It was five minutes by right from where they were parked on Third Avenue, but Grave Digger made it in three and one half without using the horn.
They found Paul in the Ford across the street from the poolroom. He said Barry was inside and Ernie was bottling up the back.
'You go and help him,' Grave Digger said. 'We'll take care of this end.'
They pulled into the spot he had vacated and settled down to wait.
'You think he's contacting Deke in there?' Coffin Ed said.
'I ain't thinking,' Grave Digger said.
Time passed.
'If I had a dollar an hour for all the time I've spent waiting for criminals to come and get themselves caught, I'd take some time off and go fishing,' Coffin Ed said.
Grave Digger chuckled. 'You're a glutton for punishment, man. That's the only thing I don't like about fishing, the waiting.'
'Yeah, but there ain't any danger at the end of that kind of waiting.'
'Hell, Ed, if you were scared of danger you'd have been a bill collector.'
It was Coffin Ed's turn to chuckle. 'Naw I wouldn't,' he said. 'Not in Harlem, Digger, not in Harlem. There ain't any more dangerous a job in Harlem than collecting bills.'
They lapsed into silence, thinking of all the reasons folks in Harlem didn't pay bills. And they thought about the eighty-seven thousand dollars taken from those people who were already so poor they dreamed hungry. 'If I had the mother-raper who got it I'd work his ass at fifty cents an hour shoveling shit until he paid it off,' Coffin Ed said.
'There ain't that much shit,' Grave Digger said drily. 'What with all this newfangled shitless food.'
Men came from the poolroom and others entered. Some they knew, others they didn't, but none they wanted.
An hour passed.
'Think they've lammed?' Coffin Ed ventured.
'How the hell would I know?' Grave Digger said. 'Maybe they're waiting like us.'
A car pulled up before the poolroom and double-parked. Suddenly they sat up. It was a black, chauffeur- driven Lincoln Mark IV, as out of place in that neighborhood as the Holy Virgin.
A uniformed colored chauffeur got out and hastened into the poolroom. Within a matter of seconds he came back and got behind the wheel and started the motor. Suddenly Barry came out. For a moment he stood on the sidewalk, looking up and down, casing the street. He looked across the street. Coffin Ed had ducked out of sight and Grave Digger was studiously searching for an acquaintance among the bums lounging in the doorways on their side of the street, and all Barry saw of him was the back of his head. It looked like the back of any other big black man's head. Satisfied, Barry turned and rapped on the door and another man came out and went straight to the limousine and got in beside the driver. Then Deke came out and went fast between two parked cars and got into the back of the limousine and Barry followed. The limousine took off like a streak, but had to slow for the lights at 125th Street.
Grave Digger had to make a U-turn and by the time he got straightened out, the limousine was out of sight.
'We ought to have got some help,' Coffin Ed said.
'Too late now,' Grave Digger said, gunning the hopped-up car past the slow-moving traffic. 'We ought to've had second sight, too.'
He went straight north on Eighth Avenue without pausing to reconnoiter.
'Where the hell are we going?' Coffin Ed asked.
'Damned if I know,' Grave Digger confessed.
'Hell,' Coffin Ed said disgustedly. 'One day we lose our car and the next day we lose our man.'
'Just let's don't lose our lives,' Grave Digger shouted above the roar of the traffic they were passing.
'Pull down,' Coffin Ed shouted back. 'At this rate we'll be in Albany.'
Grave Digger pulled up to the curb at 145th Street. 'All right, let's give this some thought,' he said.
'What kind of mother-raping thought?' Coffin Ed said.
He was near enough to the scene where the acid had been thrown into his face to evoke the memory. The tic started in his face and his nerves got on edge.
Grave Digger looked at him and looked away. He knew how he was feeling but this wasn't the time for it, he thought. 'Listen,' he said. 'They were driving a stolen car. What does that mean?'
Coffin Ed came back. 'A rendezvous or a getaway.'
'Getaway for what? If they had the money they'd already be gone.'
'Well, where the hell would you rendezvous, if you weren't scared?' Coffin Ed said.
'That's right,' Grave Digger said. 'Underneath the bridge.'
'Anyway, we ain't scared,' Coffin Ed said.
The two guns who had handled Deke's armored car were on the front seat, the same one driving. He was also a car thief specialist, and had stolen this one. He doused the lights when they came to the end of Bradhurst Avenue and eased the big car off the road that led to the Polo Grounds, stopping between two stanchions underneath the 155th Street bridge.
'You two guys spot the car,' Deke ordered. 'We'll wait here.'
The gunmen got out, careful of the rifles on the floor, and split in the darkness.
Deke took a large manila envelope from his inside coat pocket and handed it to Barry. 'Here's the list,' he said. He had had it made weeks before from the telephone directories of Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn by a public stenographer in the Theresa Hotel. 'You let him do the talking. We're going to have you covered every second.'
'I don't like this,' Barry confessed. He was scared and nervous and he couldn't see the Colonel giving any clues away. 'He ain't going to pay no fifty grand for this,' he said, taking it gingerly and sticking it into his inside pocket above his pistol.
'Naturally not,' Deke said. 'But don't argue with him. Answer his questions and take whatever he gives you.'
'Hell, Deke, I don't dig this,' Barry protested. 'What's this cracker outfit got to do with our eighty-seven grand?'
'Let me do the thinking,' Deke said coldly. 'And give me that rod.'
'Hell, you want me to go with my bare ass to see that nut? You're asking me a lot.'
'What the hell can happen to you? We're all going to have you covered. Man, goddammit, you're going to be as safe as in the arms of Jesus Christ.'
As Barry was handing over the gun he remembered, 'That's what the Colonel said.'
'He was right,' Deke said, taking the pistol from the holster and sticking it into his right coat-pocket. 'Just his reasons are wrong.'
They were silent with their thoughts until the gunmen materialized out of the darkness and took their places on the front seat. 'They're over by the El,' the driver said, easing the big car soundlessly through the dark as though he had eyes of infra-red.
The trucks and cars manned by the workers cleaning the stadium were moving about in the black dark area beneath the subway extensions and the bridge, which was used by day as a parking space, their bright lights lancing the darkness. Once the black limousine of the Colonel was picked up in a beam of light, but it didn't look out of place in that area where architects and bankers came at night to plan the construction of new buildings when the old stadium was razed. The Lincoln kept to the edge of the area, avoiding the lights, and stopped behind a big trailer truck parked for the night.
The gunmen picked their rifles from the floor and got out on each side and took stations at opposite ends of the truck. They had. 303 automatic Savage rifles loaded with. 190-point brass-nosed shells, equipped with telescopic sights.
'All right,' Deke said. 'Play it cool.'
Barry shook his head once like shaking off a premonition. 'My mama taught me more sense than this,' he
