Carl said, “It works better for Stomper if you’d be the one to contact Olga. She doesn’t know he’s back yet.”
“And Isaac had her phone number?”
Stomper said, “My son knows how to get information. He knows how to get things done. I told you how he and his group keep an eye on things around the ‘hood. Part of that is keeping track of them who leave the ‘hood and go on to make a mark. Olga, she may be high cotton now, but she just started right down there with the rest of us.”
I said, “If I remember my blues history, wasn’t Olga was married to TJ, the drummer?”
Carl nodded. “It’s sort of a delicate situation. That’s why me and Stomper would rather you handled it.”
Stomper added, “See, Olga and TJ, they ain’t together no more. Few years back, TJ, he took up with some gal used to hang around Leon’s, name of Jenna. TJ and Jenna, they done got married.”
I didn’t spend too much time considering the proposition. They could play detective if they wanted to on the Shorty Long angle. I could always pick up the slack if or when they struck out. For now, I was perfectly satisfied with the opportunity to strike up a conversation with Olga James. I’d been glad to undertake this opportunity to help an artist like Stomper whose music had given me pleasure over the years, but the entire enterprise was a labor of love. Not a penny in it for me, as far as I could see, and I was not only fine with that but the chance to shake the hand whose fingers had worked the keyboard on Stomper’s “Late Night Boogie,” was, honestly, payment enough.
Olga James had played on Stomper’s sessions. The elegant swing of her piano stylings, somehow airy and funky at the same time, was featured on the recordings of a dozen or more artists not only in the blues field but also in rock and even country-western. I had a fair sampling of her playing in my music collection at home.
We were approaching my car. Carl had found a parking space directly next to my Lancia. I was about to ask for Olga James’ contact info.
But I never got that far.
Because that’s when the shooting started.
6
The roar of a rapidly accelerating engine on the periphery of my senses first caught my attention and that saved our lives.
The street fronting the Denny’s was four lanes of moderate traffic flow. A white Mustang was breaking from the pack, veering across a lane of traffic and cutting off drivers, racing past the parking lot at an increasing rate of speed. Two indistinguishable figures were visible inside the Mustang, one of them leaning out the passenger window, extending an arm from the car as if pointing in our direction.
There is something called “the fog of combat.” When combat escalates to those pounding heartbeats that determine the razor’s edge between survival and eternal darkness, the action can unfold in such a jumbled, chaotic blur as to defy a combatant’s linear structure of rationalization.
Don’t ask me why but I am exactly the opposite in that the first flare-up of a threat has always clarified and heightened my every perception. And that’s what happened now. Every detail crystal clear. Drive-by. Dude tracking a gun in our direction. Holy shit.
I flung threw myself bodily at the other two. The three of us toppled to the blacktop just as the gunner opened fire.
In the open-air of the busy street, the handgun barked pop! three times.
The bullets buzzed close by over our heads, one of them pinging into the chassis of a parked vehicle.
Then the Mustang was peeling noisily away to the screech of burning tires.
Stomper remained pressed to the ground, not even lifting his head enough to look around.
He muttered, “Damn, that was close.”
Carl did lift his head enough to warily peer about into what seemed like a sudden vacuum of silence after that crackle of gunfire.
Carl said to me, “What was that all about?”
I didn’t pause to respond. The Mustang was speeding off down the street. I hustled into the center of the street, assuming a shooter’s crouch and hauling out my .44 to bear on the rocketing car. Then I lowered the gun. The Mustang had already eaten up the city block, and that was too far downrange to risk a noncombatant randomly wandering into my field of fire.
The Mustang squealed around the corner a block away.
Not that much of a lead! That “clarity of combat” was kicking in big time.
Options: I could grab for my keys. Jump into the Lancia. Back up. Turn around. Wait for the kids to get out of the way with their skateboards. Give chase while taking care to avoid a fender bender with oncoming traffic. And by that time the Mustang would be a long gone, not so fond memory. Or I could stand there like everyone else with my thumb up my backside, figuratively speaking of course, and simply watch them get away. Or I could improvise.
I straightened from the shooter’s crouch and ran to where the group of youngsters stood, watching. I reached into my back pocket, withdrew my wallet and extended a twenty–dollar bill to one of the kids holding his skateboard.
“I need to borrow that.”
The kid’s eyes brightened. He snatched the twenty and rolled the board toward me with a nudge of his foot.
“Work your show, whitebread.”
I tossed my keys in the direction of Stomper and Carl, not paying attention to who caught the keys.
I shouted over my shoulder, “Follow me!”
Then I was out of there. I settled my weight on my right foot upon the fiberglass board and propelled my body forward with my left foot, maintaining my balance with my elbows raised and bent, allowing for the considerable weight of the .44 in my right hand. The clatter of the skateboard’s spinning metal wheels on pavement filled my senses. I kept my body supple as the board jolted me along.
I steered out of the parking lot easily enough and sped on. The breeze of my momentum rustled my hair and stung my eyes. I was really moving. I negotiated the traffic patterns easily, propelling myself along with a pumping left foot.
