by Ed McBain
In the hallway, Byrnes, Carella, and Parker crouched on the steps. They could hear the gunfire outside, could hear shouts from the cops, screams from the crowd, the sound of glass breaking and wood splintering, the high whistle of slugs that caromed and ricocheted.
Outside, Frankie Hernandez stealthily moved past the glass front of La Gallina, working his way toward the fire escape.
The crowd was suddenly hushed.
The only sound on the street now was the explosion of the revolvers on the rooftops and in the windows facing Miranda's apartment.
She came around the corner hurriedly.
There were tears on her face, and her blouse had pulled free from her skirt, and she thought she could still feel the imprint of Cooch's fingers where he had touched her. It was twenty minutes past twelve, and she hoped against hope that Jeff would still be there, hoped he had at least the faith to realize ... to realize what? Tears streaking her face, she rushed into the luncheonette.
He was not there.
She looked at the empty stools, and then she turned to Luis and she said, "Luis, there was a sailor..." and Luis nodded instantly.
"He left."
"I ... I couldn't get away and then ... the crowds in the street..."
"He left," Luis said again.
She turned from him quickly and went into the street again. She could hear the pistol shots, thunder on a sunny day. "China, hey, China!" She wished it would really rain, she wished the skies would open and "China, hey, don't you hear me?" rain would come down to wash the streets, wash all the...
"Hey! China!'
She looked up suddenly. "What? Oh oh, hello."
Zip was standing by the ices cart, grinning.
"Hey, how are you, China?"
"Fine," she said. "I'm fine, thank you."
"You want some ices?"
"No. No, thank you, Zip."
He studied her. "What's the matter?"
"Nothing."
"You look like you was crying. Was somebody bothering you?"
She shook her head. "No, no."
"If anybody bothers you, you just let me know," he said. "I'll take care of them the way I'm gonna take care of Alfie."
"You leave Alfie alone!" she said sharply and suddenly, her eyes flashing.
"Huh?"
"Why do you want to hurt him? You have no right to hurt him!"
"Hell, I ain't afraid of him!" Zip said.
"Nobody said you were."
"It's just, he's got this coming, that's all."
"You know he didn't do anything, Zip. You know that."
"He done plenty! I'm gonna bust him wide open. I'm gonna..."
She began crying suddenly and fitfully. "Why do you talk that way?" she shouted. "Why do you have to sound so tough? Aren't you ever yourself? Can't you be yourself?"
Surprised by her sudden passion, he stared at her, speechless.
"What are you trying to show?" she asked, the tears running down her face. "What are you trying to do? Make it worse here than it really is? What's wrong with you? What the hell is wrong with you?"
He stared at her, confused. He reached out to touch her, not knowing that the tears were something which had been building inside her from the moment Cooch attacked her, building on the wild run from the tenement to the luncheonette, building against the desperate hope that the sailor would still be there, kept in check by sheer will power, and now overflowing; he did not know these things, he only knew that she was crying. And in the face of such female vulnerability, in the face of anguish such as he had never known or seen, Zip pulled back his hand, unable to touch her in that moment, unable to establish a contact which seemed in that moment too intimate, too revealing.
"Hey ... hey. listen," he said, "don't cry. What do you want to cry for?"
"Promise me you won't do anything to Alfie," she said. "Promise me."
"Listen ... hey, you don't have to cry."
"Promise me."
"China ... everybody knows what I said I was gonna do. Like I told them" He hesitated. "I told them you was my girl."
"You shouldn't have said that."
"I know. I mean, even I know you ain't my girl. Listen, can't you stop crying? You want my handkerchief?"
"No," China said, sobbing. "I'm not crying."
"Here, take it," he said, handing her the handkerchief. "I hardly used it yet."
She took the handkerchief and blew her nose.
"You want some ices?" Zip asked lamely.
"No. Zip, you won't hurt him, will you? He did nothing to me, believe me. He's a nice boy."
Zip did not answer.
"You'll be doing something very wrong if you hurt him."
