The New Black Mask Quarterly (No 2)

Joe Gores Excerpt from Come Morning

Joe Gores was the first writer to win Edgar Allan Poe awards in three categories: for the best first mystery novel, A Time of Predators, in 1969; for the best mystery story, “Goodbye, Pops” in 1969; and for the best episode in a television dramatic series, “No Immunity for Murder” on Kojak, in 1975. Before turning to a literary career, Gores worked at what he regards as the related occupation of private investigator: “A detective gets in and digs around in the garbage of people’s lives. A novelist invents people and then digs around in their garbage. They are very similar.”

Gores is currently working on a new novel and episodic television scripts. Come Morning, the novel from which this excerpt is taken, will be published in spring 1986 by the Mysterious Press.

When Runyan was captured eight years before, the $2,000,000 in diamonds he stole were not recovered. As a result, upon his parole from San Quentin, he finds his freedom and his life threatened on every side: by the insurance investigator who arranged his parole, by mysterious former “partners” who want their cut, by an unknown killer who wants him dead.

He plans to get the diamonds from where he hid them and buy his way out. But they are gone. Now his only hope is to pull another robbery — something he swore never to do again — and use the proceeds to stay alive.

“Brother Blood’s out making a coke buy,” said Taps. He was a handsome ebony man of about thirty-three, with some of Eddie Murphy’s sly, jive-ass manner. “You got one hour for sure, maybe more.”

It was 1:21 in the morning. As they passed the Sunset Boulevard exit of the San Diego Freeway, Grace got the rented Cougar into the right lane. Traffic was late-night fast but light. Louise was beside her in the front seat; Taps and Runyan were in the back. The night was clear and dark and crisp.

“An hour’s enough.” Runyan fought to keep irritation out of his voice. Pregame tension.

“I hear you talkin’.” Tension strummed Taps’s voice also.

They must have gone over the plan in broad strokes a hundred, two hundred times in San Quentin, a fantasy scheme to pass a few of the endless prison hours. Now it was happening.

Grace took the Wilshire Boulevard exit, following the off ramp down and around under the freeway past the huge sterile landscaped area of the Los Angeles Veterans Administration. She went east on Wilshire.

They passed the anachronistic one-story, red-roofed Ships Restaurant in Westwood, a gaudy soft palate for the new high-rise condo teeth that lined Wilshire like multimillion-dollar inlays; a half-mile beyond, Grace turned off at the fringes of the ultraprivate L.A. Country Club.

She turned again, then slowed to crawl past a pair of high-rise condos that took up an entire block. She was a very beautiful black woman in her twenties who wore her hair natural and very short.

“Brother Blood’s penthouse is in the one on the right.”

“You go in the one on the left,” added Taps unnecessarily. “Not so much security.”

Runyan didn’t say anything at all. He wished Taps hadn’t come up with that idea about not leaving the penthouse with the bonds. He desperately wanted it not to mean the obvious but knew he was going to have to find out the hard way. He was five years older than Taps, with shiny black prison-chopped hair and piercing blue eyes.

Grace turned right at the next corner, then right again and stopped. They were now around behind the buildings. Runyan took a deep silent breath, gripped his black nylon stuff bag, and opened his door.

“Twelve minutes,” he told the back of Grace’s head as he stepped out into the street.

Without turning, she said, “I’ll be ready.”

Runyan closed his door without slamming it, went around behind the back of the waiting car to the curb side. Although the street was residential-area deserted, he could hear occasional cars on Wilshire two blocks away.

Louise reached a hand out of her window. When he took it her skin was warm, almost hot, as if she were slightly feverish. She was twenty-nine, the most beautiful woman Runyan had ever known, with shoulder-length black hair and a sensual face.

“Eight years,” Runyan said with a nervous grin. Eight years in the belly of the beast.

“Eight years better,” said Louise. Her wide-set emerald eyes, which seemed to glow with an inner light, caught and held his gaze.

Runyan nodded, suddenly jaunty; his jitters had disappeared when she had spoken. Taps stuck his head and one arm out of the rear window; the manicured nail of his long brown forefinger made tiny ticking noises against the crystal of his watch.

