A fireman hit the giant in the back with the flat of his ax. A sound came from the giant’s mouth like a wet cough.
Another fireman raised his ax.
Grave Digger caught it by the handle in midstroke and drew his long-barreled, nickel-plated, 38-caliber revolver. He swung the barrel against the back of the giant’s hand. The pain went through the giant’s hand into the captain’s Adam’s apple and the captain’s head filled with a shower of blue-pointed stars.
The giant’s grip went slack and the captain fell.
At sight of the captain on the ground, tempers flared.
The fireman snatched his ax from Grave Digger’s grasp and made as though to chop at him.
From the other side, Coffin Ed’s revolver flashed in the dim light as he warned, “Don’t do it. Don’t lose your head. Your ass goes with it.”
The fireman whirled his ax and hit the giant a glancing blow across the back of the neck.
The giant cried like an enraged stallion and began to fight. He elbowed the fireman on his right in the jaw, knocking him unconscious. He couldn’t close his left hand, but he flailed out with his left arm and flattened two firemen with axes.
Firemen reversed their axes and began whaling at him with the hickory handles. Some were getting through and making deep purple welts on the giant’s sensitive white skin. Firemen were going down from the giant’s pumping right fist and bodies were piling up as though a massacre were taking place. Still others closed in. The giant showed no signs of weakening, but he was slowly turning black and blue.
The sexton was standing to one side, wringing his hands and beseeching the irate firemen, “Be calm, gentlemen, it’s divine to forgive.”
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed were doing their best to stop the fracas.
“Easy does it,” Grave Digger was repeating.
Coffin Ed was imploring, “Let the police have him.”
But their pleas had no effect.
A fireman hit the giant across the shins. He went down. Firemen swarmed over him, trying to pin his arms behind him. But the muscles beneath his greasy purpling skin were rock hard. Fingers couldn’t get a grip. It was like trying to hold a greased pig at a state fair.
The giant got to his hands and knees and pushed to his feet, shaking off firemen like a dog shedding water. He put his head down and started to run, plowing through a rain of blows.
“The son of a bitch ain’t human,” a fireman complained.
He got across the sidewalk and stepped onto the grass. His foot sunk into the belly of the unconscious dwarf. Globules of vomit spewed from Jake’s mouth. No one noticed.
He vaulted over the hood of a fire engine and got a lead on his pursuers.
“Stop him, he’s getting away,” a white cop shouted.
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed had moved out into the street, anticipating the breakaway. They had the giant blocked.
The giant drew up as though skidding on his heels. For an instant he stood like a cornered animal, his back to the fire engine, looking for a way out. He had the bruised, bleeding, bewildered look of a bull when the picadors have finished.
“Shall we take him?” Coffin Ed asked.
“Hell, let him go if he can make it,” Grave Digger said.
They drew apart and let the giant through.
Cops and firemen were closing in from both ends of the fire engine. The detectives’ car stood obliquely in the street and two prowl cars flanked the other side.
The giant leaped onto the hood of the little black sedan. His rubber-soled sneakers gripped. His next leap took him to the top of a white-and-black prowl car. For a brief instant he was caught in the glare of a fire engine spotlight, a grotesque figure in the strained, shocking, ugly position of panic-stricken flight.
Automatically, as though the target were irresistible, a cop drew a bead with his service revolver. At the same instant, as though part of the same motion sprung from another source, Coffin Ed knocked his arm up with the long nickel-plated barrel of his own revolver. The cop’s pistol went off. The giant seemed to fly from the roof of the prowl car and crashed into the foliage of the park.
For a moment everyone was sobered by the sound of the shot and the sight of the giant crashing to earth. All were gripped by the single thought — the cop had shot him. Reactions varied; but all were held in a momentary silence.
Then Coffin Ed said to the cop who had fired the shot, “You can’t kill a man for putting in a false fire alarm.”
The cop had only intended to wing him, but Coffin Ed’s rebuke infuriated him.
“Hell, you killed a man for farting at you,” he charged.
Coffin Ed’s scarred face twitched in a blind rage. It was the one thing in his career which touched him to the quick.
“That’s a goddamned lie!” he shouted, his pistol barrel flashing in a vicious arc toward the white cop’s head.
There was just time for Grave Digger to catch the blow in his hand and spin Coffin Ed around.
“Goddammit, Ed, control it, man!” he said. “It’s a joke.”
The white cop was being forcibly held by two of his uniformed mates. “These two black bastards are crazy,” he mouthed.
Coffin Ed allowed himself to be drawn off by Grave Digger, but he said, “It ain’t no joke to me.”
Grave Digger knew that it was useless to explain that Coffin Ed had shot a different boy, one who was trying to throw perfume into his face. He had thought the boy was throwing acid; and he already bore the scars of one acid bath in his face. Everyone in the department knew the straight story, but some of the white cops distorted it to needle Coffin Ed.
The fracas didn’t last more than a minute, but it gave the giant a chance to get away. The park dropped steeply from the manicured fringe bordering Riverside Drive through a rocky jungle of brush down to a wire fence enclosing the tracks of the New York Central Railroad’s freight lines and the elevated platform of the six-lane West Side Highway.
A cop heard the giant threshing through the brush and shouted, “He’s making for the river!”
The pursuit commenced again. No one had believed the giant’s story of robbery and murder taking place.
“Let ’em go,” Grave Digger said bitterly.
“I ain’t stopping ’em,” Coffin Ed said. “With the start he’s got now they won’t catch him anyway.”
Grave Digger took off his heavy felt hat and rubbed his palm across his sweat-wet short kinky hair.
They looked at one another with the unspoken communication they had developed during the years they had served as partners.
“You think there’s anything in it?” Grave Digger asked.
“We’d better try to find out. It’d be a hell of a note if somebody was being murdered during all this comedy we’re having.”
“That would be the story.”
Coffin Ed walked over and looked down at the unconscious dwarf. He bent over and felt his pulse.
“What about our friend Jake?”
“He’ll keep,” Grave Digger said. “Let’s go. This halfwit Pinky may be right.”
2
By that time Riverside Drive was wide-awake. Vaguely human shapes hung from the dark open windows of the front apartments like an amphitheater of ghosts; and the windows of the back apartments were ablaze with lights as though the next war had begun.
