Manhunt. Volume 9, Number 1, February 1961

“Sure!” he said, putting on a false grin. “You was the guy run after that punk stuck me up!” He squinted his pig eyes. “Looks like you lost him. How’s about me giving you a sawbuck for your trouble?” He pressed a key on the green brass cash register, the machine rang, and he held a sawbuck out toward me.

I shook my head and glanced around. “The cops gone now?”

“They was here and left. Happens too often to guys like me who’re close to rough neighborhoods.” He forced another one of his grins. “Hazards of the business, I guess. Come on, take the money.”

“No, thanks.” There was something about this creep that made even his money seem distasteful. “I just came to tell you something. The kid’s name. Sammy Barlow. He lives over on Twenty-Third and Maple.”

Kelly pursed his lips and nodded silently, his eyes dropping as he replaced the sawbuck in the cash register. “That helps one hell of a lot. Thanks again. Say...”

“Yeah?”

“Can I get your name and address? You know how the cops and insurance companies are.” He grinned. “Anybody seen what happened, they want to know.” I gave him my name and address. He raised his eyebrows and repeated the address: “3245 West Pine? Hey, that ain’t a bad neighborhood.”

“It’s a rooming house,” I said.

He stuck his hand over the counter. I shook it queasily. He said, “You sure you won’t take that sawbuck?”

I got away fast. The fresh air tasted good, and I couldn’t figure why. Maybe just because I was out, when I shouldn’t have been mixed up in it all in the first place. I had a distantly rumbling worry about the mess, but I closed my mind to it as I walked the ten blocks west on West Pine to the place where I lived. I said I had been stupid, got myself knocked in the head for it, but dumped it all right back in the lap of the guy whose business it was. Kelly Burke would phone the cops, they’d pick up Sammy, and that’d be all.

Sammy was a good looking kid. Crazy maybe, pulling armed robbery. Crazy wild bunch he hung around with, what could you expect? Comes running out of a liquor store with a bag of money in his hand and a knife in the other hand, stupid kid, should’ve put the knife away when he was on the street, and maybe nobody’d know he had a bag full of money. It was too obvious.

I almost fell on my face as I stepped off a high curb. I wasn’t watching where I was walking, I was getting so interested in my thoughts.

Obvious... about the bag of money. But all I saw was a paper bag. I didn’t see any money. Yes, I did. I saw money in Kelly Burke’s cash register just a few minutes ago, and now it was only about two and a half hours since it all started. Where could Kelly get a bundle of cash this time of night, when all the banks were closed? And why wasn’t he more shook up? Most guys would close up for the night if a kid with a gleaming knife come in and pulled a robbery.

I tried to push it out of my mind again. It was only a couple blocks farther to my house, so I tried to concentrate only on walking, noticing people and cars, not thinking at all. But I couldn’t really stop thinking, because I was involved. I would have been involved even if I hadn’t stupidly run after Sammy at first, because he was a kid in trouble, and whenever a kid’s in trouble, everybody’s involved. I noticed a couple kids walking ahead of me, slower than I was walking. Boy and girl, arms around one another’s back as they strolled. Good sight. Catty corner across the street a beat car parked by the curb and shut off its lights. More kids, probably, stopping there for a while to neck. I grinned at myself and was feeling good.

The feeling changed two minutes later when I was going up the sidewalk to the porch of the house where I had a room. Something moved on the lawn and I turned quickly when a thick voice said,

“Hi Pussycat.”

It was three of the ones who’d been outside the juke joint, one of them the big guy who clobbered me. Three tough kids, and three neat switchblade knives open in the darkness. Then they rushed me, cutting ahead toward the porch, but I spun about and, yelling at the top of my lungs, ran into the middle of the street, with cars zooming past, and kept running right down the white line in the middle. I heard above the horns honking at me the sounds of their angry voices, glanced back once and saw them heading for the car they had parked on the side street. They’d get me once they were able to get out in the traffic. I kept running, waving my hands over my head and screaming like a lunatic. Then brakes were screeching and some guy hollered at me. The guy in the fifty-three Buick was middle aged, mad, and scared.

“Give me a lift!” I shouted.

“Get in, you nut!”

And I got in, panting, my throat hurting, and he took off. When I looked back there was too much traffic for me to make out the car the kids were driving. “Thanks, Mister,” I told him.

“Sure.” He glanced suspiciously at me, probably expecting to see a gun. “Where you want out, the nuthouse?”

“Some guys are after me. You going to Kings Highway?”