The Real Cool Killers (2 page)

Instinctively he leaped high and sideways, away from the oncoming car. His arms and legs flew out in grotesque silhouette.

At that instant Sonny came abreast of the Arabs and shot at the leaping white man while he was still in the air.

The orange blast lit up Sonny’s distorted face and the roar of the gunshot sounded like a fusillade.

The big white man shuddered and came down limp. He landed face down and in a spread-eagled posture. He didn’t get up.

Sonny ran up to him with the smoking pistol dangling from his hand. He was starkly spotlighted by the car’s headlights. He looked at the white man lying face down in the middle of the street and started laughing. He doubled over laughing, his arms jerking and his body rocking.

Lowtop and Rubberlips caught up. The eight Arabs joined them in the beams of light.

“Man, what happened?” Lowtop asked.

The Arabs looked at him and began to laugh.

Rubberlips began to laugh too, then Lowtop.

All of them stood in the stark white light, swaying and rocking and doubling up with laughter.

Sonny was trying to say something but he was laughing so hard he couldn’t get it out.

A police siren sounded nearby.

The telephone rang in the captain’s office at the 126th Street precinct station. The uniformed officer behind the desk reached for the outside phone without looking up from behind the record sheet he was filling out.

“Harlem precinct, Lieutenant Anderson,” he said.

A high-pitched correct voice said, “Are you the man in charge?”

“Yes, lady,” Lieutenant Anderson said patiently and went on writing with his free hand.

“I want to report that a white man is being chased down Lenox Avenue by a colored man with a gun,” the voice said with the smug sanctimoniousness of a saved sister.

Lieutenant Anderson pushed aside the record sheet and pulled forward a report pad.

When he’d finished taking down the essential details of her incoherent account, he said, “Thank you, Mrs. Collins,” hung up and reached for the closed line to central police on Centre Street.

“Give me the radio dispatcher,” he said.

Two colored men were driving east on 135th Street in the wake of a crosstown bus. Shapeless dark hats sat squarely on their clipped kinky hair and their big frames filled up the front seat of a small, battered black sedan.

Static crackled from the shortwave radio and a metallic voice said: “Calling all cars. Riot threatens in Harlem. White man running south on Lenox Avenue at 128th Street. Chased by drunken Negro with gun. Danger of murder.”

“Better goose it,” the one on the inside said in a grating voice.

“I reckon so,” the driver replied laconically.

He gave a short sharp blast on the siren and gunned the small sedan in a crying U-turn in the middle of the block, cutting in front of a taxi coming fast from the direction of The Bronx.

The taxi tore its brakes to keep from ramming into the sedan. Seeing the private license plates, the taxi driver thought they were two small-time hustlers trying to play big shots with the siren on their car. He was an Italian from The Bronx who had grown up with bigtime-gangsters and Harlem hoodlums didn’t scare him.

He leaned out of his window and yelled, “You ain’t plowing cotton in Mississippi, you black son of a bitch. This is New York City, the Big Apple, where people drive–”

The colored man riding with his girl friend in the back seat leaned quickly forward and yanked at his sleeve. “Man, come back in here and shut yo’ mouth,” he warned anxiously. “Them is Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson you is talking to. Can’t you see that police antenna stuck up from their tail.”

“Oh, that’s them,” the driver said, cooling off as quickly as a showgirl on a broke stud. “I didn’t recognize ’em.”

Grave Digger had heard him but he mashed the gas without looking around.

Coffin Ed drew his pistol from its shoulder sling and spun the cylinder. Passing street light glinted from the long nickel-plated barrel of the special .38 revolver, and the five brass-jacketed bullets looked deadly in the six chambers. The one beneath the trigger was empty. But he kept an extra box of shells along with his report book and handcuffs in his greased-leather-lined right coat pocket.

“Lieutenant Anderson asked me last night why we stick to these old-fashioned rods when the new ones are so much better. He was trying to sell me on the idea of one of those new hydraulic automatics that shoot fifteen times; said they were faster, lighter and just as accurate. But I told him we’d stick to these.”

“Did you tell him how fast you could reload?” Grave Digger carried its mate beneath his left arm.

“Naw, I told him he didn’t know how hard these Harlem Negroes’ heads are,” Coffin Ed said.

His acid-scarred face looked sinister in the dim panel light.

