Westlake, Donald E - Novel 32 (4 page)

 
          
The
way to take somebody out of a place full of his friends is to do it fast. This
was a coffee shop on
Macdougal Street
in
Greenwich Village
, a hangout of several different kinds of
freaks, and at
one o’clock
on a Saturday night it was full; college students, tourists, local citizens,
hippies passing through town, a general cross-section of people who don’t like
cops.

 
          
Ed
waited outside on the sidewalk. If worse came to worst, I’d push Lambeth into
running and he’d run straight into Ed’s arms.

           
He was at a table midway along on
the right, just as the finger had said. He was with four other people, two male
and two female, and he had a bunched-up handkerchief in his left hand and kept
patting his nose with it.
Either he
had a cold or he
was on something; most of them sooner or later try a free sample of what they sell.

 
          
I
stopped behind his chair, and leaned over him slightly. “Lambeth?”

 
          
When
he looked up over his shoulder, I saw that his eyes were watery and red-lined.
It was still maybe a cold, but it was still more likely heroin. He said,
“Yeah?”

 
          
Despite
what they say in the movies, a plainclothes detective is not instantly
recognizable as a cop. “Police,” I said, low enough so he’d be the only one to
hear the word clearly. “Come on along with me.”

 
          
He
had a loose kind of grin. “I don’t think so, man,” he said, and faced around to
his friends again.

 
          
He
was wearing a fringed deerskin vest. I reached over his shoulders and yanked
the vest back around his arms, pinning him like a straitjacket. At the same
time, I lifted him and kicked the chair out from under him.

 
          
Nobody
thinks faster than his body. If he’d just let himself drop to the floor then,
he would have gotten away from me. Maybe long enough for his friends and some
busybody bystanders to louse me up. But his body reacted automatically, getting
his feet under him, helping him to stand, and the instant he had his balance I
turned him toward the front and ran him full speed at the door.

 
          
He
yelled, and tried to squirm to the side, but I had him pinned and moving. The
door was closed, but would open with a push; I pushed it with his head. We’d
gone through so fast there hadn’t been time for anybody to react along the way.

 
          
Lambeth
was still struggling when he hit the street. Ed was standing there, and our
Ford was parked right in front. I didn’t slow down, but kept running across the
sidewalk and slammed Lambeth into the side of the car. I wanted the wind and
the fight out of him. I pulled him back a foot or two, and bounced him off the
car again, and this time he sagged and quit fighting.

 
          
Ed
was beside me with the cuffs. I let go of the vest, slid my hands down
Lambeth’s arms, and lifted his arms up behind him like pump handles, bending him
over the trunk of the car. Ed clicked the cuffs on, and opened the Ford’s rear
door.

           
I was shifting Lambeth over into
position to shove him into the car when somebody tapped me on the upper arm,
and a female voice said, “Officer?”

 
          
I
looked around at a middle-aged tourist woman in a red-and-white flowered dress
and a straw purse. She looked angry, but as though she was making a great
effort to be reasonable. She said, “Are you absolutely sure that much violence
was necessary?”

 
          
Lambeth’s
friends would be coming out any second. “I don’t know, lady,” I said. “
It’s
how much I used.” Then I turned away from her again and
kicked Lambeth into the car and followed him in. Ed shut the door behind me, as
the coffee-shop door opened and people began to pile out into the street

 
          
Lambeth
was crumpled up on the right side of the rear seat like a dead dog. I adjusted
him around into a sitting position. He looked dazed, and he mumbled something
but I couldn’t tell what

 
          
Up
front, Ed said, “Tom?”

 
          
“Yeah?”

 
          
“Looks
like you’re gonna get another letter in your file.”

 
          
I
looked at him, and he was checking the rear-view mirror, looking at the
situation behind us. “Is that right,” I said.

 
          
“She’s
taking down the license number,” he said.

 
          
“I’ll
blame you,” I said.

 
          
Ed
chuckled, and we turned a comer, and headed uptown.

