Tough Bullet

  Carmody wanted a good time in New Orleans. With eleven thousand in stolen money in his pocket, he figured to enjoy some good liquor and bad women before he headed back to Texas. But it didn’t work out that way, and he found himself framed for a brutal murder. The slickers who robbed and framed him thought Carmody would cut and run, but they didn’t know Carmody. He works hard to get money and it makes him mad to take the rap for someone else. Slugging and shooting his way through the hellholes and back alleys of New Orleans, he taught the slickers an important lesson.

  Don’t mess with Carmody—it’ll get you killed!

  TOUGH BULLET

  CARMODY 3

  By Peter McCurtin

  First Published by Leisure Books

  Copyright © 1971, 2015 by Peter McCurtin

  First Smashwords Edition: July 2015

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Cover Painting © Edward Martin. Visit Ed here

  Series Editor: Ben Bridges

  Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Estate.

  Chapter One

  I robbed a gambling hall operated by the three Flynn Brothers—Frank, John, Bill—in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and went down to New Orleans to have myself a time. I didn’t get as much as I expected—must have been a slow night—but I got eleven thousand, give or take some, and New Orleans was the closest hell town I could think of.

  Besides, New Orleans was my kind of town. Even the way things are, you don’t find many big towns where the gangs run hog-wild, where the last two Chiefs of Police, Mealey and Hennessy in this case, get themselves sent to Boot Hill; the first by other ambitious law-dogs who wanted his job and couldn’t get him to retire sensible-like; the second by a bunch of Black Hand Italians who didn’t like the way Hennessy worked, which must have been pretty good or pretty bad, depending on how you looked at it. From the Black Hand point of view, then a new point of view in the Crescent City, it must have been pretty bad, because one dark night at the corner of Girod and Rampart these Black Handers lay back in the bushes and blew the chief in half with a blast from a double-barrel cut down to eighteen inches, with the stock sawed through behind the trigger, and hinged.

  When I heard about it, I decided that sawing the stock and putting hinges on it so it could be carried on a hook under a dustcoat was a new one on me. In New Orleans they called that kind of weapon a Black Hand persuader. I had been using sawed-offs for years, but hinging the stock was a new twist. I decided I would have to try it sometime.

  It was my kind of town all right. Chief Hennessy lived long enough to say who shot him and a dying declaration is supposed to be ironclad evidence in any regular court of law, but not in good old New Orleans. The judge was getting set to turn these Black Handers loose to do some more dirty work when a mob of righteous citizens marched on the Parish Prison and strung up and shot down the dirty foreigners. After that things went back to normal.

  I wanted things to be normal. I wanted to rest up for a while, not just hole up the way you can in Galveston and Houston. I didn’t want to hole up and get charged extra for everything and still have to wonder if the graft I paid the local law was enough to keep them from pulling a double-cross. What I wanted was to walk around free and easy and have myself a time with some of that eleven thousand.

  New Orleans was the town for that. They said it was the wildest, most wide-open big town in the South. It was so wild that newsboys didn’t try any more to sell papers with hollers of murder, rape or robbery. And that made sense to me, because how could you sell papers with yellow-rag stories of murder and robbery when everybody was murdering and robbing everybody else.

  That’s just what New Orleans was like when I went down there looking for fun. At the time I’m talking about the only way to tell the city police apart from the street gangs was—the police wore uniforms. Ask a member of the Metropolitan Police how to get from the corner of South Claiborne and Canal to any address on Louisiana Avenue, and you might get told. Or you might get told to go to hell, or you might get robbed, depending on whether the bluebelly was just feeling mean or dead drunk.

  Any town with law-dogs like that is a good place for a man on the run. You could get away with anything in New Orleans. The rest of the country might have wanted posters out on you from one end to the other; in New Orleans you were all right as long as you paid your way.

