Ed McBain - Downtown

“Read it to me,” Alice said.

“Four left to twenty-eight,” Silvio said.

“Look at this, willya?” one of the moving men said. “Roller skates, ice skates, dart boards, a pool table...”

“I ain’t lifting that pool table, I can tell you that.”

“That’s heavier than the piano.”

“It’s an organ,” Silvio said over his shoulder. “Three right to seventy-three.”

“What’s this thing?”

“A toboggan.”

“What do you do with it?”

“Two left to thirty-five,” Silvio said.

“I never seen so much stuff in my life.”

“And this is what’s left after Christmas, don’t forget.”

“Slowly to the right till it opens,” Silvio said.

Silence.

Then:

“Holy shit!”

This from Larry.

More silence.

“That’s got to be at least a million dollars’ worth of dope,” Alice said.

Yep, Michael thought. A dope plot.

“I thought Mama said Ju Ju was only small-time,” Silvio said.

“Mama was wrong,” Larry said.

“Or lying,” Alice said, and there was another silence.

A longer one this time. A contemplative one. A pregnant one. The silence of thieves considering whether another thief had screwed them. It was an interesting silence, laden with possibilities. Michael waited. Connie squeezed his hand. She had understood the silence, too.

“Maybe Mama didn’t know there’d be so much stuff in the box,” Larry said.

“Maybe,” Alice said.

She did not sound convinced.

Silence again.

All three of them were trying to figure it out.

“Listen, we ain’t touching that pool table,” one of the moving men said. “There’s slate in that table, it weighs a ton.”

“Fine,” Alice said.

“Damn straight,” the moving man said.

Silence except for the sound of newspapers being crumpled, cartons being snapped open, work shoes moving across the floor, men grunting as they lifted heavy objects.

“We got paid,” Larry said.

A shrug in his voice.

“But did we get paid enough ?”

This from Alice.

“The deal was to deliver Ju Ju,” Larry said. “That’s what we done.”

Trying to make peace.

But he was standing with the rest of them at that safe, and he was looking in at what Alice had described as at least a million dollars’ worth of dope.

“That was the original deal,” Larry said.

“The deal changed yesterday,” Alice said.

“The deal changed to doing Barnes, too.”

“And cleaning out Ju Ju’s store.”

“Was what the deal changed to.”

“But did Mama know there’d be all this stuff in Ju Ju’s box?”

They were all silent again.

“The answer is no,” Alice said.

Silence.

“Because I’ll tell you why.”

Michael was extremely interested in hearing why.

“Because if you were Mama,” Alice said, “would you trust the three of us with a million dollars’ worth of dope?”

They all began laughing.

Michael nodded in agreement.

“Sure, laugh,” one of the moving men said. “It ain’t you three gonna get the hernia.”

“What I think,” Alice said, “I think the trucks can deliver all this fine merchandise to Mama...”

“As agreed,” Silvio said.

“But us three will take what’s in the box here, how does that sound to you?”

“It sounds only fair to me,” Silvio said.

“More than,” Larry said.

“But who left on the lights?” Alice asked.

Michael thought it was a bad idea to be standing here behind all these dead animal skins. He should have been standing at the table with the weapons instead. Because Alice and her two chums were now fanning out over the warehouse floor, earnestly trying to determine who had left the lights on.

He guessed this was going to be a process of elimination.

This was going to be Gee, it wasn’t us who left the lights on, and it couldn’t have been the moving men, so it had to have been someone else. And maybe the someone else is still in here. Like maybe hiding behind the counter over there, upon which were displayed six Tandberg FM tuners, three Nakamichi cassette decks, and a Denon direct-drive turntable.

A woman came around that counter now.

Alice.

For sure.

The same woman who’d been firing at them from the rooftop.

The long blonde hair and slitted blue eyes, the delicate Michael Jackson nose, the pale ivory oval of her face. In her hand, a gun that looked foreign. She could have been playing a Russian assassin in a James Bond movie. It was bad enough, however, that she was an American assassin in a real-life drama starring Michael Barnes and Connie—

It occurred to him that Connie was no longer at his side.

Before he had time to wonder how or when she’d disappeared, he saw a short, thickset man coming around the sleeve of a chinchilla coat hanging at the far end of the rack. Except for his broken nose, the man looked a lot like Tony the Bear Orso or Charlie Bonano, both of whom looked like Rocky’s brother-in-law. He had a gun in his hand. Michael guessed this was Silvio.

“Hey!” Silvio yelled, if that’s who he was, and Michael immediately slipped between a Siberian yellow weasel coat and a Persian lamb, brushing past the furs and through the rack to emerge on the opposite side where a tall, angular, craggy-faced blondish man who looked like Sterling Hayden in The Godfather was coming around the end of a table upon which was displayed an open coffin with no one in it.

Michael figured he himself would soon be displayed in that coffin, which was made of fine mahogany and lined with white silk and hung with bronze handles.

If the other one was Silvio, then this one was Larry.

So there was Silvio coming through the rack of furs farther up the line now, emerging between a Mexican ocelot and a Mongolian marmot, and here was Larry spotting Michael now and also shouting “Hey!” and here, too, was Alice coming around the home entertainment center display and seeing Michael, and grinning like an African lioness contemplating a warthog dinner. Michael figured this was it. The full deck had been dealt at last and there were no more aces in it.

“Freeze!” the voice said.

It sounded like Detective O’Brien.

But it was Connie.

Standing with a gun in each hand.

Behind Alice and Larry, who had probably heard that word a great many times in their separate careers and who did not move a muscle when they heard it now. Coming through the rack swathed in furs left and right, Silvio froze, too. Connie looked like the Dragon Lady. Cool and beautiful and deadly. Ready to blow away anyone who did not take her by overnight junk to Shanghai. The guns were only .22 caliber revolvers, but in her delicate hands they looked like big mother-loving cannons.

“Help us here!” Alice shouted to the moving men, but they, too, had seen the guns in Connie’s hands and the look in her eyes, and they had heard the word “Freeze!” thundering like a Chinese curse into that echoing space, and when they’d realized that they themselves were not the ones being asked to freeze, they decided this might be a good time to get the hell out of here before someone asked them to move a piano. There was a rush toward the metal entrance door, now an exit door too narrow to accommodate the sudden traffic. The moving men piled into the doorway like Keystone Kops, wedging themselves there for an impossibly tangled moment, unraveling themselves, and then hurling themselves headlong into the corridor outside.

Larry shook his head in dismay when he heard the elevator starting. Still shaking his head, he dropped his gun to the floor and looked at his watch, probably wondering if Johnny Carson was still on. Silvio raised his hands over his head. He looked like a man who did not have to be told that Chinese people stuck bamboo under your fingernails. Especially Chinese women. Or maybe it was the Japanese who did that. Either way, he wanted nothing further to do with this entire enterprise.