"You ain't sore at me, are you?" His voice dropped. "Like because I said you was my girl?"
"No. I'm not sore."
"I won't say it no more," he said gently. He shrugged. "I don't even know why I said it." He thought for a moment. "Except maybe because you're so nice, you know?"
"Thank you," she answered, and she smiled weakly. She handed him the handkerchief. "I got it all wet."
"Oh, that's okay, that's okay." He shrugged. "You feel a little better now?"
"A little."
"You really shouldn't cry, China. It's a sin to cry unless like something serious happens, you know? Like unless you lost somebody or something."
"I did lose somebody, Zip." Her eyes clouded for an instant, and then she shook her head. "You promised? About Alfredo?"
"Well, I didn't exactly..."
"I wouldn't want you to get into trouble," she said.
He stared at her as if she had uttered the words in Russian. His brow furrowed. He kept staring at her. The concept seemed new to him. Nor could he understand her concern. It wasn't as if she was struck on him or anything, he knew lots of girls who were, but China wasn't. So what was it? Why should she give a damn about him one way or the other? And yet, he knew she wasn't lying. Standing with her, he knew that she was as much concerned for his safety as she was for Alfie's.
"I got to think about it," he said.
"Yes, think about it. Please." She touched his hand briefly, and started off toward the corner.
He watched her go, a frown on his face.
"Pidaguas," the man at the cart said.
Zip nodded. The man had put the five cups of ices into a cardboard container. Zip paid him, and then picked up the container with both hands. He kept frowning, and then the frown disappeared, and his face broke into a grin as he turned back toward the packing crate.
Frankie Hernandez had reached the hanging ladder of the fire escape.
Be careful with those buttets, he thought. If you dumb bastards put them any lower, you'll hit me. And that would be the end of this Uttk caper.
Bracing himself, the gun in his holster now, he leaped up for the hanging ladder, missed, and dropped silently to the pavement. He flattened himself against the building and looked up. The volley from the rooftops was effectively keeping Miranda away from the windows. He moved out, jumped for the ladder again, caught it with one hand, reached up with the second hand, and then, hand over hand, began climbing. The ladder began to drop as he climbed, inching on squeaking, rusted iron hinges, drowned out by the roar of the guns from across the street. He drew his .38, hefted it in his hand, and began climbing the remaining rungs to the fire escape.
The people in the street watched him silently.
The guns showered destruction against the front of the building.
Zip was still smiling when he reached the crate, still thinking of what China had said. Somehow, he felt curiously relieved, as if ... as if something very heavy had been taken off his mind. And then he heard the voice.
"Well, now, ain't this nice? One of the darling Latin Purples bought ices for us!"
He looked up sharply. He recognized the gold jacket instantly, and the words "Royal Guardian" flashed into his mind, and he told himself not to be afraid, but he felt a tight knot of fear beginning in his s
tomach.
"H-hello, Tommy," he said.
"Hello, Zip," Tommy answered. "You're just in time. Get your boy off the box."
"Get ... but..." He paused, nibbling his lip. The carton of ices in his hands felt suddenly very heavy. "But it's ... it's my box," he said. "I brought this all the way over from the..."
"It belongs to whoever's using it," Tommy said. "And we want to use it"
"Aw look, Tommy," Zip said, "what do you want bad blood for, huh? Can't we...?"
Tommy reached up suddenly, twisting his face into Papa's trouser leg, pulling him off balance, and dumping him into the street. Zip, his hands full of ices, his mind whirring with the new thoughts China had put there, stood by helplessly, wondering what to do now, wondering why...
"Blow," Phil said to him.
"Aw, come on, Phil, can't we...?"
"Li'1 Killer," Phil corrected.
"Sure, can't we...?"
"Blow!" Phil said firmly.
He shoved out at Zip suddenly. Tommy, trained for the maneuver, stuck out his foot Zip tripped, staggered backward, the cups of ices leaving his hands and spattering over the street. He jumped to his feet instantly, his hand darting for his pocket. Nothing was in his mind right now but salvation. If China had said anything to him, he'd now forgotten it. All he knew was that he was being threatened by two Royal Guardians, that he was outnumbered and vulnerable.
