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

that instant the American rioters got the exit notion and jumped up and started looking for exits. A moment later the room was boiling with men running in all directions, bumping into each other, fighting to break free of each other to reach the doors and windows, the policemen grabbing at them and trying to hold on, or else using the night sticks to break it up that way, but there was no breaking it up, there was no stopping it, not even when Lieutenant Taggert reached for his shoulder holster and drew his revolver and fired a warning shot. He fired another shot at the ceiling and then decided to really use the gun. He fired at one of the Puerto Ricans and the man went down with a bullet in the kneecap.
That should have stopped it. But all it did was increase the action, the prisoners accelerating their efforts to get through the doorways and windows. Lieutenant Taggert fired again and a big Ukrainian-American was hit in the abdomen and now some of the policemen had drawn their guns and were shooting. One of them hit a Puerto Rican in the shoulder. Another put a bullet through the thigh of an Irish-American who was caught in a traffic jam at the front door. Then another policeman took aim at the crowd trying to get through the front door' and changed his mind and aimed his gun for a longer-range shot, pointing the gun toward the large window behind the desk platform on the far side of the room. The window was open and Whitey was climbing through.
The policeman shot and missed and fired again and the .35 slug punctured the window sill an inch away from Whitey's ribs. Whitey threw a sad-eyed, scared-rabbit glance backward at the seething room and saw all of it in a flashing instant that showed convulsive, tumultuous activity. It was a very busy room. The noise was terribly loud, a cracking-up noise that sounded like the end of everything. In the same instant that he glimpsed the frenzied action, Whitey saw the two men who were not taking part in the action, just standing on the side lines and watching it. The two men were Lieutenant Pertnoy and Captain Kinnard.
The Lieutenant stood in the corridor doorway and he had his hands in his trousers pockets. One side of his mouth was curved up, but it wasn't a smile; it was sort of quizzical, like the expression of a man looking at a board and studying a mathematical equation. A few feet away from the Lieutenant the bulky shoulders of Captain Kinnard were limp and the Captain's arms hung loosely and he was shaking his head very slowly. His eyes were half closed and his mouth sagged. He was slumped there against the wall like a fighter on the ropes getting hit and hit again and not allowed to fall.
Whitey saw all of that but couldn't see more of it because now there was another shot and the bullet split the glass of the raised window above his head. He decided he wasn't traveling fast enough, and instead of climbing through the window and then climbing down, he dived through, going headfirst and then twisting in the air, twisting hard to bring his legs down. He landed on his side on the gravel driveway some ten feet below the window. He rested there with his eyes closed, wondering whether he had a broken hip. He felt it and it wasn't broken and he told himself to get up. He got up and started to walk. At first he walked slowly and with a limp. Then he limped faster. The injured hip gave him a lot of pain, but it was more flesh burn than bone hurt, and maybe if he,didn't think about the pain he wouldn't need to limp. He stopped thinking about the pain and stopped limping and started to run.
He ran. He picked up speed and told himself he needed more and then he was really sprinting.

5
It was three minutes later and they were chasing him down an alley off Clayton Street. Then it was five minutes later and he was in another alley four blocks east of Clayton. He was moving east and coming out of the alley and running across River Street. They came running after him and he went twenty yards