The Heat's On Read Online Free PDF

Street.
    “I like a joint where you can smell the girls’ sweat,” Coffin Ed said.
    It had a bar fronting on the street with a cabaret in back where a two-dollar membership fee was charged to get in.
    When the detectives flashed their buzzers they were made members for free.
    Noise, heat and orgiastic odors hit them as they entered through the curtained doorway. The room was so small and packed that the celebrants rubbed buttocks with others at ad joining tables. Faces bubbled in the dim light like a huge pot of cannibal stew, showing mostly eyes and teeth. Smoke-blackened nudes frolicked in the murals about the fringes of the ceiling. Beneath were pencil sketches of numerous Harlem celebrities, interspersed with autographed photos of jazz greats. A ventilator fan was laboring in the back wall without any noticeable effect.
    “You want stink, you got it,” Grave Digger said.
    “And everything that goes with it,” Coffin Ed amended.
    Some joker was shouting in a loud belligerent voice, “I ain’t gonna pay for but two whiskeys; dat’s all I drunk. Somebody musta stole the other three ‘cause I ain’t seen ‘em.”
    Behind a dance floor scarcely big enough to hold two pairs of feet, a shining black man wearing a white silk shirt kept banging the same ten keys on a midget piano; while a lank black woman without joints wearing a backless fire-red evening gown did a snake dance about the tables, shouting “ Money-money-money-honey ,” and holding up her skirt. She was bare beneath. Whenever someone held out a bill, she changed the lyric to, “Ohhhweee, daddy, money makes me feel so funny,” and gave a graphic demonstration by accepting it.
    The proprietor cleared a table in the back corner for the two detectives and showed them most of the amalgam fillings in his teeth.
    “I believe in live and let live,” he said right off. “What you gentlemen wish to eat?”
    There was a choice of fried chicken, barbecued pork ribs and New Orleans gumbo.
    They chose the gumbo, which was the specialty of the house. It was made of fresh pork, chicken gizzards, hog testicles and giant shrimp, with a base of okra and sweet potatoes, and twenty-seven varieties of seasonings, spices and herbs.
    “It’s guaranteed to cool you off,” the proprietor boasted.
    “I don’t want to get so cooled off I can’t warm up no more,” Grave Digger said.
    The proprietor showed him some more teeth in a reassuring smile.
    They followed the gumbo with huge quarters of ice-cold watermelon which had black seeds.
    While they were eating it, a chorus of four hefty, sepia-colored girls took the floor and began doing a bump dance with their backs to the audience, throwing their big strong smooth-skinned hams about as though juggling hundred-pound sacks of brown sugar.
    “Throw itto the wind!” someone shouted.
    “Those hams won’t stay up on wind,” Coffin Ed muttered.
    The tight close air was churned into a steaming bedlam.
    The temptation was too great for Coffin Ed. He filled his mouth full of watermelon seeds and began spitting them at the live targets. It was a fifteen-foot shot and before he got the range he had hit a couple of jokers at ringside tables in the back of their necks and almost set off a rumpus. The jokers were puffing up to fight when finally Coffin Ed’s shots began landing on the targets. First one girl and then another began leaping and slapping their bottoms as though stung by bees. The audience thought it was part of the act. It was going over big.
    One joker was inspired to give an impromptu rendition of “ Ants in your pants .”
    Then one of the black seeds stuck to the cream-colored bottom of one of the girls and she captured it. She held it up and looked at it. She stopped dancing and turned an irate face toward the audience.
    “Some motherraper is shooting at me with watermelon seeds,” she declared. “And I’m gonna find out who it is.”
    The other three dancers examined the seed. Then all four of them,