“The power goes off fifteen minutes after Grace goes in. Then you got ninety seconds to get on and off the cable, or—”

“Or I fry,” said Runyan.

“And remember Brother Blood owns the damn building, so when you’ve made the switch—”

“I know what to do,” Runyan said flatly.

Grace drove aimlessly to kill the minutes between went in. Taps leaned his forearms on the back of the front seat, his head behind and between those of the two women in front of him.

“We got a couple minutes for insurance. Swing by the dealer’s an’ make sure Brother Blood is where he’s s’pozed to be.”

They crossed Beverly Glen on Lindbrook, and near Holmby drove by a long black Mercedes limo with a middle-aged black chauffeur leaning against the front fender and smoking a fat brown cigar.

“Yeah!” exclaimed Taps. “We’re on!”

Grace drove the Cougar back the way she had come and stopped on a side street a block from the condos. Taps got out; he wore work clothes and a Dodgers souvenir baseball cap. He carried an electrician’s black metal toolbox.

“You got five minutes,” he warned Grace.

“I be late, shugah,” she drawled, “you fire my ass.”

Taps watched the car drive away. It was all expensive homes here, in the multi-hundred-thousand-dollar range. Pool man on Mondays, wetback Mexican gardeners on Wednesdays, private school for the kids, vacation in Puerto Vallarta with Europe every third year. Well, his turn now.

He walked quickly back to a manhole cover flush with the concrete, took a stubby wrecking bar out from under his windbreaker, inserted the bent end into the socket, and heaved the cover aside. It grated loudly in the still night air. He sat down on the edge, found the ladder with his toes, shot another look around, then went down out of sight. The cover grated back, clanging dully into place. The street was deserted again.

Grace had parked the Cougar in mid-block so that it wasn’t really in front of either high rise. Louise, leaned back against the locked door on her side of the car, watched Grace use the tipped-down rearview mirror to make herself into a whore. Grace caught her eye in the mirror and winked.

“Your man’s gonna be just fine, honey.”

“I thought you didn’t like him,” said Louise coldly.

“Said he was trouble.”

From a handbag big enough to hold an UZI machine gun, Grace took purple three-inch spikes and a bright purple silk scarf. She cinched the scarf tight around her middle, leaving the ends hanging over one hip. Then she jerked the zipper of her shimmery red jumpsuit down almost to her navel.

“I like you and him together, shugah,” she drawled. “You go by your gut feelin’ with a man, you don’t never be wrong.”

She wore no brassiere; her breasts were magnificent, bared almost to the edge of the areolas, but she frowned down at them, then began rolling her nipples between her fingers and thumbs until they stood out boldly against the thin satin material.

Finally she looked over at Louise. “How do I look?”

“Like a two-dollar quickie on the back seat.”

Grace winked again. “You got it, shugah.”

She opened her door and got out. Louise slid over under the wheel. She had always considered herself quite sophisticated; Grace made her feel young and naive as a virgin.

She called, “Good luck.”

Grace turned and gave her a street urchin’s grin and a thumbs-up signal, then cut at an angle across the carefully barbered and lit lawn toward the front entrance of the condo that did not have Brother Blood’s penthouse perched on top of it.

Picking any lock takes a certain amount of time and a great deal of skill. It is not the simple matter that television would have us believe. Nobody ever picked a lock with one pick; at the outset a tension tool — an L-shaped piece of spring steel — must be inserted into the keyhole and turned slightly so that as you raise each pin to its shear line, the tension will keep it from falling back down into the core.

Runyan had spent 2.5 minutes trying to “rake” the lock of the basement rear service entrance of the high rise — the quick and easy way that sometimes works in a matter of seconds — then had gotten serious: another 7.55 minutes with his tension tool and a curved-tip pick before the lock finally yielded.

He made no move to open the door, instead held it just fractionally ajar; he knew that a closed-circuit TV scanning camera was covering the inside of it. He checked the luminous dial of his watch: less than a minute to go.

