Airtight Willie & Me by Iceberg Slim Page A

the treasure house. He remembered a late, late TV football movie line: “One for theGipper.” He paraphrased a limerick to himself with perverse glee: One more for Satin and me and Mama makes three.
    Behind the door in the living room, ebonic fatso Frank “Jelly Drop” Watson went rigid in his chair at the knock of an unscheduled caller. His mouth and nose were covered with a surgical mask to prevent inhalation of the white pile of doom dust on a card table he was packaging for his large retail trade.
    He waddled to the door, peered through the dot of a peephole. “Whatta you want?” he said.
    â€œTelegram for Mister Watson,” the messenger answered.
    â€œShove it under the door, Pops,” Jelly Drop bellowed.
    â€œCan’t; need your signature,” the messenger said firmly.
    â€œOh shit!” Jelly Drop exclaimed as he ripped off the mask and cracked the door on the chain. He took the signature board and scribbled his name.
    Pony exploded from the shadows, seized the messenger as he raised the sole of a heavy boot, kicked and crashed the chain from its moorings. Jelly Drop tumbled to his back on the carpet. Pony shoved the messenger atop him and stormed into the room. He leaned and leveled the shotgun down on Jelly Drop’s head.
    He commanded, “Both of you get up and sit on that couch with your hands on your head.”
    They trembled to their feet. The messenger scrambled to the couch. He clasped his hands on the top of his head. His false teeth chattered. Pony patted Jelly Drop’s pajamas and robe before he goosed him toward the sofa with the snub barrel of the shotgun.
    Jelly Drop stumbled to the couch. He collapsed on it. His hands shook on his bald head. He glared as Pony scooped up his precious merchandise into the plastic cover on the card table and shoved it into the shopping bag.
    Pony’s eyes were serpent bright with menace as he snarled, “Fat ass, if you blink your eyes I’ll blow your head into your lap.”
    Pony watched the pair in a dresser mirror as he rummaged forJelly Drop’s cash stash. He found it beneath shirts in a drawer where his junkie finger man had said it was. He backed out the shattered door into the hallway, shotgun aimed at the couch. He sprinted for the foyer door.
    Jelly Drop lunged from the couch to the card table. He ripped a taped pistol from its underside. He hastened to his front window and opened it. He emptied his pistol at Pony’s figure streaking down the sidewalk. The messenger fled the scene on rubbery legs. Jelly Drop smiled meager satisfaction to see Pony stumble a bit and grab at his shoulder before he disappeared into the night.
    Jelly Drop’s jaws were inflated with his moniker candy as he put through a coded call to his wholesaler, Razzle Red, to arrange credit purchase of a replacement batch of doom dust and to report that the phantom bandit, with Red’s twenty grand price on his head, had scored again.
    Satin fell into depression, felt despicably corrupt and worthless as she cruised the El Dorado down a business street on Chicago’s black Southside—the street where Razzle Red turned her out on, where, for a year, she humped and frenched off myriad multiethnic johns. But she opened up Red’s nose as none of his whores ever had, she told herself. She grinned lasciviously. My pussy hooked his nose tougher than the crystal blow he pigs up, she thought.
    For an upper, she remembered how she got in the wind to whip her master plan on Red that recovered the piles of bread she’d humped into his pockets. She remembered how she made him find her, crawl, beg her back on her terms. “No more trick-flipping, Red; set me up in a boutique or get out of my face,” she’d told him.
    â€œI’m really something else, a helluva lady,” she reassured herself. Then a downer snared her: “I’ve been delivering Red’s dope, risking my ass for a month. Gotta cut