Sin City by Harold Robbins

a little snarly. I’ll tell you what, we’ll draw for the first month’s rent, double or nothing.”
    He shuffled the cards. His hands were twisted and gnarled from the old injury or arthritis, but he was still quick.
    â€œThey call you Lucky, don’t they?”
    â€œHow’d you know that?”
    The old man shrugged and gave a small, secretive smile. “I hear lots of things.”
    He spread the cards in a fan.
    â€œPull your card, kid.”
    I looked over the fan of cards and drew a card. Ten of hearts. Not bad. It beat eight of the twelve other cards in the deck.
    He pursed his lips, started for the center of the fan, changed his mind and flipped over a card off to the left.
    Ace of spades.
    I pulled my wad out of my pocket and peeled off five twenties. It left me with just twenty bucks.
    â€œI guess they were wrong,” he said.
    â€œâ€™Bout what?”
    â€œCalling you Lucky.”

18
    I said an emotional good-bye to Suke and Naomi after helping load their car. I refused the money Suke tried to stuff in my pocket, telling her that I had plenty. “Save it for Naomi’s baby,” I told her.
    My next stop was Morty Lardino. He held court at the back of a pool hall on a side street downtown. Morty was a small-time racketeer in a town that still had the shadow of the mob. People said Howard Hughes bought the mob out of Vegas with his checkbook, but they laughed all the way to the bank because they only got themselves out of the limelight. Vegas was a sea of loose money and it had an irresistible appeal to crooks. Besides, bottom feeders like Morty were always around. Morty was strictly a street-crime guy, collecting a commission from pimps, getting a cut from the drug pushers, importing girls and renting them to the whorehouses outside the county limits where prostitution was legal. But there were too many legal rackets in Nevada for a small-time hood to get rich quick. And the type of protection rackets that flourished on the East Coast, like laundries or garbage collectors, didn’t go well in a society where everyone owned guns and a lot of sheriffs still wore cowboy hats.
    â€œMr. Lardino,” I said, respectfully stopping five feet from his table. He was alone at the table. Another man had gotten up and gone to the john as I came in.
    Morty was not quite as big as Tony, but he had a cold mean look, a junkyard dog with a small brain and big teeth. I heard his old man was a wop and his old lady a Jew. I was Heinz ketchup, but Betty said I had some Jewish and Italian blood, so I planned to play that card with him when I had a chance.
    Taking a cigar out of his mouth, a diamond the size of Mount Rushmore flashed on his ring finger. He wore a black jacket heavily coated with dandruff and a dark-blue shirt with white polka dots, gray slacks, and white shoes. A gold chain was on his wrist and around his neck.
I hated the gold chain look—it reminded me of that creep Kupka, who was weighed down with the stuff.
    â€œWhat’d ya want?”
    I came up to the table. My throat was dry. I heard Morty was a real ball breaker. A drug pusher had four fingers missing from his right hand and the word on the street was that Morty had stuck the guy’s hand under the blade of a paper cutter and pulled the handle himself after the dealer had shorted him on a payoff.
    â€œI’m looking for a job?”
    He flicked ashes off of his cigar as he squinted at me. “This look like the unemployment office, kid?”
    â€œNo, sir, but I heard you need someone to run errands.” What he needed was a bagman. The morning paper said a man was arrested last night trying to shake down a cop posing as a prostitute. I knew the dude, he hung around with Tony Lardino. His job was to collect money from the pimps and pushers in a bag and bring the bag to Morty. Every dime. The job paid well, but acting as a go-between for crooks and a mobster wasn’t exactly considered an