![]() Commonly, to accentuate the silence and dreariness of the scene before the fight, a tumbleweed would roll past the fighters. Shootouts were common in many old Western films, most famously in spaghetti Westerns. Sternwall, a Midway Books “paperback original”, 1952 one printing, never republished.Title text: The tumbleweed then tried to roll off into the sunset, but due to the Old West's placement north of the subtropical ridge, the prevailing winds were in the wrong direction. – The Last of the Elegant International Assassins, by Horace P. His first job, and he wouldn’t make a dime from it, but at least he had gotten his feet wet. What could Billy do? One thing he had learned from his magazine stories was that a professional assassin always completes his contracts, so he raised the brick again and brought it down on the big man’s head.īilly walked away, as quickly as possible without running, and it wasn’t until he reached the end of the block that he remembered to drop the brick. “What the hell?” said the big guy, Jerry, Marie’s husband, staring drunkenly down at Marie’s crumpled body. Billy raised the brick high and as the man and woman staggered arm in arm past the corner of the alley Billy brought the brick down as hard as he could.Īnd he smashed the skull of poor drunk Marie. He heard the voices, the laughter, getting louder, coming closer to the entrance to the alleyway. It was those voices, the loud, laughing voices of Marie and Jerry!īilly shook his head the way a dog does when it wakes up, and he pulled himself to his feet. ![]() He would just rest his eyes for a minute. Fortunately, this was the Bowery, and there was nothing unusual about a man sitting in an alleyway. He got sleepy again, so he sat down with his back against the wall, with the brick on his lap. He went back to the entrance of the alleyway and waited. He rooted around in the darkness, and he found quite a few empty beer and wine bottles, but he figured he needed something more lethal, and finally he found a pile of rubble with some bricks in it, and he picked out a nice one. Now he just needed to find something to bump off Marie’s husband with. He turned left outside the bar, and there was the dark alley. “You’re welcome,” said Billy, with his small-town politeness, and he quickly climbed off his bar stool and staggered out. He glanced down at the change in front of him, separated two quarters and shoved them toward Bob, and pocketed the remainder. Marie and Jerry were still there, thank God. This is not a hotel.”īilly looked down the bar. Finally, he nodded off, and he was awakened by Bob rapping that Marine Corps ring of his on the bar top. When would Marie and Jerry leave? Despite himself, and despite the fact that he tried to pace himself, Billy realized he was getting drunk. They were weird back home in Wheeler’s Corners and they were weird here in the big city. They sure didn’t look like a couple that didn’t get along, but, who knows, thought Billy. Billy got hungry, so he had a couple of the dogs himself. Marie ate four of the dogs, her husband Jerry must have eaten a dozen of them before he was through. It looked like they were going for the Wednesday night two-for-one hot dog special. Marie and Jerry drank, and laughed, they ate. He was sitting on the other side of the corner down at the end of the bar, where he could keep an eye on Marie and Jerry, who sat about midway at the bar. He didn’t want to get too drunk, not for his first “hit”. He would just have to find a way.īilly was drinking the house bock, but he tried to drink slow. Well, nobody ever said being an assassin was going to be easy. He would have to find some other way to bump off the guy. He would really have to find a gun for his next job, but right now all he had was his old pen knife, and the more he thought about it, the more he thought the pen knife might not do. Billy didn’t mind that he was loud so much, but the big part gave him pause, because Billy didn’t have a gun. Besides the fifty bucks Marie had promised Billy, she told him he could keep whatever money Jerry had left in his wallet, if he had anything left.īilly got to Bob’s early, and, sure enough, after a while Marie came in, with her husband, or at least Billy assumed he was her husband. It would look like a robbery, and that’s what Marie would tell the cops. When they left the bar, which probably wouldn’t be until Bob cut Jerry off, they would turn left on the way to their trap up the block, and all Billy had to do was wait in the alley next to Bob’s and then do the deed. The Marie dame had told him that her husband Jerry was taking her to Bob’s Bowery Bar that night for dinner and drinks for her birthday, and that Jerry would get roaring drunk the way he always got when he went to Bob’s. The night when Billy Baskins would officially begin his career as an elegant international assassin.
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