Ezio Spinodi was in trouble but he didn’t know it. He was like a sparrowhawk who sees a songbird sitting on a barbed-wire fence and makes a casual pass. The songbird turns out to be a shrike that chases him down in a thicket and beats his brains out. He saw Helen Sedlacek, a pretty, diminutive woman sitting in a Colorado ski bar in one of those pricey new concrete hotels in Winter Park. She wasn’t dressed like a skier or a local, but he would have noticed her anyway, because he’d seen her earlier, on the Amtrak train from Salt Lake City to Denver, and he’d seen her get off in Granby, just a few miles northwest of here.
It wasn’t some huge surprise; Ezio was looking for her. He’d been sent by Humphrey DiEbola, the Detroit mob boss, to find her and Joe Service. When they got to someplace useful, like Denver, he was supposed to call in for further orders.
Ezio, popularly known as Itchy, was a moderately cynical man—he was a Detroiter. Further orders would mean only one thing, Ezio felt. But it was significant that he hadn’t been given the order from the start. So he was cool. He was not about to drop the hammer until he heard the command.
Only, they hadn’t gotten to Denver. Joe Service had been taken off the train in Granby in an ambulance. It looked to Itchy like he’d had a stroke, or a heart attack—some kind of fit. Surprising—such a young man. Maybe it had been dope, cocaine or something. Joe had been accompanied by a cop from Detroit, Itchy knew him—Detective Sergeant Mulheisen. If Joe’s fit had incidentally removed “Fang” Mulheisen from the scene, Itchy could not complain, even if it complicated things. But he believed he had obeyed his right instincts in not following Joe and Mulheisen, rather than the babe. He’d definitely gotten the feeling that Humphrey was more interested in the babe than in Joe Service. Not that Itchy believed for a nanosecond that Humphrey had a letch for this babe, no matter how young and good-looking. This babe must have her mitts on some loot. That was his theory. There is a prevailing cynicism among Detroiters. They have an image of themselves as unsentimental, can-do people. They say: Screw pretty … does it work? To hear them talk, the rest of the world is more or less Disneyland. Of course, genuine cynicism gets nothing done; a real cynic doesn’t believe in anything, much less that something will “work.” So maybe Detroiters are just pseudocynics. Severe skeptics. Beauty is a hard sell, but there are some takers. The point is, practicality is poured on one’s morning pancakes.
Helen Sedlacek was no less a Detroit girl than Itchy a Detroit guy. Born and raised on the east side, she had gone to Dominican, a Catholic girls school, graduated from Michigan State University, started her first business in Birmingham (once a suburb, but now the epicenter of the Detroit municipal zone). She had definitely eaten Motor City molasses on her hotcakes. Which is not to say that she hadn’t her soft, feminine side.
Helen was about thirty, small, slim, and dark. She had gallons of black hair, with a silver skunk stripe rising from her right temple. She had a boy’s physique and she was strong and lean-muscled. Fearless and brave; sweet and demure. Everyone has at least two sides: how they see themselves, versus how others see them. At least two, more like dozens, especially as the years go by.
At one point, when she was about fourteen, Helen had acquired the nickname Sonya. Schoolkids aren’t notably discriminatory when it comes to ethnic origins. Or rather, they are very discriminatory, but careless: they don’t distinguish between a Yugoslavian and a Russian, especially if both countries are part of what was then called the Iron Curtain, or the Red Menace. No Serbs or Croats in those days, before the walls came tumbling down. She was known as Sonya Bitchacockoff.
She wore nothing but black, and her black hair was long and generally draped over her pale face. She tended toward capes and hoods. She read poetry, especially Anna Akhmatova, and even affected an accent—“Vot do you vant,” she would mutter. Or, with a wave of the hand, “Leaf me alone.” To her credit, she genuinely liked Akhmatova’s verse, although she was more attracted by the legendary image, and she enjoyed correcting the pronunciation of the name by her teenaged friends—“Perhaps you muss be Slaf,” she would say, pityingly.
But the “Bitchacockoff” tag was derived from a bizarre incident. It hardly needs to be said that teenagers experiment with sex; it’s required. She had a couple of girlfriends with whom she discussed the varieties of sexual experience, a lot. Each pretended to a greater experience than they possessed. They were all virgins, but denied it. One of them, a rapidly developing girl of Italian extraction, even claimed that she had “gone down” on her boyfriend.
