Runaway

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Runaway

Ed McBain writing as Richard Marsten

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

To
BOBBY
and
JERRY

One

Because the neighborhood had planted fear so deeply inside him, he ran the instant he heard the shot.

He did not stop to wonder where the shot had come from. A shot meant trouble, and trouble meant cops, and in the neighborhood you ran when the cops came.

He came up out of The Valley, away from the slab-gray fronts of the tenements, away from the back yards and the clothes stiff with the first rush of winter, grotesquely clutching the cold air. His feet clattered on the pavement, and a hundred hollow echoes reverberated from the cast-iron sky, fled into dim hallways, reached out again to smother the asphalt with sound. He went past the candy store on the corner where Freddie ran a drop, and then he hit Seventh Avenue and turned downtown, slowing his pace a little now because the shot was behind him. He mingled with the crowd, and there was warmth in the crowd, and he heard the click of high heels on pavement, smelled the perfume of the women, listened to the voices disjointed and distorted, a part of his people now, a part of the warm cocoon bundled around him, bundled against the winter and the cops and the shot he had heard.

The Market Place was ahead of him, stretching down to the park from 115th Street. He had been to the Market only once, when he was sixteen, and he could still remember the dim hallway and the lightly perfumed body, the shadows on the ceiling, the heavily murmured incantation of commercial love. He had enjoyed the experience, but there was plenty around you didn't have to pay for, and he knew plenty of guys who'd been lured into a hallway by a pair of loose hips on the Market, only to be slashed and mugged by accomplices. And though he knew all this, the Market still held a peculiar fascination for him, and he almost forgot the shot as he walked through it.

The girl lounging in one of the doorways, lighting a cigarette, showing colossal disinterest for everything around her, shoved herself off the doorjamb with an insinuating push of her hip. She started down the steps in front of the building, swinging her body exaggeratedly, and he watched the smooth flow of silk over her flat stomach where the monkey-fur jacket ended. He quickened his pace, and she touched his arm lightly as he passed her. She didn't say anything. She tilted her face and smiled an age-old smile, and he simply shook his head and kept walking, and then she cursed after him.

He walked through the Market, wondering what was going on in each of the rooms behind the drawn window shades, knowing very well what was going on, but wondering about it anyway, and deriving a strange peculiar satisfaction from wondering.

The Golden Edge faced Central Park, and he thought, Next to Sugar Hill, I'll take the Golden Edge. The thought was not a new one to him, and he shrugged the way he always did whenever it crossed his mind. He knew he lived in The Valley, and he knew that he'd probably die in The Valley, unless he made a big killing on the numbers, and then, man, watch that Caddy. A big yellow job, with whitewall tires, and maybe zebra upholstery. No, maybe that would be putting it on too much. But yellow, anyway, and whitewalls for sure. And then watch all the pussies wail when Johnny Lane came down the street. A convertible with the top down, and he'd smile at them and just wave, sort of, not a real wave, just a kind of raising of his hand a little to let them know he was born and raised here and he bled for them all, but he was glad he was out of it. And then he'd cut out for his pad on Sugar Hill, none of this Golden Edge stuff, not if he made a real killing, and he'd have a Scandinavian maid, or maybe a German
Frau
who just came to this country and couldn't speak English so good, one of those real blonde women, sort of big all over, with one of those can't-speak-English smiles on her face, willing to please, happy to please, she damn well better please or he'd get him another one. And Cindy—well, Cindy'd live there with him, of course, but she wouldn't mind the
Frau
because she'd understand, Cindy would. That's if he made a killing, or if he could latch onto something the way Barney did, but he always had a horseshoe up his behind, that guy.

He crossed 110th Street and walked into the park, not looking behind him because looking behind was the worst thing you could do. He found an empty bench, and he sat down and pulled his coat collar up against the cold, and only then did he wonder who got shot. Maybe nobody at all, and maybe there was no reason to run, but when cops are involved, it's better to run first and think about it afterward, or just run and not think about it at all. He wondered if the cops ever worked you over for just thinking about something, and he smiled at his own absurd imagination and tried to make himself comfortable on the bench.

He had never liked the winter, and he sure as hell wasn't looking forward to this one. Last winter they hadn't had enough heat to keep a cockroach alive, though the cockroaches didn't seem to care about the heat. Molly kept the oven lit all the time last winter, and you could suffocate from that kind of dry, catch-in-the-throat gas heat. You'd think that sonovabitch would at least give you heat, especially in the winter, instead of making your muscles sore from pounding on the goddamned radiator all the time. He was almost ashamed to bring Cindy up there, and he remembered the time she didn't want to take off her clothes, and he thought it was because Molly would be home soon, but it was really because the flat was so cold.

He pulled his collar higher. If anything, this was going to be a colder winter. He could feel that bite in the air, like stepping on the bathroom floor at four in the morning. It ate at a man's bones, the cold, and damnit, he didn't like the cold, and that was that. No more winter, Johnny Lane has decreed, so winter is hereby abolished. That means no more mink coats, either. Wonder what all those high-stepping broads are gonna do without their mink coats. Probably freeze to death, even if it's summer all the time.

He looked up to the big apartment buildings on the other side of the park, and he wondered how it felt to live in one of those jobs, and wake up every morning and open the window and look out over the park instead of looking at some other guy in his undershirt opening the window and looking at you across the alleyway. The people from the apartment houses sometimes hit the spots, ooohing and ahhing, my, how quaint all this is. He'd seen them in their evening clothes, all dolled up, the women with dresses slashed to their navels, the men smoking pipes, like invaders from another world. They didn't belong in the neighborhood, and he resented them, but at the same time he envied the holiday spirit that was always with them.

And they call
us
the happy people, he thought bitterly.

He had been sitting on the bench for ten minutes when Snow White and the two cops pulled up. The white top of the squad car reflected the pale November sun, and it struck the old panic within him, but there was no place to go except deeper into the park, and that would be senseless. He sat still and wondered if he were carrying any mootah, but he remembered that he'd smoked his last joint down to a roach last night, and he was glad he wasn't hooked like some of the other cats, because these bastards would just be itching for a possessions rap. He kept looking up at the apartment houses out there, far away on the other side of the park, pretending the cops weren't sitting in the car there at the curb, giving him the once-over. He heard the car door slam shut with the solid sound of bank-vault doors, heard the empty clatter of the cops' shoes on the pavement, and then saw their shadows, long and thin in the afternoon sun, fall across the bench.

“Getting some air?” one cop asked.

He looked up, trying to feign surprise, knowing the fear was all over his face, and knowing cops could smell fear the way a hound could smell a bitch in heat. For an instant he panicked, thinking he
did
have a stick of marijuana on him after all. But he remembered that he had smoked it down, and the panic vanished.

“Yeah,” he said, his voice trembling just a little. “I've been getting some air.”

“We got a dead man,” the second cop said dryly.

He blinked up at the cop, condemning himself for feeling guilty when he was completely innocent. But the neighborhood was one big festering guilt complex, and he was one ulcer in that sick system. He could not have felt innocent even if he'd wanted to.

“A dead man?” he said. “Yeah?”

“This is all news to you, huh?” the first cop said.

“Yeah. Yeah, it is.”

“He got it with a zip gun, this guy,” the cop went on. “You own a zip gun?”

“No,” he said. He had owned a zip gun once, before the cops had begun giving the gangs a lot of trouble. He had ditched the gun together with a knife that was over the legal limit in blade length. He had been in street-gang fights since then, but he'd only used broken bottles or clubs, and sometimes he'd thrown bricks from the rooftops. But he'd never carried anything that could warrant a booking.