Emery Samnic was forty-seven years old, had been married to the same woman for twenty-six years, and despite this — or because of it — had his sexual fantasies like any other man. For five nights a week he wore the uniform of a security guard and sat behind the security desk in the high-rise lobby.

It was good duty. Tipped back in his swivel chair, he had only to turn his head to examine the bank of TV-screen monitors set against the back of the security cubicle. The monitors covered the condo’s entrances, doorways, corridors, and the interiors of the elevators. In one a guard walked a hallway; the others showed nothing at all.

A beautiful black woman appeared in the front-entrance monitor to push the night buzzer. It sounded behind Emery’s desk. She waited with a hip thrust out provocatively, her big gaudy handbag tucked under one arm, tapping a three-inch spike against the pavement, a thin brown cigar between her lips.

There was no one else with her, but Emery stood up and loosened the Smith & Wesson .38 police special in his belt holster before pushing the button to release the door catch.

On the screen, the black woman opened the door and disappeared. The real Grace, in living color, simultaneously came across the lobby toward his desk, her heels clop-clopping on the terrazzo, everything moving the way women’s bodies moved in his fantasies. Her expression was go-to-hell, and she obviously wore no bra or panties under the clinging red jumpsuit.

Emery cleared his throat and said, “This isn’t your sort of place, sister.”

Grace put her elbows on his counter, thrusting out her butt and languidly blowing smoke in his face.

“I is invited, honey.” She had a slightly husky voice.

She could see past Emery’s thick waist to the basement monitor. Runyan opened the loading door and entered boldly. She leaned closer yet, giving Emery the news all the way to her navel. As Runyan walked over to the freight elevator and pushed the button, Grace pointed at the house phone with a very long synthetic purple nail.

“Why don’t you phone up the man and find out? Apartment... two three seven.”

What sort of business would the Rotzels have with this sort of woman at almost two in the morning? The old man was a deacon of the Baptist church, for Pete’s sake.

“This time of night...” Emery began, letting it hang.

Grace moved her cleavage closer; across the lobby, the elevator indicator glowed as the cage descended to Runyan.

“It was a urgent phone call, shugah,” she said. “I swear I think that man was watching a dirty movie, and he’s got his motor running, you know what I mean...”

Emery knew what she meant: he could feel his dork pushing out against the heavy twill uniform pants. Jesus, what would it be like to put the old banana into something like that?

He unconsciously blew out a deep breath and picked up the house phone and tapped out two three seven. On the monitors, the elevator door opened and Runyan stepped through, disappearing from the basement screen to be instantly picked up by the adjacent elevator camera. Grace could hear an angry squawking voice on the phone. Hurry, Runyan, damn you!

Emery said unhappily into the phone, “This is Emery on the lobby desk downstairs. I’m sorry to disturb you, sir, but there’s a young lady here who says—” He broke off to listen to more squawks, finally said, “I know what time it is, sir, I surely do, but she says you wanted—”

Grace, watching Runyan spring up and knock open the elevator ceiling trap, reached across the counter to grab the phone out of Emery’s hand.

“Lemme talk to him,” she said, then said into the phone, “Listen, buster, you phone up an say you needs an around the world, bad. Now what’s this shit about—”

“Who is this?” demanded a high scratchy man’s voice. “How dare you use language like that to me? My wife and I are Christian people who—”

“So you got your old lady there; so I takes care of her too,” said Grace, winking at the openmouthed Emery. “All it’ll cost you is an extra fifty—”

“I’m going to call the police and report you!” shrieked the man on the phone. On the monitor, Runyan was tossing his stuff bag up through the ceiling trap. In front of her, Emery was starting to turn toward the monitors. Grace quickly thrust the phone back into his hands.

“Man wanta talk to you.”

On the monitor, Runyan crouched for his leap.

On the phone, the confused Emery said, “I... I’m real sorry, Mr. Rotzel, I didn’t know she was going to—”

“Rotzel?”

Grace reached over and broke the connection in midword. Behind Emery, Runyan leaped up and grabbed the edges of the trap.

“Rotzel ain’t the name of the dude phone up! What’s this here address?”

“Uh... twelve forty-two Bonington—”

“Sheeit, shugah, I got the wrong building!”