“It’s not bad,” she claimed, “just kind of salty and a little sweetish-sour at the same time. You have to be careful not to gag, when it goes down your throat.”
“You mean you let him come?” the others asked.
“Oh, no! Ugh! I could never do that. I mean when it pokes the back of your mouth, you know?”
One night a bunch of them were parked in a van, down by Windmill Point. One of the boys had stolen a bottle of his parents’ booze, a fifth of Southern Comfort. It was sweet and palatable to their youthful tastes and soon they were all more or less tipsy, if not drunk. The toughest of the boys, Cazzie, started talking about oral sex. There was a lot of snickering and giggling, boasting, and the conversation evolved to the point where he dared the girls—there were three of them, including Helen—to show their nerve by “going down.”
The other girls seemed at least cautiously willing to try, but Helen balked. She wasn’t against a lot of kissing and feeling, even a furtive hand job, but she wasn’t going to actually allow some boy to penetrate any of her orifices—not in front of other people. The boys, however, were intensely excited by the idea, naturally. The Southern Comfort had emboldened them all, lowered their inhibitions or, at least, had provided them with an excuse if it actually occurred. But not Helen.
“I want to go,” she insisted, straightening her clothing.
“Aw, c’mon, Sonya,” Cazzie said. He pulled her to him. “A little blow job never hurt anybody.” He had actually unzipped and produced a throbbing penis that was about ready to explode. The other kids were thrilled and joined in.
“Do it!” they cried.
Cazzie, encouraged and sexually maddened, grabbed Helen by the head and forced her face to his groin. He was strong and clearly intended to force her to do it, thrusting his rigid organ at her lips.
With a snarl, Helen opened her mouth and then clamped her little, sharp teeth onto the end of his penis, biting down as hard as she could. The boy screamed and cuffed her head away. He howled in agony, then rage. Helen spit blood into the boy’s face. That was a brilliant gesture.
Cazzie was so concerned with wiping his face—he wasn’t sure that the spittle wasn’t semen, an unsettling thought—and tenderly cosseting his penis that he didn’t strike her again, or kick her out. The others were scared and the driver quickly started the van and drove to Helen’s home. “You bitch!” Cazzie roared when they pushed her out of the van in front of the house.
It was an instant legend. But for Helen, the significant thing was that she had acted spontaneously. She analyzed her behavior incessantly. It was so unlike her, she felt. What was she thinking? She saw herself as poetic, introspective, though daring and unconventional. She entertained the idea that she ought to have made at least a feint at performing the act, and then to have recoiled in disgust. That would be the way to do it. Later she might advertise her disgust, so everyone would know she’d had the nerve, but she’d loathed the act.
Or she ought to have become hysterical from the start, perhaps. To have made a scene that would startle the other kids and awaken them to the enormity of what was being proposed. That probably would have worked. Even as far gone as Cazzie was in Southern Comfort and sexual arousal, he should have remembered who her father was. Yes, she could have invoked her father, the gangster. She’d already had some experience with that: often enough, she’d had to endure a definite social coolness, a certain notoriety, from some of the more snobbish kids. What was the good of having a mobster for a father if he couldn’t protect her, at least with his reputation?
Her friend Julie, also from a mob family, had shared this semi-ostracization with her. Julie, however, had been in the van. It occurred to Helen that if Julie hadn’t been there, the mob threat might have worked. But it was less easy to invoke when Julie was present. Julie, after all, was the one who had confessed that she’d gone down on her boyfriend.
So, faced with the apparent approval of her peers, faced with the penis itself, she had chosen violence. And she had chosen it, she had to recognize that. It wasn’t just an automatic reaction. She had opted for attack. That surprised her. To say nothing of Cazzie and the others.
Now she was a teenaged legend: Watch out for Sonya, she’ll bite your cock off. Before she was thirty she had done a lot more than that. She had killed men and not by accident. Intentionally. Murdered the boss of Detroit’s mob, no less. She had all but leaped into the back seat of his Cadillac to blast him with a shotgun. In Montana, where she had gone to lie low with her lover, Joe Service, she had been tracked down and attacked by a hired killer. She had shot him to death in a bloody hot springs. Bitchacockoff, indeed—how about your head?
On the flip side, Helen thought of herself as a good, loving, and dutiful daughter, an ordinary, ambitious, and modern young woman. She’d founded her own consulting firm, she’d been successful in the most mundane of ways. She never thought of herself as a killer. Sure, she had killed, but only once on purpose. The others she dismissed as accidental. She was not sorry for having blasted Carmine Busoni. He deserved killing. He had ordered the death of her father.
