Airtight Willie & Me by Iceberg Slim

beautiful self in jail or the grave for this hotel that ain’t worth a hair of your head, or your baby daughter’s, to get. Hook a fine young man and get married.”
    She shaped a smug smile. “I have, and I am. And I’m going to own this hotel, Mister Sims, and live happily ever after.” She turned and exited into the jaws of the ravening weather. Snowflakes spangled her indigo mane like crystal stars.
    He shook his head as he watched her pull her opulent machine away into the blizzard pit of twilight. The brute machine growled through the darkening city’s flashbulb neon to the highway for the Big Windy. Satin flipped on the radio to her and Malique “Pony” Jones’s torch ballad, Lou Rawl’s “You’ll Never Find.” Orgasmic waves rocked her with the expectation of Pony’s bed. She snorted a blow of pure cocaine. Her hand-fashioned boot stomped the golden bomb toward Pony, the bandit scourge of black Chicago’s dope dealers.
    Ninety miles away in fallen dark, Malique “Pony” Jones parked his tan Mercury Marquis in a side street on Chicago’s Southside. He slid his black-clad Whippet frame to the street. His huge grey eyes were slits of cold-blooded purpose as he cradled, under his arm, a sawed-off shotgun in a shopping bag. A floppy black hat was jammed down on his long skull and black silky hair. Thrilly jolts of ecstasy electrified his junkie loins.
    His fancy-prancy equine stride took him a half block down the ghetto street into the dingy foyer of a tenement building. Stevie Wonder’s voice and music issued faintly. Pony’s gloved hands slipped a Halloween fright mask across his too-pretty face. He moved silently up the foyer stairs. He faded into hall shadows facing the front ground apartment of his prey.
    For tensioned eons it seemed to him he compulsively glanced at the radium face of his wristwatch as he fidgeted impatiently waitingto snap the trap. He heard Ink Spot, Bill Kenny’s romantic falsetto voice, singing, “If I Didn’t Care” waft from an old 78 record on the second floor. His mother’s all-time favorite he remembered.
    His delicate mouth fashioned a psychotic smile as he remembered how his father hated the record, despised it because, he sneered, “It’s so gutless and faggy I’ll puke. Shut it off or I’ll stomp the record player to pieces.”
    The muscle-bound cocksucker hated me too, Pony thought, as he remembered how his father caved in his ribs during sadistic roughhouse play when he was a willowy kid of ten to toughen him and “grow some muscles on that sissy body,” his father had vowed. He remembered how joyous he was behind his forced camouflage of token tears to see, at last, his father’s monster muscles raped and slain in the coffin by the steel mill, by his father’s sucker Paul Bunyan bit in blackface for the white boss’s pats on his nappy head for his slave labor.
    Pony fondly patted his blue steel money minter. He thought, I wish the dead and stinking bastard could see me make more money in minutes than he could hump up in a year. I wish he could see how much more lavishly I support Mama, could see how clever and bad and tough I am, could see me, for years, take off small fortunes without taking a single fall.
    He heard the whoosh, felt the icy blast of the foyer door opening. He stiffened as an elderly Western Union messenger entered the foyer with the telegram he’d sent to his mark. He inched forth as the messenger drummed his knuckles against the door. His plunder lust, his buried passion for death, erected him as he caressed the shotgun crutch for his invalid ego, for the crushed image of his manhood.
    Rapture barraged him to see his gargantuan shadow stalk the wall. He felt like an implacable Colossus of conquest, more ferocious than Genghis Khan. He smiled as he crowned himself Pony, the Rex of Heist! He cat-footed closer to the door of