I finished my drink and braced myself for the heat outside. I stepped out onto the pavement, blinking the sun and sweat out of my eyes. As I turned up the street a figure approached me, little more than a silhouette against the blazing day. The figure stopped abruptly, standing up straighter, as I heard a sharp snap by my right ear. I was already diving for cover when the report of the gun reached me.

I rolled to my left, hoping to dive back into the bar before the next shot found me. The other man stood improbably still, then slowly twisted and crumpled to the sidewalk. A single, clean bullet hole adorned his forehead. His face hadn’t even had time to register surprise as the high-velocity slug bounced around inside his head. As he hit the sidewalk the revolver he had been carrying under his coat clattered to the ground.

A woman emerged from a storefront and almost stumbled over the dead man. She looked at him with distaste until she saw the expanding pool of blood by his head. With a scream she ducked back into the store. The police were going to be here soon. I did not want to be anywhere in the vicinity when they arrived, but I didn’t think I had much choice. Someone must have seen me. It would be easier to talk to them now than explain why I left.

That left me with little to do except keep the corpse company. He had been a big guy, blonde, with that Northern European blockhead look. His hair was short and neatly combed, undisturbed by the violence just beneath its roots. The gun was a .38 Smith and Wesson, clean and deadly. I wondered what he’d been planning to do with it. I didn’t bother looking for ID. The cops would check, but I was willing to guess he wasn’t carrying any. “Who you working for?” I asked him, but he wasn’t telling. I tried another line. “Was that for me?” I asked, gesturing to the gun. I pointed to the hole in his head. “Was that for me?”

His blue eyes were staring straight into the sun. It was starting to bother me, the way he never blinked. I was considering going back into Jake’s when I heard the siren. The patrol car roared to a stop and two uniforms stepped out. I heard more sirens approaching. Anything else the stiff wanted to tell me would have to wait.

The cops were no different than the dead man. There’s two ways for a kid with some muscle but not much brains to get ahead in this city; he can join one of the local gangs, or he can become a cop. It comes down to the same thing either way. They have a boss who tells them whose skull to crack and they go do it. It’s a simple life, and a good living for those untroubled by scruples or the sanctity of human life. They looked me over and told me where to stand until someone with an IQ greater than 12 could come and talk to me. After that there wasn’t much for them to do but stand around looking important and threatening passers-by while the dead guy slowly cooked in the sun.

More squad cars rolled up, with a black sedan hot on their tail, Ed Hennessey hunched over the wheel, grinding his teeth and his gears, coming to a halt in a cloud of blue smoke. I had mixed feelings about Ed. He was a smart guy and a good drinker, but he was a reporter. I’d done some odd jobs for him in the past; once I had produced photos and an address where a priest was engaging in activities decidedly unholy. That story never hit the presses—most of those things don’t—but Ed gave me a nice bottle as a bonus.

I wasn’t enthusiastic about having my name in the paper connected to a story like this one, however. Things were complicated enough already, and having me connected with what appeared to be a straight gang hit was going to make it difficult with some of my usual contacts. I live in a gray world, a world of shadows, and the black-and-white of police cars and the bright light of flashbulbs would send my peers scuttling back under the refrigerator.

Still, if Ed thought I knew something, I’d be able to squeeze a couple of drinks out of him.

If I was ambivalent about Ed’s arrival, the cops were openly hostile. A sweatly-faced patrolman with more more swagger than sense was waiting as Ed unfolded his long frame from behind the wheel of the Chrysler. “You get right back in that car and blow on out of here!” the officer said.

“Hello, Charley,” the reporter called out to me, ignoring the policeman as he might an annoying little dog. “What’s the story here?”

“This is a crime scene,” the officer persisted.

Ed looked at the corpse and acknowledged the cop for the first time. “No kidding?” he asked.

“Stay back,” the cop said. “Stand over there.” He gestured down the sidewalk.

Ed came over and stood by me. He wasn’t making any new friends on the force by acting that way, but considering some of the things he had printed about the local constabulary I didn’t think he had much to lose. He had more he could print, and the cops knew it, or they might have opted to end his career early by making sure his fingers would never operate a typewriter again. A delicate balance of power. I knew he had the goods on them because I had helped him collect some of it. The cops didn’t know that. I don’t think they knew anyway.

“What happened?” Ed asked me, glancing at the corpse.

“Someone shot him,” I said.

Tune in next time for: The Devil You Know!

“Why me?” I asked.

“A mutual friend recommended you. Willy Gancek.”

