Hang By Your Neck by Henry Kane

Author:Henry Kane [Kane, Henry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4405-4138-4
Publisher: Prologue Books
Published: 1949-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I paid my bar bill and I went out into the sunshine. I had a half hour to kill and I knew where to kill it. I waved a hand at a taxi and I went to Barrow Street. I climbed up the steep stairs and I knocked on the door. Prairie opened it, and his thick round body stayed in the doorway. “Hi, Transom.”

“Boy, that’s one hell of a climb.”

“You ain’t kidding.”

His thick round body was still in the doorway.

“Aren’t you going to ask me in?”

“No.”

I pointed past his shoulder.

“Merrill in?”

“Yup.”

“I’d like to talk with him.”

“You got an answer to that before, Transom.”

“It’s important, Prairie. I want to—”

“You asked him before, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“You got an answer, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“So?”

I ducked, and pushed by him. He didn’t expect that. He grunted and slammed the door shut. There was nobody in the studio. It smelled of whiskey and sweat and paint and turpentine. “Wise guy,” Prairie said, and flung himself toward me. I ducked again. I heard the wheeze of the air from his lungs as he went past me. I twisted around and went after him. I rushed a fist at his solar plexus and I heard him grunt again. He turned with a look of surprise on his face, and I pushed a fist into that. He smiled, happily, and dove at me again, and again I ducked. The impetus carried him all the way to the wall and one of Conrad Merrill’s naked ladies fell off the wall and bounced off Prairie to the floor. I lunged after him, and I brought one up all the way from the floor to the back of his ear. It didn’t move him. He stood like wood. He flailed an arm toward me, backward, and my mouth was bleeding. He whirled, and I moved under his arm. Now we were reversed. I had my back to the wall and Prairie was in front of me grinning. “Wise guy,” he said. I smelled the whiskey from him, as he probably did from me. “Wise guy,” he said, with his arms out wide and his neck pulled in and his bald head forward and low. He leaped, bull-rush, head first. I moved, and I got out of it. His head went into the wall with a thud, but one hand caught the sleeve of my topcoat and I spun around to the floor, losing my hat. I got off the floor, quick. He was still crouched against the wall, turning slowly in the crouch. His eyes were creased in a fat grimace and the whites were showing.

I jumped him.

I shouldn’t have.

Wrestling with Prairie O’Neil was foolhardy. Drunk or sober, numb from violent contact with a wall or no—wrestling with Prairie O’Neil was foolhardy. It was like trying to embrace a bronze statue in the park. You couldn’t even get your arms around him, and despite the pudgy look of him, it was all hard and knobby. We floundered, until his educated hands, arms, and legs made contact.

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