Микки Спиллейн - The Long Wait

The guy I was looking for was just inside the enclosed porch and for an instant I saw his hat silhouetted against a night light in the kitchen. It was enough. He probably was being very careful, but not quite careful enough.

I followed the hedge line, moving slowly with my body down low to the ground. I was all the way up to the house before I realized how mechanically I had done it.

Almost like I had done it before.

Something was there like a battery of floodlights winking on and off in my brain while cold hands pulled at my back. Just like that the sweat started to move down my shoulder blades. I hit my belt with my hands and felt for something that should be there, damn near going crazy when I couldn’t find it.

It passed. It took a little while and left me with the shakes, but it passed. I was cold all over because something that was buried years back in time almost came back to me. I cursed and tried to think of what it was.

The house was a ghostly wall pressing against my back, the vine on the trellis wet fingers against my hand.

This.

Had this been what I had done before?

Had I stood in this same spot, climbed up that trellis and gone in that window up there before?

I shook the thought out of my head. Someplace I had read about twins, how there was thought transference. Maybe it happened to people who looked alike too. If there was anything to be remembered I didn’t want to know about it. The rain muffled the curse on my lips and I swung up on the trellis.

It didn’t take ten seconds to reach the window and two to open it.

The room smelled of a woman and the outlines of a bed were visible against the wall. I left the window open, eased across to the door and put my ear to it. Downstairs a radio was playing softly, but nothing else. I opened the door, looked out in the hall and stepped through.

Stairs ran down on my one side and to my left a pair of doors opened off the corridor. The one in the middle was too pinched in to be a room so I picked the last one.

I was right this time. The door was unlocked and probably hadn’t been opened often in the last five years. The musty smell of disuse hung in the air and every step I took tossed back dust from the carpet. The light from the street lamp out front put a yellow glow on everything, casting long dim shadows across the floor.

There was a studio couch, a desk, a pair of filing cabinets and a safe against the walls, reminders of a man who had made this room his den. I had to be right the first time. There wouldn’t be any second chance. I started across the room to the safe when the beam of light that hit me in the back threw a monstrous shadow on the wall.

I damn near screamed, swung around and stood there trembling in every muscle of my body. The light hit me in the eyes went over my face and she said, “I knew you’d come.”

It left me with hardly enough voice to say, “Turn that damn thing off before they see it!”

The light snicked off.

“How’d you know I was here?”

“I sensed it, young man. I have lived in this house so long listening for footsteps from this room that never came that when someone was in here I knew it. One of the benefits of old age, you might say.

“Who’s downstairs?”

“Two men.”

“F. B. I.?”

“One is. The other is a state man. They don’t know you’re here.”

I picked the light from her hand. “Do you know the combination of that safe?”

“No, only Bob knew it. He never wrote the combination down and it has never been open since his death. There was never anything of any value in there. He kept all his personal papers in a safe-deposit vault.”

“What went in there?”

“Just important things he brought home from the office.”

“I’m going to open it.” I was sweating without knowing why.

She said it very simply. “Go right ahead.”

The darkness hid my grin, but she heard the shallow laugh I let out. “You have one hell of a lot of nerve. I’m supposed to be a killer.”

“It hasn’t been proven to me... yet.”

Some woman. Her husband would have been proud of her. I snapped the light on, shielding the beam with my hand. I walked over in front of the safe, knelt down and took a good look at it. I reached for the knob and in the soft glow of the light saw the tremble in my hand.

Everything was familiar again. Everything. I looked at the face of that damned safe and no matter where I looked every rivet, every detail of the thing was an old friend. My breath was coming in short jerks that racked my chest. There were things coming into my mind that clawed at my guts with steel nails and tried to rip them out.

I was cold. Damn, I was cold. The past was pushing by the present and I felt it ooze out where it could be seen. The dial on the safe was a face laughing at me and I knew that it wasn’t just this safe I was familiar with, but a lot of them. My mind knew every one of them!

Now I was all right. I was a guy with a short memory. It was clean. For five years I had searched for the past without finding it, and when it did begin to show I didn’t want to see it.

I knew she was watching me from behind. I made my hand go back to the dial and let my body follow some unnatural instinct that put extra nerves in my fingers and gave my ears some uncanny perception. I knelt there for twenty minutes patiently exploring the supposedly foolproof workings of that lock and at the end of that time I heard what I was listening for, turned the knob and opened the door.

A ten-year-old newspaper lay on the bottom shelf. A tobacco tin of Indianhead pennies was on the other. I pulled open the top drawer and there was a pink numbered ticket from Philbert’s lying against the back.

My back ached from kneeling so long. I stood up, pushed the door shut and stuck the ticket in my pocket. Mrs. Minnow took the light back and I saw her face. She was looking pleased.

“There was something there?”

“Yes. Do you want to see it?”

“Would it be any good to me?”

“Not now. Later, maybe, but not now.”

“Keep it,” she said, “and good luck.”

“Thanks.”

She let out a sob as I left the room, but didn’t follow me. I went back the way I came, took the same route to the car and climbed in. It was still raining and my pants were soaked from knocking up against the bushes.

But I didn’t feel cold any more. Just hot. Good and damned hot.

The guy behind the counter was as white as I had left him.

His mouth was dry from licking it so much and the shreds of a block of a rubber eraser were scattered all across the woodwork. He took the ticket, went in the back where I heard him pulling the drawers out, then returned with a large brown envelope. Without a word he passed it across the counter, took the two bucks the tag said the job was worth and rang it up.

He was very slow in turning around. It was necessary that I wait until he turned around because I wanted him to see my face. His eyes got glassy and he nodded without anything having been said and I went out.

I drove down a block, parked under a street lamp and opened the envelope. Inside were two identical positives and the negative of a photostated letter. It had been written in longhand and addressed to Robert Minnow.

It read:

Dear Mr. Minnow,

This letter is to inform you that in the event of my death it is entirely likely I was murdered. Somewhere among my possessions you will find positive evidence of my connection with Leonard Servo and photographic evidence of others who may be implicated in my death.

Gracie

That was all there was to it, but it was enough. I stuck the stuff back in the envelope, pulled up the rubber carpet on the floorboard and laid it against the boards. The carpet fell back and covered it nicely.