  Lord Almighty, I was ready to do that. All I wanted was a good time—you know, the drinking without fret, the women as clean as money could guarantee, the cards honest or fairly honest—and I was ready to pay for it. I was ready to pay the city detective, a big ugly bull in a hard hat, who called on me a couple of hours after I checked into the Hotel Lafitte on Mount Royal Street. I guess the room clerks in all the hotels were pretty cozy with the law.

  I showed the detective a ten-dollar bill, and he laughed in my face. “Captain Basso’ll be around to see you later,” he advised me. “The captain is Chief of Detectives. He’s the one who decides if you stay or go. And how much you pay.”

  The big bastard didn’t even ask my name. I didn’t give it to him. But I did say I was ready to cooperate with the captain. More than ready. I was looking forward to it.

  Crook or not, he was still a detective. You know what he said? He said, “Watch your step, mister.”

  Captain Basso didn’t bother me. When my trigger finger was working right, which was most of the time, I could draw and fire four bullets and put them close together in less than three seconds. I was six-one tall, thirty-seven in years, and one-ninety in weight. Nobody but a liar would call me handsome, not with the knife mark on the left side of my face, and the bullet-nicked ear. I was tough, and I thought I was smart. Well, maybe I wasn’t so smart. I got into trouble. It happened this way. There was this whore called Minnie Haha, so help me, who worked in a cathouse on North Franklin...

  ~*~

  I wasn’t suspicious because staying that way can spoil it when you climb into the sweat-sack with a woman. Anyway, I didn’t have to be; the minute I hit town I deposited my eleven thousand dollars in one of the new strongboxes in the big steel safe at the Hotel Lafitte on Royal Street. Sure I was drunk—to get drunk was part of the reason I’d come to New Orleans—and right after I got through with the first whore at Queen Gertie’s place on North Franklin, the Queen herself knocked on the door of my room, and when I said she could come in she came in fluttering her fat hands, followed by a big black buck in a derby hat and a candy-striped shirt with rosette armbands bunching up the sleeves.

  I guess he was about the biggest buck I ever saw. The silk shirt he wore was likely the biggest size they make, but the slabs of muscle across the chest and shoulders stretched it tight, threatening to pop the buttons. At first I thought there was going to be trouble, but you’d think he’d never left the old plantation—he was so goddamned polite.

  The black had two bottles, whiskey and champagne, and two glasses. Queen Gertie was all rings and bracelets and powerful perfume. I thought it was kind of raw, her walking in like that, but I guess she was pretty used to that in her line of business.

  Gertie was as fussy as the head sandwich-maker at a church social. “No complaints, I hope,” she fluttered. “We do try to give satisfaction. Rita is, shall we say, new to the profession, bu
t, well, her heart is in the right place.”

  I agreed, saying that as far as I knew everything about Rita was in the right place. Madams don’t like that kind of talk. Drunk but polite, I said, “She’s a credit to her race. What race is that, by the way?”

  “Honduran,” Queen Gertie answered, “Rita’s from Honduras.”

  I couldn’t think of anything bad about Honduras. If they had asked me to guess where Rita was from I would have said Mexico. But Honduras was all right with me, and I said so. Before I climbed off my Honduran sweetheart, I tucked a five-dollar bill behind her ear and sat up in bed. In Gertie’s place they had double beds, making it possible for more than one person to sit up at one time. I was stone-drunk, but I still had my dignity. And I still had my guns.

  Both were .38-caliber double-action Colt Lightnings, the barrels cut down. One was stuck in the outside pocket of my coat hanging over the back of a chair. That one was for show, meant to be seen like a stickpin in a necktie, meant to be gone after if trouble started. The other .38 was stuffed under the pillow. I said I wasn’t suspicious, and I wasn’t—just careful. I sized up the big black. I figured I could get the gun under the pillow before he got the gun in the coat.

  But it wasn’t like that, not entirely. Before I could ask Gertie what in hell she was doing in my room with two bottles and a too polite black man, she said, “Won’t you have a drink? It’s the custom of the house to welcome all new patrons. I was, uh, busy when you came in, and now I’d like to extend the hand of friendship.”

