Charlie, you look like shit warmed over.

“Well, hello, Tom. I sure am in a pickle.”

A FEW HOURS FROM THE DROP AND KATHRYN DECIDED THE GANG should take in a movie. Not just any movie but Gold Diggers of 1933, with Joan Blondell, a picture that Photoplay and Shadoplay had called a hot-shit masterpiece. There was even a full-page advertisement in the Kansas City Star she’d bought at the Tulsa station for a special showing at the Newman Theater that promised some cool, refrigerated air. She wasn’t sure if she was more excited about seeing Blondell’s gowns or getting out of the damn heat. But after some nonsense from Popeye and Mickey Mouse-George laughing so hard he snorted-the movie finally started up, and there she was with a big mug on either side of her, George dozing off not even five minutes after the lights dimmed, and Albert, who’d kicked his two-tone lace-ups up on the empty seats in front of him, munching a bag of popcorn.

Kathryn couldn’t contain it. She saw the whole dream of her life coming together as those chippies danced and twirled onscreen with big silver dollars on their hands and stuck between their legs over their snatches. Hands waving. Feet skipping. Twirling, dancing, and jumping. We’re in the money, the skies are sunny… She wanted to jump up into the screen and join right in.

Here she was. Cleo Brooks. Born in Saltillo, Mississippi. Born on nothing. Born to nothing. She’d been stupid, getting knocked up at fifteen because some boy told her he just wanted to feel it for a second, and then getting involved with that moody bastard Charlie Thorne, who said he’d die for her-and did-and then Little Steve Anderson, who damn near killed her. She remembered being black-and-blue, mouth cut and bloody, his slim, bony hands knocking the stuffing from her every night he got loaded on bathtub gin, and then nearly being sent to prison for pinching a bottle of perfume and a velvet beret. It was George who bailed her out of the can, him being nothing more than a childish scrawl on a cocktail napkin, and the one who told Anderson -that big-dick bootlegger in Fort Worth -that if he so much as looked at her again, he’d rip his goddamn head off and shit down his neck. But somehow every step-from Mississippi to Tulsa and to Fort Worth -had brought her here to Kansas City, where she was finally going to be the woman that she’d imagined. All they needed was that fat Gladstone grip.

We’re in the money, we’re in the money.

She wanted to dance on the seat but instead squeezed Albert Bates’s meaty arm. He ate some more popcorn and gave her a solid ole wink like only a good mug could handle.

George started to snore, fedora over his eyes, and Kathryn glanced behind her in the big space of the movie theater, finding that there were only six people at the matinee. She moved her shoulder, and his head lolled to the side, splurting awake, then finding her shoulder and snoring again.

Albert finished the popcorn and wadded up the bag.

He checked his watch.

It had been a long night, and during a sappy love scene she found herself in the bathroom and washed her face and hands, reapplied her makeup and ran a comb through her black hair and used some dark wine tint on her lips.

She’d been on a train and in a car so long that her ass hurt. And she hung back from the boys for a bit, leaning into the wall of the darkened theater. She pulled some loose hair from her face and tucked a knuckle under her chin. She’d always felt rich in a movie house. She liked the way this place had long red drapes sashed open, red lamps, glowing like a Chinaman’s tearoom, running down the aisles. Lots of brass railings and comfortable velvet seats. You could be anyone in a movie house and dream as big as you wanted without feeling like a sap. She’d worn her best gown and some comfortable T-strap slippers. They’d go out tonight. They had to go out. She didn’t care a bit about George wanting them to lay low. What’s the use of being rich if no one saw you flaunt it?

She checked her watch. This drop was as slow as Christmas.

Blondell was on the street now in a fine French number, scarf knitted gaily at her throat, watching some poor bastard stoop to his knees to pick up a discarded cigarette. She grabbed the man’s shoulder as if in some ballet and lit her own fresh cigarette with his and gave the poor bastard the new one. I don’t know if he deserves a bit of sympathy, / Forget your sympathy. Now, that was class. That’s the kind of rich gal that Kathryn Kelly would be. She’d never forget hard times. Remember my forgotten man, she sang. You had him cultivate the land; / He walked behind a plow, / The sweat fell from his brow, / But look at him right now!… Blondell caressed the lamppost, holding on like the earth was unstable, and moved through the whole moody dream, thinking about those forgotten men, bastards who’d fought and bled in the war and now marched through soup kitchens and breadlines, as she let go of the post. She placed both hands on her left hip, that slight cock of the hip getting Kathryn thinking. She could do that, she could hold that power without the post. And once, he used to love me, / I was happy then; / He used to take care of me, / Won’t you bring him back again? / ’Cause ever since the world began, / A woman’s got to have a man; / Forgetting him, you see, / Means you’re forgetting me…

Nuts to that.

She checked her watch.

It was time.

WHEN THE TELEPHONE RANG AT A QUARTER TILL SIX, GUS JONES picked up the receiver while Kirkpatrick paced the hotel room.

“Who’s talking?” asked a man with a raspy voice.

“Kincaid,” Jones said.

“This is Moore,” the man said. “You get my wire?”

“I did.”

“Well,” the man said, pausing, “are you ready to close the deal?”

“Should be, if I knew that I were dealin’ with the right parties.”

“You ought to know by now,” the man said. “Listen now and follow these instructions. Take a Yellow Cab, drive to the Hotel La Salle, get out, take the suitcase in your right hand, and start walking west.”

“I figured on taking the suitcase.”

“Who is this?”

“I’ll be there at six-twenty,” Jones said. “I have a friend who came up here with me-I figured on bringing him along.”

“Hell, no,” the man said. “We know all about your friend, we saw that fat old man on the train last night. You come alone and unarmed. You got me? We get wind otherwise and Urschel’s dead.”

The phone rang off and the operator came on the line. Jones hung up.

“What did they say?” Kirkpatrick asked.

“They spotted me on the train.”

“Hot coffee,” Kirkpatrick said. “I knew it. I just knew it.”

“Cool your britches,” Jones said, reaching for his suit jacket and slipping into it. He placed some.45 bullets in his pants pocket and checked the load in the cylinder. “I’ll be right behind you. Grab the bag and take a Yellow Cab to the Hotel La Salle. That ’s south from here. Once you get there, start walking west.”

“Which way is west?”

“Ask the doorman.”

Kirkpatrick nodded and felt for the.38 he’d tucked into his trousers. Jones looked at him and reached out for the gun with his right hand. Kirkpatrick took a breath and then passed it over.

“Just walk,” Jones said. “And don’t look back. Just keep walking till they make contact. I’ll be behind you. Give ’em what they want. Don’t negotiate and don’t try to be a hero. Just hand over the money.”

“And then what?”

“We pray these moneygrubbing bastards are honest men.”

YOU COULDN’T MISS THE SON OF A BITCH. IT WAS THE SAME AS watching a drunk man trying to walk straight; they do everything cockamamy. And here was Mr. E. E. Kirkpatrick, executive of Tom Slick Enterprises, trying to act normal. He strolled along the boulevard on a hot Sunday evening with that goddamn beautiful Gladstone grip. Kathryn even loved the color, a light butternut brown. She thought she could even smell the leather from the open window in the big Cadillac, scrunched down in the backseat that would fit four fat men, the Thompson she hocked her life to buy clutched in her arms in case there was trouble. Across the street, in a stolen Chevrolet, Albert Bates had a rifle poked out a side window. And George was in an alley, waiting for Albert to bump the lights, and then he’d move down Linwood Street, down that tony row of dress designers and shoe shops and hatmakers and a dozen places Kathryn wanted to visit, to make contact with the sucker.