Cora walked over and spat in my face. She hissed “Mother” and kicked me with a spiked toe. I tried to roll away, and she sent another kick at my back.
Then my ace in the hole hit me right between the eyes, harder than any of the blows I had absorbed so far. Last night I had heard Wallace Simpkins’s voice through the door: “’Cepting revenge, mister union big shot. I got me other business on that train.” In my mind that “business” buzzed as snuffing Lieutenant Billy Boyle, and I was laying five-to-one that Cora wouldn’t like the idea.
Lizard took Cora by the arm and led her to the couch, then squatted next to me. “You’re a sucker for a spitball,” he said.
I smiled up at him. “Your mother bats cleanup at a two-dollar whorehouse.”
He slapped my face. I spat blood at him and said, “And you’re ugly.”
He slapped me again; when his arm followed through I saw the handle of an automatic sticking out of his right pants pocket. I made my voice drip with contempt: “You hit like a girl. Cora could take you easy.”
His next shot was full force. I sneered through bloody lips and said, “You queer? Only nancy boys slap like that.”
A one-two set hit me in the jaw and neck, and I knew it was now or never. Slurring my words like a punch-drunk pug, I said, “Let me up. Let me up and I’ll fight you man-to-man. Let me up.”
Lizard took a penknife from his pocket and cut the rope that bound my arms to my sides. I tried to move my hands, but they were jelly. My battered legs had some feeling in them, so I rolled over and up onto my knees. Lizard had backed off into a chump’s idea of a boxing stance and was firing roundhouse lefts and rights at the living room air. Cora was sitting on the couch, wiping angry tears from her cheeks. Deep breathing and lolling my torso like a hophead, I stalled for time, waiting for feeling to return to my hands.
“Get up, shitbird!”
My fingers still wouldn’t move.
“I said get up!”
Still no movement.
Lizard came forward on the balls of his feet, feinting and shadowboxing. My wrists started to buzz with blood, and I began to get unprofessionally angry, like I was a rookie heavy, not a thirty-one-year-old cop. Lizard hit me twice, left, right, open-handed.
In a split second he became Jimmy Bivins, and I zoomed back to the ninth round at the Legion in ’37. Dropping my left shoulder, I sent out a right lead, then pulled it and left-hooked him to the breadbasket. Bivins gasped and bent forward; I stepped backward for swinging room. Then Bivins was Lizard going for his piece, and I snapped to where I really was.
We drew at the same time. Lizard’s first shot went above my head, shattering a window behind me; mine, slowed by my awkward rear pull, slammed into the far wall. Recoil spun us both around, and before Lizard had time to aim I threw myself to the floor and rolled to the side like a carpet-eating dervish. Three shots cut the air where I had been standing a second before, and I extended my gun arm upward, braced my wrist, and emptied my snub-nose at Lizard’s chest. He was blasted backward, and through the shots’ echoes I heard Cora scream long and shrill.
I stumbled over to Lizard. He was on his way out, bleeding from three holes, unable to work the trigger of the .45. He got up the juice to give me a feeble middle-finger farewell, and when the bird was in midair I stepped on his heart and pushed down, squeezing the rest of his life out in a big arterial burst. When he finished twitching, I turned my attention to Cora, who was standing by the couch, putting out another shriek.
I stifled the noise by pinning her neck to the wall and hissing, “Questions and answers. Tell me what I want to know and you walk, fuck with me and I find dope in your purse and tell the DA you’ve been selling it to white nursery-school kids.” I let up on my grip. “First question. Where’s my car?”
Cora rubbed her neck. I could feel the obscenities stacking up on her tongue, itching to be hurled. All her rage went into her eyes as she said, “Out back. The garage.”
“Have Simpkins and the stiff been clouting the liquor stores in West Adams?”
Cora stared at the floor and nodded, “Yes.” Looking up, her eyes were filled with the self-disgust of the freshly turned stoolie. I said, “McCarver the union guy thought up the train heist?”
Another affirmative nod.
Deciding not to mention Billy Boyle’s probable presence on the train, I said, “Who’s bankrolling? Buying the guns and uniforms?”
“The liquor store money was for that, and there was this rich guy fronting money.”
Now the big question. “When does the train leave Union Station?”
Cora looked at her watch. “In half an hour.”
I found a phone in the hallway and called the Central Division squadroom, telling Georgie Caulkins to send all his available plainclothes and uniformed officers to Union Station, that an army-chartered Super Chief about to leave for ’Frisco was going to be hit by a white-negro gang in army and porter outfits. Lowering my voice so Cora wouldn’t hear, I told him to detain a negro quartermaster lieutenant named William Boyle as a material witness, then hung up before he could say anything but “Jesus Christ.”
Cora was smoking a cigarette when I reentered the living room. I picked my badge holder up off the floor and heard sirens approaching. “Come on,” I said. “You don’t want to get stuck here when the bulls show up.”
Cora flipped her cigarette at the stiff, then kicked him one for good measure. We took off.
I ran code three all the way downtown. Adrenaline smothered the dregs of the morph still in my system, and anger held down the lid on the aches all over my body. Cora sat as far away from me as she could without hanging out the window and never blinked at the siren noise. I started to like her and decided to doctor my arresting officer’s report to keep her out of the shithouse.
Nearing Union Station, I said, “Want to sulk or want to survive?”
Cora spat out the window and balled her fists.
“Want to get skin searched by some dyke matrons over at city jail or you want to go home?”
Cora’s fist balls tightened up; the knuckles were as white as my skin.
“Want Voodoo to snuff Billy Boyle?”
That got her attention. “What!”
I looked sidelong at Cora’s face gone pale. “He’s on the train. You think about that when we get to the station and a lot of cops start asking you to snitch off your pals.”
Pulling herself in from the window, Cora asked me the question that hoods have been asking cops since they patrolled on dinosaurs: “Why you do this shitty kind of work?”
I ignored it and said, “Snitch. It’s in your best interest.”
“That’s for me to decide. Tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“Why you do—”
I interrupted, “You’ve got it all figured out, you tell me.”
Cora started ticking off points on her fingers, leaning toward me so I could hear her over the siren. “One, you yourself figured your boxin’ days would be over when you was thirty, so you got yourself a nice civil service pension job; two, the bigwig cops loves to have ball players and fighters around to suck up to them—so’s you gets the first crack at the cushy ’signments. Three, you likes to hit people, and po -lice work be full of that; four, your ID card said Warrants Division, and I knows that warrants cops all serves process and does repos on the side, so I knows you pickin’ up lots of extra change. Five—”
I held up my hands in mock surrender, feeling like I had just taken four hard jabs from Billy Conn and didn’t want to go for sloppy fifths. “Smart girl, but you forgot to mention that I work goon squad for Firestone Tire and get a kickback for fingering wetbacks to the Border Patrol.”
Cora straightened the knot in my disreputable necktie. “Hey, baby, a gig’s a gig, you gots to take it where you finds it. I done things I ain’t particularly proud of, and I—”