Death Wish (28 page)

Kong heaved a liquid sigh and died, and his face was hideous with sick triumph.

Taylor was still beside Kong, drained and still staring at Kong's twisted face when Bama wheeled in Taylor's chair. He was accompanied by Dew Drop and Ivory Jones, Taylor's personal orderlies. They silently followed behind Taylor as he drove his motorized chair back to his bunker.

C
ollucci and Angelo left the penthouse at two
A.M
. for the bash of confidence at the Voodoo Palace. When they arrived, the doorman unlocked the door and let them into a scene of wild revelry and celebration.

Twenty flamboyantly garbed numbers bankers and wholesale drug dealers danced and laughed with their wives and women. They spotted Collucci. The band stopped playing, and the crowd shook the room with cheers and applause. Collucci and Angelo took ringside seats at the reserved table. The band started up the last dance tune before showtime.

And in her tenement room up the street, Mayme Flambert put her binoculars aside. She went to the phone in the hallway and dialed Taylor to inform him of the changed location of the bash.

Shortly after, Ivory Jones and Dew Drop were preparing a van to take Taylor to an alley ambush position diagonally across from the front of the Palace.

Dew Drop said, “Ivory, I don't like it. What do you think?”

Ivory said, “There's nothing to think about, Drop . . . We gave Big T. our promise . . . He don't have to know we're gonna back him up. Take it easy, Drop. Everything's gonna be cool.”

Dew Drop said, “I guess . . . You seen Bama?”

Ivory said, “We don't have to worry about him. He went to bed finally, after three days. He's dead.”

Ten minutes later, Taylor sat hidden inside the van with a machine gun on his lap.

The Rizzos, armed with high-powered rifles and rigged spotlight, installed themselves on the Palace roof, twenty minutes after Taylor was in position beneath a mountain of garbage and trash near the mouth of the alley.

Only Taylor's glittering eyes were visible as they locked on the front door of the Palace. He sat there and saw his life cover to cover, over and over again as he waited.

At the end of the block, Ivory and Dew Drop, armed with shotgun, rifle, and handguns, crouched in the van waiting to back Taylor's attack.

At four ten
A.M
., the Palace door opened, and the horde of rowdies burst onto the sidewalk. Taylor was coiled like a steel spring in his chair as he watched for Collucci to appear.

The sidewalk in front of the Palace was almost clear when Collucci, Angelo, and Rivers stepped out. Taylor struggled from the garbage and mounted the machine gun on a steel apron bolted to the chair arms. He switched the chair into high gear, then he plunged toward Collucci from the alley mouth with fierce face and bared teeth into the middle of Forty-seventh Street.

The Rizzos illuminated Taylor with the spotlight. Collucci spotted Taylor an instant before he blasted off a burst. Quickly he snatched Angelo into the gutter beneath the limousine.

Mack Rivers caught a stitching of holes across his forehead and dropped dead on the sidewalk.

The deafening barrage of the Rizzos popped spurting springs of blood on Taylor's chest and face. He was a shredded sieve when a blast blew off a chair wheel. The chair crashed to the pavement in front of the Palace.

Behind him, Ivory and Dew Drop opened up with shotgun and rifle fire. Their guns shattered the spotlight and killed Mario Rizzo, who smashed onto the sidewalk.

The other Rizzo's automatic rifle splintered the van windshield and gouged gaping holes in the chests of Ivory and Dew Drop. The van crashed into a shoe store and exploded.

Taylor, tied into the capsized chair, lay on his side, his head resting on the asphalt. The left half of his face was gone. His nose dangled like a misshapen finger across the gory ruin.

But still he gripped the machine gun butt, and his remaining eye had an eerie phosphorescence as it swiveled in the lopsided head seeking Collucci. It locked on Collucci and Angelo, at its level, cowering in the gutter beneath the limousine. Taylor bellowed. His hate and passion for vengeance aimed the snout of the machine gun. The bodies of Collucci and Angelo leaped and cavorted under the impact of the flaming blasts that virtually chopped them in half.

Bama, in fake white whiskers and wig, moved through the gawkers and knelt beside Taylor. Taylor's eye swung up to Bama's face. A comet flare of El train light streaked overhead and haloed Bama's wooly wig an instant.

