Manhunt. Volume 14, Number 1, February/March, 1966

“There’s no one here,” Bello quivered when the door failed to open to the fifth floor apartment.

“We’ll just see.” The driver of the car pulled a strip of reinforced celluloid from his pocket and eased the spring lock back more quickly than a key could have been inserted in it. “We’ll just see.”

The five addicts piled into Gortoff’s apartment like a squad of vice cops crashing into a call girl headquarters. The one waving the.38 spun Bello in front of him and the groggy heroin pusher stumbled to a deep leather chair.

“There’s no one around here,” one of the intruders screamed from a bedroom. “I told you that Bello’s as phoney as the caps he pushed on us. Let’s give it to him right here. This trip was just another stall.”

“Wait a minute,” another shouted from the bath. “Here’s a works. This place is a shooting pad. There could be some stuff around. Let’s take it apart.”

The “taking apart” process was thorough. Only Bello and the revolver-waving addict failed to join in the ripping, tearing, furniture smashing, plumbing-ripping, fixture-breaking search for heroin.

“This is your one and last chance, Bello,” the armed addict whispered into the pusher’s one good ear. “I’ll give you a chance that these hop-heads won’t. Make like you’re trying to get away. I’ll let you go and chase you. Lead me to your connection and let me do business with him. Just me. No one else. We can get out of here and away from them without being noticed. Now!”

“I can’t...”

“You’ve no time to talk. Get going!”

Bello lurched for the apartment door and ran. The.38 cracked twice and two harmless slugs hit the ceiling. By the time the destruction-happy addicts noticed the pseudo flight, Bello and his pursuer were in the elevator.

“Say where, Bello,” the addict shouted above the roar of the sedan’s motor as it roared up the ramp into the Grant Avenue fog, “and don’t be fool enough to play games with me. You heard this piece work back upstairs. Every slug left in it belongs to you. Which way?”

“All I can do it make a couple phone calls and try to find where he is. Pull down Bush Street and stop at that Chink pharmacy. I’ll call from there.”

“I’ll be right with you.”

Bello entered a coin booth, feeling in his pocket for change.

“I’ve got a dime, Bello, Don’t close the door. I’ll tune in.”

He listened as Tony Bello dialed. And he scribbled down the number on the inside of a pack of book matches. There was no answer. Bello tried another number. The waiting addict scribbled it down. Again, Bello got his dime back from the pay phone.

“No luck,” Bello shrugged.

“You mean your luck’s running out, Tony.”

“Let’s go over to Kearny Street. I know one spot where he might be about this time.”

“We’ll go, Bello. I’ve got lots of time but you sure haven’t much left. Your time’s running out.”

Bello and his persistent and patient armed escort made three stops — at a Kearny Street cigar store, at a Geary Street bar and finally at a small baron Turk.

In the Turk Street bistro, Bello talked to a bartender. His silent shadow, on the next bar stool, listened.

“See Karl around tonight?”

“Not yet.”

“Know where you can get in touch with him?”

“Probably in his pad with Marie. You call there? And what the hell happened to your face, Tony? Run into a truck?”

“Accident. This damn fog; hit a street light standard over on Stockton. I called Karl at his pad. He wasn’t there.”

The bartender knew Bello was Karl Gortoff’s man. And Bello knew the bartender and the bar belonged to Gortoff. He leaned over the bar, close to Bello’s good ear. “He lays up over in Sausalito, Tony, when he’s not around town. His schooner’s anchored there. But don’t tell him I tipped you off and your business better be damned important to bother him over there.”

“It is. Thanks.” Bello turned to his shadower. “Come on.” Tony Bello led the way out of the bar into his last brawl — on Turk Street near Eddy, at the fringe of San Francisco’s tenderloin.

“Get the bastard!”

“You phoney sonuvabich!”

It was a different, younger crowd of addicts than the earlier assailants with whom the revolver wielding shadower had first caught up with the pusher. Half sick, crazed without heroin and shooting Bello’s powder sugar, the younger addicts moved in on Bello, neither noticing nor caring for the presence of his shadow — who stepped away from the attack and moved on away from the brawl. Bello was a street fighter and continued to kick, gouge, bite and swing even after he’d been cut by a dozen switchblade knives, sapped with lengths of chain and lead pipe. He stopped swinging only when he dropped to the sidewalk — dead. His attackers ran around the corner on Eddy and disappeared.