aftermath of an earthquake. Rats the size of small dogs ran these streets and sidewalks as if they owned them— and I wasn’t about to argue with them.
It was five till seven when the maroon coupe pulled over and parked near the corner of Orchard and Scott. I continued on, pulling over half a block down. I sat and smoked and watched in my sideview mirror as two men got out of the front seat of the coupe, leaving it running. Despite that, no driver could be spotted behind the wheel: seemed only two men had been in that coupe after all; hadn’t been a wheelman waiting for them. That might explain why their getaway had been slowed enough for me to catch sight of their escape from Drury’s neighborhood. Nine millimeter in my fist, cigarette in my mouth, I turned in my seat and looked out the back window.
From across the street from where the maroon coupe was parked, where he’d been sitting in his own parked car, a six-foot figure in a dark gray suit under an open raincoat stepped out and crossed to join the two men on the corner, under a streetlamp, one of the few around here that was working.
They were talking—smiles all around, a friendly confab. All three men were an anomaly in this neighborhood: well-dressed white men, lawyer Bas and the two assassins, neither of whom (at this distance, anyway) looked familiar to me. The man who’d been driving the maroon coupe—small, round-faced, mustached—wore a light gray suit, no topcoat, and a darker gray fedora; his lanky partner, also mustached, wore a dark blue topcoat and a lighter blue fedora.
So that fucking Bas
Even from half a block away, I could see Bas’s wide-eyed shock, and he turned to flee down the sidewalk, away from them (and me) when the guy opened up—shotgun all right…no doubt the same one that had nailed Drury—and the night exploded. Bas seemed to pause in midair before he pitched face-forward to the cement, his splattered back a modern art study in charcoal and red, worthy of Charley’s penthouse wall.
I was long since out of the car, and running down the street, hat flying off, cigarette trailing sparks into the night, gun tight in my fist, when the guy in the topcoat got in behind the wheel of the parked, motor-running coupe—he’d traded jobs with his partner, who had trotted down to where Bas had belly-flopped onto the cracked cement. The .45 in the round-faced assassin’s hand blasted down at the supine attorney, once, twice, blossoming orange in the darkness.
The round-faced guy ran back to the coupe, climbed in on the rider’s side, and they took off, heading straight at me, though neither had noticed me yet; the glare of their headlights made me squint, but I’d anticipated it, and I saw them, both of their mustached faces (the tall one had a harelip scar), and they saw me too—their expressions as saucer-eyed as Bas’s—as I pointed the nine millimeter at their oncoming windshield and fired.
The shot rang through Little Hell, echoing, and the bullet spiderwebbed the windshield, but I didn’t think I’d hit either one of them, goddamnit, and I dove and rolled as the driver swerved, first to try to run me down, second to take a right that would take them toward and under the El tracks, toward Ogden Avenue.
I was barely back on my feet, when they were gone, out of my view, and—gun still in hand—I ran down to the fallen Bas, knowing it was hopeless, but checking him out, anyway.
Kneeling down to take a closer look, I figured the shotgun blast in his back had probably killed him; but the coup de grace pair of .45 shots in his head made taking his pulse a worthless procedure. I did it anyway.
Now that the shooting had stopped, people were coming out of their houses and tenements, colored faces filling doorways and windows, eyes wider than Willie Best’s and shouts of “Call the police,” and “Buncha white men shootin’ at each other,” and such like, from either side of the street, surrounding me, an accusatory gospel choir singing skyward in the night.
Before the cops or Jesus responded, I ran back to my car and got out of there, hoping to hell we all looked alike to them.
The same red-uniformed doorman as on my previous visit to the Barry Apartments—paunchy, fiftyish George with the drink-splotched face—was on duty; and he remembered me…and my name.
“Oh yes, Mr. Lincoln,” he said, accepting another of my green business cards. “How can I help you tonight?”
“I just want to go up and see my friend Joey Fischetti.”
George shook his head. “I’m not sure any of the Fish family is in, this evening. I came on at four, and the other guy said they’ve all cleared out.”
“Yeah? Vacation?”
“Not sure. They winter in Florida, y’know, but I never saw ’em go down this early, before. You could ask that girl who lives with Rocco. She’s back.”
The corner of my left eye twitched. “Is she?”
“If you can get past Pete, she is,” he said, with a shrug.
“Pete?”
George nodded toward the lobby. “The elevator operator. He’s sort of the guardian at the gate. I work for the Barry Apartments; but Pete works for the Fischettis.”
“I appreciate the information, George.”
“Any time, Mr. Lincoln.”
I had a clear head and I had that cool, detached limbo state of mind that I’d experienced in combat on the Island— Guadalcanal, that is. A distancing that keeps men under fire from going mad.
I clopped across the marble floor of the narrow, mirrored, fern-flung lobby. Over my arm the London Fog was draped, which hid the nine millimeter in my fist; I wasn’t wearing a hat—it was somewhere in Little Hell, having blown off my head when I was running down the street, trying to help Bas, fucking up yet another bodyguard assignment.
