his stomach down into his groin.
“We’ve talked too much already,”. the white man said, moving into Leila and raising the knife.
Leila’s hand flew to her mouth but she didn’t dare scream.
The lookout moved forward and stuck the gun muzzle against the small of the white man’s back, then pulled it back a few inches so it could breathe; it was an automatic, and if he had to shoot it needed air.
The white man got the message. He froze with his hand raised. “You ain’t going to shoot me,” he said. His voice sounded as dangerous as a rattlesnake’s warning.
“Just don’t hurt her is all,” the lookout said in a voice that sounded equally as dangerous:
The second colored man drew his own. 38 police special, holding it down beside him in his left hand.
“This is getting too tight for me,” he said. “I got fifteen grand wrapped up in this deal myself, and if it gets blown away we’re all going to go.”
“Chicken feed,” Leila whispered, holding the lookout with her eyes.
Sweat had filmed on her temples and upper lip; a vein in the left side of her throat was throbbing. She breathed as though she couldn’t get enough air; her breasts in the jersey-silk pullover were rising and falling like bellows. She was playing a sex pot if there ever was one; but all she wanted in this world was to get to the window, and it seemed like ten thousand miles away.
Unseen by the lookout, the white man turned the knife in his hand and gripped the point.
“This bitch is going to scream any minute,” he said.
The lookout made an offer. “I’ll give you my share for her.”
Leila edged closer to the window. “You won’t lose,” she promised.
Nobody spoke. In the silence the slow, hypnotic beat coming from below repeated itself endlessly, changing instruments for eight-bar solos.
“It’s a deal,” the white man said. “Now get back on the door.”
“I’ll stay here-let Lefty take the door.”
Leila turned her back to the window and groped behind her for the shade. Her fingers found the drawstring.
“Kill him!” she screamed and jerked the string.
Everything happened at once.
The shade flew up and spun at the top in sudden chopping sound like a runaway ratchet wheel.
Leila dropped toward the floor as the white man threw the knife. It caught her in the stomach and went in up to the hilt.
The lookout swung his automatic, searching for a target.
Glass shattered, and the room exploded with the big, hard, head-splitting roar of a high-powered. 38 as Grave Digger, standing on the snow-covered fire escape, shot through the iron window grill and put two slugs less than an inch apart in the gunman’s heart.
Simultaneously, two shots sounded from the corridor; metal broke and wood crashed, and cold air rushed into the room.
The left-handed gunman spun toward the connecting doorway and went through with his pistol down at his left hip in the Hollywood gunslinger’s fashion. He ran into a brace of slugs and came reeling back with two sudden eyes in his forehead, his coat flapping in the hard percussion of sound.
With no expression whatsoever in his beetle-browed, brutal face, the white man drew from the shoulder. He was lightning fast.
But Grave Digger had already taken a bead on him with the long nickel-plated barrel resting on an iron crossbar. He put the first one in the white man’s right arm, just above the elbow, and the second one in his left kneecap.
The pistol dropped from the white man’s hand as he pitched to the rug on his face. The pain in his knee was excruciating, but he didn’t make a sound. He was like a wounded tiger, silent, crippled, but still as dangerous a killer as the jungle ever saw. Without looking up, knowing that he didn’t have a chance, he turned over and lunged for his fallen pistol with his left hand.
Coffin Ed came in from the reception room and kicked it out of his reach, then crossed the room and shot the padlock off the window grill.
Grave Digger kicked it in, knocked out the broken window glass with the side of his shoe and came into the room. Snow followed him.
Leila was curled up against the baseboard with her hands gripping the handle of the knife, crying softly and moaning.
Grave Digger knelt down, pulled her hands away gently and handcuffed them behind her back.
“You can’t pull it out,” he said. “That would only kill you.”
Coffin Ed was occupied handcuffing the white man’s good left hand to his good right leg. The white man looked at him without expression.
Finally Casper opened his eyes. The scene was stained red by the blood on his eyeballs.
Coffin Ed undid the gag.
“Get me loose quick,” Casper said thickly, talking through a mouthful of blood.
Grave Digger unlocked the manacles and Coffin Ed freed his legs.
Casper got to his hands and knees and looked about. He saw the manacled white man. Their gazes met. Casper saw the white man’s revolver on the floor beside the desk. He crawled to it bear fashion and picked it up. Everyone was watching him, but no one except the white man expected it. He pumped three slugs into the white man’s head.
Coffin Ed went crazy with rage. He kicked the pistol from Casper’s hand and aimed his own revolver at Casper’s heart.
“God-damned sonofabitch, I’ll kill you!” he raved. “He was ours; he wasn’t yours. You God-damned sonofabitch, we worked all night and all day and took every God-damned rape-fiend risk to get this hoodlum, and you kill him.”
“It was self-defense,” Casper said thickly, blood spattering from his slashed tongue. “You saw the mother- raper trying to shoot me-didn’t you!”
Coffin Ed drew back his pistol as though to club him across the head. “I ought to knock out your God-damned brains and call it an accident,” he raved.
“Easy, Ed, easy man,” Grave Digger cautioned. “You ain’t God either.”
Leila was laughing hysterically. “You knew what kind of man he is when you were risking me and everybody else to save him.”
Grave Digger watched Casper pull to his feet and stagger toward the closet for some clothes to put on.
“Man, does money mean that much to you?” he asked.
“What money?” Casper said.
Down below on 125th Street was a crowd scene. Traffic was stopped. Joe Green’s big black Cadillac limousine sat in a line of cars a block long, the motor running and nobody in it. The sidewalks on both sides of the street were jammed. The Paris Bar and the Palm Cafe and the Apollo Bar had erupted their clients. The three movie houses had been deserted for the bigger attraction.
“Gawwwaheddamnnnn. A shooting every night,” a joker crowed triumphantly. “It’s crazy, man, crazy.”
Prowl cars converged from all directions, weaving in and out of the stopped cars, on the right side and on the wrong side of the street, jumping the curb when necessary to get by. Their sirens were screaming like the souls of the damned; their red lights were blinking like eyes from hell
Cops jumped out, big feet splattering in the ankle-deep slush, went up the stairs like the introduction to the television series called “Gang Busters.”
Their eyes popped at the sight that greeted them.
Coffin Ed was telephoning for an ambulance.
Grave Digger looked up from the floor, where he was kneeling beside Leila Baron, stroking her forehead and consoling her.
“It’s all over but the lying,” he lisped.
