“Nerves of steel, huh?” he asked, a small smile forming on his thin lips.
“No, sonny,” I said. “I just don’t give a damn, that’s all. Come on.” He hesitated, and I shouted, “Come on, you simple bastard!”
He lunged at me, the knife swinging in a glistening arc. I caught his arm and yanked it up, and we struggled like two ballet dancers under the bare bulb. I twisted his arm all the way up then, bringing up my foot at the same time. I kicked him right in the butt, hard, and he went stumbling across the room, struggling for his balance. He turned with a vicious snarl on his face, and then did something no expert knife man would ever do.
He threw the knife.
I moved to one side as the blade whispered past my head. I heard it bury itself into the door jamb behind me. I smiled then.
“Well! It does appear we’re even.”
I took one step toward him, remembering Lew when it was too late.
“Not exactly, pop,” Lew said.
I didn’t bother turning around because I knew sure as hell that Lew would be holding the .38 I’d taken from him once today. Instead, I dove forward as the gun sounded, the smell of cordite stinking up the small room. My arms wrapped around Byrne’s skinny legs, and we toppled to the floor in a jumble of twisting limbs.
The gun sounded once more, tearing into the plaster wall and Byrne shouted, “You dumb mug! Knock it off!”
He didn’t say anything else, then, because my fist was in his mouth and he was trying hard to swallow it. I picked him up off the floor, keeping him in front of me. I lifted him to his feet and kept him ahead of me, moving toward Lew on the couch.
“Go ahead, Lew,” I said. “Shoot. Kill your buddy and you’ll get me, too.”
“Don’t move,” he said.
I kept crossing the room, holding Byrne’s limp body ahead of me.
“I said don’t move!”
“Shoot, Lew! Fill Jackie-boy with holes. Go ahead, you damn fool, shoot!”
He hesitated a moment and that was all I needed. I threw Byrne like a sack of potatoes and Lew moved to one side just as I jumped. I hit him once in the gut and once in the Adam’s apple, almost killing him. Then I grabbed Lew by his collar, and Jackie by his, and I dragged them out of the room, and down the stairs, and out on the sidewalk. I found the cop not far from there.
I told Kit all about it later.
Her eyes held stars, and they made me think of a time when I’d roamed the neighborhood as a kid, a kid who didn’t know the meaning of pain or the meaning of grief.
“Come see me, Matt,” she said. “When you get the time, come see me. Please remember Matt.”
“I will, Kit,” I lied.
I left the grocery store and I walked over to Third Avenue. I grabbed the El there, and I headed for home.
Home.
If I hurried, I might still find a liquor store open.
The El rumbled past 120th Street, and I looked out of the window and down the high walls of the tenement cliffs. And then 120th Street was gone, and with it Matt Cordell’s boyhood.
I slumped against the seat, pulling my collar high, smiling a little when the woman next to me got up and changed her seat.
Stop Him!
by Bruno Fischer
It was a tough situation. He was helpless, and the escaped con had hungry eyes on his wife.
They came out of the woods in the late afternoon. I looked up, and there they were passing the crab apple tree, the hulking younger man and the shrunken old man.
They didn’t say hello. They looked at my right foot, which was in a plaster cast.
“Guess you’re Neal Taylor,” the big man said.
He wore denim pants and a soiled T-shirt tight to his barrel chest and he needed a shave. The old man was in nondescript rags that smelled.
“Yes,” I said.
“Where’s Lucy?”
I closed my book. “She’s gone to the city for a few days.”
Tiredly the old man said, “He’s lying. She wouldn’t leave him alone for long out here with that bum foot.”
“Sure thing, Pop,” the other said. He came on the porch and grinned down at me. “We’ll stick around. Where do we get a drink?”
“The pump is in the kitchen,” I told him.
They went into the bungalow. I reached for my crutches and stood up.
The hot afternoon was very still. There were no other houses on the mile-long road that was hardly more than a track through the woods. Nobody had come up it in the two weeks we’d been here, and nobody would except Lucy, who had driven to town for food and would be back any minute.
The bungalow belonged to my friend George Dunn. It had no modern conveniences, no electricity, running water or phone, so his wife wanted no part of it. He hung onto it for occasional week ends during the fall hunting season. When I broke my ankle in the city, he offered Lucy and me the use of the bungalow until I would be able to return to work. “If you don’t mind peace and quiet,” George had said.
We didn’t at all mind peace and quiet as long as we were together. We’d been married only ten months. Besides, this was the only alternative I could afford to convalescing in our stuffy city apartment.
Now, suddenly, there was too much quiet and no peace.
I hobbled into the living room. From there I could hear the pump squeak in the kitchen and the low muttering of their voices.
A rifle hung over the fireplace. It was merely there for show; it was unloaded, and anyway the firing pin was broken. But they wouldn’t know that. Resting my weight on my good foot, I reached up for it.
I had it in my hands when they charged into the room. Before I could turn around, the younger, bigger man drove his fist into my face. The one foot on which I could stand shot out from under me. The cast on my other foot struck the floor and pain knifed from it all the way to my heart.
“You all right, son?” the old man asked anxiously.
He was bending over me. A revolver was in his hand. Gasping for breath, I looked past him at his companion who also had a gun, a heavy black automatic. He stuck it inside his belt and picked up the rifle.
“You didn’t need to sock him,” the old man told him. “He’s crippled.”
“Hell, Pop, he’s lucky I didn’t plug him.”
The old man slipped an arm under my shoulders. “Can you get up, son?” His eyes were the weariest I had ever seen, but they were surprisingly kind. He helped me to the armchair.
I sank back, feeling my ankle throb in the cast. The man who had hit me was examining the rifle.
“Busted and empty.” He dropped the rifle and kicked it against the wall and stared down at me. “So you know who I am? You very sure?”
“Yes,” I said. “You’re Roy Kester.”
“When did you hear about us busting out of pen?”
“I didn’t hear,” I said. “We’ve no radio and I don’t see a paper often. I guessed. I knew you were serving a long term in Trevan State Prison and it’s only twenty miles from here. And there was the way you asked for Lucy and the way you acted.”
The old man had found a pack of cigarettes on the table and was lighting one hungrily. “You don’t have to worry, son,” he assured me. “We’ll be on our way soon.”
“Sure,” Roy Kester said. “Just take it easy, Taylor. You can’t blame a guy for wanting to stop off and see his wife after six years.”
I put my head back against the chair and looked up at him. He was about thirty, two or three years younger than I. He was bigger and handsomer.
“She’s not your wife,” I told him. “She’s mine.”
“Last time I saw her she was married to me. Sleeping with me.” A bleakness came into his face. “She pulled the divorce while I was in the pen.”