Grave Digger chuckled. “You should have told him that these people don’t have any respect for a gun that doesn’t have a shiny barrel half a mile long. They want to see what they’re being shot with.”

“Or else hear it, otherwise they figure it can’t do any more
damage than their knives.”

When they came onto Lenox, Grave Digger wheeled south through the red light with the siren open, passing in front of an eastbound trailer truck, and slowed down behind a sky blue Cadillac Coupe de Ville trimmed in yellow metal, hogging the southbound lane between a bus and a fleet of northbound refrigerator trucks. It had a New York State license plate numbered B-H-21. It belonged to Big Henry who ran the “21” numbers house. Big Henry was driving. His bodyguard, Cousin Cuts, was sitting beside him on the front seat. Two other rugged-looking men occupied the back seat.

Big Henry took the cigar from his thick-lipped mouth with his right hand, tapped ash in the tray sticking out of the instrument panel, and kept on talking to Cuts as though he hadn’t heard the siren. The flash of a diamond in his cigar hand lit up the rear window.

“Get him over,” Grave Digger said in a flat voice.

Coffin Ed leaned out of the right side window and shot the rear-view mirror off the door hinge of the big Cadillac.

The cigar hand of Big Henry became rigid and the back of his fat neck began to swell as he looked at his shattered mirror. Cuts rose up in his seat, twisting about threateningly, and reached for his pistol. But when he saw Coffin Ed’s sinister face staring at him from behind the long nickel-plated barrel of the .38 he ducked like an artful dodger from a hard thrown ball.

Coffin Ed planted a hole in the Cadillac’s front fender.

Grave Digger chuckled. “That’ll hurt Big Henry more than a hole in Cousin Cut’s head.”

Big Henry turned about with a look of pop-eyed indignation on his puffed black face, but it sank in like a burst balloon when he recognized the detectives. He wheeled the car frantically toward the curb and crumpled his right front fender into the side of the bus.

Grave Digger had space enough to squeeze through. As they passed, Coffin Ed lowered his aim and shot Big Henry’s
gold lettered initials from the Cadillac’s door.

“And stay over!” he yelled in a grating voice.

They left Big Henry giving them a how-could-you-do-this-to-me-look with tears in his eyes.

When they came abreast the Dew Drop Inn they saw the deserted ambulance and the crowd running on ahead. Without slowing down, they wormed between the cars parked haphazardly in the street and pushed through the dense jam of people, the sirens shrieking. They dragged to a stop when their headlights focused on the macabre scene.

“Split!” one of the Arabs hissed. “Here’s the things.”

“The monsters,” another chimed.

“Keep cool, fool,” the third admonished. “They got nothing on us.”

The two tall, lanky, loose-jointed detectives hit the pavement in unison, their nickel-plated .38 specials gripped in their hands. They looked like big-shouldered plowhands in Sunday suits at a Saturday night jamboree.

“Straighten up!” Grave Digger yelled at the top of his voice.

“Count off!” Coffin Ed echoed.

There was movement in the crowd. The morbid and the innocent moved in closer. Suspicious characters began to blow.

Sonny and his two friends turned startled, pop-eyed faces.

“Where they come from?” Sonny mumbled in a daze.

“I’ll take him,” Grave Digger said.

“Covered,” Coffin Ed replied.

Their big flat feet made slapping sounds as they converged on Sonny and the Arabs. Coffin Ed halted at an angle that put them all in line of fire.

Without a break in motion, Grave Digger closed on Sonny and slapped him on the elbow with the barrel of his pistol. With his free hand he caught Sonny’s pistol when it flew from his nerveless fingers.

“Got it,” he said as Sonny yelped in pain and grabbed his numb arm.

“I ain’t–” Sonny tried to finish but Grave Digger shouted, “Shut up!”

“Line up and reach!” Coffin Ed ordered in a threatening voice, menacing them with his pistol. He sounded as though his teeth were on edge.

“Tell the man, Sonny,” Lowtop urged in a trembling voice, but it was drowned by Grave Diggers’s thundering at the crowd: “Back up!” He lined a shot overhead.

They backed up.

Sonny’s good arm shot up and his two friends reached. He was still trying to say something. His Adam’s apple bobbed helplessly in his dry wordless throat.

But the Arabs were defiant. They dangled their arms and shuffled about.

“Reach where, man?” one of them said in a husky voice.

Coffin Ed grabbed him by the neck, lifted him off his feet.