In her education she had been told by the nuns and the priest that “Thou shalt not kill” was absolute, it applied across the board. But there were exceptions, obviously. It wasn’t ever applied to soldiers in battle. And you couldn’t be blamed for killing in self-defense; in fact, not to resist was seen as a kind of betrayal of one’s self, one’s group. And in her family, the principle of revenge was respected.
She didn’t recall ever having a conversation with her father in which he said, “Honey, when someone kills a relative it’s your duty to kill him.” But there had been many stories recounted by her father and her mother in which exactly that principle was illustrated and approved. The only thing was, these events had taken place in the Old Country and, romantic posturing aside, Helen wasn’t enthusiastic about the Old Country. Her parents’ tales of the Old Country bored her—why couldn’t they stick to the present? They weren’t in the Old Country anymore. So some Bogdanovich, say, angry at a seduction of his wife or daughter or sister, had waylaid and killed a Simonich. Three or four generations of Simoniches and Bogdanoviches have to kill each other? Not in America.
She had pondered this after her father’s death. There seemed to be a vague but important reservation that the revenge code applied particularly in the Old Country, not here. She thought it had something to do with the prevalence of family and clan traditions over there, and possibly with the doubtful legitimacy of successive governments. There, governments—the State—were not seen as adequate, reliable, or even just. In America, presumably, it was different. For Helen, there were no family stories about revenge in America where the initial act of treachery had occurred in America. Except maybe for hillbillies in Appalachia.
She considered the frequent accounts of gangland slayings where revenge was invoked by the perpetrators. Big Sid and Mrs. Sid would usually shake their heads disapprovingly and say, “Those Sicilians.” The Sicilians, then, were to be seen as crude, primitive people—Old World hillbillies, still addicted to a system in which clans and families had reserved the final act of justice to themselves. In the Old Country, sure: revenge was a duty. Here: no. Those Sicilians, they forget that they aren’t in the Old Country anymore.
Nonetheless, when her father was slain by Carmine’s orders, shot down by a nameless, faceless, hired assassin, Helen Sedlacek clearly saw that justice was left in her hands. The police were helpless, hopeless. She felt that the investigating officer, Detective Sergeant Mulheisen, was unconcerned, possibly incompetent. And when she encountered the private, independent investigator for the mob, Joe Service, she found a sympathetic and attractive man who would help her obtain justice. She prepared almost religiously for her act of retribution and was thrilled when she was able to carry it out effectively, with Joe’s help.
Since then, events had taken unexpected turns. She had soon resigned herself to the fact that her old, straight life was now closed to her. By now, she was caught up in more complex situations, for which she didn’t always feel prepared. Joe Service had warned her about this. The mob, he’d said, would feel that they had to respond to her act of simple justice—it was the old code. They would pursue her. And they had. But she had prevailed.
Helen did not have the common attitude toward the mob. It wasn’t the stuff of movies and novels for her. It was familiar. She knew the people involved, some of them intimately. She wasn’t awed by them, not very impressed, even. She knew many of these people to be stupid and ignorant, incompetent. They had names and faces for her: half-witted James who drooled, incredibly vain Guido who wouldn’t dance at parties because he wasn’t good at it, neurotic Ari who was sure he was too short, hopelessly fat and blundering Nick who wouldn’t go swimming because he was ashamed to be seen in swim trunks. She knew these dorks.
But knowing that her father was a mobster didn’t mean that she had any clear idea of what he actually did. He seemed mostly idle, but he was always talking about “business.” What kind of business? She didn’t know and she understood that it was not to be inquired about too closely. She knew almost nothing about how the organization actually functioned. She was genuinely dismayed when they continued to pursue her after Carmine’s slaying. Why hadn’t they, of all people, understood that she’d had to revenge her father? Okay, they had to make a show of revenging Carmine, but when she’d survived the attempts to kill her, she felt that should be the end of it.
She had survived, she hadn’t tried to retaliate in turn. In a curious way, she believed that her success had crucially altered the equation. It was the mandate of heaven, a concept she remembered from a college class in Chinese history, perhaps a little unclearly. Sometimes, it seemed, a perfectly legitimate and long-established dynasty had been overthrown. The new regime justified its usurpation under the handy principle of the mandate of heaven, which turned out to be a form of realpolitik, at least as she understood it. The emperor is defeated, long live the (new) emperor. Of course, she wasn’t the new emperor. She was just an agent of change. Humphrey DiEbola was the new don. In fact, in the eyes of the most knowledgeable, he’d been the “real” don for years. So maybe it wasn’t a change of regimes. But she had not thought that far.
