MARIHUANA

By WILLIAM IRISH

(a.k.a. Cornell Woolrich)

(1941)

The bell rang at about eight that night, and it was a couple of King Turner's friends, Bill Evans and Wash Gordon, come to take him out. "To get him away from himself," as they would have put it. They had a girl with them whom they introduced simply as Vinnie.

That he mightn't want to go out, or if he did, that he mightn't want to go out with them, didn't enter into their calculations at all. They couldn't imagine anyone not wanting to go out with them, especially when they went to all that trouble just to brace him up.

Turner opened the door and just looked at them when he saw who it was. He didn't say "Come in" or anything. He didn't have to with them. They parted in the middle, the girl and Evans pushed past on one side of him, Gordon on the other, and all of a sudden his apartment was full of noise. The radio was going at three-quarters tone, the girl named Vinnie was experimenting with a cocktail-shaker that played a tune, and Evans was busily slapping the lids of boxes up and down looking for a cigarette. This came under the general heading of camaraderie. Turner had experienced a lot of it since his wife had left him and he'd been living alone. As long as the fort had already been taken over, he went ahead and closed the door; but with a rueful look, as if he would rather have done it while they were still out there in front of him.

Evans spread his hands astonishedly, said: "Well, come on, get your things, what're you waiting for?"

"Know where we're taking you?" Wash Gordon added. "To a ranch. To a ranch to blaze weed."

"What's a ranch?" Turner asked. "And what's weed?"

The three of them exchanged a pitying look among themselves, as if to say "Isn't he corny? Doesn't know anything, does he?"

"Marihuana. The ranch is the flat where you smoke it. We just found it ourselves."

Turner sliced his hand at them in rejection, turned away.

"No, he'd rather stick around here and brood down his shirt-collar all evening. Brood about Eleanor."

"It's just for you," Evans urged. "It'll make you think you've got her back." He dropped one eyelid toward the other two.

The girl had found a picture, was studying it. "I don't see so much to brood about," she said felinely.

Turner came over and hitched it away from her, turned it face-down.

"Not on that subject," Gordon warned her in an undertone. "Can't take it."

"Well, are we going or aren't we?" she wanted to know sulkily.

"Sure we're going." Evans found Turner's hat, flattened it down on his head, slapped his topcoat lengthwise around his neck like a scarf. "So is he." He caught him by one arm and pulled him, Gordon by the other. "We know what's good for him, don't we, Wash?"

"I don't think it'll be much fun taking him along," the girl commented under her breath to Gordon.

"Sure it will, watch. He's never tried it before; he'll hit the ceiling. You should always have an amateur along on this kind of a party, for comic relief."

After they'd finally hauled him across the threshold, Turner quit trying to dig his heels in.

The girl came out last and closed the door after her, after sticking out her tongue at Eleanor's photograph. "You'll thank us for this," she promised Turner pertly. "It'll put a little life in you, Old Faithful."

"I left my latchkey in there," Turner protested. "I won't be able to get in again when I come home."

"It'll be so long before you come home," Gordon jeered, "the building'll probably be condemned and torn down from old age."

They got into a cab and drove west to Tenth Avenue, then up that into the lower Sixties, the Hell's Kitchen district, without giving any exact address.

"We ought to get a rebate for bringing a new customer," the girl said breezily.

Evans motioned to his lips and jerked a cautioning thumb toward the driver. "Wait'll we get outside again," he warned.

They got out at a blind street corner, apparently chosen at random, stood for a moment in the ghostly pall of a street light until the cab's taillight had winked out ahead. "We'll walk it from here," Evans said. "Driving right up to the door in a cab, in this neighborhood, is a tipoff something's doing inside. The neighborhood grapevine would finally get word to the cops."

They crossed over toward Eleventh, went up a side street on that side on foot. Turner's reluctance to accompany them, even this late in the proceedings, was plainly visible on his face, but they ignored it.

They stopped finally outside one of the moldering Civil War era tenements that, interspersed with billboards and lofts, lined the dismal thoroughfare. Turner tried to extricate himself for the last time, as if assailed by some intangible premonition. "I'm going to call it off. I got a feeling something's going to go wrong if I go up there. I got a feeling something's going to happen."

"Aw, don't be yellow," Gordon snarled. Turner could see by their expressions that they didn't really like him, there was no real friendship there; they wanted him to come along simply to have a good time at his expense, to make him the butt of a joke, laugh at his inexperience.

They looked at him scornfully, and the girl said contemptuously, "Oh, let him go. Don't make him come up if he's afraid."

It was the sort of challenge that usually works, against all reason and logic, with almost anyone. It did this time too. Turner turned toward the tenement entrance without another word, followed them in. If the girl's elbow nudged Evans' ribs in the gloom ahead, he failed to see it.

"Don't make any noise now," Gordon cautioned in the murky depths of the entrance-hallway. "They don't want the other tenants in the building to get wise."

There were stairs ahead, lit—or rather hinted at—by a single bead of gaslight, the size of a yellow pea, hovering over a jet sticking out of the wall. They tiptoed up them Indian-file. They had to go that way, the rickety case was too narrow to take two of them abreast.

"Once you get in it's not so bad," Evans tried to hearten Turner in a stage whisper over his shoulder. "They've got it fixed up pretty nice, out of the profits they make."

"Aren't they taking a chance on the law?" Turner asked, tailing the rest of them around a creaky landing and up another flight.

"If the dicks do bust in, what evidence have they got? How can they prove these people aren't just having a few personal friends in for a sociable evening? How long does it take to get rid of a few dozen reefers down the air shaft?"

They climbed the rest of the way in silence until they had reached the top floor of the sinister place, stood huddled there for a moment getting their breaths back. There was a peculiar, insidious trace of something in the air up here, very hard to identify—a ghostlike pungency that prickled the nostrils. Turner had never met with it before, couldn't tell what it was. But he had his suspicions.

"Well, here goes." Evans took a tug at his necktie, strode forward, knocked at a door fronting the top-floor hall. The others moved after him, stood grouped there as if for mutual protection.

There was a single, muffled footfall somewhere on other side of the door. The backing of a handmade peephole, bored through the woodwork with an awl, was removed, and an orange-lidded eye presented itself. That was because the light was on the eye's side, the hall where they stood held simply a pin-point of gas.

Evans made himself their spokesman. "Charlie and Joe," he offered. "Remember us? We brought a friend back with us this time." Girls evidently didn't count in this little subdivision of the underworld; a miscalculation many a shady character has made.

The eye blacked out and a chain dropped with a clunk. Then the door opened narrowly. So narrowly they couldn't see who was behind it. The invitation to enter, however was implicit. It reminded Turner inescapably of the old-time Prohibition gin-flats, only it purveyed something a good deal worse.

Evans, as ringleader, squeezed himself in first. The girl went next, with a shiver of thrilled anticipation. Gordon went next, and Turner came last. Somebody's hairy, sleeve-rolled arm dropped behind him like an ax, to close the door.

They were standing at the end of a long "railway" hall that seemed to go on indefinitely into the distance. A solitary electric light bulb overhead was made even dimmer with a jacket of crepe-paper. A man was standing there beside them with one hand held at a receptive level, as if waiting for something. He squinted at Turner, the newcomer, said: "This guy all right?"

"Perfect," Evans assured him. He got out money, said to Gordon: "I'm paying for Vinnie, you take care of Turner." There was evidently a flat admission-rate, with as many cigarettes supplied as the customer asked for. The doorkeeper had produced an ordinary white stationery envelope, was doling them out as they passed him.

"I've got money here—" Turner objected, used to the etiquette of the upper world. But vice is never stingy when it comes to roping a neophyte in.

"You're our guest," Gordon overrode him, pushing his hand down. "Just one for him, he's green," he said patronizingly to the man in shirt sleeves. The latter handed Turner a cigarette that looked like an ordinary cigarette, only the fill was a little darker and coarser. Turner didn't know what to do with it, stuck it upright in his breast pocket.