Grace winked at Emery and swiveled her way toward the door, her exaggerated hip swing holding his lusting eyes long enough for Runyan to disappear through the trap in the elevator ceiling. As the door closed behind Grace, Emery wiped the sheen of sweat from his forehead and whirled belatedly to check the monitors. Everything was serene, nothing moving anywhere.

Standing on the roof of the elevator cage, Runyan took a pair of odd-looking clamplike things called Jumar ascenders from his black nylon stuff bag and fitted them to the cable about eighteen inches apart. They had rope slings that hung about three feet below them. The clock was really running now. Runyan put his feet in the slings and, stuff bag clipped to his belt, began walking himself up the cable.

Under the street two blocks away. Taps Turner was moving cautiously along one of the utility access tunnels by the light of a tiny powerful halogen-bulb flashlight. He set down his electrician’s kit in front of a switch box bolted to one wall and used his pry bar to break the padlock hasp. Inside the hinged cover were rows of engaged knife switches. He began to compare the interior layout of the box with a wiring diagram, humming a Lionel Richie love ballad softly under his breath.

Louise drove the Cougar while, beside her, Grace wiped the makeup off her face with a wad of Kleenex. Both women were laughing at her tale of Emery’s wandering eyes and bulging pants.

In the elevator shaft, Runyan grunted his way upward. The air was close and smelled of hot metal and lubricating oil. Runyan’s movements were crisp, executed without hesitation. He had to be exact because he had no “protection” in place — he was working without a safety line. The strength of his grip on the Jumars and the sureness of his feet in the slings were his only insurance against falling as he practiced this mild form of... what? Masochism? Maybe self-abuse. His body was sure feeling abused as he used the Jumars to climb the cable.

Endlessly.

He rested a moment, panting, tipped his head back to look up into the dimness of the shaft. The big wheels over which the cables ran still seemed a long way up.

He went into the fugue state he had perfected while practicing gymnastics at Q, trying to pass the endless hours of confinement. One of the prison survival skills you never heard about was infinite patience. He had learned it.

What was Louise doing right now? He checked his watch. Still driving around; she wouldn’t park the car near the other condo’s underground-garage entrance until about five minutes before he was scheduled to be coming out.

He shoved a Jumar up the cable, and it rapped against the rim of the grooved wheel over which the cable passed.

He’d made it!

Runyan grabbed the nearest spoke of the wheel, made sure of his grip, then carefully disengaged his feet from the Jumar slings to swing his legs up and hook them around the wheel rim.

Hanging backward under it like a sloth under a branch, he removed the Jumars from the cable with his free hand, clipped them to carabiners threaded on his belt. Then he merely climbed the spokes of the massive wheel so he could step onto the metal grid-work service platform.

The housing door, as on the diagram he had studied, opened out onto the blacktopped roof of the building. He stopped for a few moments, massaging tautness from his arms while gulping fresh night air. Still on time, he negotiated the mini-obstacle course of capped chimneys and vents toward the edge of the building that faced the twin high rise a hundred feet away.

On the inside of the four-foot-high concrete parapet was a sign held to the wall with cement screws: DANGER — HIGH TENSION. He bent across the top of the low wall to look down.

Bingo. A very thick black power cable ran along the outside of the building five feet below, did a right angle through a terminal box, and stretched away into the darkness toward Brother Blood’s building. Right where it was supposed to be.

Runyan checked his watch again, unclipped the stuff bag from his belt, set it on the roof, and took out one of the climbers’ lights known as break-’em-shake-’ems. He bent it into a horseshoe around his neck; it glowed with a soft cool green light like Darth Vader’s sword. Break-’em-shake-’ems left the hands free, a vital factor in rock climbing.

He zipped the bag, clipped it back on the belt, and undipped his Jumars. He put them on the top of the parapet, then jumped up so he was sitting on it between them, facing in.

He checked his watch again. One minute before two A.M.

Down in the utility tunnel below the street, Taps checked his watch: its digital number showed 1:59:07 and:08 and:09.

