Ed Mcbain - Fuzz

“You ready?” Buck asked.

“I’m ready,” the deaf man said, and picked up the voltohm meter. “We promised to get JMV, didn’t we?” he asked.

“We sure did.”

“Okay,” he said, grinning. “We’re going to get two JMV’s — and one of them’s in the 87th Precinct!”

Exuberantly, he led them out of the apartment.

The two young men had been prowling the streets since dinnertime. They had eaten in a delicatessen off Ainsley and then had stopped to buy a half-gallon of gasoline in the service station on the corner of Ainsley and Fifth. The taller of the two young men, the one carrying the open can of gasoline, was cold. He kept telling the shorter one how cold he was. The shorter one said everybody was cold on a night like this, what the hell did he expect on a night like this?

The taller one said he wanted to go home. He said they wouldn’t find nobody out on a night like this, anyway, so what was the use walking around like this in the cold? His feet were freezing, he said. His hands were cold too. Why don’t you carry this fuckin’ gas a while? he said.

The shorter one told him to shut up.

The shorter one said this was a perfect night for what they had to do because they could probably find maybe two guys curled up together in the same hallway, didn’t that make sense?

The taller one said he wished he was curled up in a hallway someplace.

They stood on the street corner arguing for a few minutes, each of them yelling in turn, and finally the taller one agreed to give it another ten minutes, but that was all. The shorter one said Let’s try it for another half-hour, we bound to hit pay dirt, and the taller one said No, ten minutes and that’s it, and the shorter one said You fuckin’ idiot, I’m telling you this is a good night for it, and the taller one saw what was in his eyes, and became afraid again and said Okay, okay, but only a half-hour, I mean it, Jimmy, I’m really cold, really.

You look like you’re about to start crying, Jimmy said.

I’m cold, the other one said, that’s all.

Well, come on, Jimmy said, we’ll find somebody and make a nice fire, huh? A nice warm fire.

The two young men grinned at each other.

Then they turned the corner and walked up the street toward Culver Avenue as Car Seventeen, bearing Phillips and Genero clinked by on its chained tires sounding like sleigh bells.

It was difficult to tell who was more surprised, the cops or the robbers.

The police commissioner had told His Honor the Mayor JMV that “a lot of police work dovetails past and present and future,” but it was fairly safe to assume he had nothing too terribly philosophical in mind. That is, he probably wasn’t speculating on the difference between illusion and reality, or the overlap of the dream state and the workaday world. That is, he probably wasn’t explaining time continua or warps, or parallel universes, or coexisting systems. He was merely trying to say that there are a lot of accidents involved in police work, and that too many cases would never get solved if it weren’t for those very accidents. He was trying to tell His Honor the Mayor JMV that sometimes cops get lucky.

Carella and Willis got very lucky on that night of March fifteenth at exactly ten minutes to eight.

They were watching the front of the shop because Dominick Di Fillippi (who had never ratted on anybody in his life) had told them the plan was to go into the shop at ten minutes to eight, just before John the Tailor drew the blinds on the plate glass window fronting the street. La Bresca was to perform that task instead, Di Fillippi had further said, and then he was to lock the front door while Calucci forced John the Tailor at gun point into the back room. In Di Fillippi’s ardent recital, there had been a lot of emphasis real or imagined, on the front of the shop. So everyone had merely assumed (as who wouldn’t?) that La Bresca and Calucci would come in through the front door, open the door, ting-a-ling would go the bell, shove their guns into John the Tailor’s face, and then go about their dirty business. It is doubtful that the police even knew there was a back door to the shop.

La Bresca and Calucci knew there was a back door.

They kicked that door in at precisely seven-fifty, right on schedule, kicked it in noisily and effectively, not caring whether or not they scared John the Tailor out of ten years’ growth, knowing he would rush to the back of the shop to see what the hell was happening, knowing he would run directly into two very large pistols.

The first thing they saw was two guys playing checkers.

The first thing La Bresca said was, “Fuzz!”

He knew the short guy was fuzz because he had been questioned by him often enough. He didn’t know who the other guy was, but he reasoned that if you saw one mouse you probably had fifty, and if you saw one cop you probably had a thousand, so the place was probably crawling with cops, they had stepped into a very sweet little trap here–and that was when the curtain shot back and the front door of the shop burst open.

It was also when all the overlapping confusion started, the past, present, and future jazz getting all mixed up so that it seemed for a tense ten seconds as if seven movies were being projected simultaneously on the same tiny screen. Even later, much later, Carella couldn’t quite put all the pieces together; everything happened too fast and too luckily, and he and Willis had very little to do with any of it.

The first obvious fact that crackled up Carella’s spine and into his head was that he and Willis had been caught cold. Even as he rose from his chair, knocking it over backwards, even as he shouted, “Hal, behind you!” and reached for his revolver, he knew they’d been caught cold, they were staring into the open muzzles of two high caliber guns and they would be shot dead on the spot. He heard one of the men shout, “Fuzz!” and then he saw both guns come up level at the same time, and too many last thoughts crowded into his head in the tick of a second. Willis whirled, knocking checkerboard and checkers to the floor, drawing his gun, and suddenly John the Tailor threw back the curtain separating the rear of the shop from the front, and the front door of the shop burst open in the same instant.

John the Tailor later said he had run back to see what the noise was, throwing the curtain between the two rooms, and then whirling to see what Carella only later saw, three men standing in the front doorway of his shop, all of them holding pistols.

This was what La Bresca and Calucci must have seen as well, looking through the now open curtain directly to the front door. And whereas they must have instantly known they had caught the back-room cops cold, they now recognized the threat of the three other cops standing in the front door, all of them with pistols in their fists and kill looks on their faces. The three men weren’t cops, but La Bresca and Calucci didn’t know that. The sergeant standing in the doorway shouted, “Fuzz!” meaning he thought La Bresca and Calucci were fuzz, but La Bresca and Calucci merely thought he was announcing his own arrival. So they began shooting. The three men in the door, facing what they too thought was a police trap, opened fire at the same time. John the Tailor threw himself to the floor. Carella and Willis, recognizing a good healthy crossfire when they saw one, tried to flatten themselves against the wall. In the flattening process, Willis slipped on one of the fallen checkers and went tumbling to the floor, bullets spraying over his head.

Carella’s gun was in his hand now. He leveled it at the front door because he had taken a good look at one of the men standing there firing into the back room, and whereas the man was not wearing his hearing aid, he was tall and blond and Carella recognized him at once. He aimed carefully and deliberately. The gun bucked in his hand when he pulled off the shot. He saw the deaf man clutch for his shoulder and then half-stumble, half-turn toward the open doorway. Someone screamed behind Carella, and he turned to see La Bresca falling over the pressing machine, spilling blood onto the white padding, and then four more shots exploded in the tiny shop and someone grunted, and there were more shots, Willis was up and firing, and then there was only smoke, heavy smoke that hung on the air in layers, the terrible nostrill-burning stink of cordite, and the sound of John the Tailor on the floor, praying softly in Italian.