Read Online Gat Heat by Richard S. Prather - Free Book Online

probably around here, somewhere close. Stub must’ve had time to give it a toss before you grabbed him.”
    Peterson called over a uniformed patrolman, told him what to look for. He found it in a minute and a half. Stub Corey of course expressed great amazement when shown the silencer. “What in the world,” he said, “is dat?”
    Lieutenant Peterson quietly screwed “dat” over the bore of the gun he personally had taken from Stub Corey.
    â€œI wouldn’t of believed it if I hadn’t seen it,” Stub said, once again showing us the empty space in his grin.
    I took a step toward him. “Stub,” I said, “I think you need a tooth out on the other side. In the interest of harmony, balance, and beauty—”
    Lieutenant Peterson grabbed my balled fist in his hands. “Easy, Scott. You want to get us all tossed in jail?”
    â€œYeah, that’s right,” I said. “At least I got to hit Bingo.” I paused. “I just hope he doesn’t sign a complaint. Hell, let me hit Stub, and they can both sign complaints.”
    â€œBe a good fellow, Scott,” he said wearily. “We got enough troubles. O.K.?”
    â€œO.K.” I sighed. “Well, here’s what happened.”
    I told him and then followed the gang down to the Hollywood jail and told it again to a stenographer. I signed the statement, jawed five minutes, and left. It was my guess that I was getting out of jail about half an hour before Stub Corey, Little Phil, and Bingo.
    But even half an hour, I figured, would give me time to get to Jimmy Violet’s hoodlum sanctuary before his boys were sprung.

7
    I turned off Laurel Canyon Boulevard, drove to the one-lane asphalt drive leading uphill to Jimmy Violet’s home.
    On the way I’d been worrying the knot of perplexity which had started growing when Bingo Kestel first slipped into my Cad outside the Beverly Hills Hotel.
    I am not unacquainted with hoods. On the contrary, because my business is crime and criminals, the law and lawbreakers, hardly a day passes when I don’t have some kind of contact with cons or ex-cons, gun-toters or musclemen. But I couldn’t think of a solitary reason why Jimmy Violet would—all of a sudden—be interested in me.
    It was that suddenness which perplexed me.
    In the last month I hadn’t been on a case which, even by a pretty good stretch of imagination, could be considered as in the area of Jimmy Violet’s interests. Those interests were primarily such enterprises as gambling, extortion, prostitution, and “legitimate” investments into which he’d poured hot money. And the only case I was on at the moment was the job Mrs. Halstead had hired me to do.
    Any connection between the Halsteads and Jimmy Violet struck me as extraordinarily unlikely. But the timing intrigued me more than a little. I’d taken the Halstead case late last night, and Jimmy’s boys had braced me before noon today. It seemed an odd coincidence. And I’m a guy very leery of coincidences.
    When I’d been talking to Bingo about Jimmy Violet’s lake, it had not been just a play on words. The guy actually did own a lake. It wasn’t anything like Lake Superior, but it was a respectable little body of water for a man-made job, approximately seventy-five by a hundred yards. Violet’s house sat on an artificial island in the middle of the lake and could be reached only by the road I was on. Unless you wanted to climb a ten-foot-high fence and swim in—or maybe wade; I didn’t know how deep the water was.
    I didn’t particularly want to know, either. If the lake was deep enough, there were probably already some guys down there tied to anvils. Jimmy wasn’t known as a particularly forgiving fellow. It was said he didn’t stay mad at a guy long, though, since he held no ill will for the dead.
    The road ran out over the water to the roughly circular