The first hit attempt had separated Helen from Joe, but they’d finally been reunited, in Salt Lake City. Then they had survived another botched attempt. She’d thought they were through the bad part. Unfortunately, just when she and Joe were on their way to freedom—the vindication of success!—Joe had suffered a serious medical relapse on the train bound for Denver, in the very throes of sexual celebration.
By then, Helen was getting more proficient at thinking on her feet. Mulheisen had actually been on the train, hot on their heels, literally in the next compartment. Under the circumstances, Helen had been compelled to abandon Joe to the detective’s mercy, which permitted her to get away.
Not incidentally, she had also managed to throw a couple of duffel bags full of money off the train, intending to salvage them later. This money, amounting to nearly eight million dollars, was the remnant of a larger amount that her father had originally skimmed from an unauthorized mob activity in Detroit. She felt it was her money. Joe Service, who had actually acquired the money, felt it was his, but he was happy to share it with her. Humphrey DiEbola felt it belonged to the mob, and he wasn’t interested in sharing. This complication helped to confuse the issue of revenge: was the mob willing to forget vengeance for money? Humphrey had hinted as much. Vengeance wasn’t the primary principle it was construed to be.
Itchy was familiar with an old adage: When a guy says it ain’t the money, it’s the principle—it’s the money. Humphrey’s interest wasn’t revenge, it wasn’t sex. It was money, just as any Detroit kid would know. Itchy was no genius. He was one of those mob figures whom the press like to inflate when they get caught, or take the fall, instead of the real villains. Not that Itchy wasn’t a genuine villain, but he was only the visible villain. He was loyal and didn’t think too much. Years ago, he had gone to prison for Carmine and the press had described him as a deadly ice-blooded hit man who had taken a softer fall. In the present case, his function was to “bring Helen home.”
That’s what he told Helen now. Or did he have other instructions? Bring home the money? Cancel her? That’s what she wanted to know.
She and Itchy discussed this issue in the hotel bar, in Winter Park. Itchy was a man of fifty years, not much taller than Helen, despite his expensive elevator shoes. He was a careful dresser. He had a very black mustache and was concerned about his thinning hair, which had once been his pride. Now it was streaked with silver, or would have been, if he didn’t use dye regularly. He advised Helen that she could get rid of the skunk stripe in her hair with his special preparation.
Itchy was a competent fellow, to a point, and unlike Helen, his ethical concerns stopped with loyalty to the boss. He was willing to use violence, if necessary, usually in the form of a discreet bullet. He didn’t like breaking people’s limbs, or scarring them. But he would, if so instructed.
He had actually met Helen a couple of times, when she was a child. He had liked her father. Everyone did. And he liked her, as much as you could like a child. Although, it was obvious she wasn’t a child anymore. He didn’t consider it a factor. To Itchy, Helen was just a songbird sitting on a wire. He called Humphrey as soon as he saw her, sitting at the bar, alone. Humphrey asked about the money. Specifically: “Has she got it with her?”
Itchy: “Not that I can see.”
Humphrey: “Well, find out.”
Itchy: “And then what? That’s why I’m calling. It’s cold. I’m standing outside.”
Humphrey: “I want to talk to her.”
Itchy: “Okay.”
Humphrey: “Don’t you do a thing. Hear me? I gotta talk to her, first.”
Helen didn’t want to talk to Humphrey, initially. She felt it was something that she and Ezio—she did not once use that despised nickname, which he’d always resented but had come to accept— could work out. She wanted his help in recovering the money, she said. She brought it right up, without any probing on his part. It was somewhere out in the country, lying near the railroad in two not very conspicuous blue duffel bags. It wasn’t very safe there, but it would be safe for a while, she thought.
Helen could see that she was stuck with Itchy, for the time being. He hadn’t tried anything heavy, except that he warned her he wouldn’t hesitate to gun her down if she tried to run off. She smiled and replied that if he even thought of taking a gun out she would blow his ass to kingdom come with the Smith & Wesson .38 in her coat pocket. Itchy wasn’t sure if she was kidding, but anyway, it didn’t matter. They were stuck with each other.
“Whether you talk to him or not, I gotta call the man back,” Itchy said. “Okay?”
