Эд Макбейн - Learning to Kill - Stories

“You damn fool,” the man said. He still could not see his face. He heard only the hoarse breathing, saw only the dim outline of the man in the feeble glow of the streetlight which filtered down onto the steps below the building.

“Where’d it go?” the man asked.

“Where’d what go?” he heard himself answer.

“You damn fool,” the man cursed again. He pushed back past Johnny, dropped to his hands and knees, and began scrambling around near the garbage cans. Johnny looked at him for a moment, and then wondered, What the hell am I standing around for? He started up the steps, heard the movement behind him, and then felt the wiry fingers clamp onto his shoulder.

“Just a second, punk,” the man said. “If you broke that syringe, then you’re going to pay for it.” He pulled Johnny back down the steps and Johnny stumbled.

“You think syringes grow on trees? I had to swipe this one from a doctor’s bag.”

Johnny got up and moved toward the steps again, and the man slammed him back against the wall. He was a big man, with arms like oaks and a head like a bullet. His eyes gleamed dully in the darkness. “I said stay where you are,” he said.

He shoved Johnny back into the alley, blocking him from the steps, and then he reached down for something that glittered near one of the garbage cans.

“You did it, punk,” he said. “You broke the damn thing.”

Johnny saw the jagged shards of the syringe in the man’s open hand. And then the fingers of the hand closed around the syringe, hefting it like a knife, with the glass ends crooked and sharp.

“You shouldn’t have been shooting up down here,” Johnny said lamely. “I didn’t even see you. I...”

“How much money you got, punk?” the man said.

“Nothing,” Johnny lied.

“Suppose we see,” the man said, advancing with the broken shards of the syringe ahead of him.

“Suppose we don’t?” Johnny answered, planting his feet, and tightening his fists.

“A smart guy, huh? Break the damn syringe, and then pull a wise-o. I don’t like smart guys. If you done something you pay for it, that’s my motto.”

He stepped closer, reaching for Johnny, and Johnny lashed out with his right fist catching the man solidly on his chest. The man staggered back, raising the hand with the syringe high. The streetlight caught the syringe, gave it up to the darkness again as it slashed downward and up. Johnny felt the ragged glass ends when they struck his wrist. He tried to pull his hand back, but the biting glass followed his arm, ripping the thin sleeve of his Eisenhower jacket, the jacket his brother had brought home in the last war. The glass ripped skin clear to his elbow and he felt the blood begin pouring down his arm and he cursed the addict, and brought back his left hand balled at the same time, throwing it at the addict’s head.

He felt his knuckles collide with the bridge of the man’s nose, felt bone crush inward and then the face fell away and back, slamming down against the concrete with the syringe shattering into a thousand brittle pieces now. Now that it was too late. He stepped around the man, and the man moved, and Johnny kicked him in the temple, wanting to knock his head off.

There was pain in his arm, and the blood had soaked through the thin sleeve of his jacket. He touched the arm and felt the blood, and when his hand came away sticky he felt a twinge of panic.

He stood at the base of the steps, wanting to kill the addict, wanting to really kill him.

He kicked him again, happy when he heard the sound of his shoe thudding against bone.

What do I do now? he wondered.

He needed a doctor, but a doctor was out. What about a druggist? What about Frankie Shea who worked for Old Man Sinisi? What about him? Did Frankie owe him a favor?

No, Frankie did not owe him a favor, Frankie did not owe him the sweat from his armpits. But they’d grown up together, had lighted bonfires together on election eve, had thrown snowballs together, had roasted spuds together when there used to be the empty lot behind Grandoso’s Grocery. You figure maybe a guy will do you a favor when your arm is running off into the gutter.

He waited until the drugstore was empty. He knew Old Man Sinisi left the store to Frankie every night after supper, leaving him just enough cash in the register to handle the few sales that piddled in before closing time. So there was no danger there. When the store was empty he walked in, and the bell over the door sounded loudly in the warm, antiseptic stillness. He walked straight behind the counter, running into Frankie as he started to come around front.

“Let’s stay back here,” he whispered.

“Johnny! The cops are...”

“It’s around already, huh?”

“Johnny, you should never have come here. Why’d you come here? Want to get me in trouble?”

“I want my arm bandaged. And something to stop the pain.”

Frankie looked at the bleeding arm and his face went white. “How’d that happen? You... you kill somebody else, Johnny? You...”

“I ain’t killed nobody yet. Look, Frankie, fix it for me, will you? You work in a drugstore, you know the ropes. Just a bandage, and something smeared on the cut, that’s all.”

“I ain’t a doctor, Johnny. Hell, I just work here.”

“You can fix it. I’ll rip your eyes out if you don’t.”

Frankie stared at him levelly. “Come on in back,” he said.

They were in the back of the shop now, in the darkened corner where the retorts and measures rested on a long brown table. Johnny sat and took off his jacket. The cut was worse than he’d thought it was. It spread on his arm in a jagged red streak. He looked at it, and was almost sick, and the pale cast to Frankie’s face told him he was almost sick, too.

“I... I got to go... go get some bandages,” he said. “Out front. I... I’ll be right back, Johnny.”

“Hurry up,” Johnny said.

Frankie went and he sat and looked at the wall of the back room, at the bottles of pills and powder with the strange, dangerous-sounding names.

He sat waiting, and it wasn’t until five minutes had passed that he realized Frankie Shea was taking a damned long time to get a roll of bandage from the shelves out front. A damned long time, and then he remembered there were phone booths just inside the entrance doorway, and he also remembered the time Frankie Shea had ducked out on him, the time the cops had caught them sticking NRA tags on the fenders and bodies of parked cars, gluing them to the metal surface.

Frankie had left him to talk to the cops that time, and whereas that was a long time ago, guys don’t usually change a hell of a lot.

Hastily, Johnny slipped into his soggy jacket.

When Frankie came to the back of the store ten minutes later, the cops behind him with drawn guns, Johnny was already gone. There was only a pool of blood on the table to testify to the fact that he’d been there at all.

The Grand was on 125th Street, just between Lexington and Third avenues. It showed the movies the RKO Proctor’s didn’t run, and it was there that Johnny went, taking a seat near the back, favoring his right arm by leaning over to the left and cradling the gashed wrist and forearm in his lap. The 3-D glasses they had given him were lying useless on his lap, alongside his cradled arm. Without the glasses, the screen was a distorted hodgepodge of color, but Johnny hadn’t come here to catch up on the latest Hollywood attempt. He’d come to get a breather.

“You ain’t even watching the picture,” the girl said.

He turned abruptly, startled, ready to run. The girl was no more than twenty. She wore a white sweater that was filled to capacity. He could see that even in the dark. She was blonde and pretty, he supposed, in a brassy, hard way. He couldn’t make out her features too clearly, except for the vivid slash of lipstick across her mouth, and the glow on the whites of her eyes reflected from the screen.