The Last Dance by Ed McBain Page B

under tables. It took a moment for Carella to spot the two gunmen advancing swiftly toward the booth, one black, one white, equal opportunity employment. It took another moment for him to realize Danny Gimp was their target.
    His coat was already unbuttoned, he reached across his waist for a cross-body draw, the nine-millimeter Glock snapping out of its holster with a spring-assisted click. There were more shots. Someonescreamed. Danny was scrambling across the floor on his hands and knees, trailing blood. A man running for the entrance doors knocked over one of the serving counters, and pizza toppings spilled all over the floor, tomato sauce running into anchovies and mushrooms and grated cheese and slippery slices of pepperoni. Carella upended a table, and ducked behind it. There was more screaming, two more shots very close by, footsteps pounding. He raised his head in time to see the gunmen running toward the front of the place, leaped to his feet, began chasing after them. There was still too much background for him to risk firing. He followed them out into the street, thought he had a clear shot, but they turned the corner in that instant and were gone.
    Shit, he thought.
    The last two shots Carella heard had been fired at close range into Danny’s head. The shot near his cheek was fired with the muzzle of the gun almost touching the skin; there was a cluster of soot on the flesh but hardly any gunpowder around the wound itself. The shot closer to Danny’s chin was fired from a few inches away; gunpowder particles were diffused over a two-inch diameter and the wound was encircled by a small area of soot. Danny was already dead when Carella knelt beside him.
    A patrolman pounded into the pizzeria with his gun drawn, scaring the patrons even further, yelling “Stand back, everybody keep back,” like an extra in an action-adventure movie. Tables and chairs had been overturned in the mad rush that virtually cleared the place of customers. But many of the patrons still lingered, either curious to see what a bleeding body looked like close up, or else hoping to wave to the television cameras if and when they got here. There was nothing jackasses liked better than to grin and wave at the camera while tragedy was unfolding in the foreground.
    â€œI’m on the job,” Carella told the patrolman. “Get an ambulance here.”
    A second patrolman entered the place now, his gun also drawn,his eyes wide, his face pale. He had never seen a dead body before except for that time in a funeral home when his uncle Pete died of sclerosis of the liver. The first patrolman, similarly inexperienced, was already on his mobile phone, telling Sergeant Murchison at the Eight-Seven that there’d been a shoot-out in the pizzeria on Culver and Sixth, Guido’s, the place was called. “There’s one person down, better send a meat wagon,” he actually called it, causing Murchison to wince.
    The television cameras arrived some five minutes before either the ambulance or a second car from adjoining Charlie Sector angled into the curb. A woman wearing a fake fur that
looked
fake told the roving reporter that all at once these two big guys came in and started shooting at the man lying on the floor over there, at which point the camera operator panned over to where Danny was lying in an ocean of slippery pizza toppings, blood and tomato sauce mingling to create an op-art camera op. The second patrolman told everybody to keep back; he was wondering if he should put up some of those yellow CRIME SCENE tapes he had in the trunk of the patrol car. Two teenagers wearing woolen watch caps, ski parkas, and baggy pants tried to position themselves behind the victim so they could grin and wave at the camera, but they were too late. The camera operator had already turned to the entrance door, where a pair of detectives from the Eight-Seven were walking in looking very official and busy, shields pinned to their