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“You’re just on it, Capt’n. Green Chevy sedan, ‘56. The guy driving checks out perfect with the Sabatini make. He’s cruised by twice, circling the block and looking at the house. I was going to wait until I catch him in the mirror again and then pull out easy — let it look as if I’m giving up the parking space but then block him when he gets in close. The street’s narrow enough.”
“How long’s it take him to make it around?”
“Four, five minutes. He’s about due. You want to pull up the block so I can have room to—”
“Too late,” I said.
Turner and Bra
“I’ll fake a stall up ahead,” Bra
Bra
Sabatini kept on coming. One more ridiculous maneuver and we were angled across the middle of the road like begi
I was slumped low and out of Duke’s line of vision. He had held up about fifteen yards behind us, probably ready to start leaning on his horn. And then Turner pulled out to barricade the street behind him.
“Now,” Bra
Duke’s car was facing us like the stem on a letter “T.” Bra
“Police, Sabatinil Get out of there with your hands high!”
But Duke wasn’t buying. His eyes shot to the rear and he saw Ti
It lurched wildly. There was no room in the street for it to get by. So Duke decided to take the sidewalk. Bra
I was coming around from behind our car on the dead run, between it and the curb — just where Duke was aiming the Chevy. I snatched at the post of a no-parking sign to stop myself. My.38 was in my right hand so I snatched with my left. I swung up and around like a kid on a maypole. And then the streamer broke and the playground came up and whacked me in the shoulder.
I heard Turner’s Special fire twice, still from behind Duke somewhere, but somehow I didn’t seem to care. Not really. All I cared about were the four thousand dollars in the First National City Bank it had taken me thirty-one years to accumulate. I lay on the sidewalk, feeling very sad and wishing I’d had the sense to blow some of the money on a little fan in my youth, while the Chevy rocked along the concrete directly at me.
CHAPTER 12
I rolled. I squirmed. I even slud, like in “He slud into third base,” from the collected writings of Jerome Herman (Dizzy) Dean.
There was a barred window at ground level in the building nearest me. I was over there and hugging the bars like a frenzied chimpanzee who can’t reach the peanuts when the car screamed in my ear and jerked around at a lopsided angle back into the street.
Turner sprinted after it. He stopped, fired five more times. The fifth one was the click of his hammer striking an empty shell.
“Son of a—”
I got back on my feet fast. The rear window of Duke’s car was shattered and half torn away, which stopped him as much as water stops a trout. He was a hundred yards off before Bra
I yanked myself to my knees, clutching the top of the front seat. Bra
We were a fall block behind the Chevy before we accelerated past the first corner. Bra
He didn’t finish. Tires screeched up ahead. The signal on Seventh Avenue was red and there was a heavy stream of vehicles crossing the intersection. I saw four cars swerve at once as Duke tried to force the Chevy into the line of traffic.
The screeching stopped. A big, Winesap-colored Olds was cutting sharply away as Duke wheeled to the right. There was a fraction of a second of absolute stillness, as expectant as if Mitropoulos had just lifted his baton.
Duke slammed into the Olds. The right rear end of the larger car tilted up like an elephant raising one leg at a tree-trunk, hung there, then rocked back. There was another dull crashing sound as a panel truck marked Flowers Say It Better skidded into the back of the Olds.
We were still moving. A Mercury convertible swung hard to the right and into Perry to avoid the pile-up. It jammed the intersection and blocked us off. Bra
Duke had already bounded out the right-hand door of the Chevy. He was ru
People shouted. I was no more than thirty yards behind him, already out into the street myself and hearing Bra
“Stop or I’ll shoot, Sabatini!”
That was Bra
Bra
I got over there. It was an antique shop and there was a lot of junk on display. Furniture mostly. A couple of tall, stiff-backed old chairs which looked almost as good as new because nobody for a dozen generations had been quite tired enough to sit on them. Two or three nervous-looking little tables on legs carved so delicately they would probably collapse under the weight of an empty shot glass. A set of yellowing bone china which Pocahontas had gotten as a shower gift from the girls at the wigwam. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s favorite bronze candlesticks, the ones he wrote Hiawatha by the glow of.
Duke Sabatini was on his back in the middle of it all, writhing in his own blood with his neck against the base of an enormous maroon ottoman. About eight inches to the left of his head a neatly hand-lettered sign had fallen. It said: A MINIMUM DEPOSIT WILL SECURE ANY OBJECT IN THIS WINDOW.
A plump, Slavic-looking woman had come rushing out of the store. She gasped and then stood there with her mouth open, staring at me and then at Bra