Split Images (1981) Read Free Page A

all around there, uh?"
    "A few. Henry, Bill, young Edsel now."
    "They got, in the barber college right there on Campau near Holbrook? Heart of Hamtramck, they got a chair Henry Ford sat in once, got his haircut. I don't mean at the barber college, when the chair was someplace else."
    "That's interesting," Robbie said. He took a drink and said, "You mentioned the other day you were with the Detroit Police."
    "Nineteen years," Walter said. "Started out in the Eleventh Precinct. Yeah, then I moved downtown, worked Vice, Sex Crimes, Robbery . . ."
    Walter lighted his Camel and pulled the silver dish over in front of him. Fuck it. "It was never boring, I'll say that."
    "You ever shoot anybody?"
    "As a matter of fact I have," Walter said.
    "How many?"
    "I shot nine people," Walter said. "Eight colored guys, one Caucasian. I never shot a woman."
    "How many you kill?"
    "I shot nine, I killed nine." Walter let himself grin when he saw the cheerleader begin to smile, eating it up.
    "They were all DOA except this one guy, a jig, hung on three hundred sixty-seven days, if you can believe it. So technically his death wasn't scored as a hit. I mean he didn't die of gunshot, he died of like kidney failure or some fucking thing. But it was a nine-millimeter hollow nose, couple of them, put him in the hospital, so . . . you be the judge."
    "How about down here?" Robbie said.
    "The guy was a quadriplegic, I mean when he died."
    "Have you shot anyone down here?"
    "In Palm Beach? I don't know if I tried to draw my piece it would even come out. No, I haven't, but the way things are going, all these fucking Cubans and Haitians coming in here . . ." Walter stopped.
    "I got to watch my language."
    Robbie gave him a lazy shrug, relaxed.
    Walter said, "Anyway, with the refugees coming in, lot of them jerked out of prison down there in Cuba . . . I know a gun shop in Miami I mentioned to you, guy's got three outlets, he's selling five hundred thousand bucks worth of handguns a month.
    Guy's making a fortune. He's got a range, he's teaching all these housewives come in how to fire threefifty-sevens, forty-fives . . . Can you see it? Broad's making cookies, she's got this big fucking Mag stuck in her apron. But that's what it's coming to. It didn't surprise me at all a man of your position would have that Python. It's a very beautiful weapon."
    The cheerleader was pouring them a couple more. "What do you carry?"
    "Now? A Browning nine-millimeter." Walter laid his cigarette on the silver dish, raised his hip from the stool as he went in under his suit coat, pulled the weapon from the clip-on holster that rode above his right cheek and placed it on the bar, nickel plate and pearl grip sparkling in the cone of overhead light.
    "Nice," the cheerleader said.
    "Detroit I packed a forty-four Mag and a thirty- eight Smith Airweight with a two-inch barrel. But that's when I was working STRESS. As a matter of fact, eight of the guys I took out it was when I was with STRESS."
    "I sorta remember that," Robbie said.
    "Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets."
    "I'm not sure I ever knew what it meant."
    "Yeah, Stop the Robberies . . . and so on. That was . . . let me see, I was on it back in '72,'73. We'd go in teams in a hot street-crime area, inner city.
    Dress like you live around there. One guy's the decoy, the target. Stroll down the street maybe act like you're drunk or you're a john looking for some quiff. The other guys lay back, see if you attract anything. See, we used teams of four. That would be your decoy, your backup, he'd be like another bum or civilian of some kind, then you'd have two more guys in the car, they covered you. We cut street crime way down, confiscated something like over four hundred guns. We had to shoot some people to do it but, well, it's up to them."
    The cheerleader seemed to smile as he frowned, liking the idea but with reservations. "Isn't that entrapment?"
    Walter said, "Hey, they named the game. All we did, we played it with