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

Finally, he checked the gun — but this was purely a fidget reflex, not a necessity, for it had been turned over to him in perfect readiness.

After that he spent the time walking aimlessly around the room — not wanting to sit down, for some unfathomable reason — touching various objects at random as he passed them, without even knowing he was doing so. Now the edge of the dresser, now the comer of the bed, now the back of a chair. Once he turned off a lamp as he went by it, then immediately turned it on again in the course of the same stride. A number of times he tightened and loosened his necktie, and once he lifted his foot to the arm of a chair, and undid, then retied the shoelace. All for some unknown reason.

The behavior pattern of a particular man passing the time while waiting to commit a murder.

The one thing he did not do was the one thing he might have been expected to do the most — smoke. Perhaps he did not want to be caught with one in his hand, if Dade unexpectedly showed up, and not know what to do with it, where to put it. Even infinitesimal things like that can throw a timetable off balance.

His excitement was very great — it would be a lie to say it wasn’t; but equally it was under very great control. Besides, it wasn’t an unwelcome excitement: it was a buoyant, uplifting one. It was a heady feeling, like the kind champagne gives. It was the feeling an actor has just as he’s about to go onstage; a prizefighter when he’s about to step into the ring; a racing-car driver when he’s about to open up the throttle; a parachutist when he’s about to dive out the hatch. It was Exhilaration — the benzedrine of the psyche.

A little short of 1:00 a.m. he heard the sound of a cab driving up at the street entrance, and wondered if it was Dade; but he didn’t go to the window to look. If it was, then he’d find out when Dade got up here, and if it wasn’t it wasn’t.

But it was. After a couple of minutes’ interval he heard the scuff of a step come up to the door across from his own. He widened the crack in his door just enough to frame one eye in it, and saw Dade standing there with his back to him, putting his key to his door. He wasn’t staggering, ballbearing-kneed drunk, but he’d had a couple — you could tell that by the formless little tune that was simmering under his breath, and if nothing else that meant his reflexes would be slower by that much.

Everything was on Killare’s side. Everything, everything. There never was such a stacked murder before.

The act of entering a room by opening up a closed door ordinarily entails three separate stances or directional pivots, although it is such an habitual act, performed so many times a day, that no one ever gives it that much thought. First, you face the door and open it. Second, you enter and turn around to face the direction in which the door is going to close. Third, you close it back to where you found it. It is simple, but it does have these three moves to it, which are usually run together as if they were one continuous motion.

Killare caught him neatly between the first and the second positions, right where the split was, right where the joint was. Dade had the door open, he was in through it, and he was just turning. Killare’s door sluiced open without a hindering latch-break, and Killare aimed his telephone directory at the opening across the way and slid the thick book full force along the floor. It went in just right, dead center, in the groove, and jammed there.

Before Dade had time to react by more than just a bugged look downward, trying to understand what the inexplicable obstacle was to closing his door, Killare had straddled the directory with a scissoring spread of his legs and was inside Dade’s room with him.

He did the two things now that Dade hadn’t had the coordination to do for himself in time: he kicked the slablike directory back out of the way into a corner of Dade’s room, and he closed Dade’s door. But from the inside — which made all the difference in the world. The gun had come out, somewhere during the course of his in-leap, and immediately took charge of Dade’s numbed reflexes.

“Now don’t open your mouth to make any noise,” he said with taut tonelessness, “because I’ll let this go at you.

“And don’t move your hands anywhere near me,” he added. “Keep them by you where they belong.”

Dade didn’t open his mouth; he seemed unable to.

Killare went on talking, as if he found it a necessity to. “Those’re the only two things you’ve got to remember, and then everything’ll be all right,” he cautioned him. Which was a false promise, but then there was no future beyond the next minute for one of them, and a promise by its very nature lies in the future.

“And don’t be nervous about it,” he warned him. “Because if you are, then you’ll get me nervous too. And if I get nervous, then I won’t be able to control myself. Just take it easy — that’s the best thing for both of us.”

Dade, through lips that were as loose as a rubber band — and almost about the same color — finally managed to quaver, “What is this? Is it money you’re after?”

“No questions,” Killare said curtly. “No conversation, I’m not going to tell you that a second time.” And he lifted his thumb away from the gun, as if it were itching him, then allowed it to fall back again.

“Where’s the bathroom?” he asked him.

Dade nudged toward it with his head, afraid now to talk any more.

“Go in there and put on the light.”

Dade did.

“Now turn on the water full force — both taps, the hot and the cold. The tub, not the shower.”

He wanted this to deaden the dialogue. And to diminish the shot — when it came. Water running down inside a shower stall makes only a hissing sound. Water tumbling into the resonant hollow of a tub makes a deep booming sound. It pounded like walloping drumbeats.

He had to pantomime him outside again by head motion, since the rushing water drowned out their voices at that distance.

Even outside in the room Killare had to step closer to him than before, in order to speak and be heard, but he kept the gun beyond the orbit of any hand-swinging snatch, and that was what counted.

In stories and in television pictures men are continuously charging against guns and their holders, and overthrowing both; but in real life it doesn’t work that way. The only kind of man who would charge a pointed gun is not a brave man, but a fool.

“Now start getting undressed for bed, just like you would any other night. Put your things where you always put them.”

Dade discarded his outer clothes, seeming to have twenty fingers that got in each other’s way. He stood there holding the garments up like a jittering clothes-tree.

“Where do you put your coat and pants ordinarily, on other nights?” Killare demanded impatiently. He had to lean toward Dade’s ear a little to ask it, so that, ludicrously, it made it seem as if the information imparted was a secret.

“I put the coat on a hanger in the closet, and I attach the pants by their cuffs to that pants holder on the side of the door.”

“Well, do it, then. Don’t stand looking at me.”

After Dade had swung open the closet door, Killare kicked a chair over against it to hold it pinned back, so that Dade couldn’t suddenly shut himself into the closet away from the gun.

“Don’t you take things out of your pockets?” he said sarcastically. “I do.”

Dade dumped out a pocket key-case with a snapdown cover, a wallet, a fistful of loose change, a ball-point pen, a warped package of cigarettes, a clean handkerchief, an unclean handkerchief, and two books of matches, all onto the dresser top. One rebellious quarter rolled off and landed on the floor.