Web of the City (31 page)

But how the hell do you locate a bunch of teenage punks in a city of over eight million people? How do you get to them before they get to you?

I knew I had to take care of a few things.

I went to see Jerry Saha over in the Bronx.

Jerry had been through the freeze-mud with me, near Won-son, and we’d kept in touch once we’d gotten back. I knew he still had his army service revolver—a spanking handy .45 that shot a real straight round. Jerry was an incurable souvenir hunter. His apartment looked like an antique shop.

I called him from a drugstore on his corner, and he told me to come on up. About ten minutes later he let me in, giving me the shush-finger. The wife and kids were asleep in the next room. It was six in the A.M.

“What’s up, Neal?” he said, belting his robe about him tighter. I told him he didn’t really want to know, but he said, “Hell, yes. Sure I do. You don’t come bursting in here at six in the morning unless something’s under your fingernails. Now give!”

So I gave him the bit from the top—all the way from the mugging, and this Pessler character’s being cooled to the tune of three hundred thousand bucks’ worth of uncuts, through Harrison’s visit in the sick ward, right up to and including the little ride I’d just come back from, and particularly about how they were going to try and cool me proper in the near future.

“I’d like to borrow your heater, Jerry,” I told him.

He looked worried for a minute, then nodded slowly. “Sure, Neal. Just a second.” He trotted into the next room, his bedroom slippers slap-slapping against the soles of his feet, and closed the door behind him. I heard a drawer open and close. Then the closet door opening. I heard him fishing around the closet for a few minutes, then he reappeared. He had a chamois bag and a small box in his hand.

“Here’s a box of bullets for the thing,” he said, handing me the box. I took out eight rounds and shoved the box in my jacket pocket. I reached into the bag, came up with the blocky thing in my hand. Jerry had taken good care of that gun. It shone.

I loaded the clip, flat-palmed it back into the butt. I shoved the .45 into my waistband. “Thanks, Jerry,” I said. “Thanks a lot. You’ll get it back in good shape.”

He looked concerned, his collegiate, crew-cut appearance cut by a frown. “Look, take care of yourself, Neal. If there’s anything else you need…”

“Not right now, Jerry. I’ll keep you posted.” I patted the spot under my dirty, mud-caked jacket where the .45 nestled against my tummy. “Thanks for this. It’ll probably be the only thing between me and Potter’s Field if it comes to a showdown with these characters.”

“What kind of a showdown?” he asked, the frown deepening.

I shrugged, my hand on the doorknob. “Don’t know, but there’s got to be one. They want
me
real bad—or they will when they find out that cliff didn’t finish me—and I want
them
real bad. I can’t stop moving, because if I do, they cool me. And they can’t show themselves, because when they do I’ll get to them.”

I closed the door quietly behind me.

I went home and sacked in with my clothes on. I didn’t sleep too well. The .45 was a hard nubbin under the pillow, and I had a lousy nightmare about a switchblade cab that was trying to push me off a cliff into a sea of diamonds.

I woke up about four in the afternoon, reeking of my own sweat. The world was shattering inside my skull, there was a painful lump where the kid had tapped me the night before, and I had a horrible itch to find those kids one by one and hammer their molars back down their throats.

I showered, dressed, and phoned in to Liggett, told him I’d be right down. He told me I could work the six-to-four shift. I told him to let word seep through the vine that Campus had been jumped and dumped—but had come back.

He asked me what I meant, so I fired the story over the line real quick. I heard a gasp, and he said he’d let the word out. “But why the hell don’t you just cut out and forget the whole thing?” he asked.

“Reasons,” I answered, thinking about Korea and being pushed too far.

Then I hung up and went downstairs, to take up where I’d left off the day before.

Things went cozy that day. I got finished with my tour of duty about four-oh-five and went home. This time I made sure I was alone when I got out of the cab.

I sacked in, and this time the sleep was better. Not perfect, but a whole lot better.

Next morning I shoved the .45 into my belt and put my jump-jacket over it. Then I went down to the cab. I got in, took out my route book, and scribbled my tie-in time. I stuck the key in the ignition.

Then I pushed the starter.