 
          
After
a couple of blocks, Lambeth suddenly said, “My arms hurt, man.”

 
          
I looked
at him. He was wide awake, and apparently rational. You don’t switch off a cold
that easily. I said, “Don’t stick needles in them.”

 
          
“With
these cuffs on, man,” he said. “I’m all twisted around.”

 
          
“Sorry,”
I said.

 
          
“Will
you take them off?”

 
          
“At the station.”

 
          
“If
I give you my word of honor, I won’t try—”

 
          
I laughed
at him. “Forget it,” I said.

 
          
He
gave me a level look, and then a sad kind of smile. “That’s right,” he said.
“Nobody*s got any honor around here, do they?”

 
          
“Not
the last time I looked.”

 
          
He
wriggled around for thirty seconds or so, and apparently finally got himself
into a more comfortable position because he stopped moving, and sighed, and
settled down to watch the city go by.

 
          
I
settled down, too, but not that much. We were traveling without siren or
flashing light, in an unmarked green car, which meant we were going with the
general flow of the traffic. Unless there’s a specific reason to make a fuss,
it’s
better not to. But the result was, we were from time to
time being stopped by red lights, and from time to time crawling along in very
slow traffic, and I didn’t want Lambeth to suddenly decide to jump out of the
car and make a run for it with Ed’s cuffs. The door was locked, and he seemed
quiet, but I nevertheless kept my eye on him.

 
          
After
three or four minutes of watching the world outside the window, Lambeth sighed
and looked at me, and said, “I’m ready to get out of this city, man.”

 
          
I
had to laugh again. “You’ll get your wish,” I told him. “It’ll probably be ten
years before you see
New York
again.”

 
          
He
nodded, grinning at himself. He seemed less freaky, more human, than he’d been
back in the coffee shop. “I dig,” he said. Then he gave me a serious look, and
said, “Tell me something, man. Give me your opinion on a question I have in my
mind.”

 
          
“If I can.”

 
          
“What
do you say; is it the bigger punishment to get sent out of this city, or to
stay here?”

 
          
“You
tell me,” I said. “Why’d you stay here long enough to get yourself into a bind
like this?”

 
          
He
shrugged. “Why do you stay, man?”

 
          
“Tm
not dealing,” I said.

 
          
“Sure
you are,” he said. “You’re dealing in machismo, man, just like I’m dealing in
scat.”

 
          
Ever
since drugs got tied in with the
cultural revolution
,
the junkies have had a richer line of horeshit. “Anything you say,” I said, and
turned away to look out my own window.

 
          
“None
of us started out this way, man,” he said. “We all started out as babies,
innocent and pure.”

 
          
I
looked at him again. “One time,” I said, “a guy a lot like you, full of talk,
he showed me a picture of his mother. And while I was looking at it he made a
grab at my hip for my gun.”

           
He gave a big broad grin; he was
delighted. “You stay in this town, man,” he said. “You’re gonna like what it
does to you.”

 
          
The
woman was all right coming down the stairs. She was bleeding from a long cut on
her right arm, and she had blood all over her face and hands and clothes, some
of it her own and some of it her husband’s and I guess she was still dazed by
it all. But when we went out the front door and she looked down the tenement
steps and saw the crowd of people standing around gaping at her, she flipped
her lid. She started screaming and struggling and carrying on, and it was hell
to get her down the steps to the sidewalk, particularly because all the blood
made her slippery and tough to hold onto.

 
          
I
didn’t like that situation at all. Two uniformed white cops dragging a bloody
black woman down the steps into a crowd in
Harlem
. I didn’t like any part of it, and from the
expression on Paul’s face he didn’t like it either.

 
          
The
woman was yelling, “Let me go! Let me go! He cut me first, let me go! I got a
right, I got a right, let me go!” And finally, as we neared the bottom of the
stoop, I could hear over her yelling the sound of a siren coming. It was an
ambulance, and I was glad to see it.

