Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade (42 page)

It was time to run.

Rather it was time to start
trudging through the night. I had no idea how much manpower was mustered to
catch me in the area. I saw nobody; then again I stayed off the roads as much
as possible. I passed farms and aroused barking dogs. At every pair of
headlights I hid myself untd they were gone. By morning I gave up hiding and
walked beside a narrow state highway with my thumb out. A black man in a pickup
truck gave me a ride to a hamlet, the name of which I cannot recall. It had a
Continental Tradways bus depot with a waiting room and a coffee shop.

At the window I asked the price
of a ticket to New York, to Miami, and to Los Angeles. The young woman quoted
the prices.

"Which one leaves
first?"

"A bus to the south leaves
in twenty minutes. For Miami you have to change in Jacksonville."

"That leaves first?"

"Yes."

"Give me a one-way
ticket."

"You really want to go
somewhere,
don't you?"

"How can you tell?"

"Psychic powers."

Soon I was riding south. I
found out that I could get off wherever it stopped, and catch another bus going
the same route. I got off in Jacksonville, rented a hotel room and bought a
cheap pistol. The next afternoon I robbed another bank. Rather I tried to rob
another bank. When I handed the note to the teller, she looked me over. Seeing
that I had no weapon in view she dropped down out of sight and began screaming:
HELP! HELP!
HELP!

Even if I'd had a pistol at her
head, I would never have fired - but I might have punched her. I spun, tucked
in my gun and walked, swiveling my head with a frown, as if I, too, was looking
for the cause of the screams.

Everybody was looking around.
My eyes locked with those of a young man in a business suit behind a desk. He
was focused on me. Had I been moving faster, he would have yelled and pointed a
finger. Instead he hesitated — until I was two steps from the front door. My
hands were raised to push it open when I heard: "There he goes!"

I hit the revolving door and
spun out onto the sidewalk at a dead run, straight across the street. Brakes
squealed as a driver stomped them, followed by the crunch of cars hitting other
cars. I kept going without a glance. On the other side of the street I went
around the corner and down a side street. An alley ran behind the storefronts.
Halfway down the alley I looked back. In hot pursuit were three or four high
school students. I pulled the pistol and fired a shot over their heads. The
leader stopped. Those behind crashed into him. They all went down in a heap.

I fired another shot and they
retreated, around the corner of the budding. I took off running again. The bus
depot was a block and a half away.

Sweat dripped through my soaked
clothes and I fought to breathe as I climbed the steps onto the bus. I could
see down the exit ramp to the street. A police car sped by. I flopped on the
seat and closed my eyes. A few minutes later my body declared that this had all
been too close for comfort. I began shaking, and the fear I had stifled went
through me in waves. Jesus Christ, a fugitive ex-con firing shots in a bank
robbery. They would bury me in Leavenworth. I'd be fifty when they let me out
again.

On a rainy weekend an old professional thief named
Jerry andl I took off a cocktail lounge in the Rampart district of Los Angelos
It was ridiculously easy to enter. The door had a burglar alarm, but it also
had a transom without an alarm. Jerry boosted nic me his shoulders, I put
masking tape over part of the transom above the latch, then hit it with a fist
wrapped in a towel. The glass cracked without falling. I peeled back the tape with
the glass stuck to it except for a couple of shards that fell with a tinkle.

Seconds later I dropped inside
the lounge, landing sofdy as a cat. I listened for a couple of heartbeats; then
I unlocked the door for Jerry to enter. The rainstorm covered for us. Jerry had
a Roadmaster Buick. We had taken out the back seats and filled every inch of
space with cases of whiskey. I also found a shotgun and a few other things
worth money. In the desk was a checkbook: I tore out several pages at the back
and returned it to the drawer. From a pawn shop I could get a check protector
machine. I figured the bar owner might not notice checks missing from the rear.

A Hollywood club owner was
waiting for the whiskey. We unloaded it into the back door on a wet Sunday afternoon,
and the next morning I took the other stuff to a fence who owned a small car
wash on Venice Boulevard a mile from downtown Los Angeles. While we were
negotiating prices his telephone rang. The fence answered it and his side of
the conversation consisted of grunts and monosyllables: "uh uh . . . yeah
. . . uh huh . . . yeah. Right." Then he said: "Tell this guy."
He handed the telephone to me.