"Use it right here, don't carry it out with you," the man warned. "We got a house rule against that."

"He'll blaze it right away," Gordon promised.

They went down the long hall single file, the way they'd come in. The man who had admitted them followed at Turner's heels only as far as the first open doorway they passed. Then he turned aside and went in there. It was a barren sort of a kitchen. Turner glimpsed a bare wooden table and chair as he went by, placed lengthwise so that they could command a view of the hallway and anyone who went by outside. A deck of greasy cards was spread out in solitaire formation on the table.

The "paying guests" had continued on down the hall by themselves, so Turner went after them. The operators of the place evidently left their callers to entertain themselves as best they could. Turner followed the hall past several more doors until it had emerged into a depressing sort of front parlor, provided with a radio, a divan and several easy chairs. Two windows on one side that overlooked the street had dark shades tightly nailed down all around their frames. A third that looked out on an air shaft was wide open top and bottom, and in addition there was an electric fan facing it from floor level across the room, to help dissipate the tell-tale fumes.

The way they made themselves at home they might have been, as Evans had suggested, just company dropping in for a friendly visit. Except that they kept their hats and coats on, as if finding it advisable to be ready to leave in a hurry if they had to.

They were the only customers at the moment. There was a man in there already, but he seemed to belong to the place. He was in shirt sleeves, with a vest dangling open over some kind of a strap, a little too slantwise to be a suspender-loop. He was reading a newspaper when they came in; just looked up briefly, then dipped into it again without paying them any further attention.

They made themselves comfortable. Vinnie pre-empted the sofa and patted it for Gordon to sit down next to her. Evans strolled across the room to change the wave length on the radio. Turner, after a momentary indecision, sat down in an easy chair in the corner, a little withdrawn from everyone else.

Gordon had struck a match for Vinnie and himself. He blew it out, dropped it tidily in an ashtray beside them. If it hadn't been for what they had said at his own place. Turner wouldn't have been able to tell what they were doing. The whole procedure, so far, was perfectly casual, innocent-looking.

"Here we go again, gang," Vinnie giggled.

They all turned to look at Turner expectantly, watching to see what he'd do. He didn't do anything. Evans came over to him finally. A thread of smoke was looping around his wrist now too. "I'll steer you how to do it," he said affably.

Turner said in a low, discontented voice: "I don't want to do this. I gotta feeling this night's going to end up bad."

Evans took it out of his breast pocket for him, aimed it at his lips. "Aw, don't be a wet blanket. If it was a drink you wouldn't refuse. So what? It's just an aerial drink." He'd clicked a pocket-lighter before Turner could swerve his head away. A sharp pain like a knife slashed down Turner's windpipe into his lungs. "Hold it," Evans coached. He pressed the flat of his hand across Turner's mouth for a minute, preventing him from exhaling. Then he picked up the fallen reefer, handed it back to him.

Then he stood a minute watching. "Take another drag," he said finally. Slowly Turner's hand rose to his mouth. Almost against his will, but it rose. The pain wasn't nearly as sharp this time.

Evans turned away, did something with his left eyelid for the benefit of the other two. "It's got him," he smirked. "He's tuned-in from now on."

Time started to slow up and act crazy. Minutes took much longer to pass than they had before. It was hard for him to adjust himself to the new ratio, he got all balled-up. When it seemed like half an hour had gone by, the radio would still be playing only the first chorus of the same selection that had begun a good thirty minutes before. Vinnie was doing a good deal of muffled giggling over there on the divan. The stranger who had been reading the paper got up, yawned, and strolled out into the hall, with a muttered "Happy landing!" He didn't come back again any more.

Turner looked down one time and a quarter of an inch of charred paper was all that was left between his fingers. Then the next time he looked there was a full-length cigarette again.

There was evidently a sort of sketchy buffet included in the admission charge. Or else Evans, who wasn't a bashful type person, had gone out and helped himself. He came back into the room after a brief absence holding a loaf of white bread tucked under one arm and hacking thick chunks off it with a bright-bladed jack-knife that he must have borrowed from one of the proprietors. The three of them, even the girl, wolfed at the thick slabs. "Find something to spread on it," Turner heard her suggest.

Evans had been standing before Turner. He put the knife down on the arm of his easy chair, turned and went out again. Turner stared bemusedly down at the shimmering blade, as though the gleam it cast half hypnotized him.

From far away he heard the girl's whispered comment to Gordon: "Look at Rain-in-the-face. I told you not to bring him with us, he's a total loss."

"Somebody ought to light a firecracker under him," Gordon agreed.

He didn't connect it with himself. It came from so far away, it wasn't as though they were talking about him at all. He started running the tip of his finger absently up and down the razorlike blade-edge of the knife Evans had left on the arm of his chair.

Evans came back in the room and he heard him say: "How's this? It's all I could find out there."

The girl said "Ugh" in a nauseated voice.

Turner didn't look over to see what it was. He didn't pay any more attention to them from then on. Something much more important was happening. Eleanor had showed up in the place. His Eleanor! The perfect lady that never could have been persuaded to set foot in such a—

First came her music, from the radio, that tune that he and she had danced to so many times in the past.

"After you've gone
And left me crying—"

Then came the thought of her. Then she herself. She was crouched down, trying to hide herself there behind the console, so that he wouldn't catch her in such a place. She peeped over at him, then ducked her head down. It wasn't just a private hallucination of his own brought on by the reefers, either; the others saw her too, he could tell by the way they spoke. Evans called over to him: "Hey, Turner, isn't that your wife across the room there? Better find out what she's doing here."

She stood up and came forward when she saw that they'd spotted her. She was trying to keep her face covered with a gauzy sort of handkerchief, and get over to the hall door and out, before they could stop her.

Turner jolted to his feet, headed her off, got in front of her. He caught her by the shoulders, tried to turn her toward him. "Eleanor! Who brought you to such a place? I'll punch them in the jaw!"

She writhed in stubborn silence, trying to get away from him.

"You got no right being here! You'll get yourself talked about. Come on, let me get you out, before somebody recognizes you—"

She wrenched herself free, turned and ran back to the opposite end of the room, away from him. He went after her.

It must have seemed funny to those other fools. They were laughing their heads off around him, instead of trying to help him. He heard Evans call out to him: "You'll never catch her that way. Here, pin her down with this." And then a muffled cry of alarm from Vinnie, the other girl, "Don't! Don't give him that, you fool!"

It came too late. Something went wrong. She turned midway in full flight, when he wasn't expecting her to, and they collided front to front. The recoil sent him back a step. She stood there perfectly still, only wavering to and fro a little as though the current of the electric fan on the floor was too strong for her. She was holding her hands clasped at one side of her bosom, as though something there hurt her a little—

Then as he stood there facing her, a hideous thing happened. Red peered through the crevices of her intertwined fingers. His eyes dilated and he held her hands protestingly toward her, as if to warn her of her danger—

Suddenly she was gone and the blank wall across the room was all that met his uncomprehending gaze. He looked down, and she was flat upon the floor, almost at his feet. Her hands had separated now, and on the place they'd clasped there was a blotch of red that kept on growing—

But more than that happened to her. In the fall, she seemed to have disintegrated into a flux of light-particles. Then they cohered again, into her face and form, but she wasn't Eleanor any more, she was—Vinnie, that girl that had come here with them.

He glanced behind him, to make sure, and all he met were Gordon's and Evan's frightened faces, livid with paralyzed horror.

One of them jumped forward, crouched over her, said in a choked voice: "Help me get her on the sofa."

Turner missed seeing what they did next; he was staring in dazed consternation down his own arm, at the knife-blade protruding from his folded-over fingers. No longer glistening cleanly but ruddied now. "How'd it get there?" he groaned, mystified. He opened his fingers and it popped on the floor.

They both had their backs to him, they were bending over her on the sofa, in frantic, furtive attempts at first aid. Evans had pulled the tail of his shirt out from under his belt, was trying to do something to her with it. "Gotta find some way to stop the bleeding—"

"That's no good. Hurry up, we better send out for a doctor!"

