Death Wish (23 page)

He tightened his hands around the base of her throat. “The what?” he said.

She enjoyed an interior guffaw that she hadn't menstruated in two decades as she said, “Another month has whirled away again, and I'm wounded again . . . until day after tomorrow.”

He said, “You're full of shit,” as he lifted his bloated organ and stroked it across the top of her shoulder.

Her face ashened with rage at the violation. Mayme scooped up the jar of cleansing cream and cracked it violently down on her shoulder blade as he leaped back an instant in time. She did a jack-in-the-box, and her chair toppled to the floor between them like a crashing counterpoint to the blare of the band's final dance number.

“You crazy jigaboo! You think Jimmy Collucci has to tear his asshole loose to lay a spook?” he screamed in a whisper.

She curled her lip and pointed to his exposed organ and taunted, “Look, trick, take your pitiful white pecker out of my face and stick it in that dago cunt you put on that throne in River Forest!”

He moved toward her.

She backed against the table, and her eardrums vibrated with the gabble of the Loas.
“Fly the scissors! Fly the scissors!”

He said, “I'll kill you! I'll fuck you or kill you!”

Her hand blurred through the air, and he saw a laser of silver fire streaking for the center of his right eye. A spastic muscle in his neck jerked his head a fraction. He felt a gentle zephyr against his eyelash at almost the same instant that he felt the scissors gouge a stinging rill across the tip of his ear.

Jimmy lunged and his fist skidded off her heavily creamed jaw. She went down and lay stunned on the carpet. He dragged her to a small adjoining room and threw her onto a daybed, then he shucked out of his clothes and patted a handkerchief against the dribbles of blood at his ear tip.

Mayme stole a glance at her wristwatch. Twenty more minutes! She looked up at him with slumberous eyes. He stooped and placed his luger on the carpet beside the bed. Then he lay down beside her. She was rigid with rage. She quivered as she fought the impulse to leap over him and try for the luger. As he pried at her thighs, he heard the grit of her teeth in defiance. Quickly he backhanded the side of her face.

The voodoo spirits chorused so piercingly she clapped her hands over her ears.
“Trance away! Trap away! Trance away!”

She went into trance. She relaxed and opened her benumbed cave to his steely stabbing.

With a groan he jabbed his tongue into her half-opened mouth. He seized hers and sucked brutally as if to tear her tongue from its roots. His scrotum sparkled excruciatingly as he exploded seed to spawn a million Mafiosi.

But even as his joy spewed, it soured in the realization of her powerful pull, of the danger, her threat to his self-image of power, of complete control, his immunity to sexual entrapment.

This freak would have to go away, right away, out of his sight and temptation, he thought as he spat and scrubbed his mouth with a
corner of sheet. She would go away, or he would put her away in the mob's cemetery on the rise behind his Sweet Dream Roadhouse.

He scooped up the luger as he rolled off the bed and got to his feet, then looked down and was fascinated at her dreamy eyes that seemed to be staring through him, and at the odd smile lifting the corners of her mouth. He shook her. She lay still as death. He slapped his palm against her cheek. She trembled a bit and came to.

Slowly, she rubbed the back of her hand across her eyes to cover the glance at her wristwatch. She had done it! Taylor would be out there waiting for him!

His voice was harsh. “Mayme, I . . . What the hell is your real name?”

She said, “It's always been Mayme Flambert.”

He stuck the snout of the luger between her eyes and said shakily, “Nigger, I won't be seeing you again.”

She said, “I know . . . I can't say I'm sorry.”

He pecked her forehead with the luger barrel. “I mean I don't want you in my sight! I mean leave the city quick as you can haul out your freakish black ass. Understand?”

She nodded.

He went to the washbasin across the room and watched her in the mirror as he soaped the inside of his mouth and washed himself. She lay motionless while he dressed. The instant that he left, she raced up a rear stairway to her apartment front window to see his death.

C
ollucci stopped to have one for the road and light chitchat with Mack Rivers at the bar.

At that moment, Bama was losing his argument with Taylor not to go alone for Collucci. Kong stood in the parsonage living room watching poker-faced. Taylor stood unsteadily on legs weakened by a two-day bout with flu.

For the dozenth time he demanded from Bama the keys to the Warriors' supercharged old Pontiac sedan.

