Read Online American Gangster by Max Allan Collins - Free Book Online

backup an hour ago.”
    â€œ . . .
missed that . . . you . . . breaking up. . . .
”
    â€œPut the call out again!”
    â€œ . . .
still can’t . . . you’re breaking . . .
”
    â€œI said put the fucking call out
again
—”
    â€œ
I just
did,
Detective. Nobody responded. I’ll try once more, but it won’t do any—
”
    â€œFuck you very much,” Richie said, and slammed the mike into its slot, thinking,
I’ll bet he heard
that.
    When Richie’s car rounded the corner onto Central Avenue, the three dark thirty-floor towers of the Stephen Crane Projects loomed like massive tombstones from the war zone landscape. If a more forbidding place existed on the planet, Richie had no desireto see it. A torched and abandoned patrol car sat silent sentry just beyond the curb, dating back to one riot or another.
    After he parked, Richie moved through the agitated all-black crowd swiftly and confidently, which was the only way to survive; the morning was unseasonably warm and, early as it was, the Crane residents and other neighborhood gawkers had come out to enjoy the fun and outrage. He spotted an ambulance pulled up on the sidewalk in front of one tower, and headed for that building.
    Just inside the doors, a frightened female paramedic, pretty cute—
stop it
, Richie told himself—pointed the way for him: fifth floor. He went up the graffiti-adorned elevator and down a graffiti-adorned hall. Outside the apartment, two more scared shitless medics, male, were milling.
    Richie displayed his badge in its wallet.
    One medic, a white guy pale as his uniform, said desperately, “He won’t let us in there, officer. There was a shooting and—”
    Richie held up a hand and said, “I’m his partner. Give me a minute.”
    He knocked, said, “It’s me!” and Javy, in jeans and a dark brown leather jacket, let him right in. Jav’s shoulder-length dark hair, muttonchops and mustache overwhelmed his hangdog face.
    â€œThank God you come, Rich, thank God.”
    Then, without waiting for Richie to say anything, Javy made his zombie-like way over to the couch and sat, slumped, hands folded prayerfully, head bowed,though Richie was fairly confident nothing religious was going on here.
    On the other hand, the skinny black guy on the floor in a blood-spattered yellow undershirt and jeans and no shoes was making like Jesus, in a crucifixion posture. Brains and lots of blood had drained out of him making a mostly scarlet Rorschach pattern on the cream-color shag throw rug. The dead dealer lay next to a low-slung white coffee table whose glass top was littered with drugs and drug paraphernalia, as well as a few empty beer bottles and soda cans.
    Richie let the paramedics in; they wheeled in their gurney while the detective called in the shooting.
    Before long he was saying into the phone, “Sergeant, does it sound like I’m asking? I’m fuckin’
telling
you: get some patrolmen over here, right now.”
    Richie hung up, hard, and the paramedics—their gurney not even unstrapped—were staring at him like his fly was open and his dick was hanging out. They’d been listening.
    â€œYou got no backup?” one of them asked.
    The other added: “Why don’t you? Have any backup.”
    Richie pointed at the corpse and said, “Bandage that asshole’s head.”
    â€œDetective,” the pale paramedic said, “he’s dead.”
    The other paramedic, a heavy-set guy, asked, “Should we even be moving him? Isn’t this a crime scene?”
    Richie walked over; the dead guy on the throw rug was between him and the paramedics. On the couch,hunkered over, despondent as hell, Javy sat staring at the shag rug, like a gypsy reading tea leaves.
    â€œThis
will
be a crime scene,” Richie said, “if a couple hundred people start rioting and kill all