Dead Letter (28 page)

"What if one of us gets hit?" I said.

"Won’t happen, Harry. This time we got the
drop on him."

Lurman smiled icily and held out his hand. "Well,
old man, this is it. Just think about what he did to Sarah and pull
the trigger."

I shook his hand and we got out of the car and
crossed Euclid. Lurman wrapped a scarf around his neck and trotted
off toward a telephone pole on the north side of the building. I
headed south to the maple tree. By the time I made it there, I was
sweating. The tree was set at a slightly oblique angle to the front
door, cutting off my view of the hall and the north side fire escape.
From where I was posted I wouldn’t be able to see Grimes until he
came through the inner door into the alcove. I bothered myself about
the angle of vision for five minutes, then leaned against the tree,
my right hand on the pistol in my coat pocket, and waited.

An hour passed and there was no action anywhere
around the building. I began to wonder if Grimes was inside after
all. The thought that he could be somewhere on the loose should have
been more disturbing than it was. It probably would have been, if I
hadn’t been so damn scared already. After leaning against that tree
for over an hour and jumping at every sound that came from the
sidewalk behind me or from the apartment building in front of me, I
would have settled for any resolution. I could see that Lurman was
getting antsy, too. From time to time he’d pop out from behind the
lamppost where he’d stationed himself and take a long look into the
hall.

After another half hour’s wait, I was convinced
Grimes wasn’t in the building. Which suddenly didn’t seem so
comforting. There was a lot of dark street behind me. A lot of
shooting room. And I found myself glancing back over my shoulder more
and more regularly. Euclid was lined with parked cars on either side;
but there wasn’t much traffic, much life, until it intersected with
Taft, two blocks to the south. The street lights made a warm, bright
cluster at Taft, and I found myself looking toward them, from time to
time, with a silly kind of fondness, as if I’d been born and raised
on that lonesome streetcorner.

At half-past nine I got tired of pretending I was
part of the maple tree and walked over to the sidewalk. A couple of
black teenagers, who were passing by, eyed me as if I was Dad’s
wallet left out on the dresser. They thought better of it after a
moment and kept on moving down the street toward Lurman, where they
were probably tempted again.

Then an automatic rifle went off somewhere behind the
apartment house with a sound like a string of firecrackers exploding
in an alley.

The black kids bolted across Euclid. A blue Ford
jerked to a stop behind me. Lurman started running down the northside
alley to the rear of the apartment. The shooting intensffied—iirst
a string of firecrackers, then the garbled popping of handguns and,
once, the muted roar of a shotgun.

I started down the alley after Lurman when I happened
to look back at the front of the building. He was just coming out the
door—long-legged, hatless, wrapped in a shearling coat. His long,
docile face looking the slightest bit perplexed, as if he were trying
to make up
his mind which way to turn.

"Ted!" I shouted. "He’s up here!"

He couldn’t hear me. The gunfire was too loud and
he was too far down the alleyway. Which meant that Lester O. Grimes
had become my problem—alone.

Grimes looked right and left, then stepped off the
porch as coolly as if he were off for an evening stroll. I guess he
couldn’t believe how well his plan had worked. I guess he couldn’t
believe there was no one out there to greet him. He cinched his coat
at the waist, smiled gamely, and started up Euclid toward Taft at a
brisk pace.

The whole block seemed to be coming to life. Lights
were popping on up and down the street. Faces were plastered against
windows. Thrill-seekers were already edging down the block toward the
source of all that gunfire.

Within a minute or so, a fleet of police cars came
thudding through the icy street, their sirens screaming and their
blue bubble-tops sprinkling an almost festive light on the
snow-draped porches and the cars parked along Euclid. It was pure
chaos. And Lester Grimes was walking calmly through its center—secure
in the knowledge that in the midst of all that light and sound no one
would be paying him a second look.

