Эд Макбейн - Guns

Colley was at the door, half watching the action at the counter, half watching the street outside. It was stickball time, you could hear kids up the street yelling. Nice April noises. City noises. He loved this fuckin city. Outside, a woman came up to the door, she was talking to somebody over her shoulder, she didn’t even look at the knob. She’d been coming here maybe half her life, she could find the place and the doorknob blindfolded. She grabbed the knob, she walked in, she saw Colley’s gun. Nice Italian lady, also like one of his aunts, but not as fat as most of them. Ready to scream down the whole neighborhood.

Colley lifted the gun so the muzzle was pointing up at her head; that hole in the muzzle could look mighty big when it was pointing up at you. He slitted his eyes. He made his voice a rasp. In Italian, he said, “Signora, sta zitta.” That meant, “Lady, cool it.” He didn’t have to say another word. The lady went over near the shelves where the macaroni was, and she started saying a novena. Forty Hail Marys and a few dozen Our Fathers Who Art in Heaven while Jocko was cleaning out the register. When Jocko started for the door, the lady fell to her knees because she knew from television and the movies that the two bad guys were going to kill her now. “Signora,” Colley said, “è finita, la commedia.” That meant, “Lady, the comedy is finished.” It was a famous line from something. Colley’s grandfather, who used to go to the Brooklyn Academy of Music for the operas there, was always quoting that line. Colley figured it was from an opera. The lady looked up at him. She still thought she was going to get shot. Colley started laughing. Jocko thought Colley had lost his marbles, and began tugging on his sleeve, trying to get him out of the store. The lady meanwhile thought Colley was Richard Widmark in that picture where he threw a lady just like herself down the stairs. She was shaking so hard she was knocking La Rosa boxes off the shelf. Jocko finally got Colley to put the gun away, and they both went outside, the guns back in their pockets now, two gentlemen out for an evening stroll. Behind them, a real-life opera started in the grocery store. Teddy threw open the car doors. Colley was still laughing.

He was really worried about the hot weather. And about this being the thirteenth job. But he’d given them his word on it, said he was going along with them, so the only thing to do now was shut up and go along. Still, he was worried. His grandmother wouldn’t even go out of the house on the thirteenth of each month. “Hoodoo jinx of a day,” she’d say, sounding more like an Irish washerwoman than a lady who’d been born in Naples. His grandmother was dead now. Cancer when he was twenty-five. That was four years ago. Hoodoo jinx of a day, she used to call the thirteenth, and refused to budge from the house on that day. Even when her brother Jerry died in New Jersey, she wouldn’t go to the funeral because it took place on the thirteenth of the month. Well, this had nothing to do with a day. of course. But still, it was the thirteenth job, wasn’t it? Well, that was stupid, that really was being superstitious. Teddy was right. And Jocko was right, too. There had to be a number thirteen unless you wanted to retire after number twelve.

Colley wasn’t nervous, he was never nervous before a job. But he was worried that this time somebody who was irritated by the heat would do something dumb. He didn’t know what. Just something that would force one or the other of them to use the gun. He had never had to use the gun. Jocko had once used the gun in Texas. He had blinded a man in a gas station. Shot him in the eye when the guy told him he didn’t have the combination to the safe. “See this, mister? I’ll shoot your face off...” and that’s just what he’d done. Bam, right in the eye. Jocko got busted; that was the second fall he’d taken. If you used the gun, there was always the chance of fuzz descending. Very dangerous. Also, you got into much heavier raps once you used the gun. On top of the robbery-one charge, you got felonious assault added. Or homicide, God forbid. Jesus, he would never want to kill anybody. Never. In his nightmares he used the gun and killed somebody.

“This is a nice heap,” Teddy said. “It handles nice.”

The car was a 1974 Ford station wagon. Teddy had boosted it that afternoon in Brooklyn. There was no need to put on different license plates or anything like that. If you boosted a car that morning, it didn’t show up on the police department’s hot-car sheets till sometime the next day. The police wouldn’t be looking for it till maybe two, three days after it got stolen. Besides, nobody in the police department went around constantly checking license plates against the numbers in their little black books. The only time they checked out a plate was if they saw something suspicious. Three guys sitting in a car watching the street, that’s suspicious. The cop on the beat’ll check out the license-plate numbers in his book, just on the off chance he’s got a stolen vehicle there. Wants to know what he’s going up against. Are those three guys just sitting there watching the girls go by, or are they thieves casing a joint they’re going to make in the next five minutes, or are they junkies waiting for the man to show with their dope? These are all considerations for the cop on the beat. He doesn’t want to rap on a closed car window with his stick and all of a sudden three guys are shooting at him. So he checks out the plate first. If the car is stolen, he calls back to the ranch for help.

Another time he’ll check a plate is if something accidentally rings a bell. At muster, the sergeant will read off the hot-car sheet, and all the patrolmen’ll make notes, and maybe something’ll stick in the guy’s head — red and white Buick with a smashed right headlight, something like that. So while he’s walking the beat he’ll see a red and white Buick with a smashed right headlight, it doesn’t take a mastermind to figure that maybe this is the car that was stolen. Out comes the book, and he checks the numbers. Thing is, your professional car thief is a man who doesn’t steal a car in the Bronx, for example, and then drive it all over the Bronx so every cop on the beat can get a good look at it. If he steals it in the Bronx, he’s usually from Brooklyn. And the cop on the Brooklyn beat couldn’t care less what the hell was stolen in the Bronx.

“Don’t you think it rides nice?” Teddy said.

“Yeah, it rides nice,” Colley said.

“I grabbed it outside a supermarket. Lady must’ve been inside doing her shopping.”

“Comes out, finds her wagon gone,” Jocko said.

“That’s life,” Teddy said.

“She leave the keys in it?”

“No, but it was unlocked. I opened the door and got at the hood latch. Thing that always amazes me, I can be working on a car four, five minutes, hood up, crossing the wires so I can start it, nobody’ll say boo to me. I once had a cop come over, would you believe it, stood there on the sidewalk with his hands behind his back, watching me while I crossed the wires. He nodded when I got the job finished. Nice work, he was telling me. You fixed whatever was wrong with it.”

The men laughed. The sense of familiarity in the car was beginning to dispel whatever worries Colley had about the heat or the hoodoo jinx number thirteen. They had done this a dozen times before, they had talked easily and casually on the way to one job or another. Teddy, in fact, had probably told that very same story on the way to each and every job, and they had laughed genuinely each time he told it. He would now explain that he had rigged a switch...

“What I done,” he said, “was rig a switch here on the dash. So I can start it without going under the hood each time.”