The Girl in the Cockpit Read online

  THE GIRL IN

  THE COCKPIT

  Michael Avallone

  STORY MERCHANT BOOKS

  LOS ANGELES

  2015

  Copyright © 2015 by David and Susan Avallone. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the author.

  http://www.mouseauditorium.tumblr.com

  Story Merchant Books

  400 S. Burnside Avenue #11B

  Los Angeles, California 90036

  http://www.storymerchantbooks.com

  OTHER GREAT ED NOON

  ACTION-ADVENTURES

  by Michael Avallone

  SHOOT IT AGAIN, SAM

  THE HORRIBLE MAN

  THE LIVING BOMB

  THE FAT DEATH

  THE FLOWER-COVERED CORPSE

  LONDON BLOODY LONDON

  THE CAST OF CHARACTERS

  . . . according to their thumbnail descriptions

  ED NOON the private eye; a man of principle and honor; money always a secondary consideration in his career and personal life.

  JOHNNY RICCO Today's Lost Teenager; running wild and looking for his father's murderer.

  TERRY RICCO Johnny's swinging sister; she grew too fast; likes to play with dynamite.

  JOHN JUNKYARD the broken-English millionaire; a man from another time in the new world.

  FRANKIE CONROY a throwback; the mobster who still exists in Big Cities. Flashy, hard, nervous.

  BELLA BALDWIN Conroy's high-priced moll; a graduate of the chorus. Hard as nails and sexy as six martinis. A blue lady, indeed.

  CAPTAIN MONKS Homicide's answer to cliché cops; a bulldog working for justice; a G.I. policeman.

  FARGO Conroy's monster bodyguard. Dumb and brutal.

  THE HAWKS Five more Johnnies; a youth gang.

  MELISSA MERCER the girl in the eye's pocket; a black beauty.

  . . . and some of them never do their fingernails again.

  ASKING FOR IT

  Ed Noon watched Terry Ricco slip out of her dress with an effortless motion born of long experience. This young girl was the most beautiful female Noon had ever seen.

  "I'm curious," she purred, rubbing against Ed softly, like a cat. "About you. What will you be like? Will you be good? Are you tender, are you cruel? Do you swear and make funny noises? Or are you something special? A quiet tiger who knows how to scratch and claw and bring out the best in me? I warn you, if you do find home plate, you'll never forget the sensation. . . ."

  Noon knew that touching Terry Ricco was like asking for death.

  But what a way to die. . . .

  CONTENTS

  April 19, 1963—

  BOY

  GIRL

  COP

  CROOK

  GANG

  EYE

  SWINGER

  BOMB

  GUN

  BRUTE

  SINGER

  DUET

  COIN

  WRAP-UP

  April 19, 1963—

  Giovanni Ricco, his swelling left eye puffing up fast, grinned toothily at me in the dim lighting of his office on Tenth Avenue. The office was in the heart of a legendary junkyard, and it looked it. More so than ever now, with the overturned chairs, the broken lamp and the general aspect of disorder. There was no mystery about the condition of the place, though. Ricco and I had just put three strong-arm goons to flight. Giovanni Ricco had never stepped into line to join the fraternity of the Organization, which was only one of the reasons I liked him. He was a big man, salt-and-pepper haired and he'd come up the hard way. All the way from his native Naples. His English wasn't too perfect but he was a fine man.

  Even in his middle fifties, he'd never learned to knuckle under. The world needed all the men like him it could get.

  "Hey. You pretty good, Eduardo. You know that?"

  "Sometimes I get lucky. Sometimes I don't."

  "You make you own luck. I know. Me, too."

  "I heard, Giovanni. They say you built a million dollars with your bare hands. Ricco, the junkyard millionaire. John Junkyard the First."

  "Hah. They say! They don't know. I build, all right. But with this—" He tapped his broad forehead with a forefinger as gnarled as a pepperoni, "—and this—" he poked his own chest where his heart was. "You know what I mean. I can tell. You gotta the look."

