thoughts at the top level of consciousness. I shared them with the still warm corpse of a kid named Bitter Canetta, who had plenty to be bitter about.
Someplace a lot deeper down, I knew I was going to get on my knees and hope my back had enough spring left in it for me to get out of the closet fast and possibly hit the killer before he could hit me. I listened for footsteps, but I couldn’t tell. The wind and creaking of the building didn’t help at all, and the rats scurrying in the walls weren’t cooperating.
There was a thin space between the bottom of the closet door and the floor. The morbid winter grey light spread through the bullet holes and under the door, but not very far. Clouds and daydreams of killers darkened the beams.
My back tightened low on the left but let me get up on my knees. I had to lift Canetta off of me and into the corner, but there wasn’t much room for moving and lifting in the closet. I remembered seeing something with Lillian Gish years before in which Donald Crisp had locked her in a dark closet. She went crackers, thrashing all over, screaming. I wondered if Al Capone had felt like Lillian Gish when he was on Alcatraz. I wondered if he had felt the way I did in that closet.
My foot slipped on a shoe and some old newspaper. My agility and silence made the USC marching band sound like silent prayer. I was sure I heard something outside the door, in the bedroom. I was sure I saw a shadow through the holes in the door. My knees ached, but my back felt all right. I thought of putting my eye next to one of the bullet holes in the door, but the thought of getting shot in the face made me sick to my stomach. I’d seen a few with slugs in the face. I backed as far as I could against the wall with my gun in my hand, reached out for the handle, and shot my 160 pounds out of the door. The door banged open behind me, closed and opened again.
My spring sent me forward toward where I figured the gunman was, but he wasn’t. I hit the bed and flew over it against the window. The window quivered and held. As I slid to the floor, losing my gun, I got a glimpse of the concrete courtyard two flights down. I could have been splattered on it if I had gone through the glass.
If anyone had been in the room I would have been dead, if he weren’t convulsed with laughter. It would take a pretty wild joker to find the whole thing funny, but my pal with the chopper didn’t seem to be too upset by the corpses he was leaving. I scrambled for my gun, making more noise, and having the flash of an idea that the killer might want to be found and was leaving corpses as Hansel and Gretel left pieces of bread or ginger ale or whatever. If I survived, and he killed enough people, I might be able to follow the trail to him. I also remembered that for some reason Hansel and Gretel’s trick didn’t work and that I hadn’t believed in fairy tales for thirty-five years.
I finally got both hands on my.38 and got up with it. The dead Canetta just looked at me dumbfounded. It was winter in a freezing apartment, and I was sweating.
I wanted to inch my way back to the front door as fast as I could and get the hell out of there. I wanted to tell myself that I had arrived too late and the killer was long gone. But I knew it couldn’t be so. With the bullet holes in them, Canetta and the other guy hadn’t been a long time dying, and besides, the kid downstairs had said three men were up here. I sat listening, trying to hold my breath. I thought I heard a squeak of floor somewhere in the back of the apartment, further into the darkness of that hall. It didn’t have to be a person. It didn’t have to be someone waiting me out, but it probably was.
I got off the squeaking bed, knowing that if someone was back there he sure as hell knew that I was there and had found his bodies. I could have opened the window and yelled “help” into the wind, but I went back to the hall.
A shot lit up the darkness like a flared match and whistled past my head down the hall. It wasn’t a machine gun. I jumped back into the bedroom and heard fast footsteps and the opening of a door.
I went back into the hall, took a shot down the hall to lead the way, and went carefully but fast in the direction of the door sound. I found a toilet and a small dining room that led into a smaller kitchen with a worn yellowish linoleum floor. The back door was open, and the storm door banged in the wind.
I stepped out onto the grey painted wooden porch and listened. I could hear clotheslines creaking and footsteps hurrying below me. I leaned over the railing into the whirling snow and looked down at an empty concrete courtyard. A figure wearing a dark coat and carrying a black case ran across the open space toward the corner of the building. I leveled my pistol and took a shot. Chips of brick sprayed near his head. He didn’t look back.
