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

“Yeah,” Mike said drily, in one of his rare calms for a moment. “He sends you men over here, by turns, on regular shift-detail, all to make me feel good, I guess.” His voice roared up again, like the suddenly released flame of a blow-torch. “I don’t need that! I don’t need somebody to play nursemaid, sit by my bed and play gin-rummy with me! Give me what I want. Get that man in there!” He tangled on his own hot breath, and had to stop and wait for his throat- and mouth-passages to clear, and then go slower and lower, but only by sheer self-enforcement. “Down that hall outside — three doors, four doors away from where we’re talking—”

“I know,” Terry said patiently.

“Well then hear it once more!” Mike exploded. Behind that door, facing the one outside here, you can see it from here when you look out. is a man moving around, standing, sitting, free and easy, taking it free and easy, and laughing to himself, laughing all the while, not only at me, but at you, at every one of us!”

“ He’s not taking it easy,” Terry said vengefully. “Every minute of his life is hell. Every breath he draws is fear. Never knowing, never knowing. I bet sometimes he wishes that he was already in, just so it would be over with. I bet sometimes he’d like to change places with the lousiest con in stir, just so he’d be safely past us on the other side.”

“That’s not enough,” Mike said, almost in anguish, throwing his head upward and back and clenching an aching fist at each side of his throbbing body. “I want to see him lying on the floor, beaten until he can’t feel it any more. Then brought back, and beaten some more, and some more, and some more. I want to stamp down on him with my foot, myself. I want to spit into his open, speechless mouth.”

They stopped, silent and spent. The fumes of their hate filled the air of the room, odorless but just as present, just as toxic as carbon monoxide.

“The try with the ghost-taxi fell through,” Terry remarked glumly after a minute or so.

“Frank called up and told me, while you were on the way over. Everything does, everything we try. It’s uncanny; he must have a sixth sense, he must be spooked.”

“He is very quick on the pick-up,” Terry admitted. “But that’s all it is. And why wouldn’t he be? He’s had three-and-a-half years to develop it. What happened was, a fluke developed that couldn’t have been foreseen, one of those fifty-to-one shots. We were parked about half a block below, keeping our eyes on the hotel-entrance, with the cab standing by alongside us, when he came out, walked over to the edge of the curb, and started sticking his neck out. We pointed the cab at him and started it off. Everything ideal; no other cabs around, very scarce, that particular hour, that particular part of New York. In-between, there’s just this one apartment building. Get this, just this one apartment building. Suddenly a doll comes hustling out of it, in a hurry to get somewhere. She runs out toward the cab, wig-wagging and squealing, in fact gets so close he almost knocks her over. She’s between him and the guy, in other words. Is that a fluke? He cuts past her and keeps aiming at the guy, like we told him. It doesn’t sink in right away, I guess he’s so glad to get a cab. He gets in. Two blocks away the cab gets held up for a light. He must have thought it over in the meantime, sitting there. And I guess the driver’s jitteriness helped to tip him off too. A lot of people are afraid like that. They’ll stand up to a strong-arm man with a gun, but mention dangerous mental disturbance and it unnerves them. It’s a superstitious fear of the unknown, coming down from olden times, that a lot of people still have even today. Anyway, a dollar-bill comes floating down onto the front seat, the door opens and slams, and the guy’s on the outside. There’s nothing the driver can do to hold him; the dollar’s much larger than just the two-block fare. And he’s afraid to try it, anyway. So we have to sit there cursing through our teeth and watch him walk the two blocks back to the hotel and get safely inside it again.”

“You figure he knew?” Mike questioned.

“Sure he knew. He never came out any more. He sat with a bottle drowning the close shave he’d had. We could hear the glass going up and down all the time.”

“He’s smart,” Mike brooded. “He can almost read thoughts. He can see you in the dark like a cat.”

“We’re smart too,” Terry said vengefully. “We can see in the dark too, like bigger cats, like tigers. There are more of us than there are of him.”

“He’s had three-and-a-half years to sharpen up his wits.”

“We’ve had thirty, sixty, a hundred-and-twenty,” Terry reminded him. He turned away suddenly from the window he’d been glooming out of. “We’ll get him with a girl. I’m going to try a girl.”

“That’s been tried.”

“How? By an anonymous phone-call from some cheesy woman’s voice, that he wouldn’t come out and meet? By some slob pretending she knocked on the wrong door by mistake, that he wouldn’t let into his room? Not this way. Not this girl. You never saw anything like this girl.”

He asked for a number on the phone. When he got it, he said: “Come on over, we’re ready for you.” Nothing else.

Mike kept breathing hard. Breathing harshly like a horse.

“Take it easy, Mike,” Terry said. “She’ll be here soon.”

“I can’t wait,” Mike lamented. “I’m suffering. Hate is like a pain inside you.” He emptied off half a water-tumbler of whiskey straight down. His brow was red, and all spangled with sweat. He wiped it off along his sleeve.

Terry sat down suddenly, bent one leg up, look off his shoe, turned it over, and shook out a tiny speck of stone or grit. “That’s been bothering me all day,” he remarked. “I haven’t had a chance to get it out until now.” Then he put the shoe back on, but not before a small whiff of mustiness had crossed the room.

The girl came. She was spectacular. But even more important than her looks was her quality. There wasn’t a trace of cheapness about her in anything: not the way she spoke, the way she walked, the way she dressed. Any man would have been proud to have her on his arm and walk her down the street, for everyone to see he had her with him. She had on a plain black dress of some smoky, gauzy stuff, without sleeves and scooped low in front and back, but not to the point of double-exposure. The only piece of ornamentation she wore was a watch the size of a nail-head, on a black cord around one wrist. Even her make-up was toned-down: no charred-eyes and bleeding-lips effect. You couldn’t be sure she had any on. As for her perfume, it was the kind you only noticed after she’d left a room, not while she was still in it. Even then you didn’t realize it was perfume, you only wondered what had made you think of her just then.

She was classy, she had it down to a science. Whether it was just knack, or she had trained hard for it, it came out just right.

A special kind of girl, for a special kind of man. A marked kind of man.

“Turn around,” Terry said impersonally.

“Now turn around the other way.”

“Now walk over there.”

“Now come on back.”

He looked over at Mike.

Mike just shook his head. “He can’t get past that.”

The girl didn’t smile or react in any way. They weren’t paying compliments, they were just stating facts.

“Careful, now—” Terry warned her.

“I’m always careful,” the girl said, with a touch of feminine disdain.

“One wrong move, and you’re liable to tip the whole thing off—”

“I never make a wrong move — where a man is involved.”

“—you’re not up against just some ordinary john. This man is educated, he’s stacked with enough money to make the hotel think twice before they’ll let us remove him by force from their premises, in order to avoid risking a big, hefty damage-suit. They’re a forty-million-dollar chain, and they can’t take the chance. The bad publicity alone would hurt their public relations. So he lives on here in a kind of immunity, always barring some infraction. And that’s where the whole problem comes in. He don’t infract. Three-and-a-half years of walking a tightrope have taught him that.”