Survival... ZERO! mh-11 Read online

  "Get back here, freak."

  "Man ..."

  "Killing you would be a public service." My voice had such an edge to it that he scurried back like a scared rat, Ms head bobbing, eager to do anything that would keep him alive. "How long are they going to be out of it?"

  "How would I know, man?"

  I snapped my head around and stared at him, watching his breath catch in his chest. "You sold him the stuff. You know how much they had. Now check them to see what's left and make a guess and make a good one or I'll snap your damn arms in half."

  He didn't argue about it. One look at my face and he knew I wasn't kidding. He bent over the pair, patted them down expertly, finding the remnants of the joints they had gone through, then stood up. "Used it all. Man, they tied one on, them two. Maybe three-four hours you might reach 'em if you're lucky."

  This time I grinned, my lips pulled tight across my teeth. "Maybe if you're lucky it'll be one hour. One. You're in the business, boy, so you'd better know all the tricks. You start working on them and don't stop until they're awake. Don't bother trying to run out. You couldn't run fast or far enough that I couldn't nail you, so play it sweet and cool and you might get out of this in one piece. One hour, kid. Get them back and I don't give a damn how you do it."

  "Man, you don't know this stuff!" His voice was nearly hysterical.

  "No, but you do," I told him.

  Velda had called in again. She was still on the stakeout but getting edgy because there had been no tip-off to Beaver's whereabouts. She was going to give it one more hour and then try another possible lead. That left me forty-six minutes to work ahead of her.

  The taxi dropped me at the corner of Columbus Avenue and a Hundred-tenth Street and when I looked around the memories of the old days from when I was a kid came rushing back like an incoming tide. There were changes, but some things never change at all. The uneven rooftops still were castle battlements, each street a gateway in the great wall. The shufflers still shuffled, oblivious to the weather, urchin noises and cooking smells mingling in this vast stomach of a neighborhood. Plate glass windows protected with steel grilling, others unconcernedly dark and empty. The perennial tavern yellow-lit behind streaked glazing, the drugstore still sporting the huge red and purple urns, the insignia of its trade. On a good night the young bloods would be gathered on the corners, swapping lies and insults, protecting their turf. The hookers

  would cruise for their Johns and the pushers would be clearing the path to an early grave for the users.

  They didn't know me here, but they knew I wasn't an outsider. I was born part of the scene and still looked it and they didn't mind me asking things and didn't mind answering. I showed the photo of Beaver to the bartender in Steve's Bar and Grill. He didn't know the guy, but took it to the back room and showed it to somebody else. One guy thought he looked familiar, but that was all.

  In the candy store, the old man shook his head and told me the man in the picture looked like somebody good to stay away from and tried to talk about the old days until I thanked him and went back outside.

  A gypsy cab driver having coffee and a doughnut in his car scanned the photo and said he was pretty sure he had seen the guy around, but didn't know where or when. It was the eyes, he said. He always looked at people's eyes, and he remembered seeing him. He told me to look for Jackie, the redheaded whore who swore she was a prostitute because she wanted money to go to college, Jackie knew everybody.

  Jackie knew Beaver, all right. He had bought her pitch about two weeks ago, gone to her apartment and parted with ten bucks for sexual services rendered, leaving her with a few welts and bruises. She had seen him once after that, getting into a taxi down the block. She knew he didn't live in the area, but assumed he dropped up to see a friend who did. No, she couldn't even guess at who it was. The neighborhood was full of itinerants and strange faces. She took my ten bucks and thought I was a nut for not getting the whole go for the money.

  Now, at least, I was in the area.

  There were three construction sites within two blocks. One was a partial demolition job and the other two were leveled. The last one had wiped out a row of three brownstones all the way to the corner and the cut went deep into the solid rock that was the bed of the city. The hole was spotted with small ponds of rainwater and a yellow backhoe tractor stood lonely and dead-looking in the middle of the gorge, its toothed claw ready to pounce into the granite, but dead, like a suddenly frozen prehistoric beast.