Helen sighed. “Okay, but you don’t say a word about the money. I’ll take care of that.”
Humphrey convinced Helen on the phone that he bore her no ill will. She didn’t say anything about the money and he didn’t mention it either. But she knew it was her hole card. Humphrey wouldn’t do anything until he knew where the money was and how he could get it.
Humphrey was concerned about her, he said. He’d always been like an uncle—Unca Umby. He cared about her and her mother. That was a good touch, just mentioning her mother, in a friendly, non-threatening way. He reminded her again that he had tried to dissuade Carmine from hitting her old man, she must believe that. Here he had precedent on his side. She must know that on an earlier occasion, when Big Sid had dipped a little too deep, it had been Humphrey who convinced Carmine not to whack the likable mobster. It was true. Humphrey had long believed that loyalty was overrated. Crooks will be crooks. You had to convince the underlings that their success was related to your success. You couldn’t prosper, no one could prosper, if everyone was going to be ripping off more than was reasonable. A little skim, sure. But nothing messy or pretty soon there’s no icing on the cake. That time, Humphrey had gotten Big Sid off with a wrist slap and a season or two of laboring in the latrines of criminal activity—enforcing and discipline.
Once back in good graces, however, Big Sid had gone back to his old sticky-fingered ways. On an earlier occasion Humphrey had told Helen that when the second transgression was discovered, he had felt that a little more severe discipline might be in order, but not a hit. Big Sid was a friendly, likable guy. The business needed these guys, a lot. It made the business a lot easier. But Carmine was pissed, he wouldn’t listen. There was no way of proving that this was the truth, but Helen believed it, which, after all, is what mattered.
What was the big problem that was bugging Humphrey? It didn’t seem to be the money, or he would have said something. It was something bigger. He couldn’t say on the phone. It was too big. He’d tell her all about it when she got home.
Helen, of course, wanted to go home. Especially with Joe in the hospital, soon to be in the penitentiary, she figured. He was no good to her now. Maybe he’d never be anything to her again. She felt drained of whatever little sentimental sweetness her soul had ever possessed. Or maybe only the Detroit molasses remained. Time to cut your losses.
Cutting losses did not mean forgetting about the money. But it was the dead of winter. If the money hadn’t been discovered already—and if someone, say a railroad worker or a rancher, had found it lying in the boondocks, next to the railroad, the story would have hit the news with a loud splash—then it could probably lie there till spring. It would take a bit of finding, obviously. She’d simply tossed a couple of duffel bags full of money off the train, somewhere west of Granby. She had a pretty good idea of the location—she’d noticed some signs—but that was not the same as having a dead fix on the site. The idea of it just lying out there, available to any passing hunter or cross-country skier … it wasn’t a comforting thought. And for all she knew, one or both of the duffels might have broken open on impact and even now the Colorado winds were broadcasting money hither and yon.
She had an image from the old Kubrick movie The Killing, where the desperate robber’s suitcase of loot breaks open on the airport tarmac and prop wash sends the dollars flying. That vision haunted her.
What the heck. She was here. Might as well go look. Itchy was agreeable. He had a rented car. They took off up Route 40.
The problem was, she knew that the money had to be somewhere west of Granby, not too far, but it was hard to judge distance on the train. It’s not like driving your car, where you constantly pass signs, annotated landmarks. On the train you’re just riding through the countryside. She thought she had a good idea, though.
Driving westward—that is, in the direction the train had traveled from—she was at first discouraged, because she thought they had been closer to Granby than they had, in fact, been. But when they drove into Byers Canyon, she realized it must be beyond that spectacular red-rock gorge, along which the Colorado River surged. Soon they issued out onto the high plateau, and then she saw, to the south, the mountains she’d noticed when she tossed the bags. Also, she recalled that the tracks had been close to the highway, on the north side. But her hopes fell when they got to Kremmling and the tracks shifted to the south and they couldn’t follow them.
She told Itchy to turn around. It had to be on the stretch between Kremmling and the canyon. They were only a few miles east of Kremmling on the return when she saw a railway maintenance shack with the painted inscription H.B.D. 98.9.
“I saw that when I first lugged the bags to the platform,” she said. The platform was in the middle of the double-decker car, at the foot of the stairs, with openable upper doors on either side of the passageway. She’d opened the upper half of the northside door and tossed the bags out, on the side away from the highway.
Shortly, the tracks crossed the highway, and now she knew she was close. They slowed and she looked carefully at the mountains to the south. And then another remembered landmark appeared: a large, wooden archway at the gate to a ranch. It was not far. They parked and hiked across the road and began to walk the track.