  Gertie sure was a fancy talker. They didn’t call her Queen Gertie for nothing. Maybe she thought she was being too fancy or else the fancy front slipped a bit.

  “What’ll it be, pardner?” she wanted to know, knowing damn well I was no city boy, maybe wanting to make me feel at home so far East. “What’s your pleasure—champagne or whiskey?”

  “Both,” I said, thinking that only a shit-kicking fool would want a drink like that. “About half-and-half, I guess.” It was the kind of thing a drunk, shit-kicking fool would say.

  Gertie laughed so hard all her rings and bracelets clinked. “I can see you’re a man who likes to try something new. And that’s the kind of a man I like. By Christ I do.”

  Gertie remembered she was a lady. “Darned if I don’t,” she said.

  Close to halfway through the two bottles, with me doing most of the drinking, Gertie got back to the subject of me being the kind of a feller that liked to try something new. But—she shook her fat body at me—was I ready to try something really different. There was this beautiful girl named Minnie Haha, and Gertie swore the name was real—a genuine Indian princess— who had never entertained a man who was able to satisfy her. It was the custom, almost a tradition by now, Gertie said, to offer this wonderful opportunity to any man who looked like he might be able to do it.

  “You could be the lucky man, Mr. Carmody,” Gertie pushed me.

  I was good and drunk. I might have mentioned my name. I was in New Orleans to have myself a time, not to sneak around. But I didn’t think I had mentioned the name. It was something to think about later.

  Gertie knew she had made a slip, and she covered by laughing a lot. Laughing came easy to Gertie. It sounded like she was laughing. The way her fat face was masked with paint and powder it was hard to tell. When she finished cackling like a randy goose she went back to calling me “Tex” and “cowboy.”

  “How much will it cost me?” I asked her.

  The big black handed me a thin Cuban cheroot and put a match to it. Then he stood back, folded his arms, still as a statue.

  More cackling from Gertie. “Not a nickel, cowboy. You can bet me if you like. The sky’s the limit, provided you got the money. If you don’t want to bet, that’s all right, too.”

  “What’s the catch?”

  “Mercy me, there’s no catch. It’s just something special. A specialty of the house. You already paid, didn’t you? We got a lot of Texas men here, and they all like to try. Of course if you’re not interested...”

  “Whoa there, Gertie,” I stopped her. Most of the hundred dollars spending money I had held out from the eleven thousand in the hotel strongbox was left. “Fifty dollars,” I said to Gertie. “I bet fifty dollars against your girl.”

  Gertie said that was fine.

  I didn’t figure I’d win the contest because old Gertie would never bet on anything but a sure thing. That was jake with me. Let the old bitch take the fifty and laugh herself sick. There was more where that came from, and when that was gone, well, the country was full of banks and gambling halls waiting to be milked.

  “Lead me to it,” I said.

  It must have looked kind of silly, Gertie leading me buff nekkid down the red-carpeted hall, the big black walking behind with the bottles and my clothes. Gertie said there was no need for me to carry the .38 I fetched out from under the pillow. Drunk or not, I saw the sense in that. Even a so-called cold fish like Minnie Haha could get rattled by a client with a gun in his hand.

  I gave Gertie the gun.

  She led me down the long hall, past the doors behind which the regular clients eased the tension at five dollars a chance. Five or ten at the most was the top price in New Orleans. I guess Gertie missed the good old days right after the war when the Yankee carpetbaggers drove the price up to as much as twenty-five for a girl with no special looks or talent.

  Minnie’s quarters were on the third floor, two rooms choked with stuffed furniture, the noise from the street deadened by heavy curtains, with an honest-to-God bathroom—very fancy. The lights were electric, in frosted globes, and one wall was taken up by an oil painting of a lot of bare-ass fat women being chased through the woods by a randy-looking little feller with chin whiskers and goat’s feet, playing a flute. I thought he would make better time if he got rid of that flute.

