Read Online Runaway by Ed McBain - Free Book Online Page B

there, and besides, he didn’t want to get Molly in hot water. He began running through the list of people he knew, and the third person he came up with was Barney Knowles.
    Sure, why not Barney? He knew Barney well. Barney would do him a few favors, especially with all the luck Barney’d been having lately. Sure, Barney would help a guy. Barney had a heart as big as Central Park.
    He smiled.
    He smiled, and then he left the phone booth and the store, and it was just as cold outside as it had been before.
    There’s a stretch of Harlem known as Striver’s Row. It stretches between Seventh and Eighth Avenues on West 138th and 139th Streets. It is not to be confused with the stretch east of Seventh Avenue on those same streets.
    The streets in Striver’s Row are tree-shaded. The houses lining those streets are made of attractive tan brick. The rents in Striver’s Row are high, and most of the residents belong to the white-collar or professional class. Barney Knowles lived in Striver’s Row.
    He had not always lived in Striver’s Row, mainly because he could not always afford the rental there. As a matter of fact, a good many of the people who’d been living there for a good long time rented out furnished rooms in order to keep up the rental. This was not one of Barney Knowles’s problems. Barney never had any trouble keeping up the rental now. Not any more, he didn’t.
    Of course, it’s doubtful that Barney’s neighbors would have approved of him so readily if they’d known he was a bookie in the numbers racket. They saw only a rather portly, dark Negro who dressed conservatively, and who always had a cheerful smile for everyone he passed. The smile seemed doubly cheerful because there were two gold caps in the front of Barney’s mouth, and you could usually see him coming two blocks away, even on a foggy day.
    Barney liked Striver’s Row. He liked it a lot, but he still kept his eye peeled for the day he could move to Sugar Hill.
    A man’s home is his castle, and Barney Knowles’s home was just that to him. When he walked the streets of Striver’s Row, the neighbors saw what he wanted them to see: the genial businessman, the smiling gent with the two gold teeth. When he closed the door of his apartment, he did as he wished.
    On the night that Johnny Lane headed for Barney’s pad, Barney was doing as he wished. His desire, on that night, was poker. His desire on almost every night, in fact, was poker. Barney was very lucky at cards, since the time his two front teeth had been knocked out. The teeth had been knocked out in a blackjack game when he was twenty-four. He had considered that the unluckiest night of his life, until things began happening to him afterward. He later looked back to the loss of those teeth as the turning point in his career. At any rate, his later good fortune seemed to stem from the time he had the gold teeth put in. Barney nearly always won at cards now. Tonight, Barney was losing.
    He was not losing because his luck was running bad. Barney’s luck never ran bad any more. He was losing because of the gentlemen in the game with him. The gentlemen owned the respective names of Arthur “The Flower” Carter and Anthony Bart. The gentlemen were very high up in the rackets indeed, and the gentlemen had an eye on Barney for a better job, and Barney had an eye on Sugar Hill, and so Barney lost that evening. Barney Knowles knew how to please.
    He was laughing heartily at one of the jokes The Flower had told when the knock sounded on his door. He allowed himself the luxury of finishing his laugh, and then he said, “Excuse me, fellers, someone at the door.”
    The Flower, encouraged by the laughter that had greeted his last effort, asked, “You runnin’ a whore house here, Barney?”
    â€œWisht I was,” Barney answered, chuckling. He left the men in the living room and walked through the foyer to the