Don't Look Behind You Read Online Free PDF Page A

details.” His belly shook in a silent laugh.
    I was starting to get pissed off. He’d gone over the line with this crap. There was no humor in my voice when I said, “Cut that shit out, Smitty.”
    “Now don’t tell me you’re getting sensitive at this late date, Mike.” He pulled open his desk drawer, slid out a single printed form and handed it across to me. “Here’s the details. Just to show you what kind of friend I am… even if I do get a kick out of needling you… I didn’t deduct any percentage for the initial contact. Your check will come directly from the client.”
    I read the sheet, folded it, stuck it in my pocket and stood up.
    “Thanks,” I said. I’d gotten kind of irritated, but he deserved that much.
    His grin came back through the cigar smoke. “No thanks necessary, Mike. The talk was worth it. I keep trying to figure out you guys with no consciences. It’s an interesting gambit.”
    I slapped my hat on and walked to the door. There was a mirror beside it and I caught my eyes in the reflection. The coldness in their gray-blue disturbed even me.
    Then I turned to him. “So how many did
you
shoot, back in your day, Smitty?”
    There was no laugh in his face and the fire in his eyes dulled to a small, dying glow. He said nothing, but I wasn’t going to leave until he answered me.
    The fire went out entirely and he said softly, “Too many.”

CHAPTER THREE
    A cold front was sticking its tongue out at New York, tasting the edges of it, and—not liking what it found—spitting it back in a short, chilly blast. The rush-hour crowd made shoulder-brushing two-lane traffic on the sidewalks, and the usual batch of arm-wavers were jostling each other in the streets trying to flag down cabs at the worst possible time.
    I said the hell with it and crossed Sixth Avenue with the light and headed east back to my apartment, playing city safari until I got past Park Avenue. Manhattan was quite a jungle and not that different from the one in Africa. Every time one faction got out of hand and threatened to destroy the terrain, the game wardens moved in, rounded them up, and moved them to someone else’s domain. In Africa it was various species of animals. In New York it was just one lousy species—people—though with its various sub-species. For instance, now that the cops had confined the whores to the side streets, the girls were waving at you out of the windows, like Amsterdam but without the sexy mood lighting.
    When I reached Lexington, I turned north to pick up an evening paper at Billy Batson’s newsstand. Billy is one of the world’s larger little people—he was the tallest of the Singer Midgets, making him easy to spot in
The Wizard of Oz
—and twenty years ago or so, he’d invested ten years of decent show biz money into a newsstand at a prime spot. His real last name I never knew, but since his stand had always sported the best array of funny books on any Manhattan street corner, he got tagged with the name of Captain Marvel’s alter ego, newsboy Billy Batson.
    Now Captain Marvel was gone, sued out of existence by the Superman crowd, while Billy Batson was still here, and so was a colorful display of comic books dominated by newcomers like
Spider-Man
and
The Fantastic Four
. Billy was a sharp, streetwise character in a plaid golf cap, a padded quilt jacket, black flannel trousers, and Keds. He spotted me when I first turned the corner and had my paper ready.
    “How you hangin’, Mike?”
    “By the thumbs, like the guys on the radio say. How about you, Billy?”
    He tossed a hand. “Don’t do no good complainin’. Hey, man, that was some lousy picture of you in the
News
this morning.”
    “What can I say? My make-up man had the day off.”
    He grunted a laugh, made some change for a customer and turned back to me. “That story stunk worse than the pic. A load of crap, if my sniffer’s still workin’ right.”
    “One man’s load of crap is another’s official police