Finally Casper opened his eyes. The scene was stained red by the blood on his eyeballs.

Coffin Ed undid the gag.

“Get me loose quick,” Casper said thickly, talking through a mouthful of blood.

Grave Digger unlocked the manacles and Coffin Ed freed his legs.

Casper got to his hands and knees and looked about. He saw the manacled white man. Their gazes met. Casper saw the white man’s revolver on the floor beside the desk. He crawled to it bear fashion and picked it up. Everyone was watching him, but no one except the white man expected it. He pumped three slugs into the white man’s head.

Coffin Ed went crazy with rage. He kicked the pistol from Casper’s hand and aimed his own revolver at Casper’s heart.

“God-damned sonofabitch, I’ll kill you!” he raved. “He was ours; he wasn’t yours. You God-damned sonofabitch, we worked all night and all day and took every God-damned rape-fiend risk to get this hoodlum, and you kill him.”

“It was self-defense,” Casper said thickly, blood spattering from his slashed tongue. “You saw the mother-raper trying to shoot me—didn’t you!”

Coffin Ed drew back his pistol as though to club him across the head. “I ought to knock out your God-damned brains and call it an accident,” he raved.

“Easy, Ed, easy man,” Grave Digger cautioned. “You ain’t God either.”

Leila was laughing hysterically. “You knew what kind of man he is when you were risking me and everybody else to save him.”

Grave Digger watched Casper pull to his feet and stagger toward the closet for some clothes to put on.

“Man, does money mean that much to you?” he asked.

“What money?” Casper said.

Down below on 125th Street was a crowd scene. Traffic was stopped. Joe Green’s big black Cadillac limousine sat in a line of cars a block long, the motor running and nobody in it. The sidewalks on both sides of the street were jammed. The Paris Bar and the Palm Café and the Apollo Bar had erupted their clients. The three movie houses had been deserted for the bigger attraction.

“Gawwwaheddamnnnn. A shooting every night,” a joker crowed triumphantly. “It’s crazy, man, crazy.”

Prowl cars converged from all directions, weaving in and out of the stopped cars, on the right side and on the wrong side of the street, jumping the curb when necessary to get by. Their sirens were screaming like the souls of the damned; their red lights were blinking like eyes from hell

Cops jumped out, big feet splattering in the ankle-deep slush, went up the stairs like the introduction to the television series called “Gang Busters.”

Their eyes popped at the sight that greeted them.

Coffin Ed was telephoning for an ambulance.

Grave Digger looked up from the floor, where he was kneeling beside Leila Baron, stroking her forehead and consoling her.

“It’s all over but the lying,” he lisped.

Chapter 20.

Casper Holmes was back in the hospital.

His eyes and mouth were bandaged; he could not see nor talk. There were tubes up his nostrils, and he had been given enough morphine to knock out a junkie.