A split second later his friends took off in his wake. "God damn it, Ed!" Grave Digger shouted and lunged for the gun. He made a grab for the barrel, deflecting the aim as it went off again. The bullet cut a telephone cable in two overhead. It fell into the crowd, setting off a cacophony of screams. Everybody ran. The panic-stricken crowd stampeded for the nearest doorways, trampling the woman who was shot and two others who fell. Grave Digger grappled with Coffin Ed and they crashed down on top of the dead white man. Grave Digger had Coffin Ed's pistol by the barrel and was trying to wrest it from his grip. "It's me, Digger, Ed," he kept saying. "Let go the gun." "Turn me loose, Digger, turn me loose. Let me kill 'im," Coffin Ed mouthed insanely, tears streaming from his hideous face. "They tried it again, Digger." They rolled over the corpse and rolled back. "That wasn't acid, that was perfume," Grave Digger said, gasping for breath. "Turn me loose, Digger, I'm warning you," Coffin Ed mumbled. While they threshed back and forth over the corpse, two of the Arabs followed Sonny into the doorway of a tenement. The other people crowding into the doorway stepped aside and let them pass. Sonny saw the stairs were crowded and kept on going through, looking for a back exit. He came out onto a small back courtyard, enclosed with stone walls. The Arabs followed him. One put a noose over his head, knocking off his hat, and drew it tight. The other pulled a switchblade knife and pressed the point against his side. "If you holler you're dead," the first one said. The Arab leader joined them. "Let's get him away from here," he said. At that moment the patrol cars began to unload. Two harness cops and Detective Haggerty hit the deck and were the first on the murder scene. "Holy mother!" Haggerty exclaimed. The cops stared aghast. It looked to them as though the two colored detectives had the big white man locked in a death struggle. "Don't just stand there," Grave Digger panted.