The second guard put down the sawed-off, held up his hands in surrender, and Spearman cuffed him and tossed him on the floor like a filled garbage bag.
At the same time, Richie was swinging his sledgehammer, turning the door into splinters.
And when Richie shouldered in, tossing the sledge, getting out his revolver, the room was already in chaos, naked women in surgical masks screaming and bumping into one another, almost comically, knocking over tables, sending packets of Blue Magic to the floor and knocking piles of heroin off onto the floor with stray powder getting into the air to offer a top-dollar contact high.
“Get down!” Richie yelled to the girls, and Abruzzo was behind him, giving the same order.
Then a shot came from somewhere, ringing off the walls, winging Abruzzo, and Richie hit the deck, other detectives entering the apartment to do the same, getting on their bellies to crawl like infantrymen taking a beachhead.
As he’d burst through the door, Richie had glimpsed somebody running toward another room, a male, probably Huey, and as no other gunfire had as yet followed, he got to his feet and ran in that direction, down a hallway.
Revolver in hand, he edged into a darkened bedroom, but found no Huey or anybody else — just a big tapestry of a tiger almost covering a wall.
Instinct told him to tear the tapestry down, which he did, exposing a humongous hole knocked through the wall, probably with a sledgehammer like his, connecting the bedroom with the next apartment. He climbed through into another darkened space, a living room (he soon realized) with light from the hallway slanting in through an open door.
Richie rushed out into the hallway and saw no one, but he could hear footsteps echoing down the metal stairs of the nearby stairwell. He and his revolver followed, and he started down the steps one at time, then two at a time, and finally five at a time, two flights worth.
It was Huey, all right, down there on the next landing, yanking open the door and exiting the stairwell onto the fifteenth floor. Huey had a pretty good lead on Richie, who followed him down the corridor, watching him duck into a doorless apartment.
Through that open portal he saw Huey step through to an exterior balcony and run, left. Instead of cutting through the apartment, Richie ran down the hallway, staying parallel to Huey, seeing him through other open apartment doors as his prey hustled along. And Richie smiled as he saw Huey tripping over some toys in his path; the balcony was enclosed with chain-link, and with hanging wash and assorted crap in the way, Huey had picked a hell of a cluttered escape route.
So Richie put on the steam and got ahead of Huey, and cut through into another doorless apartment; but access to the balcony was boarded shut! His strategy failing him, Richie saw Huey through the window, running by, and, impulsively, the detective grabbed a tiny portable TV off a nearby counter and hurled it like a baseball, shattering the glass...
... and knocking Huey alongside his head.
By the time Huey was back on his feet, Richie had found his way to the balcony, and was standing there facing Huey.
“Give it up, Huey.”
Huey, dazed, somehow shook it off and charged into Richie, pummeling him with blows. Richie, tired of fucking around, kicked out once, hard, breaking Huey’s femur.
This time Huey went down and didn’t come back up, being busy howling in agony.
“You have the right to remain silent,” Richie advised him.
But Huey didn’t seem to be listening.
Over the next twenty-four hours, the Lucas brothers and their cousins would all be arrested — Dexter at his dry-cleaning establishment, Melvin at his metal works, Turner at his tire service, Terrence at his electrical shop — cuffed and led to patrol cars and driven away.
But on Sunday, barely half an hour after he had broken Huey Lucas’s leg, Richie went out of his way to make the most satisfying arrest of all. He was hardly dressed for church, and was by any reasonable assessment a sweaty, rank mess, when he pulled up to the Baptist church in Harlem. He’d used the siren to make good time and Toback had called ahead, so half the police in New Jersey were already waiting, having surrounded the church as if it were a gangster’s hideout.
And wasn’t it?
Frank Lucas, his wife and his mother were among the surprised members of the congregation who exited the service and started down the steps only to realize police and police cars were everywhere. Frank’s driver, Doc, had already been cuffed and taken into custody.
And all of the many shotguns, revolvers and automatics were pointed at Frank, making two things clear: he was their target, and he wasn’t going anywhere...
Through the crowd, Richie moved — a rumpled guy in street clothes approaching an impeccably groomed and dressed drug kingpin.
For the first time, Richie Roberts and Frank Lucas faced each other, Richie standing one step down from Frank, whose aloof manner spoke of more than just a single church step separating him from the detective.
“Richard Roberts, director of the Essex County Narcotics Bureau,” he said and held up his ID. “You’re under arrest, Mr. Lucas.”
“Was it really necessary to—”
“Yes. Turn around, Frank.”
Frank sighed, shook his head, took his time, but he turned around. And he even put his hands behind his back, for the cuffs, without being told to.
“You think you got Frank Lucas,” he said, with a cold over-the-shoulder glance at his captor, “but you got nothing.”
“There’s a difference?” Richie asked.
And hauled him away.
26. Official Correct
At his apartment, Richie Roberts looked at himself in the long mirror inside his closet door, thinking that the new gray suit had seemed to fit better at the discount clothing store. Too late to get another, and anyway he’d already cut the tags off.
So he cut the tags off his blue striped necktie, too, and put it on; took only four tries to get a decent knot, and the thing looked pretty good against the pale blue of his shirt. The man in the mirror appeared professional enough, confident, ready for the big day at the courthouse.
Of course, once at the courthouse, the big day really began with Richie upchucking his breakfast in a men’s room stall. And the guy looking back at him in the mirror over the sink had a kind of sickly, even deathly pallor. He decided the fluorescent lights were to blame, but splashed some water on his mug just the same. Gathering himself, he went out to do battle somewhere much scarier than the streets: a courtroom.
Richie and a single assistant at the prosecutor’s table were grossly outnumbered by the battery of expensive legal hired guns at the defendant’s table.
And when Frank Lucas came bursting through the courtroom doors, a celebrity had arrived, a handsome, charismatic figure in a tailored suit worth three months of Richie’s rent, escorted sans handcuffs by an amiable federal marshal who seemed to be getting a kick out of the accused’s company.
The celebrity defendant was greeted by a gallery of other celebrities, smiling, fawning, over this pope of dope. Hands reached out to Lucas, to pat him on the shoulder or back, and beautiful women, black and white alike, leaned out with their lovely lipsticked mouths offering kisses and words of encouragement. Joe Louis — who was scheduled as a character witness for this benevolent community leader — was allowed to hug Lucas, in front of God, the judge, the jury and everybody.
Maybe, Richie thought, I should just toss it in now...