Ed McBain by Learning to Kill: Stories Read Free Book Online Page A

die, in case Harry was carrying a gun. Harry was born and raised right in this neighborhood, and all the kids knew him from when he used to be king of the hill. And Harry was always heeled, even in those days, either with brass knucks or a switch knife or a razor or a zip gun, and later on he had a .38 he showed the guys. That was just before he lammed out—the time he knocked off that crumb from uptown. I remember once when Harry cut up a guy so bad, the guy couldn't walk. I swear. I mean it. He didn't only use the knife on the guy's face. He used it all over so the guy couldn't walk later, that guy was sorry he tangled with a customer like Harry, all right. They only come like Harry once in a while, and when you got a Harry in your neighborhood, you know it, man. You know it, and you try to live up to the rep, you dig me? You got a guy like Harry around, well hell, man, you can't run the neighborhood like a tea party. You got certain standards and ideals, I guess you would call them. So we was all kind of sorry when Harry had to take off like that, but of course he was getting all kinds of heat by that time, not only from the locals who was after him for that crumb uptown, but also he was getting G-heat because the word was he transported some broads into Connecticut for the purpose of being illegal, leastways that's the way they read it off on him at the lineup, and I know a guy who was at the lineup personally that time, so this is straight from the horse's mouth.
    But if those cops were wondering whether or not Harry was heeled, I could have saved them a lot of trouble if they wanted to ask me. I could tell them Harry was not only heeled but that he was probably heeled to his eyeballs, and that if they expected to just walk in and put the muscle on him, they had another guess coming, or maybe two or three. It didn't make one hell of a big difference anyhow, because the cops looked as if they took along their whole damn arsenal just to pry Harry out of that seventh-floor apartment.
    The streets were really packed now with people and cops and reporters and the emergency cop truck, and I expected pretty soon we would have President Eisenhower there to dedicate a stone or something. I began to wonder where the hell the boys were because the rooftops were getting lined pretty fast, and if the cops and Harry were going to shoot this thing out, I wanted to watch him pick them off. And unless we got a good spot on the roof, things would be rugged. I was ready to go looking for Aiello when he comes back with Ferdy and Beef.
    Ferdy is a guy about my height and build, except he's got straight black hair and brown eyes, and my hair is a little curly and my eyes are not brown really, they're amber—that's what Marie says, and she ought to know, dad. I been going with Marie since we was both thirteen, and that makes it close to three years now, so she knows the color of my eyes, all right.
    "This the straight dope?" Ferdy asked. Ferdy used to be on H, but we broke him of it 'cause there's no room in our bunch for a hophead. We broke him by locking him in a cellar for about two weeks. His own mother didn't even know where he was. We used to go down there and give him food every day, but that was all. He could cry his butt off, and we wouldn't so much as give him a stick of M. Nothing till he kicked the heroin monkey. And he kicked it, dad. He kicked it clear out the window. It was painful to watch the poor guy, but it was for his own good, so we let him claw and scream all he wanted to, but he didn't get out of that cellar. Pot is okay, 'cause it don't give you the habit, but anybody wants to hang around me, he don't have no needle marks in his arm. He can bust a joint anytime he likes, but show me a spoon, and show me a guy's bowing to the White God, and I break his butt for him, that's the truth, that shows you the kind of guy I am.
    "Harry's up there," I told Ferdy.
    "How you like that?" Beef said. Beef must weigh about two