“I ain't saying it no more. Gimme the keys, Bama,” Taylor said as he waved a flashlight and brushed by Bama in the doorway. “I ain't forgot how to hot wire a ride,” Taylor flung over his shoulder.

Bama shook his head and followed him down the hallway to the door to the street. Kong went to the phone in his apartment to tip Mack Rivers. Bama tugged at Taylor's overcoat sleeve as he went through the door. Taylor ignored him, but stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and turned.

Bama threw him the ring of keys and said, “Star natal, fool, you still got the flu. At least take the squad with you.”

Taylor unlocked the Pontiac at the curb and said before he got in, “Ain't got no time now, Grandmaw Bama, to roust up no squad and two of ‘em got galloping flu.” Then he grinned and said, “I might chastise you when I get back for shuckin' and jivin' away all them minutes. ‘sides, it looks like ain't but him and one more dago.”

He started the engine and punched the proper pattern on the radio's selector buttons to pop up the top of the dashboard. It was the steel box containing an arsenal. He took out a sawed-off shotgun, automatic rifle, and several handguns, and placed them on the seat beside him. After that, he pushed the dashboard lid down and locked it shut with a quick tattoo on the radio selectors, then he rocketed the Pontiac away.

At that moment, Mack Rivers came away from the phone at the end of the bar. His black face was gray.

He stood gesticulating mutely in front of Collucci before he blurted, “Mr. C, we got to put out all the lights and steel bar that front door! Taylor is coming to waste you . . . and he ain't stuck on me.”

Collucci felt a tiny flutter of fear behind his navel. He was suddenly irritated and angry that Mack Rivers's fearful face had triggered the one emotion he was most ashamed of, and afraid of feeling himself.

He said harshly, “Mack, you cunt! Get yourself together!”

Rivers said, “But Mr. C, that chump is crazy!”

Collucci buttoned up his overcoat. “He alone?” he said softly.

Rivers said, “Yeah . . . but . . .”

Collucci said, “Mack, when I was just a pissy punk, I got the reputation that any ass that comes solo against me gets the bloody shit stomped out of it.” He turned away toward the front door.

Mack Rivers snapped his fingers for a half-dozen of his gunmen seated around a nearby table lapping up an on-the-house setup of Jim Beam. They looked at Rivers.

He jerked his head toward Collucci at the door. “Back up Mr. C. with Taylor. Some of you get in them gangways from the comer down, and some of you just shuck and jive like squares on both sides of the stem out front.”

Collucci whipped himself around, and his teeth flashed in his dark face. “Mack, why, why can't I get it across that I don't need anybody out there to help me put a tag on Taylor's toe tonight?”

Rivers shook his head and heaved a sigh. He called Lieutenant Paul Porta's office at Eleventh Street headquarters. Within minutes, Porta's office radioed him the Taylor info as he cruised with his squad a half mile away from the Voodoo Palace.

The gunmen picked up their glasses and went, with Rivers, to peek at the street through front-window drapes.

Collucci stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and struck his lighter to a cigarette. While he lit up, his eyes swept both sides of the block. They locked on a silhouette inside an oncoming car halted by a stoplight at the intersection to his left.

It's him!
Collucci thought as he plucked the luger from his overcoat pocket and gripped it flat against his thigh.

Taylor spotted Collucci and stiffened inside the Pontiac.

Collucci walked to the curb near the front bumper of the bulletproof limo.

Angelo slid across the seat and lowered the glass. He stuck his head out toward the sidewalk and said, “Everything peaches and cream?”

Collucci said, “Yeah, Taylor is on the turn . . . stay inside and start the machine.”

From the corner of his eye he watched Taylor ease the Pontiac across the intersection and pull to the curb at the end of the block and snuff the Pontiac's lights. He saw Taylor's silhouette vanish. He was certain Taylor was racing toward him behind the cover of parked cars.

Let the cocksucker come,
he thought as he telescoped himself
behind the limo's grille and peered around a headlamp at Taylor's form bent over in a running crouch, bumping car sides as he lurched down the street on legs rubbery with flu.

Collucci smiled as he gazed at Taylor's feeble gait. He thought,
I'll move up the sidewalk and blow him away when he goes past my cover.

As he turned to streak for a point of ambush, he noticed a knot of black people had formed behind him and others were at windows and standing in doorways staring at him.

