Marihuana (3 page)

He couldn't linger. He had to get out, now more than ever. He widened the door, looked out, gun still bare in death's-head fist. Their retreating tread was still vibrating at the upper end of the interminable hall. The lookout seemed to be accompanying them to the front — further evidence, to him, that they were punitive agents — he could see the receding blur of his white shirt dwindling in the gloom.

He was at the door by now, palsied hand to chain. He had to pocket the gun, for the first time since he'd had it, to free both hands. He got one off the groove with little more than a faint clash. Someone gave a hoarse cry of alarm down at the other end — that meant they'd finally discovered her. Then a great welter, a hubbub, of voices sounded. There was a lurking note of the crazed laughter of marihuana somewhere in the bedlam.

The remaining chain swung down, he wrenched the door out, and he was free. The last thing he heard behind him was the oncoming stomp of running feet.

Now began flight, that excruciating accompaniment to both the sleep-dream and the drug-dream as well. Down endless flights of stairs that seemed to have increased decimally since he had come up them so many days before. Round and round he went, hand slapping at the worn guardrail only at the turns to keep from bulleting head-on into the wall each time. The clamor had come out onto a landing high above him now; a thin voice came shouting down the stair-well, "There he is!" raising the hue and cry to the rest of the pack. Footsteps started cannonading down after him. They only added wings to his effortless, almost cascading waterlike flight.

Like a drunk, he was incapable of hurting himself. At one turning he went off his feet and rippled down the whole succeeding flight of stair-ribs like a wriggling snake. Then he got up again and plunged ahead, without consciousness of pain or smart. The whole staircase-structure seemed to hitch crazily from side to side with the velocity of his descent, but it was really he that was hitching. But behind him the oncoming thunder kept gaining.

Then suddenly, after they'd kept on for hours, the stairs ended. He tore out through a square of blackness at the end of the entrance-hall, and the kindly night took him to itself — along with countless other things that stalk and kill and are dangerous if crossed.

He had no knowledge of where he was; if he'd ever had, he'd lost it long ago. The drums of pursuit were still beating a rolling tattoo inside the tenement. He chose a direction at random, fled down the deserted street, the wand of light from a wan street-lamp flicking him in passing, so fast did he scurry by beneath it.

A corner opened out before him, and he went skidding around it on the sides of his shoes. He was on an avenue now, where there was more light, and instinct warned him not to go so fast for he was automatically inviting pursuit and seizure by whatever passers-by he encountered. A man coming out of a saloon stepped back just in time to avoid being hurled down, and hollered maudlin imprecations after him, any one of which might have elicited sudden lead-spattering death for an answer, had he but known it.

Another corner, and he'd put two bends in the line of direct vision between himself and his pursuers. But he couldn't keep up this pace much longer; his breath was clogging and his heart felt as if it was swelling up like a balloon. He had to put some kind of a barrier around himself, no matter how flimsy, behind which to gain a breathing-spell.

He saw a little candy shop ahead, the kind that the neighborhood kids patronize with their pennies, casting a weak swath of light across the sidewalk through its glass front. He tottered past the first time; he would have preferred a doorway or a basement areaway. But then he couldn't go on any further; his breath clogged up entirely, and he had to flounder to a stop against the wall. He turned back and made his way in by a process of rolling his shoulders along the plate-glass front.

There was only one person in it, a stout woman in a sweater, evidently the shopkeeper. She was sitting with elbows propped on the soft-drink counter, reading a newspaper. He had wavered past her toward the back before she had had time to look up. She was the kind of shopkeeper who finishes the paragraph she is reading before waiting on a customer. Then by the time she had he was abreast of the telephone booth in the rear. She took that to be his errand and lowered her head again.

A bulb went on dimly over him as he spread the folding glass panel to muffle his asphyxiated breathing. He clawed at it, hectically twisted it until he had gotten kindly, sheltering darkness around him again. The booth had a little, inadequate seat, little better than a corner-bracket. That supported him for awhile. Then he let himself go floundering down to the floor, back upright against the booth wall, one knee reared before him, the other folded under him.

