Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

“This is one time I’m too scared even for that,” she quaked. “I’m afraid what it might do to me.”

He put both glasses and the bottle on the floor, to gain enough room on the table top for his reading. He spread the paper open on it. There was a chair there, but he read standing up, just bending forward, with his hands flat on the table.

She put the back of her hand to her forehead several times, as if distracted. She came up next to him finally, tried to read from over his shoulder.

“Quit shaking the table,” he said.

She took her hand off it. “I’m getting better,” she said. She tried to light a cigarette, but it shook too much in her mouth, and the match flame couldn’t pin it down.

“I never saw you like this,” he said.

“I never was this way before, like I am now.”

“Beatrice Barrett,” he said, from the paper.

“Was that her name?” she asked him.

“I never knew her name,” he said. “We only met about an hour before.”

Her own feminine eye now selected a detail. “Twenty-eight,” she said. Her throat gave a hiccup of derision. “Wanna bet? Sure, I’m twenty-eight too.”

“Shut up,” he said, but without animosity. He wanted to concentrate on what he was reading.

“Anything about—?”

He seemed to know what, rather whom, she meant.

“Not yet. They wouldn’t put it in even if there was. They jump first.”

“Oh, God,” she whimpered.

“You’re going to fix us good,” he said. “I can’t take you down to the street, that way.”

“I’ll try,” she said. “I’ll try.”

“Is it the first time it ever happened to anyone?” he wanted to know disparagingly.

“For me it is,” she said.

He swore scaldingly. Not at her, but at the contents of the newspaper. He pasted his open hand down on it with vicious impact. “Damn them! They can’t wait till they break out with it.”

“You didn’t figure they were going to hold it back, did you?”

He didn’t answer.

“What do we do?”

He turned on her then — almost spun around he turned so swiftly. “We get the hell out of here but fast, while we can still make it!” he said intensely.

As if it were a signal, the two of them broke into a flurry of fast, frenzied action. He flung himself down into a chair, began shoveling his feet into his shoes, which he had discarded while she was out. She hauled a small valise out from under the bed and flung things into it.

She moaned, at one point, “Just when I thought we could sit tight for a day or two.”

“You don’t sit tight when you’ve got a rap like this coming at you.”

“Where do we go?”

“Where doesn’t matter. Just go and keep on going.”

“We’ll never make it.”

“Sometimes when you don’t think that, is just when you do.” He pulled a hat down low over his face, shading it.

“You carry the bag,” he said. “I may need both arms free.”

She whitened even more.

“Don’t leave anything behind, now,” he cautioned. “That’s just what they’re looking for.”

He went up close to the door and pressed his head sideward to it. He held still. Then the bolt slipped, die chain dropped.

He opened it and went out first, making a furtive gesture at her, with his hand held down low, to follow.

She looked around to make sure nothing had been forgotten — nothing that might betray them.

She saw the paper, left wide open at that particular story, lying conspicuously on the table under the light. She took it by both outer edges at once and closed it.

Then she stopped a minute, her arms wide, the paper between.

He went “Sssst” warningly through the open door, to hurry her up.

She turned and ran out after him, as if she had just been reminded that he was waiting for her. But she left the valise standing in the room.

He was at the end of the stairs, waiting to go down. He gave her a black look.

“Wait minute, Al!” she whispered urgently, running all the way over to him so that she could keep her voice low. “Wait a minute. Not the same one.”

“Whaddaya mean not the same one?”

“East, not West.” She was hissing like a tea kettle with her strenuous sibilancy. “The same street — but East, not West.”

“That’s a misprint,” he whispered back to her. “Can’t take a chance — papers are full of ’em.”

“No, it isn’t. Come back in, I’ll show you.”

He followed her back. They re-closed the door, then bent over the paper again, her finger guiding him.

“There it is. East. And there it is down there again.”

“It’s a misprint,” he said. “It’s got to be. They came out with it in a hurry.”

Then suddenly he stopped and fixed his eyes.

“No,” he agreed slowly. “You’re right. It isn’t the same one. ‘The victim’s apartment was located upstairs over a fashionable restaurant, Luigi and Manfredo’s.’ And—” He turned and looked at her. They stared at each other eye to eye. “And — where I was — there was a dry cleaning establishment down below.”

She finished putting back the bolt and chain. “Pour me one too,” she said, luxuriating. “All the way to the top.”

When it was halfway down to the bottom again, she held it up and gazed at the light through it, musingly.

“You know, that’s something that could never happen in a story. Two blondes, both the same night, both the same street. Only, one east, one west. Could happen only in real life.”

The truck drove up at 9:29 P.M.

The batch hit the ground.

“Twanny-four returns,” Mom said to the driver.

Her nephew ran out from in back and sheared the twine binding. He hoisted the free bale in sections to the top of the counter. Mom stowed some of them below the shelf, left the rest on view for immediate sale. She adjusted the wick of the oil lantern, which had begun to flicker a little. She propped up her elbows. The rest was up to the buying public.

A boy and a girl came along, thin as clothespins—

The place was empty and unlighted until the boy and the girl came into it together. She looked around after he’d turned on the light.

“Hey, how’d you find this place?”

Her voice was shrill, splitting. Not naturally so, purposely so, as if she were calling to him across the width of a street.

“Dusty told me about it. He came here with Marge the other night.”

“Ho, what I know about Marge!” she chortled brassily. Every remark was pitched in a raucous key. She couldn’t seem to keep her voice moderate. Or even try to.

They were both approximately the same age, perhaps a year or two in his favor — that evanescent slot just in between the end of adolescence and the onset of maturity. Childhood’s final sunset.

They were dressed alike too. He wore a coat-shirt of vivid scarlet, hers was electric blue. His trousers were legging-tight, hers were too. Her hair was long, his was too. The only difference was that hers was bound into a mane and lifted away from the back of the head; his mane clung to the back of his neck and went down inside his collar. And they were both thin as inverted exclamation-points.

“What’s wrong with Marge?” he answered her last remark. “Think she’s a square?”

“I know she isn’t,” his companion agreed with ready gang-loyalty.

He began to dump cans of beer out of a brown-paper bag they’d brought in with them.

“You’re the square,” he told her.

“I’m here, ennI?” she squalled protestingly. “So what more do you want?”

He chopped at the top of one of the beer cans with an opener, and it overbalanced, rolled off the table, and clouted to the floor. He used a filthy expletive, but she was neither surprised nor offended.