Neon Mirage Read Online Free PDF

to you,” I said.
    “I’ve been on the end of the phone calls. Most of them have been messages for Mr. Levinson. But they’ve from time to time threatened me, too.”
    She didn’t seem very bothered.
    “If it’s not too difficult for you, what have they said?”
    “Oh, no death threats, not at me. Just that they’ll cut my face up. That kind of thing.”
    She was pretty blasé about it, and looking at her close, I didn’t think it was a pose. This little dame had balls. So to speak.
    “What would you think about me tagging along with you,” I said, “for the next week or so?”
    She smiled wryly; one deep dimple. “I’d like that fine. I don’t have a boy friend…at the moment. So you wouldn’t be getting in the way of anything.”
    “I’m going to put a man right here in the office with you. I’m personally going to escort you to and from work. We’ll go out for lunch and supper together, too.”
    She arched an eyebrow. “Dutch treat?”
    “Your uncle’s buying. I’m on an expense account.”
    “You know, I’m living at home, now. In Englewood. I’ve been taking the streetcar to work…”
    “We’ll put you up at the Morrison.”
    “You don’t still live there?”
    “Actually, yes. Different room, though. I moved in when I got back from service, temporarily, and I’m still there. I’m looking for something else, but you know the housing situation.”
    She nodded. “Do you have a couch?”
    “Yes.”
    “I could move in with you.”
    “That’d be ideal, really. If you think you could trust me…”
    “Do you think you could trust me, is the point?”
    “I could find out.”
    We began sleeping together that night. She made me promise not to tell her uncle. I accepted those terms; I wasn’t crazy. I took his hundred bucks a day, charged him expenses, and slept with his niece. I said I was a lowlife.
    On the fourth of our days together, we had just dined at the Berghoff and were walking down West Adams, heading back to the Morrison, when a figure stepped out of the alley. He meant to scare us, and he did, planting himself like an ugly tree before us. He was big and he was pasty-faced and hook-nosed, wearing an ugly blue and white checked sportcoat over a white sportshirt and baggy light blue pants. He looked like a bouncer in a circus museum.
    “Tell your boss to drop the case,” he said, and he jerked a thumb at the alley. “Or the next time I come outa one of these, I’m gonna drag yas back in.”
    He didn’t seem to know me; hell, he didn’t seem to notice me. I didn’t know him, either, but you didn’t have to be Jimmy Durante to smell mob on this guy.
    I eased myself in front of Peg, gently pushing her behind me, shooing her back toward and into the Berghoff, and as I did, the guy frowned at me, as if trying to place me.
    Both his big hands were at his side, so there was little risk when I pulled the nine millimeter out from under my shoulder and shoved it in his fat gut and said, “Let’s you and me go in the alley, right now, bozo.”
    He swallowed and we did. I smacked him once with the automatic, along one side of his head, and he went down and sat amongst the garbage cans and was out, or pretended to be. His ear was bleeding. He had a gun, too, which I took from under his arm and tossed down the alley, skittering on the bricks into the darkness. I took out one of my business cards and, before sticking it in the guy’s breast pocket, jotted a note on the back of it: ASK GUZIK TO CALL ME.
    The next morning Guzik did.
    “You slapped the Greek around,” Guzik pointed out in his detached monotone.
    “If you’d seen how he was dressed, you’d have helped.”
    Guzik grunted; it seemed to be a laugh.
    I said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d lay off the girl.”
    I didn’t ask him to lay off Ragen. That would be going too far; that wouldn’t be my business.
    “She’s your girl?” Guzik asked.
    “She’s mine. I’ll kill anybody who touches her.”
    Long