Chester Himes - All shot up

“Door’s locked,” the lookout said.

“Go back anyway.”

The lookout didn’t move. “What you going to do with her?”

“Kill her, goddammit, what you think?” the white man said flatly. “You think I’m going to let her live and send me to the chair?”

“We can use her to make him talk,” the lookout argued.

“You think he’s going to talk to save this whore?”

Leila had inched over to the partition separating the two rooms and now began edging slowly toward the inside window.

“Don’t let him kill me,” she begged in her little-girl’s voice to keep their attention distracted.

Her mouth was open; the tip of her tongue slid across her dry lips to make the red paint glisten. She stuck out her breasts and made her body sway as though her pelvic girdle was equipped with roller bearings. She was playing her sex along with her race for all it was worth; but her big brown eyes were dark pools of terror.

The white man turned his back on the lookout and moved toward her with the knife held in a stabbing position.

The second colored man said, “Wait a minute; he’s going to shoot you.”

The white man halted but kept staring at Leila without turning around. “What’s the matter with you niggers?” he said. “The bitch has got to be silenced; and we ain’t got all night to fool around.”

The word nigger estranged him. Where before they were divided by a woman, now they were separated by race. Neither of the colored men moved or spoke.

Down below in the Paris Bar someone had put a coin in the juke box, and the slow hypnotic beat of an oldtime platter called Bottom Blues came faintly through the floor.

The second colored man decided to act as peacemaker. “Ain’t no need of you two falling out about a woman,” he said. “Let’s consider it.”

“Consider what?” the white man said. His big, sloping shoulders beneath the loose blue coat seemed suspended in motion.

Moving inch by inch, Leila played the lookout with eyes that promised a thousand nights of frenzied love. All of her life she had played sex for kicks; now she was playing it for her life and it didn’t work the same; she felt as sexless as a leg of veal. But everything depended on it, and she forced words through her numb trembling lips.

“Don’t let him kill me, please, I beg of you. I’ll give you money-all the money you want. I’ll be every kind of woman you can think of; just don’t let him-”

“Shut up, whore,” the white man said.

“Let’s talk it over,” the lookout mouthed. Lust was shaking him like electric shocks, half choking him, draining his stomach down into his groin.

“We’ve talked too much already,”. the white man said, moving into Leila and raising the knife.

Leila’s hand flew to her mouth but she didn’t dare scream.

The lookout moved forward and stuck the gun muzzle against the small of the white man’s back, then pulled it back a few inches so it could breathe; it was an automatic, and if he had to shoot it needed air.

The white man got the message. He froze with his hand raised. “You ain’t going to shoot me,” he said. His voice sounded as dangerous as a rattlesnake’s warning.

“Just don’t hurt her is all,” the lookout said in a voice that sounded equally as dangerous:

The second colored man drew his own. 38 police special, holding it down beside him in his left hand.

“This is getting too tight for me,” he said. “I got fifteen grand wrapped up in this deal myself, and if it gets blown away we’re all going to go.”

“Chicken feed,” Leila whispered, holding the lookout with her eyes.

Sweat had filmed on her temples and upper lip; a vein in the left side of her throat was throbbing. She breathed as though she couldn’t get enough air; her breasts in the jersey-silk pullover were rising and falling like bellows. She was playing a sex pot if there ever was one; but all she wanted in this world was to get to the window, and it seemed like ten thousand miles away.

Unseen by the lookout, the white man turned the knife in his hand and gripped the point.

“This bitch is going to scream any minute,” he said.

The lookout made an offer. “I’ll give you my share for her.”

Leila edged closer to the window. “You won’t lose,” she promised.

Nobody spoke. In the silence the slow, hypnotic beat coming from below repeated itself endlessly, changing instruments for eight-bar solos.

“It’s a deal,” the white man said. “Now get back on the door.”

“I’ll stay here-let Lefty take the door.”

Leila turned her back to the window and groped behind her for the shade. Her fingers found the drawstring.

“Kill him!” she screamed and jerked the string.

Everything happened at once.

The shade flew up and spun at the top in sudden chopping sound like a runaway ratchet wheel.

Leila dropped toward the floor as the white man threw the knife. It caught her in the stomach and went in up to the hilt.

The lookout swung his automatic, searching for a target.

Glass shattered, and the room exploded with the big, hard, head-splitting roar of a high-powered. 38 as Grave Digger, standing on the snow-covered fire escape, shot through the iron window grill and put two slugs less than an inch apart in the gunman’s heart.

Simultaneously, two shots sounded from the corridor; metal broke and wood crashed, and cold air rushed into the room.

The left-handed gunman spun toward the connecting doorway and went through with his pistol down at his left hip in the Hollywood gunslinger’s fashion. He ran into a brace of slugs and came reeling back with two sudden eyes in his forehead, his coat flapping in the hard percussion of sound.

With no expression whatsoever in his beetle-browed, brutal face, the white man drew from the shoulder. He was lightning fast.

But Grave Digger had already taken a bead on him with the long nickel-plated barrel resting on an iron crossbar. He put the first one in the white man’s right arm, just above the elbow, and the second one in his left kneecap.

The pistol dropped from the white man’s hand as he pitched to the rug on his face. The pain in his knee was excruciating, but he didn’t make a sound. He was like a wounded tiger, silent, crippled, but still as dangerous a killer as the jungle ever saw. Without looking up, knowing that he didn’t have a chance, he turned over and lunged for his fallen pistol with his left hand.

Coffin Ed came in from the reception room and kicked it out of his reach, then crossed the room and shot the padlock off the window grill.

Grave Digger kicked it in, knocked out the broken window glass with the side of his shoe and came into the room. Snow followed him.

Leila was curled up against the baseboard with her hands gripping the handle of the knife, crying softly and moaning.

Grave Digger knelt down, pulled her hands away gently and handcuffed them behind her back.

“You can’t pull it out,” he said. “That would only kill you.”

Coffin Ed was occupied handcuffing the white man’s good left hand to his good right leg. The white man looked at him without expression.

Finally Casper opened his eyes. The scene was stained red by the blood on his eyeballs.

Coffin Ed undid the gag.

“Get me loose quick,” Casper said thickly, talking through a mouthful of blood.

Grave Digger unlocked the manacles and Coffin Ed freed his legs.

Casper got to his hands and knees and looked about. He saw the manacled white man. Their gazes met. Casper saw the white man’s revolver on the floor beside the desk. He crawled to it bear fashion and picked it up. Everyone was watching him, but no one except the white man expected it. He pumped three slugs into the white man’s head.