He thought,
What if one of them is a Warrior sympathizer with a gun? Or what if one of them shouts a warning to Taylor that I'm waiting for him?

He slipped quickly into the limo and said, “Pull out, Angelo, and do no more than fifteen straight-ahead.”

Angelo pulled away from the curb, and Collucci saw Taylor straighten up and stop fifty yards away for a moment, with sawed-off shotgun dangling in his hands. Taylor turned and scuttled back toward the Pontiac.

Collucci turned from the rear window and said, “The cocksucker moves like he's busted up or something . . . Just keep going west.”

Angelo said, “I got the M16 out of the trunk. Want it? . . . Maybe you can put a round or two in his noggin.”

Collucci said, “Too much traffic . . .”

An instant later he saw Taylor suddenly bomb the Pontiac forward.

Collucci said, “Kick the piss out of this crate!”

Angelo stomped the gas pedal, and the limo shot forward and regained its block distance from the roaring Pontiac. Collucci slid aside a silver dollar-sized steel cover on a porthole beneath the rear window of three-inch-thick glass. He leaned across the front seat and got the M16 rifle off the floorboard.

Three blocks east of Taylor, Mayme Flambert was packing her portable possessions as if expecting a visitation from a horde of enemy voodoo demons. She had just moments before seen Porta's
squadron of gangbusters racing after the Pontiac. She knew the odds were now riding with Collucci, and she was red-hot with death.

Inside the limo Collucci said, “Cut left fast into that alley over there and kill the lights.”

Angelo swung into the maw and slammed through the littered alley at fifty miles per hour for a hundred and fifty yards without lights.

Taylor brought the Pontiac into the alley mouth on two wheels and torpedoed it toward the limo's dark shape.

Collucci let go a burst from the Ml6 that shattered the Pontiac's radiator and the windshield just as Taylor screeched the brakes and almost in the same motion flung himself to the alley floor, rolling and firing his automatic rifle at the flashes of flame jetting from the muzzle of Collucci's M16.

At that same instant, Porta and his squad careened into the alley and Taylor was bathed in spotlight before he rolled under the Pontiac.

Porta bellowed over a bullhorn, “Jessie Taylor, this is Lieutenant Porta of the gang squad. Roll out with your hands clean.”

Taylor rolled beneath the front bumper. He decided he'd spring up and, using the Pontiac's hulk to cover his back from Porta, rush Collucci with a firestorm of automatic rifle. He was past thinking about himself now. He just wanted Collucci dead.

As he slid his legs out to take his feet for the attack, Collucci leveled down on Taylor's shadow and a burst of twenty bullets ripped and mangled Taylor from thighs to ankles. The impact blew him into the middle of the alley floor. His kneecaps were blown away, and he lay blacked out with pain and shock.

Porta put the spot on Taylor's motionless form, and in the glow saw Collucci marching down the alley toward Taylor gripping the M16 with both hands.

Porta leaped from the police car and shouted, “Mr. Collucci! Halt! That bandit is our business!”

Collucci marched grimly on, zombielike, his eyes bulgy and bright.

A woman screamed from a tenement window overlooking the alley, “For the luvva Jesus Christ! Somebody stop him!”

Porta leaned into the police car and said, “This may be delicate. I better handle it.” Immediately he turned and double-timed his heavy legs down the alley toward Taylor.

Collucci reached Taylor and rammed the snout of the M16 against the center of his forehead. Taylor's eyes fluttered open and hardened as Collucci's looming figure came into focus.

Taylor said haltingly, “You spaghetti-gut motherfucking pussy . . . You too yella to pull the trigger even?”

Collucci jerked his finger violently against the trigger at the instant that Porta kicked the exploding rifle off target. The burst riddled the Pontiac's side as Porta struggled with Collucci for the M16.

“Let me finish that cocksucker, Paul . . . Let me finish him, Paul,” Collucci pleaded.

Collucci stumbled over Taylor and fell backward to the alley floor. Porta twisted the rifle free. He helped Collucci to his feet. At that same moment Porta heard the feet of his men against the gritty alley floor, and he caught a glint of Collucci's pocketknife blade as he squatted and opened it to slash Taylor's throat. Porta swung the barrel of the M16 against Collucci's chest.