James Cain - The Baby in the Icebox and Other Short Fiction

“You’re running it, Bugs.”

“Nekkid like he is, they may be quite a while identifying him, see? Without any driver’s license, or Elks’ pin, or tailor’s label, or that stuff they generally go on, they might be some little time. Well, all that time we’re moving, you get it, stupid? We’re on our way, and they don’t know what car we got, or the number of it, or anything at all, except we’re not no longer hauling meat. Pretty, isn’t it?”

“Oh, it’s clever. I can see that.”

“I killed him so he can’t talk to the cops and tell them what they might want to know. Of course, we all know you killed him.”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“What do you mean, ‘that’s right’?”

“I mean if you say I killed him.”

“Quit cracking smart.”

“O.K.”

“And quit chattering them teeth.”

Changing cars I had got wet, and he hadn’t give me any chocolate bars, and I was cold and hungry and weak, and my teeth were chattering all right. I bit down on them, and they stopped. It was four or five in the afternoon by then, and we were in Los Angeles already, and I began wondering why he didn’t kill me. He had everything he wanted, a car, a suit, a raincoat, and dough. He didn’t need me any more. Then I got this awful sensation in the pit of my stomach, when I saw he was going to kill me, and it was just a question of when. He sat there staring at me, the gun in his lap, and I figured it would be at the next stop. So when we come to it I went right through. He snarled like a mad dog. “What’s the big idea, going through that light?”

“I didn’t see it.”

“I told you quit cracking smart.”

“I swear I didn’t see it.”

“You want some cops stopping us?”

“If you don’t see it, why would you stop?”

“You stop at the next one, though.”

“Oh, sure.”

The next one, I went through at seventy, and he began to scream. He’d have plugged me right there, but at that speed he was afraid. But I had the mirror and he didn’t, and back of us I see a light, just a single. Then behind that there’s another one, and then still another. I hold on seventy, but they begin closing in. The next light, I come off the gas, like I’m going to do like I’m told, and stop. I feel him tighten, and aim the gun. When we dropped to forty I hit the brake and cut the wheel. We spun around like something crazy. Inside, it’s like we’ve exploded, because he’s thrown on the floor but he shoots just the same. Whether I’m hit I don’t know, but I throw open the door and jump. Inside there’s more shots, and outside the motorcycles deploy, all three guns barking. I start to run, then I go down. But I don’t lay there. Because it was the torrent in the gutter that threw me, and it rushed me along like I was a hunk of rubble. I try to get up and can’t. Then all of a sudden it’s pitch dark and I’m falling. Then I crash down, so I think my back is broken. Then the water is rushing me along again, and I tumble where I am.

I’m in a storm drain.

They have them all over the city, some little, made out of terra-cotta pipe, some big, made out of concrete sections. They run under streets, and every so often there’s a manhole, so they can clean them out, and off under the sidewalks are intakes, to tap the flow in the gutter. In the intakes, they got handholds and bars, just in case somebody did fall in, and if I’d been quick I might have saved myself, but I was too crossed up. How big the pipe was that I was in I don’t know, but at a guess I would say three feet, maybe. In that was running about a foot of water, and I was bumping along with it, feet first. I kept trying to stop, but I couldn’t. Over my face all the time the water kept pouring, and I kept gasping for air, and every time I’d gasp I’d swallow a gallon and then start over again.

How long that went on I don’t know. It seemed like an hour, but figuring it up now, I’d say about a minute. Then I see some gray light, and almost before I knew it, I was shooting past another intake pipe. I caught it, and four or five feet away, I could see bars. I reached and tried to grab one, but the water was pulling me back. I slipped off and went helloing down the black pipe again, still trying to breathe, still strangling from the water that was pouring over me. But my mind began to work, anyway a little bit. I knew there’d be another intake further on, and I set myself to watch for it and grab for a handhold. But I was watching on the right-hand side, where the other one had come in, and I shot right by one on the left. Then a couple more went by and I began to scream. It came to me, somehow, what a no-account life I’d led, and here I was, winding it up like a rat in a sewer, and even with the water in my mouth I began to scream like a maniac.

I saw light again, and got ready, but it wasn’t an intake this time. It was a grating over a big square drain that my pipe spilled me into, and then I really began to move, and for just that long I could breathe better and my back didn’t bump any more, because it was deeper. I put my head up, and there must have been two feet of clearance above me. But then I noticed there wasn’t that much, and pretty soon I knew why. Every so often pipes came roaring in, and each one filled the big drain fuller, and pretty soon it would be running full with no air, like a water pipe. I wasn’t screaming any more. I had just give up. I was going along, but I didn’t care any more.

Pretty soon something clipped my nose, and I put up my hands. I almost died then, because the top was only six inches from my face. There was a roar, and I figured another pipe was coming in. I knew I was up tight, and drew the biggest breath I could. When the top bumped my face I pushed down under to keep it away. Then I rolled over. I could feel the top bumping my back, and I kept telling myself I mustn’t breathe. I had that many seconds to live till I breathed, and I clamped down on my throat like I had in the truck, when we were bumping down the hill. Then something bumped my belly, and I breathed. But what I breathed was air. I opened my eyes and it was almost dark, and street lights were on, and I was washed up on a slab of concrete in the middle of water that was boiling all around me. About twenty feet away I could see the square mouth of a drain, and I figured it was what I come out of. It was at least five minutes, I guess, before I doped it out I was in the middle of the Los Angeles River.

I won’t tell you much about how I got out of there, about the guy that seen me, and stopped his car, and found a length of rubber hose, and threw me one end of it, and then ran me home, and wrapped me in blankets, and opened up a can of hot soup, and then give me hot coffee and hot milk mixed, and then put me to bed. If I told you too much, maybe you could figure out who he is, and he’d be in more trouble than I’m worth. And anyway, what I want to tell about, what I been leading up to all this time, was next morning, when he come in the little room he had put me in, and sat down beside the bed, and it was just him and me. He kind of mentioned that his wife and little boy were visiting her folks over the weekend, and I got the idea that was what he was trying to tell me, that it was just him and me, that nobody else knew anything. After a while he says: “What’s your name?”

“...Bud O’Brien’s my name.”

“Funny. I thought it was Conley.”

“What made you think that?”

“There was a convict named Conley that made his escape yesterday. From the stencil marks on those denims you were wearing, I figured you came from a prison yourself.”

“In that case, you might be right.”

“Want to read about it, Conley?”

“Yeah, I’d kind of like to.”