The drive down Ashland took us up onto the overpass across the north branch of the Chicago River. For a moment I thought the maroon coupe’s driver had finally made me, when he took a quick left onto Courtland; but I had a feeling it was just a turn he almost missed, and—not wanting to lose him—violated proper surveillance technique and, rather than continuing on straight through the intersection and doubling back, took the Courtland left, myself.
I’d been expecting them to hit Armitage, another busy commercial street, but then I saw the coupe take a right, sliding onto Kingsbury, a dreary rutted road cutting through a canyon of factories, with a railroad track running down the center, to feed the concrete tongues of loading docks on either side. This solitary stretch was all but uninhabited—save, presumably, for the odd night watchman— and the streetlamps were minimal, throwing occasional pools of light into the shadow-soaked world.
Had they spotted me? Were they leading me to a lonely section where they could deal with me, unseen? I had cut my headlights again, as soon as the coupe turned down this tunnel-like passage. I dropped back, a block and a half; they weren’t slowing, or speeding—just proceeding at a legal twenty-five to wherever the hell they were going.
It then occurred to me that we were heading—or at least could be heading—to where Drury and that lawyer Bas were supposed to be meeting the surprise witness, in…I checked my watch…fifteen minutes. Was Bas the boss to whom the hitmen were reporting? Had the lawyer suckered, and betrayed, Drury, with his unlikely story of a witness without a name?
At North Avenue, the coupe turned left; I followed, and almost missed noticing that—two blocks down—they’d taken a fast right onto Orchard. I made a last second turn and got honked at by a startled, pissed-off driver—I’d forgotten my headlamps were off.
But I left the lights off, despite the irate motorist’s bleat, because traffic was sporadic now, as I crawled behind the coupe into the outer circles of Hell. From where we were, and southward, lay Little Hell, the roughest slum of the Near Northside; this had been a Sicilian area, not so long ago—Little Sicily, they’d called it, proud home of Hell’s Corner, the location of more gangland slayings than any other spot in the city.
Though the fringe blocks we were creeping through were still home to a few handfuls of Sicilians, and white faces were not completely unknown in these parts, the area was eighty percent colored, now. At the south end of this nasty neighborhood was some new public housing—the Frances Cabrini Homes, several blocks of tidy row houses—intended for the colored residents of the area, but filled with Sicilians and other whites who moved into the projects, bequeathing to the blacks the truly decrepit slum dwellings of Little Hell—a mix of dilapidated paint-peeling frame houses and crumbling brick tenements, dating back to the Chicago fire.
Little Hell was an apt phrase, except perhaps the “Little” part. These tenement apartments were usually shared by two families, and most buildings were without functioning bathrooms or running water. Sections of the vaulted sidewalks— often used to store coal—were cracked and unsafe, fissures in the cement that might have been the aftermath of an earthquake. Rats the size of small dogs ran these streets and sidewalks as if they owned them—and I wasn’t about to argue with them.
It was five till seven when the maroon coupe pulled over and parked near the corner of Orchard and Scott. I continued on, pulling over half a block down. I sat and smoked and watched in my sideview mirror as two men got out of the front seat of the coupe, leaving it running. Despite that, no driver could be spotted behind the wheeclass="underline" seemed only two men had been in that coupe after all; hadn’t been a wheelman waiting for them. That might explain why their getaway had been slowed enough for me to catch sight of their escape from Drury’s neighborhood. Nine millimeter in my fist, cigarette in my mouth, I turned in my seat and looked out the back window.
From across the street from where the maroon coupe was parked, where he’d been sitting in his own parked car, a six-foot figure in a dark gray suit under an open raincoat stepped out and crossed to join the two men on the corner, under a streetlamp, one of the few around here that was working.
They were talking—smiles all around, a friendly confab. All three men were an anomaly in this neighborhood: well-dressed white men, lawyer Bas and the two assassins, neither of whom (at this distance, anyway) looked familiar to me. The man who’d been driving the maroon coupe—small, round-faced, mustached—wore a light gray suit, no topcoat, and a darker gray fedora; his lanky partner, also mustached, wore a dark blue topcoat and a lighter blue fedora.
So that fucking Bas was their boss—he’d set Drury up for these natty assassins. But why was the lawyer meeting them here, where the meeting with the (I now assumed) imaginary witness was to have taken place? He did represent some taverns and clubs in this part of town, but still I was just realizing, with a shudder, the faultiness of my original thinking, and reaching for the door handle, thinking that Bas might be innocent, and in danger, when the taller mustached assassin swung something out from under that dark blue topcoat—a shotgun.
Even from half a block away, I could see Bas’s wide-eyed shock, and he turned to flee down the sidewalk, away from them (and me) when the guy opened up—shotgun all right…no doubt the same one that had nailed Drury—and the night exploded. Bas seemed to pause in midair before he pitched face-forward to the cement, his splattered back a modern art study in charcoal and red, worthy of Charley’s penthouse wall.
I was long since out of the car, and running down the street, hat flying off, cigarette trailing sparks into the night, gun tight in my fist, when the guy in the topcoat got in behind the wheel of the parked, motor-running coupe—he’d traded jobs with his partner, who had trotted down to where Bas had belly-flopped onto the cracked cement. The .45 in the round-faced assassin’s hand blasted down at the supine attorney, once, twice, blossoming orange in the darkness.
The round-faced guy ran back to the coupe, climbed in on the rider’s side, and they took off, heading straight at me, though neither had noticed me yet; the glare of their headlights made me squint, but I’d anticipated it, and I saw them, both of their mustached faces (the tall one had a harelip scar), and they saw me too—their expressions as saucer-eyed as Bas’s—as I pointed the nine millimeter at their oncoming windshield and fired.
The shot rang through Little Hell, echoing, and the bullet spiderwebbed the windshield, but I didn’t think I’d hit either one of them, goddamnit, and I dove and rolled as the driver swerved, first to try to run me down, second to take a right that would take them toward and under the El tracks, toward Ogden Avenue.
I was barely back on my feet, when they were gone, out of my view, and—gun still in hand—I ran down to the fallen Bas, knowing it was hopeless, but checking him out, anyway.
Kneeling down to take a closer look, I figured the shotgun blast in his back had probably killed him; but the coup de grace pair of .45 shots in his head made taking his pulse a worthless procedure. I did it anyway.
Now that the shooting had stopped, people were coming out of their houses and tenements, colored faces filling doorways and windows, eyes wider than Willie Best’s and shouts of “Call the police,” and “Buncha white men shootin’ at each other,” and such like, from either side of the street, surrounding me, an accusatory gospel choir singing skyward in the night.
Before the cops or Jesus responded, I ran back to my car and got out of there, hoping to hell we all looked alike to them.
The same red-uniformed doorman as on my previous visit to the Barry Apartments—paunchy, fiftyish George with the drink-splotched face—was on duty; and he remembered me…and my name.