"They wouldn't let one in here; they're afraid of being reported."

"What'll we do? We can't just let her lie here bleeding to death—"

One of them glanced around remorsefully at him, then turned back again. "She shouldn't have teased him. I told her to lay off that subject—"

Turner's foot edged forward along the floor, pointing toward the hall doorway and escape. His body followed it. He was leaning forward above the waist in crafty, narcotized stealth. They kept their backs turned toward him, absorbed in their befuddled attempts to revive the inert figure on the divan.

He had already gained the doorway unnoticed, was looking back from the semi-sanctuary of the hall, when he saw one of their heads dip down lower over her. Heard the horror-smothered exclamation that followed. "Bill— oh my God, she's gone! I can't hear her breathing any more. It must have grazed the heart—"

He went wavering down the interminable reaches of the hall, rocking from side to side like someone breasting a ship's corridor in a high sea.

Before he was out of earshot one last exclamation reached him. One of them must have looked around and missed him. "Where'd he go? Get hold of him! He can't run out and leave us with her on our hands, we're all in this together!"

And then the reassuring answer, "He probably just went to the bathroom, to be sick. He won't get out without us, don't worry; the door's all chained up."

Oh, won't I? he thought craftily. He kept going, panic simmering deep within him; ready to boil over into a tide of destruction engulfing anyone who stood in his way. The hallway seemed to be of elastic; the more of it he covered, the more of it was stretched away before him. And the seconds went by so slow. He'd been under way, trying to get to that far front door, for fully fifteen or twenty minutes now. They'd come after him soon, they wouldn't wait back there much longer for him to return.

The first of the side doorways that lined the hall came creeping toward him at last. It had been left narrowly ajar. He stopped. The light was on in the room behind it. He crept forward, paying out his hands along the wall as he went, for balance. He found the crack of the door, peered through it. He saw a slice of an iron bedframe, a motionless hand. Emboldened, he advanced to the other side of the doorway, where the gap was. He looked in through that.

One of the two owners, the man who had been sitting in the front room, was stretched out in there asleep, one hand backed against his eyes to ward off the light. He'd taken off his vest and shoes, and that strap that wasn't straight enough to be a suspender-strap was dangling now around one of the knobs at the foot of the bed. It ended in a holster, with a black slab of metal protruding from it. Turner couldn't take his eyes off it, while the long seconds that to him were minutes toiled by.

That meant out, that black slab, more surely than any door. More than that, it meant a continuance of out, for so long as he had it. And he wanted out with all the desperate longing of all trapped things, blindly clawing their way through a maze to the open. To the open where the equal chance is.

He widened the door, until the gap had become entry. He felt his way across the room toward it, using his feet on the floor the way the hands are usually used across an unknown surface, testing for unevennesses that might cause sound, avoiding them where they seemed to lurk. He kept his eyes on the sleeper's half-shielded face; he knew the danger would come from there first, if there was going to be any.

He'd reached it finally. He tilted the bottom of the holster out, to keep it from striking the iron bed-frame. He knew all the right things to do. All the tricks of stealth seemed to come to him instinctively. Or maybe the self-protective facets of his mind had been made keener. Dangerously so.

He drew the gun up until its snub nose had come clear. Then he let the holster down again. He stood there wavering slightly, but with his perceptions diamond-clear. "I've got a gun now. If this town tries to stop me, that'll be this town's hard luck!"

He moved backwards for the room door, in order to keep his gaze on the sleeper's face. Only, now there was a difference: if that face awoke, that face would go to sleep for good. Halfway across, a worn floorboard creaked treacherously, and he flexed his knees and crouched. The sleeper's hand slid down from his eyes to his mouth. But his eyes didn't open.

He went on. The door sill nudged his heel, and he was over and out in the hall. He eased the door back to its original width, and started sidling along shoulder to wall, toward the next doorway down, behind which the card-playing lookout was.

He stopped just short of it and held his breath. He'd never known before that cards, a game of solitaire, could be heard so clearly. He heard: snap! and then a long wait, and then snap! again, as the unseen player laid them down one by one.

And then, just as he was starting to inch the gun muzzle past the frame of the doorway, preparatory to swerving it around and training it into the room, there was a catastrophic interruption. A sudden knocking on wood sounded, so close by it almost seemed to hit him in the face. A chair scraped back, and the card player cut out into the hall less than a foot ahead of him, so close his back almost grazed the gun point. The doorkeeper turned toward the front without looking back the other way, or he would have seen him there immediately behind him. Turner saw the light blur of his shirt sleeves recede into the shadowy haze of the hall just ahead.

He took a furtive step after him, his intention to champ the gun into his spine as soon as the chains were let down and overawe his way out. Again something happened to freeze his inflamed blood to new lows of panic.

The lookout had stopped before the panel, head tilted to the peephole. "Who are you?" Turner heard him ask gruffly.

A blurred voice answered something indistinguishable from outside. Turner couldn't catch it directly, was too far back, but he got it—or thought he did—indirectly, through the lookout's abbreviated repetition.

"Dicks?" he heard him say clearly.

Dicks! Detectives had already been summoned, were at the door to arrest him. Evans and Gordon must have betrayed him, must have gotten word out in some way, perhaps through the windows overlooking the street, or perhaps by some telephone he had failed to notice, as soon as he'd left the death chamber.

The reaction of the lookout in the face of this situation should have had some meaning, but it failed to register on his jangled faculties. The lookout didn't seem unduly perturbed, he started unlacing the chains without trying to warn those in the front of the flat. Perhaps the password he had heard was: "A friend of Dick's" and not "Dicks!" Turner was never to know.

To retreat was simply to return to the scene of his crime. To step aside into the kitchen was simply to be discovered by the lookout within the next moment or two. To carry out his original idea of weaponing his way out gun-first was now suicide; detectives were a different matter.

Then his eyes focused on this closet door, down ahead but on the opposite side of the hall from the kitchen—and the other doorways. It must have been there all along, but it only now peered through to his taut consciousness. It was so close to the end of the hall it formed nearly a right angle with the front door. It meant almost treading on the lookout's heels to sidle in through it.

There was no time to weigh chances. He crept up behind the lookout, knifed his hand behind the refuge-door—it hadn't been shut tight into its frame—drew it out and slid in in back of it. Then he reversed it to about where it had been before, to avoid the risk of the latch tongue clicking home.

He was in darkness. He could feel something soft hanging beside him, like an old sweater. Whatever noise there had been had blended with the opening of the other door. He heard feet shuffle by outside his hiding-place, and a voice said: "Straight down the hall, gentlemen." That convinced him of who the newcomers were and what they were here for; it sounded like the sort of grudging permission that might be given to detectives forcing their way in. The chains had gone up again. A follow-up tread went by, after the others. The silence fell again.

He couldn't linger. He had to get out, now more than ever. He widened the door, looked out, gun still bare in death's-head fist. Their retreating tread was still vibrating at the upper end of the interminable hall. The lookout seemed to be accompanying them to the front—further evidence, to him, that they were punitive agents—he could see the receding blur of his white shirt dwindling in the gloom.

He was at the door by now, palsied hand to chain. He had to pocket the gun, for the first time since he'd had it, to free both hands. He got one off the groove with little more than a faint clash. Someone gave a hoarse cry of alarm down at the other end—that meant they'd finally discovered her. Then a great welter, a hubbub, of voices sounded. There was a lurking note of the crazed laughter of marihuana somewhere in the bedlam.

The remaining chain swung down, he wrenched the door out, and he was free. The last thing he heard behind him was the oncoming stomp of running feet.

Now began flight, that excruciating accompaniment to both the sleep-dream and the drug-dream as well. Down endless flights of stairs that seemed to have increased decimally since he had come up them so many days before. Round and round he went, hand slapping at the worn guardrail only at the turns to keep from bulleting head-on into the wall each time. The clamor had come out onto a landing high above him now; a thin voice came shouting down the stair-well, "There he is!" raising the hue and cry to the rest of the pack. Footsteps started cannonading down after him. They only added wings to his effortless, almost cascading waterlike flight.