 
          
We
got to the sidewalk just as the ambulance came to a stop at the curb. The crowd
was keeping out of it so far, giving us a big open space on the sidewalk,
moving out of the way of the ambulance. All I wanted was to get this over with
and go away somewhere for a while. The woman was wriggling and squirming like
an eel, a long black eel covered with blood and screaming with a voice like a
fingernail on a blackboard.

 
          
It
was one of those high-sided ambulances, a boxy van, and it carried four
attendants, two in front and two in the back, all dressed in white.
But not for long.
The four of them climbed out and came
running over to us and got hold of the woman. One of them said, “All right,
we’ve got her.”

 
          
“About
time you got here,” I said. I knew they’d been as fast as could be expected,
but the situation had me scared, and when I’m scared I get mad, and when I’m
mad I sound off.

 
          
They
didn’t pay any attention to me, which was the right thing to do. One of them
said to the woman, "‘Come on, honey, let’s fix the old arm.”

 
          
Their
being dressed in white had made a connection with the woman, because now she
started to yell, “I want my own doctor. You take me to my own doctor!”

 
          
The
four attendants hustled the woman to the ambulance, having as much trouble with
her as we’d had, and a second ambulance arrived, pulling in behind the first.
Two guys came out of this
one,
both also dressed in
white, and came over to us. One of them said, “Where’s the stiff?”

 
          
I
couldn’t say anything; I was having trouble breathing. I just pointed at the
building, and Paul said, “Third floor rear.
In the kitchen.
She really cut him to pieces.”

 
          
Two
more had come out of the back of the second ambulance, carrying a rolled-up
stretcher. The four of them went up the stoop and into the building. At the
same time, the first four were getting the woman into the first ambulance, with
some trouble. So much movement, so many flashing red lights, kept the crowd
from deciding to join in; they’d just be spectators this time.

 
          
Paul
and I were finished with this one, for right now. We still had to call in, and
later on there’d be forms to do at the station, but for the next couple of
minutes the action had moved away from us. And it hadn’t happened any too soon.

 
          
Excitement
carries you through the tense parts. It had been that way from the beginning,
from the first time I was around at a violent situation, which was a ten-year-
old kid hit by a cab on Central Park West. He was still alive, the kid, and
when you looked at him you wished he wasn’t But die excitement and noise and
movement had carried me through the whole scene, and it wasn’t until we were
driving away from it that I had Jerry, an older cop who was my first partner,
pull the cab over to the curb and stop so I could get out and up-chuck.

 
          
That’s
never changed, from that day to this. I don’t up-chuck any more, but the ran of
emotions is still the same; the excitement carries me through the tense part or
the ugly part or the violent part, and then there’s a sick queasy letdown that
comes after it

 
          
The
patrol car was across the street where we’d left it, with its engine off and
its flasher on. The two of us went over there, pushing our way through the
crowd, ignoring the questions they were asking us and ignoring what was going
on behind us. When we got to the car, we stood beside it a minute, not talking
or moving or doing anything. I don’t know what Paul was looking at; I was
looking at the car roof.

 
          
A
siren started again, I looked around, and the first ambulance was leaving,
taking the woman to
Bellevue
. I turned to look at Paul, and he had blood smeared all over his
shirt-front, and dotted on his face and arms like measles. “You got blood on you,”
I said.

 
          
“You,
too,” he said.

 
          
I
looked down at myself. When we’d come down from the third floor, I’d been on
the side of the woman where her cut arm was, and I had even more Wood on me
than Paul did. My bare arms, from elbow to wrist, were soaked in blood, the
hair all matted, like a cat that’s been run over. Now that I was looking at
myself, with the sun beating down on me, I could feel the blood drying against
my skin, shrinking up into a thin wrinkled layer of scab.

 
          
“Christ,”
I said. I turned away from Paul and leaned my left side against the car and
stretched my left arm away from me across the white car roof, where the
flashing light kept changing the color of it. I couldn’t think about getting
clean, I couldn’t think about what I was supposed to do next, all I could think
was,
I’ve got to get out of this. I’ve
got to get out of this.