“You got the silencer, just in case?” he said, and I smiled grimly.
“Na-No! Fellas, ha, ha, honest!” He sounded like he had hay fever. “I’ll tell yah what I know. A sp-spade dude I met on the street seh-seh-sets me up, honest. Tha-that’s all.”
“Herbie,” I said, cold as ice. “Check the mattress.” Herbie went over to the mattress as I motioned Speedy off with a wave of the piece.
“Hey,” he said, “ha-who do you think you are?”
“Unless you wanna find out, you better shut up,” I said. Herbie lifted the mattress and there, lo and behold, were our bricks. “Pull ’em out!” I said to Herbie.
“Ha-hey!” said Speedy, suddenly realizing what was going on. “You ca-can’t take those. The ma-man’s coming by tonight for th-those!”
“Well, then, we’d better be on our way,” I said. “Herbie, put the stuff in the sack and let’s leave this punk to his works.” Spoken in the best tough-guy, out-of-the-corner-of-the-mouth tones I could muster. Speedy was not impressed.
“Ha-hey! What about my br-bread?”
“Shut up, punk,” I said, but just as Herbie turned his back on him the freak lunged for the bag of bricks, and they were both down on the floor.
“Up,” I shouted. “Get up unless you wanna eat some lead,” and he stood up, leaving Herbie rolling around on the floor, laughing.
“Too much,” Herbie said. “Eat some lead. Too much.”
Speedy looked at Herbie, then back at me, and stepped forward with a lead-be-damned gleam in his eyes. “Pa-punk, heh?” he gurgled. “Punk, punk, alla ta-time punk, heh? Whozza pa-pa-unk?”
He was only about a yard away from me and I was thinking we had to get out of there fast. “Stay back,” I said. “Back!”
But he kept on coming and finally I felt myself getting excited and desperate at the same time, and a strange feeling was welling up inside of me, power, a power feeling, his fate in my hands, and all of a sudden I knew that his fate was in my hands, and I felt the rush of it, I’m going to do it I rushed, I’m going to do it, and I pulled the trigger thinking simultaneously O my God I’ve done it O my God what have I done I’ve done it—
And just then a fine stream of water arced out of the gun, hitting Speedy in the knees.
He was so freaked he didn’t understand for a minute, but then he knew what had happened and jumped at me. Herbie was on the floor again laughing, and I knew that I was going to have to put Speedy away for a while to get us out of there in one piece. Fortunately speed freaks are not noted for their muscle tone. A quick right to the temple brought him to the floor and then I dropped down on him, knee first, and caught him in the crotch. Another right and a left to the jaw and he was gone. It’d look better that way, I thought, when the man showed up. I pulled Herbie up from the floor and we ran.
We were almost to the door when the first gunshot echoed through the hallway, and the banister nearby splintered. We dropped to the ground, ducking back into the shadows.
“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” Herbie said. He was too scared to say anything else.
I looked up toward the third floor. A cloud of pale blue smoke hung in the air. I started to move downward again, and there was another gunshot. This time I saw the flame spurt from the rifle. Speedy was up there, all right. But his shot was wide—he couldn’t hit anything in his condition.
“Come on,” I said, “he can’t hit anything.”
“The hell he can’t,” Herbie said, crouched down behind the splintered banister.
All around us, the apartment building was beginning to wake up. We heard people moving and talking in their rooms. No doors opened, though; everybody was afraid to look outside. On the other hand, they’d certainly be phoning the heat.
“Come on, Herbie!”
For a moment he stayed curled up, paralyzed, and then he sprang forward. We sprinted downstairs. There were two more shots. And then, just as we were going out the door, a final shot and Herbie shouted, “I’m hit, I’m hit!” He stumbled and fell through the front door and lay on the steps.
I was already halfway down the steps when I heard him cry out. I ran back up, knowing that Speedy would now be racing from the stairwell to the outside window. I grabbed the bag that Herbie had dropped, and helped him to his feet. He was wincing with pain.
“Got me… in the shoulder… bad…” Herbie said. I put my arm around his waist and got him down the steps and off to the car. There was one more shot as we drove off into the night.
48
THE NEAREST PLACE WAS SANDRA’S apartment. It took us about ten minutes to get there, ten very bad minutes, with Herbie trying to be manful about things but not succeeding very well. He kept talking about how he could feel the blood running down his back. I wanted to take him to a doctor but he said No, no doctors, No—and anyway we couldn’t go to a doctor with a carful of dope, so I drove to Sandra’s. I got him up the steps to the apartment. John wasn’t there; no one answered the buzzer. I reached up above the door, found the key, and unlocked the door.
John and Sandra wouldn’t dig Herbie’s blood all over the apartment, but that was just too bad for now. I threw the sack of dope inside, then helped Herbie down the hallway to the bedroom. He was groaning softly, and covered with sweat.
“Easy now, easy,” I said, helping him down onto the bed. “Let’s get your jacket off.” He moaned as I removed it, his face contorted; with the jacket off, I got him onto his stomach and pulled out his shirt, which I then tore straight up the back to see how bad the wound was.
And stopped.
For a flash I was puzzled, and then I began to get pissed. Fucking Herbie. “Where does it hurt, man?”
“Oh… oh… in the middle… right shoulder… around the scap… scapula.”
“Yes,” I said. “I see.” What I saw was a smooth, slightly flabby, white expanse of unbroken skin. “Doesn’t look too bad, though. Here, you better see for yourself. Go look in the mirror.”
“Okay,” Herbie said, doing the heavy number. With a wince he said, “Give me a hand up, Pete, buddy.”
“Sure.” I whipped him off the bed with one hand and watched in silence as he staggered to his feet and walked into the bathroom. The bathroom light went on, and there was a long silence.
Finally, quietly, came an awed voice: “Far out.”
There then followed another long silence, in which I lit a cigarette, smoked it, and tried to keep from going in and plugging the little bastard myself. After a while, I heard him say, “Most perplexing.” And then, finally, he came back into the bedroom.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Herbie said. He was being very dignified and composed. “And I apologize for being an alarmist.” And then he walked out of the room.
“Hey, where’re you going?” I went out into the hallway after him, and found him returning with the sack. He walked toward the kitchen, and as he passed me, he said, “I think we’d better count the bricks, don’t you?”
He had made a fast recovery, and I told him so. He didn’t say anything in response. Out in the kitchen, he began to count the bricks while I raided Sandra’s refrigerator. Sandra is a candy freak. Every kind of American, Italian, French, Spanish, Swiss, Indonesian, Japanese candy can be found in her refrigerator. While I was looking, I said, “How many bricks?”
“What?” Preoccupied voice.
“How many bricks?”
“C’mere and dig this, Peter.”
I turned around to look. He was holding the sack in front of him. At first I saw nothing. Then, to demonstrate, he stuck his finger into the neat little hole.
“Interesting?” he said. He then picked up one of the bricks, and cut it open with a knife before I could protest. There was a piece of dull gray metal imbedded in the brick.