Runyan had edged himself back across the top of the wall until his butt was hanging off into space. This was the tricky part. He now was supported only by his hands gripping the outside angle of the top and the outer wall, and by his heels hooked over the inside edge.

Runyan hyperventilated, focusing his energies to that white-hot physical point that perhaps only athletes know, then let his knees slowly bend, arching his body back and down. Now only his heels hooked over that inner edge, and his calves along the top of the wall supported his body; he was hanging face-out, upside down above the high-tension cable terminal.

He groped above him on top of the parapet for one of the Jumars, found it, brought it slowly down in front of his face. If he should drop one of them now, it was all over.

In the tunnel, Taps’s glowing watch digits read 1:59:58 and:59 and 2:00:00, and his hands, in place on two of the knife switches, pulled them down to disengage them.

In the Cougar, Louise was just turning into the block where the high rises were when all the lights went out except the streetlights. She grabbed Grace’s arm in her excitement.

“It’s happenin,’ baby, it’s happenin’!” responded Grace in a voice almost guttural with tension.

Hanging upside down by the green glow of his break-’em-shake-’em, supported by his calves and heels on the parapet, Runyan jammed the first Jumar into place, squeezing it down so the brake bit into the high-tension core of the cable with its relentless grip. He knew that if the power had not been cut, he already would have been just smoking meat.

He found the second Jumar, fixed it in place. In his head, the seconds were ticking away. There were only ninety of them before Taps reengaged the knife switches.

He gripped the Jumars with his iron hands and kicked off the building. His body swung out and down and around, his arms and hands taking the full shocking jolt of his weight as he jerked up under the cable. He was now hanging from the Jumars only by his grip, which already had loosened the brakes so he was sliding down the cable toward Brother Blood’s building.

Emery skittered his flashlight beam around a lobby lit only by the streetlights outside. Over by the elevators a second guard’s flash danced and probed.

“It isn’t just us, Emery,” he called.

Emery felt a great weight lift off him. He had been afraid it might somehow have something to do with that black hooker who had showed up. “Okay, then, I’ll call Water and Power,” he said.

Runyan, still lit only by his break-’em-shake-’em, walked the Jumars quickly up the cable toward the junction box on Brother Blood’s building, panting with the nonstop effort as the seconds exploded in his brain. At the box he reached over, a hand at a time, to grab the bare power cable. Then he kipped himself up into a full press-out. He got a foot up onto the cable, a knee, was balancing on the wire, grabbed the edge of the parapet, and jerked his feet up off the cable.

There were crackling bursts of white light as the Jumars, scorched and smoking, fell away. The lights flickered on in the buildings as he muscled himself up onto the wall and dropped over onto the roof.

He ran lightly across a patio landscaped with expensive potted greenery and shrubs to the sliding glass doors to the penthouse. It looked like a lock that might be reasonable about raking. Since the penthouse was supposedly the only way to the roof, he didn’t have to worry about alarms.

Louise had pulled over to the curb and stopped when the lights had gone out. Now, ninety seconds later, they were back on again. She whirled on Grace.

“Did he make it? Did he?”

“I didn’t see no falling bodies,” smiled Grace. “Relax, shugah. That man of yours, he’s a survivor.” She dug an elbow into Louise’s ribs. “Lets get moving again, baby. Don’t wanta draw no po-leece before Taps can get out of that manhole.”

With a thrust of his powerful shoulders, Taps heaved the manhole cover aside. He grabbed the tool kit from where it was wedged between him and the ladder, set it on the street, then leaped nimbly up on the pavement himself. He kicked the manhole cover, clanging, back into place, ran to the sidewalk.

He had taken only half a dozen jaunty and unconcerned steps when a Power and Water truck came rumbling around the corner and stopped beside the manhole. The uniformed workmen who got out never even glanced his way.

Runyan slid open one of the glass doors, entered, shut and locked it carefully behind him, then pushed his way through the drapes into the spacious living room. The dim glow of his break-’em-shake-’em showed it was sumptuous and decorator perfect.

