Main > Series > Chapters > Fame Annual 1984 > When The Heat Came Down

The night was young, the moon was yellow, and the streets were coming alive, getting ready for the night. Small groups of bright-shirted youths slowly gathered by the steps of their tenements. Young girls walked up and down in pairs, shouting welcomes and giggling. Stereos appeared, radios, harmonicas. The music throbbed through the hot, close air. Bootsy, Grandmaster Flash, Marvin Gaye, Earth Wind and Fire. The dancing began.

     Leroy was feeling the heat. His rent was due, there'd been trouble at the poolroom, and Miss Sherwood was hot on his case, demanding five hundred words on the treatment of the Indian in modern American literature. He was trying to think of the last cowboy film he'd seen when he heard a car slow up behind him.

     “Hey, boy!” said the voice. Leroy carried on walking home.

     “Hey, Leroy!”

     The car pulled ahead of him and stopped. Leroy's heart sank, his body tensed with anticipation.

     A thin man in a long black coat climbed out of the car and stood facing him.

     Leroy recognised him at once - Upstate Red, a cheap conman, a drifter, a rat - a crazed thug who'd lost his patience with time. Red came from out of town, and since he'd hit the streets he's played it like he was already dad and living in hell.

     “Hey, Leroy,” said Red, offering his hand. Leroy felt the seat on his spine go cold as Red's other hand shifted something bulky inside his coat pocket.

     “I've got no business with you,” he said stiffly.

     “It's Willard I want.”

     “I'm NOT my brother's keeper.”

     Red leaned close and Leroy caught the rancid smell of stalk whisky on his breath. “I ain't got time, boy,” he said. “If I don't find him, they're going to find you in little parcels spread over town.” He slapped Leroy on the back, climbed in his car and sped off, leaving the echo of his laughter hanging heavy in the night air.

     Leroy seethed with anger and frustration. Heat clung to him like a fever. The back of his neck was damp and gritty. He beat his palm with his fist. One more weight to juggle.

     He tried to weigh up his chances as he headed for home. He could run, but not forever. He could hide. He could fight. He figured he could take Red one to one, but Red had never heard of the Marquis of Queensberry and he wasn't too proud a man to enjoy the kind of edge a sawn-off shotgun gives you.

     Leroy cursed his luck as he crossed the street. He'd been on top of things. He'd been holding his life together so well. At the poolroom he was OK. The trouble from last night would blow over. At school he could make it. The writing stuff was hard but - they sure liked his dancing and they didn't pull too many numbers on him.

     But Willard? There was trouble whenever he showed. Deals. Waiting. Bragging in the streets. Willard was drowning and every time Leroy helped him out was one time closer to going under with him.

     Leroy stepped nimbly to one side to avoid being run over by two girl roller skaters in identical swimsuits, Kool and the Gang blaring from the stereo they held between them.

     So what could he do? Well - he was a New Yorker. Native. He could survive. Red hadn't even been born in the city. Red was just a country boy with a big mouth and a gun, a hick playing fast and loose with other people's lives, a bumpkin coming on like Pretty Boy Floyd. New York would find Red out. It always did. New York was famous all over the world. Poets came to live there, painters, writers, actors, boxers, dancers. New York had museums, nightclubs, theatres, parks, class restaurants, Wall Street, Broadway, the United Nations.

     He'd be all right. It was his turf. His name was Leroy. Leroy from New York. The dancer.

     He tried to think of all the famous names that had come out of New York, but a block had formed in his mind and he couldn't shift it. The only names that sprang up were Mayer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel. And Al Capone. And Legs Diamond. And Johnny Torrio, Dutch Schultz, Lucky Luciano, the Gallow brothers, Joe Bananas, Lupo the Wolf and Son of Sam. And Upstate Red.

     A headline on an abandoned newspaper caught Leroy's eye: STATUE OF LIBERTY FALLING DOWN.

     When Leroy reached his room, he found the door had been forced. Inside, Willard was lying on his bed with a large-brimmed hat pulled down over his face. In the dim light, Leroy noticed a dark stain below the left knee of his grey trousers.

     “Hi, Leroy,” said Willard.

     “I told you before -” Leroy began angrily.

     “I need your help!” interrupted Willard. “I'm in trouble, boy!”

     “If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.”

     “You're my brother, Leroy.”

     “Not any more.”

     Willard rose from the bed and thrust his face aggressively close to Leroy's. “This time it ain't my fault, Leroy. Upstate Red pulled a scam with the man and he's trying to lay it at my door. He's got two crazy junkies with him and if they kill me before I get a chance to talk -”

     Leroy barely listened to the words, as he stood looking deep into his brother's eyes. There was no fear there, no desperate calculation. There was nothing. They were blank, the blank eyes of the doomed, the lost. Leroy knew that if he held his ground his brother would first bully him, and then, if he thought it might help, he would plead. Beg even. Leroy could not face that.

     “What do you want?” he asked quietly. Willard went over to the window and peered into the street.

     “They know I'm here,' he said. One of them is probably fetching Red now.” He pulled up the leg of his trousers to reveal an ugly, gaping wound. “I can't outrun them like this, but if I can lose them, I can get to the man and clear myself.”

     “You want me to run interference?” asked Leroy, his mind flashing back to happier times, street games.

     Willard took of his hat and placed it on Leroy's head. “I want you to be my decoy.”

     They changed clothes in silence. As Leroy made to go, Willard placed his hand on Leroy's shoulder. Leroy noticed how heavy it felt.

     “Willard,” he said. “I'm doing this for me - to get you out of my life for good. But -” and here a fierce light seemed to flare in his eyes. “I will never, repeat never, help you out of a jam again. In fact, if I ever see you again -”

     “Go get 'em, tiger,” said Willard, laughing and lighting a cigarette.

