The rifle snapping over the shotgun blasts continued, as I stayed low and checked Didi who was shaking in fear, a crumpled moaning wreck; her bare back was red-pocked from two pellets, which seemed not to have entered her body, probably bouncing off the pavement and nicking her-but she was scared shitless.
Still, I could tell she was okay, and-staying low, using the Caddy as my shield-I fired the nine millimeter toward that vacant lot, where orange muzzle flash emanated from below that Blatz billboard. The safety glass of the Caddy’s windows spiderwebbed and then burst into tiny particles as the shotgunning continued, and I ducked down, noting that the rifle fire had ceased. Had I nailed one of them?
Then the shotgun stopped, too, and the thunder storm was over, leaving a legacy of pain and terror: Neddie Herbert was shrieking, yammering about not being able to feel his legs, and Didi was weeping, her long brunette hair come undone, trailing down her face and her back like tendrils. Writhing on the sidewalk like a bug on its back, big rugged Cooper had his revolver in one hand, waving it around in a punch-drunk manner; his other hand was clutching his bloody stomach, blood bubbling through his fingers.
I moved out from behind the Caddy, stepping out into the street, gun in hand-ready to dive back if I drew any fire.
But none came.
I wanted to run across there and try to catch up with the bastards, but I knew I had to stay put, at least for a while; if those guys had a car, they might pull around and try to finish the job. And since I had a gun-and hadn’t been wounded-I had to stand guard.
Now time sped up: I saw the parking lot attendant, who had apparently ducked under the car when the shooting started, scramble out from under and back inside the restaurant, glass crunching under his feet. Niccoli ran out, with Stompanato and Fred Rubinski on his tail; Niccoli got in the Caddy, and Cohen-despite his limp bloody arm-used his other arm to haul the big, bleeding Cooper up into the backseat. Stompanato helped and climbed in back with the wounded cop.
Fred yelled, “Don’t worry, Mick-ambulances are on the way! We’ll take care of everybody!”
And the Caddy roared off.
Neddie Herbert couldn’t be moved; he was alternately whimpering and screaming, still going on about not being able to move his legs. Some waitresses wrapped checkered tablecloths around the suffering Neddie, while I helped Didi inside; she said she was cold and I gave her my sportjacket to wear.
Florabel came up to me, her left hand out of sight, behind her; she held out her right palm to show me a flattened deer slug about the size of a half dollar.
“Pretty nasty,” she said.
“You get hit, Florabel?”
“Just bruised-where the sun don’t shine. Hell, I thought it was fireworks, and kids throwing rocks.”
“You reporters have such great instincts.”
As a waitress tended to Didi, Fred took me aside and said, “Real professional job.”
I nodded. “Shotgun to cause chaos, that 30.06 to pinpoint Cohen…only they missed.”
“You okay, Nate?”
“Yeah-I don’t think I even got nicked. Scraped my hands on the sidewalk, is all. Get me a flashlight, Fred.”
“What?”
“Sheriff’s deputies’ll show up pretty soon-I want a look across the way before they get here.”
Fred understood: the sheriff’s office was in Jack Dragna’s pocket, so their work might be more cover-up than investigation.
The vacant lot across the street, near the Blatz billboard, was not what I’d expected, and I immediately knew why they’d chosen this spot. Directly off the sidewalk, an embankment fell to a sunken lot, with cement stairs up the slope providing a perfect place for shooters to perch out of sight. No street or even alley back here, either: just the backyards of houses asleep for the night (lights in those houses were blazing now, however). The assassins could sit on the stairs, unseen, and fire up over the sidewalk, from ideal cover.
“Twelve-gauge,” Fred commented, pointing to a scattering of spent shells in the grass near the steps.
My flashlight found something else. “What’s this?”
Fred bent next to what appeared to a sandwich-a half-eaten sandwich….
“Christ!” Fred said, lifting the partial slice of white bread. “Who eats this shit?”
An ambulance was screaming; so was Neddie Herbert.
“What shit?” I asked.
Fred shuddered. “It’s a fucking sardine sandwich.”
The shooting victims were transferred from the emergency room of the nearest hospital to top-notch Queen of Angels, where the head doctor was Cohen’s personal physician. An entire wing was roped off f the Cohen party, with a pressroom and listening posts for both the LAPD and County Sheriff’s department.
I stayed away. Didi’s wounds were only superficial, so she was never admitted, anyway. Cohen called me from the hospital to thank me for my “quick thinking”; all I had done was throw a few shots in the shooters’ direction, but maybe that had kept the carnage to a minimum. I don’t know.
Neddie Herbert got the best care, but he died anyway, a week later, of uremic poisoning: gunshot wounds in the kidney are a bitch. At that point, Cohen was still in the hospital, but rebounding fast; and the State Attorney’s man, Cooper, was fighting for his life with a bullet in the liver and internal hemorrhaging from wounds in his intestines.
Fred and I both kept our profiles as low as possible-this kind of publicity for his restaurant and our agency was not exactly what we were looking for.
The night after Neddie Herbert’s death in the afternoon, I was waiting in the parking lot of Googie’s, the coffee shop at Sunset and Crescent Heights. Googie’s was the latest of these atomic-type cafes popping up along the Strip like futuristic mushrooms: a slab of the swooping red-painted structural steel roof rose to jut at an angle toward the street, in an off-balance exclamation point brandishing the neon
I’d arrived in a blue Ford that belonged to the A-1; but I was standing alongside a burgundy Dodge, an unmarked car used by the two vice cops who made Googie’s their home away from home. Tonight I was wasn’t taking pictures of their various dealings with bookmakers, madams, fellow crooked cops or politicians. This was something of a social call.
I’d been here since just before midnight; and we were into the early morning hours now-in fact, it was after two a.m. when Lieutenant Delbert Potts and Sergeant Rudy Johnson strolled out of the brightly illuminated glass- and-concrete coffee shop, into the less illuminated parking lot. Potts was in another rumpled brown suit-or maybe the same one-and, again, Johnson was better-dressed than his slob partner, his slender frame well-served by a dark gray suit worthy of Michael’s habidashery.
Hell, maybe Cohen provided Johnson’s wardrobe as part of the regular pay-off-at least till Delbert and Rudy got greedy and went after that twenty grand for the recordings they’d made of Mickey.
I dropped down into a crouch as they approached, pleased that no other customers had wandered into the parking lot at the same time as my friends from the vice squad. Tucked between the Dodge and the car parked next to it, I was as unseen as Potts and Johnson had been, when they’d crouched on those steps with their shotgun and rifle, waiting for Mickey.
Potts and Johnson were laughing about something-maybe Neddie Herbert’s death-and the fat one was in the lead, fishing in his pants pocket for his car keys. He didn’t see me as I rose from the shadows, swinging an underhand fist that sank six inches into his flabby belly.
Like a matador, I pushed past him, while shoving him to the pavement, where he began puking, and grabbed Johnson by one lapel and slammed his head into the rear rider’s side window. He slid down the side of the car and sat, maybe not unconscious, but good and dazed. Neither one protested-rkiking fat one, or the stunned thin one-as I disarmed them, pitching their revolvers into the darkness, where they skittered across the cement like crabs. I checked their ankles for hideout guns, but they were clean. So to speak.
Potts was still puking when I started kicking the shit out of him. I didn’t go overboard: just five or six good ones, cracking two or three ribs. Pretty soon he stopped throwing up and began to cry, wallowing down there between the cars in his own vomit. Johnson was coming around, and tried to crawl away, but I yanked him back
