Ed McBain_87th Precinct 22 (26 page)

They stood on the street comer arguing for a few minutes, each of them yelling in turn, and finally the taller one agreed to give it another ten minutes, but that was all. The shorter one said Let’s try it for another half-hour, we bound to hit pay dirt, and the taller one said No, ten minutes and that’s it, and the shorter one said You fuckin’ idiot, I’m telling you this is a good night for it, and the taller one saw what was in his eyes, and became afraid again and said Okay, okay, but only a half-hour, I mean it, Jimmy, I’m really cold, really.

You look like you’re about to start crying, Jimmy said.

I’m cold, the other one said, that’s all.

Well, come on, Jimmy said, we’ll find somebody and make a nice fire, huh? A nice warm fire.

The two young men grinned at each other.

Then they turned the corner and walked up the street toward Culver Avenue as Car Seventeen, bearing Phillips and Genero clinked by on its chained tires sounding like sleigh bells.

It was difficult to tell who was more surprised, the cops or the robbers.

The police commissioner had told His Honor the Mayor JMV that “a lot of police work dovetails past and present and future,” but it was fairly safe to assume he had nothing too terribly philosophical in mind. That is, he probably
wasn’t speculating on the difference between illusion and reality, or the overlap of the dream state and the workaday world. That is, he probably wasn’t explaining time continua or warps, or parallel universes, or coexisting systems. He was merely trying to say that there are a lot of accidents involved in police work, and that too many cases would never get solved if it weren’t for those very accidents. He was trying to tell His Honor the Mayor JMV that sometimes cops get lucky.

Carella and Willis got very lucky on that night of March fifteenth at exactly ten minutes to eight.

They were watching the front of the shop because Dominick Di Fillippi (who had never ratted on anybody in his life) had told them the plan was to go into the shop at ten minutes to eight, just before John the Tailor drew the blinds on the plate glass window fronting the street. La Bresca was to perform that task instead, Di Fillippi had further said, and then he was to lock the front door while Calucci forced John the Tailor at gun point into the back room. In Di Fillippi’s ardent recital, there had been a lot of emphasis real or imagined, on the
front
of the shop. So everyone had merely assumed (as who wouldn’t?) that La Bresca and Calucci would come in through the front door, open the door, ting-a-ling would go the bell, shove their guns into John the Tailor’s face, and then go about their dirty business. It is doubtful that the police even
knew
there was a back door to the shop.

La Bresca and Calucci knew there was a back door.

They kicked that door in at precisely seven-fifty, right on schedule, kicked it in noisily and effectively, not caring whether or not they scared John the Tailor out of ten years’ growth, knowing he would rush to the back of the shop to see what the hell was happening, knowing he would run directly into two very large pistols.

The first thing they saw was two guys playing checkers.

The first thing La Bresca said was, “Fuzz!”

He knew the short guy was fuzz because he had been questioned by him often enough. He didn’t know who the other guy was, but he reasoned that if you saw
one
mouse you probably had fifty, and if you saw one
cop
you probably had a thousand, so the place was probably crawling with cops, they had stepped into a very sweet little trap here—and that was when the curtain shot back and the front door of the shop burst open.

It was also when all the overlapping confusion started, the past, present, and future jazz getting all mixed up so
that it seemed for a tense ten seconds as if seven movies were being projected simultaneously on the same tiny screen. Even later, much later, Carella couldn’t quite put all the pieces together; everything happened too fast and too luckily, and he and Willis had very little to do with any of it.

The first obvious fact that crackled up Carella’s spine and into his head was that he and Willis had been caught cold. Even as he rose from his chair, knocking it over backwards, even as he shouted, “Hal, behind you!” and reached for his revolver, he knew they’d been caught cold, they were staring into the open muzzles of two high caliber guns and they would be shot dead on the spot. He heard one of the men shout, “Fuzz!” and then he saw both guns come up level at the same time, and too many last thoughts crowded into his head in the tick of a second. Willis whirled, knocking checkerboard and checkers to the floor, drawing his gun, and suddenly John the Tailor threw back the curtain separating the rear of the shop from the front, and the front door of the shop burst open in the same instant.