     Leroy made his way up to the roof of his building and peered over, just in time to see Upstate Red's white-walled Chevy come screeching to a stop in the street below. A man in a suede bomber jacket materialised from the shadows, Red gout out, and they talked. Leroy picked up a stone and threw it. It bounced noisily off the bonnet of Red's car. The two men looked up the roof. Leroy waved and then grinned. The chase was on.

     Leroy know the roofs well. He had often practised there. Some nights he would just lie on his back on the roof for hours, staring at the starts in the sky. He knew he could dance Red all over them and not get caught, but he also knew there was only one other way down. If REd had a man on that exit, he was trapped.

   Leroy slipped down to a lower level when he heard Red's feet on the stairs. There was a stretch of open roof ahead of him that ended with a drop to the street. Across the drop, about fifteen feet away, there was another wall, with an old metal ladder clinging to it. Jamming Willard's hat hard down on his head and humming the Spiderman theme tune, Leroy made his run.

     “Hold it there, Willard!” screamed Red, taking aim at the zig-zagging figure racing across the roof.

     But the figure didn't stop. It didn't slow down. It picked up speed as it neared the drop, and when it reached the edge of the roof it soared into the air. Red was so astounded he didn't even shoot.

     Leroy hit the ladder with a force that rattled every bone in his body, but he clung on tight and scrambled upwards, slipping over the lip of the roof and lying gasping with his cheek to the gravel. He could hear Red shouting down into the street.

     Time was short. Leroy ran at a crouch and opened the door to the other block's stairs. He sneaked inside and ran down, taking six stairs at a time. He was three floors from the street when he came up against the first of Red's men.

     Leroy didn't even break his stride. He was moving too fast to even think. No two-bit junkie was going to stop him. As the hood took aim with a Colt Python, Leroy put one hand on the stair rail and launched himself in the air.

     The expression on the hood's face seemed to freeze, and for Leroy, the whole thing happened in slow motion. He was perfectly balanced, and as he dropped down to the next set of stairs he lashed out with his foot, catching the gunman a powerful blow on the upper arm. The gunman dropped his weapon, Leroy landed like a cat and kept on running.

     Leroy burst into the street at full speed, ducking, dodging and weaving his way through the crowds. He raced round the corner, sprinted across some waste ground and then clawed his way up a wire fence into a basketball court. He ran the length of the court, climbed the fence at the other end, dropped down and hurried into the nearest dark alley.

     Leroy flung himself against the wall and tried to catch is breath. That should have shaken them. Maybe now he could forget about Willard and get on with his life.

     “What you doing, boy?” said a voice behind him. Leroy turned and saw three men in the alley. A fourth lay on the ground beside them. The largest of the men was carrying a baseball bat.

     “Can't stop,” said Leroy, sprinting out into the street again. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Red's car cruising round the corner further up the street.

     He ran for half a block, dived down an alley and clambered over the wall at the end. He made his way through an abandoned warehouse where some old timers were playing cards and drinking, then slid into the crowds on the next street.

     Leroy was walking now, trying to look inconspicuous. He thought of dumping Willard's hat but his decision became irrelevant when Red's car came into view again at the intersection ahead.

     Leroy turned and ran. He heard the squeal of tyres behind him and he flew into the nearest doorway.

     It was a hotel, but the desk clerk hardly had time to open his eyes before Leroy was past him and slamming through the kitchen door at the back. He caught a glimpse of a cook staring open-mouthed as he flashed through and out of the back door. As he raced out and down the back steps he heard banging and shouting behind him.

     Leroy jumped across the alley and into another door. It was a store-room. He ran across it and through the open door.

     “Eeeeek!” The scream came from an elderly woman trying on a flowery hat. Leroy had blundered into a hat shop.

     “I'm sorry!” he said, jumping the counter and heading for the front door.

     “Not so fast!” yelled a plump woman, suddenly barring his way.

     “Nobody steals from me!” She whipped the hat from Leroy's head and clutched it to her chest.

     “But -” Leroy didn't bother to argue. He dipped his shoulder and slipped past her and tried to open the front door as she rained heavy blows on the back of his neck.

     “He finally got it open, pushed his way through a gathering crowd and dived into the nearest subway. He took the first train out and settled into a seat for a long night ahead.

     Coco and Bruno were deep in discussion on the steps of The School of the Arts when Leroy arrived the next morning, but they broke off when they saw him. “You look awful, man,” said Bruno.

     “Leroy - is anything wrong?” asked Coco.

     Leroy didn't answer. He was staring at the figure leaning against the wall nearby. It was Willard.

     Leroy walked straight up to him, ignoring Danny's cheery greeting and Julie's concerned gaze.

     “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

     Willard smiled. “We did it, Leroy,” he said. “The Johnson boys did it. I saw the man and he was cool. The safest place for Red today is jail.”

     Leroy restrained himself from lashing out. He drove his forehead into the palm of his hand and kicked the wall.

     “We did it?” he asked, his voice strained with indignation and anger. “We did it? I did it, Willard, and I nearly lost an arm and a leg doing it. I told you not to bother me You promised to leave me alone. I've been chased all over town, I've nearly been arrested for shoplifting, I've spent all night riding the subway with a bunch of freaks and I did it because I thought I could get you off my back. I dind't want your money. I dind't want your thanks. Just WHAT are you doing here?”

     “I've come for my hat,” said Willard. “Leroy? . . . Leroy? That was a fifty-dollar hat, boy . . . Leroy?”

     He threw his cigarette into the gutter and turned away from Leroy's retreating back.