Taylor's Halloween pumpkin mouth burbled through an ooze of blood and entrails. “Willie tole me . . . Mama darlin' tole me . . . Bama tole me, even . . . I shoulda knowed . . . You was up there . . .”

Then Taylor was dead, and Bama wept.

The sex-fiend squealing of city death wagons sodomized infant day. Chicago, the gaudy bitch, had banged another carnal night away. Now the fake grand lady lay uglied in her neon ball gown, sleazed in the merciless light. Her bleak drawers hung foul with new and ancient death.

A preview of

Airtight Willie & Me

B
ack in the days when bad girls humped good bread into my pockets, con man, Air-Tight Willie and pimp . . . me . . . lay in a double bunk cell on a tier in Chicago Cook's County Jail. I was having one bitch kitty of a time tuning out the interracial sewer mouth shucking and jiving and playing the “dozens” from cell to cell on our tier.

“Lee, your mama is a freakish bitch that hasta crap in a ditch 'cause she humped a railroad switch.”

“Hal, your raw ass mammy had bad luck. That drunk bitch got platoon raped in an army truck.”

Air-Tight Willie leapt off his bunk screeching and made it a “dozens” roundelay. “Dummy up you square ass punks. Both you mutha fuckah's got mamas so loose and wide they gotta play the zoo to cop elephant woo.”

I was winding up a stone and a day. I would hit those cold-blooded streets four brights (mornings) hence, Whoreless! I mean I was desperately trying (in the flare of matches they lit across the
courtyard) to monitor the shuck and jive of the whores and jaspers (pimpese for lesbians) as they ate each other out and banged their pygmy cocks together.

I figured by culling the bullshit coming from across the way, I might pick up a dropped name and a line on at least one three-way money tree. Maybe she'd be up a bit. Maybe some joker had blown one. Maybe I could fly one a couple of my magnetized copping kites (high voltage letters) when I hit the bricks, and steal a 'HO!

Slippery Air-Tight Willie, on the bunk above me had slid into mind reading sure as he was rotten.

I saw his mongoose face peek down at me as he said in his molasses drawl. “Slim, I ain't complimented nobody, no time before. But I gotta say you ain't nothing but a foxy dude to stop playing for skunk bitches like them over there and deciding to play the con with me in them streets.”

I said sleepily, “Yeah, Willie . . . A 'ho ain't worth a thimble of poo-poo.'”

Willie, needing a partner to play the con, had given me a six weeks crash course in how to stop and qualify (any money to play for? . . . ever been flimflammed before?) a mark, put him on the send (he goes to get his money), and how to rip him off with cross-fire dialogue between us.

I sure needed to play Willie's game. At least until I got the bread to lay down on a far-out ride, (maybe a vintage Rolls, fur trimmed) B.R. (flash cash) and threads to dazzle and lure whores to within stealing or “turn-out” copping range.

A match flared in a cell across the way illuminating two broads sixty-nining while a third broad, wearing a crude dildo fashioned from a toilet brush, humped dog-fashion behind one.

An excited chump, on the tier above us, apparently was baring his stiff problem to the trio. He screamed through the open windows into the unusually warm January night. “You long cunt bitches gander this big, black pretty I'm holding and eat your freakish hearts out!”

A shrill voice broad lopped off his fake balls, “Dave Jones, this is Cora Brown. You old snaggle tooth fag. You know I know, that thing you flashing wasn't nothing in them streets but a handle for dudes to flip you over with.

I thought about some of the harrowing disadvantages in playing con. A felony bust if caught. A morgue slab if a cut-throat mark woke up before he was “blowed off.” And most unpleasant of all was the epidemic scuttle butt that grifters often got bone tired and foot sore searching for a qualifiable mark.

Willie, validated his monicker, and soft shoed onto my wave length again. He crooned, “Slim, I got a lot of confidence in you. I'm gonna angle my ass off as soon as I get in the wind this morning scoring for transportation and other nit shit we gonna need. Howzit sound, Pal-of-mine?”

I barely heard him because I was trying to pluck out, from the din across the way, a line on a cafe-au-lait fox. She was fingering into the crimson slash in her jet brush to drool the voyeur chumps upstairs. She was boasting how she'd cut her old man loose during visiting hours that very day.

I said, “It sounds sweet, Willie . . . and sweeter is when we start taking off those big stings! . . .”

As I fell asleep, I heard young joker hollering he was a helluva pimp.