Willy Gancek, a.k.a Willy the Weasel, was hardly a friend of mine. He was a two-bit punk with the temper of a rattlesnake and the intelligence of a hubcap. He was ambitious, the Weasel was, but he’d burned all his bridges long ago and was only now starting to realize it. That made him desperate on top of stupid. Just the kind of guy a savvy woman could suck in and use and ditch when the time came, but not the kind she could rely on for exercising good judgement. For that, she would have to find someone else, some sap too scared to be a criminal and too honorable to go completely straight. Me, apparently. “It was nice of Mr. Gancek to think of me,” I said. “I’ll have to send him a fruit basket.”

She smiled. “I believe he called you a washed-up hack who will do anything for a drink.”

“He’s smarter than I thought. For the record, though, a pretty face also works.” Hers was more than pretty, but there were some things I was not prepared to do, even for a drink. Dying was at the top of the list.

“Not very much smarter. He offered to drive me to France. He thought it was in New Jersey.”

My turn to smile. “You mean it isn’t?” I put my serious face back on and left my latest drink on the table, to prove a point. “All right then, Mrs. Fanutti, tell me what it is you would like me to do.”

She produced another cigarette and while I was fumbling for a light she said, “I want you to get me out of the pool.”

I struck the match and concentrated on holding it at the correct angle. She leaned slightly into the flame and took her time puffing her cigarette to life. “I’m sorry?” I asked when we were done. The fire had come close to my fingertips by then, but I wasn’t about to let go.

She looked at me through the thin trail of smoke rising from the tip of her cigarette. Turkish tobacco, I thought. Expensive. The kind used by people more worried about impressing those around them than enjoying the smoke. “The pool full of sharks you mentioned before. I want out of it,” she said.

“Have you tried asking them?”

“Believe me, there is no love between me and those people. They would be happier if I wasn’t around. But there are things I know that they would prefer I didn’t mention to anyone. While I am here, they can keep an eye on me.”

“There’s something they want from you, too, isn’t there?”

She seemed surprised that I figured out that a bunch of thugs who had no qualms about murder would need a reason to keep her alive. “Viti had a large pile of money stashed away. They want it.”

I wondered what the definition of large was among those people. Larger than my large, that was for sure. “And you know where it is?”

“If they thought I knew where it was, they’d have started cutting off my fingers already. But they think Viti will lead me to it.”

She hadn’t answered my question, but I let it slide. “That would be quite a trick from where he is.”

“You didn’t know Viti. He planned for this. Sooner or later something will turn up and lead me to the stash. They want to be there when that happens. He even told them that if anything ever happened to me they would never see the money.”

“So he bought you an insurance policy, did he? He must have known it wouldn’t last forever.”

“Of course he knew. He was a smart man.” From the tone of her voice I wasn’t stacking up so well in comparison. “He did it to buy me time to get away.”

“Which is where I come in.”

“I would like you to help me fake my own death. I will pay you handsomely.”

Somehow I knew she was going to say that. It all sounds so neat and clean; no one will look for you because they all think you’re dead. But it’s not so simple. First, there’s the money. Some of it is going to disappear and reappear somewhere else, and these people are exceptionally good accountants. Then there’s the people. Everyone in on the plan is a liability. Third, there’s the body. There’s got to be some stiff to put in the coffin. I could tell that she had been thinking about it for some time, and she probably thought she had the answers to all those problems, but the plan would be complicated, and somewhere it would go wrong.

“Better to just run,” I said. “Plan ahead, but don’t take too long. Get new papers. Get as much cash together as you can, buy a bus ticket and don’t stop until you’re in South America.”

She looked across the table at me. “It’s not that simple,” she said.

“You better make it that simple if you want to live.”

She suddenly seemed smaller than she had before. She had come in with a plan, some kind of fantasy that had given her hope, and I hadn’t even bothered to hear it. I wonder if she had told her plan to the Weasel, and whether he had encouraged her. She should have known right then that it was going to fail. “I—I need to think.” That wasn’t Lola Fanutti speaking, it was a frightened Kentucky girl a long way from home.

“If everyone did that I’d be out of business.” I tried for a reassuring smile, but I think I missed.

Her voice was rushed. She wanted badly to get out of there. “I’ll contact you again. We have to leave separately. They’re watching me. That’s why I didn’t come to your office.”

It didn’t matter; I was made. If they were watching her, they’d seen her come in here, and they’d seen me come in. She wouldn’t come in to a place like this for a casual drink and I was the only regular who could help her. Out there somewhere there was now a bullet with my name on it. When it would arrive I didn’t know but there was nothing I could do to dodge it. I hadn’t even accepted the job, but they wouldn’t bother to find that out. My only way out was to go to them myself and expose her, but I knew I wasn’t going to do that. I was well and truly fixed.

By the time she had finished paying Jake (“One more for Mr. Lowell”) she had recovered her poise. I watched as she swished her way out the door and into the bright furnace of the city. She could swish with the best of them, I’ll give her that.

Tune in next time for: Death in the Street!