The study also was a decorator’s dream of a study: thick carpets, minicomputer and letter-quality printer, massive hardwood desk, overstuffed leather executive’s swivel chair that looked ready to fly, waist-to-ceiling bookshelves behind the desk, silver-edged trophy plaques on the walls.

“Coke-Dealer-of-the-Year Award,” muttered Runyan. He shut the door and returned his break-’em-shake-’em to the stuff bag after turning on the lights. His hour was almost up.

The telephone was a futuristic model with memory; on one side of it was a black oblong box with buttons on it, on the other a computer modem cradle for the receiver. It was the key to the safe, but here Taps’s intelligence was vague. Runyan pushed the top button on the black box. The stereo deck started to play. He pushed it again. The stereo stopped.

Second button. The maple doors slid open on the huge console TV, and the set switched on. Again. Off.

Third. Lights on and off.

Fourth. Window blinds.

When Runyan pushed the fifth button, a panel of the bookshelves, books and all, swung open to reveal a small wall safe of hardened cadmium steel. Runyan tried the swing handle. Locked. He went back to the desk and pushed the final button. Nothing happened. Again. The safe was still locked.

How would the mind of a Brother Blood work? Intricate mind. Liked games. Liked gadgets. A sly and tricky dude...

He picked up the receiver and fitted it into the computer modem. Then he punched the final button again. Nothing. He flicked the black on-off rocker switch on the back of the computer, tried again. The door of the safe popped open an inch.

Yeah. The games people play. Here’s to you. Brother Blood. He switched off the computer and took from the stuff bag the orderly stacks of ornately scrolled counterfeit bearer bonds. Inside the safe were exactly similar stacks of genuine bearer bonds with the same sequenced serial numbers. He put these stacks on the far end of the desk. It would be disastrous to mix them up.

Taps cut off from the sidewalk between bushes to the rear wall of Brother Blood’s building. He had just set down his electrician’s box when a thin nylon cord set down Runyan’s black nylon stuff bag a dozen feet away. Taps slashed the cord with his pocketknife and walked away with the bag, not glancing back, not bothering with his tool kit.

At the corner was one of the open pay phones without a booth. He looked quickly, almost guiltily around, then slotted his dimes and tapped out a seven-digit local number.

“Yeah,” he said into the phone. “I want to talk with Brother Blood. Tell him Taps Turner is calling.”

When Louise turned the corner, Taps was at the open-style booth, talking and gesturing earnestly on the pay phone. Beside her, Grace drew in a sharp breath.

“That rotten son of a bitch! Stop the car!”

She was out before it stopped moving, leaving her door hanging open and Louise gaping after her, open-mouthed, as she ran across the grass strip toward the phone where Taps was just saying, “Okay, that be cool...”

Grace snatched the receiver out of his hand and slammed it back onto the hooks. He backhanded her across the face, yelping in astonishment, “You crazy, woman? Whuffo you—”

Grace was yelling, “He saved your life! You owe him!”

He grabbed her by the arms and started shaking her, barely aware of Louise’s pale shocked face framed in the open car door a few yards away.

“We got the bonds, all of ’em!” Seeing some of the wildness fading from her eyes, he gingerly released his grip on Grace’s arms. In a quieter voice, he said, “Wasn’t no way we could do that except make sure he couldn’t ever come back at us.”

“You did it ’cause he saved your ass in prison,” said Grace in a low, intense voice. “There ain’t a livin’ soul in this world you’d do that for, an’ you can’t stand thinkin’ about it.” She gave a harsh laugh. “And now Brother Blood’s gonna take you down, nigger.”

Taps hesitated when, in the background, their car suddenly fishtailed away, so abruptly that Grace’s open door slammed shut. He felt sudden fear. Grace wasn’t hardly ever wrong; and now the white bitch Runyan had brought along had cut out with their car, stranding them. But he said, “You... you’re crazy, woman.”

“Don’t you see it yet?” she asked in an almost tired voice. “Brother Blood, he’s gonna start wonderin’, How that man know to call me at the dealer’s unless he was in on it an’ just chicken out at the last minute?” Over his protestations, she continued, “It’s what you’d think, was you. Ain’t Brother Blood gonna be any different.” She shook her head and turned away from him. “I ain’t hangin’ around to die with no boot dumb as you.”

