Cornell Woolrich - Nightwebs (A Collection of Stories)

The stair-well was empty; the landlady must have retreated temporarily to her quarters below to rouse her husband, so he wouldn’t miss the excitement of the capture and towing away. Lew passed Tom’s closed door and was going by it without stopping, going straight down to the street and the new career that awaited him in the slumbering city, when Tom opened it himself and looked out. He must have heard a creak and thought it was the detective returning, thought Lew, and figured a little boot-licking wouldn’t hurt any.

“Did you get him—?” Tom started to say. Then he saw who it was, and saw what Lew was holding in his hand.

Lew turned around and went back to him. “No, he didn’t get me,” he said, ominously quiet, “I got him.” He went in and closed the door of the room after him. He kept looking at Tom, who backed away a little.

“Now you’ve finished yourself!” Tom breathed, appalled.

“You mean I’m just beginning,” Lew said.

“I’m going to get out of here!” Tom said, in a sudden flurry of panic, and tried to circle around Lew and get to the door.

Lew waved him back with the gun. “No, you’re not, you’re going to stay right where you are! What’d you double-cross me for?”

Tom got behind a chair and hung onto it with both hands — as though that was any good! Then almost hysterically, as he read Lew’s face: “What’s the matter, ya gone crazy? Not me, Lew! Not me! ”

“Yes, you!” Lew said. “You got me into it. You knew they’d follow you. You led ’em to me. But they still don’t know what I look like — but you do! That one went up there after me can’t tell now what I look like, but you still can! They can get me on sight, while you’re still around.”

Tom was holding both palms flat out toward Lew, as though Lew thought they could stop or turn aside a bullet! Tom had time to get just one more thing out: “You’re not human at all!”

Then Lew pulled the trigger and the whole room seemed to lift with a roar, as though blasting were going on under it. The gun bucked Lew back half a step; he hadn’t known those things had a kick to them. When he looked through the smoke, Tom’s face and shoulders were gone from behind the chair, but his forearms were still hanging across the top of it, palms turned downward now, and all the fingers wiggling at once. Then they fell off it, went down to join the rest of him on the floor.

Lew watched him for a second, what he could see of him. Tom didn’t move any more. Lew shook his head slowly from side to side. “It sure is easy all right!” he said to himself. And this had been even less dramatic than the one up above on the roof.

Familiarity with death had already bred contempt for it.

He turned, pitched the door open, and went jogging down the stairs double-quick. Doors were opening on every landing as he whisked by, but not a move was made to stop him — which was just as well for them. He kept the gun out in his hand the whole time and cleared the bottom steps with a short jump at the bottom of each flight. Bang! and then around to the next.

The landlady had got herself into a bad position. She was caught between him and the closed street-door as he cleared the last flight and came down into the front hall. If she’d stayed where she belonged, Lew said to himself, she could have ducked back into her own quarters at the rear when he came down. But now her escape was cut off. When she saw it was Lew, and not the detective, she tried to get out the front way. She couldn’t get the door open in time, so then she tried to turn back again. She dodged to one side to get out of Lew’s way, and he went to that side too. Then they both went to the other side together and blocked each other again. It was like a game of puss-in-the-corner, with appalled faces peering tensely down the stair-well at them.

She was heaving like a sick cat in a sand-box, and Lew decided she was too ludicrous to shoot. New as he was at the game of killing, he had to have dignity in his murders. He walloped her back-handed aside like a gnat, and stepped over her suddenly upthrust legs. She could only give a garbled description of him any way.

The door wasn’t really hard to open, if you weren’t frightened, like Lew wasn’t now. Just a twist of the knob and a wrench. A voice shrieked down inanely from one of the upper floors, “Get the cops! He’s killed a fellow up here!” Then Lew was out in the street, and looking both ways at once.

A passerby who must have heard the shot out there had stopped dead in his tracks, directly opposite the doorway on the other side of the street, and was gawking over. He saw Lew and called over nosily: “What happened? Something wrong in there?”

It would have been easy enough to hand him some stall or other, pretend Lew was himself looking for a cop. But Lew had this new contempt of death hot all over him.

“Yeah!” he snarled viciously. “I just shot a guy! And if you stand there looking at me like that, you’re gonna be the next!”

He didn’t know if the passerby saw the gun or not in the dark, probably not. The man didn’t wait to make sure, took him at his word. He bolted for the nearest corner. Scrunch, and he was gone!

“There,” Lew said to himself tersely, “is a sensible guy!”

Black window squares here and there were turning orange as the neighborhood began belatedly to wake up. A lot of interior yelling and tramping was coming from the house Tom and Lew had lived in. He made for the corner opposite from the one his late questioner had fled around, turned it, and slowed to a quick walk. He put the gun away; it stuck too far out of the shallow side-pocket of Tom’s suit, so he changed it to the inner breast pocket, which was deeper. A cop’s whistle sounded thinly behind him, at the upper end of the street he’d just left.

A taxi was coming toward him, and he jumped off the sidewalk and ran toward it diagonally. The driver tried to swerve without stopping, so he jumped up on the running-board and wrenched the wheel with his free hand. He had the other spaded into his pocket over the gun again. “Turn around, you’re going downtown with me!” he said. A girl’s voice bleated in the back. “I’ve got two passengers in there already!” the driver said, but he was turning with a lurch that nearly threw Lew off.

“I’ll take care of that for you!” he yanked the back door open and got in with them. “Out you go, that side!” he ordered. The fellow jumped first, as etiquette prescribed, but the girl clung to the door-strap, too terrified to move, so Lew gave her a push to help her make up her mind. “Be a shame to separate the two of you!” he called after her. She turned her ankle, and went down kerplunk and lay there, with her escort bending over her in the middle of the street.

“Wh-where you want me to g-go with you, buddy?” chattered the driver.

“Out of this neighborhood fast,” Lew said grimly.

He sped along for a while, then whined: “I got a wife and kids, buddy—”

“You’re a very careless guy,” Lew said to that.

He knew they’d pick up his trail any minute, what with those two left stranded in the middle of the street to direct them, so he made for the concealing labyrinth of the park, the least policed part of the city.

“Step it down a little,” he ordered, once they were in the park. “Take off your shoes and throw them back here.” The driver’s presence was a handicap, and Lew had decided to get rid of him, too. Driving zig-zag along the lane with one hand, the cabbie threw back his shoes. One of them hit Lew on the knee as it was pitched through the open slide, and for a minute Lew nearly changed his mind and shot him instead, as the easiest way out after all. The cabbie was half dead with fright by this time, anyway. Lew made him take off his pants, too, and then told him to brake and get out.