He ducked off Third Avenue now, and into the darkness of the side street. There was no one in sight, and he scaled the fence rapidly and then went directly to the window with the loose bar.
He tried all the bars, beginning to lose hope, and then suddenly happy when the fifth one came free under his hands. He moved the bar to one side, jimmied open the window, and then squeezed through the opening. It was a tighter fit than it had been when he was sixteen, but he made it and dropped to the concrete floor, reaching up to close the window behind him.
He found the old iron stairwell and took that up to the third floor where he knew all the mats would be. When he heard the voices, he turned around and was ready to run, but they’d already spotted him.
“Hold it, Mac,” one of them said.
A watchman, he thought.
He froze solid because there was no sense in running now. Maybe he could bull it through, and if not he still had a good left arm, and he still knew how to throw a fist.
The man moved closer to him, a big man in the near darkness.
“Whatta you want, Mac?” he asked.
“You the watchman?” Johnny asked.
The big man laughed. “A watchman, huh? A watchman? You on the bum, too, kid?”
He felt immensely relieved all at once, so relieved that he almost smiled. “Yeah,” he said, “I’m on the bum.”
“Come on in. You want a cup of java?”
“Man, I could use some,” he said. The big man laughed again and reached out for Johnny’s arm. He tried to pull it away, but he wasn’t quick enough, and he winced in pain, and the big man looked at his sticky fingers.
“You hurt, huh, kid?” he asked. There was no sympathy in his voice. There was instead a crafty sound, as if the man had made a very valuable discovery and was hoarding it under the floorboards of his mind.
“Come on,” he said, his voice oily now. “We’ll get you that java.”
He led Johnny to the circle of men huddled in one corner of the huge concrete-floored room. An electric grill was plugged into an outlet, and a battered coffeepot rested on the glowing orange coils. Johnny looked at the circle of bearded faces, four men all told, five counting the big man who’d led him to the group. The men were smiling, but there was no mirth on their faces. His arm dripped blood onto the concrete floor and the eyes calculated the dripping, and then shifted back to his face, the smiles still on the mouths, but never reaching the calculating eyes.
“Who you brung for dinner, Bugs?” one of the men asked.
“A nice young punk,” the big man answered. “Hurt his poor little arm, though, didn’t you, sonny?”
Johnny wet his lips. “Yeah, I... I got cut.”
“Well, now, that’s too bad, punk,” one of the men in the circle said. “Now that’s too bad you got a cut on your arm.”
“Maybe we got a nurse here can fix it up,” another man said.
“Sure, we got a lot of nurses here, kid. We’ll fix you up fine, kid. Here, have some coffee.”
He wasn’t sure now. He wasn’t sure what they meant, and he wasn’t sure whether they intended him harm or whether they were giving him sanctuary. He knew only that there were five of them and that he had only one good arm.
One of the men poured the coffee into a tin cup, and the strong aroma reached his nostrils, clung there. He wanted that coffee very badly, he wanted it almost desperately. The man handed the cup to Bugs, and the steam rose in the orange glow of the grill.
Bugs said, facing Johnny squarely now, “You want the coffee, punk?”
“I’d like a cup,” Johnny said warily.
“You got money to pay for it, punk?” Bugs asked. Maybe that was it. Maybe all they wanted was money. But suppose...
“No,” Johnny lied. “I’m broke.”
“Well now, ain’t that a shame?” Bugs said, winking again at the other men. “How you ’spect to get any coffee unless you pay for it? Coffee don’t grow on trees now, does it?”
“I guess not,” Johnny said slowly. “Forget the coffee. I’ll do without.”
“Now, now,” Bugs said, “no need to take that attitude, is there, boys? We’re willing to barter. You know how to horse-trade, punk?”
“I don’t want the coffee,” Johnny said firmly. He was already figuring how he’d make his break because he knew a break was in the cards, and the way the cards were falling he’d have to make the break soon.
Johnny wet his lips and moved closer to the glowing grill. Bugs kept eyeing him steadily, the vacuous, stupid smile on his face.
“All right,” Johnny said nervously. “Give me the cup.”
Bugs extended the steaming tin cup. “That’s a good little punk,” he said. “That’s the way we like it. No fuss and no muss. Now go ahead and drink your coffee, punk. Drink it all down fine. Go ahead, punk.”
He handed the cup to Johnny, and Johnny felt the hot liquid through the tin of the container and then he moved. He threw the coffee into Bugs’s face, lashing out with his left hand. He heard Bugs scream as the hot liquid scalded him and then Johnny’s foot lashed out for the grill, kicking wildly at it, hooking the metal under the glowing coils. The grill leaped into the air like a flashing comet, hung suspended hot at the end of its wire, and then the wire pulled free of the outlet, and the grill glowed for an instant and then began to dwindle, its coils turning pale.
He was already running. Bugs was screaming wildly behind him, and he heard footsteps, and he heard another scream and knew that the wildly kicked grill had burned someone else. He headed for the steps, with the sounds angry behind him, the footsteps thudding against the bare floor. His own feet hit the iron rungs of the stairs, the echoes clattering up the stairwell, down, down to the main floor and then across the darkened room with the piled, dusty furniture, the shouts and cries behind him all the way. He leaped up for the window, jimmied it open, and then shoved the loose bar aside.
“I’ll kill the louse!” he heard Bugs shout but he was already outside and sprinting for the fence. He jumped up, forced to use both arms, with the blood smearing across the fence in a wild streak. And then he was over, just as Bugs squeezed through the bars and ran for the fence. He was tired, very tired. His arm hurt like hell, and his heart exploded against his rib cage, and he knew he couldn’t risk a prolonged chase because Bugs would surely catch him.
He was at the corner now and Bugs still hadn’t reached the fence. He spotted the manhole and he ran for it quickly, stooping down and expertly prying open the lid with his fingers. He’d been down manholes before. He’d been down them when the kids used to play stickball and a ball rolled down the sewer and the only way to get it was by prying open the manhole cover and catching it before it got washed away to the river. He was in the manhole now, and he slid the cover back in place, hearing it wedge firmly in the caked dirt, soundlessly settling back into position. He clung to the iron brackets set into the wall of the sewer, and he could hear the rush of water far below where the sewer elbowed into the pipes. There was noise above him, the noise of feet trampling on the iron lid of the manhole. He held his breath because there was no place to go from here, no place at all. The footsteps clattered overhead and the iron lid rattled and then the footsteps were gone.
He waited until he heard more footsteps, figured them to belong to Bugs’s followers.