The Big Bundle
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Leave us a Review
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note
Book One Kansas City Shuffle
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Book Two St. Louis Blues
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
I Owe Them One
About the Author
Acclaim For the Work of
MAX ALLAN COLLINS!
“Crime fiction aficionados are in for a treat…a neo-pulp noir classic.”
—Chicago Tribune
“No one can twist you through a maze with as much intensity and suspense as Max Allan Collins.”
—Clive Cussler
“Collins never misses a beat…All the stand-up pleasures of dime-store pulp with a beguiling level of complexity.”
—Booklist
“Collins has an outwardly artless style that conceals a great deal of art.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Max Allan Collins is the closest thing we have to a 21st-century Mickey Spillane and…will please any fan of old-school, hardboiled crime fiction.”
—This Week
“A suspenseful, wild night’s ride [from] one of the finest writers of crime fiction that the U.S. has produced.”
—Book Reporter
“This book is about as perfect a page turner as you’ll find.”
—Library Journal
“Bristling with suspense and sexuality, this book is a welcome addition to the Hard Case Crime library.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A total delight…fast, surprising, and well-told.”
—Deadly Pleasures
“Strong and compelling reading.”
—Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
“Max Allan Collins [is] like no other writer.”
—Andrew Vachss
“Collins breaks out a really good one, knocking over the hard-boiled competition (Parker and Leonard for sure, maybe even Puzo) with a one-two punch: a feisty storyline told bittersweet and wry…nice and taut…the book is unputdownable. Never done better.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Rippling with brutal violence and surprising sexuality…I savored every turn.”
—Bookgasm
“Masterful.”
—Jeffery Deaver
“Collins has a gift for creating low-life believable characters …a sharply focused action story that keeps the reader guessing till the slam-bang ending. A consummate thriller from one of the new masters of the genre.”
—Atlanta Journal Constitution
“For fans of the hardboiled crime novel…this is powerful and highly enjoyable reading, fast moving and very, very tough.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Nobody does it better than Max Allan Collins.”
—John Lutz
I told Letterman to pull over.
He did, then nodded toward the bridge. “Should I leave the headlights on?”
“No. It’d just make a target of me.”
He shut off the beams and the bridge’s mouth turned black and unwelcoming. I got the nine millimeter out and slipped from the car into the night.
I entered the sheltered structure slowly, cautiously, wood groaning under my feet, sparse moonlight filtering in between slats, my back to a creaky wall. I went all the way to the north end and stayed low, gun ready, as I came out. I looked around the low brush on either side of the road.
Nobody.
I returned to the car and got in. “No sign of a soul,” I said.
We rumbled through the rickety bridge and then pulled off to the left as we exited the north end. From the back seat I yanked out the duffel and then the two of us, like gangsters in fedoras and topcoats dragging a dead body, lugged the eighty-five pounds of money to the underbrush just past the north end of the bridge.
“All right,” I said. “Now you head back.”
He blinked at me. “You mean we head back.”
“No.” I lifted the nine mil. “I’m waiting for these bastards…”
HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS BY MAX ALLAN COLLINS:
THE BIG BUNDLE
TOO MANY BULLETS*
SKIM DEEP
TWO FOR THE MONEY
DOUBLE DOWN
TOUGH TENDER
MAD MONEY*
QUARRY
QUARRY’S LIST
QUARRY’S DEAL
QUARRY’S CUT
QUARRY’S VOTE
THE LAST QUARRY
THE FIRST QUARRY
QUARRY IN THE MIDDLE
QUARRY’S EX
THE WRONG QUARRY
QUARRY’S CHOICE
QUARRY IN THE BLACK
QUARRY’S CLIMAX
QUARRY’S WAR (graphic novel)
KILLING QUARRY
QUARRY’S BLOOD
DEADLY BELOVED
SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT
DEAD STREET (with Mickey Spillane)
THE CONSUMMATA (with Mickey Spillane)
MIKE HAMMER: THE NIGHT I DIED
(graphic novel with Mickey Spillane)
* coming soon
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A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK
(HCC-156)
First Hard Case Crime edition: December 2022
Published by
Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street
London SE1 0UP
in collaboration with Winterfall LLC
Copyright © 2022 by Max Allan Collins
Cover painting copyright © 2022 by Paul Mann
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Print edition ISBN 978-1-78909-852-5
E-book ISBN 978-1-78909-853-2
Design direction by Max Phillips
www.maxphillips.net
Typeset by Swordsmith Productions
The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.