Like a drunk, he was incapable of hurting himself. At one turning he went off his feet and rippled down the whole succeeding flight of stair-ribs like a wriggling snake. Then he got up again and plunged ahead, without consciousness of pain or smart. The whole staircase-structure seemed to hitch crazily from side to side with the velocity of his descent, but it was really he that was hitching. But behind him the oncoming thunder kept gaining.

Then suddenly, after they'd kept on for hours, the stairs ended. He tore out through a square of blackness at the end of the entrance-hall, and the kindly night took him to itself—along with countless other things that stalk and kill and are dangerous if crossed.

He had no knowledge of where he was; if he'd ever had, he'd lost it long ago. The drums of pursuit were still beating a rolling tattoo inside the tenement. He chose a direction at random, fled down the deserted street, the wand of light from a wan street-lamp flicking him in passing, so fast did he scurry by beneath it.

A corner opened out before him, and he went skidding around it on the sides of his shoes. He was on an avenue now, where there was more light, and instinct warned him not to go so fast for he was automatically inviting pursuit and seizure by whatever passers-by he encountered. A man coming out of a saloon stepped back just in time to avoid being hurled down, and hollered maudlin imprecations after him, any one of which might have elicited sudden lead-spattering death for an answer, had he but known it.

Another corner, and he'd put two bends in the line of direct vision between himself and his pursuers. But he couldn't keep up this pace much longer; his breath was clogging and his heart felt as if it was swelling up like a balloon. He had to put some kind of a barrier around himself, no matter how flimsy, behind which to gain a breathing-spell.

He saw a little candy shop ahead, the kind that the neighborhood kids patronize with their pennies, casting a weak swath of light across the sidewalk through its glass front. He tottered past the first time; he would have preferred a doorway or a basement areaway. But then he couldn't go on any further; his breath clogged up entirely, and he had to flounder to a stop against the wall. He turned back and made his way in by a process of rolling his shoulders along the plate-glass front.

There was only one person in it, a stout woman in a sweater, evidently the shopkeeper. She was sitting with elbows propped on the soft-drink counter, reading a newspaper. He had wavered past her toward the back before she had had time to look up. She was the kind of shopkeeper who finishes the paragraph she is reading before waiting on a customer. Then by the time she had he was abreast of the telephone booth in the rear. She took that to be his errand and lowered her head again.

A bulb went on dimly over him as he spread the folding glass panel to muffle his asphyxiated breathing. He clawed at it, hectically twisted it until he had gotten kindly, sheltering darkness around him again. The booth had a little, inadequate seat, little better than a corner-bracket. That supported him for awhile. Then he let himself go floundering down to the floor, back upright against the booth wall, one knee reared before him, the other folded under him.

Reprieve for a little while. But the night was so long, the drug was so strong. Everyone's hand was against him, every face was an enemy's.

"All right, one at a time," the Lieutenant glowered. He didn't like either one of them, after what they'd just finished telling him. He had them typed at a glance. No-good bums. Dressed up, and with jobs, and money in their pockets, but bums just the same.

They were both on the verge of hysteria, faces like chalk at the horrendous consequences unleashed by their own thoughtlessness. Gordon kept whining over and over, uncontrollably, "We didn't mean no harm.... We didn't mean no harm...." He had a black eye from one of the cops.

"Shut up!" thundered the Lieutenant, pounding a fist down on the desk top. "You say that once more, and I'll let you have one across the snoot! Speak up now—where else is he likely to go? Any place you know of? Any close friends he's liable to turn to?"

They both shook their heads dazedly. Evans was still clutching a flimsy bit of woman's scarf. A scarf that had belonged to the girl named Vinnie. "We two were about his best friends," he faltered, "I don't know of anyone else he—"

"His best friends! Hagh!" The Lieutenant flipped the lever on a desk transmitter. "Send Spillane in here." Then he backed an arm toward the two cringing objects before him. "Take 'em out!" he rasped.

A lean, springily-knit individual thumped the already open door in passing, came striding in twenty inches to the stride while they were being hustled out.

"Spillane—" said the Lieutenant. Then he dropped his voice confidentially, while the detective hand-heeled the corners of his desk. It rose again toward the end, as he finished giving the instructions, consulted the memoranda he'd taken down. "His name's King Turner. He's twenty-five, medium build, light-brown hair, he's got a peculiarly thin face that you can't miss, cheeks sort of hollowed-in. He's wearing a pepper-and-salt suit, a telescope-crown gray hat, a belted gray topcoat that he may or may not still have with him. His own address is 22 East Fifth, between Lexington and Third. You may be able to head him off there, but I've got my doubts he'll go back there. The point is he's roaming the streets right now, a menace, a living death, to anyone that happens to cross his path. For all practical purposes he's a maniac, he's all hopped-up with marihuana. He broke out of there armed. He's got a Luger packed with six bullets on him at this minute—I'm sending out a general alarm on him, but I'm giving you this special assignment in addition. You've got to catch up with him before it's too late and—"

The cop that had taken Gordon and Evans out thumped the door, stuck his head in. "One of them two birds just remembered another place he thinks he might go, Lieutenant," he interrupted.

"Let's have it," said the Lieutenant alertly.

Evans' pasty face was thrust in, with the cop's hand guiding it at the back of the neck like a terrier's scruff. "His former wife, he's still crazy about her," he said disconnectedly. "That brought on the whole thing, over at the ranch— They're separated, and she's living at the Continental, on 49th Street, under her own name, Eleanor Philips—"

The Lieutenant turned back to Spillane. "He's liable to go there, to change his clothes or try to borrow enough money to get out of town on. Try for him there too—and you'd better warn her she's in danger, not to let him in. To communicate with us immediately if he shows up or she hears from him in any way. And whatever you do—"

Spillane hung back for a minute at the threshold, turned his head,

"—see that that guy is overtaken and stopped before this night's over, or there's going to be some killing like there never was before!"

He was still coiled there in the unlighted depths of the phone booth. His breathing was a little less harassed now. The only sound had been an occasional crackle as the woman up front turned a page of the paper she was poring over. She must have lost track of him, forgotten that he was still there—

Suddenly a tread on the wooden flooring at the shop entrance, heavy, authoritative, inward-bound. Then a voice, resonant, masculine, ominous: "Ye know who I'm looking for, don't ye? Ye know who it is I'm after?" And a chuckle. But a grim chuckle.

The woman's betrayal was instant, almost indifferent.

"He's back there, where do you suppuz? Go and get him yusself!"

Turner's heart spiraled frantically up, dropped down again where it belonged only because it couldn't burst out of his chest cavity. The gun came out almost by reflex action. He rose cobra-like within the narrow confines of his hiding-place. He edged the slide back a fraction of an inch—they were both out of range of the pane itself—peered laterally out, with two eyes on a vertical axis. One, his own; the other, the gun-bore, six inches lower.

A lowering uniformed cop, a big bull of a man, was standing up there, opposite the soft drink counter that ensconced the woman. But his head was turned down Turner's way, and there was a knowing glint to his slitted eyes.

Turner flung his own head back so violently the other way it struck the inner wall of the booth. He didn't even feel the impact, and his hat, crushed, deadened the sound of it. He dropped down again, to the lower rim of the glass eyes just above it, gun-mouth just above it. If he came toward him, if he came down this way—

A heavy preliminary footfall sounded. Then a second. Then a third. The cop's blue uniform-front impinged on the edge of the glass. Turner sighted the gun, centered it directly over his shield.

He took one more step forward and he stopped right outside the booth, blurring the pane. He didn't seem to be looking in, he craftily kept his profile turned toward it, as if unaware of it. But Turner saw his shoulder shift position, slope downward. That meant his arm was reaching back, that meant he was drawing.