Reprieve for a little while. But the night was so long, the drug was so strong. Everyone's hand was against him, every face was an enemy's.

"All right, one at a time," the Lieutenant glowered. He didn't like either one of them, after what they'd just finished telling him. He had them typed at a glance. No-good bums. Dressed up, and with jobs, and money in their pockets, but bums just the same.

They were both on the verge of hysteria, faces like chalk at the horrendous consequences unleashed by their own thoughtlessness. Gordon kept whining over and over, uncontrollably, "We didn't mean no harm.... We didn't mean no harm...." He had a black eye from one of the cops.

"Shut up!" thundered the Lieutenant, pounding a fist down on the desk top. "You say that once more, and I'll let you have one across the snoot! Speak up now — where else is he likely to go? Any place you know of? Any close friends he's liable to turn to?"

They both shook their heads dazedly. Evans was still clutching a flimsy bit of woman's scarf. A scarf that had belonged to the girl named Vinnie. "We two were about his best friends," he faltered, "I don't know of anyone else he———"

"His -best- friends! Hagh!" The Lieutenant flipped the lever on a desk transmitter. "Send Spillane in here." Then he backed an arm toward the two cringing objects before him. "Take 'em out!" he rasped.

A lean, springily-knit individual thumped the already open door in passing, came striding in twenty inches to the stride while they were being hustled out.

"Spillane———" said the Lieutenant. Then he dropped his voice confidentially, while the detective hand-heeled the corners of his desk. It rose again toward the end, as he finished giving the instructions, consulted the memoranda he'd taken down. "His name's King Turner. He's twenty-five, medium build, light-brown hair, he's got a peculiarly thin face that you can't miss, cheeks sort of hollowed-in. He's wearing a pepper-and-salt suit, a telescope-crown gray hat, a belted gray topcoat that he may or may not still have with him. His own address is 22 East Fifth, between Lexington and Third. You may be able to head him off there, but I've got my doubts he'll go back there. The point is he's roaming the streets right now, a menace, a living death, to anyone that happens to cross his path. For all practical purposes he's a maniac, he's all hopped-up with marihuana. He broke out of there armed. He's got a Luger packed with six bullets on him at this minute — I'm sending out a general alarm on him, but I'm giving you this special assignment in addition. You've got to catch up with him before it's too late and———"

The cop that had taken Gordon and Evans out thumped the door, stuck his head in. "One of them two birds just remembered another place he thinks he might go, Lieutenant," he interrupted.

"Let's have it," said the Lieutenant alertly.

Evans' pasty face was thrust in, with the cop's hand guiding it at the back of the neck like a terrier's scruff. "His former wife, he's still crazy about her," he said disconnectedly. "That brought on the whole thing, over at the ranch——— They're separated, and she's living at the Continental, on 49th Street, under her own name, Eleanor Philips———"

The Lieutenant turned back to Spillane. "He's liable to go there, to change his clothes or try to borrow enough money to get out of town on. Try for him there too — and you'd better warn her she's in danger, not to let him in. To communicate with us immediately if he shows up or she hears from him in any way. And whatever you do———"

Spillane hung back for a minute at the threshold, turned his head,

" — see that that guy is overtaken and stopped -before this night's over-, or there's going to be some killing like there never was before!"

He was still coiled there in the unlighted depths of the phone booth. His breathing was a little less harassed now. The only sound had been an occasional crackle as the woman up front turned a page of the paper she was poring over. She must have lost track of him, forgotten that he was still there———

Suddenly a tread on the wooden flooring at the shop entrance, heavy, authoritative, inward-bound. Then a voice, resonant, masculine, ominous: "Ye know who I'm looking for, don't ye? Ye know who it is I'm after?" And a chuckle. But a grim chuckle.

