Free All Shot Up by Chester Himes Page B

picking his nose.
    Two cops in a prowl car with the lights out slipped quietly up beside him. They were on the lookout for that particular car. But when they saw him, sitting there in his coonskin cap, looking as unconcerned as though he were fishing for eels underneath the bridge, they didn’t give the car a second glance.
    “One of the Crocketts,” the driver said.
    “Don’t wake him,” the other replied.
    The car slipped noiselessly past. He didn’t see it until it had pulled ahead.
    Trying to catch some whore hustling, he thought. Mother-rapers come along and steal my car and all these cops can do is chase whores.
    The bar ran lengthwise, facing a row of booths. It was crowded. People were standing two and three deep.
    Sassafras went ahead of Mister Baron, elbowing through the jam. She stopped and turned around.
    “Where is the phones?”
    “In the restaurant,” Mister Baron said. “We have to go all the way to the back.”
    “You go ahead,” she said, pulling aside so he could pass.
    A joker on a bar stool reached out and tugged the tassels of her cap.
    “Little Red Riding Hood,” he cooed. “How about you.”
    She snatched her cap from his hand and said, “How about your baby sister?”
    The man drew back in mock affront. “I don’t play that.”
    “Then pat your feet,” she said.
    The man grinned. “What you drinking, baby.”
    Her glance had caught the smoky oil paintings of two brownskin amazon nudes reclining on Elysian fields above the mirror behind the bar. She tried not to laugh, but she couldn’t help it.
    The man followed her glance. “Hell,, baby, you don’t need much as what they got.”
    She gave herself a shake. “At least what I got moves,” she said.
    Suddenly she remembered Mister Baron. She started off. The man grabbed her by the arm.
    “What’s the rush, baby?”
    She tore herself loose and squeezed hurriedly to the rear. Glass doors opened into the restaurant, and she bumped into a waitress going through. The phone booth was to the rear on the left. The door was closed. She snatched it open. A man was phoning, but it wasn’t Mister Baron.
    “’Scuse me,” she said.
    “Come on in,” the man said, grabbing at her.
    She jerked away and looked about wildly. Mister Baron was nowhere in sight.
    She stopped the waitress coming back.
    “Did you see a little prissy man with wavy hair come through here?” she asked.
    The waitress looked her over from head to feet.
    “You that hard up, baby?”
    “Oh shoo you!” she cried and dashed through the swinging doors into the kitchen.
    “Did a man come through here?” she asked.
    The big, sweating, bald-headed cook was up a tree.
    “Git out of here, whore!” he shouted in a rage.
    The dishwasher grinned. “Come ’round to the back door,” he said.
    The cook grabbed a skillet and advanced on her, and she backed through the doorway. She looked through the dining room and bar again, but Mister Baron had disappeared.
    She went outside and told Roman, “He’s gone.”
    “Gone where?”
    “I don’t know. He got away.”
    “Where in the hell was you?”
    “I was watching him all the time, but he just disappeared.”
    She looked like she was about to cry.
    “Get in the car,” he said. “I’ll look for him.”
    She took her turn sitting in the hottest car in all of New York State while he searched the bar and restaurant for Mister Baron. He didn’t have any better luck with the cook.
    “He must have got out through the kitchen,” he said when he returned to the car.
    “The cook would have seen him.”
    “It’d take a shotgun to talk to that evil man.”
    He climbed in behind the wheel and sat there looking dejected. “You let him get away, now what us going to do?” he said accusingly.
    “It ain’t my fault that we is in this mess,” she flared. “If you hadn’t been acting such a fool right from the start might not none of this happened.”
    “I knew what I was doing. If he’d tried to pull off something