The expressmen looked in the same direction, but they didn’t see anything.
“Yassum,” Uncle Saint called in a flunkey’s voice. “Right away, mum.”
He put the Lincoln in gear and drove past the express truck without giving it a look and kept on down Riverside Drive, keeping within the twenty-five-mile speed limit.
The expressmen got into the compartment of the truck. The driver started the motor and the truck took off behind the limousine at a more rapid speed.
Uncle Saint accelerated, watching the following truck in his rearview mirror. He kept well ahead, lengthening and shortening the gap between as though driving naturally.
He knew he was playing a dangerous game, especially alone. But he was too old and had lived too long on the edge of violence to be scared of death. What scared him was the idea of what he planned to do. What was in his favor was the fact nobody knew him. No one but Pinky and Sister Heavenly knew his straight monicker; in recent years but few people had seen him in the light. If he could get it and get away, only those two would know who had done it, and even they wouldn’t know where to look for him.
He accelerated gradually as he realized the truck was headed downtown, and pulled far ahead. He was two blocks ahead on the almost empty drive when he came to the entrance to the Yacht Club at 79th Street. He swerved into the curving driveway and slowed down, hidden by the dense foliage of the crescent-shaped park. He got a glimpse of the truck passing on Riverside Drive. He came back into the drive a block behind it and kept a bakery truck in between down as far as 72nd Street.
The truck turned east on 72nd Street to Tenth Avenue, and went south. It was a southbound avenue, feeding the Lincoln and Holland tunnels underneath the Hudson River, and was fairly covered with commercial traffic at this hour. That made it easy. The express truck had only one rearview mirror on the left front fender. Uncle Saint kept far to the right, and always kept some vehicle in between.
At 56th Street when the truck turned toward the Hudson River, the Lincoln was exposed for a moment or two; but when the truck turned south again alongside the overhead trestle of the New York Central Railroad line, he was covered again. On the west side of the wide brick-paved avenue, the whole length of North River was closed in by the docks of the great oceangoing lines. Underneath the trestle, as far as the eye could see, trucks and truck- trailers were parked side by side. The southbound lane was heavy with traffic feeding the docks.
Already the funnels of the
The maneuver was executed so quickly Uncle Saint didn’t have a chance to stop behind the truck and had to pull ahead of the Buick to park.
It was a no-parking zone and two cops in a prowl car looked meaningfully at the three parked vehicles as they drove slowly by. Being as one was a chauffeur-driven limousine and another an express truck, the cops let them slide for a moment.
Two dark-suited, straw-hatted, somber-looking men sat in the front seat of the Buick and watched the prowl car pass the Cunard dock and drop out of sight in the traffic. The man on the curb side opened the door and stepped out onto the sidewalk. He was a heavyset, black-haired man with a thick-featured, olive-skinned face and a bulging belly. His black single-breasted coat was buttoned at the bottom. He came down the street, looking anxiously toward the exit of the French Line wharf.
Uncle Saint watched in the rearview mirror, concentrating on the men in the express truck.
The driver of the Buick sat with his right hand on the wheel, his left hanging loosely through the open window.
When the heavyset man came level with the curb-side window of the Lincoln, he turned with a quick, catlike motion, unexpected in a man of his build, and came toward the car. He clapped his left hand on the car top, flipped open his coat and drew from a left shoulder sling. When he bent over to peer through the window, as though speaking to the gray-haired old chauffeur, his flapping coat shielded the pistol from view. It was a single-shot derringer with a six-inch perforated silencer attached. Without speaking a word, he took careful aim at the softest spot in Uncle Saint’s head. His dull dark eyes were impassive.
Abruptly from behind him a hard voice shouted, “Get ’em up or I’ll shoot!”
He didn’t see the faint motion of Uncle Saint’s lips. He wheeled about convulsively, the back of his head striking the top of the doorframe, knocking off his hat onto the seat of the car.
Uncle Saint lunged for his shotgun lying on the floor.
The gunman wheeled back, his eyes bugging out, as Uncle Saint was bringing up the muzzle of the double- barreled shotgun.
Both fired simultaneously.
The small coughing sound of the silenced derringer was lost in the heavy booming blast of the shotgun.
In his panic, Uncle Saint had squeezed the triggers of both barrels.
The gunman’s face disappeared and his thick heavy body was knocked over backward from the impact of the 12-gauge shells.
The rear light of a truck parked beneath the trestle in the middle of the avenue disintegrated for no apparent reason.
The air stunk with the smell of cordite and burnt flesh as the driver of the Buick leaned out the window and emptied an automatic pistol held in his left hand.
Holes popped into the back of the Lincoln’s tonneau and the left-side rearview mirror was shattered.
Uncle Saint hadn’t been touched, but his nappy hair was standing up like iron filings beneath a magnet.
Abruptly a woman began to scream in high, piercing, repetitious shrieks.
Uncle Saint felt as though the top of his head was coming off.
Then men began to shout; horns blew; a police whistle shrilled, and there was a sudden shower of running feet.
Both cars took off at once.
A trailer truck was passing on the left side and a taxi coming from the French Line dock blocked the traffic lane ahead. Porters and stevedores were running up the sidewalk and a uniformed cop with a pistol in his hand was trying to break through.
Uncle Saint was looking through a blind haze of panic. His brain had stopped working. He was driving instinctively, like a fox encircled by hounds.
The truck was to his left, the taxi was in front; he pulled to the right, up over the curb, heading behind the taxi. The running men scattered, diving for safety, as the two cars roared down the broad sidewalk, the Buick following the Lincoln bumper to bumper.
At the entrance to the dock a porter was loading luggage from a taxi onto a four-wheeled cart. He didn’t see the Lincoln until it hit the cart. He sailed into the air, clinging to the suitcase as though running to catch a train waiting somewhere in the sky, while other luggage flew past like startled birds. The cart raced down the pier and dove into the sea. The porter came down feetfirst on top of the following Buick, did a perfect somersault and landed sitting on the suitcase, his astounded black face an ellipsoid of white eyeballs and white teeth.
In front of the Cunard Line dock Uncle Saint found an opening back to the street. He turned into it but couldn’t straighten out fast enough and crossed in front of the same trailer truck he had already passed on the sidewalk. It was so close the truck bumper passed overtop and left rear fender of the Lincoln as he barely missed the concrete pier of the railroad trestle on the other side.
Rubber screamed on the dry brick pavement as the truck driver applied air brakes. The truck horn bleated desperately. But it didn’t save the Buick following in the wake of the Lincoln. The truck hit it broadside. The sound of metal rending metal shattered the din. A senseless pandemonium broke out up and down the street.
The truck had overturned the Buick and the front wheels had run overtop it. Hundreds of people were running in all directions, without rhyme or reason.
Uncle Saint got away.
He didn’t see the accident or hear the sound. He was on the inside traffic lane and it was clear for nine straight blocks. Instinctively he looked into the rearview mirror. Behind him the avenue was empty.
Traffic had been stopped at the scene of the accident. The first two prowl cars to arrive had blocked off the street. For the moment the black Lincoln had been forgotten. By the time the cops got around to gathering evidence, Uncle Saint had passed 42nd Street. None of the witnesses had recognized the make of the car; no one