The woman's betrayal was instant, almost indifferent.

"He's back there, where do you suppuz? Go and get him yusself!"

Turner's heart spiraled frantically up, dropped down again where it belonged only because it couldn't burst out of his chest cavity. The gun came out almost by reflex action. He rose cobra-like within the narrow confines of his hiding-place. He edged the slide back a fraction of an inch — they were both out of range of the pane itself — peered laterally out, with two eyes on a vertical axis. One, his own; the other, the gun-bore, six inches lower.

A lowering uniformed cop, a big bull of a man, was standing up there, opposite the soft drink counter that ensconced the woman. But his head was turned down Turner's way, and there was a knowing glint to his slitted eyes.

Turner flung his own head back so violently the other way it struck the inner wall of the booth. He didn't even feel the impact, and his hat, crushed, deadened the sound of it. He dropped down again, to the lower rim of the glass eyes just above it, gun-mouth just above it. If he came toward him, if he came down this way———

A heavy preliminary footfall sounded. Then a second. Then a third. The cop's blue uniform-front impinged on the edge of the glass. Turner sighted the gun, centered it directly over his shield.

He took one more step forward and he stopped right outside the booth, blurring the pane. He didn't seem to be looking in, he craftily kept his profile turned toward it, as if unaware of it. But Turner saw his shoulder shift position, slope downward. That meant his arm was reaching back, that meant he was drawing.

His fear-inflamed mind sent the control-signal to his finger-joint to fold back. The trigger sliced back. The blast seemed to lift the booth clear off the floor, drop it down again. A pin-wheel of vacancy appeared in the glass, flinging off shards and slivers.

The cop's profile went down without turning full-face even at the very end, stunned unawareness of what had hit him written on it. Turner slapped back the remaining lower section of the panel, revealed it once more. On the floor, already dead. But still surprised. He took a step out, found himself facing a table of three rigid figures, only two of them still breathing.

There was a little runty man standing there, just past the booth in the other direction, as though he had been coming forward to meet the cop from the rear of the store, holding a numbers-slip in his extended hand. Still clutched in the cop's nerveless hand on the floor was, not a gun, but a dollar bill, freshly withdrawn from his back pocket.

The tableau held for a frozen minute. Neither of them, the woman nor her husband, seemed able to realize what had happened to him. Then as Turner stepped forward into their line of vision, smoking gun out before him, the woman's slack jaw tautened for a scream. He dialed the gun her way and the scream suffocated to death in her larynx.

"In back, the two of you!" It was the berserk yowl of an enraged tomcat on a back fence.

It was impossible for her to escape from the counter that walled her in on three sides, in any direction but toward him. She was afraid to go toward him. They were ignoramuses, but they could tell they were up against something that wasn't normal, they could tell by his eyes.

The little man, gums white, quavered: "Please, Momma, don't argue; you heard him."

She wrung her hands, whined: "Please, mister, just let me go by, I only want to get on the other side of you, like you said; don't do nothing———" and scurried by, head and shoulders defensively lowered as though he were an overhanging branch.

He shepherded them into the little back room the man had come out of, looked around to make sure there was no other way out, changed the key to the outside of the door and locked the two of them in, with a hissing "Keep quiet now, or I'll come back and———"

The shop entrance was still clear, no inquisitive figures blocking it. Facing it, and the prospect of further flight, he raked distracted fingers through his hair. That dislodged his hat. He saw it, but left it lying where it had fallen. There was no time for anything but to keep going — until he dropped.

Outside in the dark again, a sinister afterthought caught up with him, just too late. "I shouldn't have left them alive. They'll tell who it was, what I looked like." But there was no turning back again, either, on this satanic treadmill that had caught him up, that was wearing out his body, mind and soul.

He hurried along furtively, hugging the building-line, a shadow that progressed by fits and starts, from doorway to doorway, crevice to crevice. A shadow looking for a home. Wasn't there any which way he could turn, wasn't there anyone in town who would———