Death Sentence Read Online Free PDF Page B

to the slammer.”
    O’Hara drank and spoke in a voice made breathless by the beer. “Statistics.”
    â€œHere’s a statistic, Mr. Mills. An infant boy born in Chicago today has a better chance of being murdered than an American soldier in World War Two had to get killed in combat. If the crime rate keeps increasing the way it’s going now, one Chicagoan in every fifteen will be a homicide victim. Dead, dead.”
    â€œCrime rate.” O’Hara made a sound: it might have been a sneeze. “Listen to this fool.” He turned and poked Paul’s sleeve. “I’ll give you real facts. We’re living in an occupied war zone. The city’s chopping and slashing itself to ruin. It’s what the ecologists call a behavioral sink. An intolerable overcrowding that leads to the inevitable collective massacre.” He pronounced the polysyllables with exaggerated precision.
    â€œYeah,” Ludlow said obscurely. “Yeah, yeah.”
    â€œChicago,” O’Hara said in a mock-wistful voice. “It’s watching the lake shore and waiting for some scaly grade-B monster to loom out of the sludge and step on the whole thing—the buildings and the people and the rats that bite the people. And in the meantime the cops go right on vagging prostitutes and shaking down storekeepers while a sniper picks off four drivers on the John F. Kennedy Expressway.”
    â€œTwenty-six homicides last weekend,” Ludlow said. There was no perceptible emotion in his voice. “Sixty hours, twenty-six murders.”
    Paul said, “Why?”
    â€œWhy what?”
    â€œIt shouldn’t be like that,” Paul said. “People shouldn’t have to be afraid.”
    Ludlow only laughed off-key.
    O’Hara said, “Listen, I talked to a guy in Cicero—he’s eighty years old and he’s grateful because it was only the third time his apartment got knocked over.”
    â€œWhy does everybody put up with it?”
    â€œWe’re all sheep,” O’Hara said. “Sure. Last weekend there was a mugger working the Christmas shoppers down in the Loop. Wearing drag, but it was a guy. Transvestite. He got pissed because a dame refused to hand over her handbag. The guy in drag shot the woman to death in broad daylight right in front of the bus terminal on Randolph.”
    â€œSweet Jesus.” Paul had the glass in his hand; suddenly it felt cold.
    Ludlow sang sotto voce: “Chicago, Chicago, it’s my kind of town,” confusing two songs, possibly deliberately.
    Paul said, “The mugger in women’s clothes—was he caught?”
    â€œThat one they caught,” O’Hara said: “Of course for every one they nail, there’s a hundred they don’t.”
    â€œYou’ll do a fantastic business in this town,” Ludlow told Paul. “Not that it’ll do any good.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œThe police won’t answer the alarms half the time.”
    â€œApathy,” O’Hara said. “Two guys got hit last night over on Mohawk .38 revolver, four shots fired right on a residential street. Nobody phoned in a report. Everybody who lives on that block must have heard the shots. But it had to wait for some guy driving by to spot the corpses and report it to the cops, and they took their time getting there.”
    â€œYou try to walk in this town, you hear footsteps behind you it’s like the sound of grenades. A walk in Chicago after dark is a combat mission.”
    â€œIt’s politics, bloody politics.”
    â€œListen to him. Everything’s politics to the mick.”
    â€œThere was a time when the Cook County machine was good for something. You got ripped off, the clubhouse would provide a meal and even a job for you, and a lawyer for the guy who ripped you off. It was all part of the community in those days. Now it’s a political battlefield. The big shots have drawn back,