The ball-lopper across the way shrilled, “Joe Thomas, bullshit everybody but Cora Brown. I heard you ate everything except the nails in Little Bit's shoes all night last summer. At the time, she told me, she was holding enough bread to burn up a herd of wet cattle. She gave you a buck for grits and greens. No playing chump! Dummy up!”

The icy morning of my release, my teeth chattered in the sleazy thin benny belonging to some slight of hand bastard in property. He had switched me out of my stable-trimmed, leather-whore catcher. I was a hundred yards down California Ave. when the sudden blast
of a horn behind me almost tinkled me. I got in the snow-dappled heap. Willie grinned and passed me a half-f, half-pint of gin.

He said, “Kill it.”

He looked me up and down.

He said, “We gotta go and score for decent bennys and bread to make up a playing boodle.”

He briefed me how, on the way to a medium size department store on State Street. We went in through different entrances. I dug Willie in position to score. My arm swept perfume bottles off a counter with a great clatter as I collapsed myself to the stone floor. I performed an attention grabbing, flop tongued epileptic seizure that sucked men's wear empty of personnel.

Some compassionate soul rammed a metal glasses case into my mouth. I peeked through the forest of legs a: Willie. He had liberated two bennys off hangers and
mat
nonchalantly till tapping (rifling a cash register) men's-wear bread. He blurred through a side door. I recovered, mouthing baroque gratitude. I walked my eyes heavenward. I profusely
thanked
J.C. and the mob surrounding me (as per Willie's instructions) as I oozed away to the sidewalk.

Our bennys were good fits. But the scratch from the till was too thin to make-up a viable boodle. On Clark Street Willie pulled to the curb and leaped from the car. I got under the wheel.

Willie walked, with head down, toward a florid fatso, in ritzy togs, coming down the sidewalk, bent against the hooligan wind. Two feet from the target, Willie spat a gob of spit into the wind and fouled the front of the dude's impeccable benny. I watched Willie rush to him, with jaws flapping apology. He feverishly wiped the dude clean of spittle and his billfold from the well (inside breast pocket).

As I was driving toward the Southside, Willie stopped arranging a wad of play money to say, “We got five hundred frog skins to makeup boodle that will give the suckers blues with a toothache . . . Say, we better blow some of the pressure in our balls into some jazzy fox to loosen up for the marks.”

I said, “Man, I don't dig no bought snatch and I'm too noble to beg for it.”

He busted out laughing, “Slim, I'm gonna hip you how to bang the choicest pros with no pay, no bed!”

We parked a half hour while he ran down his poontang swindle. In the Seventies on Cottage Grove Ave., he told me to pull over and park in front of the MOON GLO BAR. I did, and dug on the vision he had dug. He caressed his tinted fly.

She hustled her Pet-Of-The-Year type curves toward us. Her face was copper satin, pure electric like those ball-blasting Aztec broads on the calendars printed in Spanish.

He opened the car door and said hoarsely, “Ain't no way we can do better than her. Don't forget the cues we rehearsed, and remember, you're stone deaf and dumb. You're a champ chump from the Big Foot Country (deep South) and you're creaming to get laid.”

I enjoyed an interior smirk. Remember? A few con items? Willie, the rectum, was apparently unhip I had memorized an arsenal of howitzer motivators I'd kept on instant alert inside my skull. I'd barraged them daily for three years to persuade a ten 'ho stable to hump my pockets obese.

Willie suddenly hammered his fist down on my hat crown. I glanced into the rear-view mirror. My lid was telescoped into a pork-pie, cocked stupidly on the side of my longhead.

He said, “Now you look the part, Pardner.”

He sprang to the sidewalk, whipping off his hat. His face was booby-trapped with pearly con as he rapped his opener. She darted a glance in my direction. He had cracked comedic shit on her to set me up as flim-flamee and her as fuckee. She giggled her epic ass off.

She scooted across the seat close to me as Willie boxed her in and shut the car door. I yo-yoed my Adams Apple as I imagined a mute bumpkin would, if pressed against her pulse-sprinting heat.

Willie said, “Sharlene Hill, this is Amos . . . did you say yur last name was Johnson, Buddy?”

I nodded and wiped my brow with the back of my hand.

She giggled and said, “Hi, Bootie, Cootie.”

Willie leaned across her and said, “She boss cute enough for that hundred dollars you want to spend?”