Wild Town Read Online Free PDF Page A

man bent double suddenly, gasping for breath, ropish food spouting from his mouth. The man spinning ludicrously, spin-staggering off of the curb and collapsing in the street.
    Ford brushed his gloves, one against the palm of the other. He went through the twin swinging doors, and immediately two chairs crashed out through the windows.
    Bugs blinked and shook his head. Customers were stampeding out the doorway, but he lunged through them and past them to the inside. Again, he could hardly believe what he saw.
    Ford was strolling toward the rear of the room, leaving a shambles of broken furniture and fixtures behind him, adding to it with every step he took. He moved unhurriedly, effortlessly; he was completely unruffled and the cigar was still in his teeth. And yet he gave the impression of raging, barely controllable fury. It came from the very deliberation of his movements, perhaps: a feeling that he was building up, relishing and prolonging the savagery, forestalling the cataclysmic climax that would end his game.
    A couple of the joint’s employees rushed him, one from each side. Ford rocked them with two simultaneous backhands, whipped his arms around their necks and crashed their heads together.
    And he hardly seemed to break stride. He was moving on before they hit the floor, tipping his hat politely to a woman who stood pressed against the rear wall.
    She was the last customer in the place, the only remaining person aside from Bugs and Ford. An ash-blonde, she had a kind of washed-out but interesting prettiness; full, high breasts, and a waist approximately half the circumference of her hips.
    “Now, that was a hell of a thing to do!” she said angrily. “Honestly, Lou Ford! I—I—could just absolutely murder you!”
    “Told you to keep out of these joints,” Ford said. “Told ’em to keep you out.”
    “And just who are you to order me around? Where do you get off at telling me what to do with my own money?”
    “But it ain’t your own,” Ford said gently. “Might not be none of your own either, if you got hard-pressed and had to start grabbin’. No, sir, sure might not be, and that’s a fact.”
    The woman looked at him sulkily. “Well,” she said. “Well, anyway, you didn’t need to act like this! ”
    “No?” Ford shrugged. “Well, maybe not. But, look—I want you to meet a fella…Mrs. Hanlon, Mr. McKenna.”
    Her eyes swept Bugs contemptuously, taking in the worn clothes, the run-down shoes, the tired haggard face. Then she reddened, for far from flinching, she found Bugs looking her over in exactly the same way; adding her up point by point, and arriving at an obviously unflattering total.
    “Well!” she said, unconsciously sucking in her breath. And then she smiled suddenly and extended her hand. “I’m very glad to meet you, Mr.—Mr. McKenna, is it?”
    “Yeah. That’s right, Mrs.—Mrs. Hanlon?”
    He grinned at her insolently. But Joyce Hanlon refused to be offended. She moved in on him, clinging to his hand, until her breasts were almost against his body. She looked up at him through silky eyelashes, spoke in the voice of a plaintive child.
    “I’m sorry. Don’t be mad, hmmm? Pretty please? Pretty please with sugar on it?”
    Bugs had no defense for that kind of stuff. He turned six different colors at once; mumbled desperately that s-sure, he wasn’t angry and he hoped she wasn’t and he was sorry, too, and—and so on, until he was sure he must sound like the world’s biggest horse’s ass.
    At last Ford rescued him with the suggestion that they get out of the place. Go somewhere they could talk. They went to one of the old-town restaurants, with Joyce holding to Bugs’s arm. And strangely it didn’t fluster him much now. When she sat down in the booth opposite him and Ford, he missed the pressure on his biceps, the intimate, secretive probing of her fingers.
    A waitress brought coffee. Ford brought up the subject of the house dick’s job, stating Bugs’s