And the bomb went off. The whole goddam universe exploded. I felt myself being shoved in the chest. It was the steering wheel. The car exploded, erupted, whanged away with a boom, and the doors flew off their hinges, thank god! I was parked next to a church. The explosion tossed me up against the holy walls.

I lay there on my face on the sidewalk, blood all over me from abrasions, while screaming metal and broken glass fell on top of me. I heard people screaming and windows flying up, and knew it must have been one hell of an explosion. I reprimanded myself mentally for swearing mentally in front of a church. Even if I
was
lying on my kisser.

It was obvious, of course. They’d planted a souper in the engine of the cab.

If the hack hadn’t been so strong—mainly due to my reinforcing sections of it on my days off—I’d have been spattered across the wall of that church permanently.

I rather supposed they hadn’t rigged it properly. If they had, no matter
how
strong that cab was, I would have been decapitated. These kids were novices when it came to installing a juice-box in a crate. I started to faint.

I heard people running up to me, and I tried to sit up. I managed to get my feet under me and pull myself up on the church stair railing. Someone produced a glass of something that tasted like bad sherry, and I sipped a bit, listening to the mingled bird-sounds of the people’s horror-cooing.

I staggered erect, and bumbled into the house to call Lig. He could handle Harrison, if that crumb was assigned to this deal.

I wanted to call Lig to thank him for spreading the word. He’d done it real fine—the bastards knew I was still kicking.

Now it was a case of hide-and-seek.

If I was “it,” I’d be “it” with a slug in my tummy or a switch shaft sticking out of my throat. If
they
were “it,” I’d be rapping a few skulls good and hard, real soon.

I moved later that day. Across town to a furnished flea trap. But it would do till I came up with something other than a cracked skull and empty hands.

Then started a week of real nightmare. I borrowed Jerry’s car and went looking. New York’s a big town. You can go for years without running into anyone you know; on the other hand, you might walk into the street and meet a guy you haven’t seen in ten years. Funny, like that. But a full week without more than three hours sleep a night—running on No-Doz and black coffee—I patrolled the streets in Jerry Saha’s car. All the way from Astoria to Brooklyn.

It wasn’t hard to get the other hackies I knew to keep half an eye open for the kids I’d described, also.

Along about Thursday, I got word from Lig that Harrison had been around looking for me. I told Lig to stall the bull, tell him I was on routes with a new cab, tell him
anything,
but to stall the slob. He did, and I kept looking, cutting my sleep down to nothing.

Nothing. That’s what I got on Friday.

Saturday was more of the same. A righteous, empty nothing; a stone loss.

But Sunday night the break came.

I was cruising on Central Park South, in the Fifties, when I saw one of them. I suddenly knew how these kids had escaped being picked up till now. He wasn’t in a black leather jacket. That was cornball stuff for these punks. It was a uniform, a disguise. He had on a charcoal-gray flannel suit and he looked like the spoiled brat of a wealthy advertising executive. He was walking crosstown.

I spotted him dead at once. It was the kid with the Barrymore profile and the sleepy eyes.

I fell behind him a half block, and tagged him all the way. He turned in at a flashy apartment house in the plush section of the Park South. When he’d gone in, I parked the car around the corner and flat-footed it over to the building. The kid was gone.

But there was a doorman.

“Hello,” I said, smiling, tipping my cabbie cap back on my head so the license button showed real plain. “Say, did a young boy in a charcoal suit just come in here?”

He looked at me leery. “Why?”

I yanked out my hack license, flipped it at him. “I just brought that fare up here from downtown, with a two-buck placket on the meter. He said he was broke and would run upstairs to get me my fare. I’d like to make sure he comes back. Can you tell me where he went?”

The doorman looked at me hard for a minute, then nodded his head. “Yes, I suppose so. He went up to Mr. Steckman’s penthouse. That’s Mr. Fritz Steckman, the broker. I’m sure the boy’s all right if he’s a friend of Mr. Steckman’s. Probably a nephew or something. Mr. Steckman has a good many young people visiting him—mostly relatives, I guess.”

“Yeah. Sure.” I smiled at him. “Thanks. I’ll wait in the cab. Hope he shows soon; I’d like to catch another fare.”

