“Still hasn’t showed up,” he said, rolling an unlighted cigar between his fingers. “How much longer do we wait?”
“Oh, God,” she said. “There is a thing in the paper I don’t like. Another few minutes.”
“Baby,” Shayne said softly, “we’re out in the open here. What thing in what paper?”
He was able to imagine the expression on her face as she tried to decide how much to tell him. “A suicide. It frightened me at first, but it has no connection with us. It is because of a girl. It will make no difference.”
“It better not make a difference,” Shayne said roughly. “Because if somebody’s blown this-”
“I’m sure it hasn’t happened,” she said quickly. “The story would be written in quite a different way.”
“Baby-” Shayne began. He broke off, seeing Rourke’s black Ford cruising slowly past. The left-turn blinkers were working, a signal that the garbage truck was four blocks away. “Here it is!”
He slammed down the phone. Coming out of the booth, he lit his cigar. He had been smoking cigarettes up to now. Brownie, seeing the lighted cigar, switched off the motor of the car he was in and came out onto the street. In the luncheonette, Irene got up hastily with a nervous yawn, giving her bangs a pat. As Shayne came abreast of the bar, Szigetti appeared in the doorway, blinking and loosening his shoulders, seeming to be fighting off a wave of nausea.
Shayne had to whistle to Billy. The boy jumped up and ran for the dress rack. On Twenty-seventh, a small man whose name Shayne hadn’t been told cranked up a tractor and began to jackknife his trailer out into the working lanes, preparing to close off the block.
Shayne crossed to the west side of Sixth as the Sanitation truck came into view, a lumbering monster painted bright yellow, with the Department of Sanitation insignia on the door and over the high cab. Traffic was moving smoothly. The sidewalks were jammed with garment workers on lunch hour. Billy worked his rack through the knots of gossipers on the sunny corner. He reached the utility post while the garbage truck was between Twenty-fifth and Twenty-sixth.
The lights were synchronized so that a theoretical single car, moving at a steady thirty-three miles an hour, could drive from one end of the island to the other, meeting nothing but green lights all the way. In real life, of course, nothing is so simple. Cars move in packs. Midday traffic jams in this district were common. Billy reached up to the one-way arrow on the lamp post and waited. The truck passed Szigetti. Billy pressed the button.
Surprised, for he expected a few more blocks on the green, the driver came down on his brakes and stopped with his front wheels over the pedestrian line.
The big trailer near the Broadway end of the short block slanted across the street. It continued to maneuver forward and back, not leaving enough space for anything to get by. The cars on the Sixth Avenue side of the blockade began to move on the green.
Shayne stepped off the curb as Irene ran screaming along the opposite sidewalk, with Brownie right behind her. In rehearsals they had timed this entire segment of the action at under thirty seconds. The Sanitation truck had two sets of handgrips on the tailgate, one on each side of the conveyor belt which carried trash and garbage to the powerful chopper which chewed it up before letting it drop into the main bin. Two cops were clinging to the handgrips, their heads turned toward the sidewalk.
The moment Shayne stepped off the curb, Billy rolled the dress rack along the sidewalk to Szigetti. Turning on his heel, he started back up Twenty-seventh.
Irene screamed, “No! Don’t! Let me alone, damn you!”
These were not the lines she had rehearsed; she believed in the spontaneous school of acting. There was no doubt, Shayne thought, that to an onlooker her terror and revulsion were real. Brownie overtook her and yanked her around. He gave her a slap that sent her staggering back against a parked car. She caromed off and came back with her fingers raised and curled.
“Don’t do that again, Sambo!” she warned. “Your white-pussy days are over. Get back uptown where you belong, black boy!”
Brownie seized her long black hair. “Where you been these last two nights? You cheated on me for the last time, you ofay bitch!”
He worked up a mouthful of spit and released it in her face. A sound came from the crowd. She slowly wiped the spit out of her eyes while Brownie collected another mouthful.
One of the cops jumped down and shouted to the driver, “Wait here!” After an instant’s hesitation the second cop joined him, feeling for his nightstick.
Still holding Irene’s hair in his fist, Brownie backed her across the sidewalk, his face only a few inches from hers. The sudden violence had emptied a patch of sidewalk around them.
“Who’s going to make me go?” he yelled. “Not you, Whitey! Not by yourself! Better bring a few friends!”
Whirling her by the hair, he slammed her against the window of a shoe-repair shop. She tried to knee him in the groin. Both cops started across the sidewalk, their nightsticks half-raised.
Shayne reached the cab. He wrenched the door open and snapped, “Move over. Street’s blocked up ahead.”
The driver took in Shayne’s uniform and badge in a glance and began to move. His companion was craning out the other window.
“Big colored fellow beating up on a white girl!” he cried excitedly.
Szigetti slid the dress rack into the open space between the cops and the quarreling lovers. He pushed hard. They batted foolishly at the swinging dresses, as Shayne had done two nights before in the house on Staten Island. While they were tied up, Szigetti reached through the dresses and squirted tear gas into their eyes from a pocket dispenser.
Irene and Brownie had already separated and disappeared.
Szigetti screamed, “Where’d that black bo go? He threw acid at them! Come on!”
He raced into a nearby vestibule, but no one else in the crowd wanted to join him in the pursuit of a large, dangerous Negro who had already managed to disable two cops. The cops were clawing at their eyes.
Above in the truck’s high cab, Shayne jammed the stick into low and was off with a roar, swinging the wrong way into Twenty-seventh. Both lanes ahead were empty. So far Michele’s scheme was working well.
“One-way street!” the regular driver cried.
“Don’t I know it,” Shayne said grimly, chewing on his cigar. “Some jokers are trying to hijack us. Not if I have anything to say about it.”
The driver Shayne had displaced was a small, swarthy man, and like Shayne he had a cigar between his teeth. He hadn’t been told what cargo he was carrying. All he knew was that the cartons and canvas bags had been loaded with care, being checked off one by one on a master list as it was put in the truck. Instead of using the rear hatchway and the conveyor belt, they had been loaded through the side hatch, so they could be rechecked at the incinerator. And then he had been given a two-cop escort, another indication that something unusual was happening.
After one look at Shayne, he peered worriedly ahead at the trailer truck. It inched forward, leaving just enough room for a scooter or a Volkswagen to squeeze past.
Shayne slowed. Billy burst from between two parked cars and leaped onto the foothold on the right of the cab. Clinging to the door handle he yelled, “In there! Take a right! A right! For Christ’s sake give her some gas!”
Shayne swung the wheel hard. The big truck rocked up over the curb. At the sight of the wooden police barrier Shayne hit the brakes. Billy screamed and he bulled ahead. The barrier went over and was crushed beneath the front wheels.
He plunged into the alleyway he and Michele had reconnoitered the day before. Behind the building he veered sharply into the unloading space. Billy threw the door open on his side, waving a gun.
“Out!” he shouted. “You guys out!”
The Sanitation worker nearest him was slow to move. Billy jabbed him in the ribs.