The Kind One Read Free

raise.”
    “Yeah? Great.
You
get a raise. That’s rich.”
    He walked over to the bed and untied my shoes and took them off. They made clunking noises as he dropped them on the floor.
    “I’m leaving now, kid. Sleep it off. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
    “Don’t leave yet. Tell me something.”
    “Like what?”
    “Tell me about why they call me Two Gun Danny.”
    Dick sighed. “Ah, Danny…it’s three o’clock in the fucking morning.”
    “Come on, Dick. Please.”
    Dick shook his head but at the same time he lit up a cigarette so I knew he wasn’t going.
    “You, me, and a couple other of the boys—one night we drove down to Long Beach. We took a water taxi out to the
Monfalcone
. It was one of them gambling boats. It was out past the three-mile limit, so it was all strictly legit.”
    “But what we were gonna do—that wasn’t legit.”
    “That’s right. We was on a heist job. We was gonna heist the dealers and the customers and we heard there was a safe with a hundred fifty G’s in it and we was gonna heist that too. But that wasn’t all.”
    “We were gonna sink it. Sink the
Monfalcone
.”
    “You wanna tell the fucking story? Yeah, that’s right. We was gonna set it on fire and sink it ’cause Bud had a beef with the owner. And we didn’t care if everybody on it drowned like rats.
    “The main gambling room was the greatest place in the world. It had green carpet and chandeliers, and roulette wheels and dice tables and slot machines, and all the customers was dressed up like a million bucks. And the dames was all gorgeous, all of ’em looked like Ginger Rogers. Dozens and dozens of Ginger Rogers.”
    “Too bad we had to burn it up,” I mumbled. “Too bad we had to sink it.”
    “Yeah, too bad. But orders is orders. So we was taking a little look-see at things when you got recognized by some muscle that worked for the boat and he started to take his piece out. But you slugged him in the jaw and knocked him colder than a mackerel and grabbed his piece and pulled out your own piece and jumped up on a blackjack table and yelled: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this here’s a heist!’”
    I was lying flat on my back, with my eyes closed. The room was spinning around me like a roulette wheel. Dick’s voice seemed to be coming from further and further away.
    “Then all these guys come running in the room, some of ’em had sawed-offs and some of ’em had pistols and you was screaming that they was dirty sons of bitches and blazing away at ’em with a gun in each hand.”
    Two Gun Danny. Then I couldn’t hear Dick anymore. I was in endless night, floating on a raft on an infinite sea. And the water was filled with floundering Ginger Rogerses in golden gowns. And they were in danger of drowning, but I welcomed them on my raft, one and all.
     
     
     

Chapter   2
     
     
       I DROVE THROUGH Hollywood in my yellow ’33 Packard Club sedan on a sunny Monday morning. I passed a church with a sign in front that said: “The eyes of the Lord are everywhere.” I had to slow down when a baseball bounced out on the street in front of me; a kid ran out after it and as he bent down to pick it up he looked up at me and I felt this sort of shiver like I’d lived through this before, except the kid with the tousled hair chasing the brownish battered ball was me, and the guy behind the wheel of the Packard was…
who
? Then the kid ran off and I felt like me again and drove on.
    I turned down La Vista Lane. It was a little street of modest pale houses and skinny palm trees south of Melrose and east of Vine. I parked in front of the Orange Blossom Bungalow Court. A sprinkler was going and made a rainbow over the sloping lawn. I climbed seven steps to a sidewalk that ran straight back from the street between identical tan tiny stucco houses, four on each side, facing each other across a courtyard. The courtyard had a couple of dwarf orange trees loaded with green half-grown oranges.
    I knocked on the door of