  Silent air compressors and equipment shacks lined one side of the street, abutted on either end by battered dump trucks. A square patch of dim light outlined the window of the watchman's stubby trailer and from behind the locked door I could hear Spanish music working toward a

  finale of marimbas and bongo drums before the announcer came on to introduce the next number.

  I knocked on the door and it opened to a toothy grin and a stale beer smell and the young-old guy standing there said, "Come in, come in. Don't stand in the rain."

  "Thanks." I stepped inside while he turned down the radio.

  "Not much of a place," he said, "but I like it."

  "Why not?"

  "Sure, why not? It's a living. I got my own house and nobody to bitch at me. Pretty damn noisy in the daytime, then I got so I could sleep through anything. Maybe that's why they keep me on. Me, I can stay awake all night and sleep daytimes like they want. Don't get much company, though. Now, what can I do for you?"

  I showed him the picture of Beaver and let him study it. "Ever see that man?"

  He looked at it intently, then handed it back. "Can't say. Daytimes I sleep, y'know. After a while them damn compressors get to be like music and they put me right to sleep. Know something? I got so's I can't sleep without "em going."

  "You're sure?" I asked.

  He nodded. "Don't remember him. We've been here a month already and I don't remember him. Know most everybody else, though. Especially the kids. The ones who like to climb all over things."

  I was about to leave when I turned around and looked at him. "The crew work in the rain?"

  "Hell no! They finished up right after it started and shut everything down. Them boys got the life, they have. Busted up my sleep real awful. When the compressors went off, I woke up. Shit, feller, I haven't been able to get back to sleep since. Everything's just too damn quiet. Look, you want a beer?"

  "No thanks."

  "You a cop? Maybe for the company?"

  "Private investigator."

  "Oh, about that stuff the kids took last week. Hell, we got it all back before they could hock it."

  "You been cooped up here all day?"

  "Naw, I walked around some. Didn't leave the block, though. Just bought some grub and beer, walked around to stretch out. Never leave the place alone long, and never at night. That's why they keep me on."

  I pulled up a folding chair with my toe and hooked my leg over it. "See any strange faces around at all?"

  "Ah, you got bums comin' through all the time. They go from ..."

  "Not bums. These wouldn't be bums."

  "Who'd come down this way if they wasn't bums? Maybe some kids from ... hey ... yeah, wait a minute. When I went for the beer ... before it got dark."

  "So?"

  "I see this car go by twice. New job with two guys in the front seat. It stopped halfway up on the other side and one got out. Then the car went up further and parked. I really didn't pay no attention to it on accounta it was raining so hard. When I came back the car was gone."

  "A late-model, black, four-door job?"

  "Yeah, how'd you know?"

  "It's parked up on Columbus outside the drugstore," I said. "You got a phone here?"

  "Under the blankets on the cot there. I like to keep it muffled. Can't stand them damn bell noises."

  Pat wasn't in, but I got hold of Sergeant Corbett and told him to get a message through and gave him my location. He told me Pat had assigned an unmarked cruiser to the area earlier, but they w
ere being pulled out in another thirty minutes. Too much was happening to restrict even one car team in a quiet zone on a quiet night and I was lucky to get the cooperation I did.

  I said, "It may not be so damn quiet in a little while, buddy."

  "Well, it won't be like the U.N. or the embassy joints. Everybody's in emergency sessions. You'll still be lucky if you get thirty minutes."

  I hung up and tossed the covers back over the phone. The watchman was bent over the radio again with a beer in his hand, reading a comic book lying open on the floor.

  My watch said Velda had left her post fifteen minutes ago. Somehow, someway, she'd find a thread, then a string, then a rope that would draw her right to this block.

