Shaft by Ernest Tidyman

Author:Ernest Tidyman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dynamite Entertainment
Published: 2016-07-14T23:21:10+00:00

8

HE COULDN’T HELP IT. That’s the way he was. Circumstance and response. Cause and effect were almost like Siamese twins of his nature, closer together than a couple of Harlem tenements. There was no room there for thought, reflection or perspective. The ball of his anger bounced from one hard wall to the other before there was time. Later, it made him wonder if he had not made a mistake. But it would be much later, months later. And there would be no guilt or self-doubt with his questions, for he was not questioning himself or his actions. Only the results . . .

There was a small cut on Shaft’s hand. A jagged chunk of the Scotch bottle had tripped over the flesh of his callused palm on its flight to the floor. The incision was neat, painless, but bloody. Like most, he ignored the rules of antisepsis and put his mouth over the cut to suck on it. The blood was warm, salty and Scotch-tasting. He spat it out into the drain sink beneath the bar.

“My name ees Count Dracula,” Rollie Nickerson said, bugging his eyes in his Bela Lugosi imitation. “I leev een a kestle een Transylvania and I don’t take sheet from nobody.”

Nickerson and the girls were all that remained of the No Name’s business. The police had suggested that everybody go home for the night. Everybody had taken it to heart. They left Nickerson and his companions because the actor had explained that he was the bartender.

“That man is an imposter,” he said of Shaft, “and these,” with a wave at the girls, “are the night porters.”

He was smashed. The cops went away after Shaft told the officer in charge of the detail that he would talk with Anderozzi about the two hoods. There was time. He had to do something about getting himself together first. Where the hell was his coat? Hanging on a hook near the cigarette machine. He held the bleeding hand under the faucet, looking up over the rim of the bar at Nickerson and the girls. When actors got nervous, he thought, they could slip into other roles, outside the ones in which life had trapped them. Nickerson was deep into the Dracula fantasy. The girls were giggling.

“Eeef you will just let me fasten these electrodes to your loffly head, my dear,” he was saying, “I am sure the experience will geev you a charge . . . ”

Shaft considered the cut. It had pretty much stopped bleeding. There was a small tin box of Band­ Aids next to the cash register. Bartenders are always slicing fingers with the lemons. One of those would be enough. The hood who had taken the bottle in the head was probably undergoing his own first aid at that moment. A lot more than this, he thought, pleased. He had felt bone give under the impact of the bottle. He checked around the bar for vodka, found a bottle of Gilbey’s behind him and held it in his left hand while he pulled the cork with his teeth.

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