All Shot Up_ The Classic Crime Thriller - Chester Himes [35]
Simultaneously Grave Digger switched on his bright lights. Coffin Ed had his pistol out and was fumbling with the handle to the window, trying to get it down. But he didn’t have time.
The two vehicles roared straight toward one another on the half-slippery street.
Grave Digger tried to outguess him. He saw the joker leaning to his right, overtop the sidecar. He knew the joker had them figured to figure he’d be leaning to the left, balancing the sidecar for any quick maneuver. He cased the joker to make a sharp last-minute turn to the right, braking slightly to make a triangle skid, and try to pass the car on the left, on the driver’s side, opposite the free-swinging gun of Coffin Ed.
So he jerked the little sedan sharply to the left, tamped the brakes and went into an oblique skid, blocking off the left side of the street.
But the joker outguessed Grave Digger. He made a rollover in his seat like a Hollywood Indian on a pinto pony, and broke a ninety degree turn to his own left and gunned it to the limit for a flying skid.
His intention was to get past the sedan on the right side, and to hell with getting shot at.
Both drivers miscalculated the traction of the street. The hard, sleety coating was tricky; the tires bit in and gripped. The motorcycle sidecar hit the right-rear fender of the sedan at a tangent, and went into a full-gunned spin. The sedan wobbled on its rear wheels and threw Grave Digger off balance. The motorcycle went over the curb behind a parked car, bouncing like a rubber ball, bruised the rider’s leg against a rusty iron stairpost and headed back in the direction it had come from.
Coffin Ed was stuck in the half-opened window, his gun arm pinioned and useless, shouting at the top of his voice: “Halt or I’ll shoot!”
The rider heard him over the roar of the motor as he was fighting to keep the vehicle on the sidewalk and avoid sidescraping the row of stairposts on one side and the parked cars on the other.
The sedan was across the street, pointed at an angle toward the opposite curb, but headed in the general right direction.
“I’ll get him,” Grave Digger said, shifting back to first and tramping on the throttle.
But he hadn’t straightened out the wheels from his sharp left turn, and, instead of the car curving back into the street, it bounded to the left and went broadside into a parked Chevy. The Chevy door caved in, and the left-front fender of the little sedan crumpled like tin foil. Glass flew from the smashed headlamp, and the rending sound of metal on metal woke up the neighborhood.
The thing to have done was to back up, straighten out and start over.
Grave Digger was so blind mad by this turn of events he kept tramping on the throttle and scraped past the Chevy by sheer horsepower. His own crumpled left-front fender caught in the Chevy’s left-rear fender, and both broke loose from their respective cars.
He left them bouncing in the street and took off after the motorcycle that had bounced back into the street and was making a two-wheeled turn north up Third Avenue.
It was pushing four-thirty in the morning, and the big transport trucks were on the streets, coming from the west, through the tunnels underneath the Hudson River, and heading north through Manhattan Island toward upstate New York—Troy, Albany, Schenectady or the Boston road.
A trailer track was going north on Third Avenue when Grave Digger made the turn, and for a moment it looked as though he might go underneath it. Coffin Ed was leaning out the window with his pistol in his hand. He ducked back, but his gun was still in sight when they passed the driver’s cabin.
The truck driver’s eyes popped.
“Did you see that cannon?” he asked his helper.
“This is Harlem,” his helper said. “It’s crazy, man.”
The white driver and the colored helper grinned at one another.
The motorcycle was taming west into 114th Street when Grave Digger got the sedan steadied from its shimmy. The melting ice on the windscreen was blurring his vision,