“I have to. I have to, now, forever. I’ll come with you, I will.”
“No time to pack,” Shank was saying. “We take what we can carry. We head first for Buffalo. It’s a big junk town. I can sell there. We can get some money together.”
They were short on money. Shank had fifty dollars in cash and the cop’s wallet yielded another twenty-five. Joe had a few dollars, Anita a few more. Enough to get them to Buffalo and pay for a hotel room, maybe a meal. Nothing more.
“All that money in the bank,” Shank said. “All that goddamn money and the bank doesn’t open until Monday. Can’t risk it. Can’t stay around. They’ll tip to us by then. And they won’t let up. The police take care of their own. Kill a cop and they turn the town inside-out looking for you. Someday I’ll come back, clean out that bank account. Not now.”
Shank and Joe stuffed the cop’s hard body into the closet. They covered the bloodstains with newspapers.
“They’ll find him,” Shank said. “Maybe this will keep them an extra hour. Maybe two hours. Every minute helps.”
Curiously, Anita remembered to turn off the water running in the sink, thinking as she did so that the water would have washed nothing away, anyhow. The scum on the dirty dishes was very thick.
They took a cab to Grand Central. Their timing was fortunate. A train left for Buffalo at 8:02 and they were on it. Shank had his knife in one pocket and the cop’s gun in the other. Joe was carrying the heroin. There was a lot of it—Shank had connected recently with Basil.
“We’ll sell it in Buffalo,” he said. “Lay over a few days, sell what we can, then head west. Buy a car. It’s safer by car. Trains make me nervous.”
The train stopped at Albany. A porter rolled through a sandwich cart. Shank bought three sandwiches and he, Joe and Anita wolfed them down without tasting them. The train started up again and sped west.
“Chicago,” Shank said. “We can hole up in Chicago. I know a cat from the coast, he’s in Chicago. An old friend. We can connect with him, hide out there. Set ourselves up, get rolling again. Just so we get out of the state. New York’s going to be too hot.”
Utica. Syracuse.
Joe wondered what was going to happen. It was bad now, very bad. It could only get worse. A man was stuck in a closet with a hole in his chest and they had put him there.
You could defend a lot of things, rationalize a lot of actions. You could defend smoking, defend selling. Somebody had to sell it, Joe’s mind ticked off the thoughts.
Murder was different.
Run, he thought. Run all you want. But where can you hide? How far can you run before they catch you?
Joe looked at Anita and wondered why she had tagged along. He was somehow a little glad she was with them. He needed her. He took her hand now and held it. If only that cop had stayed away. He and Anita would have had their own place. And finally he would be money ahead and he could get a job and everything would be all right, good and clean and proper.
Not running.
Not looking for a place to hide.
Why had she come along? Of the three, she alone was safe. She alone could go home, back to Harlem, back to something approaching sanity. She could stay away from police, she could be safe. Nobody knew her. Nobody was looking for her.
And yet she had chosen to be with him. Now she was breaking the laws. Accessory to and after the fact. Guilty, now.
Why?
Rochester. Batavia.
Anita sat in her seat and tried to sleep but could not. She wondered when she would be able to sleep again. Sometime, maybe.
Joe was holding her hand, squeezing it. She wanted to squeeze back but she was still numb and she could not move. She felt as if she were not really alive. Everything was a dream. A big bad dream. A nightmare she was somehow living her way through. A bad nightmare that would have a dismal ending.
They were running. First to Buffalo. Then to Chicago, then to somewhere else. She wondered when they would be able to stop running. Never, she decided. They would run until they dropped, run until they were caught and tried and electrocuted. She wondered if she would be killed with the others. She wondered if it made any difference, if anything made any difference any more.
Probably not.
She lit a cigarette from the butt of another and the smoke scratched her throat and clouded her lungs.
She coughed out a cloud of smoke and her head swam. Nothing mattered any more. Nothing would ever matter. She and Joe were together, they would run together, they would be caught together, they would die together. Nothing mattered. Nothing would ever matter. Buffalo.
The train jolted to a stop and they stood up together and walked out of it.
Buffalo was gray in the morning. Anita, Joe and Shank left the railroad station and took a taxi to a dilapidated hotel on Clinton Street where the desk clerk asked no questions. They paid ten dollars in advance and the clerk gave them a room on the third floor whose window opened out on an air shaft. The room was dirty, the two beds unmade.
“It’s quiet,” Shank said. “And we won’t be here long. A day, two days. Then we clear out and head west. We leave this town behind us. A bad town to begin with. And in the wrong state—for us. There are forty-nine other states. We’ll do better in any one of them. Not New York.”
He took the heroin from Joe, put it in the dresser drawer. “You stay here,” he said. “The two of you, stay in the room, keep it quiet. I’ll be back in an hour, two hours. Wait for me.”
He went out and left them alone.
For several minutes they sat by themselves and said nothing. Then Joe broke the silence.
“You didn’t have to come,” he said.
“I know.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I guess I had to be with you. I don’t know why.”
“You were nuts to come. I don’t know how we’re going to get away.”
She said nothing.
“But I’m glad you came,” he went on. “I’m selfish, but I’m glad you came. I would go nuts without you. I need you, Anita.”
She looked at him.
“Anita,” he said. “I love you, Anita.”
She went to him and sat on the bed with him. He put his arms around her, slowly, tentatively, and their mouths came together and they kissed. A long kiss. A good kiss, a kiss saying many things.
“We have to stay together. We need each other, Anita. And some day we’ll get out of this. Out all the way. It’ll be the two of us forever.”
“I hope so, Joe.”
“It will. It will, honey. I love you, honey, I love you and I need you and—”
It happened like a dream. There was no need to talk any more. They were lost in their overwhelming need, a need that could only be satisfied through the merging of flesh with flesh, body with body, soul with soul. They undressed automatically and they came together with no preceding love-play, no kisses, no caresses. His flesh claimed her and they joined in a dreamlike version of reality, bodies seeking, hearts pounding, minds clouded with love.
When it was finished they lay in each other’s arms, holding themselves together, trying to right their lives with the sudden enormity of their love for each other. In the peak of passion they had managed to lose the horror of reality, the true nature of their situation. Now, as they basked in the glow of after-love, that horror filtered through to them once again. But they had each other, and somehow this lessened the horror. As long as they were together they could survive it.
Finally, they slept…
