“No,” Colley said, and blew his nose again. “I don’t know him.”
The second cop was staring at him.
“That it?” Colley said.
“Hold it just a minute,” the second cop said, and looked at the flyer in his hand.
“Mike,” he said, and was reaching for the gun holstered at his side when Colley broke.
He was used to running from cops in these streets. Years ago, when they had the club, he ran from trouble on the average of twice a week. The cops knew him by sight in those days. They knew Ernie, who was the president, and Benny, who was the war counselor, and Colley, who was the sergeant at arms. The big three. The ones who ran the Orioles. More than a hundred members in those days. Two dozen here on the block, another seventy-some spread for a radius of half a mile. One time, when the shit was on between the Scorpions and another Italian gang near the parkway approach, the leader of the Italian gang asked Ernie could he lend some help for a rumble supposed to take place in the park Saturday morning. Ernie said he could put a hundred guys in that park just by snapping his fingers. That Saturday they wiped up the street with those Scorpions.
There were shots behind him; they cracked with brittle precision on the cool early-morning air. The night people were out, they sat on stoops and congregated on street corners, they moved apart to let Colley through. The shots sounded unreal. After those shots fired in the liquor store, after those shots that had killed one cop and wounded another, none of these shots splintering the air sounded genuine. They served to alert the other cops, though. Cops hear shots, they see a man running, they don’t have to ask if he’s the victim or the perpetrator, they know automatically the guy running is the guy who done something wrong. Colley was running, and people on the sidewalk were stepping aside to let him through, ducking away, actually, because they could hear guns cracking, and they knew that meant bullets were flying, and bullets didn’t always hit who they were intended for. There were cops behind him firing, and cops ahead of him beginning to get the drift of what was happening; they were only here looking for a man who’d killed a cop, they were only here with flyers and walkie-talkies and half a dozen police cars and half a hundred uniformed cops, and Christ alone knew how many plainclothes bulls, and they were confronted now with two cops firing at a fleeing man, but they were still looking puzzled. A pair of cops, in fact, parted to let him go by, and then shouted, “Hey! Hey, you!” after he’d passed them and gone around the comer.
He knew these streets, he knew running these streets.
There were more cops ahead of him, they didn’t know what had happened around the comer, but they had heard shooting and enough time had elapsed now for them to have drawn their guns. They were in fact running toward the comer as he made the turn, and he wheeled sharply to his left, his leather-soled shoes skidding out from under him, he wished he was wearing sneakers like in the old days. But he didn’t fall, he caught his balance at once and began running for the vacant lot alongside the grocery store.
There were no cops ahead of him, now they were all behind him, and they were all shooting. A bunch of black kids wearing gang jackets were standing under the lamppost, their eyes opening wide as they heard the shots and doped out something big was happening, not your penny-ante street-gang bullshit, man, but something tremendous, some thief running here in the night, some desperado, some crazed and demented killer. The jackets they wore nowadays looked seedy and faded and cheap, nothing like what the Orioles used to have when the club was riding high, nothing like what even the Scorpions had. And the Dragons — you had to admit those spies had some fancy jackets, the blood spurting from the throat of Luis Josafat Albareda, onto the front of the yellow silk, the name Macho in green thread over his heart.
Colley was in the lot now. There were rats in the lot, they scampered over the garbage, scaring him half to death, squealing, scurrying away noisily as he ran for the fence. The cops behind him were yelling different directions and orders and swearing and stumbling and generally behaving like the dumb bastards they were. “This way,” or “Hold your fire, there’s civilians,” or “In the lot, he’s in the lot,” or “Get a car, we need lights,” a babble of sound behind Colley as he ran over the familiar terrain toward a fence he’d scaled a hundred times or more in his youth.
He was smiling when he reached the fence. He knew that once he scaled this fence, the cops behind him were out of luck. He knew that beyond this fence was a maze of back yards and alleyways, basements in abandoned buildings, stairways to roofs that joined other roofs, shaftways to leap, roof leading to roof leading to roof, until he would emerge a block away and cross a street to enter yet another labyrinth of alleyways and back yards. In ten minutes he would be in a different neighborhood entirely, in what used to be Scorpion turf. The cops would be up the creek once he scaled that fence.
He jumped for it. He skittered up its wooden face like a cat with a thousand claws. He straddled its top as bullets whined around him, ricocheting off the brick wall of the abandoned building on the other side, and then he deliberately turned his head and looked back at the cops. He was giving them the edge, daring them to knock him off the fence with their popguns, knock off the cop killer, you bastards, and win yourselves a Kewpie doll on a cane — that night at Coney Island on the Ferris wheel, the promises he’d made, Terry turning out to be a hooker. Coming home had been a bust, all of it had been a fuckin bust except for this moment, this exhilarating moment with the cops running toward him over the garbage in the empty lot, the rats scrambling away, the guns popping against the night, tiny flashes of yellow, the bullets humming past his head: he was Superman, he was able to leap tall buildings, he was able to outrace speeding locomotives, he was invincible, he was indestructible.
He burst out laughing.
The laughter froze the policemen in their tracks.
The firing stopped.
In an instant Colley was over the fence and safe.
Five
Jeanine was still wearing the blue jeans and the T-shirt, she was still barefooted.
She let him into the apartment, and then she locked the door behind him and listened quietly while he told her what had happened. He was still feeling high after his run from the cops, not the kind of high he experienced when he was smoking dope, nor even the kind of jazzed-up, slowed-down high that was there each and every time he went into a store with a gun in his pocket. This was a combination of nervous energy and fear and excitement — the detective who was still alive had identified him from a mug shot and flyers had been run off, and now every cop in the city had a picture of him and was looking for him. On the way over here, his heart had nearly stopped every time he saw a squad car or even a lone patrolman standing on the comer under a lamppost.
He had read a story in one of those magazines that published true adventure articles, where it showed a bare-chested guy wrestling an alligator on the cover, and where inside it had ads for body-building and condoms and books on how to pick up girls. This particular story was about a guy who’d got lost in the jungle someplace, and it told about how he was in a state of intense excitement the whole time he was in there, listening for every snapping twig and searching the dark for glowing eyes and even learning how to interpret silences. Colley had felt that way coming crosstown to the apartment, and he still felt as though he was on some kind of dangerous mission that would end with him walking out of the jungle into civilization, big shining city in the distance there, music and booze and beautiful women.