Cornell Woolrich - Nightwebs (A Collection of Stories)

Lew got in at the wheel. The driver stood there on the asphalt in his socks and shirt-tails, pleading, “Gee, don’t leave me in the middle of the park like this, buddy, without my pants and shoes, it’ll take me all night to get out!”

“That’s the main idea,” Lew agreed vindictively, and added: “You don’t know how lucky you are! You’re up against Death’s right-hand man. Scram, before I change my mind!”

The cabbie went loping away into the dark, like a bow-legged scarecrow and Lew sat at the wheel belly-laughing after him. Then he took the cab away at top speed, and came out the other end about quarter of an hour later.

He was hungry, and decided the best time to eat was right then, before daylight added to the risk and a general alarm had time to circulate. The ability to pay, of course, was no longer a problem in this exciting new existence that had begun for him tonight. He picked the most expensive place open at that hour, an all-night delicatessen, where they charged a dollar for a sandwich and named it after a celebrity. A few high-hats were sitting around having bacon and eggs in the dim, artificial blue light that made them look like ghosts.

He left the cab right at the door and sat down where he could watch it. A waiter came over who didn’t think much of him because he didn’t have a boiled shirt. He ran his finger down the list and picked a five-dollar one.

“What’s a Jimmy Cagney? Gimme one of them.”

“Hard-boiled egg with lots of paprika.” The waiter started away.

Lew picked up a glass of water and sloshed it across the back of his neck. “You come back here! Do that over, and say sir!” he snarled.

“Hard-boiled egg with lots of paprika, sir,” the waiter stuttered, squirming to get the water off his backbone.

When he was through, Lew leaned back in his chair and thumbed him over. “How much do you take in here a night?”

“Oh, around five hundred when it’s slow like this.” He took out a pad and scribbled “5.00” at the bottom, tore it off and handed it to Lew.

“Lend me your pencil,” Lew said. He wrote “Pay me” in front of it, and rubbed out the decimal point. “I’ll take this over to the cashier myself,” he told the waiter.

Then as he saw the waiter’s glance sweep the bare table-top disappointedly, “Don’t worry, you’ll get your tip; I’m not forgetting you.”

Lew found the tricky blue lighting was a big help. It made everyone’s face look ghastly to begin with and you couldn’t tell when anyone suddenly got paler. Like the cashier, when he looked up from reading the bill Lew presented and found the bore of the gun peering out from Lew’s shirt at him like some kind of a bulky tie pin.

He opened the drawer and started counting bills out. “Quit making your hands shake so,” Lew warned him out of the corner of his mouth, “and keep your eyes down on what you’re doing, or you’re liable to short-change me!”

Lew liked doing it that way, adding to the risk by standing there letting the cashier count out the exact amount, instead of just cleaning the till and lamming. What was so hectic about a hold-up, he asked himself. Every crime seemed so simple, once you got the hang of it. He was beginning to like this life, it was swell!

There were thirty or so bucks left in the drawer when the cashier got through. But meanwhile the manager had got curious about the length of time Lew had been standing up there and started over toward them. Lew could tell by his face he didn’t suspect even yet, only wanted to see if there was some difficulty. At the same time Lew caught sight of the waiter slinking along the far side of the room, toward the door in back of him. He hadn’t been able to get over to the manager in time, and was going to be a hero on his own, and go out and get a cop.

So Lew took him first. The waiter was too close to the door already for there to be any choice in the matter. Lew didn’t even aim, just fired what he’d heard called a snap-shot. The waiter went right down across the doorsill, like some new kind of a lumpy mat. Lew didn’t even feel the thing buck as much as when he’d shot Tom. The cashier dropped too, as though the same shot had felled him. His voice came up from the bottom of the enclosure, “There’s your money, don’t shoot me, don’t shoot me!” Too much night-work isn’t good for a guy’s guts, Lew mused.

There was a doorman outside on the sidewalk. Lew got him through the open doorway just as he got to the curb, in the act of raising his whistle to his lips. He stumbled, grabbed one of the chromium stanchions supporting the entrance canopy, and went slipping down like a fireman sliding down a pole. The manager ducked behind a table, and everyone else in the place went down to floor-level with him, as suddenly as though they were all puppets jerked by strings. Lew couldn’t see a face left in the room; just a lot of screaming coming from behind empty chairs.

Lew grabbed up the five hundred and sprinted for the door. He had to hurdle the waiter’s body and he moved a little as Lew did so, so he wasn’t dead. Then Lew stopped just long enough to peel off a ten and drop it down on him. “There’s your tip, chiseler!” Lew hollered at him, and beat it.

Lew couldn’t get to the cab in time, so he had to let it go, and take it on foot. There was a car parked a few yards in back of it, and another a length ahead, that might have blocked his getting it out at the first try, and this was no time for lengthy extrications. A shot came his way from the corner, about half a block up, and he dashed around the next one. Two more came from that, just as he got to the corner ahead, and he fired back at the sound of them, just on general principle. He had no aim to speak of, had never held one of the things in his hand until that night.

He turned and sprinted down the side street, leaving the smoke of his shot hanging there disembodiedly behind him like a baby cloud above the sidewalk. There were two cops by now, but the original one was in the lead and he was a good runner. He quit shooting and concentrated on taking Lew the hard way, at arms’ length. Lew turned his head in time to see him tear through the smoke up there at the corner and knock it invisible. He was a tall limber guy, must have been good in the heats at police games, and he came hurtling straight toward Death. Tick, tick, tick, his feet went, like a very quick clock.

A fifth shot boomed out in that instant, from ahead of Lew this time, down at the lower corner. Somebody had joined in from that direction, right where Lew was going toward. They had him sewn up now between them, on this narrow sidestreet. One in front, two behind him — and to duck in anywhere was curtains.

Something happened, with that shot, that happens once in a million years. The three of them were in a straight line — Lew in the middle, the sprinter behind him, the one who had just fired coming up the other way. Something spit past Lew’s ear, and the tick, tick behind him scattered into a scraping, thumping fall — plump! — and stopped. The runner had been hit by his own man, up front.

He didn’t look, his ears had seen the thing for him. He dove into a doorway between the two of them. Only a miracle could save him, and it had no more than sixty seconds in which to happen, to be any good.

His star, beaming overtime, made it an open street door, indicative of poverty. The street was between Second and Third Avenues, and poverty was rampant along it, the same kind of poverty that had turned Lew into a ghoul, snatching a dollar from a dead man’s pocket, at six-thirty this night. He punched three bell-buttons as he flashed by.

“If they come in here after me,” he sobbed hotly, “there’s going to be shooting like there never was before!” And they would, of course. The header-offer down at Second, who had shot his own man, must have seen which entrance he’d dived for. Even if he hadn’t, they’d dragnet all of them.