The Specialists Read Online Free PDF Page A

their lives by going to bed with him. The next thing they knew they were hysterical with passion. By morning they would be madly in love with Giordano, who would never see them again. It wasn’t a matter of principle with him. He had told friends that he was spending his entire life looking for a woman he would want to see a second time, and he just hadn’t found her yet.
    Nor did he intend to abandon the search. On Tuesday night his telephone rang while he was searching industriously with a six-foot Swedish blonde whose breasts each weighed about as much as Giordano. The phone picked a very bad time to ring, and Giordano flipped the receiver onto the floor and went back to what he was doing. He never did get around to putting it back on the hook, so he didn’t get the colonel’s wire until he went to the office the next morning.
    “Get me on an afternoon flight to Kennedy,” he told one of his girls. “Round-trip, return open. Call United first, but check the movie for me before you make it firm. Then call the Plaza in New York or, if they’re full, the Pierre. Tell them just overnight.”
    He didn’t have to worry about packing. He had a bag packed and ready in his office. There were two suits in it, plus shirts and socks and underwear and a full complement of toilet articles. There was also a pair of throwing knives, a strip of very thin, very strong steel, and a small-caliber automatic pistol.
    The girl looked up from the phone. “Oh, Lou,” she said, “was that first-class or tourist? I don’t think you said.”
    “Oh, make it first-class,” he told her. “They give us a discount.”

SIX
    By the time Murdock got back to his rooming house Tuesday night, he couldn’t have told a telegram from a turbojet. He was in Minneapolis working on and off for a firm of short-haul movers, and he had spent most of that day moving a family from a third-floor apartment on Horatio to a fourth-floor apartment just three blocks away on Van Duyzen. One stairwell was worse than the other, and they had a baby grand piano that was a bitch on wheels. By the time he was through, a beer sounded like one fine idea. After a half dozen bottles of Hamm’s it seemed like an even better idea to switch to something a mite more powerful. He woke up with vague memories of a fight in one place and of dragging ass when the owner called the cops, and then going over to some other place that some good old boy knew about and starting in all over again. Somewhere along the line he evidently decided to pack it in and head for home, and damned if he hadn’t found his way, but he couldn’t remember that part of it at all.
    He threw his legs over the side of the bed and sat up. He tried to remember if he had told the boss he would be coming to work that day. It didn’t make such a much whether he did or not, because fish would fly before he’d show up at that moving company, but if they were expecting him, it meant he’d be out a job. Or maybe he wouldn’t; most of the moving companies took what they could get and didn’t expect you to be reliable. Which was good news, because if there was one thing Ben Murdock wasn’t, reliable is what it was.
    He was just created to raise hell, a lanky redneck with hair like straw and a mean streak that just had to pop out now and again. If he stood in the sun, freckles popped out on his face and forearms, and if he stood anywhere for any length of time, sun or shade, the meanness popped out the same way and he was ace-high certain to buy trouble for himself. He grew up in Tennessee and got thrown out of school over and over again, and when he was nineteen, he had to take off and drive up to Chicago because of a difference of opinion with a girl. His opinion was that she was sort of in the mood no matter what she said, and her opinion was that he had raped her. When she made her opinion known to the police, he borrowed himself a car and pointed it north.
    They never did get him for the car he borrowed,