His fear-inflamed mind sent the control-signal to his finger-joint to fold back. The trigger sliced back. The blast seemed to lift the booth clear off the floor, drop it down again. A pin-wheel of vacancy appeared in the glass, flinging off shards and slivers.

The cop's profile went down without turning full-face even at the very end, stunned unawareness of what had hit him written on it. Turner slapped back the remaining lower section of the panel, revealed it once more. On the floor, already dead. But still surprised. He took a step out, found himself facing a table of three rigid figures, only two of them still breathing.

There was a little runty man standing there, just past the booth in the other direction, as though he had been coming forward to meet the cop from the rear of the store, holding a numbers-slip in his extended hand. Still clutched in the cop's nerveless hand on the floor was, not a gun, but a dollar bill, freshly withdrawn from his back pocket.

The tableau held for a frozen minute. Neither of them, the woman nor her husband, seemed able to realize what had happened to him. Then as Turner stepped forward into their line of vision, smoking gun out before him, the woman's slack jaw tautened for a scream. He dialed the gun her way and the scream suffocated to death in her larynx.

"In back, the two of you!" It was the berserk yowl of an enraged tomcat on a back fence.

It was impossible for her to escape from the counter that walled her in on three sides, in any direction but toward him. She was afraid to go toward him. They were ignoramuses, but they could tell they were up against something that wasn't normal, they could tell by his eyes.

The little man, gums white, quavered: "Please, Momma, don't argue; you heard him."

She wrung her hands, whined: "Please, mister, just let me go by, I only want to get on the other side of you, like you said; don't do nothing—" and scurried by, head and shoulders defensively lowered as though he were an overhanging branch.

He shepherded them into the little back room the man had come out of, looked around to make sure there was no other way out, changed the key to the outside of the door and locked the two of them in, with a hissing "Keep quiet now, or I'll come back and—"

The shop entrance was still clear, no inquisitive figures blocking it. Facing it, and the prospect of further flight, he raked distracted fingers through his hair. That dislodged his hat. He saw it, but left it lying where it had fallen. There was no time for anything but to keep going—until he dropped.

Outside in the dark again, a sinister afterthought caught up with him, just too late. "I shouldn't have left them alive. They'll tell who it was, what I looked like." But there was no turning back again, either, on this satanic treadmill that had caught him up, that was wearing out his body, mind and soul.

He hurried along furtively, hugging the building-line, a shadow that progressed by fits and starts, from doorway to doorway, crevice to crevice. A shadow looking for a home. Wasn't there any which way he could turn, wasn't there anyone in town who would—

She came this time without the help of music. She was never very far removed from his thoughts, Eleanor. She was golden letters lighting up the frightened darkness of his mind. She'd help him. She was the only one he could trust. She'd once loved him. All that love couldn't be completely gone, there must be a little of it left.

But where was she? He couldn't remember, he couldn't remember that name. Some hotel, but he couldn't remember the name.

Sometimes it seemed almost to come to the tip of his tongue, then it receded again. Commodore? No. Concord? No. Con—? Con—?

He dogtrotted along through the dark, whimpering disjointedly: "Eleanor! Eleanor! I've got to find her."

A cop from a radio-car had just let them out of the back room when Spillane got there. Half the neighborhood had come crowding into the store, was milling around inside it. The crowd hid the dead cop on the floor from Spillane's sight for a minute. He nearly tripped over him when it gave way unexpectedly at his pressure.

The storekeeper's wife made straight for the fountain, wrenched at one of the spigots, gulped a mouthful of soda water from the hollow of her hand. Then she darted to the cash register, shut the drawer, hastily clawed at its contents. She gave a bleat of relief. "It's ull right, Poppa! Dolla ninety-seven! He didn't take nothing!"

"For no rizzon," the little storekeeper panted amazedly.

"Like gless, his eyes!" the woman shuddered.

Spillane had picked up the much-trodden-on hat. "K. T." he read from the sweatband. "Yeah, I think I know who he was," he said gloomily.

"For no rizzon," the shopkeeper heaved again. "Ufficer O'Kiff didn't even know he was in there. I didn't myself! Did you, Momma?"

"Sure, but I forgat."

Spillane eyed the glass-littered booth. Then he reached in and from its furthermost recesses picked up a dislodged "Out of Order" placard, that must have fallen unnoticed long hours before Turner had ever sought refuge in it.

"Yeah, that was him," he repeated. He questioned them on his appearance. They told him. They told him copiously, nearly breaking their necks nodding in confirmation.

He started out toward the locked store entrance, beyond which the shoals of excluded onlookers now stood peering in.

They didn't understand what he meant when they heard him mutter troubledly: "Now it is too late— Now there's only one language to speak—"

The key to memory had been a simple one after all; simple but effective. An unguarded telephone directory, this time hanging on the wall, almost at the entrance of a long narrow, all-night lunchroom, with a dozing vagrant or two nodding in the one-armed chairs. The huddled entrance, the book snaked from the hook and cowered-over in the corner with back turned, the vibrating finger tracing the classified list of hotels, recognition—like striking a match on sandpaper—when his nail struck the name. The Continental.

And now, the Continental itself.

She stepped out of the car in a peach-colored wrap, and she was beautiful enough to have caused even death to relent and pass her by. The man who loved her was standing beside her, holding her hand, and she was right under the lighted marquee of the hotel she lived in; how could anything happen to her. There was nothing waiting for her but sleep, upstairs.

"Goodnight and thanks, Matt. I enjoyed the evening tremendously."

"Won't you let me come up for a minute?"

She smiled disarmingly. "It's late and I'm tired. Call me from your office tomorrow, instead."

"Well, at least let me take you in as far as the elevator."

This time she laughed outright. "You don't have to be so formal. You'd better run along home and get some sleep yourself. No one will kidnap me between here and the lobby."

"Well, may I call you back in ten or fifteen minutes, just to say goodnight? It's hard to say it the way I'd like to, down here in the middle of the street."

There was another machine, blocked off from the entrance by his, trying to reach it and discharge its occupants. It had already sounded its horn querulously a couple of times. He had to get in and drive off without waiting to hear whether he had her permission or refusal for the last request.

She waved and turned away. On the bottommost entrance-step she dropped her handkerchief or something. She had to stop a minute to pick it up. Otherwise perhaps—

That was when the whisper reached her, from the outer darkness beyond the marquee. "Eleanor! Eleanor!" She turned and looked that way, uncertain she had actually heard anything, and a blurred form seemed to draw still further back into the gloom. There were a line of shrubs, growing in tubs, ranged on each side of the entrance, and it seemed to sidle in between two of them.

She hesitated, stepped toward the border of the light. The whisper came again, clearer now. "Eleanor. Come out of the light, I gotta speak to you—" She could make out a crescent of pale face looming there between the shrubs.

The darkness fell over her peach cloak like a gray curtain as she advanced a step further in that direction. The crescent-face enlarged to full. "King!" she gasped in sibilant astonishment.

"I have to see you. I have to see you right away. I called your room from the outside, and they said—"

"I'm always glad to see you any time, King. Come on up a minute then."

"I'm afraid to go in there with you. Somebody might see me—"

She could make out his harassed, disheveled condition, misunderstood the cause of it. "You've been drinking again," she reproved forgivingly. "Never mind, come on up and I'll straighten you out."

"But I'm afraid to let them see me—"

"There's an all-night drugstore down at the lower corner there. From the back of it you can go directly into the hotel; without having to pass in front of the desk. Suppose we go in that way."

Even before they'd reached it, a surge of cold fear drenched him. Could he trust her? Should he take a chance and go up? Once he was up there, escape might be cut off. Then the reassuring thought came: she didn't know what he'd done yet, so there was no reason for her to give him away.

There was no one in sight in the drugstore, only a night clerk busied behind a partition filling a prescription. They I passed through completely unseen. A passageway to the rear of it, leading to the hotel coffee-shop, was serviced by the elevators. She brought one down and they got on. She had the moral courage of utter respectability. "Straight up, Harry; don't stop at the main floor."