"What's up?" I said.

"Look here," said the
voice of a black man. "I'm down here on Western. I've got all kinds of
stuff out in the alley behind an electronics store. I can't get my car running
and I need a ride ..."

"Where are you?" It
was down Western in the 70s.

"I'm tellin' you, man,
it's a taxi job."

It would cost me nothing to
look, and I was intrigued. It was crazy, but I had a fascination with crazy
once upon a time.

On the corner of Western and a
cross street a skinny black man with the haggard face of a hooked junkie met
me. He had me go around the block and turn down the alley. Sure enough, covered
by a blanket in the parking space behind a shop was a pde of stereos and
television sets and a thousand LPs that sold for a dollar and a half apiece on
the hot goods market. It wasn't Fort Knox, but as he said, it was a taxi job.

I turned in and stopped, bending
down the license plate as I got out of the car, in case someone came by. We
began piling stuff into the Buick, which still had its back seat removed. In
less than two minutes we were rolling.

The fence bought everything
except a full-length women's coat. It was cashmere except for a mink hood,
collar and label. The label said
Bullock's.
The fence offered less than I knew I could get from a
cocktad waitress on Sunset Boulevard. Anyway, I preferred letting her have it.
In fact, if she was friendly enough, I might make her a gift.

My new crime partner, whose
name I didn't know, was simultaneously sweating and shivering and yawning.
"You're
sick,
huh?" I asked. The term "sick" on the street meant sick from
heroin withdrawals.

"Like a dog, man. You use,
man?"

I shook my head. "I'll
smoke some grass."

"Would you drive me to my
connection?"

On impulse, I agreed. Actually
I had to drive him to two connections. The first one wasn't home, the second
one wanted to know who I was. We were so far from a white area that we might as
well have been in Nairobi.

It was dark when I took him to
his home near Manchester and Western. It was a nice bungalow on a residential
street. I went inside to use the telephone. I wanted to tell a barmaid that I'd
be late, and not to make another date.

While I was in the house,
someone knocked on the door. My new crime partner's girlfriend went to answer.
I heard voices that had an unfriendly timbre. It was time for me to leave.
"I'm gone," I said to my associate, heading toward the front door.

The "newcomer" was
actually a pair of young black men. Both of them were 6'3" or more. As I
squeezed past and stepped outside into the darkness, I could feel their eyes
burning me.

Down the walk and out the gate.
My car was at the curb thirty feet away. As I reached it, I heard the gate
squeak. I looked back. The two men were following me. I got in and opened my
knife just as they arrived. One came around to the driver's side. Suddenly he
reached through the back window and grabbed the mink-trimmed coat. "That's
my mother's coat."

As soon as he spoke, I
understood the whole thing. My "crime partner" had burglarized
someone he knew, someone who suspected him as soon as the crime was discovered.

He reached to open the driver's
door. I swung the knife and he jumped back. I turned the key and punched the
gas. The big Buick fish-tailed and burned rubber.

I turned a corner; and another,
constantly looking in the mirror. I saw a pair of headlights. Were they
following me? I couldn't tell. I turned a corner and hit the gas.

A car behind me announced it
was the police with flashing lights on its roof.
Here we go again.
I pushed the accelerator to
the floor and the car jumped forward. The scream of a siren filled the LA
night.

I had to abandon the car. I was
out of my area and didn't know the streets. But first I had to get around two
corners — and then bale out. I could just imagine the chase. The radio was
being cleared, and the car in pursuit was giving them a running account:
"South on Budlong, turned west on Forty-third . . . South on . . ."
Other police cars were coming to join the chase.

I drove down a side street
toward a boulevard with a traffic light ahead. Both lanes were blocked with
waiting cars. I spun the wheel to the right, half jumped the curb and driveway
into a gas station, hit the brakes and swerved. My back end swung around and
smashed into a signpost. Over the curb onto the boulevard. Punched it. The
speedometer climbed. They weren't around the corner when I turned the next one.
Halfway down the block, I stomped the brakes. The tires screeched and the car
skidded to a halt. Before it stopped, I was out and running in a line across
the street and down a driveway beside a house. Behind me the police car came
around the corner. Had they seen me?