  "Takes one to know one." I began to make motions about getting out of there by reaching for my hat which sat atop his old desk. "You sure know how to hit a man. I thought you'd knock that hood through the wall. Well, they won't be bothering you for awhile—"

  "Hey," he said again, putting his brawny hand on me, his face showing regret. "You no leave yet? I pay you for this. You help Ricco, he show his appreciation. Okay?"

  "Not okay. You don't owe me anything. If you'd been a little old lady three guys tried to mug, I would have done the same, wouldn't I? Forget it—I was just passing by when I heard the ruckus."

  "Eduardo," he said very slowly, with deep pride sounding in his voice. "I don't forget what you do for me today. You don't forget, either. We friends. And for friendship—there must be a sign."

  "You lost me, Giovanni."

  His smile lit up the whole office with its tumbled confusion, the old appurtenances of the salvage business. He took me by the arm, almost pulling me further into the room, toward an alcove of some kind in the rear. I saw a workbench, a box of tools, a dangling trouble lamp. There was a heavy and ancient aroma of age and disuse.

  "You see what Giovanni means," he chuckled, happily. "A sign, a thing, a how-you-say—we bind the deal. A contract, eh? Look."

  He was holding something up in his hand, suddenly.

  The dim light around us shone off the glittering, rounded sides of a coin of some kind. I stared closer. It was a silver dollar.

  "This will be our pledge of brotherhood," Giovanni Ricco said with that underlying note of great pride and tradition that seemed to characterize the man. "When I fix it up, Eduardo, you and I, we be friends for life. Come—you see."

  I didn't have any idea what he meant but I went with him into the little workroom and watched as he clicked on the trouble lamp, unscrewed the iron vise set on the bench and hummed to himself.

  He was happy, then, and so was I.

  Just being alive sometimes is all the reason anyone needs.

  He placed the shining silver dollar in the vise and slowly began to tighten the twin blocks. With the coin, poking upward, gleaming like a half-moon in the pale yellow illumination.

  "You see, Eduardo," Giovanni Ricco said, "you see—?"

  BOY

  The kid with the gun was an amateur.

  He had to be, considering his age.

  The wild look in his popping brown eyes was untrained, unskilled, and the shoulder-length dark hair, worn Jesus Christ style, and the bellbottoms and Army fatigue jacket, labeled him Dropout all the way. He couldn't have been a day older than seventeen but the big, black .45 in his unsteady right hand was the oldest thing in the world. To me, that is, who has to live with one, live by one, and maybe someday will have to die by one.

  My whole world is .45 calibre.

  "You killed Papa," the kid croaked in a very young voice that put lighted matches under my fingernails, "and now I'm gonna kill you!"

  The gun was dancing in his fingers now.

  It was Army, too. Genuine government issue.

  G.I. .45's have a certain different look that you always remember from those bad old days when patriotism wasn't a dirty word.

  It was a crazy place to ha
ve your fate run up and meet you—the inside hallway of the building where I hung up my hat and coat and tried to have some kind of a home life apart from the private detective agency I own and operate on West Fifty-Sixth Street This was Central Park West and far from midtown Manhattan, but sometimes the price is exactly the same. You pay the dues for being a detective wherever you may be. It depends on so many things you have no control over.

  The kid had caught me with my flaps down and my love for humanity up. A few hours ago I had stepped off a monster jet, fresh back from two weeks in Mallorca and that wonderful detached feeling of well-being still lingered. But now the plane and my peace of mind had crashlanded in five seconds flat. That was all the time it had taken for me to walk into that box of a hallway and be jumped like a rookie cop on the first night on his beat. My own shoulder-harnessed .45 might as well have been in Mallorca for all the good it would do me, now. It was a dead end.

  I kept my hands up as high as the kid wanted them.

  "I don't know you," I said. "And I didn't know your Papa. Why should I want to kill a man I don't know?"

  The kid gasped tearfully, his jaw worked and the crazy look didn't leave both eyes. The .45 wavered a little but it didn't leave my chest.