John the Tailor later said he had run back to see what the noise was, throwing the curtain between the two rooms, and then whirling to see what Carella only later saw, three men standing in the front doorway of his shop, all of them holding pistols.

This was what La Bresca and Calucci must have seen as well, looking through the now open curtain directly to the front door. And whereas they must have instantly known they had caught the back-room cops cold, they now recognized the threat of the three other cops standing in the front door, all of them with pistols in their fists and kill looks on their faces. The three men weren’t cops, but La Bresca and Calucci didn’t know that. The sergeant standing in the doorway shouted, “Fuzz!” meaning he thought La Bresca and Calucci were fuzz, but La Bresca and Calucci merely thought he was announcing his own arrival. So they began shooting. The three men in the door, facing what they too thought was a police trap, opened fire at the same time. John the Tailor threw himself to the floor. Carella and Willis, recognizing a good healthy crossfire when they saw one, tried to flatten themselves against the wall. In the flattening process, Willis slipped on one of the fallen checkers and went tumbling to the floor, bullets spraying over his head.

Carella’s gun was in his hand now. He leveled it at the
front door because he had taken a good look at one of the men standing there firing into the back room, and whereas the man was not wearing his hearing aid, he was tall and blond and Carella recognized him at once. He aimed carefully and deliberately. The gun bucked in his hand when he pulled off the shot. He saw the deaf man clutch for his shoulder and then half-stumble, half-turn toward the open doorway. Someone screamed behind Carella, and he turned to see La Bresca falling over the pressing machine, spilling blood onto the white padding, and then four more shots exploded in the tiny shop and someone grunted, and there were more shots, Willis was up and firing, and then there was only smoke, heavy smoke that hung on the air in layers, the terrible nostril-burning stink of cordite, and the sound of John the Tailor on the floor, praying softly in Italian.

“Outside!” Carella shouted, and leaped the counter dividing the shop, slipping in a pool of blood near the sewing machine, but regaining his footing and running coatless into the snow.

There was no one in sight.

The cold was numbing.

It hit his naked gun hand immediately, seemed to wed flesh to steel.

A trail of blood ran from the shop door across the white snow stretching endlessly into the city. Carella began following it.

The deaf man ran as fast as he could, but the pain in his shoulder was intolerable.

He could not understand what had happened.

Was it possible they had figured it out? But no, they couldn’t have. And yet, they’d been there, waiting. How
could
they have known? How could they
possibly
have known when he
himself
hadn’t known until fifteen minutes ago?

There had been at least twenty-five pages of “V” listings in the Isola directory, with about 500 names to a page, for a combined total of some 12,500 names. He had not counted the number of first names beginning with the letter “J,” but there seemed to be at least twenty or thirty on every page, and he had actually gone through
eleven
names with the initials “JMV,” the same initials as His Honor the Mayor James Martin Vale, before coming to the one on Culver Avenue.

How could they have known? How could they have pinpointed the tailor shop of John Mario Vicenzo, the final
twist of the knife, a JMV located within the very confines of the 87th? It’s impossible, he thought. I left nothing to chance, it should have worked, I should have got them both, there were no wild cards in the deck, it should have worked.

There were
still
some wild cards in the deck.

“Look,” Jimmy said.

The taller boy, the one carrying the gasoline can, lifted his head, squinted against the wind, and then ducked it immediately as a fiercer gust attacked his face. He had seen a tall blond man staggering off the pavement and into the center of the snowbound street.

“Drunk as a pig,” Jimmy said beside him. “Let’s get him, Baby.”

The one called Baby nodded bleakly. Swiftly, they ran toward the corner. The wind was stronger there, it struck them with gale force as they turned onto the wide avenue. The vag was nowhere in sight.

“We lost him,” Baby said. His teeth were chattering, and he wanted to go home.

“He’s got to be in one of these hallways,” Jimmy said. “Come on, Baby, it’s fire time.”

