“Stick with me. I’ll get you out of here.”
“No! Not until I see Pinky’s okay.”
“Forget about him. He’s a dead man.”
In all the shouting it was nearly impossible to separate police orders from the uproar on the loading dock. I pulled away and returned to the front windows so I could see what was going on. Dante disappeared into his office. I stood where I was, sick with fear. Violence scares me silly, but it felt cowardly to run off when Pinky’s life was at stake. Below, one of the tractor-trailers growled to life. The driver stomped on the gas pedal. The cab shot forward, careening toward the road where two police cars were parked, blocking the exit. Officers took cover, their guns drawn. The driver refused to give ground and plowed into one of the black-and-whites, which seemed to levitate before coming to rest with a bang. The impact smacked the trucker against the steering wheel and he slumped to one side, blood running down his face. I half expected him to open the door and make a run for it, but he was out cold. By that time, most of the workers had had the good sense to give up the fight. They were herded into the open, where they were ordered to get down on the ground, hands over their heads.
Mesmerized, I scanned the loading platform, where I saw Cheney Phillips. Next to him was Len Priddy with his face upturned. Both ducked out of sight and came up on the far side of a semi, using the cab to shield themselves as they popped up in range of the two shooters. I was certain all the officers had been cautioned about the unwarranted firing of their weapons. Pinky and Cappi, of course, were free of such restraints.
Behind me, Dante’s office girl had taken cover under her desk, phone in hand. Her instinct was probably to call the police, but the place was already overrun with officers. Meanwhile, Cappi had circled half the warehouse on the elevated walkway. He ran toward me, approaching from my right. He pushed me aside and headed toward the nearest stairway. He must have thought if he could get down to ground level, he’d be close enough to the side door to get out. He was so focused on reaching safety that he ignored the fact that officers were blocking the exit. Pinky was still to my right and closing the gap between them. Cappi turned and fired twice, and Pinky went down, his right leg going out from under him. He couldn’t have been more than fifteen feet away from me. Cappi was out of ammunition, and that changed the dynamic of the game for him. Abruptly, he turned, his face set. Maybe having wounded Pinky, he’d flipped from victim to aggressor. He moved toward me at a measured pace, reloading as he walked. Pinky pulled himself up. I screamed. “Pinky, RUN!”
I meant for him to go back the way he’d come, but he hobbled in my direction, his gaze fixed on mine. This put him directly in Cappi’s path. My instinct was to grab him and pull him out of the line of fire. Dante apparently had a similar impulse, but he was focused on me. His face was dark with anger. “I told you to get down!”
I glanced back and realized he was two feet behind me, screaming in my ear. He grabbed me for a second time and dragged me toward his inner office.
“Let go!” I broke his grip, desperate to protect Pinky if there was any way I could. In retrospect, it seems pointless, my thinking to intervene. I have no idea how I could have affected the outcome. Far from helping, I was only putting myself in harm’s way. Dante turned me with a quick yank that threw me off balance, saying, “Sorry about this.”
I stumbled, and I might have caught myself if I hadn’t been so astonished at the sight of his fist coming at my face. There was no way to avoid the impact. The blow caught me dead center and he landed a punch to my nose that dropped me to my knees. I put my arms out, tumbling forward until I supported myself on my hands and knees. My brain clanged around in my skull like the clapper in a bell. I collapsed into a sitting position and put my hands to my face. Blood gushed through my fingers, and at the sight of it I could feel my eyes roll back in my head. I heard one more shot fired, but the sound came from a long distance away, and I knew the shooter wasn’t aiming at me. I blacked out briefly and then I was dimly aware of officers swarming up the stairs.
31
Dante felt his way down the steep set of stairs built into his office wall. One push had activated the touch latch, and he secured the door behind him before he moved on. During Prohibition, his father built the staircase to cover emergencies. For Pop, an unexpected visit from the cops or an angry competitor was the sort of crisis that required a hasty retreat. Dante had played in the underground passages as a kid, long after Prohibition ended, and he knew how to navigate the maze of small rooms in total darkness. Originally the space housed a number of stills for the manufacture of assorted liquors and spirits that could be stored by the caseload before shipment by rail. The corridor extended for a block and a half, with a number of offshoots created to confuse those unfamiliar with the subterranean network. The hard-packed dirt path gradually climbed upward and daylighted in a culvert that skirted the now-defunct drive-in theater. When Dante exited, he was on the second of two side roads that flanked the theater. The other road ended at the warehouse. Dante was well beyond the chaos, and he imagined the raid was in its mop-up phase. On this side of the drive-in there were five three-story buildings that made up an industrial complex with sufficient traffic to make his sudden appearance seem unremarkable.
Lou Elle was waiting in her car with the engine idling. Dante approached on her right, with the big soft-sided suitcase in hand. He opened the rear door and deposited the suitcase on the backseat, then opened the passenger-side door and got in. Lou Elle shifted from park to drive and pulled onto the road, accelerating slowly to a modest twenty miles per hour. At Holloway, she turned right and drove on for a quarter of a mile. Dante glanced back, but there were no police cars in sight and no indication that an alarm had been sounded in the wake of his escape.
He massaged his right hand where the knuckles were bruised and swollen, though not as painful as they appeared.
Lou Elle glanced over at him. “What happened to you?”
“I busted a lady in the chops. I forgot what it’s like punching someone’s lights out. Hurts like a son of a bitch.”
“You hit a woman?”
“I had to stop her barging into the middle of a shoot-out.”
“A shoot-out?”
“Cappi and a guy named Pinky Ford exchanged fire while the raid was going on. Talk about a wild scene. Pinky got clipped, but he’ll survive. It’s a wonder nobody else was hurt.”
“I remember him. He came to the office once. Wasn’t he that wiry, bowlegged fellow in a satin shirt?”
“That’s him.”
“Is Cappi all right?”
“Cappi’s dead. A cop took him out with one shot to the head. The timing was close. Cappi was about to blow a hole in Pinky’s chest.”
“You’re okay with that?”
“I’m fine. Don’t worry about it. Saved me doing it myself. It’ll break Pop’s heart and I’m fine with that too. He’s getting what he deserves. You talk to Nora?”
“Well, I called, but she didn’t seem receptive. I gave her the information, but she didn’t jump all over it.”
“You tried, at any rate.”
He reached into the inner jacket pocket of his suit coat and took out a bulky envelope with a name and address written on the front. “Couple of weeks, deliver this. Tell her to do what she wants with it. The money’s compensation for the punch.”