  "Sure, that's your story! But I know you, Ed Noon. You're a big-shot private eye who runs around in dark alleys shooting old men in the back. You lousy rotten fink——!"

  The ferocity of the words slammed into me like separate, vicious knives. The kid's private insanity scared me. You can do something with a trained gunman who's got method and a professional reason for being silent and careful when he comes to make you a statistic. But a wild youngster who operates with nothing but a blind vengeance on his side, is liable to go off any second. Just like that gun in his hand.

  I backed off away from him in the little space remaining in that hallway. It was going on midnight and Pete the doorman who was usually on duty beyond the glass doors that led into the lobby proper, might have been The Invisible Man. I eased up against the bracket of buzzers and black buttons lined up on the wall behind me: the nameplates and metal-framed slots for the forty-odd apartments in the building. Never had that taken-for-granted regulation for buildings everywhere seemed so important. Or so welcome.

  Gently, barely moving, I flexed my shoulder blades and back muscles, bearing down on those buzzers and buttons. Easy.

  "Look, kid—" I talked fast. He was cocking the .45, relishing and stretching out his moment of sadistic triumph. He wanted me to sweat and crawl, obviously, before he blew my head off. Maybe beg him for mercy, on my hands and knees?

  "I'm no killer. I wouldn't even step on a dog's tail without thinking about it twice— Even in the Army, when I carried what you're carrying now, I didn't want to kill Nazis—"

  He was starting to breathe hard, poking the ugly bore of the .45 higher up—into my very teeth—as he closed in on me, when the answering buzzer that opened the lobby door blasted the stillness of the hallway. The weight of my body, depressing the whole board of buttons, had finally drawn one belated, probably angry response. Or maybe everybody sounded off in chorus. The buzzer spurted, snorted and zzzzzzzzzzd with sudden volume, like a hi-fi set suddenly switched on. It was ear-popping and certainly the last thing my welcoming committee expected.

  The kid must have jumped a foot in the air, his head twisting fearfully as if he had backed into a bee-hive. It wasn't much of a diversion but it was all I needed, because he'd been close enough for me to fix his tie, if he'd been wearing one. Close enough for me to have patted him on the cheek, if he'd been a good boy.

  Only, I didn't think he was a good boy so I clobbered him.

  I brought my left hand down in a Karate chop on the inside of his left wrist, slamming the .45 away from my body. That did it. The gun roared and thundered in the cracker-box confines of the hallway.

  My right hand came down and thudded off the kid's jaw, in a hard fist, forearm and elbow triple grandslam. It was the sort of blow that would have dropped a Mohammed Ali, let alone a teenage boy. The kid bounced off the wall and crumpled in a tangled heap at my very feet. I scooped up the dangerous .45, quickly slung the boy over my shoulder in a fireman's-carry and kicked out at the downstairs door which was still being electronically contacted by that swarm of answering buzzers. There was no time to think about angry tenants, injured feelings, mistaken identities and blasting guns.

  I raced into the lobby, moving fast, ready to tell Pete to go disappear again in case he suddenly turned up. Fortunately, the self-service elevator was waiting on the lobby floor, door open and ready for use. I scrambled in and made it up to my Shangri-La retreat without interference from Pete or any of my neighbors. Midnight in Manhattan can be like that. Sometimes you never run into a soul even when a gun goes off in the dead of night.

  Lurching into the dim haven, with the kid's unconscious form getting heavier by the second and reminding me that I wasn't getting any younger, I didn't turn a light on until I reached the living room which overlooks Central Park. I dumped him down on the long sofa, stretching him out on his back, so he could breathe better.

  He was a solidly-built boy. Shaped like a wedge, with very broad shoulders and trim waist that was made for the thick band of leather that passed for a belt. I estimated his height at about five foot ten and his weight at a hundred and sixty-five. Trying to think things over and putting little bits and pieces together in my mind, I sat down in the wing chair on the other side of the mosaic-tiled coffee table with the sofa on the other bank, and took off my porkpie fedora and scaled it away from me. I was both a little angry and a little puzzled. The kid pounding his ear on my sofa was a complete stranger to me—and I am great on names and faces. I'm still the guy who can tell them who played Clark Gable as a boy in Manhattan Melodrama—Mickey Rooney, in case you're interested.