Visit us on the web at www.HardCaseCrime.com
For my grandson
Sam
when the time comes
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Although the historical incidents in this novel are portrayed more or less accurately (as much as the passage of time and contradictory source material will allow), fact, speculation and fiction are freely mixed here; historical personages exist side by side with composite characters and wholly fictional ones—all of whom act and speak at the author’s whim.
“The evil is in the people,
and money is the peg they hang it on.”
ROSS MACDONALD
THE BIG BUNDLE
BOOK ONE
Kansas City Shuffle
October 1953
CHAPTER ONE
A middle-aged man taking stock of his life is to be expected. But for this to be my midpoint, I would have to make it to 94, and anyway it was the ghosts of my past haunting me, not my conscience, which after all was the nine millimeter Browning automatic I still carried all these years after my father killed himself with it—when I disappointed him taking the Outfit’s money to get ahead on the Chicago PD.
As I write this I’m closer to 94 than 47, which was my age in October 1953 when I caught an Ace Company cab outside the Kansas City Municipal Airport. The cabbie was colored, which in a city where the population was 10% that persuasion might not have been a surprise. Still, Negro hackies didn’t generally work white areas, though airport runs could make for a decent fare and those who didn’t like the driver’s shade could take the next ride down, and those who didn’t give a damn got a smile and a nod and no funny business like unrequested tours of K.C.
And I didn’t need one of those—I’d done jobs here before. The airport was five minutes from a downtown whose “Petticoat Lane” on Eleventh Street had smart shops and patrons who could afford to frequent them; around Twelfth and Main were the usual stores and palatial movie houses, a few blocks east was a civic center whose plaza included two of the taller buildings, the Courthouse and City Hall, with the massive bunker of Municipal Auditorium to the southeast.
Everything was still up to date in Kansas City. They were giving my toddling town a run on the meat-packing and agricultural fronts. They had an impressive art gallery, fine arts museum and kiddie-pleasing zoo, and the industries included steel, petroleum, and automotive manufacturing. And one once-booming local enterprise that had faded since the ’30s had made a big comeback recently.
“You in town about that kidnapping, boss?” the cabbie asked.
He was grinning at me in the rearview mirror. He looked like Mantan Moreland but with a flattened nose; that and his cauliflower ears made him a former prizefighter. Yes, I’m a detective.
“Why would you think that?”
Now he was looking out his windshield, which was my preference.
“Address rang a bell,” he said.
“Ah.”
“Anyway, boss, I read about you—you that private eye to the stars.”
Life magazine had done a story about me when I opened my L.A. branch.
“Don’t recall your name, though,” he said.
“Nathan Heller,” I said.
“Chicago, right?”
“Right.”
“…So what’s Alan Ladd like?”
“Short.”
“What about Mitchum?”
“Tall.”
That made him laugh.
For the record, I was an inch shorter than Mitchum and weighed around two hundred pounds, my reddish brown hair going white at the temples, and “almost leading man handsome” (the Life writer had said). I made up for the “almost” by being a success in my trade—president of Chicago’s A-1 Detective Agency. By way of evidence I offer the court my Botany 500 suit, Dobbs hat and Burberry raincoat, lining in—it was cold in Kansas City in October, and the sky was trying to make its mind up whether to rain or snow.
We rumbled across the Missouri River by way of the upper deck of the Hannibal Bridge.
No laughter now, as he asked, “You gonna help get that little boy back?”
“Do my best.”
“I got a boy that age myself.”
“So do I.”
“I believe somebody took my boy, I kill his ass.”
“So would I.”
He laughed again, but the sound of it was different.
Just under a week ago, a bit before nine A.M., someone rang the bell at an exclusive Catholic elementary school here in Kansas City. A young, inexperienced nun answered and found a plump, pleasant-looking (though agitated) woman on the doorstep; about forty, the caller looked respectable enough in a brown hat, beige blouse and dark gabardine skirt. The woman even wore white gloves.
She presented herself as the sister of Virginia Greenlease, whose six-year-old son Bobby attended the school, and said she’d just rushed her sister, who’d shown signs of a heart attack while they were out shopping, to the hospital. Virginia was asking to see her son. The nun—new at the school, barely speaking English—fetched the child and turned him over to the woman calling herself the boy’s aunt. The boy went along dutifully, hand-in-hand.