The buildings and pedestrians on the sidewalks were starting to blur past me. I rounded the corner after the Mustang without cutting back on my speed, leaning into the turn. The shriek of the skateboards wheels on the pavement seemed even louder than before.
And there it was.
The Mustang was stopped one block down by heavy crosstown traffic and a red light at the intersection. The stop would be only seconds before the driver of the Mustang saw daylight and darted on through or into the crossflow. The driver thought he had a few seconds to play with.
As soon as I skateboarded onto the side street, I raised my pistol, getting close enough to risk a shot without slowing my ride on the board. I saw no vehicular or pedestrian traffic between me and the car but I would have to use only one arm for aiming since I had to keep the other arm spread outward for balance as I jarred along, and there were still too many civilians around what with drivers crossing the busy intersection ahead. Everything from a stray shot to a fatal ricochet had to be taken into account, and so I held my fire. But I was now only 20 yards from the Mustang and closing.
The driver of the Mustang must’ve seen me. The car executed a sharp right-hand turn, causing more than one driver up ahead to stand on his brakes, filling the air with more squealing tires as cars on the cross-street fought to avoid collisions.
And then came the daylight I wanted.
There was a break in the traffic, and the turning Mustang was angled between me and a row of vacant, uninhabited lots. It was now or never before the Mustang completed that turn and rejoined the heavy traffic flow and disappeared from sight.
I squeezed off a round. Even speeding through the open air, the report throttled my eardrums. The skateboard lurched beneath me like a speedboat hitting turbulence. I shifted my weight, ridding out and straightening the board’s wobble, and the board straightened.
Ahead, the Mustang completed its turn and continued out of my sight but moving slower than it should have under the circumstances.
I negotiated the skatebo
ard into the turn with every intention of continuing pursuit for everything I and that skateboard were worth.
But further pursuit was uncalled for.
The Mustang was stalled out at mid-block in the street ahead. This was a secondary artery. Small stores. Apartment buildings. No other traffic in sight at this particular moment. A scattering of pedestrians along the sidewalks and in doorways were poised in the middle of whatever they had been up to, now observing the Mustang abandoned in the middle of the street with its driver side door yawning open.
The Magnum’s heavy .44 caliber bullet had blown out the right rear tire. The car had come to a halt with its front end mounting the curb in front of an apartment building. Folks who had been sitting on front stoops were standing. But no one was coming forward. Apparently, gunfire in this part of town was no reason to go scrambling for cover, though the onlookers were practicing caution and no one was in a hurry to come running to help.
Fine with me.
I let the skateboard go rattling on its way and advanced on the Mustang. No one shot at me.
The hot pursuit was over. The driver and the gunman had escaped. They could have taken any one of a dozen routes into the surrounding neighborhood.
A squeal of tires from behind me and, in less time than it takes to tell, my Lancia braked to a stop a few feet from me with another squeal and the sharp smell of tortured rubber against pavement. My modest conveyance was not accustomed to such race car handling, but then my Lancia had never before had Stomper Crawford at the wheel.
He flung himself out to join me with the with that here-I-come attitude that must have initially earned him the name Stomper in the first place. He barely missed being struck by Carl’s car.
Carl emerged from his sedan, showing far less enthusiasm. He hesitated, assessing the situation, noting those up and down the street who were remaining where they were and the activity from the corner where a young man was just now rounding that corner, leading his friends to reclaim his skateboard. When Carl rejoined me and Stomper, he was out of breath and his face was flushed.
“Holy cow, Kilroy! I never saw you in action before. Incredible! The way you – “
“Not now, Carl,” I said. “We’ve got to get gone before the cops show up.”
Stomper said, “That’s sure ‘nuff fine with me. This kind of publicity will ruin me before we got started.”
He retained a take-care-of-business presence, his eyes ceaselessly scanning the street around us for any danger, any warning of possible incoming fire.
Carl said, “But what if they come for Stomper again? Are we safe?”
Stomper sent him a dour look.
“Ain’t no one safe in my world, hoss. Best you believe that.”
“Oh, I believe it after what just happened,” Carl assured us earnestly. “I’m just wondering, well, what do we do now?”
I said, “You can bail any time, Carl. How about you, Stomper?”
“Me?” Stomper coughed up phlegm and spat it upon the ground. “Shoot, I didn’t come back to this mess just to run away again. You boys bail on Stomper, I’ve still got my boy Isaac to see me through.”
I holstered the .44.
“I’m not going anywhere, Stomp.”
Carl said, “Well, I’m not going anywhere either unless it’s with Stomper!” He started patting his pockets, eyeing the Mustang. “I should write down the license plate number. The police –“
Stomper said, “I don’t want to get involved with the Man. We need to dust.”
I said to Carl, with a nod at the Mustang, “Those wheels were ‘jacked. The cops will track down the owner soon enough. Stomper’s right. We need to get gone.”
As if to emphasize that point, sirens could suddenly be heard rapidly approaching from opposite directions, each maybe three or four blocks away but closing fast.
Stomper said, “Either one of you boys is carrying my black ass out of here or I’m hoofin’ it. Call it and call it fast.”