In a way I was lucky. The confusion would work in my
favor, too. And then Lester was playing it so coolly that he might
not think to look behind him. And even if he did, he’d have a hell
of a time picking me out among all the cops and thrill-seekers
streaming down the sidewalk.

Just to be safe, I waited until he had about twenty
yards on me, then stepped from behind the lamppost, gun in hand, and
started up Euclid after him. Pale, excited faces brushed past me in a
blur. But I was concentrating on that tall target sixty feet in front
of me. I was going to need to make up some ground, because once he
got past Taft and McMillan there would be a lot of dark street in
front of him. And then the magnum wouldn’t be worth a damn at more
than ten or fifteen feet. With a short barrel, it’s nowhere near as
accurate as a smaller caliber pistol—it can’t be fired at all
without kicking your arms up ninety degrees. And on the ice, I might
well end up on my butt. That meant I was going to get one shot, at
best, before Lester returned fire.

That meant I had to get as close to him as possible
to make that one shot count. Right on top of him if I could manage
it, like they teach you at the police academies. Close enough to
stick the barrel in his ribs and squeeze the trigger and blow a hole
the size of a pie plate in Lester Grimes’s belly.

I started to trot.

A half-dozen more people rushed by me, heading up
the   street to Linda Green’s apartment. I didn’t see
their faces, just that rangy figure bobbing in the distance. The
adrenalin was starting up. It made my skin tingle and itch. It
brought a cold sweat out on my face and arms and made my heart pound
painfully in my chest. My knees felt as if they weren’t locking
right, as if they might buckle at the very next step.

Easy, Harry, I told myself. Easy.

Another fleet of patrol cars thudded and shrieked
down Euclid. I could still hear the roar of gunfire coming from the
brownstone, and the air had begun to smell of cordite smoke. It
drifted like a fog through the cold air. I could taste it, burning,
in my throat.

By the time he got close to Taft, I’d made up
twenty feet on him. Not nearly enough. Across the intersection,
Euclid became Auburn Avenue—a long, flat residential street, lined
on either side with tall brownstones and lit dimly by gas lights.
Once he got across that intersection, he’d be home-free. Then it
would be like following a wounded lion into the bush. Auburn was a
grid of dark alleys and asphalt drives that led between buildings to
the old-fashioned slat garages and carriage houses set behind them in
unlighted backyards. He could disappear down any one of those
alleyways and I would lose him.

Unless he’d spotted me, in which case I could
suddenly end up very dead. He was heavily armed, I was sure of that.
He’d probably left the machine pistol with Linda Green or whoever
it was who was creating the noisy diversion that allowed him to
escape. But there was still that sawed-off shotgun that Chico
Robinson had mentioned. It was probably tucked like a derringer in
one huge sleeve of his shearling coat or under the breast where he
could jerk it free. And he was a dead-shot, as that school
superintendent had learned. He was also slightly crazy, which
increased the chances of an ambush if he had spotted me. He wanted to
kill me. He’d almost succeeded in the Coney Lot. He wasn’t going
to miss this time—not at close range, with a sawed-off.

I thought of taking a wild shot at him from where I
stood. But there were too many people on the sidewalk. And there were
cars on Taft. It would be a ten-to-one shot anyway, from thirty or
forty feet.

No, he has to stop, Harry, I told myself. For a
minute at least. Either that or you have to follow him into that dark
patch of ground on the other side of Taft. I stared at the stoplight,
swinging in the breeze at the corner of Taft and Euclid and prayed
that it would turn red.
He made it to the
corner and the light didn’t flicker.

"Change, damn it!" I almost shouted.

He’d just stepped off the curb when it went yellow.
Grimes hesitated a moment, and I thought of how I might die.
Vaporized like Sturdevant or locked like the girl in a coma. Then
Grimes stepped back up onto the curb. And I cocked the magnum and
began to run. All out. Arms chugging. Breath coming in
throat-scalding bursts. My heart pounding like someone’s fist
knocking inside my chest.

