Эд Макбейн - Learning to Kill - Stories

“They kidding?” I said. “Thirty seconds? Who they think he is? Jesse Owens?”

“He ain’t going out anyway, and they know it,” Ferdy said.

Then, just as if Harry was trying to prove Ferdy’s point, he opens up from the window below us. It looks like he’s got a carbine, but it’s hard to tell because all we can see is the barrel. We can’t see his head or nothing, just the barrel, and just these shots that come spilling like orange paint out of the window.

“He got one!” Beef yells from the other window.

“Where, where?” I yelled back, and I ran over to where Beef was standing, and I shoved him aside and copped a look, and sure as hell one of the bulls is laying in the street, and the other bulls are crowding around him, and running to their cars to get the ambulance because by now they figure they’re gonna need it.

“Son of a bitch!” I say. “Can that Harry shoot!”

“All right,” the loudspeaker says, “we’re coming in, Manzetti.”

“Come on, you rotten bastards!” Harry yells back. “I’m waiting.”

“Three cops moving down there,” Ferdy says.

I look, but I can only see two of them, and they’re going in the front door. “Two,” I say.

“No, Donlevy’s cuttin’ through the alley.”

I ran over to Ferdy’s window, and sure enough Donlevy is playing the gumshoe, sneaking through the alley and pulling down the fire-escape ladder and starting to climb up.

“He’s a dead duck,” I said.

“Don’t be so sure,” Aiello answered, and there’s this gleam in his eyes as if he’s enjoying all this with a secret charge. “They may try to talk Harry away from the fire escape.”

“Yeah,” I said slow. “That’s right, ain’t it?”

“I want to get out of here,” Tessie said. “He might shoot up here.”

“Relax,” Ferdy told her, and then to make sure she relaxed, he sat down on the couch and pulled her down in his lap.

“Come on,” she said, “everybody’s here.”

“They only the boys,” Ferdy said, and he starts mushing her up. You can hear a pin drop in the street down there. Everybody on the rooftops is quiet, too.

“What do you think...” Beef starts, and I give him a shot in the arm to shut him up. From inside the building across the way, and through Harry’s open window, I can hear one of the cops talking. At the same time, while they’re pulling Harry over to the door of the apartment, Donlevy’s climbing up that fire escape. He’s up to the fourth floor now, and going quiet like a cat.

“How about it, Manzetti?” the cop in the hallway yells, and we can hear it plain as day through Harry’s open window.

“Come and get me!” Harry yells back.

“Come on out. Throw your gun in the hallway.”

“Screw you, cop!”

“How many guns you got, Manzetti?”

“Come in and count them!”

“Two?”

“ Fifty- two,” Harry yells back, and that one really busts me up. I stop laughing long enough to see Donlevy reaching the fifth floor, and making the turn in the ladder, going up to the sixth.

“He’s gonna plug Harry in the back,” I whisper.

In the hallway, the bull yells, “This is only the beginning, Manzetti. We haven’t started playing yet.”

“Your friend in the street don’t think so,” Harry answered. “Ask him if we started or not. Ask him how that slug felt.”

Donlevy is almost on the seventh floor now. He steps onto the fire escape as if he’s walking on eggs, and I can see the Detective’s Special in his fist. I hate that punk with every bone in my body. I almost spit out the window at him, and then he’s flattening himself against the side of the building and moving up to Harry’s window, a step at a time, while the bull in the hallway is talking, talking, and Harry is answering him. Donlevy gets down on his knees, and he’s got that gun in his right hand, and he’s ready to step up to the window and start blasting.

That’s when I started yelling.

“The window, Harry! The window!”

Donlevy looks up for a second, and I can see the surprised look on his face, but then he begins to back off, but he’s too late. The slugs come ripping out of the window, five in a row, as if Harry’s got a machine gun in his mitts. Donlevy grabs for his face, and then the gun flies out of his hand, and then he clutches at his stomach, and then he spins around and he’s painted with red. He stumbles forward to the fire escape, and then he crumbles over the railing and it looks as if he’s going to hang there for a second. The crowds on the rooftops are cheering their heads off by now, and then Donlevy goes all the way over, and Harry is still blasting through that window, pumping slugs into Donlevy’s body, and then Donlevy is on his way down, and the cheers get cut off like magic, and there’s just this god-awful hush as he begins his drop, and then a lady in the street starts to scream, and everybody’s screaming all at once.

“He got him!” I said, and my eyes are bright in my head because I’m happier than hell.

“He got Donlevy!”

“Two down,” Beef said.

“They’ll get him,” Aiello said, and he’s got a worried look in his eyes now.

“You sound like you want that,” I tell him.

“Who, me?”

“No, the man in the moon. Who you think, who?”

“I don’t want them to get Harry.”

“Then stop praying.”

“I ain’t praying, Danny.”

“There ain’t a bull alive can take Harry,” I inform him.

“You can say that again,” Ferdy says from the couch. Tessie ain’t saying nothing anymore. She figures she might as well play ball or Ferdy will get nasty, and she knows Ferdy’s got a switchblade knife in his pocket.

A phone starts ringing somewhere across the alleyway. It’s the only sound you can hear on the block, just that phone ringing, and then Harry’s head pops up at the window for just a second, and he waves up, not looking at us, not looking at anybody, just looking up sort of, and he yells, “Thanks,” and then his head disappears.

“You saved his life, Danny,” Ferdy said.

“And he appreciates it, dad,” I answered.

“Sure, but what’re they gonna throw at him next?” Aiello says, and from the tone of his voice I figure like he wants them to throw a Sherman tank at him.

“Look, meatball,” I tell him, “just keep your mouth shut. You talk too much, anyway.”

“Well, what the hell. Harry ain’t nothing to me,” Aiello said.

“Hey,” Ferdy said, “you think the bulls are gonna come up here and get us?”

“What the hell for? They don’t know who yelled. It could have been anybody on the roof.”

“Yeah,” Ferdy said, and he kisses Tessie and Tessie gets up and straightens her skirt, and I got to admit Ferdy knows how to pick them, but she still don’t compare to Marie. She goes in the other room, and Ferdy winks and follows her, and I figure we lost a good man for the proceedings. Well, what the hell. There’s just me and Beef and Aiello in the room now, and we’re watching through the window, and it suddenly dawns on me what Aiello said.

“What do you mean, Harry ain’t nothing to you?”

“He ain’t,” Aiello said.

“A,” I told him, “you’re looking for a cracked head.”

“I ain’t looking for nothing. What the hell, he’s a killer. He’s wanted everywhere.”

“So what?”

“So that don’t make him my brother, that’s all. I never killed nobody.”

“He’s from the neighborhood,” I said, and I tried to put a warning in my voice, but Aiello didn’t catch it.

“So it’s not my fault the neighborhood stinks.”

“Stinks!” I walked away from the window and over to Aiello. “Who said it stinks?”