"Yes, Miss Philips." She got the respect due utter respectability. Though he'd seen the man step into the car after her, he kept his eyes straight front, didn't leer around over his shoulder. He kept on living, because of that. Turner's hand was on his back pocket the whole way up.

The main floor passed with a blurred flash of black-and-white tiled floor. The desk was off side out of sight somewhere; even if it hadn't been, no one could have focused the car's occupants as it shot up past the opening.

They got out, and she made a turn, keyed a door, threw it open. She lighted up the room beyond. Then she turned and said, "Now, King, what's all this great—?"

He said, "Close the door, first. Hurry up, come inside, first."

She did. By that time he was already over at the first of the two other doors it contained, looking into a closet. Then at the next one, looking into a bath. He said, "Are you alone? You sure you're alone?"

"Come here, King," she said soothingly. "Sit down in this chair. You're all unstrung. I don't like the way you're acting. What is it?"

"Eleanor, if I told you something, could I trust you not to give me away?"

She smiled rebukingly. "Have I ever let you down?"

"But this is something different. Once I've told you, I'm wide open, I'm at your mercy."

She said with charming ruefulness. "If you think I could take advantage of you, then maybe you'd better not tell me."

"But I have to. I'm all choked up with it." He tore open his vest with both hands and a button popped off. "And I need your help, I'm cut off, surrounded!"

"Tell it, then. I think you can count on me." She had forgiven him in advance; a bad check, a mess with a girl, no matter what it was.

He sat down at last. He let his hands dangle limp over his knees. "Eleanor, I killed a girl over in a place where I was."

He saw her go down out of her depth for a minute. He saw the blue-gray tinge of shock course through her skin, mottling it, as from an immersion. She hadn't been thinking along those lines. This was finis. "Are you sure?" That was just a cover-up, to gain time while she was fighting for self-mastery. She kept her voice steady. The end of the last word shook a little, that was all. She knew he must be sure; he wouldn't have come to her if he hadn't been.

"I saw them pick her up. I heard them say she wasn't breathing any more. I was holding the knife in my hands, all red."

He was a thing apart now; one of those things you read about in the papers, but didn't have a right in the same room with you. But still she tried to help him; she was that kind. "It's ghastly, but the only thing to do is to go to them and—"

"But you don't understand. There was a second one. A policeman, in a candy-store. He came in and— I did that one purposely."

She took a step back. Then another one. The peach cloak dropped in a puddle. Her voice was thin and still, he could hardly hear her.

"What is it? What's acting on you? What's the matter with your eyes? It's not drink, I can tell that—"

"Marihuana."

She looked down at the floor. Something made her shiver. He could see her doing it quite plainly. Something made her feel cold.

A spark kindled in the room. A spark of suspicion in his mind. Once lit, there was no way of reaching it to put it out again. Everything she did from now on simply fanned it brighter.

"Who was that man, in the car down at the door?"

"A friend."

"Is he coming back? Is he coming up here?"

"No, no." Her voice was shaking now beyond control. Only her demeanor was still steady, her facial expression. She was so used to peace and safety, it hadn't cracked yet. "Don't you want to lie down on the bed, King? It might help you— get over it, wear it off—"

He glanced over at it longingly, as if worn out; almost seemed to incline the upper part of his body toward it. Then he checked himself, drew back. The spark glowed bright, and he darted her a suspicious sidelong glance.

She drew slowly back across the room, without turning her back on him; the way a person does who is already in mortal terror, but trying not to give offense.

Presently he pointed to the bath door. "Can I go in there a minute?"

"Yes, surely."

He closed the mirrored door after him. Instantly it flashed open again. "What were you reaching for? I saw your hand go out."

Horror showed in her eyes, but she overcame it. "I was only reaching down for a cigarette. Here they are. See them?"

"But you're standing nearer the outside door than you were a minute ago." He came out into the room, stayed out, on guard.

The cords at the side of her neck were pulled taut. She tried to smile waveringly at him, re-establish a normal atmosphere. "Here, I'll sit all the way over here; I promise you I won't move—"

He sat back in his original chair, nearer the door. He never took his eyes off her for a single instant. She faced him, eyes steady by sheer will power alone in a face calcium-white with tension, while the minutes seemed to explode around them like popcorn. Once she broke, heeled hands to her eyes as if overcome. "Don't! You're torturing me. My nerves are tearing. That devilish drug—"

He slitted his eyes at her. "You're scared of me," he said accusingly. "That must be because you—"

"Only because you're making me so. You're acting so unpredictable." She was twining and untwining her fingers desperately. "Lie down for only a minute, give me a chance to pull myself together. I've just experienced a shock, I need time to adjust myself. Then, in five minutes from now, we'll be more used to each other, not so jump—"

"In five minutes you could be all the way down in the lobby—" He stopped short, blinked puzzledly. "What were we talking about just then?"

She clawed at her lips, forced back a scream. She quickly recovered, smiled at him again with dearly-bought composure. "For my own sake and yours, let me try to clear it out of your mind. What's good for it? Please lie down. I'll sit beside you; you'll hold my hand if you want; you'll tie my wrist to yours—"

She seemed on the point of winning him over. He looked yearningly toward the bed. She could sense that he was about to give in, relax this deathwatch, if only for a moment. And once his eyes dropped close—

The telephone shrilled out janglingly in the coffin-silent room. She gave a spasmodic start, that was almost a leap in air. Instantly he was on his feet, hovering watchfully between her and it.

"Who is it?"

"I don't know; how can I tell, until I answer?"

"Don't touch it or I'll—!"

She had made an inadvertent little gesture toward it; she quickly whipped her hand back again, as if it had been burned. She shivered, stroked her own upper arms as if she were unbearably cold. Help—that was so near and yet so far.

Both their gazes were fixed on it, the inanimate instrument, now; his in hair trigger menace, hers in swooning helpless frustration. If she could only knock it off the edge of the—

"Keep your elbow down! I saw it move—" His own hitched up.

"But it may be Matt, the man you saw bring me home. He knows I'm up here. If I don't answer, it'll be worse than if I do. I'll tell him I'm in bed, I'll tell him not to bother me—"

The continued ringing was an irritant, perhaps that helped. "Go ahead," he gritted. "Get rid of him." But the gun had come out now, was pressed into the soft flesh of her throat, just under the chin.

Her hand crept out toward the transmitter, cautiously, as if fearful of bringing on calamity if it betrayed too much eagerness. One of the breaks in the ringing had just occurred.

It didn't end! It stretched— it stretched— Silence. The call was killed. He flicked her futilely-extended hand back with the point of the gun.

Her head dropped down on her chest with a swinging roll. He tilted it back with his free hand. Moisture squeezed out of her eyes.

"What're you crying for?" he scowled viciously. "You musta wanted to talk to him bad? You musta wanted to—"

She didn't make any answer. You don't reason with a hooded cobra or a hydrophobic dog or a time bomb. You can't. There was only silence in the room, waiting silence— and the three of them.

There were three of them in the room now, where only two had first come in. Death was in the room with the two of them.

Spillane touched the requisitioned passkey gingerly to the door, gun unlimbered in his right hand and standing well off to one side of the opening. He sent the freed door back with a stub of his toe and followed his gun in like a compass.

Darkness and silence.

The place swallowed him up. There was a wait. Then the snap of a wall switch and a gush of light. He came back again to the outside doorway, hitched his head at the empty hallway, and a lurking auxiliary materialized around a bend in it, almost as if by mind reading.

"Not here," Spillane breathed when he had approached. They both went in and he closed the door after the two of them.

Eleanor's picture was still where Turner had put it down after last looking at it.

"Pick your spot while we can still see," Spillane cautioned. "I'm going to kill the lights as soon as I try to get hold of her once more. He may show up from one minute to the next—"

He lifted Turner's phone, slotted the dial.

A voice said, "Good evening, Continental."

