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

He’d paved the way for the gun long ago; he knew where to get it, whom to get it from, and how much it was going to cost him to get it. But he hadn’t wanted to get it until he was ready to use it; it was an illegal gun, it had to be, and to carry it around on him for any length of time beforehand was too risky — it would be asking for trouble in the worst way. Even to keep it hidden somewhere on his own premises was no longer safe. The police now had this new break-in-and-search procedure, which didn’t stand back to wait for warrants, and you could never tell when they were going to spring it on you. Violence that had become almost an everyday commonplace in the city had in turn brought about police methods that were often not strictly out of the lecture room or official handbook.

So the gun was his for the asking and paying — he’d already seen it and handled it; but he needed the extra day to get it. He hadn’t had the faintest idea he was going to meet Dade that night, and in this unlooked-for way.

“Take this gentleman up to Room 211,” the deskman instructed a bellboy.

The door to Dade’s room was squarely, point-blank opposite his own, he saw when he got up there. And the separation wasn’t the width of the main corridor, but of a side corridor. He could step from his door to Dade’s without putting down the same foot twice.

Lingering behind a moment while the bellboy fiddled around the room, he imagined he could even hear Dade’s breathing coming through the opposite door, with the cloying heaviness of approaching sleep.

Sleep tight, he wished him grimly. It’s your last night on earth for doing so. Tomorrow night this time you’ll be sleeping in a different way — cold and doughy and smelling of formaldehyde.

The bellboy went out, and Killare picked up the phone without a minute’s waste of time, almost before the door had latched back into place, and asked for a number. It was in the Yellow Pages, but you wouldn’t have found it if you’d looked under “Guns.”

There was an unusually long wait, as though the telephone was ringing in the back of somewhere. The back room of somewhere. Then even after the connection opened up, there was nothing — no voice, no one said anything. As though the person standing by it was very cagey, very wary about answering his calls, didn’t even like to commit himself to a noncommittal “Hello” until he had some idea who was calling.

Finally, to break the deadlock, Killare said, “How about it? You there?”

“Whosis?” came back a guarded voice — so guarded it was barely allowed to pass through the speaker’s lips.

“Remember me? I was in there a couple of times about — something.”

“I don’t remember you,” the voice said peremptorily. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I am—” Killare started to elaborate.

The voice cut him off almost hysterically. “Look, no names! There could be woodpeckers somewhere along the line. Tap, tap, tap — you know? Everybody has them nowadays,” he went on. “Even housewives.”

“This has nothing to do with your regular business. It’s something we discussed on the side.”

“Oh,” the voice said, enlightened. “Now I know.” The voice sounded almost relieved, as though bargaining over the sale of an illegal gun was a mere nothing, a bagatelle, compared to the man’s main-line occupational hazards.

“You know that package?” Killare said. “That package you’re holding for me? I’m coming around to pick it up. I have to have it tomorrow. I’m coming around tomorrow about five.”

The voice was still determined to play it safe. “A lot of people leave packages in my care that I don’t know anything about. It’s like I was running a parcel service. Sometimes they never show up again, sometimes they show up a year later and expect me to remember.” Which would be his “out” if the gun were ever to be traced back to him; Killare got that. “You could come around here tomorrow at five, like you say, and I still wouldn’t know you from Adam.” Which was an oblique way of saying, All right, come ahead around at five; and Killare understood that too.

“Even if you brought four hundred dollars with you, I still wouldn’t know you.” And he understood that too.

Killare gave an unmirthful laugh. “Price has gone up, I see.”

“When you want a thing bad it always goes up.”

“I want it bad,” Killare said to himself.

He was well satisfied as he hung up. The man on the other end made him smile, with his melodramatic antics, his stage waits on picking up the phone, his cryptic conversations, and the rest of his cover-up gymnastics — all of which were as out of date in today’s hard-shelled, gear-stripped world as a man’s opera cape or a mushroom-shaped helmet on a cop. The police themselves would have been the first to laugh at him. The man probably had read too many dime novels when he was a boy, or else he had an ineradicable sense of guilt about not having stayed honest, which expressed itself in this form. But he was reliable. He delivered the goods — when you laid cash on the line.

Nothing to do now but raise the money and wait. And strangely enough, he enjoyed the waiting too. It made him feel twice as good. It added a spice to the enterprise. It was like doing it over twice, once in contemplation and once in commission.

He stretched out across the threadbare sofa in one long, straight, unbroken line from the top of his head to the backs of his heels, and made a cushion of his clasped hands and placed them at the back of his head for a head-rest. A little table-top radio beside him, which he had flicked on, warmed up and cut in with almost bull’s-eye patness on a deep-throated woman growling a blues: “There’s gonna be some shooting like there never was befoa, And the undertaker-man is gonna knock upon his doa —”

“Sing it, lady, sing it,” he urged.

It may feel bad at first when you’re wronged or damaged or trampled on in some way there’s no forgiving, but it feels good later to kill the man you hate for doing it to you. It sure feels good, he exulted.

It feels like a drink on the house.

It feels like a Cadillac all your own.

It feels like when the dice come up with your point, and the floor is papered with other people’s money.

It feels like when a beautiful blonde runs her fingers through your hair, and then throws away her shoes because she says she’s never going to walk away from there again.

It feels even better than all those things put together.

When he returned to the hotel at eleven the next night, he had the gun.

Dade wasn’t back in his room yet — he could tell because he glimpsed the key still sticking out in the mail box adjoining his, when he stopped at the desk to pick up his own. Not that this was an infallible guarantee; most hotels kept spares in their mail boxes, in case a guest locked himself out and had left the key inside the room.

He preferred it this way— Dade not yet in. It could give him time to get things warmed up inside of him.

He went into his own room, closed the door, and made the few, very minor preparations there were indicated — and they were far less complicated and taxing than those required on many less crucial occasions, he reflected.

First, he adjusted his door so that it could open at one clean sweep, without the interruption hitch of freeing the latch by turning the knob, and without the accompanying warning sound this would give. In other words, the door was left open a narrow crack — but this couldn’t be detected unless it was peered at closely from either side.

Next, he took the telephone directory, which each room was supplied with, from under the nightstand and stood it up on end against the wall just inside the door, in readiness for its particular use. To make it even more suitable to the purpose he had in mind for it, the hotel had encased each directory in its own stiff binding, with the name of the hotel and the room number stamped at the top. The binding made the directory rigid and unbendable.