As his hand closed on the switch knife in his pocket, he thought only I got to get out of this.
"Don't pull the blade, Zip," Tommy said gently.
Zip's eyes moved quickly to Tommy, saw that his hand was already in his pocket. They flicked to Phil who was ready to charge in on his flank. Undecided, he faced them. Elena, on the crate, began to laugh nervously. Tommy grinned and then picked up the laugh, and then Phil joined him, and their laughter was triumphant and, hearing the laughter, Zip began to tremble. He wanted to fight them, he wanted to destroy them, wanted to pull the blade and rip into them, show them who he was, show them who they were laughing at. But fear aawled in his belly like black worms, and he felt his fingers loosening their grip on the knife. In impotent rage, his eyes brimming with tears he did not wish to show, he whirled suddenly and kicked at one of the ices cups in the street.
And then he saw Hernandez on the fire escape.
Flat against the side of the building, edging silently past the first shattered window, and then the next, his gun in his hand, Hernandez hesitated for a moment, and then crouched beside the third window.
He brought up his revolver.
Zip understood what was happening in an instant.
Burning with shame and indignation, wanting to explode, wanting to show these rotten bastards they couldn't kick him around, wanting to shout, to rip, to gouge, to release the shame that growled inside him, wanting to show that he was Zip, Zip, ZIP!, he looked up at the first-floor windows and suddenly, without knowing why, he cupped his hands to his mouth.
"Pepe!" he bellowed. "The fire escape!"
13
When Hernandez heard the yell, he thought at first that his ears were deceiving him. His immediate reaction was to turn his head toward the street. And then he realized that Miranda, in the apartment, had whirled at the sound of the shouted words. And then he recognized the look in Miranda's eyes, and Hernandez tightened his finger on the trigger of the .38, and then he heard the explosions inside the apartment and then he was spinning backward and falling. He had been crouched outside the window, so he fell no more than three feet to the iron floor of the fire escape, but it seemed to him that he was falling through space for a very long time, and it seemed to him that he hit the iron slats with the force of a meteor slamming into the earth.
There were two bullets in his chest.
He had never been shot before, not when he'd been a Marine participating in the Iwo Jima landings, and not since he'd joined the police force. He had seen wounded men, a lot of wounded men, when he'd been in the service, but somehow he had detached the wound itself from the event which had caused the wound. He had been raised on the kid games of Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians, bang! I got you! bang! you're dead! and there had always been something glamorous to the idea of getting shot. Even when he had seen the open gaping wounds, the notion of glamour had persisted.
He knew now that the notion was false, and he wondered which con man had ever sold him such a silly bill of goods. When the bullets slammed into his chest, he felt nothing at first but impact. He had been punched before, punched with hard driving fists that had knocked the wind out of him, and he knew what it felt like to be hit. He had once been struck with a hammer swung by a delirious building superintendent, catching the blow on his shoulder, feeling the sharp sudden pain of metal against flesh. But he had never been shot, and he knew now that when a man got shot he didn't daintily clutch his chest and say, "Uggggh!" and then do a fancy movie-extra dive. He knew that the force of a bullet was like the force of a steam locomotive, and he knew that when you got hit with a bullet, you got knocked off your feet. It was as simple as that. Maybe everyone didn't get knocked off his feet when he was shot, but the bullets that struck Hernandez spun him around from his crouch and then knocked him flat to the fire escape.
He felt only impact and shock at first, and then the cold sensation of falling through space, will-less, unable to control himself, simply falling, falling, and then colliding with metal, powerless to stick out his arms to cushion the fall.
And then he was on fire.
