Donald Westlake: Cops and Robbers

He had a loose kind of grin. “I don’t think so, man,” he said, and faced around to his friends again.

He was wearing a fringed deerskin vest. I reached over his shoulders and yanked the vest back around his arms, pinning him like a straitjacket. At the same time, I lifted him and kicked the chair out from under him.

Nobody thinks faster than his body. If he’d just let himself drop to the floor then, he would have gotten away from me. Maybe long enough for his friends and some busybody bystanders to louse me up. But his body reacted automatically, getting his feet under him, helping him to stand, and the instant he had his balance I turned him toward the front and ran him full speed at the door.

He yelled, and tried to squirm to the side, but I had him pinned and moving. The door was closed, but would open with a push; I pushed it with his head. We’d gone through so fast there hadn’t been time for anybody to react along the way.

Lambeth was still struggling when we hit the street. Ed was standing there, and our Ford was parked right in front. I didn’t slow down, but kept running across the sidewalk and slammed Lambeth into the side of the car. I wanted the wind and the fight out of him. I pulled him back a foot or two, and bounced him off the car again, and this time he sagged and quit fighting.

Ed was beside me with the cuffs. I let go of the vest, slid my hands down Lambeth’s arms, and lifted his arms up behind him like pump handles, bending him over the trunk of the car. Ed clicked the cuffs on, and opened the Ford’s rear door.

I was shifting Lambeth over into position to shove him into the car when somebody tapped me on the upper arm, and a female voice said, “Officer?”

I looked around at a middle-aged tourist woman in a red-and-white flowered dress and a straw purse. She looked angry, but as though she was making a great effort to be reasonable. She said, “Are you absolutely sure that much violence was necessary?”

Lambeth’s friends would be coming out any second. “I don’t know, lady,” I said. “It’s how much I used.” Then I turned away from her again and kicked Lambeth into the car and followed him in. Ed shut the door behind me, got behind the wheel, and we pulled away from there as the coffee-shop door opened and people began to pile out into the street.

Lambeth was crumpled up on the right side of the rear seat like a dead dog. I adjusted him around into a sitting position. He looked dazed, and he mumbled something, but I couldn’t tell what.

Up front, Ed said, “Tom?”

“Yeah?”

“Looks like you’re gonna get another letter in your file.”

I looked at him, and he was checking the rear-view mirror, looking at the situation behind us. “Is that right,” I said.

“She’s taking down the license number,” he said.

“I’ll blame you,” I said.

Ed chuckled, and we turned a corner, and headed uptown.

After a couple of blocks, Lambeth suddenly said, “My arms hurt, man.”

I looked at him. He was wide awake, and apparently rational. You don’t switch off a cold that easily. I said, “Don’t stick needles in them.”

“With these cuffs on, man,” he said. “I’m all twisted around.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Will you take them off?”

“At the station.”

“If I give you my word of honor, I won’t try—”

I laughed at him. “Forget it,” I said.

He gave me a level look, and then a sad kind of smile. “That’s right,” he said. “Nobody’s got any honor around here, do they?”

“Not the last time I looked.”

He wriggled around for thirty seconds or so, and apparently finally got himself into a more comfortable position, because he stopped moving, and sighed, and settled down to watch the city go by.

I settled down, too, but not that much. We were traveling without siren or flashing light, in an unmarked green car, which meant we were going with the general flow of the traffic. Unless there’s a specific reason to make a fuss, it’s better not to. But the result was, we were from time to time being stopped by red lights, and from time to time crawling along in very slow traffic, and I didn’t want Lambeth to suddenly decide to jump out of the car and make a run for it with Ed’s cuffs. The door was locked, and he seemed quiet, but I nevertheless kept my eye on him.

After three or four minutes of watching the world outside the window, Lambeth sighed and looked at me, and said, “I’m ready to get out of this city, man.”

I had to laugh again. “You’ll get your wish,” I told him. “It’ll probably be ten years before you see New York again.”

He nodded, grinning at himself. He seemed less freaky, more human, than he’d been back in the coffee shop. “I dig,” he said. Then he gave me a serious look, and said, “Tell me something, man. Give me your opinion on a question I have in my mind.”

“If I can.”

“What do you say; is it the bigger punishment to get sent out of this city, or to stay here?”

“You tell me,” I said. “Why’d you stay here long enough to get yourself into a bind like this?”

He shrugged. “Why do you stay, man?”

“I’m not dealing,” I said.

“Sure you are,” he said. “You’re dealing in machismo, man, just like I’m dealing in scat.”

Ever since drugs got tied in with the cultural revolution, the junkies have had a richer line of horseshit. “Anything you say,” I said, and turned away to look out my own window.

“None of us started out this way, man,” he said. “We all started out as babies, innocent and pure.”

I looked at him again. “One time,” I said, “a guy a lot like you, full of talk, he showed me a picture of his mother. And while I was looking at it he made a grab at my hip for my gun.”

He gave a big broad grin; he was delighted. “You stay in this town, man,” he said. “You’re gonna like what it does to you.”

The woman was all right coming down the stairs. She was bleeding from a long cut on her right arm, and she had blood all over her face and hands and clothes, some of it her own and some of it her husband’s and I guess she was still dazed by it all. But when we went out the front door and she looked down the tenement steps and saw the crowd of people standing around gaping at her, she flipped her lid. She started screaming and struggling and carrying on, and it was hell to get her down the steps to the sidewalk, particularly because all the blood made her slippery and tough to hold onto.

I didn’t like that situation at all. Two uniformed white cops dragging a bloody black woman down the steps into a crowd in Harlem. I didn’t like any part of it, and from the expression on Paul’s face he didn’t like it either.

The woman was yelling, “Let me go! Let me go! He cut me first, let me go! I got a right, I got a right, let me go!” And finally, as we neared the bottom of the stoop, I could hear over her yelling the sound of a siren coming. It was an ambulance, and I was glad to see it.

We got to the sidewalk just as the ambulance came to a stop at the curb. The crowd was keeping out of it so far, giving us a big open space on the sidewalk, moving out of the way of the ambulance. All I wanted was to get this over with and go away somewhere for a while. The woman was wriggling and squirming like an eel, a long black eel covered with blood and screaming with a voice like a fingernail on a blackboard.

It was one of those high-sided ambulances, a boxy van, and it carried four attendants, two in front and two in the back, all dressed in white. But not for long. The four of them climbed out and came running over to us and got hold of the woman. One of them said, “All right, we’ve got her.”