I ran down the steps, slipping a couple of times on the patches of ice. Somewhere I could hear the wail of police sirens over the weather and the thubbing of my heart. Someone, maybe the old lady who was waiting for Sheldon, had called the cops about machine-gun shots. Even with the wind, someone must have heard what looked like at least forty rounds of explosion.
Running across the snowy sidewalk of the courtyard, I turned the corner and ran through a passageway to a street. Half a block ahead I could see the figure with the suitcase. I figured I had been lucky. I had arrived when he had put the machine gun away. Whoever he was, even if he had a car waiting, couldn’t carry a machine gun through the streets. That was why he had taken the shot at me with a hand gun. The few seconds I had stopped to talk to the kid downstairs had probably kept him from decorating the apartment with me along with Canetta and the little man.
I couldn’t get a good look at the guy, who was moving pretty well on the empty streets in the snow considering the fact that he was carrying a fifteen pound machine gun in a suitcase.
Running was hard. No one shoveled the walks in this neighborhood. It was tough to cut the distance between us. Everytime I tried to hurry, I slipped, but I kept the distance between us the same. There were definitely police cars somewhere behind, but I didn’t stop to worry about them. If the guy with the chopper had someone in a car waiting, it was far from where he had used his gun. If he had a car parked, I had stayed close enough to him to keep him from jumping into it without risking a clean shot from me as he took time to start it and drive away, especially on a snowy street.
We kept chugging through snow, my pant legs dripping wet, steam coming from my mouth. I didn’t know what kind of shape he was in for a cross-country race.
He turned a corner and headed east toward Pulaski. I kept up. In two short blocks he crossed Pulaski. I had cut the distance by about fifteen feet and was sure I’d have him. He was slowing down. Then he got lucky. Streetcars didn’t run often on Sunday in Chicago, but one pulled up at the corner as he crossed the street. It was heading north and he got on. I was too far away to catch it and bothered by the blowing wind and low visibility to make out his face even if he had turned it toward me, which he carefully did not.
The red streetcar headed north and I stood panting. I still had some run left in me, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to take on a streetcar. I decided to give it a try anyway. Maybe a cab would come by and I could catch it and the streetcar. There weren’t many people on the street, which looked like it was normally commercial. Sunday and bad weather kept the number down to a handful as I trotted into unknown territory after the slow-moving streetcar.
It stopped to pick up a passenger on Sixteenth Street but pulled away before I could cut the distance very much. The sidewalks of Pulaski were shoveled reasonably clean, and I would have caught up with the streetcar on a day when it made normal stops to let off and pick up people. As it was, even with traffic lights, I kept it in sight. The streets moved up in numbers. By Twelfth Street, I had managed to keep from losing ground and I was sure the man with suitcase had not gotten off. But it was man against machine. The man was sucking in chilled air fast and feeling the pain of unfamiliar cold.
I leaned against a delicatessen on the corner of Twelfth and Pulaski and was stared at by a small, bearded man dressed entirely in black. He picked up a discarded cigarette butt that had melted a hole in a bank of shoveled snow and turned his back on me.
The streetcar and killer had won. It pulled further into the blowing snow. I stood catching my breath, or trying to. When I could talk, I asked the bearded man where I could get a cab. He answered me in Yiddish. I said thanks and looked around for a cab. There wasn’t any. I gave up and went into the delicatessen, sweating and panting.
At a booth away from the door, I put my hands on the warm table, waiting for the pain and trembling to pass. The place was full of families and couples having their Sunday meal out. The place was clean and plain, with the smell of hot food and onions.
“What’ll it be?” asked a guy with a pot belly, a sour look, wild grey hair, and a white apron.
“A buck and a half of lunch, a friendly smile, and coffee.”
His thick face moved into a bilious fake grin, and I let out a laugh-more of a laugh than the moment deserved, but I needed it. I was alive. The waiter shrugged, people looked at me and I tried to control myself.
