Jeremy’s eyes darted to the street. He saw Anson, and he began to run instantly, and at the same moment the bronze doors swung open and the bank guard shouted, “Stop, thief!”
Jeremy turned blindly, his gun leaping into his hand. He fired at the guard, his head turned, his body moving forward on churning legs.
Anson’s eyes widened.
“Jerry! For Christ’s sake, watch...”
The car lunged out of the driveway, catching Jeremy on the run. Jeremy screamed, the gun in his hand bucking as his finger closed around the trigger again. He screamed again when the car knocked him to the pavement, and the wheels crushed his body flat.
The bank guard was down the steps now, his gun in his hand. Anson reached the car and pulled open the rear door. The guard sighted carefully, and then he squeezed the trigger as Anson climbed into the car. The shots erupted into the quiet of the small street. Two spurts of dust rose on Anson’s back, and then the dust gave way before two rivers of blood. He fell backward, clinging to the center post as the car wheeled into the street and backed for its turn. He lost his grip then, toppling out of the car to fall facedown on the pavement, his back running blood.
The money, Carl thought. The money’s still here in the car. Then the windshield was shattering and he had only a second to realize those were bullet holes before his face crumbled and he lurched forward onto the wheel.
The big day was over.
Tomorrow was payday.
Innocent Bystanders
Runaway
Let me tell you how I happened to change my name.
It wasn’t that I got irritated by bosun’s mates in the Navy stumbling over “Lombino” even before they got to the first vowel. It wasn’t even editors calling the agency to ask for “that Italian guy up there.” It was a novel titled Don’t Crowd Me, and an editor named Charlie Heckelman at a paperback house called Popular Library.
Early in 1952, I had finished, and the agency was marketing, a mystery novel in which an advertising man on vacation in Lake George comes upon a dead body in his cabin and is subsequently blamed for the murder. This was a sort of Innocent Bystander story that became a sort of Man on the Run story, and the byline on it was one of my then still-pseudonyms, Evan Hunter. Well, we sent the book to Popular Library, and Charlie — with whom I’d had business lunches on many an occasion — called to say he liked the book a lot, and would like to buy it, but would like to meet Evan Hunter first to see if he’d agree to some revision suggestions. I ran into Scott’s office and told him Charlie Heckelman wanted to meet Evan Hunter! Scott said, “So take Evan Hunter to meet him.”
A few days later I went to Charlie’s office, and he took one look at me and said, “Where’s Evan Hunter?”
“I’m Evan Hunter,” I said.
Well, after he got over his surprise, he told me the book was a good one, whoever had written it, and then explained where he thought it could benefit from a few revisions. He said he thought he could publish it by December of that year if I could get the revisions to him fairly quickly. I told him I thought I could, and then I suggested — since the cat was now out of the bag — that we use the byline S. A. Lombino on it, which was the name I’d used in college on my weekly column for the school newspaper.
Charlie looked at me long and hard.
“Well,” he said, “it’s your book, and you can put whatever name you like on it. But I have to tell you... Evan Hunter will sell a lot more tickets.”
So that’s what it’s all about, I thought. Never mind Grandpa traipsing all the way from Ruvo del Monte to Naples to get on a ship and sail steerage to America, never mind him getting his “first papers” here and later his citizenship, never mind all those bonfires celebrating freedom on election night, never mind all that Land of the Free and Home of the Brave oratory; if I put S. A Lombino on a novel, everyone will think it was written in crayon by a ditch digger or a gangster.
The very next week, I went downtown with a lawyer and got a court order that legally changed my name. I’ve been Evan Hunter since May of 1952, longer than I ever was Salvatore Lombino, longer than most of my readers have ever been on this earth. A sure affirmation of the correctness of my decision is that the Internet has never allowed me to forget that once upon a time, long long ago, in a galaxy far far away, I was “that Italian guy” named Salvatore Lombino.
Which brings us to the story that follows.
By February of 1954, when “Runaway” was first published in Manhunt, the neighborhood I’d lived in until I was twelve had changed drastically enough so that I could use it as the setting for the tale of an Innocent Bystander who becomes a Man on the Run. But even before the story was published, I had already changed the hero’s name from Johnny Trachetti to Johnny Lane, radically changed the setting from Italian Harlem to what was then called Negro Harlem, expanded the story into a novel, and submitted it to Gold Medal Books, who published the longer version in July as Runaway Black, the new title I’d given the novel. I was enormously pleased when one reviewer thought the Harlem background rang so true because Richard Marsten was undoubtedly a black man!
But the tale does not end there.
Years later, when a new paperback edition of the book was being planned by a publisher who shall go unnamed, I received a proof of the cover, and was shocked to see that the word “Black” had been dropped from the title. The book was now simply called Runaway, even though the lead character was now black and the setting was now black Harlem. I thought I’d entered a time warp. So I asked them how come. They told me that Runaway Black was a “racist” title. Racist! I told them that I had proved my credentials forever with The Blackboard Jungle, wherein Gregory Miller, a black kid (later played brilliantly on the screen by Sidney Poitier)was the goddamn hero, and if they didn’t want to use my title on the book, they could have their money back and forget publishing it altogether. Guess what? They took back their money.
This, then, is my first run at “Runaway,” with its original title and its original setting (the neighborhood I grew up in) and its original Johnny Trachetti — an innocent bystander if ever I saw one.
Because the neighborhood had ingrained fear so deeply inside him, he ran the instant he heard the shots.
He did not stop to wonder where the shots had come from. Shots meant trouble, and trouble meant cops, and in this neighborhood you ran when the cops came.
He cut down First Avenue, past the coal yards, past the corner bar, and then turned left on 119th Street, heading for Pleasant Avenue and then down toward the river. He didn’t stop running until he reached a bench on the Drive, and then he sat and looked uptown to where the Triboro arched its silvery sleek back against the sky. There was a football game today at Randall’s Island. He had seen the college girls, nubby-looking in their tweeds, and the men with pipes and porkpie hats, walking across the bridge earlier that day. They were like invaders from another world. They did not belong in the neighborhood, and he resented them.
He had been sitting on the bench for ten minutes when Snow White and the two cops pulled up. The white top of the squad car reflected the brilliant October sun, and it struck the old panic within him, but there was no place to go except the river, so he sat still and bulled it through. He heard the car doors slam shut with the solidity of bank vault doors, heard the empty, hollow clatter of the cops’ shoes on the pavement, and then saw shadows, long and thin in the afternoon sun, fall across the bench.