"No, wait a minute, Phil," Tommy said.' Something hard and cold had crept into his voice and into his eyes. He studied Cooch minutely, and then said, "You ought to watch your mouth, boy, you know?"
"I don't have to watch nothing," Cooch said. He did not know whether or not he was afraid. Actually, he did not feel afraid. Not with four guns rucked into the waistband of his trousers. But at the same time, he knew that something was pushing him into sounding two members of the toughest gang in the neighborhood. He could only assume the force propelling him was fear. And yet, he did not feel afraid.
Tommy climbed down off the packing crate. "You got a real loose mouth, boy," he said. "You ought to watch the way it spills over."
"You take care of your own mouth," Cooch said.
"You're really looking for it, ain't you, boy? Your day ain't gonna be complete until we break your arm, is it?"
"You finished making big noises?" Cooch asked. "I'm in a hurry."
Tommy stepped into his path. "Stay put, boy."
"Tommy," Phil warned, "there's a million bulls all over the..."
"Shut up!" Tommy said tightly, without turning his attention from Cooch. "I give you a chance to take off that jacket nice and polite, now didn't I, Cooch? For your own good, I asked you. Okay. Now you're gonna take it off because I'm telling you to take it off. Now how about that?"
"How about it?" Cooch answered.
"You take it off, or I cut if off your back!"
"Sure. Try it."
"You're the kind I like," Tommy said, taking a step forward, his hand reaching into his pocket. "You're the kind of spunky little bastard I..."
"Hold it!" Cooch whispered. "Hold it right there, man! I got four pieces under this jacket, and I swear to God I'll use every friggin' one of them!"
Tommy stopped suddenly, eyeing Cooch, wondering if this were just a bluff. It did not seem to be. Cooch's eyes were steady, his mouth tight.
"So come on, hero," he said confidently.
"Let it go, Tommy," Phil said worriedly, his eyes flicking to the cops swarming over the street.
Tommy studied Cooch an instant longer, and then backed away. "We got a big man with a piece here, Phil," he said. "You're real big with them pieces, huh, Cooch? Well, I got some more advice for you. Friendly advice. Don't never go walking about without a piece from now on, you hear? Because, buddy, you are going to need one. You are really going to need one."
"Thanks, you yellow bastard," Cooch said, grinning, and then he turned on his heel and ran off toward the corner.
"Cooch, huh?" Tommy said, smoldering. He nodded. "Okay, Cooch. We're gonna see about you, Cooch."
"A nut!" Phil said, shaking his head. "We try to help him, and he turns on us." He shook his head again. "It just don't pay to be nice to nobody." He looked up at the girls. "You chicks gonna stand on that box all day long?"
"What else is there to do?" Elena asked.
"Let's go up to my pad," Phil said. "My people are out. We roll back the rug in the parlor, and we have a little jump, what do you say?"
"I don't know," Elena said. "Juana?"
"I don't know. What do you think?"
"It's too hot to dance," Elena said.
"Okay, so let's go get a beer," Phil said. "What the hell's the sense in hanging around here? Don't you know what's gonna happen?"
"No. What's gonna happen?"
"Eventually, they're gonna shoot Pepe," Phil said simply. "What do you think? He's gonna get away?"
"He might," Elena said.
"Impossible."
"Why is it so impossible?"
"Because there's got to be a moral," Phil said. "The Bad Guy never wins. Crime don't pay. Otherwise the Breen Office don't let it through." He burst out laughing. "Hey, Tommy, you dig that? The Breen Office..."
"Yeah, I caught it," Tommy said. "The son of a bitch! I was trying to help him, can you imagine that?"
"Come on, girls," Phil said. "Let's cut out, huh?"
"Juana?" Elena said.
"Okay," Juana said.
"Great," Phil said, helping them off the crate. "Believe me, you'd be wasting your time hanging around here. Ain't nothing gonna happen to Pepe but he's gonna get killed.
If the police had been as confidently sure of the outcome as was Phil, they would not have bothered to arm themselves with tear-gas pellets this time at the bat. For whatever Phil might have thought about the inevitability of Hollywood-type gangland movies, Pepe Miranda had broken out of an apartment the day before, and today he had shot a patrolman and a detective, and the possibility existed that he might shoot a few more detectives or even another lowly patrolman or two before the festivites were over. And, granting this possibility, there was the further possibility that he could and might break out of this apartment today, foiling the police, the Breen Office, the brothers Warner, and even Anthony Boucher. In any case, this time the cops were playing it safe. One of their patrolmen had been carted away in an ambulance, and one of their detectives lay spilling his blood, drop by drop, to the sidewalk below, and those seemed like enough casualties for one day.
So they lined up across the street like Hessians on a Massachusetts field in 1777, and they put their tear-gas guns to their shoulders, and they awaited the order which would release a new volley of bullets against the windows across the street, driving Miranda back so that they could plop their triple tracer shells into the apartment. There was nothing as sad as a crying thief, and all those valiant men in blue would watch Miranda with aching hearts as he burst into tears, but that was the way the little tear-gas pellet bounced.
Lieutenant Byrnes waved his arm at the rooftops, and the volley began. There was no glass left to shatter, and even the window frames were so badly splintered that the new cascade of bullets seemed to seek out instinctively the relatively untouched brick surrounding the windows. Big chunks of red brick showered onto the fire escape and the pavement below. Hernandez, lying as still as a stone, was covered with red dust.
"Okay," Byrnes said to the men in the street, "get it going. Aim for the windows and get as many in there as you can!"
The men started firing. The triple tracer shells arced in lazy spirals toward the window. From inside the apartment, Miranda let out a roar like a wounded animal. There was a hiss, and then a cloud of smoke, and then more hisslike explosions and suddenly tear gas was pouring from the open windows. The pellets raced about the apartment like decapitated rats, designed to wriggle and squirm so that they could not be picked up and returned to the street. The scent of apple blossoms drifted into the street, a mild scent wafted over the heads of the crowd. Miranda was cursing a blue streak now, shouting and roaring. He appeared at the windows once, and was driven back by a Thompson gun which all but ripped away half the side of the building.
And then, suddenly, in the street, there was a pop and a hiss, and the scent of apple blossoms was unimaginably strong, and Andy Parker reeled backward from one of the patrolmen and shouted, "You stupid idiot! You goddamn stupid idiot!"
14
Well, you can't blame people for accidents. People have accidents all the time, and cops are only people, and if a gun misfires, it misfires, and that's that. And if a tear-gas pellet which is supposed to go zooming up through the air suddenly plops onto the asphalt and explodes there, those are just the breaks. Maybe Parker shouldn't have been standing so close to the patrolman firing the pellet. But accidents will happen, and Parker was standing close to the gun when it misfired, and close to the pellet when it exploded, so that he got the first mushrooming whiff of tear gas before the pellet went dizzily skipping into the crowd. Tear gas ain't Chanel Number 5. Especially when it goes off practically in your face. His eyes began to burn instantly. Blindly, he reached for his handkerchief, cursing the patrolman, and compounding the felony by rubbing the chemical deeper into his smarting eyes.