Taps let her get almost to the sidewalk before he called after her, “But I got the bonds, baby!”

She turned to look at him almost with pity. “You got shit. Taps. You think Runyan didn’t know you planned to cross him when you asked he th’ow those bonds down to you?”

She trudged away, her steps tapping out a jaunty staccato in marked contrast to the slump of her shoulders. Taps wanted to run after her, grab her, make it right. But he had to know about this first. He ripped open the black stuff bag with his switchblade in a frenzy of anticipation and dread. It was full of newspapers folded to the approximate size of bearer bonds.

Runyan stepped into Brother Blood’s private elevator and pushed the GARAGE button next to the LOBBY and PENTHOUSE buttons. Tight security. He touched the bulky oblong under his sweater. If Taps was waiting for him across the street from the garage entrance, then everything was straight; if not, yet another friend had betrayed him. He was running out of people who hadn’t tried it, one way or another. Even Louise...

Ashcan that. It was all in the past. They were together now for the long run; they could depend on each other for anything. In five minutes it would all be over.

Taps Turner had a terminal case of the stupids, thought Brother Blood. Planning to steal the bond stash — with a white dude, yet! — and then chickening out and thinking he’d be dumb enough to swallow the con about stumbling across the robbery! No, Taps was dog meat right now; he just didn’t know it yet.

Brother Blood was a tall lean bald hollow-eyed man, impeccably dressed in a three-piece midnight blue suit and mirror-shined black oxfords. He leaned forward to peer out of the windshield past the beefy shoulder of his bodyguard as the black stretch limo was whispering down the deserted street beside his apartment building.

They turned the corner. The driver pushed the remote electronic-eye activator. Fifty yards away, the heavy steel-mesh gate was rattling upward. As it did, a lean dark-haired white man in black slacks and black sweater emerged from the garage, walking quickly. His hands were empty, but Brother Blood’s practiced, suspicious eyes picked out the ex-con.

“That’s him,” he said to his driver. “Run him down.”

Much too late, Runyan heard the almost silent rush of the limo coming at him. Even as he hurled himself desperately to the side, he knew he would be dead before he hit the concrete.

That was when Louise, seat-belted in and with the accelerator floored, rammed her car into the rear fender of the limo. The impact knocked its rear sideways just enough to jerk its nose aside the necessary fraction to miss Runyan as he landed, tucked, rolled, and came up running.

Not away. At. He was aware with an edge of his consciousness that Louise’s car, slewed around by the impact, had spun broadside into a power pole on the other side of the still-deserted street. No fire, no explosion, and she was trying to open her sprung door: probably unhurt. She had not only saved his life; she had bought him just enough time.

Since the windshield was bulletproof glass, the bodyguard, a thickset black gorilla with wary eyes, already had his door open and his head and arm stuck out to fire at Runyan. But Runyan was high in the air; a piston-drive snap of both legs kicked the door shut again.

The bodyguard slumped down halfway out of the car, his skull creased on one side by the edge of the door, on the other by the edge of the frame. Brother Blood, halfway out of the back door, looked up into the black eye of his bodyguard’s gun in Runyan’s hand. He threw his arms up and wide; Brother Blood was a survivor too. Runyan gestured him away from the car and up against the wall of the building with movements of the heavy-caliber automatic.

“I won’t forget this,” he said in a soft, deadly voice.

“Don’t,” said Runyan as if he didn’t care one way or the other. He swung the gun toward the chauffeur, who was trying to fit himself under the dash like a stereo.

“I... I just drive, sir,” the chauffeur said quickly.

Runyan gestured again. “Not anymore. Not tonight.”

The chauffeur opened the door on his side and scuttled out on his hands and knees, then came erect and backed away into the center of the street, arms high, face gleaming with an earnest sweat of nonviolent intentions.

Louise had managed to kick open her car door. She ran across the street to the limo and slid in under the steering wheel. Runyan heaved the unconscious bodyguard out of the way so he could get in beside her.

“I think we probably could leave,” he said mildly.