All Shot Up_ The Classic Crime Thriller - Chester Himes [22]
“Then somebody knew about the payoff beforehand,” Grave Digger said. “You can’t organize a heist like that in that length of time.”
“Not even in a day,” Coffin Ed said. “These men were pros; and you can’t get pros like ordering groceries. They might have had their uniforms, but they’d have to lift a car—”
“It hasn’t even been reported as stolen yet,” Anderson cut in.
“I got a notion these guns were from out of town,” Coffin Ed went on. “No local hoods would choose 125th Street for a caper like that. Not that block of 125th Street. They couldn’t depend on the weather to drive the ground-hogs in their holes; and normally on a Saturday night that block, with all its bars and restaurants, would be jumping with pedestrians. They had to be somebody who didn’t know this.”
“That doesn’t help us much,” Anderson said. “If they’re from out of town, they’re long gone by now.”
“Maybe,” Grave Digger said. “Maybe not. If it wasn’t for this hit-and-run business, I might buy it.”
Anderson gave him a startled look.
“What the hell, Jones; you can’t think there’s a tie-in.”
Coffin Ed grunted.
“Who knows,” Grave Digger said. “There is something specially vicious about both those capers, and there ain’t that many vicious people running loose in Harlem on a night as cold as this.”
“My God, man, you can’t think that hit-and-run was done deliberately.”
“And then in both instances pansies were croaked,” Grave Digger went on. “Accidents just don’t happen to those people like that.”
“The hit-and-run driver couldn’t have possibly known his victim was a man,” Anderson argued.
“Not unless he knew who he was and what racket he was pulling,” Grave Digger said.
“What racket was he pulling?”
“Don’t ask me. It’s just a feeling I got.”
“Hell, man, you’re going mystical on me,” Anderson said. “How about you, Johnson. Do you go along with that?”
“Yep,” Coffin Ed said. “Me and Digger have been drinking out the same bottle.”
“Well, before you get too drunk with that mysticism, let me fill you in with the latest facts. The two patrolmen, Stick and Price, who thought it was a joke to report they’d been knocked down by a homemade flying saucer, have admitted they were hit by a run-away automobile wheel coming down Convent Avenue. Does that give you any ideas?”
Grave Digger looked at his watch. It said five minutes to four.
“Not any that won’t keep until tomorrow,” he said. “If I start talking to my old lady about automobile tires, as fat as she’s getting, I’m subject to losing my happy home.”
Chapter 8.
When Roman came to the castle standing in the fork, where St. Nicholas Place branches off from St. Nicholas Avenue, he stood on the brake.
Sassafras sailed headfirst into the windshield, and Mister Baron’s unconscious figure rolled off the back seat and plumped onto the floor.
“Which way did they go?” Roman asked, reaching for the .45 revolver that lay on the seat between them.
Sassafras straightened up, rubbing her forehead, and turned on him angrily. “You asking me? I ain’t seen which way they went. They might have went downtown for all I know.”
“I seen them turn uptown,” he argued, his cocked gray eyes seeming to peer down both streets at once.
“Well, make up your mind,” she said in her high, keening voice. “They didn’t go into the castle, that’s for sure. And you can’t set here in the middle of the street all night.”
“I wish I had the mother-raper who built that castle there in the middle of Harlem,” Roman said as though it were responsible for his losing sight of the Cadillac.
“Well, you ain’t got him, and you better get out the middle of the street before someone comes along and claims you has stolen this Buick.”
“We has, ain’t we?” Roman said.
The bump had revived Mister Baron, and they could hear him groaning down on the floor behind them. “Oh God... Oh Jesus Christ... Those dirty bastards...”
Roman slipped the car in gear and drove slowly down between the rows of brick-fronted apartment buildings on St. Nicholas Place.
The castle, somebody’s brainstorm at the turn of the century, stood at 149th Street; above were the