  Minnie Haha came out of the bathroom when we came in. She didn’t look pleased to see me, and she didn’t look sorry. She was dark enough to pass for an Indian if you didn’t know what a real Indian looked like. What she looked like was an Indian princess in a dime novel. Graceful and tall, dark-skinned and black-haired, with even features and green eyes. Good looking as hell, not a bit like any real Indian I ever saw.

  Minnie was wearing a wispy something that showed more than it hid, which of course was the idea. She climbed on to the big four-poster without saying a word and propped herself up against a stack of silk pillows. The green eyes that looked at me were blank, not cold or mean, just blank.

  Gertie spoke as if Minnie needed an interpreter. Or like a schoolmarm taking the fifth grade on a tour of the first Confederate capital at Montgomery. “Minnie doesn’t talk much, Mr … ?”

  Gertie paused for my name. I gave it to her.

  “But you’ll find her a sweet girl, Mr. Carmody,” Gertie went on. “Confidentially, Mr. Carmody, Minnie had a terrible experience as a young girl. Which explains everything, if you know what I mean.”

  “You bet,” I said. The booze was getting to me now, and I didn’t want to waste another minute. Feeling confident, I started for the bed.

  Queen Gertie coughed delicately. “The fifty dollars, Mr. Carmody. You do have it?”

  “Sling those pants this way,” I told the black. While I was digging out the fifty I felt for the key of the hotel strongbox. It was still there. I put the pants across the back of a bowlegged chair beside the bed and handed the money to Gertie. The fifty was gone then and there, but what the hell!

  Gertie tucked it away in the front of her dress. The smile she gave me was motherly. “A drink?” she asked.

  I guess I didn’t need that last drink. There was most of a quart in my belly. I took it anyway.

  “Good luck,” Gertie said, and went out, the big houseman behind her. It didn’t occur to me to ask Gertie how she planned to judge the contest. The fact is, it wasn’t much of a contest. I was ready and raring to go, but that isn’t enough sometimes. Not when a man has all that whiskey in his gut. Sure I tried. I
tried hard, but it was like trying to swim across the Colorado River in a sack.

  “Sorry, princess,” I mumbled, trying to look at her through the fog. There was something else in that bottle besides whiskey. I didn’t think about that at the time. I didn’t think about anything. I wanted to go to sleep. I went to sleep ...

  Chapter Two

  When I woke up Minnie Haha was gone. So was the four-poster. Then I realized I wasn’t in the same room. There was light coming through the oiled-paper shade on the window. There was a pain like a broken leg in my skull, and shutting my eyes against the light didn’t help much. My mouth tasted like dirty socks, and the room stank of perfume and disinfectant and whiskey. The whiskey stink came from me.

  What I needed was more whiskey and, by God, there it was! A full bottle and a clean glass standing on a chair beside the bed. The two .38’s lay beside the bottle and my duds hung over the back of the chair. When I was able to sit up—it took about two hundred years—I broke the seal on the bottle with my thumbnail and slopped whiskey into the glass.

  I had to hold down the first drink. It kept trying to come up, and fighting it to stay down brought the sweat out on my face. After the second drink, I didn’t feel any worse than ready to die, and the third made me feel recovered enough to be plain miserable.

  Sitting up, I checked the guns. They were all right and the thirty-five dollars in my pants pocket added up right. The key to the strongbox was still there. The look and smell of the room told me I was still in Queen Gertie’s. Squinting with pain, I raised the shade, and there was North Franklin Street, deserted and quiet in the hard morning light About five o’clock, I figured, and except for some loud snoring somewhere, Gertie’s place was as quiet as the street.

  There was a washstand, a jug and basin on top. I washed my face, left some water in the jug to rinse out my mouth. It took a lot of rinsing to get rid of the bad taste. After that I had another drink and —Gertie was right considerate—fired up one of the good Cuban cheroots lying on the chair.