  Five minutes later, with the apartment quiet and soft moonlight filtering through the two windows on the Park side of the apartment, the unknown kid was stirring awake. He groaned out of unconsciousness, the way everybody does. Mumbling, blinking his eyes, trying to sit up and looking around to get himself reoriented. And then awakening was complete. He glared at me from the length of the sofa, his eyes wet with anger. And something else. But he didn't try to go for me. I was sitting quietly in the wing chair, with his old .45 indolently lying across my right knee as if I could suddenly turn it in his direction and burn him without even changing my position. He had got that message.

  As mixed up as he seemed to be about everything else.

  "Whaddya going to do with me?" he snarled suddenly. It was a growl.

  "You tell me, kid. You push a gun in my face and try to kill me. Now I've got the gun. Got any ideas?"

  "Sure," he sneered. A pathetic sneer because he was really a very good-looking boy. The long hair was crisp and clean-looking, not resembling old mattress stuffing. His features were even and regular, save only for a lower lip as full as a madonna's. There was a striking richness to his dusky skin which only accented rather fine white teeth and tremendously vibrant eyes. He looked like a Spanish grandee's son or the logical successor to some Godfather's legacy. Latin-looking as that. "Shoot me, Noon. Go ahead. Just like you did the old man. You dirty bastard."

  I sighed. "Don't make me mad. You will watch your mouth around me at all times. I don't go for foul talk. You dig?"

  "Screw you." It was a hiss of pure contempt and courage. "I don't care what you like. You hear me?"

  "Yeah, I hear you. But maybe I can appeal to whatever code of ethics or sense of justice you may have. If I'm going too fast for you, just hold up your hand. But don't you think I have a right to know who you are, who your father was and why I might kill him? Or am I asking for a whole helluva lot too much?"

  "I'm not gonna tell you nothing. I goofed but the guys'll get you for me. Because you shot Papa in the back! When he wasn't looking—when he didn't have a chance—" His voice broke, rising almost to a scream of pure rage. Then he collapsed completely.
He began to cry.

  All I could do was bite my lip and fume inwardly while he sobbed his insides out on the long sofa. I didn't know exactly what to say or do at that point. Only two things were crystal-clear. The boy had really wanted to kill me and had loved his father with a passion. Far more than most kids his age ever could love their old man, and he was positively certain that I was the man who had done it. His violent crying told me all that because his sobs were a compound of sorrow for Dear Old Papa and rage with himself for losing the chance to even up the score.

  In that tormented, no-talking span of time, in which neither myself or the kid were communicating in any way, there was an interruption. A welcome one, somehow, in spite of the lateness of the hour and what it could mean. The front doorbell rang. Nearly as startling as the buzzing racket had been downstairs. Both for the kid and myself.

  He suddenly took his hands away from his face, a gleam of hope lighting up the bewildered wilderness of his face. I shook my head, motioning him not to try anything, and backed out of the room to answer the door. If the kid had reinforcements—the "guys" he had mentioned—the apartment could turn into a circus, no matter what I did. But I still was the one with the gun. Two, counting my own. So I unholstered that one and made like a movie detective as I jerked the door inward and stepped back, covering the threshold. Two-Gun Noon, as it were.

  It was a night of surprises. Ugly ones and gorgeous ones.

  I lowered the twin destroyers, feeling a little foolish.

  The most beautiful blonde I had seen since Vera Miles was a pup, took one frightened look at my prominent guns, wailed "John-n-n-y!" and swept by me in a cloud of nice-smelling perfume, timed to a flounce and a flurry of outrageously round and curved feminine accessories. I could hear her wedgies clumping down the corridor toward the living room. The floor was carpeted but the blonde was tattooing noisily despite that.

  I didn't know what to say or do . . . for all my experience and expertise in the dialogue-with-guns department.