Under the Skin Read Online Free PDF Page B

quarter was
all the blood there was. His head was slumped to one side and his eyes
were open. He looked like he’d just been asked a stumper of a question. I closed his eyes and wiped the pick on his undershirt and put
it back in my coat.
    The other two still had their faces to the wall and looked like they
were trying not to even breathe.
“Tell those Dallas assholes we know it’s their machines Willie
Rags was pushing,” I said. “Tell them Rosario Maceo says don’t cross
the line again.”
I picked up the valise and we hustled out of the room and over
to the elevator. Brando patted the girl on the ass and said, “Let’s go,
honey.”
She blushed and worked the levers and down we went. She looked
a little disappointed we hadn’t brought anyone out in handcuffs. • •
I
    t was normally an hour’s drive between Houston and Galveston,
but we went back by way of Kemah and League City, a pair of
burgs just inside the Galveston County line. We had a list of all the
places where Ragsdale had put in his Dallas machines and we stopped
••
     
at each one to have a talk with the owner—a dozen or so cafés and
about as many filling stations and pool halls.
    Ragsdale must’ve thought he was being smart just because he
stayed away from any joint that already had our machines in it.
Maybe he thought the Maceo brothers wouldn’t care that he was
working in Galveston County so long as he dealt only with joints free
of Maceo machines. Maybe he was so dumb he thought they wouldn’t
even hear about it. But Sam Maceo had friends everywhere and they
had eyes and ears all over. They reported everything they heard that
might mean some outsider was working this side of the county line.
Sam would then pass the information to Rose and Rose would decide
what to do about it.
    What set Rose off about Ragsdale and the Dallas outfit wasn’t just
the money they were siphoning out of a few mainland joints. What
galled him was their lack of respect. He couldn’t blame outsiders for
wanting to get in on Galveston’s easy money, but he did blame them
if they tried to get in on it without Maceo permission. Sometimes
Rose would let an outside bunch work its game on the county mainland—never on the island—but only for a percentage of the gross. If
the outside outfit thought the Maceo cut was too high, Rose would
shrug and wish them luck and that was the end of the discussion.
Only fools tried to work their game in Galveston County without
Rose’s blessing. Those who did try it could count on Rose taking
swift measures to set things straight.
    I was one of the measures he could take.
So were about two dozen other guys, the bunch of us known as
“Rose’s Ghosts.” We saw to it that Maceo territory was defended and
Maceo will was done. We were a fairly open secret—even the chief of
police and the county sheriff knew about us—but you’d never see a
word about us in the papers except as “person or persons unknown.”
Besides discouraging outside outfits from crossing the Galveston line,
we protected the Maceo interests in neighboring counties. We col •• lected the Maceos’ money—the daily take from Maceo clubs, the cuts
from places renting Maceo equipment, the loan payments from businesses staked with Maceo cash. We kept the grifters out of the Maceo
casinos. Hell, we kept them off the island altogether. We came down
hard on drunkrollers and room thieves, even harder on strongarms
and stickup men. Although few of the good citizens ever said it out
loud, most of them knew that the real law enforcement in Galveston
wasn’t the cops—it was us.
    It was in the Maceo brothers’ interest to keep their gambling
rooms honest and make sure the hotels and the city streets were safe.
The “Free State of Galveston,” as everybody called it, was the most
wide-open place in Texas, probably in the country, and what kept the
highrollers and big spenders coming was the knowledge they