They walked about a mile and Itchy wanted to quit. He wasn’t outfitted for this. He had snow in his fancy shoes; they were ruined. He was cold, and he’d lost confidence in Helen. She wasn’t daunted, however. “Just one more curve,” she begged.
And then they saw the bags. They were about a hundred yards apart, and no more than a hundred feet from the road. She urged Itchy to go back and get the car. By the time he returned, she was standing by the road with both bags.
Now the big question: How to split?
They discussed it on the drive up over the pass to the highway to Denver. Itchy’s initial claim was simple: no split, return the money to Humphrey. But Helen’s argument was also attractive: Humphrey had no idea if they actually could recover the money, or how much it was. He hadn’t even asked if she’d had it with her. So he didn’t know. They could split it, she argued, and he was free to return his share to his boss, if that was what he wanted. Or, he could take his share and go live on a tropical island. She would never rat on him, she couldn’t. She was going back to Detroit. She might have to return something to Humphrey, if it came to that, but she’d decide that if and when it came up.
It would come up, Itchy was certain. But he was receptive to her suggestion that even if he returned to Detroit with his share, she would have no reason to tell Humphrey that he had taken a cut.
The first order of the day was to count the money. They drove south of Denver and checked into a new, almost empty hotel off I-25, near Castle Rock. It was an ideal place, comfortable, inexpensive, and isolated by a newly landscaped site that hadn’t been completely cleaned up and resodded yet. In the room, they counted up $7,375,223. Fifty-fifty would yield $3,687,611.50 apiece.
Itchy had no visions of palm trees and margaritas. He was going back to Detroit too. And he wasn’t going with no three million and change, a hefty chunk of which would have to be turned over to Humphrey. He proposed a 33-33-34 split, with Helen keeping the extra point.
No, no, she argued. Remember that Humphrey doesn’t know how big the pie is, or even that they had it. Why not a mil for Humphrey, maybe a few extra bucks to make it look realistic, and they’d split the remaining six or so? They could figure out a plausible story and Humphrey would have to accept it.
Itchy didn’t buy it. They went on in this way for a while, then went for a walk down to the town, for a little air, and Itchy found some cheap cigars in a convenience store. On the way back, nothing resolved, they loitered around yet another construction site, another new roadside motel, while Itchy smoked one of the cigars. He perched on a low concrete wall, recently poured but now cured and waiting for a hotel to be erected on it. He puffed his cigar and examined his ruined shoes.
“Two hunnerd and fifty bucks,” he said, disgustedly.
“You can buy yourself a dozen new pairs,” Helen observed. “Why do you smoke such bad cigars?”
“That’s all they got,” Itchy said, poking at his shoes mournfully.
She paced about, gazing at the hazy mountains to the west, beyond which the sun had just set. She heard a cry and wheeled around. Itchy had disappeared. One shoe lay on its side on the earth, next to the wall.
She raced to the wall and looked down into the huge excavated basement. No Itchy. But there was a large circular concrete projection from the earthen floor, perhaps a drain or something. It looked like a concrete tube on end, a vertical culvert. She found a place in the wall where she could clamber down onto the floor, which would soon be poured with concrete, level with the lip of the tube. She could see down into the tube. It was perhaps eighteen inches in diameter, maybe more. She could see Itchy’s feet, about three feet down, one of them stockinged.
Somehow, he had tumbled backward and into the tube, no doubt striking his head in the process. He was neatly stuffed in the culvert. She called, but there was no response.
She stood up and took a deep breath. It was horrible, but there it was. The answer to her problems. There was no way Itchy could extricate himself, if he wasn’t already dead. He was headfirst down a drain, unable to move his arms. He would soon suffocate, or maybe … well, she didn’t know just how he would die, but he would by morning, that was obvious.
She could call for help, but that would mean the fire department, the police, and then … well, she couldn’t call for help. She looked down the drain. There was a muffled groan. She sighed and reached down. By nearly diving into the hole herself, just barely keeping her feet on the ground, she could seize Itchy’s ankles. She began to tug.
The next morning, on the way to the airport, she explained the cut to him: with his million he could keep a low profile, and when he eventually retired he’d be in excellent financial shape. She knew of some excellent investments. As for Humphrey, he’d have to be satisfied with the news that they had been unable to locate the money. Hell, he didn’t even know it had been on the train.