Later that morning the mother superior’s second-in-command called the Greenlease home to check on how Mrs. Greenlease was feeling.
Mrs. Greenlease, who answered the phone herself, said, “Why, just fine.”
The first ransom letter came a few hours later, special delivery.
We moved through an industrial area and then an unpretentious mix of commercial and residential, all pretty sleepy on an early Sunday afternoon. In the plush Country Club District, broad, winding boulevards followed the contours of the terrain, interrupted by public areas overseen by sculptures and fountains; a classy retail plaza ran to Spanish-style stucco and cream-color brick. The homes themselves were near mansions—not just “near,” really—with impeccably landscaped, evergreen-garnished yards that in warmer weather were likely trimmed as often as their owners saw their barbers.
“We in Kansas now, Mr. Heller.”
We’d only been traveling fifteen minutes. “Over the state line already?”
“Yessir. This is Mission Hills. Lots of rich folks. You a golfer, sir?”
“I am.” I disliked the sport, but sometimes it was the best way to keep clients happy.
“Well, they’s three golf courses to choose from. They keep ’em open till the first snow.”
Autumn had turned the plentiful trees into a riot of color, orange, yellow, red, green, even purple, that last desperate burst of life before winter delivered death. But the grass was still green, brown barely intruding, with a scattering of those vivid colors making a patchwork quilt of lawns. Fathers were tossing footballs to sons while littler kids leapt into heaping piles of leaves with a fearlessness they’d yet to outgrow, their mothers leaning on rakes and looking on in worried surrender.
The cab was about to turn onto Verona Road from West 63rd when a figure in a fedora and raincoat ambled out from around the corner and planted himself before us with his arms outstretched. The cabbie hadn’t been traveling fast in this residential area, but it was startling enough to make him hit the brakes with a squeal.
Tall, his long, narrow oval face home to a prominent nose and jutting chin, eyebrows heavy on a high forehead, the interloper came over to the window the cabbie was rolling down and leaned in like an officious carhop.
“Local traffic only,” he said, polite but with an edge.
I leaned up and said to the cabbie, “I’ll handle this.”
I got out and said, “Nathan Heller. They’re expecting me at the Greenlease home.”
“Special Agent Wesley Grapp,” he said, stepping away from the cab, holding up ID with his left hand and offering his right with the slightest of smiles. His grip was firm but not showy. “You’re on our list.”
I gave him about half a grin. “I’ve been on the FBI’s list a long time.”
That got a chuckle out of him. “Yes, I’ve seen the file. It’s thicker than Forever Amber and about as juicy. What did you do to get on the Chief’s bad side? It’s not included.”
The Chief, of course, was J. Edgar Hoover.
“Oh,” I said casually, “a long time ago I told him to go fuck himself.”
This chuckle came from somewhere deep. “That’ll do it. Call me Wes.”
“And I’m Nate. So you’ve set up a checkpoint.”
“We have. We’ll take you from here.”
My overnight bag was in the trunk and the cabbie got it out for me. I gave him a sawbuck and made a friend for life.
Grapp walked me around the corner to his ride, a dark blue Ford Crestliner. I tossed the bag in front where a younger agent in suit and fedora sat behind the wheel—slender in horn-rimmed glasses—and Grapp and I got in back.
I said, “I guess you know Bob Greenlease called me in personally. You have no objection?”
“None. I’m all for it, actually.”
That surprised me; the FBI didn’t usually welcome private detectives to the party. “Why’s that?”
“We’ve been pretty well frozen out of this so far. Helping as much as we’re allowed. Mr. Greenlease has kept us pretty much at arm’s length. The guy’s got a lot of clout. He’s working strictly through the K.C. chief of police.”
Greenlease, a major stockholder in General Motors, was one of the wealthiest men in the Midwest. A self-made man from farming stock, he’d started out around the turn of the century making handmade cars and running a repair garage, then landed a franchise to sell Cadillacs; now he was the largest distributor of Caddies in the Southwest. His founding dealership, the Greenlease Motor Car Company, was where I first met him in 1937, when I was brought in to deal with auto parts pilfering by employees. And since just after the war, the A-1 had arranged security for the Annual Chicago Automobile Show, of which Greenlease was always a big part.
“Of course FBI policy in kidnapping cases,” Grapp was saying, “means doing nothing that might jeopardize the victim’s safe return. And Mr. Greenlease insists on no surveillance of any ransom drop…or at least he has so far.”