The fire engulfed him. It started with the two gaping holes in his back where the bullets had left his body, and then ran straight through his body like burning tunnels to the two smaller holes at the points of entry, and then suddenly flared up to consume his entire chest, and then his shoulders, and then his throat and his face, a roaring fire. He found it hard to breathe, he sucked in air through his parted lips, and he dimly realized that one of the bullets must have gone through a lung, and then blood bubbled out of his mouth, and he thought it was saliva until he saw its bright-red splash on the cuff of his shirt, and then he panicked.
Gasping for breath, his body on fire, pain lancing through him, he felt the panic rush into his head and settle behind his eyes like a pair of thumbs pressing outward. More blood bubbled from his mouth.
Giddily, he wondered if he were going to die.
The thumbs kept pressing against the backs of his eyes, spreading darkness which came in waves and retreated. He could hear shouting in the street below. He wondered if they'd collared whoever had done the yelling.
He wanted to puke.
He felt the nausea start deep in his stomach, tasted the vomit in his throat, and then the fire escape was spinning, the sky was spinning, the world was spinning, and he choked on his own blood and crashed into unconsciousness.
The boys had vanished like Arabian horse thieves.
Zip had begun running the moment he'd shouted the warning to Miranda, shoving his way through the crowd, dashing around the corner. Papa and Sixto, as soon as they realized what had happened, followed him. All three were gone before Byrnes, Carella, and Parker rushed from the doorway of the tenement.
Byrnes turned his head toward the fire escape instantly. "Frankie!" he yelled. "Frankie!" There was no answer.
"What happened?" Parker asked, struggling to catch his breath. "Is he dead?"
"I don't know. He's just laying up there. We got to get him down." He stared suddenly at the sidewalk beneath the fire escape. "What the hell is ... Jesus! Jesus Christ!"
"What is it?" Carella asked.
"That's blood!" Byrnes said, something like awe in his voice. "That's blood dripping down!"
The men watched the steady patter of drops to the pavement. The drops fell silently, as straight as arrows, one after the other, spattering to the pavement in an ever-widening stain.
"We got to get him off there," Byrnes said.
"It was a kid who yelled the warning to Miranda," one of the patrolmen said.
&nb
sp; "Leave it to the kids," Byrnes said, shaking his head. "Sometimes I think the kids in this precinct are more damn trouble than all the professional thieves put together."
"It ain't them," Parker said, watching the dripping blood in fascination. "It's the parents. They come here without even knowing how to speak the language. What the hell can you expect?"
"My old man had a brogue you could cut with a knife," Byrnes said. "What's that got to do with..."
"What'd you say, Lieutenant?" a reporter behind the barricade asked. "About the kids?"
"Nothing for publication."
"You think the kids today will grow up to be like Pepe Miranda?"
"No. That's not what I think."
"What do you think, Lieutenant?"
"I think we've got a bleeding man on that fire escape, a man who may be dying. I think I want to get him off there while there's still a chance for him, and I think you'd better get off my back before I restrict the area to all reporters."
"Don't get touchy," the reporter said. "I've got to peg this story on something."
"On something? What the hell do you want? A Barnum and Bailey circus? Peg it on Miranda, peg it on Frankie Hernandez who may be up there dead, for all I know!"
"Life is cheap, Lieutenant," the reporter said.
"Is it? Then peg your story on your asshole! And leave me alone!" Angrily, Byrnes strode off toward the squad car.
"Boy," the reporter said, raising his eyebrows. "He's sure got a low boiling point, hasn't he?"
"He's been working in this precinct for a long time now," Parker said. "This ain't exactly the garden spot of the universe."
"I'm only trying to get some ideas about Miranda, that's all," the reporter said. "What the hell, nobody's job is easy."
"You want some ideas on Miranda?" Parker asked. "Then look around you. Miranda's only the end product. You don't have to be in that apartment with him to know what he's like. Just look around you, pal. You'll see Miranda in every stage of his development." Parker nodded sagely. "Just take a look," and then he followed Byrnes to the patrol car.
Tommy and Li'1 Killer saw Cooch the moment he came around the corner.
"Hey, Tommy," Phil said. "There's one of them."
"One of who?"
"The Latin Purples. Man, if the cops spot that jacket..."