From where Genero sat in the RMP car, he could see the empty windswept avenue through a frost-free spot on the windshield, snow devils ascending with each fresh gust of wind, hanging signs clanging and flapping, an eerie graveyard sound rasping at the windows of the automobile. The avenue was deserted, the snow locked the street from sidewalk to sidewalk, lights burned behind apartment windows like warming fires in a primeval night.

“What’s that?” he said suddenly.

“What’s what?” Phillips asked.

“Up ahead. Those two guys.”

“Huh?” Phillips said.

“They’re trying doors,” Genero said. “Pull over.”

“Huh?”

“Pull over and cut your engine!”

He could hear them talking on the sidewalk outside, he could hear their voices coming closer and closer. He lay in the hallway with his shoulder oozing blood, knowing he had to climb those steps and get to the roof, get from this building to the next one, jump rooftops all night long if he had to, but first rest, just rest, just rest a little, rest before
they opened the door and found him, how had they got to him so fast? Were there policemen all over this damn city?

There were too many things he did not understand.

He listened as the voices came closer, and then he saw the doorknob turning.

“Hold it right there!” Genero shouted.

The boys turned immediately.

“Fuzz!” Baby shouted, and dropped the gasoline can, and began running. Genero fired a warning shot over his head, and then belatedly yelled, “Police! Stop or I’ll shoot!” and then fired another warning shot. Up the street, where he had parked the RMP at the curb, Phillips was opening the door on the driver’s side and unholstering his revolver. Genero fired again, surprised when he saw the running boy drop to the snow. I
got
him! he thought, and then whirled to see the second boy running in the opposite direction, Holy Jesus, he thought, I’m busting up a
robbery
or something! “Halt!” he shouted. “Stop!” and fired into the air, and saw the boy rounding the corner, and immediately ran after him.

He chased Jimmy for three blocks in the snow, pushing through knee-deep drifts, slipping on icy patches, the wind a constant adversary, and finally caught up with him as he was scaling a back-alley fence.

“Hold it right there, Sonny,” Genero said, “or I’ll put one right up your ass.”

Jimmy hesitated astride the fence, debating whether to swing his legs up and over it, or to get down before this trigger-happy bastard really carried out his threat.

Sighing, he dropped to the ground at Genero’s feet.

“What seems to be the trouble, Officer?” he asked.

“Trouble
is right,” Genero said. “Get your hands up.”

Phillips came puffing into the alley just then. He walked up to Genero like the hair bag he was, shoved him aside, and then pushed Jimmy against the fence while he frisked him. Genero was smart enough to make certain
his
handcuffs were the ones they put on the kid, though there was a moment there when it seemed like a touch-and-go race with Phillips.

By the time they got the kid back to the squad car, by the time they went up the street to ascertain that the other kid was still alive, though barely, by the time they located the hallway door the kids were about to open, by the time they opened that door themselves and flashed their lights into the foyer, all they saw was a puddle of blood on the floor.

The blood continued up the steps.

They followed the spatters to the top floor, directly to the open door of the roof. Genero stepped outside and threw the beam of his flash across the snow.

Bloodstains and footprints led in an erratic trail to the edge of the roof, and from there to the roof beyond, and from there to the rest of the city, or perhaps the rest of the world.

Two blocks away, they found Steve Carella wandering coatless in the snow like Dr. Zhivago or somebody.

The cleanup in the tailor shop was a gruesome job.

La Bresca and Calucci were both dead. The big redheaded man named Buck was also dead. Ahmad was alive and breathing when they carted him off in the meat wagon, but he had taken two slugs in the chest from Calucci’s .45, and another in the stomach from La Bresca’s Walther. He was gushing blood, and spitting blood, and shivering and mumbling, and they doubted very much if he’d make it to the hospital alive.

Carella was shivering a little himself.

He stood near the radiator in the tailor shop, wrapped in his overcoat, his teeth chattering, and asked John the Tailor how much money there was in the metal box he was taking home.

“Due cento tre dollari.”
John the Tailor said.

Two hundred and three dollars.