Francis Nevins - Night and Fear

He wanted to stay there, sit there under the front wheel, and just ache. He had a headache and a sprained back and the pit of his stomach felt like a mule had kicked him, and his mouth was gritty with tooth-enamel. A disembodied thought, “Molly!” came to him from far away. He didn’t know what it meant just then, but did what it seemed to want him to. Got one of the buckled doors open and crawled out hands-first. Just as his chin got to the ground and his feet came clear, a gorgeous sunburst of yellow beamed out from the car-engine, and an instant later a towering pillar of flame was shooting sky-high from it. It stung him and he jerked away from it side-wise along the floor, but the pain brought him to, he got up on his knees.

Feet came pounding, but not from the busted front door, from another direction, going toward it. On the opposite side of the curtain of flame. A voice cried shrilly about its hum: “I don’t know who was in it, don’t bother looking! Get out quick — give it to ’em with the tommy if they try to stop us outside!”

A figure flashed by from behind the furnace-glow heading for the open door, carrying something in front of it. A second one was right behind it. O’Dare snatched his gun out, did his best to steady his wrist but couldn’t wait to make sure. “Hold it!” he yelled. Both figures whirled. The second one, with a bared revolver, slightly telescoping the first, with a sub-machine! He saw then that the warning had just been a medieval anachronism on his part, instantly fired first before they had, from where he was, on his knees. It was the second one went down, not the one with the tommy. He’d cleared the way for it, that was all. He dropped flat on his face in a nosedive, as though there were water under him, not cement-flooring.

It was popping, and something that sounded like horizontal rain was hissing by above him. Then it broke off again after about two rounds, and he raised his face from the little pool of blood the nosebleed he’d given himself had formed under it. The guy was on top of the weapon, shaped like a tent, bending too far forward over it, blocking it with his own body from O’Dare. Then he straightened out in a flat line along the floor, and McKee came in from outside holding a feather of smoke in his fist. He spread his legs and stepped over him.

“Got him, didn’t I?” he said almost absent-mindedly. “First time I ever shot a man in the back!” Then taking in O’Dare’s blood-filmed face, “Great guns! you’re a goner! Shot your puss off—”

“I hit it on the floor ducking!” snapped the cop impatiently. “What was you doing, picking daisies out there the last two hours?”

McKee held the side of his jaw. “I took a nap on the road. Next time don’t be so—”

The blaze from the car was collapsing into itself, turning red. O’Dare ran around it, past the dick and in toward where they had come from just now. An arctic blast hit him in the face. There was a long corridor, it seemed to stretch for miles, lined on both sides with gleaming white refrigerator-doors. Dazzling, like a snow-scene, each door big enough to take whole beeves in at a time. He ran down to the far end of it, turned, came back along a second one. “Molly!” he yelled, “Molly!” and then a sudden premonition freezing him, screamed it like an inmate of a madhouse. “Molly!” The sound of his own voice rang mockingly back in the vast, cold, empty place. “They’ve done away with her! She’s in one of these things, I know it!”

There was a sudden scampering of fugitive footsteps somewhere nearby. He heard McKee, in the next aisle over, stop short, call out, and dart back the other way, as though chasing someone. O’Dare’s yells changed as he too raced toward the sound, hidden from him by the towering row of refrigerators. “McKee! Don’t shoot him — whoever he is! He’s the only one can tell us where she—! Don’t shoot!”

And then, in despairing finality, a gun cracked out there where the car was. Just once.

There was a third prostrate figure this side of the other two when he got there, head toward the door in arrested flight. McKee was standing stock-still, looking down. The inspector and the rest, who had just gotten there, were coming in from outside.

O’Dare Hung himself down on the still form like a long-lost brother, tried to sit it up.

“He’s dead,” a voice said, “Whaddya wanta do that for?”

“I didn’t do it,” McKee said, white, “they got him from outside, like I did the first one.”

“She’s in one of them ice-boxes, I tell ya!” O’Dare screeched, “Now we’ll never find out which one—!”

The inspector barked, “Get in there quick, you men! Open ’em up—” A sudden mass-panic gripped them, horror was on their faces as they rushed forward in a body.

It was O’Dare who sighted the thing, with seconds that were centuries pounding at his maddened brain. Didn’t know how he had for the rest of his life. A little fleck of color down the long dazzling-white of that vista, a tiny thing, a mote, a dot. Green. Smaller than the smallest new leaf in May. The edge of a dress caught in the airtight crevice between ponderous refrigerator-door and refrigerator. A thing that in another age they would have called a miracle; that still was a miracle in this 1937, call it what they might.

They got it open and she slumped into their arms, lips blue, fingernails broken, in the bright-green dress he’d kidded her so for buying only a week before. (She still has it; he won’t let her wear it, but he won’t let her give it away either. He touches it to bring him luck, keep them from misfortune, every time he goes out on duty — as a detective, third grade. )

She opened her eyes in the car, going back, and smiled up at the blood-caked face bending over her. “It was so cold in there and dark, and I couldn’t breathe any more. It was just a dream, wasn’t it, Danny? Just a dream and I’m awake now?”

“It was just a dream,” Officer 4432 said, holding his wife close in his arms.

“Blue Is for Bravery” ( Detective Fiction Weekly, February 27, 1937), which had been submitted as “The Police Are Always With Us,” is rather short and almost plotless but full of action and desperate urgency and with a viewpoint rare indeed for Woolrich. As Danny goes berserk and careens across the nightscape in a race against time and death, for once our reaction to a Noir Cop is undivided and we are completely and uncritically behind torture, mayhem and whatever else is done by a protagonist with a badge.

He was a wise guy. He’d had one Collins too many, but even without that he still would have been a wise guy. He had too much money, that was the whole trouble with him. No, that wasn’t it either; he had an offensive way of showing he had too much money. Get the difference? Always knew everything. That type. Ready to bet any amount on anything, at the drop of a hat. On whether the next pretty girl to come down the street would be a blonde or a brunette. On which of two given lumps of sugar would attract a fly first.

Money talks, they say. His always drowned out the other fellow’s argument. He’d put up stakes he knew the other fellow couldn’t afford, most of the time. Leaving him a choice of backing down or being taken for a thorough cleaning. His money had a habit of putting the other fellow in the wrong either way; making a liar out of him or showing him up for a welsher. I’m convinced he would have caught cold without a big fat overstuffed wallet for a chest-protector. He was always making round trips in and out of his pocket, with a flourish and a hard slap down and a challenging bellow. And the way he hounded them afterwards until he’d collected what was coming to him, you’d think he really needed the money. He was the one usually on the collecting end too, poetic justice to the contrary. He didn’t have a real gambler’s instincts. Apart from a few side-bets of the type I’ve mentioned above, he almost always picked a sure thing. Not much of a sport, when it came right down to it. The dislike, the spark of animosity his overbearing ways always aroused, was what got his bets taken up for him more often than not. Case of the poor slobs cutting their noses to spite their faces, just because they hated his insides so. He steered clear of professionals, seldom bet on sporting events. If I hadn’t known he’d been born wealthy; was lousy with money — and lousy without it too — I would have suspected him of making a nice living out of this nasty little pastime of his. But there wasn’t even that excuse for it. And vet he put the screws on worse than a loan shark, using a man’s reputation and self-respect among his friends as a bludgeon to make them pay through the nose.