  I went out, closed the door and looked up the street, then started to walk slowly. On half the four-floor tenements were white square cardboard signs lettered in black notifying the world that the building was unfit for tenancy or scheduled for demolition. The windows were broken and dark, the fronts grime-caked and eroded. One building was occupied despite the sign, either by squatters with kerosene lamps or some undaunted tenant fighting City Hall. In the middle of the block was one brownstone, the basement renovated years ago into a decrepit tailor shop no wider than a big closet. A tilted sign on the door said a

  forlorn open, and I would have passed it up entirely if I hadn't seen the dot of light through the crack in the drawn blind.

  Sigmund Katz looked like a little gnome perched on his stool, methodically handstitching a child's coat, glasses on the end of his nose, bald head shiny under the single low-watt bulb. His eyes through the thick glasses were blue and watery, his smile weak, but friendly. An old-world accent was thick in his voice when he spoke. "No, this man in the picture I did not see," he told me.

  "And you know everyone?"

  "I have been here sixty-one years, young man." He paused and looked up from his needlework. "This is the only one you are looking for?" There was an expression of patient waiting on his face.

  "There could be others."

  "I see. And these are ... not nice people?"

  "Very bad people, Mr. Katz."

  "They did not look so bad," he said.

  "Who?"

  "They were young and well dressed, but it is not in the appearance that makes a person good or bad, true?"

  I didn't want to push him. "True," I said.

  "One used the phone twice. The second time the other one stopped him before he could talk. I may not see too well, but my hearing is most good. There were violent words spoken."

  I described Carl and Sammy and he nodded.

  "Yes," he said, "those are the two young men."

  "When they left here ... did you see where they went?"

  The old man smiled, shook his head gently and continued sewing. "No, I'm afraid I didn't. Long ago I learned never to interfere."

  I unclenched the knots my fingers were balled into and took a deep breath. Time, damn it, it was running out!

  Before I could leave he added, "However, there was Mrs. Luden for whom I am making this coat for her grandson. She thought they were salesmen, but who would try to sell in this poor neighborhood? Not well dressed young men who arrive in a shiny new car. They knock on doors and are very polite."

  I watched him, waiting, trying to stay relaxed.

  "Perhaps they did find a customer. Not so long ago they went into Mrs. Stone's building across the street where the steps are broken and haven't come out."

  The tension leaked out of my muscles like rain from my hair and I grinned humorously at Mr. Katz.

  His eyes peered at me over his glasses. "Tell me, young man, you look like one thing, but you may be another. By one's appearance, you cannot tell. Are you a nice man?"

  "I'm not one of them."

  "Ah, but are you a nice man?"

  "Maybe to some people," I said.

  "That is good enough. Then I tell you something else. In Mrs. Stone's building ... there are not just two men. Three went up the first time, then a few minutes ago, another two. Be careful, young man. It is not good."

  And now things were beginning to shape up!

  I ran back into the rain and the night, cut across the street and found the building with the broken steps, took them two at a time on the side that still held and unsheathed the .45 and thumbed the hammer back. The front door was partially ajar and I slammed it open with the flat of my hand and tried to see into the inkwell of the vestibule. It took seconds for my eyes to adjust, then I spotted the staircase and started toward it.

  And time ran out.

  From a couple of floors up was a crash of splintering wood, a hoarse yell and the dull blast of heavy caliber guns in rapid fire, punctuated by the flatter pops of lighter ones. Somebody screamed in wild agony and a single curse ripped through the musty air. I didn't bother trying to be quiet. I took the steps two at a time and almost made the top when I saw the melee at the top lit momentarily in the burst of gunfire, then one figure burst through the others and came smashing down on top of me in a welter of arms and legs, gurgling wetly with those strange final sounds of death, and we both went backward down the staircase into an old cast iron radiator with sharp edges that bit into my skull in a blinding welter of pain and light.

  CHAPTER 11

  Velda was crying through some distant rage. I heard her say, "Damn it, Mike, you're all right! You're all right! Mike ... answer me!"

  My head felt like it was split wide open and I felt myself gag and almost threw up. The light from Velda's flash whipped into my eyes, beating at my brain like a club for a second until I pushed it away.

  "Mike ...?"

  "I'm not shot," I said flatly.

