She walked into her bedroom and switched on the table-light. The room was well furnished, looking rather like a movie set. She stood looking round, seeing nothing.
Six months had gone by since the day they had got Hurst out of a jam. Six months of unrest and feverish activity. Hurst had paid them back for what they had done. Dillon was his right-hand man now. They were no longer petty gangsters. They were in the money now. Dillon’s job was to see Hurst’s racket ran smooth. He had a tough mob to work for him, while Hurst was content to sit in the background and collect the money as it rolled in.
Hurst’s racket was this. He manufactured automatic machines of every description. He had gambling machines, moving-picture machines of a doubtful kind, food machines, cigarette machines and even prophylactic machines. On the face of it, a good sound business. It was where he put the machines that made his game a racket.
His mob went round with a truck planting the machines on small shopkeepers, or hotels, apartment houses and suchlike. These people were forced to take them. Those foolish enough to resist were either beaten up or had their windows smashed. They got no rake-off from the machines and Hurst had no over-heads. He sent men round weekly to clear the money, and he made a big thing out of it. His gambling machines were foolproof. Foolproof for Hurst. A sucker simply could not win anything from them, but still they tried. Hurst had over six thousand automatic machines in operation.
It was Myra who suggested the schools. Hurst was nervous that there would be a row, but Myra had planned carefully. Nearly every school had a favourite candy shop, and it was in the candy shop that the automatic was planted. They put a smut movie automatic and a gambling automatic, and the kids flogged all their candy money in these machines. It brought in a new and pretty big revenue.
Dillon kept all the shopkeepers on the jump. He had to find fresh fields to plant the automatics, and he had to supervise the collecting of the money Hurst gave him a ten per cent cut on what he turned in.
It was not quite the big job Dillon had planned but it was bringing them in fifteen hundred dollars a week. Also, Dillon was running a mob, and it was a mighty tough mob at that.
Myra had money to burn. She kept away from Dillon’s headquarters, and lived the life of a rich business man’s wife.
For six months Dillon had been coming back each night around nine o’clock, and they would go out some place and eat. And now there was no sign of him’.
She wondered if he’d run into trouble. After his one attempt to get rid of Hurst, Little Ernie had sunk in the background. Myra began to think maybe Dillon had got himself knocked off in a gun fight.