He asked without any introductory explanation, "Did she come in yet?"

The answer was given with immediate understanding, as though this was only the latest of many such calls, repeated at short intervals. "I'll try once more, but I don't think she has or I would have seen her." Then a period of vacant humming. The voice returned. "No, Miss Philips hasn't come back yet, her room doesn't answer—"

"Hold her downstairs at the desk with you, if she does!"

He hung up, eyed the picture somberly.

"I'd better get over there myself—and fast," he said. "She's got to be tipped off the minute she comes in!"

The other man had disappeared by now, though the room was still fully lighted. A low voice from behind a reversed wing chair said "I'm set. Give it the gun."

The wall switch snapped a second time, and they both disappeared.

"You sit tight here, we'll work both ends at once. He's still likely to come back here— if he can remember to locate it. If he does, don't take any chances—he's dynamite!"

"That's all right," the voice from behind the wing chair said dryly, "I used to be foreman of a blasting crew before I joined the outfit."

The outside door opened and closed again. Darkness and silence.

She was a rag doll now, a scarecrow in a stringy, silver dress, the beautiful thing that had alighted under the marquee downstairs so short a while before. But the will to live was left, continually seeking new outlets, groping, cajoling, tempting, keeping her on her feet when her flagging, beaten down spirit wanted to let her down in an inert heap at his feet.

"—and they put mayonnaise on them, and they toast the bread if you want them to; I've often had one sent up late at night—"

"Yes," he assented eagerly. "I haven't eaten since Tuesday night, before I went to that— But how do I know you won't try to give me away?"

"You'll hear me, you'll be right beside me— I'll just give the order— not a syllable more."

"But when he comes up with it?"

"I'll have him leave it on the floor outside the door."

The hempseeds create a false, insatiable appetite, as well as distorting the time sense. He couldn't resist the picture she had so temptingly drawn for him. "All right, go ahead," he said truculently, and poised two fingers of his free hand directly over the transmission hook, ready to press down as on a telegraph key.

"But not into my cheek like that," she pleaded subduedly. "I can't speak clearly, it distorts my mouth—" He withdrew the gun a little, just beyond contact point.

She had it in her hand at last, at her ear; a skull that was still alive, sending down for sandwiches. She swallowed twice, to lubricate her strained throat. She was not going to try anything so foolhardy as to—that was not the plan. The will to live was too strong for that.

"Coffee-shop, please." His breath was coming down her forehead from above in a hot stream.

After a wait that seemed eternal, a voice answered.

She said: "Send up two sandwiches, double-decked and toasted—" Something wet fell on her forehead. "And coffee in a container, to 815." And she added, with quiet urgency, "Just like the other night. I can't seem to sleep."

The voice at the other end said, with sudden understanding: "Oh, you mean you want some of that sleeping-stuff I got from the drugstore for you to put into it again, Miss Philips?"

"A lot," she answered. "A lot—" And then as the connection broke, "—of mayonnaise." She replaced the transmitter as though its weight had broken her arm.

"What was that, just like the other night?" he demanded suspiciously.

"Not too sweet, I don't like the coffee too sweet."

"How do I know who you were really talking to just then?"

"But you heard me."

"How long will it take to get up here?"

"Oh, about five minutes," she said incautiously.

"Yeah? Well, we'll see. If no sandwiches have come in five minutes, I'll know you put something over on me, gave me away—"

This time her face turned ashen; more stricken than it had yet been since they'd come into the room. "No! Don't— you can't do that? That stuff has damaged your time conception— you think Tuesday night was a long time ago, and it's still only Tuesday night! You won't be able to tell—!"

He gave her a grim smile. "You seem frightened, Eleanor. If you just phoned down for sandwiches, why are you looking so white?"

"Let me call back, tell them to hurry it—"

He moved toward her with catlike agility. "You're not touching that thing again tonight! I was a fool to let you do it the first time!" He gave a foreshortened tug of rabid violence, and the phone cord dangled loose in his hands.

She ran a distracted hand through her hair. "Then in fairness to me, look at the clock over there? Set the time at which I made my call. Twenty-five minutes past four. See?"

He turned and glanced at it, but his face didn't change.

"Let me have a cigarette, in mercy's name," she breathed huskily.

He flung one at her. He began taking quick turns back and forth, directly in front of the room door. Every so often he'd stop and listen intently. There was silence inside and out. Only the sound her breathing made, and his velvety tread on the carpet.

The gun had stayed out. Presently his eyes stabbed over at her. "It's taking a long time—" he said threateningly.

She dropped the cigarette, as though it were top-heavy between her fingers. "But King, you're loading the dice against me," she moaned. "His coffee-maker may be out of order, he may have gotten off at the wrong door—any little thing like that, and you're penalizing me for it!"

"You didn't phone for any room service!" He had stopped pacing now. This was the showdown, at long last. She cringed back against the wall. "You gave way on me to the dicks, and they're probably on their way over right now—"

"But you heard me—"

"I can't remember what I heard any more. I can't think straight and you know it, you're trying to kid me— I know how they close in on someone they're after; they sneak up and surround the place first. That's what's taking them so long. It's over half-an-hour already!"

Her head rolled dismayedly from side to side against the wall. "It isn't—it's only a little over three minutes! Look at the clock!"

She held out her arm, pointing, but this time he wouldn't turn. "You set it back. It's long ago you called down. I know how it feels!"

She only had one more dodge left. One more, and then the struggle for life was out of her. "Our song. Wait! I have it here—" She floundered across to a turntable, began shuffling through records with a furtive haste. One dropped, broke; another, a third; she didn't even stop to look at them.

She found one, fitted it on, set the needle-arm. Then she turned to face him, at last gasp. Already more dead than alive. He had already killed her, all but her body. Life wasn't worth this price, anyway.

The music came from behind her, seemed to well up out of nowhere in the room.

"King! Do you remember our first Christmas together? That little house in New Rochelle. The tree we put up. Don't come any nearer. The clock! It's only six minutes; he'll be here any—"

"Why did you have to give way on me? All I asked was to stay here in your room until the heat cooled."

"Don't point it this way! Don't tighten your arm! I'm going to get married again next month! I was going to be happy again, until you came here tonight! Don't take it away from me—!"

"Now I'm sure you squealed on me."

It crashed out like thunder, making the room seem smaller and lower-ceilinged than it was. She went down saying two things: "The clock!" and "I'm Eleanor!" Then she said one thing more, spoke a name he didn't know: "Matt!" Then she died on the floor.

"After you've gone, after you've gone a-wa-a-a-ay."

The record whined off into silence. The smoke thinned into invisibility. The knock on the door came just as the minute hand on the disregarded clock behind him nicked twenty-five minutes to five in the morning — ten minutes after she had telephoned down to the coffee-shop. A lifetime. A deathtime.

He pivoted, then stood there tense, without moving, gun ready again. The knob turned and it opened slowly. An aluminum tray covered with a napkin came in first, alone, as if suspended in mid-air. A voice came second, cheerfully unaware. "Here y'are. How's 'at for quick service." A waiter's face came last, hitched back, smirking proudly.

He hadn't heard the shot. He must have been still coming up in the car shaft when it sounded. He looked in past Turner and gun, saw her there, like a rumpled silver flag lowered in defeat. His face turned flour-white. The tray slowly upended, somersaulted, went down flat with a crash.

The rest happened fast, while people behind other doors up and down the hall must have been still rearing uncertainly upright in their beds or trying to report over an unanswered telephone: "I thought I heard a shot up here somewhere."

Turner said, "In! In all the way!" and locked the bath door on the palsied waiter. Then he shoved the tray litter aside with his foot and closed the room door. Then he sprinted down the hall and around the turn and skidded to a stop on the rubber matting before the twin elevator-panels. He gouged a thumb into the push button.

There was a dial over each to indicate each car's position. An uncanny, an unbelievable synchronization, that might never have occurred again in ten years of nights, had taken place just as he arrived. The two cars were proportionately distant from him, one a floor below, one a floor above. The latter (evidently the same one that had discharged the waiter on its way up just now) coming down, the former coming up.

