Chester Himes - The real cool killers

There was a rusty sheet-iron gate in the concrete wall between the small back courts. The gang leader unlocked it with his own key. The gate opened silently on oiled hinges.

He went ahead.

"March!" the henchman with the knife ordered, prodding Sonny.

Sonny marched.

The other henchman kept the noose around his neck like a dog chain.

When they'd passed through, the leader closed and locked the gate.

One of the henchman said, "You reckon Caleb is bad hurt?"

"Shut up talking in front of the captive," the leader said. "Ain't you got no better sense than that."

The broken concrete paving was strewn with broken glass bottles, rags and diverse objects thrown from the back windows: a rusty bed spring, a cotton mattress with a big hole burnt in the middle, several worn-out automobile tires, the half-dried carcass of a black cat with its left foot missing and its eyes eaten out by rats.

They picked their way through the debris carefully.

Sonny bumped into a loose stack of garbage cans. One fell with a loud clatter. A sudden putrid stink arose.

"God damn it, look out!" the leader said. "Watch where you're going."

"Aw, man, ain't nobody thinking about us back here," Choo-Choo said.

"Don't call me man," the leader said.

"Sheik, then."

"What you jokers gonna do with me?" Sonny asked.

His weed jag was gone; he felt weak-kneed and hungry; his mouth tasted brackish and his stomach was knotted with fear.

"We're going to sell you to the Jews," Choo-Choo said.

"You ain't fooling me, I know you ain't no Arabs," Sonny said.

"We're going to hide you from the police," Sheik said.

"I ain't done nothing," Sonny said.

Sheik halted and they all turned and looked at Sonny. His eyes were white half moons in the dark.

"All right then, if you ain't done nothing we'll turn you back to the cops," Sheik said.

"Naw, wait a minute, I just want to know where you're taking me."

"We're taking you home with us."

"Well, that's all right then."

There was no back door to the hall as in the other tenement. Decayed concrete stairs led down to a basement door. Sheik produced a key on his ring for that one also. They entered a dark passage. Foul water stood on the broken pavement. The air smelled like molded rags and stale sewer pipes. They had to remove their smoked glasses in order to see.

Halfway along, feeble yellow light slanted from an open door. They entered a small, filthy room.

A sick man clad in long cotton drawers lay beneath a ragged horse blanket on a filthy pallet of burlap sacks.

"You got anything for old Bad-eye," he said in a whining voice. -

"We got you a fine black gal," Choo-Choo said.

The old man raised up on his elbows. "Whar she at?"

"Don't tease him," Inky said.

"Lie down and shut," Sheik said. "I told you before we wouldn't have nothing for you tonight." Then to his henchmen, "Come on, you jokers, hurry up."

They began stripping off their disguises. Beneath their white robes they wore sweat shirts and black slacks. The beards were put on with make-up gum.

Without their disguises they looked like three high-school students.

Sheik was a tall yellow boy with strange yellow eyes and reddish kinky hair. He had the broad-shouldered, trimwaisted figure of an athlete. His face was broad, his nose flat with wide, flaring nostrils, and his skin freckled. He looked disagreeable.

Choo-Choo was shorter, thicker and darker, with the egg-shaped head and flat, mobile face of the born joker. He was bowlegged and pigeon-toed but fast on his feet.

Inky was an inconspicuous boy of medium size, with a mild, submissive manner, and black as the ace of spades.

"Where's the gun?" Choo-Choo asked when he didn't see it stuck in Sheik's belt.

"I slipped it to Bones."

"What's he going to do with it?"

"Shut up and quit questioning what I do."

"Where you reckon they all went to, Sheik?" Inky asked, trying to be peacemaker.

"They went home if they got sense," Sheik said.

The old man on the pallet watched them fold their disguises into small packages.

"Not even a little taste of King Kong," he whined.

"Naw, nothing!" Sheik said.

The old man raised up on his elbows. "What do you mean, naw? I'll throw you out of here. I'se the janitor. I'll take my keys away from you. I'll-"

"Shut your mouth before I shut it and if any cops come messing around down here you'd better keep it shut too. I'll have something for you tomorrow."

"Tomorrow? A bottle?"

The old man lay back mollified.

"Come on," Sheik said to the others.

As they were leaving he snatched a ragged army overcoat from a nail on the door without the janitor noticing. He stopped Sonny in the passage and took the noose from about his neck, then looped the overcoat over the handcuffs. It looked as though Sonny were merely carrying an overcoat with both hands.

"Now nobody'll see those cuffs," Sheik said. Turning to Inky, he said, "You go up first and see how it looks. If you think we can get by the cops without being stopped, give us the high sign."

Inky went up the rotten wooden stairs and through the doorway to the ground-floor hall. After a minute he opened the door and beckoned.

They went up in single file.

Strangers who'd ducked into the building to escape the shooting were held there by two uniformed cops blocking the outside doorway. No one paid any attention to Sonny and the three gangsters. They kept on going to the top floor.

Sheik unlocked a door with another key on his ring, and led the way into a kitchen.

An old colored woman clad in a faded blue Mother Hubbard with darker blue patches sat in a rocking chair by a coal-burning kitchen stove, darning a threadbare man's woolen sock on a wooden egg, and smoking a corncob pipe.

"Is that you, Caleb?" she asked, looking over a pair of ancient steel-rimmed spectacles.

"It's just me and Choo-Choo and Inky," Sheik said.

"Oh, it's you, Samson." The very note of expectancy in her voice died in disappointment. "Whar's Caleb?"

"He went to work downtown in a bowling alley, Granny. Setting up pins," Sheik said.

"Lord, that chile is always out working at night," she said with a sigh. "I sho hope God he ain't getting into no trouble with all this night work, 'cause his old Granny is too old to watch over him as a mammy would."

She was so old the color had faded in spots from her dark brown skin so that it looked like the skin of a dried speckled pea, and once-brown eyes had turned milky blue. Her bony cranium was bald at the front and the speckled skin was taut against the skull. What remained of her short gray hair was gathered into a small tight ball at the back of her head. The outline of each finger bone plying the darning needle was plainly visible through the transparent parchment-like skin.

"He ain't getting into no trouble," Sheik said.

Inky and Choo-Choo pushed Sonny into the kitchen and closed the door.

Granny peered over her spectacles at Sonny. "I don't know this boy. Is he a friend of Caleb's too?"

"He's the fellow Caleb is taking his place," Sheik said. "He hurt his hands."

She pursed her lips. "There's so many of you boys coming and going in here all the time I sho hope you ain't getting into no mischief. And this new boy looks older than you others is."

"You worry too much," Sheik said harshly.

"Hannh?"

"We're going on to our room," Sheik said. "Don't wait up for Caleb. He's going to be late."

"Hannh?"

"Come on," Sheik said. "She ain't hearing no more."

It was a shotgun flat, one room opening into the other. The next room contained two small white enameled iron beds where Caleb and his grandmother slept, and a small potbellied stove on a tin mat in one corner. A table held a pitcher and washbowl; there was a small dime-store mirror on top of a chest of drawers. As in the kitchen, everything was spotlessly clean.