"Them is Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson you is talking to. Can't you see that police antenna stuck up from their tail." "Oh, that's them," the driver said, cooling off as quickly as a showgirl on a broke stud. "I didn't recognize 'em." Grave Digger had heard him but he mashed the gas without looking around. Coffin Ed drew his pistol from its shoulder sling and spun the cylinder. Passing street light glinted from the long nickelplated barrel of the special. 38 revolver, and the five brassjacketed bullets looked deadly in the six chambers. The one beneath the trigger was empty. But he kept an extra box of shells along with his report book and handcuffs in his greased-leather-lined right coat pocket. "Lieutenant Anderson asked me last night why we stick to these old-fashioned rods when the new ones are so much better. He was trying to sell me on the idea of one of those new hydraulic automatics that shoot fifteen times; said they were faster, lighter and just as accurate. But I told him we'd stick to these." "Did you tell him how fast you could reload?" Grave Digger carried its mate beneath his left arm. "Naw, I told him he didn't know how hard these Harlem Negroes' heads are," Coffin Ed said. His acid-scarred face looked sinister in the dim panel light. Grave Digger chuckled. "You should have told him that these people don't have any respect for a gun that doesn't have a shiny barrel half a mile long. They want to see what they're being shot with." "Or else hear it, otherwise they figure it can't do any more damage than their knives." When they came onto Lenox, Grave Digger wheeled south through the red light with the siren open, passing in front oi an eastbound trailer truck, and slowed down behind a sky blue Cadillac Coupe de Ville trimmed in yellow metal, hogging the southbound lane between a bus and a fleet of northbound refrigerator trucks. It had a New York State license plate numbered B-H-21. It belonged to Big Henry who ran the "21" numbers house.