Free Neon Mirage by Max Allan Collins Page B

handle—if Jim were to sell us half interest in Continental. I believe Siegel’s Eastern friends would tell him to shut Trans-American down.”
    “Would Siegel go along with that?”
    “He’d have no choice. His friends out East aren’t going to say much of anything if he wants to go having a Jim Ragen shot up. But if he goes against us , he would be in effect going against them.”
    “I see.”
    “Here.” Guzik dug deep into his right pants pocket. He withdrew the fattest roll of paper money I have ever seen, bound by a thick rubber band. You couldn’t begin to get your forefinger and thumb around that wad. He peeled off five bills, like a hand of poker. I looked at them the same way: I had five of a kind. All hundreds.
    I swallowed; my tongue felt thick. “Isn’t carrying a roll like that a little dangerous, Mr. Guzik? Even for a guy with bodyguards…”
    “Just the opposite. I always carry ten or twenty grand with me.”
    He said that like ten or twenty bucks.
    “With a roll like this, I don’t have to worry about getting kidnapped no more. I just give the dough to the guys who want to snatch me and they go away more than satisfied.”
    “All you want for this five hundred is for me to tell Ragen about Siegel?”
    “Yes. And tell him we’re prepared to double our last offer to him.”
    “Double it?”
    “Yes. That’s two hundred grand for fifty-one percent of the business.”
    That sounded like a lot of dough to me.
    “What,” I asked, “if he wants to sell out altogether?”
    “We’d make a fair offer. All I ask is to negotiate and reason.”
    And then, failing that, shoot you dead.
    “Okay,” I said. I rose, sticking the five hundred in my wallet. “Is that all you wanted, Mr. Guzik?”
    “Yes. Report back to me. I’ll give you a number.” He took a card from his breast pocket and handed it to me. There was no name on it, just a phone number.
    “I’ll send flowers, as well,” he said. “He’s in Michael Reese, I understand. I was in there for pneumonia, oh, ten or fifteen years ago, myself. Good hospital. I had ’em put me in that Meyer House wing. Better for security.”
    “Really,” I said, slipping his card in my wallet next to the five C-notes.
    I was just turning to go when I heard a commotion in the adjacent room.
    One of the waiters, in his mock English accent, was saying, “You can’t go back there, sir,” and somebody else was saying, “Oh yes I can.”
    And then, big as life, there was Bill Drury standing there in his natty vested blue suit. He was grinning like a fox; of course, the sporting prints on the walls around him were all about foxes getting killed, but that probably didn’t occur to him.
    “Jake,” he said, not acknowledging my presence, “stand up. Everybody else, stay seated.”
    “Drury,” Guzik said, standing slowly, a dirigible lifting off, “why don’t you wise up. Look at the record.”
    “And what will I see if I do, Jake?”
    “You’ll see I always reward my friends and punish my enemies.”
    “Assume the goddamn position, Jake. That wall will be fine.”
    Guzik’s gray face turned pink. He said, “Must I suffer that indignity?”
    “Oh, yeah,” Drury said.
    “You know I never carry a gun. I never carried a gun in my life.”
    “How do I know tonight isn’t the first night? Maybe you didn’t hear—Jim Ragen got shot. You’re a suspect. Assume the fucking position, Jake.”
    Guzik’s face tightened—an unlikely sight, considering how flabby that pan of his was—and he shook his head at the two tables of bodyguards, who sat on the edge of their chairs, ready to wade into this; but Guzik’s gesture meant for them to sit it out. He leaned against one wall, a fox hunt print just above his pudgy, splayed hands.
    Drury patted him down hard. Came across the fat roll of bills and held it up to look at it, like a piece of evidence he was considering.
    “What’s this, Jake?”
    “More money than you see in a year. Why don’t you