See Them Die полностью

"It's Pepe!" Zip shouted, and the cry spread through the crowd like lava rushing down a mountainside, "It's Pepe, Pepe, it's Pepe, it's Pepe, Pepe, Pepe."

"You shot one of our patrolmen," Byrnes said.

"Did I kill him?" Miranda shouted from the apartment, still invisible, his voice floating down into the street.

'Wo."

"You're lying to me. I killed him."

"You hit him in the shoulder. Are you coming out?"

"Did I kill him? Is he dead?"

"Let them come after you, Pepe!" Zip shouted.

"Miranda, we don't want to play games here. If you 're coming out…"

A new sound erupted, drowning out the words that came from the megaphone, filling the air with its familiar wail.

"What's that?" Miranda shouted.

"It's an ambulance. What do you say, Miranda?"

"He shouldn't have tried nothing with me," Miranda said. "He could have got killed. I could have killed him."

"Butyou didn't. So what do you say? Yes or no? You coming out?"

"No!" Miranda shouted, suddenly and viciously. "You think you got some cheap punk up here? This is Pepe Miranda!" His voice rose. "You hear me? You want me, you come in here and get me!"

"That's telling them, Pepe!" Zip yelled, and he poked Sixto in the ribs, and suddenly the street was alive with cheers of encouragement.

"Yea, Pepe!"

"Bravo, Pepe!"

"Tell 'em, tell 'em!"

"Quiet!" Byrnes roared. "Everybody quiet!" Patrolmen moved quickly into the crowd, and the people in the street fell suddenly silent. But the rooftops still rang with cheers for the trapped killer in the apartment. Byrnes waited for the sound to die out. He put the megaphone to his mouth and said, "All right, Miranda. No more talk. We're coming in."

"Then stop talking and come get me, you yellow bastards!" Miranda shouted, and suddenly the shade on one of the windows snapped up, and there he was, Pepe Miranda the killer, a short, wiry man standing in his undershirt, his lips pulled back into a snarl, a three days' growth of beard on his face, a gun in each hand. He pulled back his head, and then snapped it forward with a short jerking motion, spitting into the street. And then he began firing blindly, both guns blazing as if he were trying to prove he was the marshal of a tough Western town.

Byrnes waved at the rooftops, and an ear-splitting volley shattered Sunday like a piece of crystal. He scooted for cover behind the squad car while the guns roared down from the rooftops. In the crowd, women were screaming and men were ducking behind each other for cover. Byrnes waved his hand again. The volley stopped, Miranda was no longer at the window.

He gathered Carella, Parker and Hernandez around him. "Okay," he said, "we're moving in. This time Miranda bit off too big a piece." He paused and looked at the faces of the men around him. "Has Captain Frick arrived yet, Steve?"

"Yes. I saw him a little while ago."

"Let's find him. I want this to be right."

Frederick Block was on his way home when he suddenly found himself in the middle of a traffic jam. Block hated traffic jams, and he especially hated them on weekends. He had gone to his office downtown to pick up a carton of eyelets which a factory in Riverhead needed instantly. He had made the delivery himself - "When you deal with Block Industries, you get service," he had told his client - and had then taken the shortest route he knew from Riverhead to the Calm's Point Bridge, and that route happened to take him through the heart of Isola and the 87th Precinct. And now he was in the middle of a traffic jam, on a Sunday, sweating inside his automobile when he should have been at the beach. Block was a fat man. Not one of those fat men who try to kid themselves by applying euphemistic terms like "stout" or "chubby" to their obesity. He was fat. F-A-T. And being fat, he sweated a great deal. And being a person who sweated - fat men, Block knew, never perspired - he did not appreciate being locked in a parked car in the middle of Isola on a day like today.

He bore the heat with tolerant malice for as long as he could. Then he got out of the car and tried to find out just what the hell was causing the tie-up. As far as he could see, there had been no accident. It always annoyed the hell out of Block when there was an accident. In the first place, careful drivers didn't get into accidents. And in the second and more important place, even if the wrecked car itself didn't block the road, traffic always slowed down to a snail's pace because every passing motorist wanted to study the extent of the damage.