I went out and got in the car, drove around the block, parked down and across the street. Then I waited.

About a half-hour later, the kid came out and started walking crosstown. I didn’t follow him—I knew where his home roost was.

I was about to make as big a play as I could. Pray? You bet your life I did!

I called Richie Ellington on the
Daily News
and got some poop from him on this Steckman.

Big operator. Wealthy. In the social register, and a large investor in the stock market. Summer home, winter home, two yachts and a hunting lodge in the Canadian Rockies. Impeccable taste—one of the Best Dressed Somethings-or-other—and unmarried. Nominated Very Eligible Hunka Meat by some group of young debs coming out, recently.

I thanked Ellington, inquired about his cats and his booze, and then started to get ready.

I changed into
my
charcoal-gray suit, and made sure the slide on the .45 was working smoothly. Then I piled into Jerry’s car and headed crosstown to Central Park South. I parked up the street from Steckman’s building, and waited till the doorman went off duty. When he’d been gone ten minutes, I climbed out and went into the building.

The alternate doorman opened the door for me. I brushed past him without a glance, as though I knew where I was going and as if I had every right to be there.

I climbed into the elevator, and pushed the button for the top floor.

The top floor wasn’t the penthouse. There was a separate elevator for that. But I didn’t take it. I took the fire stairs. When I got to the top, the door was locked; but another flight went up, and I figured it must go to a service shed atop the penthouse.

I kept climbing, and a minute later opened the fire door to the outside. I was standing next to a metal ladder that went up into a water tank.

I slammed the door, and walked around the platform. Turned out the penthouse was a duplex, with an entrance up here at roof level. It was parked far back at the rear of the area, with a glass front and a large patch of neatly tended greenery surrounding it, grass and shrubs and whatnot. I didn’t see anyone outside the house, so I jumped into the grass.

I rolled under a bush, all in the same movement, and came up with wet grass on my back and the pistol in my hand.

The glass-doored greenhouse-looking penthouse was right across from me. I figured to lay there till it got dark enough inside and outside so that no one would see me. I wasn’t sure just how many were in there.

It took a long time getting dark, and I had a long chance to get some thinking done.

I knew why they wanted to get me so bad. I was the only boy who could identify them. There was a sweet setup here, but I wasn’t sure just what it was. Who was Steckman, and how did he figure into this? What were those punks doing, coming to visit him?

I wanted some answers, but more, I wanted all those kids—and the guy that was operating them. Him, most of all. I knew I couldn’t call the cops till I had all of them, the whole batch of them. Let one lone juvie get away, and my days were even more numbered than right now. Those kids hold grudges longer and harder than any adult. I had to get them all together, or my life wouldn’t be worth starting fare on my meter.

It pitched-out around 9:30, and I started my creep toward the penthouse.

The grass was dry now, and the sounds of traffic filtered up the face of the building. The .45 was warm in my mitt. I suddenly realized I’d been hanging onto it for over three hours, while I’d been waiting.

I crawled over to the big windows and looked inside. At first I didn’t see anyone. The living room was empty. Just an overplush apartment, decorated ultramodern with hanging lamps, screwy-looking wire clocks on the walls—the works.

In a few minutes a man came into the room with a drink in his hand; he was wearing a wine-colored satin smoking jacket, with a silk scarf knotted about his throat. The guy was about forty, or forty-five, hair graying at the temples, a smooth, unlined face, almost like a baby’s. He looked hard, but the mark of dissipation was on him. As though he’d just gotten rich and was letting himself go to fat enjoying it.

It was Steckman all right. Richie Ellington had described him almost perfectly. I waited a few minutes to make sure he was alone; then I shoved in.

The French doors were unlocked. He must have felt pretty secure up there in the clouds. When I stepped through into his living room, the .45 aimed at the spot behind his brandy snifter, he turned a fish-belly white.

“Who—who are you?” he asked. Real hacky phrase—no inventiveness, this guy. I disliked him more and more. But I told him anyhow.

“The name’s Campus, Mr. Steckman. Neal Campus. I’m the boy you don’t like.”

He started sputtering something about getting out, and who the hell did I think I was, but I cut him off sharply.