually suggestive of warmth, but there was no warmth in it and any illusion of friendliness was instantly dispelled by the eyes, marble-hard, eternally watching, and cold. He was being transported to the state penitentiary to begin serving a life sentence for armed robbery, and his name had been much in the news the past few months because of his capture in a running gun battle with police leading half across the state and a sensational trial in which he had been convicted on two out of five counts of armed robbery.
    If I’m going to wish for a smoke, though, he thought, I might as well go whole hog and wish I had a gun. I wonder if these two-for-a-nickel clowns really think they can get a rise out of me. They must think I’m some kid who’s never been worked on before. Next thing, they’ll be offering me a Coke and then taking it away when I reach for it. They’d probably think something like that was new and pat theirselves on the back for thinking it up. They’d go pretty good shoving that pimple-faced kid around, but they should have got me when I was younger if they wanted to have any fun.
    You can see they’re used to handling chicken thieves and guys they pick up in crap games, way they got me in here, with one arm handcuffed to this horse-faced pimplehead and the other one loose. It’s a good thing that old sheriff wasn’t around when we loaded up to start. He’s smart old stud and he knows his business and he’d have chewed their tails out.
    Maybe, though, if you look at it another way, it ain’t such a good thing for ‘em, at that. If he’d been there to tell ‘em how to transport a prisoner, maybe this time tomorrow night they’d be back there shaking down the hustlers around the beer joints and picking their teeth front of the courthouse, and I’d be starting a life sentence in a place I couldn’t get out of. You both better take a good look at her, boys, because there’s three of us that likely ain’t ever going to see none of it again.

Four
    Beyond the country store the