Free The Heat's On by Chester Himes Page B

dragged out a rusty iron lockbox in which he kept everything he owned. From his side pants pocket he took a single key attached to a long brass chain hanging from his belt and unlocked the tremendous Yale padlock which secured his box.
    Two pairs of eyes followed his every movement, but he studiedly ignored them. He had his own alcohol lamp, teaspoon and spike, and he would use no other.
    Silently they watched him mix a deck of heroin and a deck of cocaine, light the lamp and cook it in a spoon, load the spike. He banged himself in a vein just above his left wrist. His brown decayed teeth bared like an animal’s when the spike went in, but his mouth went loose and sloppy in a soft sighing sound as he drew out the spike.
    Sister Heavenly finished her cup of tea and waited a few minutes for his speedball to work, slowly swallowing the sweet marijuana smoke.
    “What happened to the trunk?” she asked finally.
    Uncle Saint looked around as though expecting to find it in the kitchen. He hadn’t made up any kind of a story and all his furtive looks at her didn’t tell him anything. Outwardly she looked indifferent and serene, but he knew from past experience that didn’t mean a thing. Finally he decided to lie to the bitter end. He had lost the motherraping trunk and had blown some motherraper’s brains out to boot, and wasn’t nothing going to change that. He was too motherraping old to worry about every little thing that came along.
    He licked his dry lips and muttered, “We been barking up the wrong tree. There wasn’t nothing in that trunk. Them expressmen come and got it and took it straight to the docks and left it there. I followed them, but when I seen there wasn’t nothing in it I figured there had been a switch, so I turned around and highballed it back uptown looking for you, but you has gone. So I figures you has already got it — if there was anything to get.”
    “That’s what I thought,” she said enigmatically. “We been on a wild-goose chase.”
    Pinky’s battered face contorted in a fit of rage. “You was after Gus’s treasure map,” he accused. “That’s why you give me that knockout shot. You was trying to steal Gus’s treasure map and you done let him get kilt.”
    “He ain’t no more dead than you is,” Sister Heavenly said calmly. “I saw him talking to the expressmen when—”
    “You saw Gus alive!” Pinky exclaimed. His eyes bugged out in an expression of horror.
    Sister Heavenly went on as though she hadn’t noticed. “Not only saw him but I felt him. He talked to the expressmen when they came for the trunk and gave them the treasure map to mail.”
    Pinky stared at her in disbelief. “You saw Gus give the expressmen the treasure map?” he echoed stupidly.
    “What are you so het up about?” she asked sharply. “Ain’t you the one who said he was going to give them the treasure map to mail to him in Ghana?”
    “But I thought he was already kilt by now,” Pinky stammered in confusion.
    Uncle Saint was staring from one to another with a fixed expression of imbecility. He wondered if he was hearing right.
    “He might be killed by now but he was alive when I was there,” she said. “And Ginny and the African was getting the bags ready to leave. Ginny was straightening up for the new couple what comes in today.”
    Pinky looked flabbergasted. He opened his mouth to say something but was stopped by the sound of an automobile horn from the street in front.
    “That’s Angelo,” she said casually, and looked sharply from one to the other to see their reactions.
    Both looked suddenly guilty and trapped.
    She smiled cynically. “Sit still,” she said. “I’ll go out and see what he wants this early in the morning.”
    “But it ain’t his day,” Pithy whined.
    Uncle Saint threw him a black look.
    But Sister Heavenly merely said, “It sure ain’t,” as she got to her feet.
    The front door was never opened, so she went out the back door and circled the house by the