He shifted toward the dial whose indicator was descending toward "8." The effect of the fumes was beginning to wear off and perhaps he reasoned that a descending car would continue downward, while an ascending one would most likely continue upward, trapping him hopelessly in the building's upper reaches. In that slight step to the left lay eight or ten months' life, lay the difference between legal death and death by violence.

Both cars arrived simultaneously. The two slides slid back so in unison that it made one continuous motion toward the right—with just the interruption of a mail-chute in between.

The back of Turner's heel lifted into the one opening just as the hub of Spillane's toe preceded him out of the other.

The panel cut him off again, put bronze between them before there had been time for a full bodily glimpse, and Turner was soldering his gun like a blowtorch into the operator's spine. "All the way down—basement, and no stops!"

Again a blurred flash of black-and-white tiled lobby, too quick to focus, and then he tomahawked the back of the operator's head with his gun-heft, stepped out of the car. Someone was discontentedly bouncing a half-dollar on the counter in the deserted coffee-shop and snarling: "Where's that damn counterman?"

That damn counterman was nine floors up, locked in the bath of a murdered woman's apartment. Turner went out the other way through the drugstore.

The sight of his own inscrutable door, twenty minutes and a wild taxi ride later, fingertips outstretched to it helplessly, reminded him of something from that night weeks ago, that night from another lifetime when he had left here: he'd left his key inside, he couldn't get in without rousing the night doorman, whom he had sidled by without awakening just now.

The fumes were all gone now—too late. He'd killed the thing he loved best. He'd still go through the motions of escape, because the life spark glimmers on to the last; of going in there, getting money, packing a bag, and trying to make one of the bus or railway stations. But it was just reflex now, momentum; the way a chicken keeps going after its head is cut off. His heart had died during the night.

There was another way in. His quarters were so high up he never locked his windows. There was a ledge, a slim coping running along the face of the building flush with them. He went down the hall, turned into an indentation, threw open the ventilating window backing it.

He climbed out on the narrow place and stood up, turned inward to the wall. Then he started to shuffle his feet along—he couldn't intercross them—and pat his hands along the stone like suction cups. It was starting to get light-blue in the east, but the streets were still dark chasms fifteen stories below. First came his tiny bath window, higher than the others and too small to go in through. He passed it, after resting a moment on the steadier grip its sill gave his hands, went on.

The main, full-sized window came inching up alongside him, and he'd made the harebrained passage, was gripping the edge of the stone window-trim, looking in. His room was still darker than the sky out behind him, but a pale oval stood out against the reflected light. It moved and he identified it. Suddenly a waiting man had reared from his wing-backed chair, screened from the door, was drawing.

Turner drew faster, fired through the glass and all. What felt like sand stung his forehead, and an intolerable pain shot from his eyeball. He slapped a hand to it—the other he needed to stay up on the ledge — and his gun went sailing down into oblivion.

He'd missed. Through the blinding smoke and with only one eye, he saw the man still on his feet, coming toward the window, gun sighted at him. Heard him say: "Don't move! Stay where you are!"

He knew the man wouldn't fire. He started inching back along the lip of stone the way he'd come, one hand patting a little red along the stonework now. He was back out of reach by the time the man had thrown up the shattered pane, was looking out at him, still trying to overawe him with his gun. "Come in here or I'll fire!"

Turner jeered, "Come out and get me!" kept sidling back. He was past the bath window now. The man got to it too late, found when he'd raised it it wouldn't have done him any good anyway, was too high up. There was a longer space between it and the hall window.

Far down below he heard sirens hooting up, and shouts reached him dimly, and though he didn't turn to look down (knew better!) he could imagine the white roofs of the two or three patrol cars peering up like overturned rowboats.

A head thrust out of the hall window ahead, sighted over at him. Spillane's head, although he didn't know him. They looked at one another squarely for the first time, although one had been chasing the other all night. Spillane tried to intimidate him with a gun too. Turner didn't even bother looking at it. He knew they wouldn't shoot him in cold blood while he was out here, for some reason, now that he was unarmed himself. If he'd still been in full flight on the streets below—

He looked down the other way. The first man had gone back to the living room window again. He was cut off. He'd stopped moving now, just stayed there where he was, equidistant from the two. All right, they had him. Let them come and get him then. He hated everyone in the world, now that Eleanor was gone. He'd take whoever came out after him, off with him.

He just stood there waiting for the end, face turned toward the blank wall, conscious of a great humming crowd far down below; deaf alike to their threats at gun-point, their cajoleries, their hidden conferences and maneuvers back out of sight of the windows.

The hall window had been vacant for a while. Now Spillane came back again. Not only his face this time, his knee, his thigh, then his whole body. So he was coming out after him, was he? He'd muffed an assignment and he was going to atone for it by playing the hero.

"You're going to die if you come out here," Turner warned him with deadly quietness.

Spillane stood up, full-height now against the wall like he was. Turner didn't begin edging away as he advanced. This had to end sooner or later; it may as well end now.

He didn't even bother answering the detective's ingratiating patter, half-heard it. "Look, I have no gun, Turner.... Come inside with me and let's talk it over.... Listen, I'll make a deal with you...."

He only spoke once—when the detective had reached the half-way mark. "This is your last chance, whoever you are. If you've got someone you love, don't be a sucker, go back."

He thought he saw the other man's face whiten a little, but he never hesitated, came slowly on.

They were a yard from each other now. "All right," Turner said clippedly. He took both hands off the wall, turned shoulders and waist toward him, started leaning, arms in hook position; then as gravity caught at him. plunged at him, wrapped him in a death-grip, and the two of them went off into space.

Someone screamed thinly, most likely Turner, and a horrified moan went up from the street.

The rope that Spillane had had wound about his waist jerked taut at about the third floor down, and the commingled bodies dangled there with a shudder for a moment. Turner's grip had broken in the fall. Spillane had him by the slack of the coat and the collar and could no longer risk shifting his hold without losing him altogether.

In the frozen silence the scores of upturned faces could see the coat part as its buttons went with the strain. Then Turner's arms started to pull out of the sleeves with hideous slowness. Spillane writhed frantically, trying to grasp him by the body itself. They shot apart, and he was alone there with an empty coat.

The net they had spread in the street might still have saved Turner, but his body didn't go out far enough, it broke across a projection at second-story height, stayed partly on and partly off.

When they had hauled Spillane up again to safety, he hung his head, had very little to say, like a man who feels he has been frustrated through no fault of his own.

"Don't feel that way," they tried to tell him, patting him on the back. "You did your best, all that anyone can do."

He kept shaking his head. "If I could only have caught up with him in time, before he dropped that first cop in the candy-store! After that it was too late. But in the beginning, all I was sent out after him for was to tell him—"

The other girl was assailed by misgivings. She tried to join in the unrestrained hilarity when Vinnie finished telling it. But she couldn't. Finally she asked: "But what was so funny about it?"

Vinnie was almost incoherent with laughter, she could hardly articulate at all. "If you coulda seen the look on his face," she strangled, "when he saw me lying there on the floor, squeezing out his gob of bread with ketchup on it against my side! And the careful way the boys picked me up and laid me on the sofa, as if I were dead! I bet he's still running! I must ring up and find out whether the boys have seen or heard from him since. It was worth the price of admission, alone! I tell you, never a dull moment when I'm around!"

The other girl dutifully chortled a little in accompaniment to Vinnie's guffaws. But she still had her doubts. "It was kind of a mean trick to play on anyone, though."

Vinnie shrugged. "Oh, well—what harm was there in it?"

"There's someone at the door. I'll answer it for you." The friend came back and reported: "There's a man out there waiting to see you, and I don't like the look on his face. It spells trouble to me. He's either a bill collector or a plainclothesman"—and with unconscious prophecy she added—"or maybe a little of both."

THE END