I sprinted through a back yard,
hands extended. Before everyone got washers and dryers for their laundry,
clotheslines in back yards were a menace to fugitives running through the
darkness. I'd once caught one across the forehead while running full tdt. My
feet kept going, and went right up into the air. I came down on my head and was
lucky that I didn't break my neck. The line cut me to the bone, and blood
flowed copiously down my face. That is how the face bleeds.

Through the back yard, over a
fence that teetered beneath me I ran. Out the next back yard, along a driveway
and across the next street, praying in a silent scream that another car didn't
turn the corner at that moment. It didn't. I had a chance if they spread out
like water in all directions from the site of the abandoned car.

I crossed a front yard and down
into the darkness of another driveway. It had a gate. As I reached for the
latch, a snarling Rottweder leaped up, snapping at my hand, its breath hot on
my face.
Shit!

Without a moment's hesitation,
I doubled back. I would go down the driveway next door. I came out and cut
across the lawn.

Across the street, from where
I'd come, appeared a dark uniform. "
Halt!'

I ran faster.

A shot sounded. The bullet
kicked up sparks on the driveway ahead of me. I tried to run faster. Ahead of
me another gate. Please, God, no dogs.

I tried to hurdle it. My foot
hooked. Down I went head first. My foot was still hooked. The bobbing
flashlight, followed a second later by a dark, looming figure. A 357 Magnum
leveled on me. "Don't
fuckin' move!"

Another dark uniformed figure,
panting hard, arrived. Lights in both houses were going on. One policeman was
trying to open the gate while the other held flashlight and pistol trained on
me. "Just stay right there."

A window went up. "What's
goin' on out there?" The voice had the telltale sound of the
African-American.

"Police business! Stay
inside!"

They got the gate open and the
handcuffs on; then began half pushing, half pulling me down the sidewalk. A
couple other cops arrived. They were pumped up and fairly vibrating from the
hot pursuit. One kicked at my stomach, but I managed to turn and raise my knee
enough to deflect it. "Ixnay . . . ixnay," said one policeman. I
remember it clearly because it was a term I hadn't heard since school.
Ixnay! What kinda shit is
that?
The
reason was the witnesses. Several of the neighbors had come onto their porches
to look. It was a middle-class black neighborhood.

An alley ran from street to
street so they didn't have to take me all the way around the block. Now there
were four cops and two more came charging down the alley from the other side,
crashing into me like charging linebackers. "Okay, sonofabitch! We'll
teach you to run, fuckhead . . . shit for brains bastard ..."

It has always been
de rigueur
for cops to kick some ass at
the end of a chase. It's all part of the game. I expected it and felt no
indignation; in fact I was a littlegrateful because half a dozen were trying to
get in their licks. A cluster of bodies rolled down the alley to the next
street where several police cars sat with lights flashing. The Buick filled the
middle of the streetwith the driver's door still open. A crowd of neighbors was
at the curb. They were all black, and over the other noises I heard a voice say
in surprise: "It's a white man! Goddamn!"

I was shoved into the back of a
police car. A sergeant came over and opened the door. They had taken my wallet.
He was holding up the three driver's licenses in three different names from
three different states. "What's your name?"

"I'm John McCone, CIA. I
tried to warn them—"

"Warn them? About
what?"

"In '36 I told them the
Japanese were going to bomb Pearl Harbor."

"What the fuck have you
been taking?"

"Will you get me to
Washington?"

Another policeman came over and
peered in. "He's loaded on something. Fucker thinks he's in the CIA."

"Who cares if he's the
Queen of May. Let's book him so we can go home."

They took me to the infamous 77
^th
Street precinct house, where I was the first white man they'd booked in two
years. They beat on me a whde for being white. By now I was into it. When they
booked me, I signed the booking card as Marty Cagle, Lt, USNR and gave my
birthday as 1905. The booking officer showed it to the Sergeant. "Put it
down. Who cares?" They booked me as "John Doe #1."

They threw me in a cell. I was
a fugitive and a parole violator, ineligible for bad. They were going to have
to drag me back to prison. There would be skid marks all the way up the
highway. They'd wondered if I was crazy since I was ten years old so I decided
now I would be nutty as a fruitcake. Let the games begin. The bravado covered
an inner emptiness bordering utter despair.

One would assume that a situation such as this would
have me climbing the walls. Instead an all-powerful drowsiness washed over me.
Sleep is an escape from depression. I slept with the stink of the jail mattress
in my nose.