The Ballroom on Magnolia Street Read Online Free PDF

nothing work out for me?’ he screamed, as he crawled around the floor of the office, in agony.
    The noise roused Marion, who was cradled in Johnny’s arms. Slowly, he helped her to stand up. She covered her stomach with her hands.
    ‘Let me call an ambulance,’ he said gently. ‘This woman’s not well. She’s in shock. And we’ll have to get that poor sucker to a hospital, too, I suppose. Give me that gun before you kill yourself.’
    Johnny went forward to get the pistol. So did Sly. Sly got there first.
    ‘Look out, Marion!’ shouted Johnny, but it was too late.
    Sly leapt forward, grabbed Marion in an armlock and the gun was in his other hand. ‘Now, hurry up,’ he snarled, ‘before I do something we’ll all regret.’
    ‘All right. All right. I’ll get the money,’ said Johnny, pulling open a drawer in the desk. ‘It’s not as much as we agreed but it’s all I can afford this time. Setting up this place has cleaned me out.’
    Sly’s greedy, green eyes lit up when he saw the thick bundle of tattered banknotes. Forgetting the empty cupboard, and his bleeding friend, he slowly reached for the money. Just as his fingers closed on the prize, Marion jerked herself out of his grasp and ran to the door. Sly saw her pull it open, and was so annoyed he wanted to shoot her. Women could never be relied upon to do what they were told. At the same time he felt something like regret, as he realized his finger had already squeezed the trigger. The gun exploded, taking two of his fingers with it. It fell from his rigid fingers, through the torn lining of his coat, and slid under Johnny’s desk just as the door opened wide and Marion fled into the hall. Sly collapsed and lay trembling beside his accomplice. He closed his eyes.
    Johnny grabbed the gun and turned to face the door.
    Dozens of revellers, attracted by the noise of the first shot, had gathered outside the door. They struggled to get a good look at the two injured men, writhing in pain on the floor; and at the handsome figure of Hollywood Hogan, as he stood, looking magnificent, beside his fake marble desk, one eye closed to avoid the smoke from the cigarette he still held in his lips. He held the weapon up high above his head, to show them all that the trouble was over.
    ‘Call the cops,’ he said. ‘Tell them I’ve got a couple of Christmas presents for them. And tell them not to worry about the gun. I have it here. There’s been enough shootin’ for one night.’
    Of course, the police believed Johnny’s version of what really happened in the office that night; that it was nothing more than a series of accidents and slip-ups, and good luck on his part.
    But nobody else believed Johnny when he told them he was nothing special. They said that he was not only a hero, but modest with it. Within days, the story was all over the city, richly embellished with every telling. Hollywood Hogan had taken on two of the city’s most notorious gangsters and wounded them both with their own gun.
    Sly and Knuckles were taken to the Royal Victoria Hospital and held under armed guard in a private ward. By the time their wounds healed, they would be ready to stand trial for armed robbery and extortion. Their misery was not mourned by the policemen of the city, who feared this was the beginning of a crime-wave, or by the outraged business community. A criminal investigation was duly launched, and Sly and Knuckles were charged under their real names of Eugene Lolly and Timothy Tate, respectively.
    The story of the robbery blazed on for months. Timothy Tate was found to be a loner who lived with his mother in a run-down bedsit in the meanest area of the city; and it was revealed that he hadn’t dated a woman in seven years. One of his ex-girlfriends came forward to sell her memoirs to the local newspapers. A modest bidding war followed. Unfortunately, when the bidding war ended in the high hundreds, she didn’t have much to say except that Timothy Tate hadn’t been