I smiled up at him. “Your mother bats cleanup at a two-dollar whorehouse.”
He slapped my face. I spat blood at him and said, “And you’re ugly.”
He slapped me again; when his arm followed through I saw the handle of an automatic sticking out of his right pants pocket. I made my voice drip with contempt: “You hit like a girl. Cora could take you easy.”
His next shot was full force. I sneered through bloody lips and said, “You queer? Only nancy boys slap like that.”
A one-two set hit me in the jaw and neck, and I knew it was now or never. Slurring my words like a punch-drunk pug, I said, “Let me up. Let me up and I’ll fight you man-to-man. Let me up.”
Lizard took a penknife from his pocket and cut the rope that bound my arms to my sides. I tried to move my hands, but they were jelly. My battered legs had some feeling in them, so I rolled over and up onto my knees. Lizard had backed off into a chump’s idea of a boxing stance and was firing roundhouse lefts and rights at the living room air. Cora was sitting on the couch, wiping angry tears from her cheeks. Deep breathing and lolling my torso like a hophead, I stalled for time, waiting for feeling to return to my hands.
“Get up, shitbird!”
My fingers still wouldn’t move.
“I said get up!”
Still no movement.
Lizard came forward on the balls of his feet, feinting and shadowboxing. My wrists started to buzz with blood, and I began to get unprofessionally angry, like I was a rookie heavy, not a thirtyone-year-old cop. Lizard hit me twice, left, right, open-handed. In a split second he became Jimmy Bivins, and I zoomed back to the ninth round at the Legion in ’37. Dropping my left shoulder, I sent out a right lead, then pulled it and left-hooked him to the breadbasket. Bivins gasped and bent forward; I stepped backward for swinging room. Then Bivins was Lizard going for his piece, and I snapped to where I really was.
We drew at the same time. Lizard’s first shot went above my head, shattering a window behind me; mine, slowed by my awkward rear pull, slammed into the far wall. Recoil spun us both around, and before Lizard had time to aim I threw myself to the floor and rolled to the side like a carpet-eating dervish. Three shots cut the air where I had been standing a second before, and I extended my gun arm upward, braced my wrist, and emptied my snub-nose at Lizard’s chest. He was blasted backward, and through the shots’ echoes I heard Cora scream long and shrill.
I stumbled over to Lizard. He was on his way out, bleeding from three holes, unable to work the trigger of the .45. He got up the juice to give me a feeble middle-finger farewell, and when the bird was in midair I stepped on his heart and pushed down, squeezing the rest of his life out in a big arterial burst. When he finished twitching, I turned my attention to Cora, who was standing by the couch, putting out another shriek.
I stifled the noise by pinning her neck to the wall and hissing, “Questions and answers. Tell me what I want to know and you walk, fuck with me and I find dope in your purse and tell the DA you’ve been selling it to white nursery-school kids.” I let up on my grip. “First question. Where’s my car?”
Cora rubbed her neck. I could feel the obscenities stacking up on her tongue, itching to be hurled. All her rage went into her eyes as she said, “Out back. The garage.”
“Have Simpkins and the stiff been clouting the liquor stores in West Adams?”
Cora stared at the floor and nodded, “Yes.” Looking up, her eyes were filled with the self-disgust of the freshly turned stoolie. I said, “McCarver the union guy thought up the train heist?”
Another affirmative nod.
Deciding not to mention Billy Boyle’s probable presence on the train, I said, “Who’s bankrolling? Buying the guns and uniforms?”