Эд Макбейн - Learning to Kill - Stories

The fifth had cost him close to four bucks. Well, he’d got a bandage for his arm out of it, if nothing else. It didn’t seem to matter at the moment that blood was already beginning to seep through the bandage again.

Detective-Sergeant Leo Palazzo lived in the Bronx. He did not particularly like Harlem, even though he’d been a cop there for sixteen years.

He was holding in his hands now a signed confession from a punk they’d had in before on a possessions charge.

The punk’s name was Andrew Ryan. They’d picked him up on 117th Street and they’d found him with a zip gun and they’d worked him over hardly fifteen minutes before he’d told them everything they wanted to know.

The only thing they really wanted to know was whether or not he’d put a few holes in the liver and heart of Angelo Brancusi. And whereas Ryan was extremely reticent in the beginning he loosened up almost instantly and seemed almost proud of his shooting prowess. A stenographer had worked up a literate-sounding confession and Ryan had scrawled his signature to it, and that had been that. Except for Johnny Trachetti.

“What about the other guy?” Corporal Davis asked Palazzo.

“What other guy?” Palazzo said.

“The one slugged Brown and swiped the RMP. Him.”

“Forget him,” Palazzo said. “He’s clean, ain’t he?”

“Yeah, but I mean...”

“We really ought to drag him in on a resisting arrest charge, not to mention the theft of the car. Teach him a lesson.”

“He was probably scared,” Davis said. “Hell, you’d have run, too.”

“When he knows the heat’s off he’ll come out in the open again.”

“You really going to pull him in?”

“No, the hell with him. We got this Ryan character, that’s all we need.”

Davis wiped a hand over his face. “What I mean, Leo, shouldn’t we wise the kid up? You know, he still thinks he’s got a murder rap hanging over his head.”

“So what?” Palazzo asked.

“Well, hell, he’s out there someplace thinking...”

“Who cares what the hell he’s thinking? He probably done something anyway, the way he ran.”

“Suppose he does something else? He thinks he’s wanted for murder, Leo, don’t you understand?”

“He’ll live,” Palazzo said. “He’s healthy, ain’t he? He’s young. He’s sound of mind and body. From the way Brown tells me he ran, he must be a hardy specimen.”

“A murder rap...” Davis said.

“Murder rap, shmurder rap. So long as you got your health,” Palazzo cracked.

The arm began bleeding in earnest. It started as a slow trickle of blood that oozed its way through the fresh bandage. But the trickle became a stream, and the stream soaked through the bandage and dripped onto Johnny’s wrist, and the drops ran into his cupped palm, hung on his fingertips, and then spattered onto the sidewalk in a crimson trail.

It got colder, too, and he missed his jacket, and he cursed himself for not having grabbed it when he’d left the girl’s room. With her screaming like that, though, it’s a wonder he managed to remember his head even. Still, it was goddamn cold, too cold for October, too cold even for January.

The trail of blood led from Lexington Avenue down to Third Avenue, past the lighted fronts of the furniture stores, past the all-night restaurants and the bakeries that served coffee from big shining urns. He was very conscious of the blood trail, and he wondered if city cops ever used bloodhounds. All he needed was a pack of mutts chasing down Third Avenue after him. He smiled, the picture striking him somehow as amusing. He could almost see his photo in the Daily News, Johnny Trachetti up a lamppost, his pants seat torn to shreds while the mutts stood up on their hind legs and barked and snapped. Caption: Killer at Bay.

Bay, you know. The hounds baying, you know?

Very funny, he told himself, but you couldn’t wrap a joke around your back, and a laugh wouldn’t stop the wind, and the wind was sure cold.

Nor could corny humor hold back the flow of blood from his arm.

Right now, he needed a place for the night.

He remembered the warehouse just off Third Avenue, where the furniture store kept all the new goods. There was a window the guys used to sneak in through, where one of the bars was loose and capable of being swung out of position. They’d taken Carmen Diaz there once when they were all around sixteen and they’d had a jolly old time on the mats the movers used to wrap around the furniture. He wouldn’t forget that time so easily because it had been his first time. Nor would he forget how they had gotten into the warehouse, because that had been the trickiest part.

He ducked off Third Avenue now, and into the darkness of the side street. There was no one in sight, and he scaled the fence rapidly and then went directly to the window with the loose bar.

He tried all the bars, beginning to lose hope, and then suddenly happy when the fifth one came free under his hands. He moved the bar to one side, jimmied open the window, and then squeezed through the opening. It was a tighter fit than it had been when he was sixteen, but he made it and dropped to the concrete floor, reaching up to close the window behind him.

He found the old iron stairwell and took that up to the third floor where he knew all the mats would be. When he heard the voices, he turned around and was ready to run, but they’d already spotted him.

“Hold it, Mac,” one of them said.

A watchman, he thought.

He froze solid because there was no sense in running now. Maybe he could bull it through, and if not he still had a good left arm, and he still knew how to throw a fist.

The man moved closer to him, a big man in the near darkness.

“Whatta you want, Mac?” he asked.

“You the watchman?” Johnny asked.

The big man laughed. “A watchman, huh? A watchman? You on the bum, too, kid?”

He felt immensely relieved all at once, so relieved that he almost smiled. “Yeah,” he said, “I’m on the bum.”

“Come on in. You want a cup of java?”

“Man, I could use some,” he said. The big man laughed again and reached out for Johnny’s arm. He tried to pull it away, but he wasn’t quick enough, and he winced in pain, and the big man looked at his sticky fingers.

“You hurt, huh, kid?” he asked. There was no sympathy in his voice. There was instead a crafty sound, as if the man had made a very valuable discovery and was hoarding it under the floorboards of his mind.

“Come on,” he said, his voice oily now. “We’ll get you that java.”

He led Johnny to the circle of men huddled in one corner of the huge concrete-floored room. An electric grill was plugged into an outlet, and a battered coffeepot rested on the glowing orange coils. Johnny looked at the circle of bearded faces, four men all told, five counting the big man who’d led him to the group. The men were smiling, but there was no mirth on their faces. His arm dripped blood onto the concrete floor and the eyes calculated the dripping, and then shifted back to his face, the smiles still on the mouths, but never reaching the calculating eyes.

“Who you brung for dinner, Bugs?” one of the men asked.

“A nice young punk,” the big man answered. “Hurt his poor little arm, though, didn’t you, sonny?”

Johnny wet his lips. “Yeah, I... I got cut.”

“Well, now, that’s too bad, punk,” one of the men in the circle said. “Now that’s too bad you got a cut on your arm.”

“Maybe we got a nurse here can fix it up,” another man said.

“Sure, we got a lot of nurses here, kid. We’ll fix you up fine, kid. Here, have some coffee.”

He wasn’t sure now. He wasn’t sure what they meant, and he wasn’t sure whether they intended him harm or whether they were giving him sanctuary. He knew only that there were five of them and that he had only one good arm.