Marihuana (6 page)

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