I said, “Carl, are you in for sure?”
Carl’s head bobbed.
“Hell yeah, I’m in,” he assured us without hesitation.
I said, “Okay, then. You guys are good to track down Shorty Long?”
“We are on it,” Carl assured me.
“What have we got on Olga James?”
“Believe it or not,” said Carl, “Miss Olga is now a pianist in The Denver Symphony. Stomper’s son came up with that.”
“I’ll take it from there,” I said. “Time to hustle.”
Stomper was almost to Carl’s car when he saw something in front of the apartment building that drew him up short. A frail black lady who couldn’t have been a day under ninety was staring intently at our vehicles and busily jotting something down in a small notebook. Without a word, Stomper crossed the street and approached the woman who was so busy scribbling down our license plate numbers, she didn’t’ realize his approach from another direction until he was towering above her.
“Young man,” she snapped at him, “you’re in a heap of trouble.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Stomper in a surprisingly gentle voice. “That there is the story of this poor boy’s life, shore ‘nuff.”
And with no show of force or aggression, he deftly plucked the pad from the woman’s fingers, gently separated and removed the single page which she had been writing on, and returned the pad to her.
With that done, he hurried back to rejoin us.
Carl was already behind his steering wheel, and within seconds the only vehicle remaining in that street was an abandoned Mustang with its driver’s side door yawning open.
7
When I’d put enough distance between myself and all that excitement, I pulled over at the first pay phone booth I saw and placed another call to Teddy Bostwick at the News. With the background clatter of the newsroom carrying across the connection from around him, he sounded surprised to hear from me so soon after our last contact. Less than thirty minutes had elapsed since I’d called him from Denny’s.
He said, “Damn, Kilroy. I’m fast but not that fast. I’ve only started to dig for the info you wanted and, well, there’s been, uh, a distraction.”
I said, “A street shooting in Five Points.”
“Uh, yeah.” The slightest hesitation. Then Teddy said, “But, uh, that just went down.”
“I know.”
Teddy’s generally pretty damn sharp, but this one caught him out of left field.
After another brief pause he said, “Now that is interesting.”
I said, “I knew you’d think so. Duffy’s. Now. Can do?”
“Will do,” he said, and he broke the connection.
Duffy’s Shamrock Bar has been a Denver institution for more than half a century. It’s a respectable Irish pub in the heart of Denver, and before any comedians out there start cracking wise about “respectable” and “Irish pub” being a contradiction in terms, allow me to clarify. From the corned beef and cabbage to The Clancy Brothers singing Danny Boy over the sound system, we’re talking as Irish as Irish can be. As Irish as the rosy-cheeked, good-natured colleens waiting on the tables and booths. Respectable? Duffy’s is within easy walking distance of, and thus well patronized by denizens of, both the state capital and City Hall. The News Building is also only a stone’s throw.
Teddy was waiting for me when I walked in. He’d already ordered and half-finished a glass of beer. Teddy’s an underweight, studious looking guy with thinning brown hair and a pasty complexion. His eyes sparkled with interest when I slid into the booth after ordering a Coke at the bar.
He said, “So that street shooting. That was you?”
I nodded.
“I did some of the shooting.”
He took another sip of his beer and thought about that for a moment.
“Well, holy shit. So, let’s have the story. What happened?”
“You don’t need me for that.”
“I don’t?”
“There were plenty of witness
es, including a nice little old lady who wrote everything down. She’ll be easy to find. She’s likely looking for someone to tell her story to.”
He made a face.
“Don’t give me that. What about you? Kilroy, you are the story.”
“I’m only part of it,” I said. “I’ll have more for you when I know more. That’s the way it has to be, Teddy.”
He stared into his glass of beer and emitted a heartfelt sigh.
“I guess, if that’s the way we have to play it. So what do you need from me?”
“For starters, who would you say has the muscle in this town to order a street hit on short notice?”
“That’s a tough one, Kilroy. Don’t you know?”
“The work I’ve been getting lately has been keeping me off the street,” I said. “I’ll ask around, but what do you know, newsman?”
“Well, there’s the local branch of your friendly neighborhood Mafia. Plenty of guns and trouble on the hoof right there. Don Carmine Battaglia’s outfit has the Denver concession, but things have been peaceful of late, far as I know. Drawing heavy heat like that could be very unhealthy.”
I leaned forward and shifted slightly so no one else in the place could see what I showed him. I inched back the lapel of my jacket enough for him to see the grip of the .44 Magnum in its shoulder holster.
“It’s unhealthy to fuck with me,” I said softly. “I’m ready if anyone wants to try and test me on that.”
Teddy was grinning a small grin. No humor, just dawning anticipation.
“I see. Okay, my friend. I’ll sign up for the party. My journalistic instinct tells me that you’ll be providing some damn good copy in the very near future either way. For my money, the sooner the better.”
“Same here,” I said. “I’m going to find out who’s throwing bullets at me and do something about it.”
“Commendable. So can you tell me about Stomper Crawford? You say it’s all connected.”
“I need information myself,” I said. “That killing behind Leon’s...”
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