Harlan Ellison - Web of the City

But how the hell do you locate a bunch of teenage punks in a city of over eight million people? How do you get to them before they get to you?

I knew I had to take care of a few things.

I went to see Jerry Saha over in the Bronx.

Jerry had been through the freeze-mud with me, near Won-son, and we’d kept in touch once we’d gotten back. I knew he still had his army service revolver—a spanking handy .45 that shot a real straight round. Jerry was an incurable souvenir hunter. His apartment looked like an antique shop.

I called him from a drugstore on his corner, and he told me to come on up. About ten minutes later he let me in, giving me the shush-finger. The wife and kids were asleep in the next room. It was six in the A.M.

“What’s up, Neal?” he said, belting his robe about him tighter. I told him he didn’t really want to know, but he said, “Hell, yes. Sure I do. You don’t come bursting in here at six in the morning unless something’s under your fingernails. Now give!”

So I gave him the bit from the top—all the way from the mugging, and this Pessler character’s being cooled to the tune of three hundred thousand bucks’ worth of uncuts, through Harrison’s visit in the sick ward, right up to and including the little ride I’d just come back from, and particularly about how they were going to try and cool me proper in the near future.

“I’d like to borrow your heater, Jerry,” I told him.

He looked worried for a minute, then nodded slowly. “Sure, Neal. Just a second.” He trotted into the next room, his bedroom slippers slap-slapping against the soles of his feet, and closed the door behind him. I heard a drawer open and close. Then the closet door opening. I heard him fishing around the closet for a few minutes, then he reappeared. He had a chamois bag and a small box in his hand.

“Here’s a box of bullets for the thing,” he said, handing me the box. I took out eight rounds and shoved the box in my jacket pocket. I reached into the bag, came up with the blocky thing in my hand. Jerry had taken good care of that gun. It shone.

I loaded the clip, flat-palmed it back into the butt. I shoved the .45 into my waistband. “Thanks, Jerry,” I said. “Thanks a lot. You’ll get it back in good shape.”

He looked concerned, his collegiate, crew-cut appearance cut by a frown. “Look, take care of yourself, Neal. If there’s anything else you need…”

“Not right now, Jerry. I’ll keep you posted.” I patted the spot under my dirty, mud-caked jacket where the .45 nestled against my tummy. “Thanks for this. It’ll probably be the only thing between me and Potter’s Field if it comes to a showdown with these characters.”

“What kind of a showdown?” he asked, the frown deepening.

I shrugged, my hand on the doorknob. “Don’t know, but there’s got to be one. They want me real bad—or they will when they find out that cliff didn’t finish me—and I want them real bad. I can’t stop moving, because if I do, they cool me. And they can’t show themselves, because when they do I’ll get to them.”

I closed the door quietly behind me.

I went home and sacked in with my clothes on. I didn’t sleep too well. The .45 was a hard nubbin under the pillow, and I had a lousy nightmare about a switchblade cab that was trying to push me off a cliff into a sea of diamonds.

I woke up about four in the afternoon, reeking of my own sweat. The world was shattering inside my skull, there was a painful lump where the kid had tapped me the night before, and I had a horrible itch to find those kids one by one and hammer their molars back down their throats.

I showered, dressed, and phoned in to Liggett, told him I’d be right down. He told me I could work the six-to-four shift. I told him to let word seep through the vine that Campus had been jumped and dumped—but had come back.

He asked me what I meant, so I fired the story over the line real quick. I heard a gasp, and he said he’d let the word out. “But why the hell don’t you just cut out and forget the whole thing?” he asked.

“Reasons,” I answered, thinking about Korea and being pushed too far.

Then I hung up and went downstairs, to take up where I’d left off the day before.

Things went cozy that day. I got finished with my tour of duty about four-oh-five and went home. This time I made sure I was alone when I got out of the cab.

I sacked in, and this time the sleep was better. Not perfect, but a whole lot better.

Next morning I shoved the .45 into my belt and put my jump-jacket over it. Then I went down to the cab. I got in, took out my route book, and scribbled my tie-in time. I stuck the key in the ignition.

Then I pushed the starter.

And the bomb went off. The whole goddam universe exploded. I felt myself being shoved in the chest. It was the steering wheel. The car exploded, erupted, whanged away with a boom, and the doors flew off their hinges, thank god! I was parked next to a church. The explosion tossed me up against the holy walls.

I lay there on my face on the sidewalk, blood all over me from abrasions, while screaming metal and broken glass fell on top of me. I heard people screaming and windows flying up, and knew it must have been one hell of an explosion. I reprimanded myself mentally for swearing mentally in front of a church. Even if I was lying on my kisser.

It was obvious, of course. They’d planted a souper in the engine of the cab.

If the hack hadn’t been so strong—mainly due to my reinforcing sections of it on my days off—I’d have been spattered across the wall of that church permanently.

I rather supposed they hadn’t rigged it properly. If they had, no matter how strong that cab was, I would have been decapitated. These kids were novices when it came to installing a juice-box in a crate. I started to faint.

I heard people running up to me, and I tried to sit up. I managed to get my feet under me and pull myself up on the church stair railing. Someone produced a glass of something that tasted like bad sherry, and I sipped a bit, listening to the mingled bird-sounds of the people’s horror-cooing.

I staggered erect, and bumbled into the house to call Lig. He could handle Harrison, if that crumb was assigned to this deal.

I wanted to call Lig to thank him for spreading the word. He’d done it real fine—the bastards knew I was still kicking.

Now it was a case of hide-and-seek.

If I was “it,” I’d be “it” with a slug in my tummy or a switch shaft sticking out of my throat. If they were “it,” I’d be rapping a few skulls good and hard, real soon.

I moved later that day. Across town to a furnished flea trap. But it would do till I came up with something other than a cracked skull and empty hands.

Then started a week of real nightmare. I borrowed Jerry’s car and went looking. New York’s a big town. You can go for years without running into anyone you know; on the other hand, you might walk into the street and meet a guy you haven’t seen in ten years. Funny, like that. But a full week without more than three hours sleep a night—running on No-Doz and black coffee—I patrolled the streets in Jerry Saha’s car. All the way from Astoria to Brooklyn.

It wasn’t hard to get the other hackies I knew to keep half an eye open for the kids I’d described, also.

Along about Thursday, I got word from Lig that Harrison had been around looking for me. I told Lig to stall the bull, tell him I was on routes with a new cab, tell him anything, but to stall the slob. He did, and I kept looking, cutting my sleep down to nothing.

Nothing. That’s what I got on Friday.

Saturday was more of the same. A righteous, empty nothing; a stone loss.