All Shot Up by Chester Himes

as those people is I room with.”
    “Well, how is us going to pay this man for staying in his house and searching for our car?” he wanted to know. “I gave Mister Baron my last dollar.”
    “We can sell him the tires off this car,” she said, “He’s in the used-tire business.”
    “I get it,” he said. “I ain’t as dumb as you think. He’s tire thief.”
    “Well, what if he is,” she said. “He’s got to know where cars is at in order to steal their tires. And that’s just who you need, somebody who knows something.”
    “Well, all right then, let’s go give him the tires off this car and get started looking. Where is he at?”
    “He lives in the Alley. He’s got a big place of his own.”
    He started the car and drove down to 112th Street and turned back toward Lexington. Just back of the buildings facing on Third Avenue was a narrow passageway that turned at a right angle and ran between the crosstown streets.
    It was a tight squeeze for a big car—there wasn’t space on either side to open the door and get out—and he had to back up three times to turn the corner.
    “I’d hate to get caught in here,” he said. “Ain’t no way to go but up.”
    The Alley was flanked by rows of two-story brick buildings, in varying degrees of decay, that had once been carriage-houses for the residents of 112th and 111th Streets. Now families lived on the second floors that had been servants quarters, and the carriage stalls were filled with long-forgotten junk, in which rats bred and children played and little girls lost their maidenheads.
    “It’s here,” she said, indicating a rotten wooden carriage-house door spotted with patches of rusty tin. “Let me see if he’s in.”
    The door was fastened by iron bars bolted to the rotten wood and a brass lock the size of a hitching block.
    He stopped the car, and she got out and peered through a spyhole beside the lock.
    “He ain’t in,” she said. “His motorcycle ain’t here.”
    “What’s us going to do?” he said.
    “Let me think,” she said, putting the tips of her mittened fingers to a dusty gray cheek and looking absent. “Oh!” she said brightly. “That reminds me. He gave me a key to the door.”
    She started digging in her handbag.
    “What’s he doing giving you a key to his door?” he asked suspiciously.
    “It’s for his girl friend,” she said lightly. “She and I is pals. And he said if she come by and he was out for me to let her in.”
    To the right of the carriage-house doors was a small door that opened on to a staircase leading to the quarters above. She inserted a key in the Yale lock and said, “There! Now we can just go inside and wait for him.”
    “You know this man mighty well,” he said.
    “His girl friend and me is just like that,” she said, holding up a hand with the thumb pressed tightly to the first mittened finger. “I’ll just run up and get the key to the big lock so you can put the car inside where won’t nobody see it.”
    “If I likes this, I likes oats in my ice cream,” he said. “And I ain’t no mule.”
    But she didn’t wait to hear him. She ran up, got the key and opened the big doors, and he maneuvered the car into a dark, damp room with bare beams and a flagstoned floor smelling of tire rubber and earth mold. Hanging to toolboards on the walls were the various equipment for changing and repairing tires, but no tires were in sight.
    He got out, grumbling to himself. She closed and locked the gate, switching about with a bright, excited insouciance, as though her pants were crawling with seventeen thousand queen ants.
    “Now we’ll just go upstairs and wait,” she said, moving as though all the ants were biting her lightly.
    The upstairs was one room. There were sets of windows at both back and front, the panes covered with oiled brown paper. In the center, on one side, was a coal-burning, pot-bellied stove. The nearest corner was filled by a double bed with a chipped, white-enameled