Free Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye by Horace McCoy Page A

the guns into my pockets and put on my hat and started out. Holiday was standing in the door, watching me.
    ‘Where are you going?’ she asked.
    ‘I’ll be back inside of an hour,’ I said.
    ‘Forget it!’ she said, sharply, blocking me. ‘You start anything with Mason now and we’re cooked. You stay away from him.…’
    ‘I wasn’t even thinking of him,’ I said.
    Then what were you thinking of? Now, look,’ she said swiftly. ‘Jinx’s got money of his own. If they’ve picked him up let him make his own deal.’
    ‘I wasn’t thinking of Jinx, either,’ I said. ‘We’re broke. We need some money to get out of town.’
    ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s too risky. I got a little dough left enough for that. Enough to get us out of town.’
    ‘How much you got?’
    ‘Around twenty dollars …’
    ‘How far will that take us?’
    ‘Far enough …’
    ‘Get out of the way,’ I said.
    She grabbed me with both hands, shaking me. ‘Are you crazy?’ she said. ‘We got to get away from here! There’s a murder rap staring us in the face! We can’t press our luck too far.…’
    ‘Stop shaking me …’ I said.
    She stopped shaking me, but kept her grip on the shoulders of my coat.
    ‘They’d pull the switch on us in a minute…’ she said, way back in her throat, a little slobber trickling over the edge of her lip.
    This is not the dame I saw handling a machine-gun yesterday,’ I said. ‘That must have been somebody else. That was some other dame....’
    ‘Somebody’s got to shake you, you amateur, you punk,’ she said.
    I hit her in the stomach with my left fist, knocking her back against the door facing. She wavered and then fell, pounding on the floor with both fists and sobbing and moaning.
    ‘Shut up and listen,’ I said, stooping down beside her. ‘Will you please shut up and listen! Listen to me!’
    She slowly stopped pounding on the floor and started to lift her head, but before she could look at me there was a knocking at the hall door. I was so dumbfounded that for a moment I was paralysed. Holiday had pushed herself up off the floor and was sitting on her shins beside me and I got a smell of fear from her, cinnamon-pungent and exciting. I rose carefully and crossed to the door, taking an automatic out of my pocket. The knocking came again, and then I realized that this was not a knocking but a rapping, impatient but not peremptory; tranquilizing me a little; surely, I was thinking, the bastards wouldn’t be coming back as meekly as this, they wouldn’t be thumping the door with one finger, which is what this noise is – and I opened the door, standing behind it, not taking any more chances, not being a punk this time, with my gun levelled and my finger around the trigger so tensely that the weight of one additional heartbeat would have caused it to squeeze fire.
    It was Jinx. I closed the door with my shoulder. His face was drawn and his eyes were wrathful.
    ‘Mason put the finger on us, the son-of-a-bitch, it was Mason,’ he said.
    ‘Goddamn you, Jinx, we know who put the finger on us,’ Holiday said, her voice throbbing, moving to him. ‘If you got anything to settle with Mason, you settle it yourself and stop trying to suck Ralph into help you. We got a hell of a break here and I won’t let you louse it up.’
    ‘Who’s trying to louse anything up?’ he said, flaring. ‘Why, for Christ’s sake, I came out here to do you a favor and the minute I get inside the door you tear my head off. I came out here to try to tip you off to the cops and I get my head torn off.’
    ‘She’s been having hysterics,’ I said. ‘Leave him alone,’ I said to Holiday.
    ‘I’ll take the chances I’m taking to do you another favor sometime,’ he said to her. ‘I was across the street in that secondhand lot,’ he said to me. ‘I saw him come out. The club-footed nance son-of-a-bitch. If I’d had a gun, I’d’ve popped him sitting there in that squad car …’
    ‘If you want to