Airtight Willie & Me Read Free Page B

speed of a gazelle.
    I pistoned south on Indiana Avenue. Before I turned at Fifty-sixth, to double back to our jalopy parked under the Garfield Boulevard El, I glanced back. The joker had been ultra-positively a second Jessie Owens in his youth. He was so close, I could see the gleam of his bared choppers and the glitter of the hatchet.
    I couldn’t have run another foot when I fell through the jalopy’s open door and collapsed beside Willie at the wheel. Willie’s face was pocked with sweat as he ground the starter furiously. We stared at the mark growing to the size of King Kong and heard his number thirteens grenading against the sidewalk. I got the window up just as he reached us.
    I said, “Oh, Mama!” over and over at the awful sound of the hatchet as he ran around the car smashing glass. His frothy mouth was quivering with madness as he chopped a confetti of glass into the car. He was reaching through the shattered window to unlock the door when the starter caught and Willie bombed the heap away.
    At that instant I made an obvious vow that I’ve kept to this moment!
    We got a pint of tranquilizer on the far Westside and sloshed the first hits down our chins.
    Willie suddenly laid out a bandana on the seat between us. He pulled out his boodle-wallet, slipped out of his overcoat, and said, “Pal-of-mine, we oughtta separate the boodle from the thirty-five-hundred frog skins so we can split right down the middle.”
    I stiffened at the thought he might try to switch me out of my end in the murk of fallen dusk. I placed all I held on the seat. And I was determined to challenge any suspect moves he made with the money before I had my end safely in hand.
    With his overcoat off, I wasn’t really worried that he was slick enough to burn me in his sweater sleeves. He shook his head as helooked at the score. He straightened out the bills. Then he made a flat package of the money. He tied it up in the wide bandana.
    He glanced at a passing police car and said, “Shit, Slim, we could get busted counting the score. Here, shove it under your seat until after we cop some ribs and a motel room for the split.”
    I x-rayed his hands as he passed the bandana, then I pushed it under the seat. He pulled away and parked behind a rib-and-burger joint on Lake Street.
    He sat there for a long time before he said, “Slim, you gonna cop the pecks?”
    I was racked with closet laughter. Did he believe I was sucker enough to leave him tending the score? I said, “Cop for yourself, Willie . . . I ain’t hungry.”
    He said, “I ain’t got a ‘sou’ to cop with,” and leaned down and pulled out the bandana.
    He untied it on the seat and removed a ten-dollar bill. He put our score back under the seat, and his mitt was clean coming out, except for the sawbuck.
    I hawk-eyed him as he got out and shut the door. He shivered elaborately and opened the car door. He leaned into the car and reached for his beanie draped across the back of the front seat. For only a mini-instant was his overcoat a curtain blocking him from view as he lifted off the seat.
    I thought, Houdini, with four-foot arms, couldn’t have plucked that score from beneath my seat at that range. Anyway, I bent over and probed until my fingertips touched it. He slammed the door shut. I felt a twinge of guilt, watching the wind flap his overcoat tails, that he was trusting me with the score.
    In a couple of minutes, I heard the thunder of the Lake Street El Train pulling into the station down the street. I looked up at it passing on the way to the Loop. Was that Willie wrapped in his blue plaid benny grinning down at me from a window in the last car?
    I tore open the bandana! It was a dummy loaded withfunny-money. I dug beneath the seat like a pooch for a buried bone. Nothing! I raced around the car and pawed beneath the driver’s seat. Something sharp gouged blood from my thumb tip. It was a