Street of No Return by David Goodis, Robert Polito Read Free Book Online

telling Taggert to look in the same direction. They both saw the Captain sitting at the big high desk on the platform three steps above the floor. The Captain was hunched low over some papers and he was trying to use a pencil. As they watched him, the pencil slipped from his hand, rolled across the desktop and off the edge, and dropped onto the floor. A policeman hurried forward, picked up the pencil, and handed it to the Captain. The Captain thanked him and started to write again, but somehow he couldn't move the pencil across the paper and finally he put it down and sat there staring at the paper.
"You see?" Pertnoy murmured.
Taggert didn't reply. He stood there watching the Captain. Then very slowly his head turned and he gazed along the rows of crowded benches, the Puerto Rican rioters on the other side of the room, the American rioters on this side, and the policemen standing stiff and tense and waiting for more to happen. They stood there lined up in the middle of the bloodstained floor, all of them holding night sticks and gripping them very tightly.
"You see?" Pertnoy said. "You get it now?"
Taggert gazed again at the Captain. For some moments Taggert didn't say anything. Then very quietly he said, "You want meto tell him?"
Pertnoy's smile became dim and dimmer and then faded altogether and he said, "Do you want to?"
"Well, someone's got to tell him."
"All right," Pertnoy said. "You tell him."
Taggert took a deep breath. He turned and walked very slowly toward the big high desk. Whitey watched him as he approached the platform, saw him mounting the steps, heard the distinct clicking of his heels on the first step and the second and the third. There were other sounds in the room but Whitey didn't hear them. He was watching Lieutenant Taggert moving across the platform to the desk and bending over to whisper in the Captain's ear. The Captain's head was low and he was staring at the paper on the desk. Taggert went on whispering and Whitey saw the Captain gradually raising his head and sitting up very straight, rigid in a metallic sort of way, as though he were something activated by a lever. Then the Captain said something that Whitey couldn't hear and Taggert's reply was also inaudible but his arm was stretched out and his finger pointed at Whitey.
The Captain got up from the desk chair. He walked across the platform, moving like a sleepwalker except that his arms were stiff at his sides. He came down off the platform and there was nothing on his face but the flesh and yet it didn't seem like flesh, it was more like something made of ice and rock. He was headed on a diagonal going toward Whitey and it was like watching the slow approach of gaping jaws or a steam roller or anything at all that could manage and finish off whatever it touched.
Whitey stood there not breathing. He saw the Captain coming closer. Then closer. He saw the dead-white face of Captain Kinnard coming in very close, some ten feet away, then seven feet away, and he wondered if it made sense just to stand still and wait for it to happen. He decided it didn't make the least bit of sense and he edged away from Lieutenant Pertnoy, not thinking about Pertnoy or Pertnoy's gun or the guns of the policemen. He was thinking about the big hands of the Captain and telling himself to move and move fast.
He moved. He moved very fast. The only thought in his brain was the idea of fleeing from the big hands of the Captain. He was running, not knowing where he was going, not particularly caring, just so long as it took him away from the Captain. He heard someone shouting, "Get him!" and then another voice, and he saw the policemen coming toward him.
In the same moment he heard a lot of shouting in Spanish from the other side of the room. He caught a flash of the Puerto Ricans leaping up from the benches and hurling themselves toward the opened door that led to the street. The policemen stopped and stared and for a split second they didn't seem to know what to do. In