Стюарт Стерлинг - Collection of Stories

“Nineteen and thirty-two at Fulton Fish Market,” Mulcahey repeated.

Koski yelled, “Tell ’em we’re scooting, Sarge.”

“We’re on our way, now. Over.”

“Notify on arrival, Vigilant. Keep on the box. Doubleyou Enn Pee Dee to Pee Dee to Pee Bee Nine, four twenty-six peeyem, March twenty-eight, authority Police Telegraph Bureau. That is all.”

The two-way was silent.

Steve Koski was searching the dead man’s clothing when Sergeant Mulcahey got to the cockpit.

“We’re getting our noses rubbed in it, Steve. Holdup an’ murder at Fulton Market.”

“Get her spinning, Sarge. I’ll poke around on this tub for a few minutes. Keep me tied in short.”

The patrol boat made a tight circle, churned suds under the bow of the towed junk boat. Koski squatted on the stern thwart, examining the stuff he’d frisked from the corpse’s pockets: Alligator wallet, swollen with folding money. Three dollars in silver. Keys on ring. Gold pocket knife. Silk handkerchief. Gold pen. Envelope with two airline tickets, New York to Havana via Miami.

“On the midnight plane tonight, eh?” Koski eyed the body dispassionately. “I’m afraid they wouldn’t take you now unless you were boxed, mister. Wonder who was supposed to go on that little trip with you?”

In the disc of the flashlight, the dead man stared glassily at Koski’s shoes. The lieutenant studied the low forehead, the dark hair growing within an inch of the eyebrows. The long, thin nose with the slightly upturned, reddened tip. The small, pursey lips, the gold-capped incisor. The last time that face had looked up at Koski had surely been from a police flyer.

His name was Eddie-something. It began to come back, now...

He snapped his fingers! Eddie — Eddie-the-Switch, that’s who it was! Koski couldn’t remember the criminal’s last name — it didn’t matter, anyway — but the Marine Division’s crack plainclothesman couldn’t forget the reason given on the Wanted Bulletin for Eddie’s being known as the Switch: “So-called because of frequent boasts that he would light somebody up!”

Eddie-the-Switch had killed a payroll messenger down South somewhere — Birmingham, if Koski recalled correctly. After beating that rap, he had been picked up on another manslaughter charge in Kansas City. He’d shot his way out of jail there. Yeah. Quite a customer, this Eddie-the-Switch had been.

But how had a hot rod like that happened to be on this junk boat? He certainly had been a long way from the accommodations on the Nightliner to Miami!

Steve Koski fished the .45 out of the wine-colored water that sloshed from side to side over the junk boat’s propeller shaft as the Vigilant’s wake bounced the eighteen-footer wildly. It was an Army Colt — with a kick Koski was glad he hadn’t felt.

But, Koski realized, the man must have been dying before the rifle bullet drilled that hole beneath his ear. There was a soggy redness, the size of a dinner plate, on the right side of the man’s coat, from the third to the fourth button. Blood from that wound had stained the water. Eddie-the-Switch wouldn’t have bled much after Steve’s .303 hit him.

Koski looked at the gunman’s hands. The man wore no gloves. Yet there were no smudges of oil or grease on palms or fingers.

“I could stand to know who cranked that flywheel for you, Eddie,” Steve Koski muttered.

He combed over the boat itself. In the stern locker, he found a jug half filled with muscatel, a burlap sack with a dozen bronze fittings — nearly new — cleats, swivel-hooks, turnbuckles. Under the bow thwart were a couple of lard cans containing brass grommets and faucets and some new copper wire. On the floorboards lay a dozen crumpled-up balls of sopping newspapers, four soaking-wet men’s socks with oyster shells in them, and more oyster shells between the boat’s ribs.

Oyster shells? In old socks? For what?

Even if somebody had opened up a few dozen oysters on a junk boat, they’d have thrown the shells over, wouldn’t they? Lieutenant Koski puzzled over it.

Mulcahey was using the megaphone to shout back to him over the roar of the exhaust. “Sounds like they got everything but the fire engines out, over there, Steve.” He was indicating the Fulton Market section.

Koski put the Army Colt in Eddie’s hat, went to the bow of the junk boat and hauled in on the tow line. “Coast her, Irish.”

The exhaust quieted. The wake subsided. Steve Koski dropped hat and gun into the cockpit.

“Heave that tarp, Sarge,” he called.

When Koski got it, he tossed the heavy canvas over the dead man, gave Mulcahey his hand and went up over the stern transom into the Vigilant’s cockpit.

With the big motor throttled down, Koski could hear the sirens on the Manhattan shore plainly. There was the rising wail of the patrol coops, the agonized screech of an ambulance, the clanging gong of the truck bringing reserve patrolmen.

“I’ve heard the band from P.S. Fifty-one sound just like that,” Mulcahey muttered, “rend’rin’ A Hot Time in the Ole Town, Tonight. That sounds now like the Commissioner was arrivin’, with all the cameramen lined up with the flash bulbs.”

“We have something for the pix boys, back there,” Koski said, the nod of his head indicating the junk boat. He watched the low roofs of the oyster sheds and fish houses emerge from the thinning fog that wreathed the tall light-spattered towers of the financial district. “We caught a pretty big mackerel, ourselves, Irish,” he went on. “But I don’t think we’ll let the lens-men snap him, the way he is now.”

Mulcahey slowed the Vigilant , searching for a berth among the fleet of purse seiners, oyster dredges, halibut boats and Block Islanders that were crowding against the fish market wharves.

“You find out anything about him, Steve?” the sergeant asked.

“I remember him from a Kansas City flyer,” Koski answered. “His name is Eddie-the-Switch. And a bad boy with a trigger he was. We were lucky somebody else had pretty well taken care of him before we ran him aground.”

The sergeant grunted. “I am not what you can call a careless man with a dollar, except maybe where chicks are concerned, but I will offer a chunk at six, two and even that when it comes out in the papers, the Commissioner himself personally directed the dragnet which cornered the internationally famous desperado.”

“There’s the ambulance,” Koski said. “Over by Shoalwater Seafoods. Run in alongside that oyster dredge, the Mollie B. ”

Sergeant Mulcahey maneuvered the black-hulled patrol boat against the battered rubrail of the dredge. Koski sprang to the foredeck.

“Get through to Pier One on the two-way,” he called back to the sergeant. “Ask them to look up the dope on 71J22RCH” He pointed to the crudely-lettered license number painted on the junk boat’s bows.

“Check,” Mulcahey said. “Give the Commissioner my love.”

Koski looped the bow line around the Mollie B’s starboard samson post, crossed the decks between yawning cargo hatches, went through a door on the water side of the pier and into the huge fish shed.

He was in the weigh office of the wholesale house. On the other side of the high wire screen, a group of men clustered around something on the floor of the office. Koski saw patrolmen in uniform, bristling precinct detectives, a couple of ambulance internes, a doctor, four or five high-booted men in white rubber aprons, a scattering of fishboat men in oilskins.

He pushed open a gate in the wire fence, went through. A patrolman blocked his way until Koski held out his cupped hand with the gold shield.

“Sorry, Lieutenant,” the patrolman apologized. “Couldn’t see you. Lights kind of blind you in here.”