Web of the City Read Free Page B

out is if you land in the can, or you get a shank in your gut. That’s what I tried to tell ya when ya made me quit.”
    He stared at the teacher with mute appeal. He was boxed-in, and he knew it. There was going to have to be a face-up soon, and he wasn’t sure he was man enough.
    Carl Pancoast leaned closer to the boy, put an arm on his knee, tried to speak to him so the words went deeper than the ears. So they went right down to the core.
    “Look, Rusty. Let me tell you something. You can go on doing what the Cougars do, all your life, and wind up the way Tony Green did. You remember Tony, you remember what happened to him?”
    Pancoast could see the memory in Rusty’s eyes. He could see the vision of Tony Green, who had been top trackman at Pulaski, laid out on a slab, with a D.O.A. tag around his big toe. A zip gun .22 slug in his head. Dead in a rumble.
    “Remember why he got killed, Rusty?”
    Pancoast was pushing thoughts tightly, forcing them to the fore, making Rusty analyze his past. It wasn’t a pleasant past.
    Drenched in violence. Product of filth and slum and bigotry. Mothered by fear. Fathered by the terror of non-conformism and the fate that waited for those who did not conform. Rusty remembered. His stomach tightened, and his seventeen-year-old brain spun, but he remembered.
    Tony Green, tall and slim, and dead. Out there on a slab because someone had danced with his steady girl at a club drag. Nothing more important. Just that.
    “I’m through, Mr. Pancoast. You don’t have to worry about that. I’m through, but man, it’s gonna be rough all the way.”
    Carl Pancoast clapped the boy on the back. It would be tough all right, tough as banana skins, but that was the way it had to be. Because Rusty had to live out there in that stinking city. He had to live and learn and sweat beside those kids.
    “What are you going to do?”
    Rusty bit his lip, shrugged. “Don’t know, man. But I got to do something. They ain’t gonna give me much longer. Maybe I’ll go over there tonight, club night. Maybe I’ll go over again and have a talk with some of the kids.”
    Pancoast’s forehead assumed V-lines of worry. “Want me to go along? Most of the Cougars know me.”
    Rusty sloughed away his offer.
    “No go. They know you, but you’re still out of it, man. Way out. You’re boss-type, and they don’t dig that even a little. I come walking in with you, and I’m dead from the start.
    “No, I can handle it.”
    He stood up unsteadily, clung to the bannister for a minute. It rocked under his weight.
    “Lousy school,” he mumbled, slamming the banister, “gonna fall apart under ya.”
    He walked back into the shop, and a minute later Pancoast heard the chisel on the ruined chair leg. Violently. Could Rusty come all the way back? Could he purge the kill stuff from his blood?
    It was going to be rough. Real rough.
    He went back to his class, worried as hell.
    After school, Rusty avoided Carl Pancoast. The teacher had done too much for him, and whatever was coming, was going to have to come to him alone. Rusty slouched against the sooty brick wall of Pulaski High and drew deeply on a cigarette. The kids avoided him. The stench of trouble was all about him.
    Finally, Louise came out of the building, books clutched tightly to her chest. She saw Rusty, and stopped. Rusty knew what was running around scared inside her head: should she go to join her steady, walk home with him, stop to have a Coke with him—or should she walk past and get the hell away from what might be coming?
    It was a big choice. One way she would lose Rusty—he was like that, just like that—and the other she might lose her pretty face.
    Rusty knew what was happening within her, and he abruptly felt so alone, so terribly desperately alone, he had to remove the burden of decision from her, had to hold onto one person in this thing… if only for a short while. He pushed away from the wall. He walked over to her.
    “Wanna stop for a