wanted her as he hadn’t wanted a woman in a long time.
He meant to have her.
He met the man’s rush neatly, blocking a punch and countering with a right to the chest. The man sagged and Baron chopped him savagely on the side of the neck.
Such a chop, properly done, kills a man. Baron had killed a man in just such a fashion several years back when he had to play it heavy for a change. This time he held back slightly with the blow. The man crumpled to the floor, alive but unconscious. He would remain unconscious for at least twenty minutes.
Baron turned to the girl. She was cowering against the wall, her eyes wide with terror that was quite probably genuine.
He laughed.
“Didn’t expect that, did you? You ought to learn to tell who’s a mark and who isn’t.”
“Please,” she said. “Please.”
“This time,” he said, “you’re going to have to go through with it. Maybe you’ll learn better next time.”
He took her by the shoulders and heaved her toward the bed. She stumbled for a few steps and sat down heavily. She didn’t move.
Back in his own room Baron felt thoroughly relaxed for the first time in weeks. Sally English—or whatever her name might really be—was more woman than he had had in quite a while. She had one hell of a body and she knew what to do with it.
Baron smiled, remembering and enjoying the memory. At first she had fought, but after a while she quit fighting and started to enjoy what she was doing.
He laughed suddenly, wondering what the poor dope of a partner would think when he came to. The guy had been expecting a mark, not a guy who would knock him cold. It served him right for being such a damned amateur.
Well, maybe they would drop out of the rackets now. The badger game was a short con to begin with and not an especially good one at that, but that pair wasn’t cut out for anything so professional. Maybe the girl would hustle and the guy would pimp for her. He decided that the guy wasn’t much better than a pimp. And the girl would make a fine hustler.
Amateur crooks. They only got in the way, lousing things up for the boys who knew which end was up. They didn’t know who to take and who to pass up.
And they always got caught. And when they got caught they didn’t know what to do, and so they wound up in the tank. Which, Baron reflected, was precisely where they belonged, the whole pack of them.
The professionals got caught too—but they didn’t wind up in jail, not the smart ones. When they hit a town they found out who was the fixer and they established contact with the fixer before they started grifting. That way they stayed out of the jug.
If they got busted they either bought the cop right away or got word to the fixer, who bought whoever had to be bought. Sometimes the fixer would get to the mark and pay him off to get him to drop charges. That was the way most of the cannon mobs operated. If that failed, the fixer bought the judge. Almost any judge would square a small rap for the right price.
But amateurs! If a mark turned in Sally and her partner they would be lost. They might have the brains to get a lawyer, but if they did they’d still wind up doing a year or two apiece. Because the same judge who could be bought would go extra hard on an amateur, just to keep his record looking good.
The hell with them, Baron thought. They deserved whatever happened to them.
Mentally he went over all the ways the pair had played the game wrong. To begin with, Sally’s whole approach was too heavy. She should have sat down a stool or two away from him instead of right next to him. She should have let him offer to buy her a drink—the second drink, not the first. She should have mentioned her husband right away and then left the rest of it up to Baron.
And, of course, she should have caught on to what he was talking about. The first words he spoke were, “I’m working the C out of Philly.” This meant, quite simply, that he was a confidence man who started originally in Philadelphia. But she didn’t even listen to him.