  "Damn you, why didn't you wait? Why didn't you call "

  "Ease off." I pushed to my knees and took the flash from her and turned it on the body. There was a bloody froth around the mouth and the eyes were glassy and staring. Sammy had bought his farm too.

  Across the street people were shouting and a siren had started to whine. I let Velda help me up, then groped my way up the stairs to the top. The President wouldn't have to have a heart attack after this. The pictures would take care of all the gory news the public was interested in. Carl was sprawled out face down on the kitchen floor of the apartment with half his head blown away, a skinny little guy in a plaid sports coat and dirty jeans was tied to a chair with a hole in his chest big enough to throw a cat through, his toupee flopping over one ear. Like the little whore had told me, one was partially bald. Woody Ballinger was in a curiously lifelike position of being asleep with his head on an overturned garbage sack, one hand over his heart like a patriotic citizen watching the flag go by. Only his hand covered a gaping wound that was all bright red and runny.

  That was all.

  Beaver wasn't there.

  I walked over and looked at the broken chair beside the table with the ropes in loose coils around the remnants.

  Somebody else had been tied up too. Behind the chair was a broken window leading to the rear fire escape and on one of the shards of glass was a neat little triangle of red wool. The kind they make vests out of.

  The flash picked out an unbroken bulb and I snapped it on. In the dull light it looked even messier and Velda made heaving noises in her throat.

  I looked at the table top and knew why Woody wanted Beaver so badly. His policy code sequence identifying the workings of his organization was laid out there on a single sheet of typewritten paper that had been folded so that it would fit a pocket wallet.

  And that was why Woody wanted Beaver. But who had wanted Woody?

  My head felt like it wanted to burst. In a minute the place would be crawling with cops. And outside, there still was Beaver, and I wanted him.

  I shoved the unfired .45 back in the sling and turned to Velda. "You stay here and handle it, kitten. Give them as much as you know, but give me running tune."

  "Mike ..."

  "This was only one stop on Beaver's route. He's heading someplace else." I w
ent over to the window and put one leg through. "How did you know about this place?"

  "One of Anton Virelli's runners saw Woody's car here. He reported in."

  "You see anybody leave the building?"

  "I'm ... not sure. I was looking for you."

  "Okay, sugar. Stall 'em. They're coming up."

  Austin Towers had had more than the hour he expected and he hadn't wasted any of it. Caesar and his friend were sitting up, shivering under cold wet sheets, trying to keep their feet off the sodden rug on the floor. The dull luster was still in their eyes, but they were awake enough to mumble complaints at Towers who threatened them with another bucket of ice water if they tried to get up.

  When he heard me come in he almost dropped the pail and stood stiff in his tracks, waiting to see if I approved or not. Caesar let his head sag toward me and managed a sick grin. "Hi, Mike. Get... get this bastard ... outa here."

  "Shut up, punk." I took the pail from Towers and sat it on the floor. "How good are they?"

  "Man, I tried. Honest ..."

  "Can they think coherently?"

  "Yeah, I'd say so. It ain't exactly like a booze hangover. They . . ."

  "Okay then, cut out." He started to move around me and I grabbed his arm. Very slowly I brought the .45 up where he could see it. His face went pasty white and his knees started to sag. "This is the kind of trouble that stuff brings. You're not invulnerable ... and kid, you're sure expendable as hell. Start thinking twice before you peddle that crap again."

  His head bobbed in a nod and new life came back into his legs. "Man," he said, "I'm thinking! I'm thinking right now."

  I let him go. "Scram."

  He didn't wait for me to repeat the invitation. He even left his coat on the back of the chair. Caesar chuckled and tried to unwrap himself from the sheet. "Thanks, old pal Mike. That guy ... he sure was bugging us. Gimme a hand. I'm freezing to death."

  "In a minute." I glanced at the other guy, slack-lipped and bony, like a sparrow under the wet cloth. "This the guy you were going to meet about Beaver?"

  "Sure, Mike." He let out a belch and moaned, his teeth chattering. "So we meet like I said."