Death Sentence

12

The number 94 bus had a sickly green two-tone paint job. Paul put the car in drive and followed the bus north on California Avenue into the barrio. It reminded him of stretches of the Borough of Queens: commercial shabbiness and nondescript duplex houses. Strong winds buffeted and ripped the racing clouds; the temperature had been dropping all morning and the car radio trumpeted alarums of snow.

Crubb left the bus at Chicago Avenue and walked east on it, shoulders high, boots clicking angrily. Paul waited double-parked and gave him a one-block lead; then he let the car creep forward without feeding any gas. Traffic swished past him in the outside lane.

Friday night Crubb had muffed his hit and come up empty. He’d shown no fear in the courtroom, only a bored arrogance; the hearing and the setting of bail were a slap on the wrist and probably had annoyed and irritated Crubb but certainly they hadn’t deterred him. The predator was still hungry.

Crubb entered a pizza café, moving purposefully — he wasn’t merely looking for a place to eat. Paul waited in a bus stop. Within a few minutes Crubb reappeared with two companions. They looked like two of the men in the bunch Crubb had been with when Paul had first seen him in Old Town.

The three of them walked, bouncing heel-and-toe, to Western Avenue where they waited for the northbound bus and got aboard it.

He gave the bus several blocks’ lead. When it discharged Crubb and his companions he had no trouble recognizing them at the distance; by the time he reached the corner they had walked a block into a neighborhood of small private houses and low brick apartment buildings. Paul glanced at them and drove a block farther along Western, then made the right turn and went two blocks and turned right again. When he parked in the middle of the block he saw the three men walk across the intersection in front of him. None of them looked his way. They had something in mind: they were looking for something, scanning the houses as they walked. Paul locked the car and walked to the corner and watched from there, staying next to the building where he could curl back out of sight if one of them looked over his shoulder.

Crubb was talking and the performance involved a great deal of body expression: his shoulders and arms and hands moved in great balletic patterns; with his friends he was a different creature from the prisoner in the courtroom. From a block away it was impossible to tell what he was talking about but his gestures expressed petulant complaint. Possibly he was expounding on the injustice of his arrest.

They passed a small apartment building without a glance; they were studying the detached houses across the road. One of the men passed something heavy from his coat pocket to Crubb — perhaps a tool, perhaps a weapon. Crubb pushed it under his tight leather coat and held it there, one hand inside the lapel.

Paul stayed where he was; it was as good a vantage point as any, at least until they went a block or two farther. There were no other pedestrians on the street; a plumber’s van went by but when it was gone nothing else moved in the street except Crubb and his two friends.

They were looking at the garages, Paul discovered. Looking for an empty one?

Then as if on random impulse they turned the corner and went out of sight. Paul hurried down the street.

It began to snow: large slow flakes. Paul turned his collar up. When he reached the corner he walked straight across the intersection, merely glancing both ways as if to make sure there was no traffic. The three men were jive-walking down the sidewalk peering at garages; one of them glanced back and Paul quickly looked the other way and kept walking until he’d interposed the corner house between him and their line of sight. Then he doubled back and peered carefully around the edge of the house.

The two companions stopped and Crubb walked up a driveway and cupped both hands to look through a window into a closed two-car garage. He shook his head and rejoined the others and they moved on.

Paul was sure of it now. They were looking for an empty garage: a sign that no one was home.

They were walking away from him but he saw Crubb’s head turn — an instinctive wariness toward the backtrail. Paul swiveled back out of sight before Crubb had a chance to see him. He gave it a few seconds and then reconnoi-. tered cautiously.

They had nearly reached the end of the block. Crubb poked a finger toward a house on the near side of the street; it was set back and Paul couldn’t see it. All three of them crossed the street.

There was only one thing to do. He went back across the intersection, retracing his own path. None of them looked his way; they were intent on the house. From the south corner he could see the edge of it and the garage into which Crubb was peering. Crubb made a quick hand motion and all three men disappeared into the passage between houses; the third man paused to look both ways and Paul faded back. When he looked out again they were gone from sight. They’d be checking out the house before breaking into it.

Paul crossed the intersection a third time and turned left and walked toward the house, looking for a place to post himself and ambush them when they emerged with their loot. On his palms the cold dampness of fear was an old familiar companion.