“Easy, Ed,” Grave Digger cautioned in a strangely anxious voice. “Easy does it.”

Coffin Ed halted, his pistol ready to shatter the Arab’s teeth, and shook his head like a dog coming out of water. Releasing the Arab’s neck, he backed up one step and said in his grating voice: “One for the money … and two for the show …”

It was the first line of a jingle chanted in the game of hide-and-seek as a warning from the “seeker” to the “hiders” that he was going after them.

Grave Digger took the next line, “Three to get ready …”

But before he could finish it with “And here we go,” the Arabs had fallen into line with Sonny and had raised their hands high into the air.

“Now keep them up,” Coffin Ed said.

“Or you’ll be the next ones lying on the ground,” Grave Digger added.

Sonny finally got out the words, “He ain’t dead. He’s just fainted.”

“That’s right,” Rubberlips confirmed. “He ain’t been hit. It just scared him so he fell unconscious.”

“Just shake him and he’ll come to,” Sonny added.

The Arabs started to laugh again, but Coffin Ed’s sinister face silenced them.

Grave Digger stuck Sonny’s revolver into his own belt, holstered his own revolver, and bent down and lifted the white man’s face. Blue eyes stared fixedly at nothing. He lowered the head gently and picked up a limp, warm hand, feeling for a pulse.

“He ain’t dead,” Sonny repeated. But his voice had grown weaker. “He’s just fainted, that’s all.”

He and his two friends watched Grave Digger as though he were Jesus Christ bending over the body of Lazarus.

Grave Digger’s eyes explored the white man’s back. Coffin Ed stood without moving, his scarred face like a bronze mask cast with trembling hands. Grave Digger saw a black wet spot in the white man’s thick gray-shot black hair, low down at the base of the skull. He put his fingertips to it and they came off stained. He straightened up slowly, held his wet fingertips in the white headlights; they showed red. He said nothing.

The spectators crowded nearer. Coffin Ed didn’t notice; he was looking at Grave Digger’s bloody fingertips.

“Is that blood?” Sonny asked in a breaking whisper. His body began to tremble, coming slowly upward from his grasshopper legs.

Grave Digger and Coffin Ed stared at him, saying nothing.

“Is he dead?” Sonny asked in a terror-stricken whisper. His trembling lips were dust dry and his eyes were turning white in a black face gone gray.

“Dead as he’ll ever be,” Grave Digger said in a flat toneless voice.

“I didn’t do it,” Sonny whispered. “I swear ’fore God in heaven.”

“He didn’t do it,” Rubberlips and Lowtop echoed in unison.

“How does it figure?” Coffin Ed asked.

“It figures for itself,” Grave Digger said.

“So help me God, boss. I couldn’t have done it,” Sonny said in a terrified whisper.

Grave Digger stared at him from agate hard eyes and said nothing.

“You gotta believe him, boss, he couldn’t have done it,” Rubberlips vouched.

“Naw, suh,” Lowtops echoed.

“I wasn’t trying to hurt him, I just wanted to scare him,” Sonny said. Tears were trickling from his eyes.

“It were that crazy drunk man with the knife that started it,” Rubberlips said. “Back there in the Dew Drop Inn.”

“Then afterwards the big white man kept looking in the window,” Lowtop said. “That made Sonny mad.”

The detectives stared at him with blank eyes. The Arabs were motionless.

“He’s a comedian,” Coffin Ed said finally.

“How could I be mad about my old lady,” Sonny argued. “I ain’t even got any old lady.”

“Don’t tell me,” Grave Digger said in an unrelenting voice, and handcuffed Sonny. “Save it for the judge.”

“Boss, listen, I beg you, I swear ’fore God–”

“Shut up, you’re under arrest,” Coffin Ed said.

A police car siren sounded from the distance. It was coming from the east; it started like the wail of an anguished banshee and grew into a scream. Another sounded from the west; it was joined by other from the north and south, one sounding after another like jets taking off from an aircraft carrier.

“Let’s see what these real cool Moslems are carrying,” Grave Digger said.

“Count off, you sheiks,” Coffin Ed said.

They had the case wrapped up before the prowl cars arrived. The pressure was off. They felt cocky.

“Praise Allah,” the tallest of the Arabs said.

As though performing a ritual, the others said, “Mecca,” and all bowed low with outstretched arms.

“Cut the comedy and straighten up,” Grave Digger said. “We’re holding you as witnesses.”