The Day of the Boomer Dukes | Page 5

chilled, Champ. Five of them."
"Chilled? Dead?" It sounded bad; there hadn't been a real rumble in months, not with a killing.
He shook his head. "Not dead. You're wanting to see, you go down Gomez's cellar. Yeah, they're all stiff but they're breathing. I be along soon as the old man comes back in the store."
He looked pretty sick. I left it at that and hurried down the block to the tenement where the Gomez family lived, and then I found out why.
* * * * *
They were sprawled on the filthy floor of the cellar like winoes in an alley. Fayo, who ran the gang; Jap; Baker; two others I didn't know as well. They were breathing, as Walt had said, but you just couldn't wake them up.
Hawk and his twin brother, Yogi, were there with them, looking scared. I couldn't blame them. The kids looked perfectly all right, but it was obvious that they weren't. I bent down and smelled, but there was no trace of liquor or anything else on their breath.
I stood up. "We'd better get a doctor."
"Nay. You call the meat wagon, and a cop comes right with it, man," Yogi said, and his brother nodded.
I laid off that for a moment. "What happened?"
Hawk said, "You know that witch Gloria, goes with one of the Boomer Dukes? She opened her big mouth to my girl. Yeah, opened her mouth and much bad talk came out. Said Fayo primed some jumper with a zip and the punk cooled him, and then a couple of the Boomers moved in real cool. Now they got the punk with the zip and much other stuff, real stuff."
"What kind of stuff?"
Hawk looked worried. He finally admitted that he didn't know what kind of stuff, but it was something dangerous in the way of weapons. It had been the "zip" that had knocked out the five Leopards.
I sent Hawk out to the drug-store for smelling salts and containers of hot black coffee--not that I knew what I was doing, of course, but they were dead set against calling an ambulance. And the boys didn't seem to be in any particular danger, only sleep.
* * * * *
However, even then I knew that this kind of trouble was something I couldn't handle alone. It was a tossup what to do--the smart thing was to call the precinct right then and there; but I couldn't help feeling that that would make the Leopards clam up hopelessly. The six months I had spent trying to work with them had not been too successful--a lot of the other neighborhood workers had made a lot more progress than I--but at least they were willing to talk to me; and they wouldn't talk to uniformed police.
Besides, as soon as I had been sworn in, the day before, I had begun the practice of carrying my .38 at all times, as the regulations say. It was in my coat. There was no reason for me to feel I needed it. But I did. If there was any truth to the story of a "zip" knocking out the boys--and I had all five of them right there for evidence--I had the unpleasant conviction that there was real trouble circulating around East Harlem that afternoon.
"Champ. They all waking up!"
I turned around, and Hawk was right. The five Leopards, all of a sudden, were stirring and opening their eyes. Maybe the smelling salts had something to do with it, but I rather think not.
We fed them some of the black coffee, still reasonably hot. They were scared; they were more scared than anything I had ever seen in those kids before. They could hardly talk at first, and when finally they came around enough to tell me what had happened I could hardly believe them. This man had been small and peculiar, and he had been looking for, of all things, the "Mafia," which he had read about in history books--old history books.
Well, it didn't make sense, unless you were prepared to make a certain assumption that I refused to make. Man from Mars? Nonsense. Or from the future? Equally ridiculous....
* * * * *
Then the five Leopards, reviving, began to walk around. The cellar was dark and dirty, and packed with the accumulation of generations in the way of old furniture and rat-inhabited mattresses and piles of newspapers; it wasn't surprising that we hadn't noticed the little gleaming thing that had apparently rolled under an abandoned potbelly stove.
Jap picked it up, squalled, dropped it and yelled for me.
I touched it cautiously, and it tingled. It wasn't painful, but it was an odd, unexpected feeling--perhaps you've come across the "buzzers" that novelty stores sell which, concealed in the palm, give a sudden, surprising tingle when the owner shakes hands with an unsuspecting