Brain Guy: A gang killer meets his match in a TNT blonde Read Online Free Page B

with the cheeriness of one who has begun to accept his misfortune. The hell with it all. He was young. The world was full of easy money. Maybe it was a good thing he had lost his job. Maybe he could coin more dough if he was on his own.
    He wondered what was to be done? He had no money in the bank. He’d spent every nickel fast as he made it. Salary, graft, shakedown money. And Joe coming to town after New Year. Joe and a pup. Just a happy family. Joe depended on him. He had twenty bucks in the dresser at the hotel room. A month’s salary. Four times twenty-five plus twenty. One hundred twenty. That was dough. That was something. What a sucker to think he was licked! He had a place to live in. Two guys could buy a lot of food for one hundred twenty bucks. He grinned at working the boss into a free flat. Why, he was a bloated millionaire. Near him an old man was guzzling soup. The old man murmured to himself. Bill laughed. Christ, he was young, smart, strong. He had some money. The city was jammed with a million devils worse off than himself. No one paid any attention to him laughing. They were used to anything. What he had to do was simple as pie, a cinch. He had to shake down as many speaks and joints as he could before everyone wised up that he was canned.
    When he stepped into the sun again, he had walked out of respectability. This Forty-second was a new street in a new town. His life was new. He passed Hubert’s Flea Museum, the posters of legless women and bearded men, the burlesques with the big color portraits of tenement girls who’d made good and were stripped naked to prove it. A huge sign read: TILLY PIPICK FROM THE BRONX. He was accosted by the sexiness of a street turned whore, bragging of a good time for little money; the radio stores, the burlesque queens, the cafeterias, dance halls, and cut-price haberdasheries pleaded for his attention. He’d been in a murder. He’d lost his job. So what? He hit Ninth Avenue and Paddy’s Market. The wagons of yellow and orange fruit, the apples and bananas, shone under the drab bridge of the El. The only immaculate things were the fruits, the piles of silvery fish, the masses of coffee beans. Bill pepped it up, briefly helloing the barbers, grocers, and other tenants who knew him and still thought he was the rent-collector. He said to them: “See you tomorrow, Wiberg.” “Too busy, Gus.” “Got work to do.” Up the sidestreets yellow and cheap with sun, where the cars were parked from corner to corner, the tenements also in lines, but forever immovable with the eternity of squalor, he chased the dollars.
    A fellow was gabbing with one of those skinny hot girls who eye every male. Bill brushed by them in the doorway where they courted, thinking of Madge. The perfume of the kid, the smell of her, belonged to Madge, though the girl was someone else. He knocked at many doors and chiseled Jewish and Greek gamblers with flabby card-sharp hands, owners of brothels and speaks, all the easy-money boys in shady rackets. “Hell,” said Herman. “You leech. I lose all my cash to some Greeks — ”
    “If it ain’t Billy. No dough, Billy.”
    “Five’s all I can spare,” said Pete.
    “Come nex’ week.”
    “Go to hell.”
    “Wednesday. O.K. Positive.”
    “Come next week.”
    “Come next week.”
    “One sawbuck’s all you get.”
    “I’m tired shellin’ out.”
    “Come next week. I ain’t no Morgan.”
    “Take a drink like a good feller.”
    “The hell with you, you bastard. Beat it.”
    “I’ll give ya ten when you move me.”
    At the end of the day he had over forty bucks. The boys had belly-ached, but forty wasn’t bad. So long, easy money. When would he be seeing it again? It wouldn’t be bad making a lot of it. A smart guy always could. And was he smart? He was smart.
    The next morning even the loafers on the corner were wise to him. The word had got around that Bill Trent was canned. Angelo, the bootblack, tipped him off the bookie was out to