There were three people and about thirty-five feet of
ground between Lester Grimes and me when that light changed. I made
up twenty of those feet and shoved two of those people out of my way
in about five seconds. But the third person—a woman in a plaid
scarf and heavy wool overcoat who was standing midway and at an
oblique angle between me and Grimes—caught sight of the pistol in
my right hand and began to scream.

Before I could even raise the revolver, Grimes
whirled to his left, tore the shotgun from beneath his coat and fired
a single blast of buckshot. The load caught the woman full in the
back, lifted her off the sidewalk and sent her flying, head first,
through the windshield of a
Chevy parked at
the top of the street.

Grimes pulled the pump a second time. But I had the
magnum braced by then. Arms extended, both hands wrapped on the
checked handle, I fired before he could squeeze off a second burst.
The magnum roared, sending out a tongue of flame and throwing my arms
back so violently that I actually did go down on the icy sidewalk.
Hard.

I’d aimed too high and the slug hit him high in
front, on the left shoulder. Hit him the way you see big-bore rifle
slugs—the 470 Nitro Expresses—bounce against the hides of rhino
or of elephant. With a dusty, sick-making explosion. Like I’d
thrown a bag of red dirt at him instead of a bullet. It spun him all
the way around toward the intersection. And it was only when he was
facing away from me that I saw the hole it had made—all the way
through his body and out the back of his coat. Jagged, red, the size
of a grapefruit. His whole coat was red
in
back and smoking in the icy air.

Grimes fell forward off the curb and went down to his
knees on the pavement. I could see part of his face. Blood was
dripping steadily from his mouth and from his nose. There was blood
everywhere on the snow and on his coat.

A woman on the other side of Taft had begun to
scream, hands on her cheeks and mouth open wide. And several of the
thrill seekers had stopped in their tracks and started running up
Euclid to where I was sitting on the sidewalk. I could hear their
feet on the ice behind me.

"Get back!" I shouted over my shoulder.
"Get the hell back."

I looked once at the body of the woman in the wool
overcoat, wedged obscenely in the cracked windshield. Then got to my
feet.

Grimes was staring at me, over his shoulder. I
pointed the magnum at him and said, "Don’t, Grimes."
Knowing full well that he was going to do it. Cocking the piece with
my left hand because I knew.

"Don’t!" I said again.

"Why the hell not?" he said stupidly. His
breath was like a red mist.

He moved so quickly it was as if he’d never been
hit. Around on his knees, the dull barrels of the shotgun nosing
through the opening in his coat. I pulled the trigger again. And he
fell back as if he’d broken in two. The shotgun went off with a
boom—straight up, in a shower of sparks and smoke. Hitting nothing.

I held the gun on him for another minute. Even though
I knew he was dead. Bent back on his knees, the shotgun gleaming in
his hands.
 

26

A police marksman killed Linda Green—Grimes’
girlfriend, who’d created the diversion that allowed him to slip
out the front door. He killed her with a single shot from an
apartment window across from her second—f1oor room.

Before she died, she’d fired over a thousand rounds
from the machine pistol Grimes had left with her. And five of 
those rounds had killed Ted Lurman.

I didn’t know that until after a squad car had
pulled up at the Taft intersection and an ambulance had come to take
what was left of Lester Grimes to the county morgue. The cops in the
squad car were nervous and efficient and, once they’d found out
whom I’d killed, palsy and sympathetic.

"You had to do it. You had to do it," one
of them kept saying to me, as if he were defending a friend in an
imaginary argument.

I kept repeating his words as I walked up Euclid, but
I was seeing Grimes’ blood frozen in the street and the smoke that
had poured from his chest, like the vaporous smoke from a manhole
cover. When I made it back to the apartment house and heard that
Lurman was dead, I sat down hard on a snow bank beside the alleyway
and tried to remember what my life had been like before Lovingwell
and Lester O. Grimes had entered it.